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Neither of us had known my two-year tour would stretch to a three-year absence.
Neither of us could have known that the Army would tell her I was presumed dead.
Neither of us had known I would be returned to her in pieces, broken in mind, body and spirit.
Neither of us could have known we would become strangers during the three years following.
We drove home in silence, Claire staring out the window at the beautiful spring landscape bathed in the golden rays of the setting sun. She’d said her piece and there was nothing more, so I drove with my eyes on the road while I tried to wrap my head around what she wanted to happen.
“You don’t want me anymore, baby?” I finally asked softly, aware that my voice was thick with the tears I’d never let run down my face.
A heavy sigh.
“Michael...” She turned slowly to look at me and I pulled the truck over onto the shoulder of the road, knowing this was going to get heavy in a hurry. “I’ve been your person for three decades, my love.” She reached across the space to put her hand on my arm and I had to steel myself, bracing for her touch. She watched me do it.
“See? That. I can’t even touch you without you pulling away from me. Do you know what it’s like to be unable to touch you?” Her beautiful blue eyes filled with tears. “I can’t go to you at night when you scream in your sleep, because I’m afraid pulling you into my arms will do you more harm than good. It’s the worst kind of torture: I have a husband, but I can’t havemyhusband.”
She swallowed hard and looked out the window again. “At first, when you suggested we see a therapist, I thought the problem was with me. But then I thought, maybe you wanted to share yourself with me again and this was what it would take, so I agreed–and at first I had hope. Atfirst. But my hope is dead, baby. I can’t look at you every day and know that all I’m ever going to be to you is a roommate.”
I turned off the truck.
Put my head back on the headrest and stared out the windshield, wondering what my wife would do if I let her see the things I had never let her see.
You should let her go.
What if I let her see the pain that leaked out of me at night, when I wanted nothing more than to crawl into her bed and wrap my arms around her, but couldn’t because of the incredible, crushing guilt? It rendered me useless.
We sat there in silence until the sun sank below the horizon and dusk stole over the fields. Then I ran an arm across one dangerously leaky eye and started the truck again.
There was a car in the driveway when we pulled in, and my heart fell. Of all the times for our daughter and her husband to surprise us, this was the worst. I wasn’t sure I could pull off the happy face my little girl expected, and I was damned sure Claire couldn’t. Those two were thick as thieves, twins born a generation apart, capable of reading each other without so much as a look, just a feeling that fizzed through the aether.
“Oh hell,” Claire groaned, and I knew she was thinking the very same thing. “This is not a conversation I’m ready to have with the kids.”
Count me on the same page. It was a conversation I didn’t want to haveever, especially with my wife.
“Just…” She flipped the visor down and quickly cleaned up her mascara in the mirror. “We’ll talk about this later–not in front of them.”
I let her go inside first and I meant to follow behind, but I couldn’t.
Instead, I trailed slowly through the yard with Flash, our Collie-something-mutt hot on my heels. Claire had gotten him while I’d been away and he’d chosen me as his person the first time he laid eyes on me, the same way she had thirty-something years earlier.
Flash followed me behind the barn, to where I’d been chopping wood each evening. But tonight I just didn’t have it in me. There was no fight and no energy, so I just sat on the huge stump I used as my chopping block and let what I’d never let my wife see run down my face and drop into the dirt.
Unrecognizable - Claire
“Something’swrong.”
Kingsley knew it the instant I walked into the house, and though there was no way I was ready to talk about what transpired just that late afternoon, my daughter could feel that my heart was broken.
“Rough session today.” I pasted the fakest smile ever on my face and prayed Kingsley would buy it, or just let me off the hook. If she wanted details I would break down, and once that dam was breached the tears would flow for days.
“Must have been a rough one.” Kingsley gave me one of her brilliant white smiles. She knew more than she should about the regular visits to the therapist, but the real reason had never been disclosed. She’d simply been told it was PTSD–I couldn’t remember whether that was Mike’s idea or mine–and it was true, but it didn’t scratch the surface: the nightmares, the flinching when I touched him, the utter fear I saw in his eyes the two times I walked into his room wearing something sexy.
I’d been trying to seduce my husband for years, desperate to find the man who’d left me six years earlier and never returned.
He’d moved into a different bedroom just weeks after he got home, trying to tell me he wasn’t used to sleeping next to someone anymore and he feared he’d hurt me if he had a nightmare and started thrashing.
Things like that were things you didn’t tell your kids, no matter how close you were to them.
