Beyond the Point

by Claire Gibson

  “He gave it to you in case something like this happened. Man up. We can do this. We don’t have a choice.”

  With that, they’d walked to the front door. Avery carefully turned the key in the dead bolt, and then the door had opened, spilling sunlight all over the scene. Knowing that Hannah would come home from Afghanistan before he returned from Iraq, Tim had strung a banner across the stairwell with the words WELCOME HOME painted in big gold letters. There were multicolored balloons all over the floor.

  “Oh God.” Avery had put her hands to her face.

  Dani had exhaled loudly and kicked a blue balloon out of her way. She hadn’t expected this. Clearly, from the pained look on Avery’s face, neither had she. Together, they had slumped onto the bottom stair and kicked the balloons in silence. Avery had been wearing a pair of brown leather boots, Dani a brand-new pair of hot pink sneakers.

  It didn’t seem fair that they were there, in Hannah’s house, while she was still stuck in the Middle East, alone with her grief. At the time, Dani wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. But sometimes, when tragedy strikes, you just have to act. And if Dani were in Hannah’s shoes, she wouldn’t want to crush the last of her husband’s breath out of the universe. There are some things a person just shouldn’t have to do.

  “What are you doing?” Avery had shouted when Dani jumped up and started stomping on the balloons with her foot. “Stop! Shouldn’t we leave it?”

  “I’m not leaving it like this.” Dani had spat back. “She shouldn’t”—pop!—“have to”—pop!—“do it.” Pop! Pop!

  Haltingly, Avery had stood from the stairs and joined her. Together, they’d slammed their heels into rubber, sending the sound of gunshots throughout the house.

  ON SUNDAY, HANNAH’S family had arrived in a rental van from the airport, looking like the flight had gone through severe turbulence, although Hannah’s sister, Emily, promised Dani the flight was fine. Dani knew that Hannah hated when people said she looked just like her mother, but the resemblance was striking. Lynn Speer had always looked young for her age, but as she’d approached the house, carrying her luggage, that no longer seemed true. The weight of grief had transformed her face. The skin underneath her eyes was thin and blue, like translucent paper. She had two deep wrinkles between her eyebrows. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. The sight of Lynn, like an aged version of Hannah, had made tears come to Dani’s eyes. They’d held each other on the sidewalk for a very long time, neither of them daring to say a word.

  She’d received a long, warm hug from each member of Hannah’s family, ending with Hannah’s father, Bill. He’d looked just as he had a few years earlier, when she’d seen him at West Point’s graduation: tall, with a thick gray mustache and his signature University of Texas ballcap. He’d wrapped an arm around Dani’s shoulders and kissed her cheek. And though his body had felt sturdy, his voice had wavered.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he’d said, sounding unconvinced. “It’s all going to be all right.”

  But nothing was right. Hannah still had not boarded a flight out of Kuwait. Dani left London in such a hurry, and now, all she could do was sit around in silence, aching for the fact that the one person who needed to be in the comfort of her own home wasn’t.

  Hannah’s family moved their luggage into the house, but tried not to touch or disturb a single thing. Tim had left Post-it notes everywhere, little surprises for his wife to find when she returned from her deployment. His handwriting hovered around every corner. You grow more beautiful every day—stuck to the mirror in the hall bathroom. RILY—waiting on Hannah’s bedside table. I like the way you smell after PT—a joke left on her sneakers in the closet. No one had dared move a single one, but Dani had begun to feel like she was avoiding a ghost.

  That night, she’d slept at Avery’s house, only to wake up and walk down the street to Hannah and Tim’s, where everyone was keeping vigil, waiting in pained silence. Emily and her husband, Mark, were in the backyard chasing Jack, who didn’t realize that this was not a time to be rambunctious. Inside, Bill Speer had claimed a seat in front of the TV, while Lynn sat at the dining room table, where she drank from a seemingly bottomless mug of coffee. Dani had joined Lynn at the table when Tim’s parents finally arrived, their presence bringing with it an even heavier darkness. And even quieter silence.

