Drown #5: everlong, part 1

April 2084 — Stephanie Day and Justin Kim are 24. Keri Riley is 23. Jeremiah Day is 27.

*soundtrack: "Everlong" by Foo Fighters


Justin woke up before Stephanie did. He hadn't slept so well in a very long time. He watched Stephanie's face change as she dreamed, and perhaps he'd never done that before. If he had, it hadn't been since they were children. He couldn't remember seeing the way her mouth pinched in and out of a frown and her brow furrowed with worry. He touched her arm. She breathed deeply once, exhaled, and then the furrow faded.

He wouldn’t kiss her again because he was angry. Stephanie should never be kissed out of anger.



So Keri wouldn't be the wife he wanted and maybe that was okay. In that realization, his heart opened up and he didn’t feel angry anymore. They would make up the rules as they went, redefining what all of this meant to them. She started that. On some level, he could even appreciate what she was doing. She was fighting a war. On some level, he could even be proud of her. She was doing what a lot of people weren’t brave enough to do. She was giving up this domestic life to be a hero. Good for her. This was what she wanted, and he would give that to her. He would let her go be a hero. He would let her go.

It was like his whole life had just been redefined.

He wouldn't go as far as to say that Keri’s mother was right, about his being selfish, but at least there was something good to take out of all of this.

Then one of the girls whimpered on the baby monitor, which meant that in ten seconds flat, they would both be screaming for their morning bottle like they were dying of hunger. Justin understood completely. Last night, he and Stephanie had cried, they’d kissed, and they’d slept, but they hadn’t eaten. He felt like he could scream of hunger too.

One wail, then two.

Stephanie started to lift her head, eyes still closed. "Stay here," he told her. "I’ll get the girls."

—

It could have been two minutes later or twenty that Stephanie finally woke up, but when she did, the house smelled like toast and cinnamon and butter. The girls were quiet, somewhere, and downstairs there were cartoons on. They weren't crying, so they must have had  their bottles. The bed was now cold where Justin had been, but she knew he was there next to her, hours upon hours through the night. She hadn’t been imagining it, unless she’d died in her sleep and this was heaven.

She splashed some water on her face and went downstairs. Heaven, indeed. He'd even made breakfast.


"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said.

She couldn't stop smiling and she felt like an idiot. Get it together, she told herself like she hadn't actually known him for seventeen whole years.

"Um, about last night," he said.

Her heart jumped out of her chest. Don't take it back, please don't take it back.

"For the record, I just wanted to say that I'm a better kisser than that. I was hasty, probably sloppy."

Jesus Christ, if that was a bad kiss then she wouldn’t survive a good one. "It wasn’t bad," she said. "Hasty, maybe. I guess I always imagined you were a pretty careful kisser."

"You imagined what kind of kisser I was?"

She blushed furiously.

"I’m sorry, don’t answer that," he said. "I have to go to work, but I wanted to make sure you were okay about everything."

"I’m good," she said, smiling like a stupid teenage girl with a crush because she didn’t know how to explain that she was slowly melting from the inside out.

He laughed at her. He knew. "But if I don’t kiss you again, I want you to know that it's not because I don't want to. Not because I regret it, because I don’t regret it. At all. I just think you should decide. You probably like your husband a lot more than I like my wife right now."

Stephanie couldn’t think of her husband right now. There wasn’t enough room in the universe. She became flustered. Was that a question? Did she need to answer that now?

Justin laughed. "No, don’t answer that, either. I mean, not until you’re ready to. Okay, eggs get cold fast. Eat up."

"Wait though," she said. "We can still hug, right?"

"Always, Steph."


Good, she thought, because she couldn't give up his hugs in a million years. She was pretty sure she couldn't give up his kisses, either, but at least she still had time to decide about that.



After he had taken his jacket and briefcase, after she heard the front door close, she danced and bounced and cheered a little, gleefully and shamelessly. He was the most perfect man ever who was not her husband.


Stephanie showered and changed and let the girls toddle off through the afternoon sunshine. She needed to check Jeremiah’s fruit trees to see if they were coming back for the spring. They weren’t though, they were brittle and sickly and the apple buds hadn’t started to flower. She’d let Jeremiah’s fruit trees die. It felt very metaphorical.

Or maybe she was just a bad gardener.

Stephanie didn’t have the reasons Justin did. If they did this, it would be cheating. Plain and simple. She could justify it how she wanted, but it was cheating because Stephanie was married and Justin was not her husband, no matter how much she might wish that he was. But the reasoning happened anyway and it was extensive. Her wedding didn’t happen in a church, so it didn’t count? She wasn’t wearing a dress, so it didn’t count? He put a gift shop ring on her finger, so it didn’t count? She loved Justin first, so it didn’t count?

