“I can’t blame her for what she did. So, yeah.” I feel bad for him for thinking that way, but who’s to say I wouldn’t think like that? I probably would.
The guy gets up, ending our conversation pretty abruptly, and heads down toward the loud first-timers. Now I’m here, left with his lingering words and my newfound fears. I pull the envelope out of my pack; the one Daphne gave me when I left a few days ago.
I open the thing, finding little strips of paper. Just like she said, she ripped her journal entries into shreds before putting them in here. If she were here and saw me take more than one out of the envelope, she’d slap my hand and tell me not to cheat, so I do the right thing and put the others back.
I love her handwriting. It’s all bubbly and accented with hearts, which I find even cuter because I don’t think she knew she’d be handing it to me when she wrote it. It reads:
This man walked into the bar tonight, and I felt the universe shift. I felt my life change in that one split second.
Damn, I miss her.
I put the envelope back into my pack, watching as my officer eyeballs me and squats down in front of me. “Anderson, how’s it going?”
“Fine, sir. How can I help you?”
“There’s a mission I need your help with. You in?”
My mouth answers before my mind has an opportunity to consider what I may be agreeing to, but in the past five years, I’ve never denied any opportunity presented to me. I wouldn’t be able to start saying no now, especially since I know he’s asking me out of respect. “Yes, sir.” Signing my life away blindly isn’t new.
“We leave at twenty-three hundred hours.” Midnight invasion I’m assuming.
I tear a piece of paper out of my notebook, scribble a few words down and close it back up. It’s my just-in-case note. I have a lot of them. As morbid as it is, I’ve saved them all and put them in the inside pocket of my vest. Some are regrets. Some are hopes. Some are promises.
This one is simple: Daphne, I love you for filling my life with enough greatness to sustain a future I might not get to see.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CURRENT DAY
Dear Journal,
It’s been one hundred and sixty-four days since I’ve seen Kemper.
This officially sucks.
-Daphne
DAPHNE
WE’VE ONLY GOTTEN TO SPEAK a few times and it was for thirty seconds each time. We’ve sent letters back and forth, but at this point, it’s been weeks since I’ve received a letter or a call. It’s the longest we’ve gone without talking since he left. The only reason I know he’s alive is because no one has come to tell me otherwise. I’m numb. I’m cold and I feel sort of dead inside. I’ve been holding onto my phone as if it contains the only oxygen left in the world. I place it on my pillow at night and leave it on the loudest tone. Just in case.
Even though I don’t know if he’s receiving them, I continue to write letters. I write stories, poems, and songs. I write until my heart feels hollow, like I’ve stripped it of all pain, but the pain slowly returns with each second I’m not writing to him. It’s all I can do to remain connected in some completely and utterly disconnected way.
I wouldn’t have imagined falling more in love with the ghost of a man. He’s not here, but my memories of every moment I was with him linger. They’re ingrained in my mind and when I close my eyes, I see him and I feel him in my dreams. Sometimes I don’t want to wake up because then everything becomes real again.
After going a couple of weeks without hearing from him at the beginning while he was “getting acclimated,” as he said, I thought the worst. How could I not?
Thank God for Jennifer next door. Our friendship developed immediately and it has been full of laughs and stories. We spend almost every night together, whether it’s watching mind-rotting TV, volunteering, or attending spousal support groups. She’s been there with a smile every time I’ve felt like my thoughts might make me sick, and her positive attitude has changed my outlook on almost everything. She’s made me stronger. Although over these past few weeks there’s been a shift in her mood. There’s been a weakness she’s trying to hide but isn’t hiding it well. She hasn’t heard from her husband either. She told me she’s never gone this long without hearing from him. I don’t think her husband and Kemper are together over there, which makes us wonder what’s going on. I know she puts on a brave face for me, but our walls are thin and I can hear her crying at night, pleading for a sign that the men are okay. This worries me.
I’ve spent days and nights wallowing. How do spouses survive this over and over? I feel like my world has come to a complete stop and I have no idea how to jump-start it back up. The last time Kemper and I spoke, he said he’d “talk to me real soon”. A month isn’t soon. The latest letters I’ve sent to him aren’t as upbeat and cheerful as I’ve forced my words to be in the past. These were more like cries for help.
At least working at the commissary makes the days sneak by, as it’s constantly busy, and I’m forced to focus on the customers rather than the boiling thoughts in my head. But when I see Marines I’ve met through Kemper walk in, I have the desire to ask every one of them if they’ve heard any news. Then I realize how silly it would be to do something like that. Every spouse wants an update. I’m not alone, but I sure feel like I am.
A hand slaps down on the counter in front of me and snaps me out of my haze. “You okay?”
“No,” I tell Jennifer. She comes to visit me around lunchtime every day and we sit out front on a bench eating sandwiches.
“Me neither,” she says.
I quietly follow her outside until we reach the bench and take a seat. I’m staring at her, waiting for her to say something because it’s the first time she’s admitted to me that she’s not okay, and as I’m seeing now, her face is a bit washed out and her eyes are red. “What’s going on?”