  It had struck Dani on her flight across the Atlantic that in losing their only son, Margaret and Charlie Nesmith had lost their entire family. Hannah had told Dani that after several miscarriages and years of waiting, they’d decided to put their savings into adoption, which brought Tim into their lives. For that reason, they’d put immeasurable pressure on themselves to be perfect parents. Where Tim was strong and vivacious, the Nesmiths were short, round about the middle, and awkward in large social settings. While Tim jumped out of airplanes and lived without fear, his parents seemed to be the worrying type, even before he’d left for war. And though the Nesmiths looked and acted nothing like their son, Dani remembered the thick laughter that came from their bellies at Hannah and Tim’s wedding—the joy they found in their son’s happiness. That much was never in question. They loved him unconditionally. And now they would grieve him unconditionally, too.

  When Margaret and Charlie arrived at the house, there was nothing to do except welcome the awkwardness with open arms. Dani stood in the kitchen while Margaret Nesmith spread her son’s SRP paperwork out on the dining room table. All four adults sat down, staring at the papers, knowing there was nothing to decide. Two still had their child. Two had had theirs ripped away. There were moments you couldn’t put into words, and seeing the Nesmiths stare at those papers was enough to send Dani back to bed in the middle of the day. Without making any announcement, she slipped out the front door and walked back to Avery’s house.

  THAT MORNING, AVERY had left a note for Dani on the kitchen counter.

  Headed to work. I’ll be done around 6:30 tonight. Text me and let me know how things are going. Tell Wendy I can’t wait to see her. —A

  Dani tried to answer a few work e-mails from Avery’s living room couch, but the thought of discussing Gelhomme’s latest commercials made her head spin. Her e-mails sounded garbled and confusing. She couldn’t seem to focus or communicate with any clarity. And so, after an hour of effort with little to show for it, she shut her computer.

  The clock seemed to move at a snail’s pace. Outside, a breeze blew leaves up off the ground and back down again. Over the weekend, Eric Jenkins had raked and bagged all the leaves in the Nesmiths’ yard, and Avery’s as well. Seated at a round table in the kitchen, looking at the empty street outside Avery’s window, Dani tried to think.

  With their bullets, insurgents in Iraq hadn’t just killed Tim. They’d sent aftershocks to Afghanistan, London, Texas, Maryland, Ohio, North Carolina . . . the list went on and on. One of their classmates stationed in Korea had just sent Dani an e-mail, asking where he could send flowers. People all over the world were dealing with the fact that enough evil existed on the planet to end the life of someone so young, with so much promise. That was the real cost of war, Dani thought. The aftermath.

  It was difficult to grieve for Tim, because all Dani could do was think about Hannah. She’d tried to imagine her friend, alone in the desert, hearing the news. Convoying for eight hours with practical strangers. Knowing that somewhere in the world, her husband’s body was broken in pieces. In every memory Dani could conjure of Tim, he was running, laughing, moving, sweating, or soaring through the air. How can someone that alive all of a sudden not be alive at all?

  And what for?

  Dani shut that line of thinking down quickly in her mind. She couldn’t let politics cloud what needed to happen first, which was for Hannah to get home and be surrounded by the people who loved her most.

  AT ONE O’CLOCK, a white Chrysler minivan pulled into Avery’s driveway, saving Dani from her thoughts. Walking out into the cold, Dani waved at the driver and waited for her to unbuckle her seat b
elt and get out of the van.

  Wendy didn’t even shut the door behind her. Arms open wide, she fell into Dani’s embrace, her body shaking from dry sobs. It was odd to Dani, to feel like the strong one. Wendy had always been the supporter, the cook, the listening ear, the shoulder to cry on. And now, it was Dani who held her up, keeping her from falling to the ground. After wiping her eyes, Wendy and Dani climbed back in her van.

  On military installations, the commissary looked exactly like a civilian grocery store, but the products were tax free. That’s why you had to have a military ID to get inside, and why Dani was so grateful that Wendy had arrived. Grabbing a grocery cart, Wendy showed her military ID to a security guard at the door and explained that Dani was her guest.

  “What should we make?” Wendy asked, when they’d walked inside.

