My fist curls tighter into the blanket and I pull it closer. I wish I could stop myself from shaking like this. It’s as if my bones are rattling loose from the confines of my skin.
“It hurts, talking about it, I get that. I’m sorry I have to ask, but I do have to ask. I need to know that you’re not going to do something like that again. I don’t want to turn my back and find that you…”
He swallows, and his Adams apple bobs. I can’t take my eyes off it. I don’t want to look up. I don’t want to see the expression on his face. I can’t take any more of this. I’m barely hanging on as it is.
“Drink your coffee,” he says, reaching forward and handing me the steaming mug.
He picks up his own mug and takes a sip, and I duck my head, quickly wiping away the tears that are freed by the movement. I look up and his attention is on his own mug, nestled in his hands. He’s staring at it, the gaudy red, white and blue strangely out of place for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on.
“I know what it’s like,” he says quietly. “To lose someone.”
My hand is shaking. I sip my coffee but it’s too hot, and I’m too broken. I put it back on the table and watch him for what feels like eternity as he stares at the mug that he holds in both hands, in the space between his knees.
“Who?” I ask, curiosity making its way through the pain.
His knuckles whiten but he doesn’t speak immediately. He radiates pain in the way that fire radiates heat. I’m both drawn to it and repelled by it. I want to come closer because I’m curious, but when I do, I know it’s going to hurt. Regardless, I can’t help myself.
“If I tell you,” he says, his eyes coupling with mine, “you have to tell me about James. Deal?”
I force down the lump in my throat, somehow.
“Do we have a deal?”
Quid pro quo, Clarice.
“Okay.”
As soon as the word leaves my lips, I’m already considering backing out. He isn’t, clearly. He begins talking, but he doesn’t shy away from me like I do from him. He looks me straight in the eye and I’m helpless. I can’t bring myself to look away. I need to see his pain. I need to know I’m not alone. Misery loves company.
“I was a sergeant in the US Army,” he says quietly. “Three tours, Iraq and Afghanistan. I was medically discharged. During my last deployment we were on a Humvee patrol in Kandahar province. It was around mid-afternoon, hotter than Hades and twice as dusty. Just another day.”
He smiles, but there’s no warmth in it. It’s hollow. He’s hollow.
“The explosion was deafening.”
The smile dies, and his eyes lose their focus for several seconds. He’s still looking at me, but he’s not seeing me. I don’t want to know what he’s seeing.
“We were hit by an IED,” he says, coming back to me. “Three dead soldiers, two who would later wish they were. The heat was… the guy sitting beside me lit up like a Christmas tree. I threw myself on top of him to smother the flames, but it didn’t make any difference. He died right in front of me.”
I want to look away, but he won’t let me. There aren’t any tears. He’s stronger than I am. Or maybe he’s just past that point. I wonder if he can still hear their voices, see their faces. I wonder if that’s where he was a moment ago, when he was staring right through me.
“Your turn,” he says softly. “Tell me about James.”
My heart races, forcing itself up into my throat. I can’t compete with dead soldiers and the horrors of war. I ache to hear James’s voice, giving me strength, urging me on. I listen for Kieran, for his cry or his laugh, or any sign that he hasn’t abandoned me, that neither of them have abandoned me. But the silence stretches out.
“We were on holiday,” I say, barely able to raise my voice above a whisper.
I stare at the floor, because I don’t want the intimacy of looking at him while I find a way to recount this. I don’t have his strength.
“James was working in Christchurch for a couple of days, he took the rest of the week off, so we could spend some family time together. We arrived on the Sunday, and he was working Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, Kieran and I amused ourselves. We went to the art gallery and the cathedral, then we went to Hagley Park, and we fed the ducks on the Avon River. Kieran loved doing that.”
I smile, even as the tears well up. I will always have tears for my blue-eyed, dark-haired little boy who deserved more than just eighteen months, three weeks and five days on this earth. The universe is cruel and indiscriminate. There is no God.
“And then I don’t remember anything else. I lost all my memories of the day of the quake. I don’t remember where we were going or what we were doing that day. I woke up five months later and they were both dead.”
I was dead. I am dead. I am not alive. This is not living.
