Nobody's Tears
By The Lady Razorsharp
She's nobody.
Truth to tell, sometimes it's easier to be nobody. No one watches you. No one pays attention. No one expects anything or comes after you to demand something.
Sometimes, though, she wishes she was somebody, especially when it comes to Gordon Tracy.
Not that she's around him very much; he's always got a gaggle of friends hanging about, a good mix of guys and girls who make him the center of whatever it is they're doing. He's got the gravitational pull of a star, with his easy charm and his bright amber eyes, and that perfect smile in his expressive, open face. Like the sea he loves, he is always in motion, sweeping people up in the wave of his personality and depositing them, awestruck, in his wake.
It's Friday night. There are lots of WASPs in the bar near the base, everyone's in civvies and listening to the jukebox crank out something so old that it's in. Friday night means the crack of billiard balls and the kind of laughter brought on by too much beer and too much danger in the day-to-day. Friday night means the first taste of freedom in a good long while, payday and all the chicken wings that buys. Gordon is holding court at one of the billiard tables, chalking his cue and chatting with the other players, fingertips going dusty blue. She's too far away to hear what they're saying, but in a moment the corners of his eyes crinkle and he flashes those white teeth, and they all bust out laughing, leaning on the bowed cues like knights leaning on broadswords.
She lets herself be pulled along by her friends, gossip and girl talk and a marked avoidance of anything having to do with their work. Glasses are refilled, empty bottles exchanged for full, and the talk begins again. Eyes are cast to the guys around the table; most of them directed at Gordon, but there are others in the running as well.
Someone nudges her elbow, and it's only then that she realizes she's been staring at Gordon for several minutes, idly touching her tongue to the salt that lingers on the rim of her glass. All of a sudden, she realizes that he's looking back, and she forgets to breathe for a second.
"Girrrrl," a voice in her ear chirps. "What are you doing?" The eyes of the petty first class next to her follow her gaze to the honey-blond pool player in question. "The way he's looking at you-"
Over at the pool table, Gordon is lining up his shot with theatrical precision, a small smile playing about his lips. He stretches his torso over the battered felt, balancing the cue just so with sculpted arms. He slips the cue through his fingers once, twice, and then drives it toward the target. The result isn't as impressive, ending up in a scratch, but he just shrugs those wide shoulders and hands the cue off to a waiting opponent.
She nearly chokes on the dregs of her margarita as he begins to amble his way toward her.
They're not exactly strangers, since she's the Commander's aide, but they've never had an occasion to chat about anything except work. Tonight, though, while she racks her brain for something intelligent to say, he breaks the ice by asking her a question:
"Have you ever had the salt inside the margarita?"
"Uh, no-"
"Ah, y'gotta try it!" Gordon takes her drink from her, waves the barkeep over, and explains what he's after. Soon she has a fresh drink, with flakes of sea salt floating on top rather than caked on the rim. "There," he says, "that's the way. It's too strong on the sides." He leans in and her heart skips. "Making a salt solution and all that? Basic chemistry, y'know?"
She lets the salty-sweet liquid roll over her tongue as his whiskey-brown gaze rolls over her. Somehow, she knows that every margarita after this one will have the salt-and the memory of him-inside.
That night, conversation flows as easily as the waves on the beach outside. Whatever gifts Gordon Tracy is blessed with, one of the foremost is the gift of gab, and she is thrilled to be the recipient. Most of her days are spent in the background, listening and watching and noting, ready to regurgitate important information at a moment's notice, like a human playback machine. Tonight, she lets him talk, punctuating the flow of words with nods and (she hopes) pertinent questions, and laughs in the appropriate places. When he reaches out to settle his arm around her shoulders, she has enough tequila in her bloodstream to allow him to leave it there.
The bar is closing, and all of the patrons are beginning to shuffle toward the exit. She moves toward the ladies' room and Gordon follows, his arm still draped casually across her shoulders. When they're at the hallway, it happens; he turns and drops his arm to catch her around the waist. He leans back against the wall, bracketing her hips with his hands, his blond lashes drooping just slightly with fatigue and a little too much to drink. Her hands come up to lock around the back of his neck, and they share a grin a split second before their lips meet.
He smells like beer and tastes like salt, but his lips are warm and his hands are tightening on her waist, pulling her in to rest against him. There are other people everywhere in this hallway, going in and out of the restrooms, making small talk and snatching kisses of their own, but for her, time and awareness have stopped utterly, narrowing down to the salty-sweetness of him on her tongue.
"Hey, Tracy," someone quips. "Time to surface, yo."
"Ah, he can't hear ya," says another voice, but he moves and her eyes flutter halfway open to see him holding up his index finger: Hang on a minute. Male laughter echoes in the hallway.
