“What? You cooked a ham?” His sister wasn’t impressed.
“I put up a tree. We had a party.” If sedately sipping
mulled cider and gazing at a poor excuse for a Christmas tree qualified.
Her tone gentled. “Do you ever see friends?”
Nerves were jumping under his skin, making him
twitchy, and it was all he could do just to sit here under
Liz’s penetrating stare.
“Some are over there on another tour. One’s in a VA
hospital. A couple of the guys live on the East Coast.
Humes lives in Houston.”
“What about friends from before the war?”
Of course, he couldn’t talk to them, either. Felt completely remote from them as if they were distant acquaintances. Most hadn’t understood why he had
joined the National Guard in the first place, and had
been aghast at the idea of him giving up so much to ship
out.
“Lizzie…” He hadn’t called her that in a long time.
“I can’t go back.”
Just as quietly, her tone terrifyingly gentle, she said,
“Yes, you can. All the way? No. You won’t be the same.
Nobody expects you to be. But to the point where you
can connect with people who love you? Sure you can.
You’ve just…chosen not to.”
He couldn’t sit for another second. The chair scraped
on the tile floor as he shoved back from the table. “I
don’t…choose…” His voice was strangled.
His sister tilted her head back so that her implacable,
yet also kind—even pitying—gaze never left his, even
when he backed away. “It’s like living with a disease.
Or being an addict. The what you can’t change. The
how you deal with it…that you can. You’re the diabetic
who won’t go to the doctor, won’t check his blood sugar
level, even though he feels lousy. John, you need help.
Counseling. Somebody who will understand.”
“She wanted me to talk to her.” He felt as if he was
listening to somebody else. Somebody in such agony,
he couldn’t keep his goddamn mouth shut.
His sister’s antennae quivered. “She?”
John gripped the back of the chair. Looking down,
he saw distantly that his knuckles were white. “I met
someone.”
He thought he heard Liz murmur, “Hallelujah,” but
wasn’t sure.
“Fiona’s a teacher. She and eight of her students were
snowbound here during that big storm in November.”
She nodded, as if slotting pieces into a puzzle. “So
what happened?”
“We e-mailed afterward. She came up to stay over
Christmas break.”
“Ah.”
“She wanted me to tell her what happened.” Realizing one hand had somehow come to be touching his scar, John yanked it away and gripped the chair again.
“And?” Liz prodded.
“I can’t keep reliving it for everyone who’s curious.”
“Curious? You want her to love you, but you can’t tell
her about something so fundamental to who you are
now?”
Desperate, he asked, “Why do the details matter?”
“Because they matter to you. If they didn’t, you’d be
able to talk about it.”
“That’s simplistic,” he argued.
All she did was challenge him with a look, something
she’d perfected by the time she was five years old. “Yeah?”
When he didn’t—couldn’t—answer, she said, “So,
you blew it with this—Fiona? Is it a hopeless cause?”
“She’s started seeing someone else. One of the
students e-mailed me.”
“Uh-huh. What’s the last thing she said to you?”
“Said, or e-mailed?”
Talking a placid sip of her coffee, his sister said, “So
she e-mailed later. Okay. What did she say then?”
“That I knew where to find her if I wanted to talk.”
“So, not hopeless.”
His spirits rose momentarily, then crashed and
burned. “That was three months ago.”
“Idiot,” his beloved little sister said without heat.
“The price was too high.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Actually talking to her. That’s
too high a price?”