“Would you like us to open them, or leave the combinations with you?”
Mom was in no position to answer.
Grams raised her eyebrows, asking me. It was always freaking up to me.
I raked my hands through my hair and took a breath, getting control back. “Open them now, please. Let’s get this over with.”
Two soldiers stepped forward, careful not to jar Mom and Grams, and opened the locks with nearly simultaneous pops. Without further preamble, the hinges squeaked as they ripped off the scabs we’d fought so hard to grow and opened up new crates of grief.
“Is there anything else?” I asked the captain, unable to take the vacant look on Mom’s face for another minute.
“No, ma’am. These are all of his belongings sent home by his unit.”
All of his belongings meant his journal! “His laptop is in there, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. We had to wait for the computer to be cleared, which is why it took so long.” He looked down at the floor and I grasped his meaning.
“Cleared his computer?” I asked, trying to misunderstand him. “You mean checked for viruses, or classified data, right?”
He grimaced and took a breath. “No, ma’am. Official policy states we have to wipe the hard drive before returning it to the family.”
You had to be fucking kidding me. “You wiped his hard drive?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was having trouble holding my gaze.
“His pictures? His journal? Everything we had of him? You just erased it like you were taking out yesterday’s trash?” My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands, desperate to draw any blood they could. Even mine.
“Please understand—”
“No! You stole from us! You took something you had no right to!” I shook my head, trying to dislodge this nightmare. “We’ve done everything you’ve asked for! Everything! Why would you do this to us?”
“It’s policy.”
“Screw your policy. You erased what was left of him! His thoughts! This is wrong, and you know it!”
Mom’s low wail ripped through me, finally letting loose the very sound bottled inside me. Her misery echoed my own, and I dismissed Captain Wilson by turning my back.
Mom knelt in front of one of the boxes, one of his army-tan T-shirts held up against her face, breathing him in on the inhale, screaming on the exhale, calling out his name. My throat closed up, but I found my voice. “Get out.”
I didn’t need to say it twice.
The soldiers filed out into the fresh air and left us trapped within our own grief.
“What’s going on?” April struggled down the stairs, and I didn’t have the energy to yell at her about her hangover anymore.
“Dad’s stuff,” I answered, gently lifting Mom to the couch by her arms. Grams rocked her like a baby as she kept the shirt against her nose, soaking it in tears and gut-wrenching sobs. She hadn’t cried like this before, not that I’d heard. She’d been too numbed, too full of shock to grieve like this a month ago. I almost wished I could shove her back into her catatonic state and spare her all of this.
I picked up another T-shirt and brought it to my nose. It smelled like him, like rainy days and reading on the couch. It smelled like hugs and scraped knees and comfort over first heartbreaks. It smelled like him so much that he could have been wearing it. But that was impossible. He was buried twenty minutes from here and couldn’t wear this shirt again.
I would never have another hug, another laugh, another Sunday crossword.
All I had was this damned shirt, and I understood Mom’s wailing. It echoed the screams building in my heart that I didn’t dare let escape. Instead, I took another breath of Dad’s scent and wondered if they had been thoughtful enough not to wash it.
“What do we do?” April’s voice shook next to me.
I’d seen Mom do it for every deployment, and this was no exception. “Get the Ziploc bags. The big ones.”
She came back a moment later with the gallon-sized bags. Soon, these shirts wouldn’t smell like him anymore, and we really would have lost every part of him. “Start smelling the shirts. If it smells like Dad, bag it.”
“Why?”
I swallowed back my tears. “When you were two and Dad deployed, you had night terrors. No one knew why, but Mom couldn’t get them to stop.” I nearly laughed. “God, they told me this story over and over. Anyway, Mom never washed Dad’s pillowcase, so she slipped it over your pillow. It smelled like him, and you slept. Once that smell wore off, she un-bagged some of his shirts that she’d saved and covered your pillow with those.”
Silent tears tracked down my sister’s face. “Okay.”
I squeezed her hand. No words would do.
While Grams let Mom cry it out, April and I sorted the things that smelled like him from the things we knew had been washed, bleached, or never worn. After the second box, we had seven shirts that smelled like Dad.
I gathered up the bags and took them upstairs and into Mom’s walk-in closet. The bottom drawer of the tall dresser was empty. It’s where he’d kept all these shirts. I slid them into the drawer and shut it.
I stood, taking stock of the top of the dresser where he kept his treasures, as he had called them, the little things we’d made for him over the years out of rice and macaroni and egg cartons. My handprint in plaster from his first Father’s Day sat next to a picture of all three of us we’d given him for his last.
My knees gave out, and I sank to the floor. I gave myself ten minutes and cried out everything I could, letting the sobs rack me and wreck me, giving in to the utter misery of losing him. This had to be it, right? This had to be the last big moment of pain.
How did we get here? We’d been doing so well, healing, moving forward, and now it was back to square one, feeling like the army walked in and notified us today. Why couldn’t there be a clear path out of this mess? Why did everything have to be so garbled and undefined and utterly fucked up?
Would this end before it broke me into unmendable pieces?
