Beyond the Point

by Claire Gibson

  Dani waved off Avery’s concern, padded into the kitchen, and returned with a hot mug of her own. She sank into the other side of Avery’s couch, under a thick blanket. “I’m not supposed to drink the stuff,” she said, taking a long sip. “But I need it right now.”

  “Did you sleep okay?”

  Dani shook her head. “I just keep thinking about her stuck over there.”

  “They can’t keep her there forever.” Avery shook her head as tears welled in her eyes. “I doubt she’ll even want to see me when she gets back.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I flaked on her so many times last year. And for . . . such stupid reasons.”

  “Hindsight is an unfair standard to use against yourself,” Dani replied.

  Avery took a deep breath and another sip of coffee. It felt strange to be sitting so close to Dani and yet to feel so far away. A huge wall existed between them, built with bricks of time and distance and things left unsaid. But if Tim’s death had taught her anything, it was that you couldn’t waste a single moment with the people you love. As much as it was going to hurt, she had to muster the energy and scale that wall.

  “I got a letter,” Avery said finally, dispassionately. “I got it this summer, actually. I guess I just was trying to pretend it didn’t matter.”

  Dani’s eyes grew a few sizes larger. She put her coffee mug down and looked at Avery with concern.

  “John Collins got paroled.”

  “Oh, Avery.”

  “I sure know how to pick ’em, don’t I?” she continued, surprised by the sarcasm in her voice. “Every guy I’ve ever dated has ended up screwing me over. Or maybe I’m the one screwing myself over. God. Listen to me. Complaining about my life when Hannah—”

  “Don’t do that,” Dani said, this time with force. “Do you hear yourself? Do you ever give yourself a break? A second to breathe? To feel what you’re actually feeling before judging yourself so harshly?”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t feel anything. I’m completely numb.”

  Avery felt hot tears form in the backs of her eyes, and soon, they were falling. How did Dani do it? She could always cut straight through the crap and directly to the heart of the matter.

  “I don’t feel like I deserve to feel upset about my life,” Avery admitted. “I should be fine.”

  “You should be what you are,” said Dani. “Sure. Your husband didn’t just get killed. But your friend did. And all of this other stuff? The letter? That matters too. You don’t have to be so strong all the time.”

  They sat in silence, letting their coffees go cold.

  “You said every guy you’ve ever dated screwed you over,” Dani said, disturbing the quiet. She let the statement linger in the air, without turning it into a question. But the subtext was clear.

  Avery chewed on her cheeks. It was so complicated. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d learned that the only way to survive life was to suck it up. Hold it together. Get the grades. Earn the stripes. Go faster than anyone else, and never let them see you cry. She’d trained herself to be harder than she really was and couldn’t fathom opening the box in which she’d carefully packed away her grief. Her weakness. If she opened it, she was pretty sure it would swallow her whole.

  “He’s engaged.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “You and Hannah, last Thanksgiving . . . you tried to tell me. And I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to see what was right in front of me.”

  “We thought he was aloof,” said Dani. “We didn’t think he was engaged.”

  “He never took me to his place. Never introduced me to any of his friends. I was so blind.” Avery shook her head and wiped her eyes with the sides of her forefingers. “And you know the worst part about it? That girl is going to marry him. I’m sure he’s just groveling at her feet, telling her it was all some huge mistake. As if I was some seductress that pulled him into my web. But we were together for a year. He talked about buying us a house, Dani.”

  “He met your family!”

  “He met my family!” Avery repeated, groaning at the thought of having to tell her mother.

  “How did you find out?” asked Dani.

  “I called him and his fiancée answered his phone,” said Avery. “I think she found a way to unlock his phone. She said she’d read all of our texts. I haven’t heard from him since.” She laid her head in Dani’s lap and let her friend stroke her hair. On the television, all the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons floated above brownstones, ready for their march down Sixth Avenue.

  “You know, you’re not the only one that’s made mistakes,” Dani said after some time had passed. “I was so afraid of losing Locke as a friend, I never took the risk to tell him how I really felt, until it was too late.”