He pulls away, eyes dancing and cheeks pink. "I gotta go," he says, straightening up from the wall and pulling away, his fingers hanging on until the very last moment. "Text me. I'll call you, 'kay?"
She doesn't, though. She's not sure if she wants to be one of the many, or to take her memory back to her billet and lock it in a box that's just for her. In the end, that's exactly what she does, because ultimately, she's nobody.
The next time she sees him, it's on Exhibition Day.
Banners and flags are flying in the breeze, the band is playing, the smell of hot dogs and fried Twinkies is floating in the air, and the public has come to gawp at sanitized versions of the wonders of naval technology. It's a fun day, and by the time it's over, everyone will be exhausted with too much sun and too much junk food.
Except that's not what happens.
The centerpiece of the afternoon is the hydrofoil demonstration. She's there in summer whites next to the Commander, eyes hidden behind her sunglasses as she scans the crowd for Ensign Tracy. The crew of the hydrofoil is already belowdecks, though, and she settles back to watch as the lines are cast off and the powerful boat slips smoothly from the end of the dock and toward the open sea.
The crowd won't be able to actually see the boat, since it has to sail well beyond the beach, but a helicopter is following in order to beam footage back to three huge screens set up in the viewing area. Children with faces sticky from cotton candy watch with wide eyes from the safety of their parents' laps as the boat makes a turn and begins to accelerate.
It's difficult to gauge speed, since the helicopter more or less keeps up, but there is a counter in the corner of the screen that ticks off the knots and converts it to miles per hour. The crowd oohs and ahhs as the count pushes past 100, then 200, and people are exclaiming in wonder and applauding as the numbers climb to 300 and beyond. Then, between one heartbeat and the next-
With a bone-shaking boom, the boat founders onto its nose and shatters apart in an explosion of white water and metal and fire. People are screaming, grabbing their children and turning sticky faces away seconds too late. The Commander goes as white as his uniform, and she realizes that all the oxygen has gone out of the world.
Gordon Tracy is dead. His crewmates are dead. The boat is destroyed, nothing remaining of it but burning bits of metal and an oily slick on the water.
Before the feed is cut, other pieces begin to surface; the curve of a hull, a twisted foil, a limp and bloody body. Then the video winks out, replaced by nothing but a black, empty screen.
Rescue copters rumble overhead. A pair of Coast Guard cutters pull away from the dock, their decks bristling with divers and equipment. Spectators clump together, holding each other and sobbing. Then the call goes up-someone's alive! One of the crew is still alive, but barely, and may not even make the evac from the water to the rescue craft.
Without a doubt, she knows it's Gordon. If anyone could survive that, it's him. Her suspicions are confirmed within the hour, as one of the choppers comes back and settles as gently as it can onto the pad. The gurney is a mess of tubes and blood and mylar blankets, so much so that he is nearly lost in the chaos, but she thinks she sees a shock of honey-blond hair, matted with red-brown, before he is shuttled to a waiting ambulance.
Usually she would be the one to call the family, if not actually breaking the bad news then securing the line before patching the family through to the Commander. Today, he makes the call. That's how you know something is bad, she thinks, as she watches the Commander press his phone to his ear. When the brass makes the call, it's gone beyond bad to downright catastrophic.
No one does anything that night. No one eats. No one sleeps. Everyone just hangs around, waiting for word. The family arrives around midnight, a stern salt-and-pepper patriarch with three young men in tow and a woman with iron-gray hair bringing up the rear with the blond, blue-eyed youngest clinging to her arm. At first they are only allowed to see Gordon through a window, and her heart twists in her chest to see them plaster themselves against the glass, fingers splayed and foreheads flattened in an attempt to reach the broken body just beyond.
For Gordon Tracy is indeed broken. Name a bone, and his is either shattered, fractured, or cracked. His brain is contused from pinballing against the inside of his skull. A hose taped into his mouth pushes and pulls the air for him. His handsome face is swollen and purple from a staggering amount of bruising. She's heard frightening things whispered in the hallway where she lingers: Paralysis. Blindness. Vegetative state. Brain death. The youngest of them is led away to gentle the reality of his brother's condition, while the oldest two stay and listen, tears in their eyes but their faces grim. The middle one dons clean-room gear, complete with rebreather and booties, just to stand next to his brother and lay his gloved fingers on the only part that isn't broken-Gordon's left hand.
It's nearly dawn when she walks by the Commander's side to meet with the family. They are all red-eyed from tears and fatigue, and at the sight of uniforms, each of them look up with identical expressions of loathing.
