Dear John (16 page)
I turned around. “To be honest,” I said, “I’m not sure you do.”
With that, I headed for the door.
I was gone until nightfall.
I didn’t know where to go or even why I left, other than that I needed to be alone. I started for campus beneath a sweltering sun and found myself moving from one shade tree to the next. I didn’t check to see if she was following; I knew that she wouldn’t be.
In time, I stopped and bought an ice water at the student center, but even though it was relatively empty and the cool air refreshing, I didn’t stay. I felt the need to sweat, as if to purify myself from the anger and sadness and disappointment I couldn’t shake.
One thing was certain: Savannah had walked in the door ready for an argument. Her answers had come too quickly, and I realized that they seemed less spontaneous than rehearsed, as if her own anger had been simmering most of the day. She’d known exactly how I would be acting, and though I might have deserved her anger based on the way I’d acted last night, the fact that she hadn’t appeared to care about her own culpability or my feelings gnawed at me for most of the afternoon.
Shadows lengthened as the sun began to go down, but I still wasn’t ready to go back. Instead, I bought a couple of slices of pizza and a beer from one of those tiny storefront places that depended on students to survive. I finished eating, walked some more, and finally began the trek back to her apartment. By then it was nearly nine, and the emotional roller coaster I’d been on left me feeling drained. Approaching the street, I noticed Savannah’s car was still in the same spot. I could see a lamp blazing from inside the bedroom. The rest of the apartment was black.
I wondered whether the door would be locked, but the knob turned freely when I tried. The bedroom door was halfway closed, light spilled down the hallway, and I debated whether to approach or stay in the living room. I didn’t want to face her anger, but I took a deep breath and made my way down the short hallway. I poked my head in. She was sitting on the bed in an oversize shirt, one that reached to midthigh. She looked up from a magazine, and I offered a tentative smile.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of bed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For everything. You were right. I was a jerk last night, and I shouldn’t have embarrassed you in front of your friends. And I shouldn’t have been so angry that you were late. It won’t happen again.”
She surprised me by patting the mattress. “Come here,” she whispered.
I moved up the bed, leaned against the bed frame, and slipped my arm around her. She leaned against me, and I could feel the steady rise and fall of her chest.
“I don’t want to argue anymore,” she said.
“I don’t either.”
When I stroked her arm, she sighed. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere, really,” I said. “Just walked the campus. Had some pizza. Did a lot of thinking.”
“About me?”
“About you. About me. About us.”
She nodded. “Me too,” she said. “Are you still mad?”
“No,” I said. “I was, but I’m too tired to be mad anymore.”
“Me too,” she repeated. She lifted her head to face me. “I want to tell you something about what I was thinking while you were gone,” she said. “Can I do that?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I realized that I’m the one who should have been apologizing. About spending so much time with my friends, I mean. I think that’s why I got so mad earlier. I knew what you were trying to say, but I didn’t want to hear it because I knew you were right. Partly, anyway. But your reasoning was wrong.”
I looked at her uncertainly. She went on.
“You think that I made you spend so much time with my friends because you weren’t as important to me as you used to be, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “But that’s not the reason. It’s really the opposite. I was doing that because you’re so important to me. Not so much because I wanted you to get to know my friends, or so they could get to know you, but because of me.”
She halted uncertainly.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
“Do you remember when I told you that I draw strength from being with you?”
When I nodded, she skated her fingers along my chest. “I wasn’t kidding about that. Last summer meant so much to me. More than you can ever imagine, and when you left, I was a wreck. Ask Tim. I barely worked on the houses. I know I sent you letters that made you think all was well and good, but it wasn’t. I cried every night, and every day I’d sit at the house and keep imagining and hoping and wishing that you’d come strolling up the beach. Every time I saw someone with a crew cut, I’d feel my heart start beating faster, even though I knew it wasn’t you. But that was the thing. I wanted it to be you. Every time. I know that what you do is important, and I understand that you’re posted overseas, but I don’t think I understood how hard it was going to be once you weren’t around. It seemed like it was almost killing me, and it took a long time to even begin to feel normal again. And on this trip, as much as I wanted to see you, as much as I love you, there’s this part of me that’s terrified that I’m going to go to pieces again when our time is up. I’m being pulled in two directions, and my response was to do anything I could so I wouldn’t have to go through what I did last year again. So I tried to keep us busy, you know? To keep my heart from being broken again.”
I felt my throat tighten but said nothing. In time, she went on.