“They told me that James was already dead by the time they dug him out. Kieran survived for four days and nine hours. I missed everything, all of it. By the time I woke up, they were gone, the funerals were over and our house was rented out to someone else. Everyone had moved on.”
I wrap my arms around my stomach, grieving in silence for the baby boy I carried in my body for thirty nine weeks and two days, and who I got to spend a mere flicker of time with outside of it. I wish I could’ve kept him safe inside me forever.
“I hear them,” I murmur, not quite to myself, but not quite out loud either. “I hear them sometimes. I can hear James’s voice. He talks to me. Sometimes I can hear Kieran laughing. I hear him running through the cottage, giggling, like someone’s chasing him.”
I smile through the tears, the memories lighting my way back to him, to them. Then the loss hits me again, and the smile dies on my lips. I look over at Luke, who hasn’t spoken a word since I started talking. He has tears in his eyes. For my family, for my baby, for me.
Then he reaches over, draws me close to him and holds me tight.
“You don’t have to stay.”
Luke looks over at me from his place on the couch. He’s not comfortable, I know he’s not, he can’t be. He’s much taller than Chris, and he dwarfs the couch, but he’s made it obvious he’s not leaving. I tried to sleep, but I can’t. Now, I feel disconnected, somehow. Standing in the doorway to the living room, I feel like a foreigner in my own house, in my own body.
“I know,” he says. “But we’re friends. If the situation were reversed, would you just go home?”
Secretly, I’m glad. My brain is exhausted, as is my body, but neither will give in, leaving me in the strange hinterland between awake and asleep. It feels like we’re in some alternate universe, left to fend for ourselves. The night has a post-apocalyptic air to it, as if we could be the last people left on the planet.
“Are you hungry?” he says, abandoning his reclining position to sit upright.
“No.”
“Want to do some star-gazing?”
Despite everything – the emotions tearing out of me faster than I can name, the disconnection, the exhaustion – I manage a smile. I can’t explain why or how, but it’s exactly what I need.
He grabs the blanket off the back of the couch, and Geezer and I follow him outside, where he lays the blanket on the grass, near the lake front.
“Back in a sec,” he says, as I kneel down on the blanket, absentmindedly running my hands through Geezer’s fur.
Luke lopes back up the steps and into the cottage. A moment later, the house lights are off and we’re in total darkness. His shadow finds its way back to the blanket.
“Can’t star-gaze properly unless you’re in the dark,” he says, lying down on the blanket, ankles crossed and hands piled loosely on top of his stomach. Geezer settles beside him, a furry lump in the dark.
I follow his lead, trying to get comfortable. The lawn curves slightly down to the water, but we lie with our heads up by the cottage and neither of us says anything for the longest time. The stars overhead are more magical than the last time we did this from the deck chairs on Friday night. God, was it only two days ago? Feels like a lifetime. Pin-pricks of dazzling light form a canvas above us, the stars lying in a faint purple mist so clear it feels like I could reach up and pluck them from the sky. I remember what he said on Friday night, about the sky being different.
“Y’know,” he says quietly, “when I came back from my last deployment, I was in pretty bad shape. Besides everything else, I was seeing things, hearing things. It wasn’t real, but it
felt
real – it felt really goddamn real. I thought I was going crazy.”
My heart begins to pound.
“I guess I kinda was, for a while there,” he continues. “I’ve discovered since that it’s not uncommon, seeing things, hearing things like that, after a major trauma. They’re like echoes, I guess, or our minds trying to make sense of the things we saw. Things happen so fast, sometimes I wonder if it takes some time to catch up.”
I don’t ask what he saw, what he heard. I don’t want to know. I think he’s trying to tell me that what’s happening to me isn’t unusual. I hope he’s not telling me that it’ll pass, because I don’t want it to. I’m not ready to let them go yet. We lapse into a long silence, but I’m no sleepier now than I was an hour ago.
“Do you believe in God?” he asks, almost reverently.
I think it over, but only for a second. I’ve already reconciled with this.
“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”
I stare skyward, conscious of his body heat. I wonder if he can feel mine.
“Do you?” I ask, because now I’m curious. “Believe in God?”
“I used to. I was brought up to. But now, I don’t know. I think I’m an atheist, but don’t tell my folks.”