  “The wedding,” Avery said, feeling herself cringe. She sat up and put her face in her hands. “Oh, Dani, I didn’t even ask how it went.”

  “It’s okay. It was hard, you know? Seeing him with her. And she’s so nice,” Dani said with a roll of her eyes. “Her dad works at the Citadel, so it was this whole big Southern wedding, which was just weird, seeing him marry someone so white, and all the things that come with that. I read scripture at the ceremony.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I did,” said Dani. “In a gorgeous gown, of course. I looked great. But I felt terrible. I just wished I could go back and do it all over again.”

  “What would you do differently?”

  “I wouldn’t be so afraid.” Dani paused. “As a woman, you don’t want to be the one that makes the first move. But now I realize if I had, I could have gotten it over with a long time ago. I could have saved myself a lot of pain.”

  “Is that the point?” Avery said. “Saving ourselves from pain?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You did the best you could. Maybe deep down, you knew he wasn’t the right one. And so you just let it play out. You can’t fault yourself for that.”

  “And you can’t fault yourself for believing Noah.”

  “Yes I can,” Avery said. “I mean, thanks. But I’m realizing now, I can’t keep blaming everyone else, like I’m some kind of victim. With Noah, I knew there were red flags; I just pretended they weren’t there. I wanted to believe him. That was my choice. And I have to own that, or else I’m going to keep doing the same thing over and over again. I deserve better than to dupe myself into a relationship simply because I don’t want to be alone.”

  Dani raised her eyebrows and nodded slowly, as if she was impressed.

  “Dang, Avery,” she said. “Did you just have a breakthough?”

  “Yeah. Maybe I did.”

  “You know we can’t talk about this stuff with Hannah,” Dani added. “When she gets home.”

  “Oh my God, of course not,” said Avery.

  “We have to just put all this aside and focus on caring for her. She’s going to be inundated with people. But you and me, we can be her buffer.”

  Avery sighed, picking up her coffee mug and feeling the cold porcelain in her hand. She needed a refill.

  “I just can’t believe she’s still not home.”

  30

  November 27, 2006 // Fayetteville Regional Airport

  Twelve days after learning that Tim had been killed, Hannah felt the lurch of the airplane as its wheels touched down in Fayetteville. After begging him for mercy, LTC Williams had finally put her on a flight from Kuwait to Germany. Then she’d taken three commercial flights—Germany to New York, New York to Atlanta, Atlanta to Fayetteville.

  While the final plane taxied up to the gate, a stewardess reminded the passengers that the seat belt sign was still on and not to move from their seats. The man seated next to Hannah pulled out his cell phone and turned it on. A woman a few rows ahead reapplied her lipstick, blood red. The cabin grew hot and stuffy as passengers donned their jackets and scarves, preparing to battle the cold outside. Tim would never get another winter, Hannah realized.
He wouldn’t be there to celebrate another Christmas or his birthday or even go on that trip to Hawaii they’d planned to take when their deployments were over. Every realization was a new death. He died a million times a day in her mind.

  Pulling her camouflage rucksack down from the overhead compartment, Hannah found her tiny flip phone inside, powered off. Normally, after a long flight, she would have immediately shot off a few text messages to tell her family that she’d arrived. But she had no desire to turn it on. It only brought bad news, thin apologies, and people’s thoughts and prayers, which, to Hannah, felt like a really poor response to someone’s life ending. She was grateful in some ways that people cared enough to reach out. But she couldn’t text back, I don’t want your prayers. I want Tim back. So she’d stopped looking at her phone altogether.

  Finally, when the flight attendant at the front of the cabin opened the airplane door, the passengers filled the aisle, trapped in a long line of anticipation, eager to get off the plane and back to the people they loved. The cabin was airless and all the energy pushed forward, though people weren’t moving at all. Hannah’s body surrendered to a cold sweat.

  “Thank you for your service,” said the woman with red lips. “I’m sure you’re glad to be home.”

