To Have and to Hold: A Returning Home Novel

by Serena Bell

  She had to be a good mom, because Phoebe was a sweet kid. Funny, thoughtful, polite, good in school, an unfailingly loyal friend to Clara.

  But that was about it. That was about all he could say he knew about Trina Levine.

  And yet he’d apparently had sex with her.

  Very, she’d said, when he’d asked how serious they’d been.

  He wondered what that meant.

  Screaming passion and mutual orgasms? Or just—compatibility?

  Sex that was by turns tender, fun, and wild? Or just—sex?

  Imagining Trina in the throes had brought on a half-mast state of arousal and the beginnings of one of those headaches that had been his intermittent companion since he’d woken up at Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany. Loss of blood, dehydration, shock, they’d said.

  Now he wondered what they’d missed.

  “I could show you the letters you sent me,” she said. “They must be somewhere. And emails. We sent each other loads of emails. You could read them…”

  Damn, he’d never answered her question. She’d asked if he believed her.

  “No,” he said. It came out shorter than he meant it to. “I mean, yes. I believe you. But no—not the letters and emails. Not now. Maybe another day.”

  To have to read through a year of correspondence with her watching him with that hopeful, expectant look. He didn’t think he could take it.

  “So—what happens now?”

  With a shock, he realized that mixed in with all the uncertainty, there was invitation in her eyes and voice. Of course. As far as she was concerned, they had a history.

  He could have her if he wanted. That’s what she seemed to be trying to tell him.

  He was human. He was male. The pleasing visuals and the note of willingness, even eagerness—they worked on him. Half-mast obediently swelled to downright—or, erm, upright—enthusiastic.

  Twelve years ago, give or take, he’d followed his dick into bed with Dee. They’d been in basic together, and she’d pursued him, and he’d been flattered. They hadn’t been the only pair to ignore the absolute injunction against fraternization.

  If a little part of him had known that he didn’t feel about Dee the way Dee felt about him, that part had been a whisper drowned by the fun and ease of regular, ready sex, the drama of doing the forbidden, and the appeal of being one of the few men he knew who was actually getting laid.

  Then Dee had gotten pregnant—

  And they’d had to get married. No choice, not in the army.

  Slowly he’d realized. He’d sorted out what was sex and what was love. His emotions caught up to his libido. And it turned out his libido had been overeager and misguided, egged on by circumstance. But by then, he was married with a kid, committed to a lifetime. He’d accepted that—embraced his reality. He had vowed to be the best husband and father he could possibly be.

  But it had niggled at him, the constant sense that there was something missing, that there was more to life, something he might never have a shot at. He’d wanted to be a better, more generous, more loving spouse and parent, but he’d often found himself wondering what the road not taken looked like.

  And despite his best intentions, he and Dee had failed each other in tiny ways every day—death by a thousand cuts—until they were both worn down.

  Since then, he’d been wary of moments like these, when the balance of power was all wrong, all in his hands. When a woman was willing, even eager, even though they both knew he couldn’t give her what she ultimately wanted. When she was interested in more, and he wasn’t.

  But he’d been interested in Trina once.

  Could it happen again?

  He searched his soul for a sign, but all he got back were the demands of his body.

  Maybe if he hadn’t been so tired. Maybe if his head hadn’t begun to pound. Maybe if he felt some faint tingle of real recognition, some sparking synapses, alerting dormant emotions.

  But all he had was the sense that maybe another man in a better state of mind, at a different place, in a different time, might have made a different decision. And all he had to offer were two words that he knew, absolutely knew, weren’t the words she needed to hear.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 4

  In a daze, she went back to the guest room—white eyelet lace and pale blue walls that had been Dee’s taste, not Hunter’s—and tried to think. It was like trying to push her thoughts through molasses.

  I’m sorry.

  The realization that Hunter couldn’t, rather than wouldn’t, give Trina what she wanted had tempered her anger, and all that was left now was grief. She’d had her heart broken once before, but she’d forgotten how sharp the pain was, and how specific. Right there, as if something were literally split open. And a sensation like every part of her was begging the world, Don’t really be happening this way. Reaching for something receding into darkness.

  Through the bog of her mind, a conviction leapt into clarity.

  She had to tell Phoebe.

  Climbing the stairs, too, felt like forcing herself through something viscous and resistant.

  “Phoebs, can I talk to you for a sec?”

  Both girls were facedown on their respective bunk beds, reading. When they weren’t playing some kind of elaborate game they’d invented—usually something to do with improv or theater—or outside in the yard working on softball skills, this was where they were. When Hunter had first left, it had taken awhile for them to see that they couldn’t play together 24/7, that they would need downtime from each other, but now they sought it out as easily and as naturally as any two siblings who’d lived their whole lives under the same roof.

  Phoebe, old enough now to scent danger, looked up from her book, her eyes narrowed and nose wrinkled with suspicion. “Can’t you just tell me whatever it is?”

