by Mila Gray
‘Walker,’ I reply.
He nods and sets his teacup down. He holds out his hand and I shake it.
‘I’m sorry for the unannounced visit. I hope you don’t mind.’
I shake my head. ‘What are you doing in this neck of the woods?’
‘Oh, I had some meetings close by,’ he says. ‘Thought I’d drop in and see how you were doing.’
I raise my eyebrows. Meetings nearby? Really? More likely someone put him up to it. It crosses my mind that as a man of God he really shouldn’t be lying, but I let it go because, strange as it is to admit it, it’s good to see him.
‘So how are you doing?’ he asks, looking me straight in the eye.
I look away, unable to hold his gaze. ‘Yeah, OK,’ I mumble.
He doesn’t say anything and I sink down onto the sofa.
‘You know,’ he says after a beat, ‘I’ve been where you are, Walker.’ I look up. He sits down opposite me. ‘I know what it’s like to feel like you’ve failed a friend.’
I bite back my response because the look in his eye quiets me, tells me he does know. There’s pain there, buried deep.
‘I didn’t just fail him,’ I hear myself say in response. ‘I failed others.’ I stare down at the carpet, squeezing my hands together tightly. ‘So many others.’ It feels as if a knife blade is wedged in my throat and I’m having to push my words past it.
‘Sounds to me like you’re shouldering a lot of responsibility for other people’s choices.’
I mull on that. It reminds me of what Didi said to me not even a week ago. Maybe they’re both right. A small piece of my brain recognizes that by shouldering the guilt and blame I’m paralysing myself as surely as taking a knife and cutting my own hamstrings. The problem is that I’m trapped under the weight of it all once more, and there’s no Didi this time to help pull me to the surface and back into the light.
‘Do you believe in God?’ I ask suddenly, looking up. I catch the chaps’ bemused expression and it strikes me what I’ve just asked. I laugh under my breath. ‘Stupid question. Of course you do. I didn’t mean that.’
‘Are you going to ask me how I can believe in God? Given what I’ve seen, and the pain and suffering there is in the world?’
I nod. That was the general idea, yes.
He nods thoughtfully back at me. ‘I get asked that a lot. There are times when I doubt, times when I wonder what God can possibly be thinking, why he asks us to suffer so much.’ He spreads his palms wide. ‘What’s the point of all this pain? What does it achieve?’
I stare at him, expecting him to follow through, but he doesn’t. I wonder if he’s just asking rhetorically, but then he continues. ‘You know, the Buddha taught that life is suffering. It’s one of the four noble truths.’
I shoot him a semi-amused glance. ‘Aren’t you Christian?’
He laughs. ‘Yes, but I think the Buddha had it right on a lot of things.’ He nods his head again and sighs. ‘The truth is, I think, that we suffer when we expect things to go a certain way, when we resist the way things actually are. If we let go and learn to live every day as it comes, to accept the present moment as it is, then I think we can find happiness. Or at least we can put a moratorium on the suffering.’
‘That sounds pretty Buddhist to me.’
He smiles. ‘Christianity teaches that suffering opens you up to grace and helps you appreciate the goodness in the world.’ He pauses, frowning, before going on. ‘I guess in the same the way you probably appreciate your sight a whole lot more now, having been blind for a time.’
I mull on that, thinking about how right he is. When I got my sight back, I saw the world in a completely different way – colours became bigger, became brighter. For a brief stretch, in the hours before Dodds died, I was transfixed by things I’d never noticed before – the scattering diamonds of light hitting water, the million different blues above me, the variations of colour in just a strand of Didi’s hair.
‘Loss makes you appreciate the little things more,’ the chaps goes on.
I think of Didi – her laugh, her touch – and feel the familiar tearing sensation in my chest as if my heart’s being ripped apart.
‘You think there’s some big master plan?’ I ask, taking a deep breath to try to ease the pain.
He nods. ‘Yes, I like to think so. I mean, I reckon we’re here for a reason. I believe God has a plan for each of us.’