Her husband was five hundred million miles away and she’d been in love with Justin for longer than she could remember. The rules of the universe began to bend and break.

—

Stephanie wondered if she wrote to Jeremiah routinely, maybe he wouldn’t get mad. Sending the message on schedule helped her remember. Every week day while Justin was at work and the girls took a nap, she wrote a message to her husband. A short video, a picture, a line or two about what she and Willow had been doing, some funny thing that was said. It felt odd sharing her life with him in this way, like he was standing outside of it, looking in through this finite window she offered him. She found it hard to know what to write, because she realized that there had always been so much of herself she didn’t offer him. You don’t realize that when you’re twenty, when you elope with some college boyfriend at a cabin in the woods. He had her body exclusively, he had her time exclusively. What more could there be?

So much more, actually. Like that tidy box in the center of her heart that she kept for Justin. "That isn’t for you, Jeremiah," she could say. "It never was and it can never be." If he would have known her better before they eloped in some mountain lodge on spring break, he might have known this about her. Maybe he didn’t know what he was getting into. Maybe he thought he could change her mind.

He was very charming in the beginning, but after too. He always seemed to know just what she wanted to hear, and he'd say it. His ideas were wild and exciting at a time when she wasn't getting anything else she wanted out of her life. Justin and Keri were planning their wedding and Jeremiah said to her, “Let’s have a baby. Let’s be a family now. I’m all you need.”

Could that be true, she wondered? Should she let him try to be all she ever needed?

When people talked about “trying” to have a baby, they always made it sound like such an effort. But there was no effort here. Stephanie stopped taking her birth control pills and three and a half weeks later, she was pregnant.

They had a lot of things to arrange. They knew they couldn’t stay at the cabin—Stephanie would need routine prenatal care and Jeremiah had grown tired of traveling back and forth for his Coast Guard duty. It was November and they had Justin and Keri’s wedding to attend. Jeremiah was excited for this wedding. “We’re going to see our two good friends be joined for life. Doesn’t it make you feel happy inside?” Stephanie felt more tense about the whole thing, and six weeks pregnant, she was starting to feel sick. She wondered what was wrong with her that she couldn’t be happy for her friends.

Keri didn’t ask Stephanie to be her maid of honor. Justin did ask if she wanted to be “best man” which made her heart feel warm, but Jeremiah laughed at that idea and Stephanie didn’t really like crowds anyway, or dresses, or the idea of standing on a raised platform in heels, so Justin chose someone else. An actual man. The wedding happened, as weddings do. Keri was a beautiful brat and Justin looked more handsome than Stephanie ever thought possible.

At the reception later, Keri was off somewhere complaining about what everyone else was doing wrong at her wedding. Stephanie hadn't seen Justin for months. He asked her, “How was the cabin? How is newlywed life?”

Whenever he called, she had told Justin everything was fine, fine, fine. But then she showed up at his wedding and she couldn’t lie anymore because he could see it in her eyes. She was not fine. It seemed like such a simple question, but she just gaped at him. Like a deer in headlights he used to call her. She couldn't even explain the feeling, the word for it, the panic she felt besides just being pregnant. "You're just feeling hormonal," Jeremiah had told her, but it felt like more than that, an all-encompassing loneliness that she couldn't shake. She took short quick breaths, looking like she wanted to say so much but couldn’t. Because her husband was standing there and she couldn't tell him this truth.

Later in the evening, Justin managed to steal her away into the quiet kitchen of the reception hall. In that privacy, she told Justin everything. "He thought we should have a baby. I wasn't even sure about it, but I just said, 'Sure, okay.' To a baby. An actual baby. And now I guess I'm gonna have a baby. Oh god, what did I do?"

“You had sex,” Justin said, and they both laughed. She cried more than she laughed, and soon after, she laughed more than she cried, until it all felt better. She had five wonderful minutes with her best friend on his wedding day before Keri and Jeremiah found where they'd disappeared to.

—

Jeremiah came back from his routine patrol duty for five days every three weeks, which meant he'd have three weeks of saved up messages to read from her, once a day, five days a week. Fifteen messages was better than one. Or none, on that one occasion she'd forgotten.

But he didn't seem quite pleased.

Jeremiah: You don't send the same kind of videos the other wives send.

Stephanie: What do they send?

Jeremiah: They cry.

Stephanie: You want me to cry?

Jeremiah: Maybe. It might be nice to see. Would you cry if I died out here, if I never made it back home? Or would you get over it? How long would it take you?