  The plan was to stock Hannah’s freezer with meals. Crowd pleasers. Things that their families could eat for days or weeks, if need be. They decided not to cook a traditional Thanksgiving, even though the day was fast approaching. Instead, Dani tried to remember which of Wendy’s meals Hannah had loved the most.

  When they were at West Point, every time they’d gone to the Bennetts’ house—whether it was to simply have a break from the barracks or to have a full-on breakdown—Wendy had always had something delicious waiting on the kitchen counter. Lasagnas, spaghetti, fried chicken. Brownies, pies, and apple fritters. That woman only lived in New York because the Army had stationed her there, so even if there was snow outside, there was always warm Southern hospitality inside. “Oh, this old thing?” Wendy would always say when someone complimented her cooking. She’d follow up with her favorite line from the movie Steel Magnolias: “‘It’s in the “freezes beautifully” section of my cookbook.’”

  The memory made Dani smile.

  If Dani wanted to cook, she had to grocery-shop from a handwritten list, but Wendy had so much experience in the kitchen, she knew what they needed by heart. Ingredients for lasagna and chili filled Wendy’s cart, as they roamed the aisles mindlessly. As they walked side by side, Dani wondered how grief would affect Hannah’s appetite. And not just for food. She wondered if Hannah would ever again have an appetite for life.

  “So, what’s it been like at the house?” Wendy asked. She pulled four cans of diced tomatoes off a shelf and put them in the cart.

  Dani sighed. “Really quiet. Tim’s parents got here this morning. But there’s just nothing to do until Hannah gets back. So it’s just . . .”

  “Hurry up and wait,” Wendy said, finishing Dani’s sentence.

  Dani nodded. “I can’t stop thinking about her. Over there, still waiting. It’s got to be excruciating.”

  “It’s hard now. But she’s still in shock. The hardest parts will come later. Six weeks from now. Six years.”

  “I just don’t understand how this could happen,” Dani said. “It still feels so surreal. It feels like a mistake. Like he’s still out there.”

  “Mark said when Tim was in his class, he was late every single day. That he never completed the reading.”

  “I could see that,” Dani said, and then smiled. She remembered sitting against the trees during Beast, helping him memorize passages from the plebe handbook. “He was so fun. I think that’s what I’m worried about. Hannah can be so serious. Tim . . . he always made sure she had fun.”

  Wendy stopped, looked at her cart. “Oh shoot,” she said. “What am I doing? I forgot the stuff for the soup.”

  “I’ve been doing that too!” Dani said. “I can’t think straight. I feel like I’m walking through a cloud.”

  “I guess, in a way, you are,” Wendy said.

  And then they turned the cart around and walked back to the beginning.

  A FEW HOURS later, Dani and Wendy unpacked the ingredients they’d purchased at the grocery store and got to work making lasagna in Avery’s kitchen. Tomato sauce and cheese were off-limits for Dani’s anti-inflammatory diet, but suddenly all those dietary rules didn’t seem to matter anymore. They needed to eat. And if she had pain, she had pain. At least she was alive to feel it.

  Her knife sliced through a raw onion, pulling sharp tears from her eyes. Meanwhile, Wendy smashed garlic cloves to release them from their paper skins. Dani cut fast and hard, letting the anger and her sadness come through the blade. Soon, the kitchen filled with the savory aroma of minced garlic and onions simmering in oil. Wendy stirred them together with a wooden spoon.

  “You know,” she said, looking at the little white pieces caramelizing in the heat, “when the girls were little, I used to hate it if Mark got home from work and I hadn’t started on dinner. So I would just chop some onion and garlic real quick and sauté it in a pan. That way, when he got home, the house would smell like I was cooking, even if I had no idea what I was going to make yet.”

  “Nice trick,” Dani said.

  “I’ve always found it interesting that when you cook, everything has to be sliced, peeled, or smashed in order to be used. The best flavors come out when the ingredients are broken and exposed to heat.”

  Dani nodded.

  “I think that’s true for us, too. Faith isn’t really faith until it’s beat up and put through a fire. When you’re crushed, you feel like you’re dying. But you’re actually coming to life. When you’re broken, that’s when the best of you comes out.”

