On Leave

by Galen DeKemper

He lifted her into his chest for their first embrace in a year. His scent had changed slightly, she noticed, as if dust had become embedded in his skin, and she searched for a hint of his old essence deep in his desert fatigues as he whispered into her ear, “I love you, honey.” There were scenes like this all around them, in the old airplane hangar where the family members met their soldiers who were returning from Iraq. Everyone was hugging someone, and Laura was glad that she had skipped her afternoon classes and driven out to this military building in Queens to meet Mikey. The following afternoon he would fly to their Texas hometown to see his family, so tonight would be their only one together. His tour had been extended and in two weeks he would leave again from his battalion headquarters in Michigan. He continued to hold her tightly as she stood on her tiptoes, just as she had imagined happening. Yet now, with time already running out, she wanted nothing more than to leave the hall so they could start the drive to her father’s lake house upstate. They didn’t know when they would see each other next. She wanted to make tonight count.

She led him through the crowd, holding one of his hands, and he followed behind her out to the parking lot. He recognized her red Prius and opened the door for her after she unlocked it with a click on her keychain.

“You’re quite the gentleman,” she said, and returned his favor with a kiss. She had intended it as a peck but he intercepted it and she was too willing to open her mouth. She was up against the car while he dropped his bag from his shoulders and held her. “Baby,” she said. “Let’s get to my place so we can have some real fun.” He stepped back to let her get to the door and she paused to size him up. In the hall, she had been too excited to really examine him. He was looking at her, doing the same. She had worn 501s and a white T-shirt, which he always said was his favorite outfit on her even though she never believed him. He stood with perfect posture, surely learned in boot camp. His skin had turned a deeper tan than he had even had in Texas, which she would have thought impossible. He had a small cut on his otherwise smooth face. There were also lipstick smears, now.

“How are you so smooth, baby?” she asked him. She knew he would have a five o’clock shadow by the time they were back at her lake house and so there only could be one answer. It would also explain the nick.

He smiled because she noticed. “I shaved on the plane.”

She drove and they were silent, but there was no awkwardness and she found herself continuously looking over at him and marveling. She couldn’t believe he was beside her, with his hand resting on the mid-console of the Prius. She set her right hand on top of it and drove with her left. She had asked for the vehicle as her sixteenth birthday present. Her father hadn’t wanted to give it to her, but he did. “Hell, girl,” he had said. “I can get you free gas at any Marathon station in this state. What the hell are you wanting a hybrid for?”

Mikey’s face had aged in the past year, she decided, and yet as she tried to determine how exactly, she had difficulty. It was something in the skin, from too many days under the sun after a childhood of even more of it. She couldn’t look for too long since she was driving, but it truly was hard to keep her eyes on the road. She was so glad to see him.

They had sex before anything, as soon as they arrived. Laura came. She felt pleasantly, completely exhausted afterwards. It had been a year, and she would have been content to spend the rest of the night in bed with him. She saw he had grown more muscular as soon as he was naked in front of her, and he felt thicker inside her even. She realized that this was what she had been holding out for, and turning down from lithe trust-funders in V-necks. She got up to use the bathroom and when she returned, he was sitting up on the edge of the bed.

“Do you want to go for a swim?” he said.

She kept her mouth closed as she tried to conceal her minor frustration with him. He was always wanting to go out and do things while she was content to lie around with him. She had been a swimmer in high school, since the girls in her academy were defined by their best activity. She was annoyed that he might be using her love for swimming to give him a chance to get in the water. Over the summer in Texas, she had swum in her pool most days. In Manhattan, she had taken a membership at an expensive, plush gym, mostly because it offered a pool. She didn’t want to go swimming in it next week and only be able to think of how much she missed Mikey. The water had been her place of refuge from everything, and now she might lose even that. But she looked at him, and he had been the one fighting in a war, so she acquiesced.

“We can go like this,” he said with a wink, and hopped up in his nakedness.

“I’ll just get the towels,” she said, and then he followed her down to the lake.

