The Brightest Stars

I wanted his touch. I needed to feel him, skin against skin. I couldn’t get him out of my mind, he had gotten so comfortable there. My fingers ached for him as I dug through my drawers for something thin and comfortable. I cancelled work for the day, ignoring the questions in Mali’s voice. I hung up before I started to cry. I focused on getting dressed. Of course today would have been a short day at work, and of course Kael and I had plans to drive as far away from this town as we could. We were preparing questions for each other, gathering music. Just the night before, Kael was making plans to thread our lives together.

Or so I thought.

Maybe he was just making plans to avenge whatever the fuck happened during that deployment.

How had everything shattered so quickly?

I thought that if I cleaned myself up, if I had a shower and brushed my teeth, I might feel a little more like myself. A little less than a zombie, anyway. But when I got to the bathroom and saw his tube of cinnamon toothpaste, rolled up at the end, I nearly choked. I hated the way this felt. This was bad. This was almost worse than the good had been good. I wasn’t sure if any of it was worth it. I never wanted to feel this again. Right then and there I decided that I wasn’t ever going to allow myself to step inside this danger zone.

I grabbed his gross toothpaste and tossed it into the trashcan. When I missed, it cracked against the drywall and a black line spread across at least five inches. I was starting to despise this house and it knew. That’s why it was falling apart right along with me.

THE SHOWER HAD HELPED a little, but I still looked like hell. I threw on black leggings and a T-shirt and towel dried my hair and sprayed a little salt spray throughout. It was a lifesaver on my thick hair. I wanted the day to go fast, that’s all I wanted. I pinched my cheeks to bring a little color to the surface.

I heard Elodie’s voice as soon as I stepped into the hallway. It sounded like she was hushing someone, but she was alone with her laptop. Phillips voice was coming through the speaker.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said.

I thought I heard him wrong, but he said it again. “Don’t lie to me, Elodie. Cooper’s wife told me that you were over there. His wife tells him everything, unlike mine.”

Elodie was crying. I had to hold onto the doorjamb in the hallway to stop myself from getting into her business. I didn’t know what Philip was talking about, but I knew I didn’t like the sound of his voice. I had never seen that side of him, or heard it. I couldn’t tell if his wife was used to it or not.

“I’m not lying. We stopped there for an hour at most. We went to the meetings, then to that house. There weren’t any men there,” she told him.

I tapped my fingers against the wall to let Elodie know I was coming. She perked up and wiped at her tears as I knew she would.

“Phillip, Karina is here,” she said. To warn him, I guess.

I didn’t know what was going on between them, but I knew I didn’t like the way he was speaking to my friend, who was swollen with his child.

“Hey, Karina,” Phillip said, his voice nice and friendly, opposite of what it just was.

I threw him a bland “hey,” and walked into the kitchen. Dishes were piling up in the sink. The laundry in the corner of the kitchen was overflowing in the basket. I couldn’t even blame the mess on my emotional despair, because the breakup had happened barely twelve hours ago. I managed to take one bite of an orange before he surrounded me again, the taste of his lips on mine the first time he kissed me. I felt the warmth of him, tasted the sweet citrus that clung to him the first time he kissed me and I tossed the orange in the trashcan.

This was getting to be a habit, tossing things into the trashcan.

Elodie signed off Skype and met me in the kitchen. Her eyes were bloodshot; the tip of her nose was red as fire.

“Everything okay?” I asked, licking the last of the orange juice off of my lips.

She nodded and sat down across from me at the kitchen table.

I didn’t want to press her, but she was obviously not okay.

“Elodie, you know you can talk to me?”

“You have enough problems.” She tried to smile, to be strong.

“Elodie, we can talk about anything. I have time for you.”

She shook her head. “No, no. I’m fine. Really, it’s just drama from the other soldiers. Why is there so much drama? Don’t they have anything better to do?” she asked me, sniffling and rubbing her nose.

“How are you?” she asked, reaching for me. I pretended not to notice as I lowered my hands onto my lap.

“I’m fine. Just tired,” I lied.

If she could lie to my face, I could do the same.

