Things were going so well.
I carry a load of wood inside to start a fire. Earlier, I was thinking about doing the whole bit—dinner, candles, cozy fire, our own little celebration. Now I’m not sure how she'd take it.
We're alone. Her parents went to have dinner and play games with friends in another condo. Tyler headed off to the party he told me about. I told him I wasn’t interested.
The wood is damp, so I’m having a hard time getting the fire going. I swear and throw down my gloves in frustration.
“Dad uses this when the wood's too wet.” I turn around, startled. Jess kneels on the floor beside me and hands me a bottle of lighter fluid.
“Thanks.”
She isn’t exactly smiling, but she doesn’t look as mad as she did before. “If you get the fire going, I’ll bring us something to eat.”
I take a chance and tease her. “You’re going to cook?”
She smiles back faintly. “I think I’ll just reheat. There are a lot of leftovers.”
“Sounds good.” Maybe tonight won’t be a total bust after all.
The fire is taking off when she comes back carrying two plates. It’s a sampling of the food we’ve been eating for the past couple of days. I’m starving, so I eat fast. She picks at her plate, takes a couple of bites, and sets it aside. She leans back and closes her eyes.
I watch her for a second. “Not hungry?” She shakes her head. “Tired.” She shakes it again.
I set my plate down and reach for her hand. She doesn’t open her eyes, but she doesn't pull away either.
“When am I going to be normal?”she asks. “Like today. I was doing fine. I let myself think about things without the hurt, remembered some good things. Seeing Kendra…with someone else… here. I can’t handle that. I know it’s not fair. She has the right to get on with her life. We all have the right to get on with our lives. Only I can’t. I’m stuck, like it happened yesterday.”
She’s talking. This is what I wanted, I guess. It scares me. I don’t know what to say; how to ease her pain, or how to help her anger. I try to remember some of my post-combat counseling, take a breath and try my best. “Things will never be normal again. Not the way it was before. You’re living with a gaping hole. We all are. Normal doesn’t exist. Sometimes it’s just survival, but we can’t stop living.”
“How are you surviving? Your hole is at least as big as mine. You were in combat and saw horrible things. You lost other friends. You lost your brother too. But you keep going. How?”
I lean back against the couch and think. "I guess the thing about being at war, or being in any intense situation like that, is that life takes on a different meaning. You understand how fragile it is, how short. It leaves you with a better idea of what you stand to lose if you wait too long to live your life."
She stares into the fire. The light picks up the gold flecks in her eyes. "And what if you're so afraid of what you might lose that you can't start living, or keep living, or do anything at all?"
I move closer to her on the couch. "What are you so afraid of losing, Jess?"
Her eyes meet mine. "You."
The air is sucked from my lungs. "Me?"
"I know it doesn't make any sense. But I've thought about it a lot. I was so afraid of losing you after Matt died that I did everything I could to push you away, to make you hate me. If I lost you that way, at least then it was on my terms, at least I felt like I was in control." She pulls her hand away. “Do you know what I felt when my dad told me that Matt was gone?”
"I can imagine."
"No. You can’t, because what I felt was relief.” She bows her head. “Because it wasn’t you. What kind of sister is grateful that her brother is dead because it wasn’t her boyfriend? And when I saw how much Kendra had lost, and then Jasmine, I was glad it wasn’t me, but I knew how easily it could have been. You told me you would have taken Matt’s place, and I know you would have. That just made it worse. I wouldn’t have let you take his place. Seeing Kendra today brought it all back. She’s happy, she’s moving on, and so much of my guilt is becauseof her.” She's curled in on herself on the other side of the couch. Her arms are wrapped around her shoulders and she's rubbing them, even though the fire is blazing and the room is hot.
My mind searches for something, anything that I can tell her that might make this better. “I think you’re feeling a kind of survivor’s guilt. We talked about that in post-combat counseling.Why did I live when someone else died?You can’t change what you feel. In Mosul, some guy dies who has a wife and four kids, and I’m happy it wasn’t me. I’m happy I get to come home. I get to be with you. And I feel guilty as hell.”
She looks up at me. “But it wasn’t your fault. You're not the one who chooses who lives and who dies.”
“But you do?”
She looks down again. “It’s not the same. Matt was my brother.”
“And you didn’t choose for him to die. And there's no way of knowing what choice you would have made if it were up to you. We don’t know why Matt and Gage didn’t come home, and I did. You loved Matt. I loved Gage. It doesn’t mean I should stop living out of guilt that my brother is dead, that he has a kid who will never know him. Pain happens, loss happens, but so do a lot of good things." I put my hand under her chin and lift her face to mine. “Maybe being happy it wasn’t me was your brain’s way of coping with it—finding something positive in a horrible situation. It doesn’t mean you didn’t love Matt. It doesn’t mean you don’t miss him.”
She doesn’t look away. “All this time I’ve been horrible to you. Everything I said. All the stupid reasons I came up with to hate you, so I could justify pushing you away. And what happened with Michael." Her eyes close in shame. "I'm sorry, Jacob. I know it's not fair for me to ask you to forgive or forget, or… but I'm so sorry for everything I did to you."
