Dirty Seal

by Harper James

Chapter 25

  Heath leaves.

  I mean, the plane leaves. I assume he’s on it. I watch the progress of his flight like some sort of crazy person; every time it inches farther away from my location on the screen map, it slices at me.

  But then it lands, and I’ve got no way to know where he is or what he’s doing. I consider calling Sierra, but don’t know what to say to her. In the end, I call Bella and explain the whole breakup.

  “Ugh, you’re right though— better to know he sucks now than later on. What if you waited for him all those months and then he came back and acted like this? What a waste,” she says.

  “Yeah. I know. I guess,” I answer, sighing. “I just feel stupid that I let myself believe it could really be something, you know? I feel like I got conned by my own heart.”

  “I think you got conned by Heath’s enormous dick.”

  “Bella!” I say, but it makes me laugh, and I’m grateful.

  Over the next few days my life swiftly returns to normal, almost alarmingly so. I go to the coffee shop to work. I go by my mom’s house— though not nearly as often, since Heath’s security check made her feel a thousand times safer apparently. I come home. It feels like the week and a half with Heath was some sort of wild vacation, or maybe even a weird fever dream— something that exists outside my real world entirely.

  And yet, my heart is heavy in a way I’ve never experienced before. There’s a constant ache in my chest, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night sobbing. Remembering what it felt like to be loved, to be whole…

  Of course, it’s only another week before a very different distraction tears into my life— my father’s parole hearing.

  “We’ll be fine,” I remind my mother in the car on the way to the courthouse. She’s staring at the outside world like a stranger in a foreign country, noting all the new gas stations and billboards that are old news to me. In between these observations, she frets loudly.

  “I don’t know. I could have just sent a victim impact statement.”

  “You need to be there. You know the odds of parole are lower if you’re actually there,” I remind her.

  “The odds of him getting to me are much higher if I’m there,” she says.

  “It’s a courthouse, not a back alley,” I say, and then she comments on a new Denny’s, and we repeat the entire conversation over again.

  The courthouse is small and boring, beige walls and square windows, a monument to efficiency and function rather than beauty. We park in the visitor lot, and I steer my mother toward the door so she can’t see the prison bus that’s already arrived with today’s parolees. Thankfully, they appear to have already entered the building, as the bus is sitting empty save for a guard at the door.

  We’re checked in by bored looking government employees, then lead to a courtroom that’s as nondescript as the outside of the building. It’s strange, I think as I look around at the other families praying for one parole result or another, how something with such powerful ramifications can happen in such a dull place.

  “I wish Heath were with us,” my mom says, and I force a smile.

  I didn’t tell her about our breakup. After everything that happened with my father, my mother is afraid of breakups. I worried she’d think Heath might turn into a monster like dad. And also? I didn’t want to admit it to her, how hard I’d fallen in such a short period of time.

  “Chad wouldn’t dare mess with us if he saw someone like Heath sitting beside you,” my mother goes on.

  “Right,” I say stiffly, licking my lips, trying not to think about where Heath might be right now, or what he might be doing. There’s been nothing in the news about the SEALS, which I suppose is a good thing. No news is good news when it comes to secret missions, right?

  “There’s his sister,” my mother says darkly. I turn to see Aunt Lisa entering the room with a handful of cousins and relatives who have been long removed from my life. One, a guy whose name I don’t even remember— is he even directly related to me, or did he marry in to the mess?— glowers at me as they sit down.

  “Don’t worry about them,” I say.

  “They’ve got more people than us. Are they all going to get to read statements for him?”

  “I have no idea,” I answer. “And it doesn’t matter. We’ve got our statements, and they’re powerful. Besides, we’re not trying to prove his guilt this time. We’re just trying to make him finish out the sentence he deserves.” This is a line straight from our lawyer, but one I’ve repeated to mom over and over for the last few days.

  Cases tick by slowly, painfully slowly, until my world comes to a stop— my father has entered the courtroom with his lawyer.