Some damn plan, I think to myself. The chaps sees my expression, the cynical flare of my nostrils, and smiles sadly. ‘You see what happened to your men and to Dodds as your fault,’ he says, ‘but it isn’t.’
‘Well, whose fault is it, then? God’s?’
‘It’s no one’s fault. It just is. You’re struggling to find a reason for it all, to understand it, but there is no reason and you’ll never be able to understand it. So the only course of action, I would counsel, is acceptance of what is.’
I stare at him sullenly.
‘You saved Sanchez. Twice.’ He smiles. ‘You might not think of yourself as a hero, but you are.’
A hero?
‘You are,’ he repeats. ‘Not just for putting yourself on the line every single day out there and for risking your life to save your men, not just for saving Sanchez’s life twice, either, but for enduring all that and still keeping on going.’
He stands up, and I do too, out of habit – I have to stop myself from saluting. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘And you will get through this. I have absolute faith in that.’
Didi
Zac kisses my shoulder and climbs out of bed. I watch him stroll to the bathroom and immediately I think of Walker. I can’t stop myself from comparing the two of them. And the comparisons aren’t good. Zac turns on the shower and shuts the bathroom door.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, pulling the sheets tight around me. What am I doing here? It’s been five days since the funeral and instead of getting better, the wound’s starting to feel infected, suppurating. I keep seeing Walker with that girl. My face burns as I think of all the things he said to me, all the lines he fed me about seeing me. What bullshit. I’m such an idiot. He never told me that he loved me. That should have been a sign right there that he wasn’t serious, that he was just playing me.
I hate him. I still love him. I hate him. And I can’t stop thinking about him. Or Dodds. I still can’t believe he’s dead. It still doesn’t feel real. None of it does. It’s like a never-ending nightmare. At night I start awake, heart pounding, seeing Dodds’ face swollen purple. His tongue lolling out.
I reach over to the bedside table and slide my hand into my purse, pulling out the letter. It’s creased and stained I’ve read it so often – I have it almost memorized; but I can’t stop myself from scouring it again for clues. What could I have done differently?
Didi,
Thanks for being a friend. I know you’re the kind of person who’ll try to figure out what you could have done to stop me, but you couldn’t have done anything. No one could have.
Life’s not all rainbows and unicorns but I hope it is for you. If anyone deserves it you do.
Become a doc. Marry Walker. Be happy.
Callum
My phone buzzes. I reach for it: it’s my mom. I switch it off. I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to talk to anyone, in fact. Being with Zac is easy because he doesn’t ask questions.
And how would I even be able to start telling him, or anyone? I’m still reeling from the shock and can barely admit it to myself. My own mother. And José. All Zac knows is that I’ve had a falling out with my mom and I don’t want to go home.
The image of them having sex is seared into my brain. After everything she’s always preached to me about honesty and trust being the bedrock of a relationship, after believing that her and my dad were the paragon of a happy marriage . . . I feel sick to my stomach.
After I walked in on them in Sanchez’s room, I ran to my car and just drove. I was p
lanning on going to Jessa’s, but halfway to LA I remembered she was away filming, so instead I ended up driving to Zac’s. If I stop to examine it, probably the motivation was a giant screw you to Walker, for leaving with Miranda without saying a word to me, for lying to me all along, for not being there when I needed him.
But it hasn’t worked. Falling into bed with Zac hasn’t made me feel in any way better. It’s made me feel worse, because every time Zac touches me all I can do is think about Walker and how much better it was with him.
Zac comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later wearing a towel wrapped around his waist. ‘So,’ he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed and resting his hand on my leg. ‘This is becoming a regular thing, you staying over.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, sitting up. ‘I’m sorry. I can—’
‘No,’ he says, interrupting me. ‘I like it. Stay as long as you need.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I mean, right now just having a place to crash is great.’ My eyes start to fill with tears. I’m like a busted, leaking fire hydrant. ‘Until I figure out what to do with my life.’