She hadn’t mentioned the water temperature to him, which, at this point in September, would be growing cool with the coming autumn, and he jumped in without hesitating while she watched from the dock. He let out a howl before he splashed in and she smiled. He had never been too cool to show when he was having fun, and at least that hadn’t changed.

He came up to the surface. With his military buzz, he no longer had his shaggy hair to shake dry. “I thought about this the whole time these past two weeks, sweating all day in the sun. I said I didn’t care how cold this would be, that it would make up for all that over there.”

So he had been dreaming about this as much as she. But then, he had only thought of the water. Had he ever really been thinking of her? “What about me?” she said. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t help asking. She wanted tonight to be perfect but could already feel herself ruining it. He would be gone tomorrow.

“Baby,” he said. “Of course I thought of you. Come on. Hop in and let’s swim out to the middle. We can do the dead man’s float and look at the stars. The water isn’t as cold as you’d think.”

She dove in, with hardly a splash, and it wasn’t. They paddled out slowly, in a couples-only version of the backstroke, as they held hands and looked at the sky. It was a clear night and there were so many stars. There had been nights like this in Texas, in a government lake that Mikey had shown her, and she knew that he hadn’t forgotten them, and realized that that was why he had suggested they swim. She was very glad that her father was rich enough to have this land, and for a minute she didn’t care how he had earned the money for it. Tonight was hers, and she was here on earth, under a perfect sky, in her lake with Mikey. She used his weight for leverage and pulled herself towards him. They kissed, both of them vertical as they treaded water.

They continued paddling, and she wasn’t worried at all, or cold, either. This was what she had been scared to let herself imagine for the past year and now she had everything.

“Do you think I can touch the bottom?” he said.

“No.” She couldn’t stand the thought of him being anywhere other than beside her. Also, she had been out here during the daytime in her father’s boat and knew that they were nearly as close to the middle of the lake as they could be. She was a strong swimmer, but even coming out this far had slightly fatigued her. She hadn’t swum competitively since high school.

“What if I do?” he said.

“Don’t try it, Mikey.” She didn’t especially want to be alone in the water at night. She called him by his first name, which she didn’t do very often, she realized. She wanted him to stay and hoped that she was showing it.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and he lifted his head to take a breath before dropping down and disappearing into the water.

At first she expected to hear silence but there were sounds of nature everywhere, the calls of birds native to New York that she couldn’t name. Laura tried to think but all she could do was count seconds, and between the ticks of each one in her head, she tried to determine how long until he would rise again. She treaded water and turned slow circles as she scanned the surface.

She was up to 35 seconds when the counting became too much and time wasn’t important, only whether he would return. Was he on his way down still, or was he coming up? How deep had her father said the lake was? She tried to think back to that sunny day on the boat but somehow the measurement he had given escaped her, and she couldn’t remember if it was only 25 feet, or more. For a second she thought it might be 35, but then remembered that that was only the number she had counted to. Or maybe it was a coincidence and they were the same. If it was, there was no way he could do it. The diving well at her high school was 16 feet and she had had to exert herself whenever she went to touch its bottom. She had once held her breath for a minute during swimming practice but that time must be approaching now. Maybe she had been counting too slowly or quickly in her head. Maybe there was some part of army training that helped him stay under for so long.

And what if he had reached the bottom but didn’t have enough breath to come up? They shouldn’t even have been swimming this far out in the lake at night. She thought that maybe he could be joking but there was no room, literally, to joke out here. The ripples from his dive had long since vanished and the lake was shining smoothly like an oil slick under the moonlight. She wondered where he was below her; what if his body was rising right below her toes, and for the first time, Laura felt a fear for herself. The water was cool at her ankles and it would only get colder deeper down. Mikey couldn’t have stayed under that long. He had to know she was scared, and for him to wait this long to come up must have been deliberate on his part. What if he had gone crazy over there and wanted to do something terrible to her? He hadn’t been too talkative tonight. He could grab her right now and drag her down. She kicked her feet, to fend off anything that might be searching for her. What if his body floated up, or she felt a hand? She raced from scenario to scenario since they were all too frightening for her to consider deeply and so she continued to search for new possibilities, but they were all just as terrifying.