  As good as that sounded—as true as it felt—it didn’t make the sting of the onion in Dani’s eyes any less painful.

  Later, when the lasagna was baking in the oven, Wendy stood at the sink cleaning dishes.

  “What ever happened to that guy Avery was dating?” Wendy asked. “The one that came to Boston?”

  “Noah,” Dani said. “To be honest, she hasn’t said anything about him since I’ve been here. I don’t know.”

  “And you?” Wendy didn’t look up from her work. “Any guys in London I should know about?”

  Dani shook her head.

  “Well then. When are you going to tell me about the wedding?”

  Dani sighed, handed Wendy the dirty cheese grater, and then sat down at Avery’s kitchen table. “How much time do you have?”

  29

  November 23, 2006 // Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  On Thanksgiving morning, Avery woke up fully clothed, sleeping next to Dani. It was still dark. The only light in the room came from an orange floodlight outside, cutting through the blinds. After two years of five A.M. wakeup calls for her job with the Army, Avery no longer had the ability to sleep in. She envied Dani’s even breathing, the sure sign that she was deep in a REM cycle, and wondered how late she’d stayed up talking with Wendy Bennett, who’d driven down from West Point a few days earlier.

  Wendy had rented a hotel room nearby, for her and Mark, who would fly in for the funeral and drive back with his wife. As time went on, more and more family and friends would arrive, Avery knew, filling hotel rooms and the Nesmiths’ house. Avery worried that Hannah would feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. She worried too that Hannah wouldn’t even want to see Avery. It was possible Avery had damaged their relationship beyond repair.

  Fearing she might wake Dani with her tossing and turning, Avery rubbed her eyes and slipped out of the room without making a sound.

  When the coffee finished brewing, Avery poured herself a cup and went to the living room, where she turned on the television, making sure to keep the volume on low. The Today show news team reported from the Upper West Side of New York City, waiting for the start of the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Avery’s cell phone rested on the coffee table, conspicuously silent. It had been two weeks since Noah’s fiancée had answered his phone. Since then, Avery had cradled her phone in her hands almost constantly, willing herself not to contact him, while simultaneously hoping he’d text or call. If they spoke again, would he try to justify what he’d done? Would he pretend it had never happened? Or would he simply disappear, free to proceed with his life, his marriage, his future, without feeling the consequences?


  Over the last few days, as Avery had spent time in Hannah’s house, it was impossible not to see the differences between her relationship to Noah and that between Hannah and Tim. Tim had left handwritten notes to Hannah all over their house. Everywhere Avery turned, there were photos of them together—including one on Hannah’s bedside table of the couple in Rome. In it, Tim was smiling so wide. He held Hannah up off the ground, like a husband would carry his wife over the threshold of a new house. Avery had taken that picture. And even then, she remembered looking through the lens and feeling a sort of reverent melancholy. Not once had a guy looked at Avery the way Tim looked at Hannah: He was only smiles. Only pride. Only encouragement. And Noah? What was he?

  Only absent. Only mystery. Only smoke.

  No matter what people said, Avery knew they were wrong about the truth. The truth didn’t set you free; it chased you down. It came at you from behind, gained speed, and then eventually overtook you until you could no longer deny its power. Lies might have been fast, but truth had endurance. And it would always outlast the competition.

  Avery pulled her knees into her chest and let the tears fall on her cheeks. She held her phone in her hands and opened it and closed it, over and over again, wishing for a call to come through.

  She hadn’t told Dani about Noah, nor had she told her about the letter she’d received about John Collins’s parole. With the money and resources in Collins’s family, he would probably have a job on Wall Street in no time at all. It seemed completely unfair to Avery. Why did these men get to get away with their violence? Why did they get to move on from their crimes, while she felt so trapped by them?

  “What time is it?”

  Dani’s groggy voice suddenly broke through Avery’s thoughts. Avery turned and saw Dani standing in the dark hallway, rubbing her eyes.

  “Six thirty,” Avery said.

  “My body is so confused. I never wake up this early. But it’s like, noon in London.”

  “I made coffee,” Avery said, lifting her mug. “Oh wait. You don’t do caffeine anymore. I forgot.”