Learning to Stay (5 page)

But Lieutenant Colonel Spencer told me that Brad would be fine, and he’d be coming home “soon.” It didn’t matter that he couldn’t pinpoint a precise date for me. The facts are these: My husband’s return is imminent, and pretty soon, we’ll be back in the club with that happy couple below. We’ll walk those same sidewalks in the same way—leaning into each other because we want to be closer still, because
we’ve always been drawn together like that. Because we have our whole lives ahead of us again. And I’ll forget that the possibilities were anything but.

Since Lieutenant Colonel Spencer’s call, I’ve developed an obsession with homecoming videos. I tell myself that I’ll watch only one, but inevitably, I go on to the next—soldiers showing up in their kids’ classrooms and spelling bees, at fast-food restaurants and during the opening ceremonies at sporting events—until too much time has passed. I picture how Brad’s homecoming will play out. Will he surprise me at work? Or will he call en route so I can meet him at the airport, running the wrong way up the down escalator to get to him, to throw my arms around him and bury my head next to his? I imagine the relief that will course through me when I can finally touch him again, in the flesh. And in my mind, that river of relief is fed by tributaries of pride and desire. I feel a kinship with Penelope waiting for Odysseus, with the nurse in Times Square letting herself be kissed so passionately by a random passing sailor. Returning from war is an ancient, primitive ritual, and I imagine the marriage beds of the Greeks—and so many who followed them in history—burned red-hot the nights of those homecomings. In ancient wars, women felt defended and protected; the men who returned survived danger others couldn’t and, in doing so, separated themselves from other men, elevated themselves toward the gods. There was, perhaps, no greater aphrodisiac. My inner feminist would hate to admit it, but things haven’t changed all that much.

Today I sit in the litigation team’s weekly status meeting, staring at my phone—at a video compilation with sound on mute but the looks on the faces in it unmistakable: joy, relief, release. In one after another, the soldier walks up to his or her family, and it’s as if someone has pressed the
PLAY
button on their lives. When I look up, my
eyes are watery and I start to scribble nonsense on a yellow legal pad until I’m certain they won’t spill over.

I don’t know when, exactly, Brad will be home. The military has given me a range of dates and the assurance that Brad will notify me before he leaves, or when he’s en route and more certain of an arrival time. So, when I walk in our house, set down my workbag, and look up to see Brad standing in the kitchen, having just poured himself a glass of water, it’s like seeing a ghost.

He is wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt, and both hang more loosely on him than I remember. Even though it’s December here, he’s tan and barefoot. There’s an unspecific hardness to him, about him, as if his aura has developed corners and jagged edges. But he’s Brad. And he’s here.

I don’t rush to Brad to wrap my arms around his neck or fit my lips and cheek into its crook. I don’t scream or squeal. I don’t do any of the things I imagined I would in this moment. Instead, I stand immobilized with big gobs of tears running down my face.

Brad comes to me, presses me to his chest like a child, and eventually, the flow slows and then stops. Feeling both silly and sluiced, I lift my head and bring my lips to Brad’s cheek. I let them hover there. Not since our first kiss have I slowed to notice every little nuance about how this feels. It’s said that distance makes the heart grow fonder, but no one mentions this: how the simple act of pressing your lips against the skin of a cheek—an act we take for granted starting shortly after infancy—can make your heart leap if you take the time to let it.

I close my eyes and my breathing falls in line with Brad’s, the rise and fall of our chests, together, creating a nearly silent soundtrack to this moment.

We lie in bed and I shiver as Brad kisses me—neck, ears, forehead, collarbone. It’s cold in our house because our furnace is on the fritz
again, but it’s more than that. It’s all the thrill of the first time we made love, only without the worries of where our relationship is going, if it’s going to last, if it’s for real. I get to feel all this and know exactly where we’ve ended up. It’s a high that leaves me tingling and shivering in every last cell of my body.

Afterward, I watch Brad sleep. I see him twitch and hear him mumble. I’m exhausted, but the grumbling of my stomach keeps me awake. I haven’t eaten since that morning, and then only a packaged blueberry muffin from the firm’s vending machine that tasted more like cellophane than blueberry. But the thought that Brad might up and disappear keeps me tethered to the bed.

Eventually my stomach and reasoning win out and I slip from our room, drawing Brad’s T-shirt over my head as I go. I make myself a mayonnaise and cheese sandwich, a guilty pleasure I usually deny myself because it’s artery-clogging unhealthy, and because Brad finds it disgusting. But tonight—tonight calls for a celebration. I even find one lonely Leinenkugel Berry Weiss, a remnant of summer, in the back of the refrigerator and crack it open. I stand over the sink, eating and sipping and looking out over our meager backyard, bathed in the light of a low-hanging moon.

And that’s when I see him.

I press my face close to the kitchen window, fighting to see past my reflection and into the yard, where Brad, wearing only jeans, is walking toward the back fence. I can see shadows of scars that crisscross his back and shoulders, looking louder and angrier than Brad ever has been. Although it’s been cold enough to snow, there’s none on the ground; still, it’s winter in Wisconsin and Brad is barefoot. I watch as he watches the fence, like a dog on high alert—body tensed, ready to spring on whatever might be lying in wait out there.

I didn’t hear him leave, but I hear him come in and I meet him in the hallway. For the first time, I notice how far away Brad looks—as if
his body was here and his mind, his thoughts, everything else inside of him were still stuck somewhere a million miles away. His eyes are black and empty, and when I ask him what he was doing, he says, “Just checking.”

“For what?” I ask. “It’s three in the morning, baby.”