I swallow the lump in my throat. I don’t know what’s happening about my internship or my PhD. I want to talk to my dad, but I can’t bring myself to call him. I don’t know what to do, whether to tell him about my mom or not, and I’m embarrassed to face him after what he walked in on.
So I’m doing the only thing I can do – avoiding him and everyone else into the bargain.
Walker
‘She’s a beauty.’
I turn around and see Isaac strolling down the jetty towards me. He pulls his sunglasses off and grins at the thirty-foot sail boat I’m standing beside before turning to me. ‘Didi?’ he asks.
I shrug and look away, glad I’m wearing sunglasses.
‘She know you named a boat after her?’
I shake my head. Isaac knows I haven’t spoken to her. ‘I don’t think she’d be that impressed,’ I tell him. ‘Her boyfriend probably has a luxury yacht moored in San Tropez that he whisks her off to on the weekends.’
‘I doubt he’s named it after her, though,’ he says, one eyebrow lifting in a sardonic smirk.
Whatever. I hop on deck and Isaac follows suit. I probably shouldn’t have named the boat Didi. It was a whim. I was thinking of my grandpa calling his boat Chiara, but now, every time I see the name, picked out in glossy white against the hull, I feel as if a fishing hook is snagging in my gut. Eight weeks and still the pain shows no sign of abating. I heard from Sanchez, who heard it from Valentina, that Didi is back dating that actor Zac Ridgemont. I found that out the day after I named the boat after her. The day after I finally sent her the letter it had taken me weeks to write. I drank an entire bottle of whisky that night. Every day since, I’ve tried not to think about her, tried instead to focus on the present, just like the chaplain, or the Buddha, or both of them, ordered.
I open the cool box and hand Isaac a cold beer, and we settle on deck, looking out over the masts and rigging at the open ocean ahead of us glinting chlorine blue. Aegean blue, I revise. Miami could be a whole lot worse, that’s for sure. And on the upside, it sure beats Afghanistan.
‘I’m thinking of taking her out on a maiden voyage down to the Keys,’ I tell Isaac, running my hand over the side of the boat. It’s amazing what a three-carat diamond translates into in boat terms. It covered the down payment, and my retirement and injury pay covered the rest.
‘So long as you’re back next week for the exhibition,’ Isaac says, taking a swig of his beer.
‘Yeah, I wouldn’t miss it,’ I tell him. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.
‘How’s the job going?’ he asks.
I smile. ‘Actually, it’s going pretty well.’
I got a job working as a boat builder, fixing up old boats, and putting my degree to use working with a design team on building new ones to contract. It’s my dream job. No chance of anyone dying on my watch or of stepping on an IED, which is a bonus. My dad is still pissed. He set up a meeting with an old army buddy and lined up a job for me working for a military defence company, one that supplies guns and bullets to the army as well as to countless insurgencies around the world, but I told him I wasn’t interested, that I’d had a lifetime of bullets and war. He told me it was far more profitable than boats. He’s probably right, but I guess it’s all about how you define profitable.
‘You spoken to Mom?’ Isaac asks, interrupting my thoughts.
I shake my head. ‘Nah, every time I call she wants to know why Miranda and I haven’t set a date for the wedding. She’s in denial about us breaking up.’
Isaac throws back his head and laughs.
‘I told her if I married Miranda we’d have to rewrite the wedding vows to take out the part about in sickness and in health.’
‘You’re better off without her,’ Isaac says. ‘I still can’t believe you dated her as long as you did. Girl was psycho.’
I laugh to myself. My dad said the same thing. It’s amazing to me now that I ever saw anything in a girl like Miranda. How I could ever have thought that was love.
After the chaplain paid his visit, I thought for a long time about what he’d said about suffering and about living. I thought, too, a lot about Dodds in his coffin, in his grave. And what I decided was that either I could follow him down there into the darkness – end up dead myself, or as good as – or I could do what the chaps told me to do: fix my eyes on the present, accept what is, and live each day as best as I can.
So while every day still has its challenges, and while loss has wrapped its iron bands around my chest again, I’m learning to live with it. There’s work to do, amends to be made. A life to live in lieu of all the lives lost.
