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Behind him the crowd rolled out, filling the entire area. I saw school-age children clinging and crying, and pregnant women trembling with the knowledge that their husbands wouldn’t be by their sides when they gave birth. Some women seemed to face this farewell with a curious sort of relief. Once he was gone, they’d be in charge again.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
I flushed, realizing my attention had strayed even though I still clung to his hand. “Just…everything. This is all so new to me, and seeing everyone here, well, I suppose we’re seeing our future, aren’t we?” I gestured at the pregnant wives, the kids of all ages, older people saying goodbye to their sons or daughters. “It’s what we’ll become one day, don’t you think?”
For some reason, that made him nervous. “Is this a problem?”
I smiled and touched his cheek. Sometimes the terrible childhood he’d endured still haunted him. He hadn’t learned to trust in love for the long term. “It looks exactly right to me. It’s a life that I want, Steve. I can tell it won’t be easy, but it feels right. So that’s what I was looking at.”
He picked me all the way up off the ground and into his arms, kissing me with intense, abiding passion. Then he set me down and we held each other, and I felt his hands moving over me as though committing me to memory. I wondered how long the imprint of his kiss would last.
There were whispers that grew increasingly urgent as time ran out: I love you, I’ll miss you, please write to me…but we’d said everything important already, and in the end there was only silence between us, lips pressed together one last time, tears held in with iron-willed control.
This was to become the rhythm of our years. Steve leaving, me saying goodbye, both of us turning away to hide our anguish from each other.
In all the times I’ve said goodbye since that first deployment, there are two words I’ve never spoken aloud, not when I was pregnant with twins, saddled with three toddlers or facing a cross-country move by myself. Sometimes, I admit, I had the thought but I held my silence. Despite the fact that the wish was ringing in my head, I never said, “Don’t go.”
Chapter Sixteen
When my husband went to sea, there was an almost complete lack of communication. In the early days of our marriage, email, satellite phones and conference calls were unheard of except for communication at the very highest level of command. My only hope of talking to Steve was via ham radio, when we happened upon a friendly, anonymous operator somewhere who was willing to hook us up. There were calls on the few occasions he made port.
That our marriage survived the stress, excitement and uncertainty of long separations is sometimes a wonder to me. One of the key elements of our survival was something I was never aware of as a civilian—the support system of spouses and families, which is the Navy’s gift to us. During deployment, my life was transformed, not just by my husband’s absence and my new-found independence, but by a special society very few are aware of—the world of the Navy wife.
When I married Steve, I was automatically inducted into a sisterhood far more intense and real than my college sorority. This was a revelation to me. We were women from all walks of life, balanced upon a single common denominator—the United States Navy.
I was gratified by the swiftness with which my sisters embraced me. There were welcome coffees and farewell teas, sightseeing and shopping expeditions, baby showers and family socials. We learned to make friends quickly, knowing our time together was limited. These women were my guides through the intricacies of Navy life. I felt as though I had moved not just to another country but to a new plane of existence.
I quickly made friends with Alicia Romano of San Diego, who was six months pregnant and who was a master of fantastically detailed counted cross-stitch. Her father had been in the Navy, and she taught me the art of shopping on base at the Navy Exchange and the commissary, dealing with gas coupons, red tape and banking. The wife of Steve’s commanding officer was a dynamo named Rachel Weeks, who had four children, and, though barely forty, had appointed herself mother hen of the squadron wives. At Captain Weeks’s Change of Command ceremony, I watched her fasten the Command Pin on her husband, and I finally understood the role the wives—and very occasionally, the husbands—played.
