Good solider

Prologue, 2007

The fact that we were all in one car was a bad omen. To anyone else, we looked like a regular American family packed into their SUV, cruising down the 141 for lunch and a walk along the Greenway. Except we weren’t for two reasons which for the most part weren’t obvious: we didn’t do things together and we weren’t American.

I look up now and again still expecting to see Natalie upfront, how it usually was when Daddy drove. I’d spent half the car ride stuck on the fact I’d never seen my parents drive in the same car and the other half thinking I’d only ever known them in their cars and my place in them. Mama liked to change hers in faster than they could make them. In her current model, a red Ford Lincoln Navigator, I sat all the way in the back, third row to the left. This was strategic. It was two seats behind Mama and out of her line of vision. In Daddy’s car, an Audi Q7 he’d kept for years and hung onto even though the additional software was always causing problems, I sat in the middle seat in the back row, leaning so far forward I could rest my elbows on the console, absorbing information from phone calls and front seat whispers, at least until Daddy noticed I wasn’t strapped in and told me to sit back in my seat. I could also tell you exactly where the car was headed if you broke the group out. If it were Natalie in the driver’s seat instead of Daddy, and me upfront where Mama was currently sitting, I’d tell you without a doubt in my mind that she was taking me to or picking me up from Mikala’s house and that we were most likely taking the long way so we could listen to Mami Chula on 95.5 the beat. If Natalie had been in the passenger seat and I’d been in the back while Daddy drove, I’d tell you we were driving to one of Natalie’s soccer games in Augusta or Raleigh or Tuscoloosa or Greenville.

This is how it was. We were a two-thirds family. Homecomings were laced with a little bit of awkwardness, like a first dance. No matter how much love there was we had five pairs of left feet and no one trusted the other to lead. These dynamics I understood. Separation, reunion, separation, reunion.

We arrive at the next intersection and Daddy merges into the right turn lane, flicking the indicator up as he slows at the yellow. I look out the window and watch the other lanes fill up as we wait. Click, click, click, click.

“You could’ve gone.” Mama says, looking ahead at the path she thought we were taking. He doesn’t say anything.

The intersection is still, all four sides held by a red light. The lines of cars queuing get longer and longer. I feel antsy, impatient. My irritation grows with each second that passes without a change to our position. Click, click, click, click. It felt ridiculous, all this waiting for nothing.

The light turns green and I’m surprised to find we aren’t catapulted forward from all the tension building up over the last few minutes. We carry on at the same pace and I stare angrily at the back of Daddy’s head, his cautiousness out of place and too late.

Driving down Pleasant Hill, a misnomer for the stretch of flat, ugly road sprawled out before us, I wait to see if the joke comes and for a moment find comfort in the silence. When were we going to stop pretending?

“Unpleasant Hill”, Daddy suddenly announces to the car, looking back to make sure the joke had landed. I ignore him and look straight at Mama, still staring off to somewhere I can’t see behind her big, dark sunglasses, the ones she wore on late-night runs to CVS to buy Pond’s cold cream and Raisinets. She laughs without the slightest twitch of a muscle. The road was unpleasant. Billboards and the hallucinogenic colors of fast food franchises litter either side of the divided highway. Driving down it was to bear witness to some neo-space race where brands competed for airspace with the same patriotism that once put people on the moon. GM still had the ground though. Every half mile, another car dealership appeared, and with it, a sea of cars.

“I just need to make a quick stop,” Mama announces to no one in particular, hands tightly clasped on top of her oversized yellow bag. She’d found the purse at Goodwill last week, drawn to the yellow leather as much as the tag color. Red, which meant it’d been on the floor for a while and was now as close to free as you could find. I wasn’t surprised it had been left there, no one else I knew dressed like Mama.

“Yellow is such a happy color, like a sunflower. Happy, happy, happy!’’ she’d exclaimed as we sat on her bed sorting through the contents of her old bag. Livvi and I were organizing the receipts when Daddy walked in, flattening them out and putting them into piles for Mama to decide if they were to keep or to trash. It was still their room but it felt strange. Livvi and I looked at each other but Mama didn’t seem bothered.

“Oh hi Dan. Back already?,” she’d said with forced casualness.