I’m staying busy, trying every day to keep my head above the surface. Being by the water helps.
‘Smile,’ Isaac says suddenly, and snaps a picture on his iPhone, then chinks his beer bottle against mine.
Didi
It’s like being in the heart of a riot. Zac grips my hand and tugs me along behind him, past Rayban-wearing security guards and a woman in a ballgown clutching a clipboard, and what sounds like a stadium of screaming teenage girls.
On television premieres always look so glamorous, but in reality it’s like being an animal at the zoo with people poking sharpened sticks through the bars. It’s breathtakingly terrifying.
‘Smile,’ Zac whispers under his breath as he pulls us to a stop in front of a bristling forest of microphones and cameras.
I force a smile, blinking in the dazzling glare of lights. I try to remember what Jessa told me about how to stand so I look good on camera. I’m wearing so much make-up I feel like a clown, but Zac’s make-up person said it was necessary so I didn’t look washed out in the photographs.
‘Is this your girlfriend, Zac?’ someone in the press pen shouts out, louder than the others.
I hear Zac laugh and then deflect the question by answering another about his role in the movie. He runs a hand self-consciously through his hair, styled just so. His other arm comes around my waist, helpfully anchoring me, because my legs have started to shake.
‘What are you wearing?’
Zac turns to me and nods encouragingly. Oh. They’re asking me. I snap to. ‘Um, a dress,’ I mumble.
Laughter. I can’t see who’s laughing, though, as everyone is cast in shadow, thanks to the floodlights.
‘Who’s the designer?’
Zac’s assistant steps in with the answer.
‘Relax,’ whispers Zac. ‘You look beautiful.’
‘Let’s go,’ he says to me under his breath. ‘The movie’s about to start.’ He waves at the photographers and starts walking back along the red carpet to the theatre entrance, past giant posters of himself.
We take our seats in the front row, and Zac pulls my hand into his. His palm is clammy. He’s nervous. He turns and smiles at me, and I feel a twinge in my heart. A Walker-twinge as I’ve started to call them. I brush it aside. I’
m with Zac now. And Walker’s with the girl I thought was Dodds’ girlfriend. I figured out that’s where I knew her from – the photograph Dodds had on his nightstand. He must have taken it. It was literally staring me in the face, and I never realized. I wonder if Sanchez and Dodds and José knew all along and were laughing behind my back.
It’s been two months since I saw Walker. I’ve made my Facebook account private. I had to after it became public that I was dating Zac. There are a lot of crazy people out there with no filter and no boundaries.
School started back up, so I’ve been throwing myself into that. In a hugely ironic turn, we’ve been studying repressed emotions.
I still haven’t been back to the centre, or spoken to my mom or dad, though they’re both peppering my phone daily with calls and texts. I texted them both back to tell them that I’m busy and need some time to work through my feelings, and since then they’ve been respecting my need for space.
My mom wants to meet me to explain, but I’m not ready to hear her explanations, and while my dad never reported what happened with Walker and me so I’m still officially a PhD student, I’m still too embarrassed to face him. I know I have to soon, though. Jessa won’t let up about it. But the truth is, I’ve needed the time to process what happened to Dodds and my role in his death. I have some inkling of what Walker was feeling now when he struggled to forgive himself over Lutter and Bailey.
The movie has started, and I try to push all those thoughts away and focus on the screen, though seeing Zac wearing a soldier’s uniform makes me think about Walker. I spend the whole movie wrapped up in thoughts about him, wondering what he’s doing at this moment, thinking about him and Miranda. Are they married yet? Are they on honeymoon? Is he happy? I hate myself for thinking about him, for not being able to let him go, for torturing myself with my memories.
I glance over at Zac. Why don’t I feel the same way about him that I do about Walker? Why am I still in love with someone who doesn’t love me, who never loved me? I scream silently at myself in frustration. Zac is my future now. I link my fingers through his and squeeze and he squeezes back.
