The sight of Noah sent Avery straight toward the coat closet. A cry came out of her throat, raw and guttural—a wail. Avery stumbled through the closet door, slammed it behind her, and then sobbed, loud and deep, like something in her gut was trying to crawl out of her throat and could only do so if she opened her mouth wide enough. Everyone out there could probably hear her, and so she shoved a row of beautiful coats off the rack and onto the floor, where she fell into the cloth and fur and wool, which muffled her cries. She couldn’t begin to feel embarrassed when there was so much else to feel. Decorum didn’t matter when compared to despair.
For the first time in many years, Avery thought about Wendy Bennett and a conversation they’d had in her living room. Something about Lazarus. And a prayer. What was it?
The words came to her as if from outside of herself. As if someone else had whispered them into her ear from the past. Lord, if you had been here, none of this would have happened. Suddenly, that felt like the most honest, heartfelt prayer she could possibly muster. She repeated those words over and over again until it became the cry of her heart. Where was God when she’d arrived at West Point, only to sit at John Collins’s table? Where was God when he broke into their locker room and hid his camera? Where was God when she sat on the witness stand, being berated and called a liar? Where was he then?
And where the hell was he now?
Suddenly, the closet door opened, revealing a petite silhouette, a strand of pearls. Wendy must have seen Avery escape into the closet, because her hands were full of clean tissues that she handed to Avery after closing the door behind her. She was the last person Avery wanted to see, and yet, as Wendy took a seat on the floor beside Avery, she realized she didn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.
“I don’t really need a sermon right now,” Avery said, letting her bitterness hit Wendy hard. She’d expected it to send Wendy out the door as quickly as she’d come in. But to her surprise, Wendy didn’t budge.
“Keep screaming,” Wendy coached. “You’ve got to let it out.”
“I guess everyone heard me,” Avery said, using the tissues Wendy had offered to wipe her eyes. The white fibers went black with smudged mascara.
“You’re feeling what everyone is feeling. You’re just brave enough to express it.”
“How can Hannah be so calm? I just want to hit something. To tear something apart. I’m so angry.”
“Hannah will get there. It might just take some time.”
“I found out a few weeks ago that John Collins was paroled,” Avery admitted. “And then, after that, I found out the guy that I’d been dating for a year was engaged to someone else the whole time.
“And, meanwhile, everyone keeps saying these are supposed to be the best years of our lives. College. Our twenties. But that can’t be true! It just can’t. And do you want to know the worst part?”
“Tell me the worst part,” said Wendy.
“Hannah . . . Hannah has to stand out there smiling at her husband’s funeral! And this whole time, I’ve been coming back into this closet and checking my phone because even though I know he’s a liar and horrible, I miss Noah so much. And I just want him to call and tell me that he still loves me, even though I know that’s never going to happen. What’s wrong with me?”
She looked up at Wendy, waiting for her to give her some Bible lesson, some thinly veiled offer to pray. Avery wished that someone else had come into the closet, because Wendy’s green eyes were just too intense. She wanted Wendy to say that nothing was wrong, and that it was all Noah’s fault, and that Avery deserved better. Instead, Wendy sighed and clasped her hands together on her lap.
“You know, we’re not all that different, you and me.”
Avery laughed, looking at Wendy’s short haircut and patent-leather shoes. “I don’t mean to laugh, Wendy, but I highly doubt that.”
Wendy raised an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised. I wasn’t always married with kids.”
Avery paused to consider that. It was odd to try to picture Wendy at twenty-four, but of course, at some point, she had been.
“When I was twenty-six, Mark and I—we were both really struggling. Our marriage was falling apart because I’d realized that he was never going to be enough for me. But I knew that if we got a divorce, I was going to be just as lonely—I’d been with enough men to know that the other guys didn’t have what I wanted either.”
“And what was it you wanted?”
“That’s easy,” said Wendy. “I wanted everything. I wanted great sex and movie-grade romance and love and electric connection, twenty-four/seven. I wanted perfection. But it turns out, here on earth, we don’t get perfection; we get people.”