  Over the last year, Trina had run this household as if the girls were sisters. If she had something to address, she’d address it with both of them. Sure, there had been moments that she’d taken one or the other aside for a pep talk, a heart-to-heart, or a little boundary-setting, but pretty much, she’d been able to say whatever she had to say to both girls. So it was no wonder her daughter was suspicious now about being culled from the pack for a special talking-to.

  Still, there was nothing to be done about it. “Sorry, Phoebs, but I need to talk to you alone.”

  Phoebe slid from the top bunk and followed her mother into the hallway, her shoulders hunched.

  “I need you to pack your stuff up. We’re going to leave soon. Tomorrow or the next day.”

  “What?!” Phoebe’s eyes found Trina’s, big with shock, and the preteen outrage echoed off the walls of the hallway.

  “I’m sorry it’s so quick.”

  “You said—you said we’d be able to stay awhile even after Hunter came back!”

  Trina and her daughter shared the same fine, straight blond hair, the same heart-shaped face. But Phoebe’s expression, stubbornness morphing into iron will, had come straight from her father.

  She braced herself, because if Phoebe sensed room for negotiation—

  “I know. But things are—complicated. Clara and her dad need to get back to their normal lives.”

  As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she knew they were a bad choice. The sullenness deepened on Phoebe’s face. “We are their normal lives. You and I are Clara’s normal life. More than Hunter is. We can’t just leave her.”

  We can’t just leave her.

  The pain doubled and redoubled. Trina had been so stricken with grief over Hunter that she’d been blind these last few minutes to the rest of what she’d lost. Not just Hunter, but Clara, too. Who’d become a sister to Phoebe.

  A daughter to her.

  She put a hand to her chest, as if she could soothe or contain the pain, but it was too great.

  She got angry again, not at him, but at herself, for how foolish she’d been. To think Hunter and Clara had been hers to keep. When she
should have learned…

  Phoebe made a small sound, tugging Trina’s attention back. Her lower lip was trembling, and Trina, who remembered how that lip had always done exactly that before baby Phoebe burst into tears, knew that her daughter’s anger was just a shell. Phoebe was as heartbroken as Trina at the thought of leaving.

  And sure enough, one tear ran down Phoebe’s face, and Trina thought for the ten thousandth time in the last year that a girl of twelve was stuck precisely halfway between woman and child. “I don’t want to go.” Phoebe’s voice was as trembly as her chin. “I don’t want to go back there.”

  She was talking about the apartment.

  “It’s so small. And dingy. It always feels dirty.”

  Trina understood what Phoebe meant. They’d always kept it clean and neat and scrubbed, but you couldn’t make thirty-year-old Formica look as glossy and beautiful as the faux granite stuff in Hunter’s kitchen. You couldn’t do much about floors that desperately needed to be resanded and refinished. And if the landlord stubbornly refused to let you repaint and kept delaying the work himself, the walls would eventually show fingerprints and the grime of years. It had always felt dirty, and when Trina had moved into Hunter’s house she’d felt the weight of that burden—which she hadn’t quite known she carried—lift off her shoulders. She’d even warned herself not to get too used to it, in case—well, women born since the last quarter of the twentieth century knew not to stake too much happiness on things they couldn’t afford to pay for themselves.

  But what she hadn’t counted on was how it would feel to have Phoebe tell her that what she’d given her all those years hadn’t been enough.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the apartment.”

  Her voice had come out testier than she’d intended, and she saw Phoebe’s eyes narrow. “Really? Are you saying you’d rather live in that dump than a place like this?”

  That dump.

  Her chest felt like there was lead in it, but she shoved the sensation away and went on.

  “Phoebe, hon. I’m not sure we’re even going back to the apartment. I don’t know if we can break the sublet contract, and it’s not up for another six weeks. I’m thinking we might go stay with Bonnie for a little bit.”

  Bonnie was Trina’s closest friend, someone she’d waited tables with for years at Mike’s Down Home.

  “Bonnie’s apartment smells like cigarettes and wet dog.” Phoebe was crying now. “I don’t want to go there. And Clara needs us. We can’t just leave her. You’re like her mom.”

  “Phoebe. Baby.” Trina hugged her tight, resting her face against the fine silk of her daughter’s hair. Under the darker scents of adolescence, she could still find the baby scent of her Phoebe, and the tenderness that sprang up in her was the deepest emotion she knew.

  She had to listen to that tenderness now, not the part of her that wanted to cling to this house and family that weren’t—and now would never be—theirs. She had to keep doing what she had always done for Phoebe—building a life for the two of them.

  “I’m not her mom.”

  The words hurt to say, but she pressed on. For Phoebe’s sake, she wanted to be matter-of-fact, to make this seem like the most normal, the safest, thing in the world. “I’m your mom. And I need to do what’s right for you and me. And right now, what’s right for you and me—and Clara and Hunter, too—is for all of us to get on with our lives. Clara needed us this year, but now she has her dad back, and they’re going to be happy. And so are we. I promise.”

  But even as she said it, even as Phoebe snuggled closer, still young enough to believe in a mother’s omnipotence, she thought of Hunter’s promise, spoken with so much conviction, felt fully in the depths of his heart, but not his to make, or keep.