I SPENT MY DAY READING. Elodie was working and going straight from there to one of the other wives’ houses. Instead of worrying about her, I tried to do the things I liked to do before I met Kael. It wasn’t so long ago. That meant reading an entire poetry book, the new hipster style of poems with black covers and catchy titles. I’m a sucker for good marketing, so I ordered three more from Amazon. Every time I ordered something online I felt like I was receiving some sort of adult points for having enough money in my checking account to be able to afford it. After I scanned Amazon for too long and talked myself out of buying a pressure washer that I would most definitely never use—the one I was eyeing was called The Clean Machine—I got on Facebook. A quick scroll would clear my head. I mean, it was so much easier to focus on everyone else’s problems than my own.

I felt better—shamefully so—when I saw that Melanie Pierson was getting divorced. Melanie was in the grade above me and slept with Austin her senior year. She pretended to like me, no doubt to get closer to my brother. Until one day we were swimming and she saw the little white lines on the tops of my thighs. I hadn’t noticed them, didn’t even know what stretch marks were, until she made her hand look like a paw and called me “tiger.” Just another person who tried to boost her own poor self-image by making fun of someone else.

Melanie no doubt thought that she would escape this town by marrying a soldier, and look at her now. Coming home with her tail between her legs. She updates everyone on everything she does, so I knew that she was moving back one week to the day. Literally.

I moved on from her to my uncle who had posted pictures of rocks that look like people. Boredom and lack of motivation will do that to a man. I wondered how people would respond if I posted a broken heart emoji. Or a lengthy paragraph about my heartbreak and how it was eating me up from the inside out, and how I probably deserve to feel every bit of this agony for being so desperate for attention that I lost control of myself and my life.

I wondered if Melanie would have the same reaction to my misfortune as I had to hers. Did she see me as Austin’s bitchy sister who was always tagging along, the girl who wore a bathing suit that showed too much, things she found repulsive enough to pick at in front of everyone we knew. I wondered about Sammy too, and if she would see my post and feel bad for her best friend, or whatever we were supposed to be. We barely talked anymore, but I still considered her my best friend. At least when anyone asked. Not that anyone did. A habit, I guess.

I closed out of Facebook before I could follow through with my social experiment. I moved on to the porch. It was the perfect temperature outside, warm enough not to have to wear a jacket, but not too warm as to be hot and sticky. I took the poetry book and a beer that Kael left in my fridge and spent the next hour outside in the fresh air. I had one drink of the dark amber beer and all I could taste was Kael.

He was everywhere. He had become everything. I turned the pages in my book and felt like every single poem was read in Kael’s voice, I skipped from page to page.

Your skin is dark

As the velvet night

Your starred eyes

Are tenants in the constellations

I closed the book and tossed it, wat

ching as it went skidding across the porch. The Chaos of Longing is exactly what I felt and I wanted the collection as far away from me as they could get. I kicked the little pink book and watched as it disappeared into the patch of weeds next to my porch.

Then I felt guilty. It wasn’t the poet’s fault that my first love only lasted a week. I crawled over to grab it and dug my hand into the stringy weeds. They were too long, too unmanageable, growing into unpredictable vegetation overgrowing my yard. This little house was the only thing that wasn’t going to turn out to be something that it wasn’t. I knew what I was getting when I signed the dotted line for the basically abandoned house at the end of a strip mall covered street. The house was exactly what I knew it was. Sure, it was falling apart and unkempt, but that’s what I had signed up for. I was working my way back to making it beautiful. My house. For me. And yet, it had become another thing that reminded me of Kael. I began to pull at the weeds in the yard. I needed a distraction and had the rest of the day to do as I pleased, as long as Mali didn’t drive past my house and see me out here yanking the weeds from the yard. Minutes went by and I moved on from the weeds to sweep the gravel back into my driveway. It had started to take over my yard.

I thought about Kael and his remodel plans for his duplex. He had a talent for home design and I hated that he told me I should pave my driveway and now every time I see the gray stone gravel, I’m would think about him.

Don’t even think about that, I told myself. Possibly out loud, but at that point I couldn’t be sure. Don’t let him make you turn on this house. It’s all you have.

AT FIRST, I THOUGHT THE white Bronco pulling up to my house was a mirage. The sun was setting so I had to have been out there for at least two hours. My mind was obviously playing tricks on me. I stood up and stared, watching unwavering as he pulled up.

When he got out of his truck, it hit me. He was at my house and I was letting him walk toward me.

“Karina.” His voice danced around me, hypnotizing me.