Laura called his name, and her voice sounded loud and jarring under the moon on the lake. When the trees echoed it back to her the syllables were no longer distinct and it was only sound.

She ducked under the water and propelled herself with her hands until her head was her deepest part. She opened her eyes. She felt the cold water on them and the only sense they conveyed to her was touch. She couldn’t see anything. Her fingers searched tentatively in the water, but she grasped nothing. She knew there were trunks of trees rising from the bottom of the lake, and she was scared that she would touch one and mistake it for Mikey. She realized that he had never even potentially seemed like a Mike or Michael to her, only Mikey, even now that he was a soldier. Maybe he had hit his head on a tree in his hasty descent, and he had been knocked out and was unable to tell which way was up. She imagined him swimming through the black water, going deeper and deeper, convinced he was about to reach air.

She would need to get an ambulance regardless, even though it would take a while to come this far out in the country. She exhaled and then followed her bubbles to the surface. That was what coaches had taught her to do in case she was ever under water and couldn’t tell. In the diving well at her high school there were constantly bubbles rising, so any diver who suffered a concussion from impact would always know which way was up.

She didn’t pause to catch her breath at the surface, and started swimming freestyle back to the dock. She felt the sensation that something was chasing her in the lake and she couldn’t maintain her poised form. She smacked at the water with her palms in her hurry to get up to her house for a cell phone. Mikey had been bragging earlier in the evening about how he got service even this far out in the boonies, and as she replayed the scene in her head, she realized she should have taken it as a warning. Of course she would have had to use the phone. She was kicking as hard as she could when she felt a toe touch something. Her body recoiled; she must have grazed one of those trees. She tried to swim even faster and then she heard a voice that was Mikey’s.

Her body deflated, and she would have begun to sink from relief if her swimmer’s instinct hadn’t kicked in and kept her treading water. She tried to piece together the last minutes but she couldn’t. She was out of breath, and still having to work to stay afloat, when all she wanted to do was to crawl onto her softest bed with Mikey. The dock was still far away.

“I did it,” he said to her. He was holding his hand up, for a high five she thought, but she lacked the energy and couldn’t believe he would have the audacity to ask for one.

She brushed her wet hair out of her face to make eye contact. “I didn’t know what happened to you.”

She thought this would prompt an apology, but all he said was, “I made it to the bottom,” and she hated him for not considering her.

“That’s great,” she said, ironically and still breathlessly. “I thought something happened and I went down to try to find you. You scared the shit out of me.” His hand was still raised. “I told you not to go down there and I’m not going to give you a high five.” She didn’t know why she was explaining this.

“It’s mud. I got it from the bottom. Here,” he said, offering it to her as proof. He really had gone all the way down.

She swam the few strokes over to him in a breaststroke. She grabbed at his extended arm and brought it down to his side. She tried to pry his grasp loose and she could feel the mud, slimy and even cooler as it squirted out from between his fingers, but he wouldn’t open his fist. She started to claw at him, using her fingernails deliberately.

“Hey,” he said agreeably, and then, “Hey!” sharper now that it hurt. He pulled back from her. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and as she looked at him she saw that he didn’t.

“Mikey. Do you know how long you were under? I counted but didn’t know if you would come up. I was going back to call an ambulance.”

“Come on. I wasn’t gone that long. Look, I’m not even out of breath.”

“I don’t know how long you were under. I stopped counting to go look for you.”

He clenched his face as if he was straining to decide on an explanation. “I’m sorry, babe,” he said after a second, in a soft voice that didn’t come from his throat. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just be with me.” There was nothing other than that.

“I am. Here.” He swam closer.

“You won’t be tomorrow.”

“Laura. What do you want me to do?” His voice was deeper again. “I’m not gonna go A.W.O.L.”

She knew that. She shouldn’t have said anything. He wasn’t stupid, but neither was she. They were just trapped. He held out his hand to her and she took it.