I wanted someone to hold me, to tell me it was going to be okay, to assure me that my life hadn’t ended with Dad’s. I wanted solace, and comfort, and not to think about it for a while. Wasn’t there anyone else who could help carry the weight of this house?
More than anything, I wanted Josh’s arms around me, and that alarmed me more than any of my other desires. But as scary as wanting him was, at least I knew wanting him would never bring me here, he’d never be a soldier, never be draped in a flag.
“Ember?” Gus’s voice came into the bedroom, breaking me out of my pity party.
I wiped the tears from my eyes, thankful I’d started wearing waterproof mascara since Dad was killed, and walked out of the closet. “Hey, little man.”
“Mom is crying again.”
“We got Dad’s stuff this morning, and it’s hard for her right now.”
He nodded slowly. He held out his hand, and I took it, walking downstairs with him. Dad’s things were stacked neatly on the furniture, waiting for Mom to tell us what to do with them.
I found his patrol cap on the coffee table and fought with myself momentarily before I placed it on Gus’s head. It didn’t mean he was going to be a soldier, and I knew that, but it hurt to see the multi-cam pattern on his sweet face.
The diamond of Grams’s wedding band caught my eye in the sunlight. She had lost both her husband and son. Tears watered her eyes, but she didn’t let them fall as she rocked Mom back and forth, like she was trying to absorb some of her pain. I didn’t see how Grams could have room for any more than what she already carried.
I sat down next to my mother, who’d begun hiccupping now that the wailing had stopped. “Mom, do you want us to sort this out or just put it back in the boxes? We don’t have to do this now.”
Her eyes skipped around the room until they landed on the boxes. Then she made her first Dad-related decision. “Return the army gear to the boxes, leave the personal stuff out. One thing at a t
ime, right?”
I forced a smile. “Right.”
We loaded the scrubs and uniforms back into the boxes but left out the pictures he’d taken with him, his shaving kit, and the odds and ends. The computer would make a great door stop. I picked up the hardback copy of his favorite book, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. He nearly had the whole thing memorized, and the cover was worn in spots from his hands. I thumbed through the pages, smiling at my favorite passages, feeling the rush of pain as I came across his.
Papers fluttered to the floor before I could catch them. I closed the book and picked them up. Sealed envelopes with names on them: June. April. Mom. August. December. “Mom?” I showed her the letters.
She sucked in her breath and stretched out her shaking hands. I gave the letters to everyone. He’d managed to send a piece of himself from so far away. I heard ripping and tearing as everyone dug into them.
Everyone but me.
If I opened it now, that would be it, and I would never hear from Dad again. I couldn’t accept that.
I tucked mine into my back pocket and went to help Gus. “I got it,” he replied, and took his letter to his room. Everyone had pulled away, experiencing a private moment with Dad.
I finished packing up his things and took the rest to Mom’s room. She might not be up for it now, but eventually she’d want to know where these things went. She’d pulled herself out of this before, and I knew she’d do it again. Until then, I’d stand watch like Dad would want.
I called Sam and stayed the night with my family, curled up in my bed. The sun rose; snow settled in and came down in thick blankets of fluffy white madness.
I walked downstairs to the smell of sausage frying in the pan, and Mom singing. Mom. Singing. I peeked my head around the corner ninja-style, wondering if she’d been snatched and replaced during the night, but no. She was singing “Les Misérables,” which was pretty dang ironic, flipping sausage while Grams scrambled some eggs.
“Good morning, sleepy,” Mom said with a wave of her spatula.
I took a seat at the bar, and Grams handed me a fresh cup of coffee, doctored just the way I liked it. I was afraid to drink, or pinch myself. I was afraid to wake up and find Mom catatonic in bed again, unable to move.
“Looks like we’re getting some snow,” I said harmlessly, testing the waters of normal conversation.
“We’re supposed to get seven inches today, but the airport should be back open tomorrow,” Grams said with a wink. “I booked my flight for tomorrow evening. Would you mind taking me?”
I shook my head. “Happy to do it.” Happy to take her, devastated that she was leaving. I took a long sip of my coffee and watched Mom. She moved with practiced ease, maybe a little stiff in places, but she was here. Her eyes were puffy from crying all day yesterday, but something had changed when she read the letter.
Mom was coming back to us.
By five o’clock, there was still no getting out of our subdivision. Not in my little VW. I really wanted to get back to the apartment. There, I could study, lose myself in campus, pretend none of this was really happening.
Now I understood why Grams had been so adamant that I take the apartment with Sam and not move home. I might have suffocated in my grief here.
Grams gathered up her sewing basket and sat on the couch next to me. She took out the service flag, the one that had hung in our window for years. I knew the tradition. Those with a son or, as tradition wavered, a husband deployed to war hung a simple white banner, outlined in red with a blue star in the middle. It was a matter of pride, announcing you had given something for this country, that the family had done their part.
But when a soldier was lost, those blue threads of the star were replaced with gold, proclaiming his sacrifice and the grief of the family. I watched, entranced, as Grams threaded the needle with shiny gold thread and began to stitch.
“This is what you were waiting for, right?” I asked. “Before you left to go home, you wanted to be here when they brought his things.”