“Today, I realized that I was hurting you in the process. That wasn’t fair to you, but at the same time, I’m trying to be fair to me, too. In a week, you’ll be gone again, and I’m the one who’s going to have to figure out how to function afterwards. Some people can do that. You can do that. But for me . . .”
She stared at her hands, and for a long time it was quiet.
“I don’t know what to say,” I finally admitted.
Despite herself, she laughed. “I don’t want an answer,” she said, “because I don’t think there is one. But I do know that I don’t want to hurt you. That’s all I know. I just hope I can find a way to be stronger this summer.”
“We could always work out together,” I joked halfheartedly, and was gratified to hear the sound of her laugh.
“Yeah, that’ll work. Ten chin-ups and I’ll be good as new, right? I wish it were that easy. But I’ll make it. It might not be easy, but at least it’s not going to be a full year this time. That’s what I kept reminding myself today. That you’ll be home for Christmas. A few more months and all this will be over.”
I held her then, feeling the warmth of her body against my own. I could feel her fingers through the thin fabric of my shirt and felt her tug gently, exposing the skin of my stomach. The sensation was electric. I savored her touch and leaned in to kiss her.
There was a different kind of passion to her kiss, something vibrant and alive. I felt her tongue against my own, conscious of the way her body was responding, and breathed deeply as her fingers began to drift toward the snap on my jeans. When I slid my hands lower, I realized that she was naked beneath the shirt. She undid the snap, and though I wanted nothing more than to continue, I forced myself to pull back, to stop before this went too far, to prevent something I still wasn’t sure she was ready for.
I sensed my own hesitation, but before I could dwell on it, she suddenly sat up and slipped off her shirt. My breaths quickened as I stared at her, and all at once, she leaned forward and lifted my shirt. She kissed my navel and my ribs, then my chest, and I could feel her hands begin to tug at my jeans.
I stood up from the bed and pulled off my shirt, then let my jeans fall to the floor. I kissed her neck and shoulders and felt the warmth of her breath in my ear. The sensation of her skin against mine was like fire, and we began to make love.
It was everything I had dreamed it would be, and when we were finished, I wrapped my arms around Savannah, trying to record the memory of every sensation. In the dark, I whispered to her how much I loved her.
We made love a second time, and when Savannah finally fell asleep, I found myself staring at her. Everything about her was exquisitely peaceful, but for some reason, I couldn’t escape a nagging sense of dread. As tender and exciting as it had been, I couldn’t help wondering whether there had been a trace of desperation in our actions, as if we were both clinging to the hope that this would sustain our relationship through whatever the future would bring.
O
ur remaining time together on my leave was much as I had originally hoped. Aside from the weekend with my father—during which he cooked for us and spoke endlessly about coins—we were alone as much as possible. Back in Chapel Hill, once Savannah was finished with her classes for the day, our afternoons and evenings were spent together. We walked through the stores along Franklin Street, went to the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, and even spent a couple of hours at the North Carolina Zoo. On my second to last evening in town, we went to dinner at the fancy restaurant the shoe salesman had told me about. She wouldn’t let me peek while she was getting ready, but when she finally emerged from the bathroom, she was positively glamorous. I stared at her in between bites, thinking how lucky I was to be with her.
We didn’t make love again. After our night together, I woke the next morning to find Savannah studying me, tears running down her cheeks. Before I could ask what was wrong, she put a finger to my lips and shook her head, willing me not to speak.
“Last night was wonderful,” she said, “but I don’t want to talk about it.” Instead, she wrapped herself around me and I held her for a long time, listening to the sound of her breath. I knew then that something had changed between us, but at the time, I didn’t have the courage to find out what.
On the morning I left, Savannah drove me to the airport. We sat at the gate together, waiting for my flight to be called, her thumb tracing small circles on the back of my hand. When it was time for me to board the plane, she fell into my arms and started to cry. When she saw my expression, she forced a laugh, but I could hear the sorrow in it.
“I know I promised,” she said, “but I can’t help it.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “It’s only six months. With all that’s going on in your life, you’ll be amazed how fast that goes.”
“Easy to say,” she said, sniffling. “But you’re right. I’m going to be stronger this time. I’ll be okay.”
I scrutinized her face for signs of denial but saw none.
“Really,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
I nodded, and for a long moment we simply stared at each other.
“Will you remember to watch for the full moon?” she asked.
“Every single time,” I promised.