“And people suck.”
“And even the ones that don’t suck let us down,” said Wendy, her voice softening. “I know Noah hurt you. But you have to know that even the best relationship isn’t going to fully give you what you’re looking for. Look at Hannah. She had it. And now it’s gone. The point of life isn’t to quench our thirst, it’s to realize we’re thirsty for something that we can’t find here.”
Avery allowed her breathing to slow down. She imagined Hannah standing out there, still smiling, still forced to shake hands with every person who had ever known Tim. Hannah was so gracious and so beautiful in the midst of her pain. And here she was, throwing a tantrum. Like a child.
“How do I go back out there?” Avery said finally.
“With your chin up. You’re the bravest one in this room, Avery, because you’re actually being honest about how messed up things are. But you can’t stay in here forever.”
“I can’t?” Avery laughed through tears.
“Don’t think so.”
There was no voice. No angel coming down on the clouds. But in that moment, a quiet peace washed over Avery’s body. If Wendy was here, still loving her after that display of insanity, then maybe there really was hope. For the first time in two years, the knot in her stomach unraveled. The tears in her eyes dried up. And suddenly, she found she had the strength to grab Wendy’s hand and stand up off the floor. The coats she’d pulled off their hangers were in a pile at their feet. Now she looked at them and laughed.
“Don’t worry,” Wendy said, pointing to the other side of the closet. “Mine’s over there. You didn’t ruin it.”
One by one, she and Wendy put the coats on hangers and back on the rack.
Maybe this is faith, Avery decided as they worked in silence.
Maybe faith was having the humility to scream at God and the audacity to get up off the floor.
36
December 6, 2006 // Interstate 95
They’d been on the highway for several hours now, riding in silence. Hannah hadn’t slept at all the night before. The funeral had completely exhausted her, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was some imaginary slum in Samarra, Tim’s body falling on the body of his soldier, and bullets ripping his insides apart. When Hannah was alone, the gagging set in. She forgot to swallow, and when she did swallow, even the saliva threatened to come back up. There was no place she could get comfortable. Not on the bed. Not on the floor. Not on the balcony overlooking Washington, DC. She’d imagined Lincoln’s statue, staring over the reflecting pool, with his words from the Gettysburg Address engraved around him.
We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.
What did that even mean?
And who got to decide?
“Do you want to listen to any music?” Avery asked, breaking through Hannah’s thoughts. “My CDs are down there on the floor.”
Hannah turned to look at Avery, whose voice sounded so distant, it was hard to believe they were in the same car. Avery was in the driver’s seat, her hair loose and wavy, like she’d slept on it wet. She offered Hannah a closed-lipped smile. Adrenaline had pumped through Hannah’s veins yesterday, enabling her to survive the three-hour receiving line. But now, she had no energy for false smiles. Somewhere in the recesses of her m
ind, she knew she was grateful for all that Avery had done—paying for her family’s flights to Fayetteville, offering to drive to Virginia, taking off work. But those acts of service didn’t make up for the ways she’d been a disappointing friend in the last few years. Hannah hated that she was angry, but she didn’t have any other emotions to spare. So she looked back out the window.
“Avery, please tell me you’ve heard of an iPod,” Dani said from the back seat. “Get with the times.”
“It’s not the same,” Avery replied. “There’s something therapeutic about looking through those CDs. It’s the soundtrack to my life.”
Mindlessly pulling the heavy leather CD case to her lap, Hannah began to flip through the sleeves, each one holding four CDs to a page. Foo Fighters, The Colour and the Shape. Dave Matthews, Live at Luther College. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Third Eye Blind. Avery had always been a nineties alternative junkie, Hannah knew. Tim loved hip-hop and country. The two most polar-opposite music styles, which he claimed weren’t opposites at all. “Rap and country artists sing about life how it is, not how they wish it would be,” Tim had said once. “Pop music is shiny. Rap and country are real.”
