Chapter Five
Roman
One Year Later
I never thought I'd get used to the stares at airports. Traveling the first time in all my gear, I had felt self-conscious of all the people looking, kids and adults staring with shameless curiosity. Now, I couldn't give two shits. I never thought I'd ever be glad to be landing at Aberdeen Regional before, but damn did it feel good to be back on American soil.
I had been gone almost exactly a year, but every day there had felt like ten, every week like a month, and every month like it was a year all on its own. Summer was just starting, my first summer back since I had missed it last year. I didn't even mind coming from the desert right back to the heat – I was just glad to be back home.
I saw my dad before he saw me. Tiff was with him, and she waved, pointing me out to him. Far as I could tell they looked exactly the same. Tiff's hair might have been different, shorter like she had had a haircut, but that was it. Dad didn't look any older, which was a good thing. He was still in his fifties, but it wasn't fun watching your parents get older. It was comforting that nothing major had happened to the two of them when I was gone.
Tiffany came up and hugged me first; she was excited. I was, too, but I was better at hiding it than she was.
I was tall, but only about an inch more than my dad. Up close now, I noticed more gray strands in his dark brown hair. I was supposed to look like him, which was something I was proud of. He was a strong, good-looking guy even north of fifty. Both Tiff and I had gotten our mother's blue eyes instead of his hazel, though. He hugged me, which wasn't something he did a lot now that I wasn't a kid anymore. He held my shoulders looking at me.
"You're back," he said.
"Yup. Glad to be back," I said. The look on his face was a blend of relief and happiness. He had never really been a fan of me joining the army; Mom had actually been more supportive than he had. Guess now that I was back in one piece and he could tell people his son was a vet, he was proud.
"Are you alone?" Tiffany asked.
"Yup. Nobody else was flying into Aberdeen."
"How was it?" she asked in awe.
"How do you think?" I shot back, jokingly.
"Was it scary? What did you do?" she asked. I sighed.
"Trained a lot. Got sunburn. Saw a lot of camels. What about you?" I asked lightly.
"That's not all you went there to do," she said, her brows wrinkling.
"Let's get him home before the interrogation, how about that?" my dad interjected. I was glad he did.
That was first on the list of things I wanted to do. The second was take a shower, third was pass the fuck out. I didn't have anything but a duffel with me because we had had to turn in all our issued equipment and weapons at the base.
"Could you at least tell us how your flight went?" she tried.
I laughed. She was just a year younger than I was so we were pretty close. She hadn't really cared about what me being in the army meant, but it looked like that had changed for her since I had been gone. We finally started out of the building to get to the car.
"It was good," I said.
"I have a hard time believing that," she challenged.
"Any word on how long you get to stay?" Dad asked.
"They don't really give us a schedule," I replied.
"So they can just come get you whenever they want?" Tiffany asked. Well...yeah. It was a job. The Armed Forces was my employer. I had signed a contract and everything.
"Pretty much," I said, resigned. That was exactly how it was. Going back was the last thing on my mind since I had just gotten home, but being realistic, another deployment was probably in the cards for me. I had lucked out with this one; shortish and not too many actual months spent in the combat zone. Fuck if I was going to let that ruin this for me. It was the furthest I had been from home and for the longest time. I was going to enjoy being here, especially since I wasn't sure how long I was going to get.
We talked throughout the trip back home, but my eyes stayed trained outside. Aberdeen wasn’t that big a town, but it was a big difference from the desert villages surrounding the airfield that had been my view for the past year.
I knew it was all in my mind, but I was expecting the house to look different. I hadn't lived there really since I had started college, but it had just felt like such a long time. I was waiting to see something that I totally didn't recognize. I felt so different coming back, so it just made sense in my mind that this place would have changed, too.
It hadn't. Our family home was right where it had always been. Two stories, two car garage, back and front yard, yellow exterior that Dad repainted every spring, gutters that it used to be my job to clean out when I was a kid. It was all the same.
"Here we are," Dad said as Tiffany pulled the car into the driveway. Home sweet home. For now. When I thought about home, this wasn't really it. I hadn't lived here for a while but I hadn't held onto my last place since being deployed. I was stuck here till I got a new place of my own. I opened my door and grabbed my luggage, following my father and Tiffany into the house.