We shared one last kiss. I held her tight and whispered that I loved her, then I forced myself to release her. I slung my gear over my shoulder and headed up the ramp. Peeking over my shoulder, I realized that Savannah was already gone, hidden somewhere in the crowd.
On the plane, I leaned back in the seat, praying that Savannah had been telling the truth. Though I knew she loved and cared for me, I suddenly understood that even love and caring weren’t always enough. They were the concrete bricks of our relationship, but unstable without the mortar of time spent together, time without the threat of imminent separation hanging over us. Although I didn’t want to admit it, there was much about her I didn’t know. I hadn’t realized how my leaving last year had affected her, and despite anxious hours thinking about it, I wasn’t sure how it would affect her now. Our relationship, I felt with a heaviness in my chest, was beginning to feel like the spinning movement of a child’s top. When we were together, we had the power to keep it spinning, and the result was beauty and magic and an almost childlike sense of wonder; when we separated, the spinning began inevitably to slow. We became wobbly and unstable, and I knew I had to find a way to keep us from toppling over.
I’d learned my lesson from the year before. Not only did I write more letters from Germany during July and August, but I called Savannah more frequently as well. I listened carefully during the calls, trying to pick up any signs of depression and longing to hear any words of affection or desire. In the beginning, I was nervous before making those calls; by the end of the summer, I was waiting for them. Her classes went well. She spent a couple of weeks with her parents, then began the fall semester. In the first week of September, we began the countdown of days I had left until my discharge. There were one hundred to go. It was easier to talk of days rather than weeks or months; somehow it made the distance between us shrink to something far more intimate, something that both of us knew we could handle. The hard part was behind us, we reminded each other, and I found that as I flipped the days on the calendar, the worries I’d had about our relationship began to diminish. I was certain there was nothing in the world that could stop us from being together.
Then came September 11.
T
his I am sure of: The images of September 11 will be with me forever. I watched the smoke billowing from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and saw the grim faces of the men around me as they watched people jump to their deaths. I witnessed the buildings’ collapse and the massive cloud of dust and debris that rose in their place. I felt fury as the White House was evacuated.
Within hours, I knew that the United States would respond to the attack and that the armed services would lead the way. The base was put on high alert, and I doubted there was ever a time that I was prouder of my men. In the days that followed, it was as if all personal differences and political affiliations of any kind melted away. For a short period of time, we were all simply Americans.
Recruiting offices began to fill around the country with men wanting to enlist. Among those of us already enlisted, the desire to serve was stronger than ever. Tony was the first of the men in my squad to reup for an additional two years, and one by one, every other man followed his lead. Even I, who was expecting my honorable discharge in December and had been counting the days until I could go home to Savannah, caught the fever and found myself reenlisting.
It would be easy to say that I was influenced by what was going on around me and that was the reason I made the decision I did. But that’s just an excuse. Granted, I was caught up in the same patriotic wave, but more than that, I was bound by the twin ties of friendship and responsibility. I knew my men, I cared about my men, and the thought of abandoning them at a time like this struck me as impossibly cowardly. We’d been through too much together for me to even contemplate leaving the service in those waning days of 2001.
I called Savannah with the news. Initially, she was supportive. Like everyone else, she’d been horrified by what had happened, and she understood the sense of duty that weighed on me, even before I tried to explain it. She said she was proud of me.
But reality soon set in. In choosing to serve my country, I’d made a sacrifice. Though the investigation into the perpetrators was completed quickly, 2001 drifted to an uneventful close for us. Our infantry division played no role in the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, a disappointment to everyone in my squad. Instead, we spent most of winter and spring drilling and preparing for what everyone knew was the future invasion of Iraq.
It was, I suppose, around this time that the letters from Savannah began to change. Where once they came weekly, they started arriving every ten days, and then, as the days began to lengthen, they came only every other week. I tried to console myself with the fact that the tone of the letters hadn’t changed, but in time even that did. Gone were long passages in which she described the way she envisioned our life together, passages that in the past had always filled me with anticipation. We both knew that dream was now two years distant. Writing about a future so far off reminded her of how long we had to go, something painful for both of us to contemplate.