Her mind flashed back suddenly to his dorm room at West Point, when they’d pulled an all-nighter studying. At West Point finals were called “TEEs,” short for “term end exams.” He’d forced her to listen to the four-CD set of Garth Brooks’s greatest hits and pulled her away from her computer to dance—terribly—to “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House.” Hannah stopped paging through the binder and put her head between her knees.
As she stared at the dirty floor of Avery’s car, Hannah noticed the edge of a letter sticking out of the purse resting next to her feet. She knew she couldn’t read it yet. Not in this car, with this little air to breathe. The phone at the bottom of her purse lit up. Someone was calling. She fought the urge to chuck it out the window and watch it get smashed by the tires of the car behind them.
“Sixty more miles,” Avery said, placing her hand on Hannah’s back. “It’s okay. We’re almost there.”
THE REST OF the afternoon went by in slow motion. Her parents, sister, and nephew went back to a hotel. Hannah’s brother-in-law said goodbye after the funeral and headed back to Texas, so he could return to work. Avery and Dani went to the kitchen to pull out another of Wendy’s meals from the freezer to defrost. Exhausted from the drive, Hannah told them she needed some time to herself and retreated to her bedroom. Her bedroom. The pronouns of her life had changed. She was no longer a we. Theirs was now hers. His was now nothing at all.
After taking a shower, Hannah wrapped herself in a robe and got back in bed, holding Tim’s clothes against her body and his letter in her hands. His scent was fading from the fibers of his shirts, she knew, and that made her angry. His words, tucked under the seal of the letter, called to her. Even clean, she felt tainted. Even warm, her body shivered. Even embracing the letter in her hands, her soul resisted.
Before the funeral, she’d walked through the house collecting every Post-it note Tim had left behind. Those he’d written months ago. But the letter he’d written days, maybe even hours before he’d died. It wasn’t thick. But it was the last thing she had. For some reason, she felt empty and achy, holding it in her hands. Like if she read it, then he would be really, finally gone. If she left it unopened—even just for a few more minutes, a few more seconds—there would still be more that Tim could say.
She was crying when she slid the pocketknife Tim had left in his bedside table underneath the envelope flap. She didn’t want to risk ripping what was inside. The paper unfolded in her hands, light and ethereal, and the date written in the corner crossed her eyes. November 12, 2006. And then she read slowly, trying to take each word in and make it last.
Dear Hannah,
We’re leaving tomorrow for what they say will be a ten-day mission, so I’m sitting down to write you this letter, to assure you that I love you. I miss you. And we will speak again soon.
I’m not naive. I believe fully in the training I’ve done and in my ability to do this job well, but I also know that what we are doing is dangerous and uncertain. But that’s just life. There’s no guarantee that anyone gets to see tomorrow, and I am no different. My only prayer is that I do well with the days God gives me. I pray the same for you.
If catastrophe strikes here, I will still feel so blessed because I have lived the equivalent of four men’s lives in my short twenty-four years on this planet. I owe it all to God, who met me in that tree the day my parachute failed. And to you, Hannah, my best friend, who had patience with me as I learned to love you with everything I had, and not just a part.
I don’t pretend to know what the future holds. I imagine us bringing children into the world, sipping wine, breaking bread, and growing old together, using our bodies up until they are sore and bruised and wrinkled and aching. But our joy does not depend on that dream coming true. No matter what happens, we of all people can afford to live fully unafraid because we know these breakable bodies house unbreakable souls.
I know our love can withstand everything that this year will bring. I know we can endure it. Here’s a poem for you (I wrote it, don’t laugh):
We are an oak tree, planted deep in the soil of love.
The heat comes to batter our branches,
The winter brings its icy burden,
But the oak will never fall.
Though it dies, it will rise to new life when the spring comes again.
Remember I love you.
Tim
37
December 9, 2006 // Fort Bragg, North Carolina
You’ve got to get her out of the house.”