  Hannah stared at the woman with grotesque horror and felt a surge of bile in her throat. She fought the urge to scream. The woman’s words were like sandpaper over an open wound. Hannah’s neck turned red, and she touched her forehead with her hand. It was clammy. She saw the people at the front of the plane shuffling out, but she still couldn’t move.

  She didn’t know it was going to feel like this. Like every moment that passed was a step deeper into grief. She wanted to be walking straight. Instead, every step forward felt like a step down.

  Eventually, the plane cleared and Hannah made her way through the terminal. It had been ten days of this. Ten days of moving, waiting, and remembering, with nowhere to go where Tim wasn’t dead. Dead. The word had no meaning anymore; she’d thought it too many times.

  Her soldiers had convoyed to the next building site in Afghanistan without her. She didn’t care. Grief had filled her with a kind of numbness she’d never experienced before. She felt either far too much and wanted to hold back, or far too little and wondered why she couldn’t muster any emotion. Most of all, she was tired and hungry and angry at herself for being tired and hungry. How could she eat when Tim would never get to taste ice cream or bite into a peach ever again? How could she sleep when Tim’s eyes had been shut forever? She didn’t want to live in a world he wasn’t in. She didn’t want to go to sleep and add another day to the days he’d been gone. Someday, Hannah thought, she would have more days without him than the days she’d had with him.

  And just like that, he died again.

  EVENTUALLY, SHE FOUND herself at the top of an escalator, with the sign for baggage claim pointing down. She took a deep breath, adjusted her backpack, and stepped on the moving staircase.

  They waited at the bottom of the escalator. Her mother, wearing a gray turtleneck. Her father, standing tall with his silver mustache, wearing a black half-zip sweater. Emily and Mark, holding a squirming Jack in their arms. Dani and Avery, one in a leather jacket, the other in uniform. Hannah buried her face in her father’s shoulder.

  “You’re home, sweetie,” said Bill. “You’re home.”

  They hugged quietly for a long time.

  31

  November 28, 2006 // Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  The house was quiet early the next morning, when Dani heard the doorbell ring. She pulled on a pair of black sweatpants and stepped into the hallway, carefully tiptoeing around Hannah’s father, who’d slept on a pile of blankets right outside Hannah’s door. Hannah’s neighbor, Michelle Jenkins, had brought over a spare air mattress, and Dani and Avery had blown it up in the upstairs office, sleeping next to unpacked boxes of books. Avery had already left for work, and even though it was ten A.M., no one had made the coffee. No one had dared wake Hannah up.

  Dani was certain she would never forget the way Hannah had looked when she’d moved slowly down that escalator at the airport. Her face appeared ghost white. Her eyes bulged, her skin pulled taut with fear. Grief had aged her, and she looked sixty years old—even her hair looked tinged with gray. When they’d arrived back at the house, Hannah had walked straight to their bedroom, their closet, where she’d pulled a pile of his clothes to her face. Dani and Avery had waited outside the door, sitting in the hall. After hours of crying, Hannah had crawled into the bed, laid her head on his shirts, and finally fell asleep.

  Downstairs, Dani opened Hannah’s front door, just as a man in uniform reached to ring the doorbell again.

  “Mrs. Nesmith?” the man asked. The man had brown eyes, dark brown hair, and a slightly Hispanic accent. He wore an Army combat uniform and held a stack of binders under his arm.

  “She’s upstairs,” Dani explained. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Captain Huerta,” he said, offering his hand to shake Dani’s. “Mrs. Nesmith’s casualty assistance officer.” He checked his watch. “We had an appointment at ten. Do you mind if I come in?”

  Ten minutes later, having rustled Hannah out of her bed, Dani sat next to her at the dining room table. Margaret Nesmith had arrived just after Captain Huerta, and seeing one another for the first time, she and Hannah embraced while the rest of them looked on in silence, willing themselves invisible. Dani knew she wasn’t family—in some ways she didn’t have a right to sit at this table. But Hannah had asked Dani to stay by her side, and now she was grateful she’d agreed. Seated on the same side of the table as Captain Huerta, Margaret Nesmith wore her dark hair in a low ponytail. Like Hannah’s, her face and lips were the color of the third casket Captain Huerta had offered as an option: eggshell white.