First he looks past me with those eyes, and then he walks past me and back to bed. “Just checking,” he says once more, his voice trailing down the hallway in his wake.

The next morning I wake to Brad looking at me. He is smiling and his eyes are filled with light. Late-morning sun streams through the window. I’m not sure exactly what time it is, and for the first time in so very long, I don’t care. For the first time in what seems like an eternity, I don’t reach first thing for my phone, for news from Brad. Because he’s here. Right beside me. It seems almost too good to be true.

“Hey, beautiful,” he whispers.

“Hey, yourself,” I say.

We make love then. And where the night before was all about making up for the time lost between us, full of impatience and craving and insistence, this morning we are in no hurry. We are gentle with each other—meditative, studious even.

When the sun is full and bright and streaming in our bedroom window, I get up and make us coffee. I bring a mug for Brad and a mug for me back to bed. Then we huddle under the covers because, though it looks like a beautiful day, the thermometer suctioned to the outside of our kitchen window is hovering around twenty degrees. After so many months of wanting so badly to have Brad here to talk to, all of the thoughts and words I’ve stored up since he left seem to
have become bottlenecked, not one of them able to make it through. Instead, I keep looking at him, trying to memorize his features in case he isn’t really here after all—or for long.

“What?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I still can’t believe it. That you’re back.”

“In the flesh,” he says. And his lips curl into a smile, but the words don’t.

We decide to venture out for brunch, to Mickey’s Dairy Bar. It’s one of our favorite places—a diner so popular with the college students because of the cheap prices and overabundant portions that the line almost always snakes out the door, even in winter.

“It’s going to be a wait,” I tell Brad.

He shrugs. “I’ve waited a lot longer for a lot less than a giant egg scramble with gravy. Plus you don’t know how many times I dreamed about—ahh—”

Brad looks confused. “About?” I say.

“You know—going to that place.”

“That place?”

“I forget what it’s called.”

It’s the only place that Brad and I ever go for breakfast, and we go every Saturday morning. But he’s been gone a long time, and he’s only just gotten back. And in between, his mind has been on many other things. “Mickey’s?” I say, hesitating, as if that might not be what Brad meant.

He nods. “Right, Mickey’s.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” I say, placing my hands on either side of Brad’s face and drawing him toward me until his lips graze mine. I was the one to kiss Brad first, the night we met, and he always said that he knew at that moment I was the girl for him—something about that kiss did it. Now and then I try to replicate it, to convince him all over again.

I was juggling two-too-many tables at the Vierling that night, when a man at a table full of men waved me down and asked me for the check while placing his hand in an area that wasn’t quite my back and wasn’t quite my ass. He was dark haired and handsome and arrogant in a way that I could tell didn’t suit him. And when I finished my shift, he was waiting outside the back door, holding a cup of coffee that he said he had been drinking steadily since dinner because he wanted another chance to make a first impression. He walked me out into a night full of snow intent on making its way to the ground, silent and purposeful. Even now I remember the way the cottony quiet of each footfall on unshoveled sidewalks and unplowed streets made it feel as if we were the only two in the city; I remember the way everything looked impossibly white against the midnight. We talked about school and religion and politics as he walked me home, all the way to the end of Presque Isle Avenue, where I lived in a second-story flat in a student house, the only redeeming features of which were its proximity to the beach and the new porch the landlord had put on the year before. Brad was about to turn and walk away when I called him back and kissed him.

The next morning, he was at my stove in rumpled jeans and a gray T-shirt, humming a tune I couldn’t quite place, as he tried to toss a pancake up and out of the pan instead of using a spatula to flip it. My Sunday
Times
was open to the Style section. The pancake landed with a splat on an unlit burner, uncooked side down. He noticed me standing there and said, “Pancakes over easy?” He smiled at me and I smiled at his dimples. I loved him already.

That was the start. All because of my hands on his cheeks, my lips on his. Those dimples. That attempt at pancakes. And here we are, having come full circle and now starting to get to know each other all over again. Or, at least it feels that way, because I feel a pitter-patter in my chest, a flip-flop in my stomach as I step into the shower and let the hot water run over me.

I remind myself to call Darcy when I get dressed. It’s a call I’ve been putting off, and now, it’s a call I don’t quite know how to make. The difference in our lives has become nearly unfathomable. My husband has come home; hers did not. It is that simple, and that complicated. I feel thankful, seeing firsthand what my life might look like in a parallel dimension, and then I feel guilty for feeling thankful.

I stay in the shower until the water starts to run lukewarm. When I get out, Brad is standing by the sink, naked. He is looking at me intently. Not smiling.

“You’re leering,” I tell him. I laugh, trying to make it into a joke. But the way he’s staring at me makes the little hairs on my arms and neck rise up.
It’s Brad,
I tell myself.
It’s just that he’s been gone for a while. He just feels like a stranger.
I take a step back anyway.

Brad doesn’t say anything. He steps to me and pulls me toward him. His hand is rough on my elbow and strong, like a vise grip.

“Babe, I’ve got to get dressed so we can go,” I say, pulling away from him. “If we don’t get there before noon, we’ll never get a table.”

“No,” he says. “Now.”

“What’s with the ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ routine?” I say, still trying to joke. “Can’t get enough of me, huh?” I wrench my arm from his grip and pat him on the chest and emit a thin, shaky laugh. But there’s something bothersome about Brad’s visage, infected with varying strains of blank and confused.

“This morning? Last night? Once in between for good measure?” I say. “Remember?”

He drops his hand from my elbow and backs away. “Yeah. Right. Of course,” he says, though I’m not sure either one of us believes him just then.