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There was a ringing in my ears, similar to what I’d heard when the IED went off, and I couldn’t help the vivid images that flashed through my mind: the truck lying on its side, a gaping hole torn through it.
Smoke and flames and the sounds of men injured and dying.
“This seems like a change of heart since our last session, Claire,” the therapist said gently, and I looked across the eighteen inches separating my wife and me. It may as well have been an ocean, for all the distance between us.
“This has been a long time coming,” Claire responded in her sweet, clear voice, swallowing down her emotions. “We’ve been doing this for years, twice a week. Where has it gotten us? My husband still wants nothing to do with me.”
That wasn’t exactly true.
The therapist looked surprised. Claire was a people pleaser and didn’t contradict anyone, not ever, or put her foot down like this.
“Are you saying you’ve given up?”
I was ready for this guy to shut the hell up.
Claire drew in a deep, shaky breath and I realized how close to tears she really was.
The last three years had broken my wife.
“I’m saying that I have no more hope. I’ll never stop loving Michael,” she looked over at me, but she didn’t make a move to touch me, “but I can’t live like this anymore.”
Her deeply painful admission cracked inside my chest and spilled something hot; liquid hurt that flooded through me and started to fill up in my eyes. I’d never known a life without Claire, not since I was seventeen. We’d been together for over three decades and had two beautiful kids. Claire was my forever.
Wasmy forever, because now she was throwing in the towel.
“I recommend we continue talking this through.” Wallace’s voice grated on my nerves. “We’ll explore this in depth as we continue, over the course of several more sessions, and make sure it’s the right decision for both of you.”
Claire drew herself up straight next to me and fixed Wallace with an icy glare. “I don’t think you understand how hard it’s been for me to arrive at this conclusion. We have talked ourselves in circles for the last three years and there has been no resolution. Hestillcan’t tell me what happened over there. Do you know what that feels like, Wallace?”
The man swallowed hard, because she had him by the balls.
“Imagine how you felt if your wife flinched every time you touched her. No hugs. No kisses or silly, sweet moments. What if you had separate bedrooms, because she had nightmares and was afraid she’d hurt you in her sleep?”
Wallace remained quiet, letting Claire’s hurt leak out.
“It’s been almost six years.” Her voice shook.
I knew exactly what had been almost six years, because I remembered our last time together with the utmost, painful clarity. It was one of my sweetest memories ever made, right before the worst period of my life.
It was the night before I shipped out on my last tour. It was my last tour ever, a two-year stint in Afghanistan with a team of guys I trusted with my life. Upon my return I was finally going to hang up the towel: retire from the military altogether and do something else with my life, something with just as much meaning, justdifferentmeaning. Something that let me spend time with my wife; the rest of my nights in her bed.
At the time our oldest, Kingsley, had recently graduated college and moved to Savannah to start a new job, while Eli would start his final year in just a few months.
Both kids had come home for the weekend and we’d spent every waking moment together, sitting on the porch and talking about plans and dreams and what the future looked like.
Claire kept our glasses full of cold lemonade and shuttled delicious food out to us, because when my girl was sad or scared or anxious, she cooked, and when I was about to deploy she was all of those things.
At night she climbed me like a tree and wrapped her body around my own, like she could fuse us together with enough effort, and then I couldn’t leave her again.
I’d left Claire several times before. I’d been deployed overseas exactly four times during the course of my military career, and she wasn’t joking when she said it was a miracle I was so close to our kids. I’d missed out on a lot of their lives, so when I was home I was all-in.
That particular night, it was just us. Kingsley had flown back to Savannah that afternoon and Eli drove back upstate, where he was living off-campus and working for the summer.
Claire had been the one to lock up the house that night and when she trailed into the bedroom and leaned against the doorway, I’d taken a moment to look up at her and appreciate just how beautiful my wife was. Her blonde hair was a little shorter than it had been in high school, but it was still thick and shiny, her body was defined and tight from the hours of work she put in each day on our small farm.
“Hit the shower, McEvoy.” Her voice had been deep and promising, and I’d scooted off the bed with remarkable speed to follow my wife’s orders.
Every precious moment of that night had been burned into my memory, committed carefully, grooved into my brain to come back to, those sweet moments of loving my wife, during the nights I lay alone in a narrow Army cot.