We have more in common than I thought. I don’t ask what changed his mind, because I think I can guess.
“What do you see, when you look up at the stars?” he asks.
My eyes flit around the night sky, looking for something, because I think that’s what I should be doing. I feel like I’m missing something. Should I see James and Kieran somewhere, in the spaces between the light and the dark? Are they the stars themselves? All of them, or just one? Maybe the brightest ones. That would make sense.
“It’s not a trick question,” he says, and I hear the smile in his voice.
“I don’t know,” I say, relaxing a bit more. “I suppose I just see how big it is up there, and how small I am.”
“I can relate to that.”
“Do you know the constellations and stuff?”
“Not really. Some, but it’s been a long time. I learnt a few when I was a kid. You?”
I search, but I can’t see anything except stars.
“I know the Southern Cross is up there somewhere, but I can’t remember how to find it.”
“The Crosby, Stills and Nash song,” he says, the smile evident again, even though I can’t see it. “I love that song.”
“Me too.”
More in common.
“What were you doing up there, Sian, by the rock? Honestly.”
The direct question throws me, and my heart races like it was just kick-started by a push or a shove forward. Despite that, it’s so much easier to talk to him like this, without having to see his face.
“I just wanted to know that James was still there, somewhere. He’s saved me before. I lean out into the void and he… pulls me back. Only this time he didn’t. You did.”
It still hurts, like I’ve been abandoned. Where is he? Why didn’t he call out to me, like before?
“So you weren’t trying to kill yourself by throwing yourself down the side of a mountain?”
I tent my knees, because lying here like this feels like I’m too exposed. The stars can see everything, all of me, and so can Luke. I want to curl up tight, like a hedgehog, prickles facing outward to keep people away, instead of inward, cutting into my heart.
“No, I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
I was trying to find a reason to stay alive.
“Well, that’s something then.”
I smooth out the fabric on my white linen trousers, glowing in the moonlight.
“Do you dream about them? James, and your son?”
My hands still, then resume their silent sweep of white fabric, before I lace them over my stomach, trying to tame the circling butterflies.
“Yes. Do you? Dream about your friends, the ones in the Humvee?”
He’s very still, just as I am. I marvel, during the long moments of silence, how far our friendship has come in just a few short days. Perhaps grief ties us together. Maybe it gives us both a kind of empathy for each other, that we didn’t have before we knew.
“Yeah. Tony, mostly. He was sitting next to me when the IED hit. His face. Shock, almost indignation, like who would dare do this to him? He was a New Yorker. He had this attitude, I guess. Like he could handle anything, anyone.”
He pauses, and I want to turn, to see his face, but he gave me the courtesy of not watching my pain, so I’m not going to watch his. It’s the least I can do.
“He had a wife, and a little girl, Danielle. She was three weeks short of her third birthday when it happened.”
My heart breaks for the wife, and the little girl who will grow up without her father. I’m the opposite. I’m Tony in this story, out there somewhere in the ether, alone, lost. I can see this pain from all angles, and it’s the kind of empathy I wish I didn’t feel, but I can’t help it.
“At least she has her daughter,” I whisper, although I know how wrong it is to compare.
Fundamentally wrong. I’m a horrible person. Kieran’s face dances in the night sky, a shimmer, but every time I follow it with my eyes, he moves. I must be crazy. Regardless, my womb aches for him. I want to find him and tuck him back inside me, where I can protect him.
“I can’t imagine how it would feel to lose a child.”
Luke’s hand finds mine, and he curls his fingers around my own. He holds on gently, as if he’s afraid I will shatter if he holds me too tightly. I’m afraid of that too.
We lie there, hand in hand, on the lawn, watching the stars in silence for the longest time, Geezer snoring gently beside us.
***
That night I don’t dream. I wake for the first time near sunrise, and it takes me a moment to remember where I am. The air is cooler, comfortable at last, and we are cocooned in the quiet of a new day. I’m lying on my side, curled into Luke’s chest. His arm is around my shoulders, his hand resting loosely on my arm. I don’t remember falling asleep, but he has pulled the blanket over us both at some point. I can feel his heart beating slow and steady against my cheek.