Stephanie: Don't say stuff like that. It scares me.

Jeremiah: Prove it. I want to see how scared you are. Show me your face.

Stephanie stared at the words for what felt like the longest time, not knowing what to do or how to respond. The words on the screen felt cold. She didn’t like him when he got like this. But seeing it in typed words seemed worse somehow. A cold voice would be heard and laughed off and then just as soon dissolved into memory to be forgotten. These words sat on her computer screen and they weren’t going away. She clicked “delete” and started a new conversation.

Stephanie: Willow did the funniest thing today…

She hadn’t seen her husband in over a year. He was somewhere near Jupiter, now. Maybe that mattered. Things felt more and more different the longer and longer he was gone. His words on the screen felt cold and his voice in the videos felt cluttered. Maybe being here would change things. How would she know until he came home? How could you know if you were falling out of love with someone who wasn’t here?

Her heart was a mysterious box of hidden doors and secret rooms.

But no matter what happened or how, it wasn’t like with Justin and Keri. Stephanie had no reason to be mad at him. He was in actual danger out there. He needed to be focused. No matter what happened in the end, she still wanted Jeremiah to come home alive.

—

Keri's mother called to talk about Justin. Again. Keri got it, Justin was mad. Okay. Fine. Be mad. What was there to do about it now? She couldn't exactly put on five pairs of lingerie and seduce him into some blistering hot makeup sex. "I know, I know, you guys spent thirty-five thousand dollars on that wedding and we started fighting after less than a year. I get it, that sucks. But it'll be fine, probably. We’ll talk it out in October when I'm home."

"By October," Madison said, "There won’t be anything left to talk about."

"But Mom, he wants me to come home. For good."

"That’s what you promised him, isn’t it? After your service contract, after the war, you would come home for good?"


"But I’m good at this," Keri whined. "What am I going to do back home? Some retail job? Some paperwork? Ugh. Yuck."

"And what about what your husband wants? I don’t think he wants a part-time wife. You know that’s not what he wants."

"He might be okay with it. He just doesn’t know it yet. But we’ll still see each other most of the year."

"There is only so far you can push the boy."

"And what about what I want?"

"I suppose we didn’t do a good enough job teaching you how to compromise."

"Ugh, compromise?" Keri scoffed. "That’s just making sure nobody gets what they want."

"He’s unhappy, Keri."

Keri could hear her mother breathing. The connection hadn't cut out. Keri knew her mother was just considering her words and what she said out loud would only be the diplomatic version.

"I think he’s considering what his options are," Madison said.


"Who is he considering?"

"That doesn’t matter. It’s all the same, isn’t it?"

"Who is it?"

"I think you could probably guess," Madison said. "Just know that you’re making a decision here. At least make sure it’s a decision you want to be making. You have to understand that."

Keri knew more than people thought she did. She could guess who it was. She felt stabbed in the back by two blades.


Keri always kind of knew Stephanie had a little crush on him, but Keri didn't think he liked her back. Stephanie? She was so tall and willowy. She had stringy hair and dressed like a twelve-year-old charity kid. She was so shy that she couldn't be very much fun in bed. Was that the kind of woman he wanted all along? 

Whatever, pathetic as it was, Stephanie? Would she really do it? What kind of a friend sleeps with her best friend's husband?

Oh wait, Stephanie probably didn't consider Keri her best friend. That was Justin. Keri was just some girl she used to play soccer with in high school like it was nothing at all. All bets were off.

And all at once, while floating on a one tiny rock orbiting a bigger rock in the blankness of infinite space, Keri realized she had no friends left in the whole universe.

"Hey, Keri, can I bother you for a minute?"

Keri shook it all off. "Go for it," she said.

"I know you were supposed to have this weekend off, but if you want it, there’s a translation seminar available this weekend. They’re going to be selecting some people to train up in Cassiopeian for the languages team. It seemed like something you might be interested in."


“Yes! Wow, me?”

“General Deppiesse said to pick a handful of strong candidates. I think you’d be great at it.”

“I’m totally interested!" Keri said. "I’m there!”

“Great. See you this weekend then.”


Keri had forgotten already what she promised she would do this weekend.

Oh, a phone date with Justin and Lily.

She rolled her eyes. It didn't matter. Lily didn’t even know who she was and Justin didn’t have anything nice to say to her, anyway. No big loss.

But this was exciting, a once in a lifetime chance. She couldn’t turn it down. How many people were given the opportunity to learn a classified alien language? Later, they’d have all the time in the world for phone dates. Now, she was going to learn to speak Cassiopeian.

—

outtakes: Keri is not cut out for marriage