  —

  “Here’s the thing.” Dr. Stephens, the neurorehab specialist Hunter had been referred to, crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “Just because you’re passing cognitive tests with flying colors and we can’t see anything on the scans doesn’t mean you didn’t have a mild traumatic brain injury.”

  Several hours of tests had brought on one of Hunter’s headaches, and he really didn’t need short, bald Dr. Stephens to tell him the news he’d just delivered. He pretty much already knew that somehow, somewhere along the way, he’d suffered a head injury.

  “I don’t have access to all your records from the field clinic or Landstuhl, which might help me get to the bottom of this, but it’s not uncommon to miss a mild-to-moderate TBI in a situation like yours where there was battle and another serious injury and transport from one treatment facility to another. There’s a military concussion evaluation, but it relies on subjective recall, which means if there weren’t people around to corroborate your memories of the events, we don’t know exactly what happened. And it’s affected by fatigue, which ninety percent of soldiers are suffering from ninety percent of the time, and has a low sensitivity when it’s administered more than twelve hours after the incident. Because of the situation you described—collapsed lung, airlift, surgery, longer-than-expected unconsciousness—it almost certainly was. And the Glasgow Coma Scale—same kind of thing. It’s a subjective assessment. If data about the length and cause of unconsciousness is faulty, you’re going to get equally faulty conclusions.”

  “But how did I make it all the way back home without someone picking up on the fact?”

  That was the part that really got to Hunter. Not just that he’d lost a year, but that he’d lost it so completely that he almost hadn’t known it was lost. Was it possible that if it hadn’t been for Trina, he might not have figured it out for even longer?

  “It’s more common than you’d think,” Dr. Stephens said. “Again, it’s a subjectivity problem. We don’t have foolproof ways to determine what someone does and doesn’t remember. There are certain kinds of questions that help—asking people about recent current events, that kind of thing—but it turns out that a very large percentage of people are oblivious to recent current events, particularly if they’ve been in a remote location.”

  Hunter sighed.

  “As I gather you were.”

  He nodded.

  He’d gone to the base first thing this morning. Before referring him to Dr. Stephens, the base doctor had told Hunter he could make a case for medical discharge. “Any cognitive impairment. Which memory loss is.”

  But Hunter didn’t know whether he wanted medical discharge. How did you decide what you wanted to do with the rest of your life when you didn’t know what your life was like?

  It was strange that all through his time in Germany and D.C., he’d never felt as disoriented as he did now, as if finding out about the gap in his memory had brought it into being.

  He’d pocketed the paperwork and the referral and gone to see the rear detachment commander, Captain Carmichael. Carmichael, brand new to his position and harried, had pulled the incident report, but it had been—typically—short on details. There had been a firefight. No other U.S. casualties. No mention of insurgent casualties, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any.

  “Can you find out more?”

  “I can try,” the captain said. “But you know how it is. Communication is intermittent. Even if they’re getting email right now, no guarantee someone’s got time to fill in the blanks for you.”

  “Tell them I lost a fucking year,” Hunter said.

  The captain gave him a look caught halfway between sympathetic and tell me a story I haven’t heard before. “I’ll do my best.”

  That left him, for as long as it took to get answers back from the front, with this giant hole in his psyche. And only Dr. Stephens to help him guess at what lived inside it.

  “So—what?” he demanded of the neurorehab specialist. “So we have no idea what happened to me and—”

  “Well, we know certain things. We know that if there was a percussion injury, like a blast, it wasn’t intense enough to cause eardrum rupture. So that helps us a little. And if there was a blow to the hea
d, it didn’t cause external bleeding or someone would have flagged it. So we’re probably looking at some kind of blunt trauma, which means damage—if it exists at all—is probably localized to point of trauma and point of rebound—” At Hunter’s blank look, he clarified. “The point where the brain bounced off your skull on the other side.”

  “Oh,” Hunter said unhappily. “And what do you mean, ‘damage if it exists at all’? I can’t remember a year of my life. That means there’s damage, right?”

  “Probably,” Dr. Stephens said. “But it’s also possible to have some retrograde amnesia in response to severe bodily injury or psychological trauma. I’m sure you’ve heard of childhood abuse victims or even adult rape victims with no memory of the incident?”

  Hunter nodded.

  “At this point, in the absence of any concrete evidence of specific brain damage, the way we proceed is the same regardless of etiology.”

  Hunter gave him a dirty look.

  “We do the same thing no matter what caused the amnesia.”

  “And that is?”

  Dr. Stephens, for the first time, had the good grace to look ashamed. “Essentially, we wait.”

  “Let me guess. I could remember in a day, a week, a month, a year, or possibly never.”

  “I think that about sums it up. And even if you get some memories back, you’re not guaranteed to get them all back. We do occasionally use ECT—electroconvulsive shock therapy—but that can also adversely affect short-term memory coding—”

  “No, thank you,” Hunter said.

  “Figured you’d say that. Okay, then. I’m here if there are questions I can answer,” the doctor said. “And I’d like to see you again, regardless, in a couple of weeks, just to repeat a few of the tests.”