As her fingers ran across his skin, she only wanted that, and embraced him. Her weight dunked him under and as she kissed his closed mouth he tried to swim both their weights back to the surface. It was too much and they continued to sink, so she gave up kissing and released him.

Back up in the air, after a breath, she resumed swimming. They were going back to the house, she decided. She moved quickly through the water, with poise this time, as she would have in the middle of a distance swim when she depended on her form to keep her moving at pace. She paid him no attention, and was surprised when she made it to the dock and he was already there, waiting to help her out. She declined his hand and pulled herself up on her own. She sat on the dock with her back to him and her toes dangled into the water. All she had wanted was him and his skin, and he had to go dive and then not come up and not let go of that fucking mud. He had taken her hint and wasn’t speaking to her. She didn’t know what to say, either, and was silent. He tried to be gallant and handed her a towel. She reached out to take it, but he was trying to win her back.

“Did they teach you that in the army?” She envisioned her father, as a cadet in the ’60s, learning something like this from a commanding officer in a mandatory etiquette class. Hadn’t the army realized that no one considered soldiers gentlemen anymore? An offered towel was meaningless when there were so many other things wrong with everything. Now, after a year, even Mikey was buying into it. Why couldn’t he just be himself?

“No,” he said, and suddenly he pulled the towel back from her. Her expectant skin formed goose bumps from the unfulfilled anticipation and her nipples were hard. She cupped them with her hands to keep them warm and then tweaked them. Why couldn’t they have stayed in bed?

“No, they didn’t teach us that,” he continued. “They taught us all sorts of shit, and they taught me how to swim a little bit better, and I can stay under water longer, but nothing else that seemed to matter, either there or out here. I was there for a year and I honestly couldn’t tell you one thing I’ve done.”

She wondered if she should ask him what he had been doing then. He had never volunteered much in his letters and she had felt it wasn’t her place to question, only to be supportive. Was now a better time? She thought of him swimming in the lake, unsure of how far it was to the bottom but knowing only that he had to reach it. She would have turned back, and was upset that he hadn’t. He had done it though, at night, while she worried from the surface. She stood up to face him. Their fingers interlocked and she felt for the mud, traces of it, on his palms. They were tough, but still smooth, like worn leather.

“Where’s the mud?” she said.

“I washed it off before I got out. Look, baby, I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

She knew he hadn’t, and tried to tell him as much in a kiss. He had been down there while she waited, and that was the way it had always been. She thought that maybe that wasn’t what she minded, it was just the results. A handful of mud or a war. One night, about a week before he had gone off to basic, he had told her he was entering the army to be a hero. She had asked him what he meant. Apparently no one had asked him that before. “I don’t know,” he had finally said. “It’s like now that high school’s over, whatever I’ve been working for is kind of done. I don’t play sports, so there’s nothing to get better at. Everything else is just working to keep on working.”

The war wasn’t giving him a chance to be great, but then again, neither was she. She only wanted to hold him and worship him, for the dreams that she knew he had in him, but he had to keep chasing them instead of being content with her. He had known this somehow, and was trying to make this evening count, and to make himself count, and she wanted to smile at him but she felt her face twisting because she felt like crying, too. She hugged him so he couldn’t see her tears.

He would be gone tomorrow, and neither of them knew where he would be in a couple of weeks. She thought back to when she had been in the lake, and how alone she had felt there, out in the middle of the world, and she wondered where he existed in that scheme of her life. He was down below, but she decided that she knew that he would always be coming up for her, no matter how deep down he went. She wondered whether they would sleep that night, or fight it off to spend each second they could together. She decided they would stay awake, since she wasn’t feeling tired at all.

When they went back up to the house they had sex again. Afterwards, she was on her back and he was lying on his shoulder at her side. He said he wasn’t tired, but he tucked his head into the nape of her neck and she listened as his breathing became slow and soft. She still wanted to stay awake, to linger in consciousness of his presence, but she was more tired than she had realized. She turned off the bedside lamp with minimum exertion, and she must have drifted off sometime after four.