  For some reason, when I think the word “my father”, I always picture the letters, not the person— like he’s not a human at all. It’s easier to acquiesce the letters with all he did to my mother and me than it is to accept a human hurting her so badly. But there he is, a man, flesh and blood, in a neat suit, freely shaved. He doesn’t look toward my mother and I, but closes his eyes and makes a show of praying as procedures begin. I roll my eyes; my mother trembles.

  My father, my aunt, and my cousins read their statements. People from the jail comment on his good behavior. It’s all a song and dance that feels familiar to me, the same tricks that he used to employ back when he and my mother were together— flowers and compliments when needed so he could fall back on them as “proof” that he was, at heart, a good husband after he hit her.

  When it’s my turn, I get through my letter without emotion, secretly channeling Heath’s calm, cool demeanor. Perhaps crying would be more powerful, but I refuse to give my father the pleasure— and I say as much.

  “Believe me, it would still be a pleasure. He liked causing us pain. He liked how afraid we were of him,” I say.

  My mother gives her statement next, stuttering and shaking through it. And then it’s done, and then the Hearing Examiner is speaking, and the room feels still.

  “I respect and value the dependent’s progress while in the state’s custody, and appreciate the positive impact he’s had on his fellow inmates through the prison education system and work study programs.” My father almost blushes; his sister and her family smile. “However,” the examiner says, and the smiles vanish. “At this point, I worry that not enough time has passed for me to feel confident that parole would be the safest, best option for the community or the victims. We will revisit parole in the future, and I encourage the defendant to continue to be a model prisoner in the meantime. Parole is denied.”

  My aunt screams, throws her purse. The cops in the room are on her quickly, my cousins are shouting at them for manhandling their mother, my father is being lead away with his head down, there’s shouting, another cop is ushering my mother and me from the room—

  And it’s done. We’re in the cold, marble-floored hallway, alone.

  “I guess…that’s it,” I say, stunned at how swiftly it all went down. I can still hear Aunt Lisa shouting, and I know she’s being arrested.

  “It’s done,” my mother says in a tiny voice, more like an animated mouse’s than a human’s. She listens to the chaos behind the door for another moment, then turns to me, eyes trembling. “Do you think we should go out to lunch?”

  My eyes widen. “To lunch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh…yes. Yes, that’d be great,” I say, the words mumbled and clumsy. I expected her to insist on going straight home regardless of the results today, especially given all the drama we just witnessed. “Where to?” I ask.

  “Oh, you pick,” my mom says. The fear is still in her voice, but I see victory in her eyes. I see my mother the way she used to be, back before she locked her doors to the world.

  I grin. “How about we go someplace new?” I ask, and she nods enthusiastically.

  Chapter 26

  With my father safely behind bars, my mother daring to venture outside again (slowly— very, very slowly), and spring around the corner
, I want to be able to forget about Heath.

  After all, he’s been gone now longer than we were ever together— almost five months. But I can’t help thinking about the fact that it was supposedly a six month deployment— is he going to come back?

  I don’t know how I’ll feel if he does. I don’t know what I’ll do if he does. My heart longs to see him again, even as my head scolds me, reminds me that it didn’t work out for a reason, reminds me that I’m not cut out to be a military girlfriend and that Heath wasn’t the boyfriend I wanted in the end, drunk on the floor of his father’s house.

  Still, I comb the newspapers, looking for information on a SEAL mission, reading between the lines as if our town’s little Daily Holler is going to be sending me secret information in news stories inches from ads for this weekend’s rodeo. The internet is just too vast a hole to fall in to, so Bella handles that medium for me, shaking her had “no” each morning when I walk into the coffee shop. No, there isn’t anything new to report today. No, there are no reported deaths or missions or victories.

  If I were a less stable person, I’d start to wonder if he’d ever existed at all.