Just like it was outside, the inside of the house was the same as it had always been. It was trippy, like I had never even left in the first place. It was sort of reassuring, too. It felt good knowing that some shit did stay the same, even when you didn't.
"You go on upstairs, Tiff's gonna get dinner started," Dad told me.
"I can help her."
"You get guest of honor privileges for one night. This will never happen again," Tiffany said to me, grinning.
"Your room's just how you left it. Go up there and settle in. I'll come get you when the grub's up," he said. I thanked him and started up the stairs. "Your mother would have been so proud of you coming home today. I wish she could see the man you grew into," he added.
I stopped and looked down at him. Five years ago was when she had died. She had been a big part of the reason that I had even gone through with it in the end.
"Thanks, I miss her, too," I said. I didn’t really want to talk about her. I knew he wasn’t really over the fact that she was gone. He smiled up at me and let me go.
Everything was where I had put it a year ago. The walls were whitewashed, and in some places, you could still see the little spots where the tape I had used to hang posters up back in the day had damaged the paint. I had a regular double bed, which wasn't that big, but bigger than the regulation beds we had used at camp. Most things after camp felt like a fucking luxury. I was glad to be back.
The first thing I did was take a shower so I could change out of my uniform. When there was a bunch of us and we were all in uniform, we all blended in, became one unit. Out in the civilian world, a guy in uniform stood out.
Before deploying, Dad had let me keep my clothes here at the house, along with stuff like my television and some gaming consoles, since he had space. The rest of the furniture I had used at my old apartment had all gone into storage.
It didn't feel like I had been gone long enough for this to feel new to me. It had just been a year. Some of the guys I had met were deployed on their second or third tours. All the stuff that seemed so normal, like having a closet and more clothes and belongings than you could carry on you at any one time felt new after not being able to have them while I was gone. It humbled the shit out of you. You couldn't feel like you weren't exactly the same as the other soldiers when you were in combat. It was a little like football in that way – but with much higher stakes and a million times more stressful.
I didn't know what was for dinner, but the smell coming from the kitchen when I came back downstairs was fantastic. The last thing I had eaten had been on the plane. When Mom had been around, she would do the cooking. Since she was gone, Dad had had to learn how to feed himself. Lucky for him, Tiff still lived at home and knew her way around a kitchen. The two of them were setting the table when I came back downstairs.
She had made individual chicken pot pies with a load of sides. I ate some of everything, and it was delicious. I took their questions as they came. Apparently, they had been paying close attention to the news just in case anything happened. They had been scared to death after the couple of bombing incidents that had made the news here, but that had never really been an everyday thing. I had to ease their anxiety about it.
Dad didn't stay long after dinner. He told us goodnight and headed upstairs. He never stayed up that late, even though it was a weekend. The food disappeared, replaced with coffee. I didn't want any since it was probably going to be a struggle getting back on US time. Tiff made herself a cup of dark coffee that she stirred about four sugars into.
It had always been easy talking to her. As adults, as fucked up as it sounds, losing Mom had made us closer. When it had happened, Tiff was the one person other than me who had really had that bond with her. She was the only person who really understood when they said that they understood.
"So how'd you keep yourself busy this past year?" I asked her.
"School, work, rinse, repeat."
"Two more years and you're out," I said.
"I don't know. I've been thinking about grad school a little lately," she said shrugging.
"Yeah? Why? Trying to stall on joining the real world?"
"Beth was in school till she was like, thirty, and look at her now," she quipped. Bethany was one of our cousins on our mom's side. She had two PhDs and our aunt had let her live at home till she had graduated. Fast forward a couple years and she was one of the youngest tenured professors at the University of Vermont.
"How is she?"
"Fine. We didn't all just sit around and wait a year for you to get back, Rome," Tiffany teased.
"You know what I mean," I said back. A year was a long time, but also, it really wasn't. It was the difference between a minor child and an adult and enough time for the planet to make a trip round the sun, but more things were the same than were different. Dad was still working, she was still at school, and family we had nearby were fine. It was like I hadn't left.