In their eyes, it's the uniforms that are responsible. The uniforms took him and didn't protect him. The uniforms were careless, treating Gordon as expendable. There will be no true sympathy from the uniforms, and she can feel the hatred of the Tracy family as plainly as if they had spoken it aloud. How badly she wants to tear off her cap and tell them: No. He matters to me. I am nobody, and he made me feel like somebody once.
Finally, one of the nurses notices her sagging against a door frame, and she is given strict orders to go back to her billet and sleep for the next six hours. Someone pushes an Egg McMuffin into her hand, and she eats without tasting it. Alone, she wearily climbs into her bunk and lays there staring at the ceiling, where her brain projects Gordon Tracy's smile against the white surface.
Eventually she sleeps. In the darkness, she pulls a waterlogged body from black water, rolling it over to reveal blue lips she once kissed in a bar. In the darkness, she pulls a limp form from a burning pile of wreckage, and amber irises dance in the firelight. She pulls him to her over and over, his blood on her hands and his voice in her ears. Salt inside, he whispers. Salt, salt, salt.
The inquest begins the next day, which means she's at the Commander's side as the committee runs the footage of the crash over and over, examining the data with a fine-toothed comb. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, they can pinpoint the exact moment when the metal gives way and the boat hits the water at over 380 miles per hour. They estimate the forces exerted on the craft and all inside, and can roughly determine how fast Gordon was flying when the deceleration nearly tore him to pieces.
At the next recess, she excuses herself to the ladies' room-not to use the facilities, but to simply sit down on the lid of the toilet and shake for ten solid minutes. What was going through his mind, she wonders, as the boat spun out of control and the water burst through the seams? Did he have time to cry out, to call his mother's name, to think of the faces of those four brothers, to make a last plea for clemency before being swept away?
The inquest continues for a solid two weeks. After it's over, she can't recall more than three meals she's eaten, but she has a large repertoire of dreams to show for her pains. When she closes her eyes, all she sees is honey-blond hair and amber eyes and white teeth. All she hears is his voice in her ears: Salt inside, salt. His hands reach out to her.
"I see you," he says, coughing out a river of red. "I see you."
It wasn't his fault, they decide. Mechanical error. He was capable, but his boat failed him and his three crewmembers. The three who were lost are given heroes' memorials, attended by the entire base and just about everyone else up to and including the President. Gordon, she hears, is laying in a hospital, finally breathing on his own but locked within a body that won't obey him. It's this thought that chills her the most of all, to think of that quick form stilled forever. She can still feel his hands on her hips and the way he pressed against her in a stuffy, crowded, noisy hallway.
One day, many months later, she hears a conversation between the Commander and the up-and-coming officer who has been slated to replace him. She's good at listening, so she stays in her seat with her eyes on her tablet and tunes her ears in the direction of the voices that think they're being quiet enough.
"I hear golden boy's out of the hospital," says the newcomer.
"Oh? Good for him," the Commander replies. "How's he doing?"
"Made a full recovery, I'm to understand. They call him their miracle boy. Stubborn kid, wouldn't give up once he found out he could move his feet. His pops pulled some strings and got him in the pool every day. Was only a matter of time after that."
"No kidding. Well, I'm glad for him; that was a rough go."
That night, for the first time in a long time, she sleeps without dreams.
Many years later, she happens to be stationed on a tiny island that is ravaged by a hurricane of epic proportions. The waves remind her of the ones in her long-ago dreams, except these are real. The sea is hungry, and it swallows up buildings and lives and comes back for more.
The rain pelts like a million tiny daggers against her skull, and she's tired. She's filled enough sandbags to build the Coliseum, she thinks, when suddenly out of the mass of grey walks an angel in bright blue and yellow.
A hand reaches out to her and takes her hand in his. Honey-blond hair and whiskey-brown eyes flash from behind the rain-splattered Plexiglas of his helmet. A smile dawns, full of perfect white teeth.
"I'm Gordon," he shouts above the storm. "I'm with International Rescue. I'm going to get you out of here!"
He doesn't remember, and she doesn't remind him, but once again she takes out the memory of a stolen kiss in a crowded bar, and she smiles.
Years later still, she lingers after Mass in the small church, remaining in her seat as the parishioners file past. Not many here recall the day that a very fast boat shattered into pieces not far from where they sit, but she remembers. She may be nobody, but she remembers, and now that the church is deserted, she takes a dollar from her purse and drops it into the collection box. She takes a tall white candle from the stack and slots it into a sapphire blue holder before the Blessed Virgin, then touches a spill to one of the wicks already burning nearby and lights her candle.
Gordon Tracy may not remember her, but she knows this: Every time the call goes out, the prayers of a nobody go with him.
-end-