She looked over her sewing spectacles at me. “Yes. I knew this would hit your mother, tear her apart. But whatever my Justin said to her in that letter seemed to pull her out of it a little. She’s surprising me, and I think she’s ready to begin living again. So am I.”
“I’m scared for you to go,” I quietly admitted, scared Mom would hear me.
“December, you have to trust your mother. You have held her up for so long, but you need to let her walk on her own now. Gus and April aren’t your responsibility anymore. Live your life, sweet girl.” She looked back to the flag and continued her work. “Your father died. You did not. I did not.” She ended on a whisper. “It is the business of the living to keep on doing so. We are no exception. We are not the first family to lose a man to war, and I fear we will not be the last. But we will be resilient.”
Through. Pull. Push. Through. Pull. Push. Over and over she drew the needle through the flag, leaving the blue outline of the star, all that was allowed to remain of him according to tradition. She stitched on the gold star, its shiny, reflective threads changing the definition of my father’s life from one of service to one of sacrifice. That stupid gold star declared this one event in his life, his death, more important than all of the nineteen years that blue star had witnessed while hanging in our living room window.
Somehow, in the circus of the last month, everything with Riley . . . with Josh . . . Dad’s death had overshadowed his life, and that made me angrier than anything else.
Chapter Thirteen
Environmentally friendly or not, I wished Colorado would have salted the roads. The red-gravel crap did nothing to increase traction. It was a hell of a drive to school on Monday morning.
I slid into my seat at class and took out my book and the chapter outline I’d done while reading. I’d been so rushed getting up north for school that I’d forgotten my student ID and hadn’t even had time to grab coffee, which did not bode well for my day.
A steaming cup of heaven was set down on my desk. I looked over to see Josh smile and take his seat. “I saw Sam this morning, and she said you’d stayed down south because of the snow last night. I figured it was probably a white-knuckle drive in today.”
I nodded. “It was a little hellacious.”
“I would have driven you. One phone call and you would have been cozy in the Jeep.” He pointed to the cup. “Coffee and all.”
I had to suppress my smile. “I told you, I can handle myself without you rushing in to save me. Besides, I heard you were busy this weekend.” A twinge of bitterness slipped into my tone. I couldn’t help but wonder who he’d been with.
“From who?”
I took a long drink of the delicious caffeine and ignored his question as our professor started class.
He snuck sideways looks at me all class long, and I diligently kept my head down. I could concentrate on the Civil War. Yeah, that’s what I’d do. The problem with that logic was that I spent the whole hour thinking about not thinking about Josh. Epic fail.
Where had he gone this weekend? Who was he with? Why the hell did I care? I’d made it clear to him that we weren’t in a relationship, so what right did I have to even know the answers? None.
Class could not get out soon enough. By the time the prof dismissed us, I’d already packed my bag so I could lunge for the door. I made it out of the building and into the crisp air before Josh caught up to me, matching my pace.
“Was the room on fire?”
Yes. I was going up in freaking flames. I blushed. “Nope, just busy today.”
“Right. Want to snag a late breakfast before you head off to study?”
I paused in the middle of the snow-covered courtyard, and he stopped. “We shouldn’t. I mean, I can’t. I mean . . . crap.”
He laughed, attracting the attention of nearly every girl on the quad. “I guess that’s a no?”
I hated being this flustered. “Yes. I mean no, because we’re not dating.”
�
��I’m quite happy where we’re at.” A look of heated intensity came over him as his gaze dropped to my lips. “Problem is you keep telling me we’re somewhere else.”
But that didn’t change the facts here. “I’m so sorry about Friday. Some apology, huh?”
He stepped close enough that I caught his sandalwood scent. I wished I could put my hormones in time-out. In the corner. Far away.
He gently lifted my chin and brushed his lips over mine. “Ember, I adore the way you apologize.”
Crap. Was the man’s voice directly linked to the throbbing between my freaking thighs? I called on every ounce of strength I possessed and stepped back from him. I didn’t miss the appraising stares we were getting from the other kids on campus.
“Nothing has changed, Josh.” I had to repeat that enough so I’d believe it. “You’re . . . you, all Josh-y and perfect . . . now, but I know it’s just a matter of time . . .”
The muscle in his jaw flexed. “A matter of time until what?”
“You know.” I glanced around us, keeping my voice low.
“No, Ember, I’m afraid I don’t.” He raised his voice, uncaring of prying eyes.
On cue, Tweedledum waved as she walked by, giving her ass a deliberate sway. “Hiya, Josh. Maybe I can see you later?”
His eyes didn’t stray from mine. “Not a good time, Heather.”
I pointed to her back as she shimmied away. “Right there. You know girls will always be lined up for you, and it’s not like you to turn them down. I’m me . . . and you’re . . . you, and it’s only a matter of time until you realize the chase isn’t as fun when the rabbit is caught. Especially when the rabbit isn’t exactly all put together.”
He clenched and unclenched his teeth until he took a deep breath. “Listen up. Forget whatever it is you think is ‘like me.’ I haven’t so much as touched another girl since that night in Breckenridge. And it’s not because they’re not asking. It’s because they’re not you.” He raked his hands through his hair, tugging on the strands. “Have some faith!”
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