  Though if that were the case, my sanity would be proven by running in to none other than Vic at the gas station one boring January morning. We’re both silently staring at the rack of candy bars together for a full ten seconds before we look up to navigate stepping around one another and realize who our fellow candy-patron is.

  “Vic!” I say, startled.

  He smiles in an unimpressed, grizzled way that reminds me why I didn’t ever like him. “Karla?”

  “Karli,” I say. I’d be hurt if it were any other guy’s dad, but with Vic, this doesn’t particularly surprise me.

  “Right. Good to see you. Hope things are well,” he says gruffly, and grabs a king-size Snickers like it personally offended him. He walks toward the counter and slides it across to the attendant.

  I want to let it go, but I can’t, not when I’m face to face— or, well, face to back-of-the-head—with a source that might actually know something for real about Heath. With Vic right in front of me, information on Heath isn’t something I can laugh at my need for; it’s vital, and I hunger for it in an almost primal way.

  “Heath,” I call out to Vic’s head. “How is he? Do you know where he is?”

  Vic goes still, save for his fingers on his wallet; he runs them across the worn leather thoughtfully before turning around to face me. The guy behind the counter looks unimpressed with whatever this exchange is over, and goes back to meddling with the lottery machine.

  It’s not until Vic is facing me head on that I notice he looks rough. He’s always looked rough, of course— it’s sort of his entire aesthetic. But Vic is a new level of rough right now, his eyes bloodshot, skin dry, hair greasy at the roots.

  “If there’s anything you can tell me, I mean,” I say quietly, stunned and surprised by his appearance— and by the hard gleam in his irises.

  “If you could know where he is, he’d have told you,” Vic says.

  “Maybe. I don’t know— we sort of fought right before he left, and I just…I just want to know if he’s okay,” I say. “Do you know that, at least?”

  Vic looks at the ground for a second, then back to the counter. He removes a five-dollar bill from his wallet and slides it across the counter. I think the conversation is over, but when he turns back around he finds my eyes again and speaks as he unwraps his candy bar.

  “I don’t know where he was. I don’t have the security clearances to know where my own god damn son was, because he’s a SEAL, you know. Too good for me,” Vic says.

  “Oh,” I stumble. “I mean— I guess if he can’t tell anyone where he is—“

  “I said I didn’t know where he was. I know where he is now,” Vic says, taking a bite of the Snickers.

  “Oh,” I repeat. “Can you tell me?”

  Vic chews. I’m pretty sure he’s doing it slowly on purpose, and it takes some real willpower on my part to keep from reaching forward and smacking the stupid candy bar out of his hands.

  “I’m trying to stop drinking,” Vic says.

  “Oh.” This, clearly, is the only word I’m capable of forming right now. I swallow and force something else from my mouth. “Uh, good luck. Is it going well?”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  “Oh.”

  “Heath said it was this or he’d move out. Said he’s sick of this shit and that he’d go to my bosses. It was a real fucked up thing to do.”

  I don’t smile. I want to smile— really, really badly— but I don’t smile, barely managing to keep my lips in a firm, hard line.

  “I think it’ll be a good thing. I’m sure it must be hard though,” I finally say, still not smiling, don’t-smile don’t-smile don’t-smile—

  “That motherfucker,” Vic says. He heaves away from the counter and walks toward the door— now, it’s clear, the conversation really is over

  “He’s okay though, Vic? Heath’s okay?” I ask, frantic to get an answer to that, at least, if Vic won’t tell me where he is.

  “He got hit by an IED. His arm is tore up. He’s recovering,” Vic says as the door chimes jingle ahead.

  “Oh my god,” I say, blinking, almost frozen— but then I dash out after him. “He didn’t lose his arm, did he? I mean, is he hurt long-term—“

  “You ask him,” Vic says, dropping the candy bar wrapper on the ground carelessly and then jamming his keys into his truck.

  “Where can I write him? Do you have an address?” I ask hurriedly. I know that the minute Vic slams his door shut, I’ll lose the chance at this information.