Emily stood in front of Dani, bobbing a screaming Jack on her hip. Outside, snow fell and stuck to the ground in thick flakes, adding to the sense that they were trapped. A red bird flew across the yard and landed on a bare tree branch. Dani watched it sit there, undisturbed by the cold.
“To do what?” Dani asked.
“Anything.” Clipping Jack into his high chair, Emily placed a bowl of oatmeal on the tray and tested its temperature with her forefinger. “She’s got to start experiencing the outside world. You’ve got to take control, D. Start calling some shots.”
“What about a movie?” Avery suggested. She was standing at the stove trying and failing to make eggs over-easy. The yolks both broke.
“I think she’d feel claustrophobic in a movie,” said Emily. “Maybe you should just ask her. See what she’s up for.”
Holding the plate of scrambled eggs, Avery walked upstairs, with Dani close behind. A large box fan whirred on the second-floor landing, which made enough noise so everyone could sleep at night—even if Hannah couldn’t. A comforter was still crumpled on the floor beside Hannah’s bed, where they’d taken turns sleeping night after night. Dani had finally purchased a one-way ticket back to London, scheduled to leave tomorrow. She hated to think of facing Laura Klein—but life was too precious to waste today worrying about tomorrow. And Emily was right. If this was Dani’s last day with Hannah, she needed to make it count.
Stopping at Hannah’s door, Dani placed her ear to it carefully. Hearing nothing, she turned the knob and went in. In the soft winter light coming through the window, Hannah looked angelic. She tossed a handful of used tissues into the air, and they fell on the bed like snot-laden snowflakes.
“Look at me,” she said. “What a mess.”
Dani smiled as she walked into the room. “Yep. You look like hell.”
“Let’s get you out of the house today,” Avery said, handing over the badly prepared eggs. “Get some fresh air. Change of scenery.”
Hannah blew her nose, loudly. “To do what?” she said through the tissue.
“One thing at a time,” Dani said. “First, shower. I’ll pick your outfit.”
Dani pulled the covers off Hannah’s legs and clapped her hands. “Rise and shine, soldier. We’re burning daylight.”
W
hile Hannah trudged to the shower, Dani scanned Hannah’s closet. Everything carried a memory. Nothing was void of emotion. Choose the wrong outfit, and the whole mission could be thwarted. She considered each piece carefully, then realized they hadn’t even decided where they were going.
Ice cream? She considered. No. It’s too cold for that.
Shopping? No. Too many choices. Too many screaming kids.
Then she thought of it. Grabbing Hannah a pair of stretchy jeans and a black T-shirt, Dani folded them perfectly and topped the stack with a bra and clean underwear.
Whether Hannah liked it or not, they were going to the spa.
HALF AN HOUR later, they arrived at a small strip mall outside of Fort Bragg, where an Asian woman invited them to come in from the cold. The walls inside were white and powder blue and somewhere an electronic fountain trickled water through stones. Dani could see several women with their hands lit by table lamps, getting manicures. All along the right wall, mirrors reflected women getting haircuts. And from the looks of the menu, there were waxing rooms, massage rooms, and a staff of hairdressers on site to cut, color, and style hair. In the back, a row of white chairs sat enthroned behind a row of water basins, where women could get pedicures. Dani pointed in that direction.
“Pedicures,” she said to the woman at the front of the spa. “And can we sit together?”
“Sure. Pick color,” the woman said, pointing toward a wall of nail polish.
As Avery walked toward the rainbow assortment of colors, Dani noticed Hannah’s face contort with emotion.
“No, no, no . . . ,” Dani said, grabbing Hannah’s shoulders tenderly. “It’s okay.”
Without a response, Hannah pushed through the salon door, back out into the cold. A bell rang as she exited. Dani motioned to the staff to give them just one minute. Then she and Avery followed Hannah outside.
Dani shivered against the cold. Hannah unwrapped the scarf from her neck, as though it were suffocating her.
Beyond the Point Page 36