“There was lightening so the game’s been postponed.” He looked over at where Livvi and I were on the bed. “What are you doing?,” his voice softening a little as he hovered by the door.

“Just going through my things,” she’d replied, a little too quickly, each word sharp enough to cut through to the subtext. Never.you.mind. He walked over to the bed anyway to take a closer look and my anger redirected itself. God he could be so clueless. I heard myself speaking, smoothing out the edges of Mama’s words. Without knowing why, I told him about our shopping trip to the thrift stores and our little treasures.

When I’d finished talking, I felt the lines moving again. They kept being drawn and I had the sense I’d never get it right. The look I got from Mama was hard to discern.

“Hardly anything goes in the trash pile with Mama!,” he laughed over his shoulder as he headed back towards the stairs. I laughed because it was true, because it was the right thing to do, because the ground was shifting again and I didn’t know where I stood.

“Well I’ll just get a bigger bag!,” Mama said loud enough so he’d hear this retort on his way back down the stairs. This time Livvi laughed but the damage was done. Mama said she was tired and we took our cue to leave. It wasn't until I was in the hallway that I realized Livvi had stayed.

We parked in front of Publix and waited to be told what was next. In sync with Mama’s movements, Livvi unbuckled as Mama opened her door.

“No, Livvi you can’t come. You’re staying here,” she said firmly, which made Livvi scowl. I would’ve laughed if the circumstances had been different. She’d always been keen to tag along to our little outings and roadtrips, fed up with being left behind.

“I’ll be right back, girls,” she added, turning around to look at all three of us before she left.

A car alarm sounds from the car dealership across the street. I watch a man in a sports polo walk towards the car parked out front like it’s his driveway. He smiles at the woman and says something that makes her laugh as he silences the alarm and opens her door in one smooth movement. The woman climbs in without the same grace. He takes his time walking around the car, as if he senses she needs a moment to regroup before they start the test drive. Maybe he just isn’t in a rush. They get in the car together and drive away from the building, a giant glass and concrete structure where other polo shirts make their sales pitches, peppered with easy half truths.

Daddy made a point of looking at Natalie as he spoke. Her disappointment would be the worst to bear. Livvi was still young. I kept my eyes on the ground like a good soldier. I hated how well I knew his thoughts and how it made me dread silence, when everything unsaid hung heavy in the air, wafting over me the way his new friend's cheap perfume would every time we ended up at her bar.

We’d still see him. Nothing would change. Most importantly, he’d never done anything wrong. I always wondered how the cars get inside the buildings. Was the entire building constructed around them? Did the cars come in parts that were then pieced together over time? Or did people simply open a door and let the cars drive in?

Livvi shifted in her seat towards me, her long, skinny legs pressing against mine. He stopped talking and the silence felt unbearable. I shifted my body closer to the door until I couldn’t feel her skin against mine anymore. I wanted this fire to build and build and build and build. I imagine Mama inside the store, staring at the produce being sprayed with a light mist to make it look fresh and dewy. Could I have that? She walks on, shaking the thought from her mind, and ends up in front of the fridges at the back of the store. Her hand reaches for the carton with the light blue cap in a movement as unconscious as breathing. 3 Weight Watcher points per cup — a whole point less than the 1% milk. It doesn’t really matter, she only has a splash in her tea. Most days, she doesn’t even log it. Maybe she should. What she really wants is creamer for her coffee. Don’t be greedy, Jane. She moves on, walking back to the front of the store through the wine aisle. The yellow bag is too heavy to carry with the basket. She flings it over her shoulder and feels it collide with a bottle, relishing the sound of the glass shattering. Happy, happy, happy! she thinks, swinging her bag into the bottles of Pinot, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz. A highly flammable brownish red liquid covers the ground as she reaches the end of the aisle, walking past checkout and back into the humidity outside. Why should I fucking pay?

His voice brings me back to the car and I look over at Natalie. It’s small but I catch her smile despite the tears she’s struggling to fight back. I feel a heaviness come over me, like someone’s placed a wet blanket over the flames threatening to consume me. He looks at me through the rearview mirror for the first time since he launched his campaign and I feel myself sink back into my seat.

I see her through the side mirror first. Her clothes are clean and a single grocery bag swings from her arm where a light blue cap peaks out and the top of a receipt flaps in the wind, pinned down by the beads of sweat on the carton. She gets in the car and we drive off, the receipt neatly folded and placed in her purse for us to sort through another day.