"What about your friends?" I asked her casually.
"My friends? You didn't really know many," she quipped. What I didn't want to say was tell me how Veronica's doing. From what I could tell from her letters and talking to her while I had been gone, they hadn't stopped being best friends in the past year.
"What about that girl Grace?" I asked, grasping for any name I could remember.
"Gracie? She took a leave of absence. She got pregnant." I tried to think of another one of her friend's names. Veronica was always the closest friend that she had had, so I was coming up blank.
"Are you dating anyone?"
"Not really. I don't have a boyfriend if that's what you're asking," she said.
Fuck, she was going to make me do it. I didn't want to come right out and ask her about Veronica, but I had to know how she had been. I had never felt lonely while I was gone. I had gotten letters from my family all the time and even got to talk to them. It still wasn't enough, though. It had been a whole year since I had said a single word to Veronica, and I was just getting how fucking long that was.
Anything could have happened. A year was long enough to meet someone new and start a relationship. It was long enough to get pregnant and have a baby. It was long enough to forget about her, but I hadn't. I hoped secretly that she hadn't, either. If she had, then that would have been my fault – but it wouldn't change the fact that I still cared about her.
"What about Ron?"
"Veronica?" she asked, putting her cup down.
"Yeah. What's she up to these days?" I asked, trying to sound casual.
"I thought you'd never ask," she said grinning. "Last I saw her, she was great."
"Yeah?"
"She has a year before she graduates, her own place without a roommate… She's great," she said. Good. That was good but I could have guessed that myself. I could have heard that from anyone, my dad probably could have told me that. I wanted more.
"Is she seeing anyone?" I asked.
"You sure you want the answer to that question?" she asked.
Fuck, I should have seen that one coming. Ron was incredible, there was no way she would still be single. She was the kind of girl a lawyer fifteen years her senior would try to marry. She was the kind of girl a freshman would be begging to give him a chance; any guy would be begging for a shot with her. She was perfect. Smart, funny, ambitious, driven, and she was mine. Up until a year ago, she had been mine. Now some other guy got to say that.
"Who is he? Do I know him?"
"You don't. His name is Sean. I think he's a philosophy major or something. They met at school."
"How long have they been together?"
"Why do you have so many questions about your ex?" she challenged.
"She's your friend. I just figure I'm going to see her again. We were together for a long time."
"Yeah, and then you dumped her."
"You think I don't remember that? I'm not proud."
"It took you a year to realize that?"
"I thought I was doing the right thing."
"You have had an entire year to think about this and you still think it was the right thing to do?"
"I can't change what I did. I made that choice, and I had to stick to it."
"And continuing to lie to her? What about that choice? Why would you let her keep thinking you thought she was a burden to you?"
"That's not what I said to her."
"You haven't said anything different. All she knows is you loved her one day, and you were telling her it was over the next. You're my brother, so it isn't my place to say anything to her, but that was fucked up, Roman. And, it's wrong to pretend you really cared what those words you said did to her after all this time."
"I do care, Tiff. You think I liked dumping her? You think it got me off seeing her crying and breaking her heart? I felt like an asshole. It took everything inside of me not to go after her. I hurt her, but it fucked me up, too."
"And now you're back. What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I just want to know how she is, Tiffany. Don't tell me if you don't want to. I cared about her for a long time, and that didn't change after we broke up." She looked at me coolly from the other side of the table like she was debating whether or not to tell me about Veronica.
"She's had time to get closure. Don't do anything stupid and rip that scab off," she warned.
"Is she happy with that new guy?"
"I don't know what she sees in him, but there must be something. She seems to like him."
"That's not what I asked," I said.
"She's doing great at school, dating a new guy, and on her way to graduating with honors. Yes. She's pretty happy, Roman."
Fine. That was all I needed to know. That was good, I wanted her to be happy. After the way, we had left things and the last things we had said to each other, her being happy was all I could ask for. I just had to make sure. I had been that guy who got to make her happy so long, I just wanted to make sure that was still happening. Like I didn't fuck her up by accident after breaking it off with her. It sucked that she was dating but that wasn't my business anymore. At least she was happy...right?