With a sharp inhale she twists to look at me. “I was watching the news.” It’s something I don’t do. It’s something I can’t do. I haven’t turned on the news since Kemper left in fear of hearing something terrifying about Afghanistan. I refuse to ask her what she saw because I don’t want to know. I shake my head, telling her exactly how I feel. Please don’t tell me anything. Please. I can’t handle it. I’m not strong enough.
I’m still shaking my head when she takes my hands in hers. “There was some kind of ambush. They aren’t saying who was involved or if there were any casualties yet, but I just have this feeling...”
Everything within me feels like it’s crumbling. My heart is burning—a feeling I’ve never experienced. A feeling I never want to experience again. “How do we find out?”
“We wait,” she says. “That’s all we can do.” She takes another deep breath and unwraps her sandwich. How in the world can she eat right now? I think I might throw up. I watch her in silence as she nibbles at her sandwich, imagining the worst, and feeling cold and achy.
“Snap out of it, Daphne. You can’t do this. We have to assume they’re okay,” she says. She takes another bite of her sandwich, looking up to the sky like she’s trying to think of something to say. “Have you run into Trent again lately?” Not exactly a helpful subject change.
“Yeah. I saw him the other day.”
“Hmm. How’s his training going?” she asks in-between bites.
“Good, I guess. I didn’t really ask.”
I know this sounds bad. Way worse than it is. About two months ago, I was getting ready to close up the commissary for the night when one last person came in. I didn’t even recognize him. His long hair was buzzed and the stubble on his face was gone. Then there was the whole head to toe camouflage thing too, which makes him blend nicely with the rest of the Marines on base. I didn’t pay much attention as I was cashing out one of the registers, but when he dropped a case of water on my counter, I looked up and saw who it was.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, feeling a hollow pit grow in my stomach. He’d come
back for me. He was going to finish me off this time. The one place I was supposed to be safe and suddenly, I wasn’t. How did he get on base? How did he know I was there? And why in the world was he wearing cammies? Those were just some of the questions going through my head at that moment.
He dipped his hands into his pockets and leaned away from the counter. “I enlisted, Daph.” Holy friggin’ bat-shit crazy. That’s all I could think. I could only wonder if he enlisted to be near me? I still don’t know. What kind of psycho does that? Trent. That’s who. “I’m not the man I want to be or wanted to be. I know my chances with you are long gone, but if I have a chance of being with someone like you by joining the Marines, then so be it. That’s what I’ve decided to do with my life.” I know he is in the physical condition to pass all the Marine Corps standards, but it’s his attitude and drug use that should have prevented him from making it to the end of boot camp. I guess he fooled them too.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” I told him. I know I didn’t exactly have the right to say that, but I don’t want him near me.
“I did it for me. Not you or anyone else. I’m cleaning myself up, and this is the best way to do it. I ain’t trying to win you back or nothing. I can only hope some day you might forgive me for the way I treated you, though,” he continued to explain.
“I’ll never be able to forgive you,” I said; although, I’m not sure that matters to him. He knew where I worked at that point. He knew where to find me, and he somehow knew Kemper is deployed—I just didn’t know how. I don’t know how. In my mind, I knew I had two options, play along or fight back. Isn’t that what I’d always done? It had been almost a year since we broke up and he’s still controlling me.
Since that lovely day, he has continued to stop by the commissary a couple of times a week. Thankfully, he hasn’t been inappropriate and he hasn’t made any flirtatious gestures, but I believe he thinks he’s playing his cards right. He comes in to buy food or whatever it is he needs and tells me he hopes I’m doing well. Lately, he’s been asking about Kemper and whether or not I’ve heard from him. Why does he care? Sometimes I wonder if him being a Marine now means he knows something I don’t. He’s got this sympathetic look in his eyes whenever he comes in, and it makes me want to gouge his eyes out.
Regardless of how many times he tries to talk to me, I’ve kept my communication with him to a minimum, never saying more than, “Have a nice day,” like I tell every other person who walks through the store.
I hate that he joined. That he’s intruded into the one place I was supposed to be safe. I hate that after he’s hurt me, he’s trying to fix himself. Why did it take doing what he did to me, to make him realize how screwed up he is?
I look back at Jennifer, who’s staring off into the distance, probably wondering if her husband was in that ambush too. “Do you think we should go back and turn on the news to see if we can find out anymore information?” I ask. At this point, I have to know more, even after diligently avoiding the news for so long.
“I was watching for a while and they just kept replaying the same clip over and over. It looks like two American vehicles got the brunt of the attack. I don’t know if you really want to see it,” she says. She’s looking everywhere but at me.
I slap my hand down on her knee. “Did you see something else?” She still won’t look at me.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. The footage wasn’t great, but I thought one of the guys in the vehicle might have looked like Kemper.” She takes my hand within hers and grips onto me tightly. “But I could be completely wrong. You know how they all look the same over there after not showering for days.” No. I actually don’t. I haven’t watched the news and I haven’t seen pictures. I use my imagination and it’s most definitely enough to give me nightmares as it is.
I look down at my watch, seeing that I still have three hours left of my shift to get through. I also know there’s a TV in the backroom. “Will you watch it with me?” I ask her.