As May swept in, I consoled myself that at least we would be able to see each other on my next leave. Fate, however, conspired against us again just a few days before I was to return home. My commanding officer requested a meeting, and when I presented myself in the office, he instructed me to take a seat. My dad, he told me, had just suffered a major heart attack, and he’d already gone ahead and granted the additional emergency leave. Instead of heading to Chapel Hill and two glorious weeks with Savannah, I traveled to Wilmington and spent my days by my dad’s bedside, breathing in the antiseptic odor that always made me think less of healing than of death itself. When I arrived, my dad was in the intensive care unit; he stayed there most of my leave. His skin had a grayish pallor, and his breathing was rapid and weak. For the first week, he drifted in and out of consciousness, but when he was awake, I saw emotions in my father that I’d seen only rarely and never in combination: desperate fear, momentary confusion, and a heartbreaking gratitude that I was beside him. More than once, I reached for his hand, another first in my life. Because of a tube inserted into his throat, he couldn’t speak, so I did all the talking for us. Though I told him a little of what was going on back on base, I spoke to him mainly about coins. I read him the
Greysheet
; when that was done, I went to his house and retrieved the old copies he kept filed in his drawer and read those to him as well. I researched coins on the Internet—at sites like David Hall Rare Coins and Legend Numismatics—and recited what was being offered as well as the latest prices. The prices amazed me and I suspected that my father’s collection, despite the fall in coin prices since gold was in its heyday, was probably ten times as valuable as the house he’d owned outright for years. My father, unable to master the art of even simple conversation, had become richer than anyone I knew.
My dad was uninterested in their value. His eyes would dart away whenever I mentioned it, and I soon remembered what I’d somehow forgotten: that to my dad, the pursuit of the coins was far more interesting than the coins themselves, and to him each coin was representative of a story with a happy ending. With that in mind, I racked my brain, doing my best to remember those coins that we had found together. Because my dad kept exceptional records, I would scan those before going to sleep, and little by little, those memories came back. The following day, I would recall for him stories of our trips to Raleigh or Charlotte or Savannah. Despite the fact that even the doctors weren’t sure whether he was going to make it, my dad smiled more in those weeks than I ever remember him doing. He made it back home the day before I was set to leave, and the hospital made arrangements for someone to look in on him while he continued to recover.
But if my stay in the hospital strengthened my relationship with my dad, it did nothing for my relationship with Savannah. Don’t get me wrong—she joined me as often as she could, and she was both supportive and sympathetic. But because I spent so much time in the hospital, it did little to heal the fissures that had begun to form in our relationship. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I even wanted from her: When she was there, I felt as if I wanted to be alone with my dad, but when she wasn’t, I wanted her by my side. Somehow, Savannah navigated this minefield without reacting to any stress I redirected her way. She seemed to know what I was thinking and anticipate what I wanted, even better than I did.
Still, what we needed was time together. Time alone. If our relationship was a battery, my time overseas was continually draining it, and we both needed time to recharge. Once, while sitting with my dad and listening to the steady beep of the heart monitor, I realized that Savannah and I had spent only 4 of the last 104 weeks together. Less than 5 percent. Even with letters and phone calls, I would sometimes find myself staring into space, wondering how we’d survived as long as we had.
We did make it out for occasional walks, and we dined together twice. But because Savannah was teaching and taking classes again, it was impossible for her to stay. I tried not to blame her for that, except when I did, and we ended up arguing. I hated that, as did she, but neither of us seemed to be able to stop it. And though she said nothing, and even denied it when confronted, I knew the underlying issue was the fact that I was supposed to be home for good and wasn’t. It was the first and only time that Savannah ever lied to me.
We put the argument behind us as best we could, and good-bye was another tearful affair, though less so than the last time. It would be comforting to think that it was because we were getting used to it, or that we were both growing up, but as I sat on the plane, I knew that something irrevocable had changed between us. Fewer tears had been shed because the intensity of the feeling between us had waned.
It was a painful realization, and on the night of the next full moon, I found myself wandering out onto the deserted soccer field. And just as I’d promised, I remembered my time with Savannah on my first leave. I thought my of second leave as well, but strangely, I didn’t want to think about the third leave, for even then I think I knew what it portended.
As the summer wore on, my dad continued to improve, albeit slowly. In his letters, he wrote that he’d taken to walking around the block three times a day, every day, each journey lasting exactly twenty minutes, but even that was hard on him. If there was a positive side to all this, it was that it gave him something to build his days around now that he was retired—something aside from coins, that is. In addition to sending letters even more frequently, I began to phone him on Tuesdays and Fridays at exactly one o’clock his time, just to make sure he was okay. I listened for any signs of fatigue in his voice and reminded him constantly about eating well, sleeping enough, and taking his medication. I always did most of the talking. Dad found phone conversations even more painful than face-to-face communication and always sounded as if he wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone as quickly as he could. In time, I took to teasing him about this, but I was never sure if he knew I was kidding. This amused me, and I sometimes laughed; though he didn’t laugh in response, his tone would immediately lighten, if only temporarily, before he lapsed back into silence. That was okay. I knew he looked forward to the calls. He always answered on the first ring, and I had no trouble imagining him staring at the clock and waiting for the call.
