to stay. I loved it here—I was having the time of my life.” He fumbles the key into the door and kicks it open.
Ruby looks at the bright, hot, cramped little room, barely big enough for a bed, and says, “I can see the appeal.”
“Well, it seemed bigger at the time. And my standards were lower.”
“I guess so.” She sets Moxie loose on the threadbare coverlet and opens a window onto the balcony. Leaning out, she says, “Well, at least we can sit out here in the evening after we put Moxie to bed. It’ll be nice when the sun goes down.”
“Yeah, we should eat out there.”
“Get some wine…”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely.” He brushes against her from behind and she ducks back in to kiss him.
“I told you this was going to be fun.”
Ruby was right: It was the best thing he could have done to confront his childhood anxieties head on. Even if her motives for doing it were not entirely pure.
Oh, let’s go, she had said firmly, dismissing his reservations. We have to go. Not for your mother, but for you. I’ll bring my camera and it’ll be like a Freudian travelogue: the estranged mother/son thing, the spectacular island scenery, the childhood fears, PTSD, and devastating brain trauma that have left you a hollow shell of a man, the grandchild she’s never met. I’d just love to get you and your mother talking on camera—who knows what dark family secrets might get dredged up? You never even knew your father, right? That kind of stuff is pure PBS-quality gold!
Great.
How a place like Catalina could have become such a ridiculous hobgoblin in his mind, Henry can’t imagine. It’s just an ordinary resort town, for God’s sake. After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan he should be grateful as hell to be here, to be anywhere. The problem is he can hardly remember his military experiences, while the events of his childhood won’t leave him alone.
He has vague impressions of the war, just enough to know it happened, but the details are sketchy because those memories were stored in the part of his brain that got scrambled in The Accident—a nasty car crash that occurred while he was home on leave. It is kind of funny: all those combat tours without a scratch, only to be done in by a drunk driver running a stoplight. Ten years of his life deleted in one stroke.
Not that he’s bitter—he has a wife and daughter who love him; a good job as a private security consultant—Henry knows he’s a lucky man. How many guys would love to erase their horrible war memories, and destroy themselves trying to do it with alcohol or drugs? How many of his fellow Marines got shipped home in boxes, or lost major body parts? As for The Accident, he could easily have been killed or crippled for life, a vegetable; it is nothing short of a miracle that he survived with only some memory loss. Yes, he is lucky—damn lucky.
So why is he so nervous about being back on this island? The ridiculous thing is there is no real basis for his fear—just flashes of weird shit he might have dreamed or invented…and that whole school incident. Kid stuff. Fuck it. Time to put it to rest.
Chapter Four
FANTASY ISLAND
This is a filthy place.
There are two kinds of filth: There is filth on the outside and then there is filth on the inside. Filth on the outside is good, honest filth. A place that is filthy on the outside can be the cleanest place of all, because it hides nothing—that’s the kind of place I’m most comfortable. Sarajevo springs to mind, during the war. Baghdad, Beirut, Mogadishu. Give me a place where I can buy a modified Kalashnikov for less than fifty dollars and carry it through the town square in broad daylight, where I can sling it over my chair in a café while I’m having a drink. Where the bodies are left to rot in the street.
Filth on the inside is more troublesome. It takes so many forms and uses pretty scenery as camouflage—as defense. No one can believe it exists, not in such a nice place, and they don’t like someone like me stirring it up. So not only have I got the filth to deal with, I’ve got these guardians of the filth, the so-called “innocent bystanders,” gawking at me like a bunch of sour-pussed old biddies in church. Sometimes they become casualties.
That would be you, Mr.