Chapter 1

2024

That night I hadn't seen all the things that crept under the surface. The lions fish waiting to kill you. The snakes hanging from the trees. The tiger sharks were harmless but I’m glad I didn’t know about them. Will knew. He watched me swim closer to the mangroves under Blondy's headlight, marveling at the lights emitted each time I struck the surface with my paddle until I’d built enough confidence to throw myself in, causing a wave of blue light to ripple right up to the edges of the gnarled roots.

I should’ve known from that first night, marveling at the billions of warning shots flying across the surface of the warm Caribbean water we swam in. We'd left at night under the last quarter moon, two to a canoe heading straight to No Man’s Land then to the bay just beyond where the bioluminescence waited, the only in the world to shoot their little lights to warn rather than to attract.

"You can't run every time something goes wrong. The definition of crazy, et cetera,"

says Rachelle. She must see I'm not following because she looks over at me again from the driver's seat and adds, "Doing the same thing over and over expecting the same result."

"Oh, right," I say, feeling my face flush in defensive guilt over being called out as much as being caught two steps behind again.

A week in town and the jet lag was no longer to blame for my absentmindedness. I've been walking in a fog since I got back. At lunch I'd made a lame joke about needing my coffee pronto when the waiter had to repeat her line of questioning over milk, temperature and sweetness. I'd just stared blankly back at her like she'd been speaking another language. Flustered and annoyed at my lack of understanding, the way someone with early onset dementia recognizes their mental acuity is faltering, I'd offered a meek 'thanks' hoping that would cover it until I realized Rachelle was looking at me with concern, which was somehow worse than the impatient, tightlipped smile from the waiter as she repeated herself. I'd just wanted a fucking latte.

"Thanks again for the ride," I say in another weak attempt to seem with it.

"No problem. It's nice to have you back."

Before the car heats up, Rachelle takes off, unbothered by the fact she can't see out her mirrors. Probably because she's from Wyoming; a Georgia winter is child's play. Teeth chattering, I take the key card from my pocket and promise myself I’ll never live anywhere where I have to think about things like snow chains and anti-freeze. If a bit of frost is capable of breaking you, imagine shoveling a driveway for six months of the year. Even though she insists she can see just fine, I scrape the ice off the side mirror with my makeshift ice scraper until my face appears, pale and scrunched up with the look of someone resigned to a self-appointed task. When did the lines around my mouth get so deep? Fuck, I’m turning into my mother.

A Honda Odyssey parks next to us as we leave and I watch the live action versions of the bumper sticker slapped on the back of the car pile out. Breaking news! Suburbia is as predictable as it was when I left it, I think, staring at the personalized window decal.

Five little figures, lined up from big to small, showed me everything I already knew about the Henley family. The tallest stick figure was bent over teeing up a golf ball. Following the logic imposed by the bumper sticker, which managed to inspire a road rage I hadn’t known before, the wife came next, but I knew her as the wife because she leaned against her golf club with the uneven stance of a woman who’s had a kid on her hip for the past five years. Does she peg him with that? After her, came three little stick figures so close in size you wondered if they knew about family planning. “The kiddos.” Christ.

“It's his loss,” mistaking the disgust on my face for something else, residual sadness from the sob story shared over lunch in listicle form. Ten years away had at least made me good at getting to the point, I think as we barrel down the 400.

I manage a noncommittal noise that sounds more petulant than I'd intended. “Your picker’s broken,” Rachelle says. “Promise me you'll just take a break from dating.”

"No risk there. I'll let you know my plans once I know so we can do a dinner with the boys." I couldn't imagine what my Hinge radar would pick up in the 20-mile radius I currently lived in. A teenager wondering what a 30-year old single woman looked like? A bored couple looking for a fun time? Or the third option, another heartbroken, bank-broken, downtrodden peer living in their childhood bedroom? No, thank you.

I wave to Rachelle from the step and unlock the side door to the garage where boxes of crap lined the perimeter, weakening our argument that Mama was a hoarder. While it was hard to find suitable proof -- 18 years of living with her didn't stand up, apparently -- I knew she thought being able to see the floor equated to tidiness. Taking in all the boxes and knowing inside each one of them contained grocery bags full of more crap, I felt my resolve to not let it all get to me weaken just a little more. It was quite literally hard to see the other side, one where I would be back in my own space in a life completely done on my own terms.

