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by Travis Lee

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Tom woke up without an alarm for the first time in six months.

The USS Defiance had pulled in a week ago and this was his first weekend free. He closed his eyes and opened them, little difference between the dark in the room and that beneath his eyelids. He checked the time on his phone. Alarm or no alarm, he still popped awake around six.

As Tom got out of bed, careful not to wake up Ashley, he thought back to the day the Defiance pulled in. He figured he would’ve gotten used to it by now, manning the rails in his dress blues, the families at the pier to greet them. Many were waving homemade signs but Ashley and Kylie brought none, Kylie reaching her mother’s chin. The things you missed. After Kylie was born, Tom’s own mother had told him the days were long but the years were short. Out to sea everything was long. Lonely nights in his rack, thinking of the missed time with Kylie. But stepping off the ship in his dress blues with his seabag slung over his shoulder to a cheering crowd, this, this was why he served. He assured himself there would be many chances to make up all the missed time.

Tom stepped into the kitchen. The sun rose beyond a set of half-open blinds, harp strings of morning light on the linoleum floor. He fixed himself a coffee and raised the blinds, blinking. Fog on the window wreathed a stained-glass firetruck Kylie had made in preschool. His first deployment, when she was three, she had cried when he came home and tried to hug her.

Tom sipped his coffee. Kylie was eight now, nine in a couple months. Tom cupped his coffee mug with both hands, lowering it to his waist. He stared at the firetruck, thinking of the long days and the short years.

Next underway wasn’t for six months.

***

The years were indeed short, Tom thought as he held Kylie’s hand and took her to the playground. The playground was massive – the advantage of base housing. A Volvo blew through the crosswalk right in front of them. Kylie stared after the car, her eyebrows arching like her mother’s. When she smiled Tom’s dimples showed. When she was angry her mother emerged. Tom’s hair was brown, Ashley’s black, and Kylie’s hair was a few shades of brown darker than Tom’s. She looked like both of them and neither of them, but never the two combined.

It was late afternoon on a Friday, an unusual chill this early in summer. Neighborhood of Spanish-style homes, crammed together with shared front yards. The Spanish-style, crammed together houses with shared front yards was the third neighborhood their family had lived in. Third, and if Tom had his way, last neighborhood.  After moving here, Kylie mentioned her friend Camilla, and going back to visit. Tom humored her in between underways as the fantasies dulled, the mentions tapered off, and Kylie talked about her friend no more.

Tom held Kylie’s hand and they crossed the street, checking to see if she looked both ways like he taught her. She did, and on the other side of the street, Tom unlatched the gate. A chainlink fence reaching his waist surrounded the playground and he pushed open the gate and let Kylie go in first.

By the slide, she slapped his arm.

“You’re it!”

Tom sniffed. He wished he’d brought his jacket and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“Dad are you coming?”

Tom gave chase. His phone weighed down his back pocket and other parents filled the benches, glued to their own phones. Tom stopped to catch his breath, patting his back pocket to make sure his phone was still there.

 “Dad! Dad!”

Tom raised a hand.

“Come and get me!”

He took another breath and jogged toward the jungle gym. They played like this, the wind picking up, Tom panting, the day perhaps long enough to make him forget how short the years were.

Kylie climbed to the top of the slide and pumped her fists, declaring herself the pilot and the jungle gym the plane. The jungle gym was designed to look like a treehouse and a sign declared it for ages 7-9. A tunnel in the design of a log connected the jungle gym to the slide and Kylie crouched, maneuvering her way through it. Before the last underway, she hadn’t even needed to duck and other signs marked different areas of the playground for younger kids. There weren’t any marked for older than ten.

His phone rang.

Some guys kept their phones turned off while on liberty, but Tom knew better. The Navy expected more of him as a leader, He answered on the first ring.

“Airplane,” Kylie called, pretending to steer the jungle gym into him.

Tom raised his, hand palm flat and stumbled back, pretending to get hit, all while listening to the news. Half here, half on the ship, Chief’s words tipping the ship from half to full.

Tom slid his phone in his back pocket and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Kylie come down! We need to go!”

 Her groan rumbled across the playground. Tom waved for her to hurry and after she came running up to him, he placed his hands on her shoulders. He no longer had to bend over to do it.

“I know we wanted to stay longer,” he said. He sugarcoated the worst for her, but no one did him the same favor. Liberty expires at midnight, nav brief at twenty-two. The unspoken part of the message was so clear that Chief might as well have shouted it: show up by twenty-hundred to get ready. The perks of leadership.

She gave him a look, one with neither Tom’s dimples nor her mother’s arched eyebrows. Something new. Her lips pursed, her eyes gazing through him, it was all Kylie. Tom stuffed his hands in his pockets. He looked over at the benches. A boy ran up to his mother, showing her a stick. She brushed him off without looking up from her phone and Tom sucked in his lips and released them with a dry pop.  

“I need to go.”

Kylie didn’t respond. On the other side of the crosswalk, Tom waited for her to catch up to him and held her hand the rest of the way home.

In the living room he expected her to ask about when they’d go back to the playground, the same question she’d asked last time he’d left. Tom never went through this song and dance with his wife, but she was a grown woman, her father and uncles in the Navy.

Kylie didn’t ask, though. She just curled up with her mom on the couch, watching YouTube videos of cats on Ashley’s iPhone, mom offering her the comfort dad couldn’t while he packed his seabag.

Seabag packed, they got in the Civic. Tom drove to base, his wife beside him on her phone, Kylie in the back, staring out the window.

She didn’t say a word all the way to the pier. Tom stepped out of the car and grabbed his seabag from the trunk. He slung it over his shoulder. At her mother’s urging, Kylie got out of the car.  

She stayed put, gazing past him.

Tom thought about what to say. He searched Kylie’s face for anger, disappointment, any feelings she’d once expressed. “It’s okay,” he said. He sought more words, better words, the Civic’s engine humming. Then he steeled himself. What comfort? Nothing he said would change the obvious.

Tom kissed Kylie on the forehead and hugged his wife. She wished him good luck, stifling a yawn with her hand, and led Kylie back to the car.

Tom passed the security checkpoint and crossed the brow, showing the watchstanders on the quarterdeck his ID, respectfully requesting to come aboard.

“Looks like we hit the lottery again,” Tom said, pocketing his ID.

“Fuck of the draw,” a young seaman said.

Tom reflected on those words as he headed topside. Tom stood at the foc’sle, his seabag heavy on his shoulders, the base drab and unwelcoming.

He looked out over the parking lot, but Kylie and his wife were gone. He watched other families say bye to their loved ones, thinking of how Kylie ducked to get through the tunnel. He told himself he was lucky, the years weren’t as short as he feared.  

There would be plenty of time to take Kylie to the playground when he got back.

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