August turned to September, then October. Savannah finished her classes at Chapel Hill and moved back home while she began hunting for a job. In the newspapers, I read about the United Nations and how European countries wanted to find a way to keep us from going to war with Iraq. Things were tense in the capitals of our NATO allies; on the news, there were demonstrations from the citizens and forceful proclamations from their leaders that the United States was about to make a terrible mistake. Meanwhile, our leaders tried to change their minds. I and everyone in my squad just kept going about our business, training for the inevitable with grim determination. Then, in November, my squad and I went back to Kosovo
again
. We weren’t there long, but it was more than enough. I was tired of the Balkans by then, and I was tired of peacekeeping, too. More important, I and everyone else in the service knew that war in the Middle East was coming, whether Europe wanted it or not.
During that time, the letters from Savannah still came somewhat regularly, as did my phone calls to her. Usually I’d call her before dawn, as I always had—it was around midnight her time—and though I’d always been able to reach her in the past, more than once she wasn’t home. Though I tried to convince myself she was out with friends or her parents, it was difficult to keep my thoughts from running wild. After hanging up the phone, I sometimes found myself imagining that she’d met another man she cared about. Sometimes I would call two or three more times in the next hour, growing angrier with every ring that went unanswered.
When she would finally answer, I could have asked her where she’d been, but I never did. Nor did she always volunteer the information. I know I made a mistake in keeping quiet, simply because I found it impossible to banish the question from my mind, even as I tried to focus on the conversation at hand. More often than not, I was tense on the phone, and her responses were tense as well. Too often our conversations were less a joyous exchange of affection than a rudimentary exchange of information. After hanging up, I always hated myself for the jealousy I’d been feeling, and I’d beat myself up for the next couple of days, promising that I wouldn’t let it happen again.
Other times, however, Savannah came across as exactly the same person I remembered, and I could tell how much she still cared for me. Throughout it all, I loved her as much as I always had, and I found myself aching for those simpler times in the past. I knew what was happening, of course. As we were drifting apart, I was becoming more desperate to save what we once had shared; like a vicious circle, however, my desperation made us drift apart even further.
We began to have arguments. As with the argument we had in her apartment on my second leave, I had trouble telling her what I was feeling, and no matter what she said, I couldn’t escape the thought that I was being baited by her or that she wasn’t even attempting to alleviate my concerns. I hated these calls even worse than I hated my jealousy, even though I knew the two were intertwined.
Despite our troubles, I never doubted that we would make it. I wanted a life with Savannah more than I ever wanted anything. In December, I began calling more regularly and did my best to keep my jealousy in check. I forced myself to be upbeat on the phone, in the hope that she would want to hear from me. I thought things were getting better, and on the surface they were, but four days before Christmas, I reminded her that I’d be home in a little less than a year. Instead of the excited response I expected, she grew quiet. All I could hear was the sound of her breathing.
“Did you hear me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, her tone soft. “It’s just that I’ve heard that before.”
It was the truth, and we both knew it, but I didn’t sleep well for nearly a week.
The full moon fell on New Year’s Day, and though I went out to stare at it and remembered the week when we fell in love, those images were fuzzy, as if blurred by the overwhelming sadness I felt inside. On the walk back, dozens of men were clustered in circles or leaning against buildings while smoking cigarettes, as though they had no cares at all. I wondered what they thought when they saw me walking by. Did they sense that I was losing all that mattered to me? Or that I wished again that I could change the past?
I don’t know, and they didn’t ask. The world was changing fast. The orders we’d been waiting for were given the following morning, and a few days later, my squad found itself in Turkey as we began preparing to invade Iraq from the north. We sat in meetings where we learned our assignments, studied the topography, and went over battle plans. There was little free time, but when we did venture outside of camp, it was hard to ignore the hostile glares of the populace. We heard rumors that Turkey was planning to deny access to our troops for use in the invasion and that talks were under way to make sure they wouldn’t. We’d long ago learned to listen to rumors with a grain of salt, but this time the rumors were accurate, and my squad and others were sent to Kuwait to start all over.