  He snorts. “Yeah. Fifteen Milton Drive.”

  I stop, shaking my head— that’s the address of Heath and Vic’s house. “You’ll forward it to him?”

  Vic snorts again, louder this time, and I think just for the effect. “He’ll open it himself. He’s been home for a month.”

  Chapter 27

  Obviously, Vic has not stopped drinking, because Heath is not home, because that would be insane and crazy and it’s just so clearly not true.

  “Fuck,” Bella says, eyes wide after I tell her the whole thing.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Like, extra fuck,” Bella says again.

  “Concur.”

  “Extra fuck with guac on the side—“

  “Yeah, got it, Bella,” I say, and sigh. “Did Jack say anything?”

  “Nope. He didn’t know. If it’s true, anyway.”

  “I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse. If he was back and told people but not me, I’d be mad, but at least I’d know it’s because he doesn’t care about me. But if he didn’t tell anyone…then maybe it isn’t true at all. Or maybe he can’t tell anyone and Vic just ratted him out.” I put my head down on the worn wooden table of the coffee shop. “What do I do?”

  “I think…” Bella bites her lips. “I think you should ask your mom.”

  “Uh, no. Because if I ask her, I’ll have to explain everything to her. And it’ll turn into this big thing, and she’s doing so well, Bella—“

  “I know, I know,” Bella says, and places her hands over mind. “I get it. But for starters, your mom is only going to keep doing better if you stop treating her like a glass figurine. You did it when she was a shut-in, and you’re sort of doing it now too.”

  I frown. “Wait, you really think that?”

  “I do. I mean, I don’t think you’re shitty for it or anything, I just think that you and your mom…you were sort of the parent there, for a while, and it wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world for either of you.”

  I make a face. “Heath said the same thing, you know. Well, sort of. That was kind of what we argued about…relationships with our parents.”

  “It sounds like he’s mending his,” Bella points out. “Maybe it’s your turn.”

  “Okay, okay— but can’t you give me your opinion to
o, before I get Mom’s?” I ask pleadingly.

  Bella laughs. “My opinion? Do whatever it takes to get that piece of ass in bed again, because he was hot.”

  “You’re no help,” I say, sticking my tongue out at her but laughing all the same.

  I drive to my mom’s house, pleased to see that she’s finally opened all the blinds on the second floor of the house. The first floor is still shut up, but it’s progress. She’s in the backyard despite the cold, pointing at places for Simon to dig. True to his word, he’s come over once a week or so to help her replant her garden. Fear is a powerful motivator in teenagers, I guess— though I think he’s secretly enjoying it, and I can tell my mom is too.

  “What could you possibly be planting in this cold?” I ask as I trudge through the backyard, scarf wrapped tight around my neck.

  “Transplanting,” Mom calls out. “The fig bush that was over on the side yard gets too much shade now, so I’m moving it to where it’ll get more light. If it does well this spring I’ll make fig preserves again! If I remember how…”

  “We’ve got two apple trees on order too,” Simon adds. “You’ve got to have two for apples, since they don’t self-pollinate.”

  “I had no idea,” I say, grinning.

  They finish up and we head into the house, where my mom immediately locks the doors behind her— old habits die hard, I guess. My mom then puts tomato soup from the fancy sandwich shop downtown (she was brave enough to go the other day and get some) on the stove before heading upstairs to close the blinds. I use the time to think on how to bring up Heath. She knew he was more than just a good friend that time he came over before, and I told her about him deploying, but she certainly doesn’t know we were…what we were.

  Though to be fair, I don’t exactly know what we were either.

  I hear her feet on the steps and exhale, then turn to face her. “Hey Mom, you remember Heath?”

  “Yes,” she says, nodding at me. I frown— her face is hard and paler than I remember it being five minutes ago. She looks worried and anxious in a way she hasn’t looked for almost a month. The conversation about Heath is immediately swept from my mind as I hurry toward her.