"Hi!," I shout to no one in particular to see if anyone's around, not really sure if I prefer walking into an empty house or a full one right now.

I hear Mama on the upstairs landing and, sensing the fight brewing in her from down here, immediately wish for the former.

"Hi, Savannah. Did you throw out my green coat?," she calls from over the bannister.

"Er, I don't think so?," I say, grateful that I have a few seconds to strategize. Livvi's voice rushing back to me the way only younger sisters' inane observations

can with cutting truth. You gotta a face with subtitles, chief!

This could go south very, very fast. I make my way up the stairs and find her in her bathrobe, hair wet but make up done, down to the red lips, digging through the piles of donation bags Natalie and I made after sorting through the guest room closet. The idea was to tackle one corner at a time but even that mini project had filled no less than 20 Hefty trash bags.

"I really liked that coat. It was brand new too! How did you not see the tag?"

"Hi, Mama. I can take a look but I thought you'd gone through everything before we started sorting piles?

"Darling I've been ill," she says with a sigh.

I fight the urge to clench my jaw and force myself to remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. You will not get another TMJ flare-up, I think, with determination that will most definitely lead to lockjaw. "Ok, I'll take a look through the bags and see if I can find it."

My phone pings with a text from Natalie, who's in her bedroom working. She arrived in town for Thanksgiving last week and is blessed with the excuse of work to burrow herself away in her room.

The cheap green SHEIN one that will continue to float through the Milky Way next to a graveyard of satellites orbiting Earth even after the planet melts then implodes? YES, we did.

As if to spite her hateful older daughters, Mama doubles over in a coughing fit on her way back to her room.

"Are you ok?"

"...yes...fine," she manages to say as she shuts the door on my face.

I continue down the hallway to Natalie's room and mime the knock and enter gesture Mama used to do when we were teenagers.

Putting on an Americanized English accent and an expression of incredulity, I push open her door and say, "But darling I knocked! Don't be cross!"

"Don't," Natalie says flatly. I watch her send off an email then swivel around in her chair to face with me with a saccharine smile.

"Fun fact, did you know that most people die in their bathrooms because they prefer to go somewhere private to hack up their lungs?"

"Uh, no, I did not."

"Well yeah. I have a call in two."

"We can go to Goodwill after then." I shut the door and head back down the hallway where I can hear Mama coughing, which I guess is a good sign. Before I open her bedroom door, I take a deep breath and remind myself I didn't do anything wrong. Did anyone else get irrationally angry at their mother when they tell them all their ails over the past year you've been away? I wasn't mad at her being sick so much as I was about how she approached the subject with a carelessness that implied her health didn't matter anyway. Like it wouldn't affect anyone else.

Her room is dimly lit and smells like hair product and Daisy by Marc Jacobs. Breathing it in had the same effect on me as rubbing a cat's face with a wet toothbrush. It was a quick hit of maternal love that made me both want cry in her arms and yell at her for it not being enough to fix the hurt.

I switch on the overheard light and see Mama flinch. "Mama, are you okay?"

"Yes, leave me," she snaps, covering her eyes in horror like it might turn her to dust.

In case the pain I was causing wasn't clear, she covers her eyes with one hand and makes a shooing gesture with her other. "Turn the light off!"

Back in the hallway, I close my eyes and visualize a rollercoaster. You can go in the park, Savannah, but you can't get on it, Jo said in our last session, where I ended up on the floor of my flat in London on the verge of dry heaving as I tried to explain why the volume at which my flatmate watched her reality shows mattered.

My phone pings again. This time the message is from Livvi in the group chat with Mama.

Hey ladiesssss, Taking off soon. Love you all so much!

She's made a habit of texting us before she travels the past year. I make a note to ask her if it's some sick intrusive thought she's developed since turning 26. Mama responds a heartbeat later, obviously chuffed by the consideration.

Excellent my lovely! Safe flight! Can't wait to see you! Savannah or Natalie will meet you at the airport xxx

I give the message a like and walk back downstairs to load the car with the Goodwill donations with the strange feeling that nothing and everything has changed.