  Hannah held the binder full of pictures of caskets in her hands. One page displayed a cherrywood box, and the next page, black onyx. She flipped through the pages blankly, like she couldn’t see anything at all.

  Dani stared from the binder up to the face of Captain Huerta seated across from them. She was grateful that he hadn’t tried to hurry Hannah along, although Dani could tell from the other binders in his bag that there were many other decisions to be made. Decisions no twenty-four-year-old should ever have to make. Choosing the coffin. Choosing the flowers. A location for the burial. Hannah looked at Dani, her eyes pleading for help.

  “I think this one is beautiful,” Dani said, pointing to an all-wood casket near the front.

  Tim’s mother lifted her chin to see. Dani turned the binder so she could see it more directly. “I like that,” Margaret said. “It’s classic. Like Tim.”

  Dani watched Hannah tense up at that statement, and knew exactly why. Tim wasn’t classic. In Hannah’s eyes, he was wild and willing to break the rules and so different from the parents who’d raised him. But Dani could see that all the fight had gone out of her.

  “Okay.” Hannah pushed the binder back to Captain Huerta. “We’ll go with that one.”

  Dani watched her take a sip of water and place the glass back on the coaster. Every motion slow, purposeful, and pained.

  “Can I ask a question?” Margaret Nesmith began, her voice a respectful whisper. Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped a tissue under her nose. “Where is he? Where have they taken him?”

  The question hung in the air for several moments, awkward and cumbersome, like a piece of furniture too large to fit through a door. Dani saw Hannah clench her jaw.

  “Your son’s remains are at the mortuary,” Captain Huerta explained. “His remains are viewable for identification purposes only. That’s something we’ll need to schedule for you, Hannah. But more importantly, right now, we need to choose a date for the funeral. Do you have a day in mind?”

  “December fifth.” Hannah and her mother-in-law said it at the same time. He nodded at both of them, then wrote down the date.

  “And location?”

&nbs
p; “Springfield,” Tim’s mother answered. “Maryland. Our hometown.”

  A moment of silence passed, full of awkwardness and tension as thick as fog. Dani turned to Hannah. It was time for her friend to break this next piece of news. Last night, Hannah had told Dani that she didn’t want Tim to be buried in Maryland. The only thing she’d decided about the funeral—the only thing Hannah seemed to care about at all—was that it took place where Tim would have wanted it to be.

  “Actually, Margaret, we’re waiting to hear back from Arlington National Cemetery,” Dani explained, speaking on Hannah’s behalf.

  The elder Mrs. Nesmith looked confused and sad, her blue eyes swimming. “Hannah, we have a family plot in Maryland. We’ve already made arrangements.”

  Captain Huerta closed his binder. “Perhaps that’s enough decision making for one day.”

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Dani sat in the living room, quietly listening to the terse conversation happening in the kitchen. She’d texted Wendy earlier that it wasn’t a good time to come over, but that if she and Mark had any connections at Arlington National Cemetery, they’d appreciate their making some calls. Dani had asked Emily to write Tim’s obituary and had called Eric to see if he could help make a list of the forms that Hannah would have to fill out for Tim’s life insurance to kick in. The amount of bureaucracy that came after a death was enough to make your head spin. Dani wanted to shield Hannah from as much of that as possible.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time to have this conversation,” Hannah’s mother was saying in the kitchen.

  Tim’s mother tried to whisper, but her voice came out louder than she’d likely intended. “Well, when is the best time? He’s been gone for two weeks and I think—”

  “Well, Margaret, Hannah . . . she just got home,” said Lynn, trying to tread lightly.

  When Dani opened her eyes, Avery had walked into the room, holding her keys. She’d taken the second half of the day off and had arrived back from work.