She shakes her head and takes the last bite of her sandwich. “I have to get back to the hospital. Someone called out today and I have to cover for them in pediatrics.” Tossing her trash into the bin beside us, she stands up and looks down at me. “The best thing you can do is keep yourself busy and stay away from the TV. I didn’t want to keep all this from you, but we have to try and put it out of our minds until we know more. It’s the only choice we have.”
I stand up and wrap my arms around her neck. “We’ll be okay.” As in her and me.
“No TV. Okay?” she reminds me.
I nod in agreement, but I’m not really agreeing. I’m just trying to appease her. I need to go see it for myself. When she’s out of sight, I step back into the commissary and walk directly into the backroom since I still have fifteen minutes left of my break. When I push through the back doors, I see that the TV is already on. It’s the first time I’ve seen it on back here, but it’s because one of the other clerks is watching it.
Smoke is billowing out of a vehicle, bullets flying, and explosions are erupting in the distance. I hear muffled screams and I don’t know if it’s coming from our men or from the locals. Now I know why she told me not to watch this. Even if I stop watching now, I’ll never get these images out of my head. The thought of something happening to Kemper makes me feel lost, like I’ve wandered too far into the woods, and I’m at a point where I’ll never find my way back out. I forced my life forward because of him and now I can’t imagine it without him. Part of me knows I did this to myself. Again. I set myself up for pain and living in fear of losing the person I love. He’s worth this kind of pain, though, and I’m sure of that because even if I have to watch this over and over again, I’d do it for him.
“Isn’t your husband over there?” Rick, my boss, sits down beside me. “You can’t watch the news and assume it’s him.”
“How am I supposed to know it’s not him?” I ask. My voice is broken and there’s little sound making up my words.
“Well, you don’t. But I’ve watched my son go through five deployments and the best advice I can give you is to always assume the best. A positive attitude will get you through this.”
“Is your son over there now?” He’s only mentioned his son being a Marine a couple of times. It’s why he works here I suppose, but he’s never said much more about him.
“No.” He stands up and pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot.
“So, he’s here on base?”
Rick takes a quick sip of his coffee before he looks back down at me. “No, he’s dead.” His words come out with force, like he’s held them in for a long time. It feels like a blow to my stomach after what I just watched on TV. And Jennifer was right—one of those men most definitely looks like Kemper. I can’t handle this. I need to, but I can’t. Rick’s confession shouldn’t come as a shock, considering the lifeless look in his eyes and the fact that he doesn’t speak to anyone. I guess this information even answers some of the questions I’ve had about him since I started, but all I can think about is the fact that life does continue on after death. But Kemper is my life now, and that equation doesn’t work.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?” Do I really want to know?
He lets out a lungful of air and sits back down, placing his coffee on the table beside him. “It was eight years ago. He was in Iraq delivering supplies to a small town. From what I heard, the place lit up like a firework display within seconds and he was boxed in. He saved a couple of his men, but he was hit with an RPG in the process.”
“RPG?” I ask, still learning all of these abbreviations.
“It’s a rocket-propelled grenade…an explosive like a super grenade,” he says. “Anyway, he died on impact and came home in a box that I’m guessing contained a few body parts.”
I hate to think about the look on my face right now because I’m sure it isn’t what Rick needs to see, but I can’t fathom what he must have gone through because losing someone you’ve loved for a few mo
nths is nothing compared to losing a child. This doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel worse. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Rick.”
“Look, the moral of my story is, no matter how much worrying you do here at home, it isn’t going to change the outcome. So, do yourself a favor and hope for the best.” He pats his hand against my back and leaves me alone with the TV. Even though I know I shouldn’t still be watching, my eyes settle on the scrolling marquis on the bottom of the screen that reads: “Breaking News.” My heart drums up faster, pounding and thumping, letting me know it’s still running at full capacity. The words, “Four dead,” appear in text. Four out of how many? I can’t be here anymore today. I’m not strong enough. I think it has always been pretty clear that I’m not a strong person. How could I think I was strong enough for this? I’m not.
I burst through the doors of the backroom, making my way into the main part of the store as I run past Rick and tell him I have to leave for the day—I don’t give him an opportunity to respond. I don’t think I need to. I run to my Jeep and drive home, only so I can lock myself inside and close the blinds. I want to hide under my covers and make this all go away like I used to do as a child. Why doesn’t that still work as an adult?
***
I haven’t moved from my bed in hours. I have no right to think that ambush had anything to do with Kemper, but I have this horrible feeling in my stomach. While that Marine on the news clip did look just like him, I want to say it was just my imagination, but Jennifer saw it too. There are so many of them over there though, so what are the odds? They have to be low. The odds of someone looking like him just have to be higher.
Every second that passes without hearing someone tell me he’s not okay, is another minute of comfort, but I don’t know how long I can ignore the fact that the house phone has been ringing non-stop for the past thirty minutes. I’m staring at it like it’s going to answer itself, or maybe if I don’t answer it, whoever it is will just go away. I know it isn’t Kemper. He only calls my cell and that hasn’t rung in over a month.
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