There's No Place Like Home

by Jasinda Wilder

  I shake my head. “Not since the memory about my son.”

  “How do you feel about that memory?”

  I sigh. “I don’t know. I feel a little…crazy, to be honest.”

  Dr. James leans forward. “Crazy? How do you mean?”

  I shrug, and fiddle with the pen. “Just…like…” I groan. “Fuck, I don’t know how to describe it. Like there’s so much inside me, just beneath the surface, and no matter how much I write, it won’t come out. Not to be too graphic, but it’s like being constipated, or something.”

  Dr. James nods understandingly. “Do you remember anything about your son, besides the memory you wrote about?”

  I don’t answer for a while. “It’s hard to think about.” I try to picture Henry, my son, and an image bubbles up; I try to describe it for Dr. James. “If I picture him, I see him as a baby. Old enough that he mostly sleeps through the night. He’s got Ava’s hair, lots of dark hair. My eyes, dark brown. Chubby cheeks. Grabby little fingers. He was always clutching at my face.”

  Dr. James lets the silence breathe for a moment, and when he speaks his voice is soft and probing. “Tell me more about Henry.”

  “I remember…I remember waking up. It was late. I went into his room and he was lying on his back, feet kicking as he cried, little fists shaking. He was pissed, like just so angry. So I picked him up, and realized he had a poopy diaper. So I changed him. He was still fussy, so I carried him out into the kitchen and made a bottle of some formula. It was a beautiful night outside. We lived on the beach—I don’t know where, California or Florida, maybe? I can’t remember. I just have this image of looking out of a sliding glass door and seeing a beach, and the ocean, and a huge full moon hanging just over the horizon, reflecting on the rippling waves. I have this feeling of peace, of joy, of happiness.”

  I swallow hard, and keep going.

  “I remember taking Henry outside onto the back porch. It was just this little square concrete slab surrounded by some fence, separating our porch from our neighbors on either side, with a gate so we could go out to the beach. We had a table and two chairs out there, and I remember sitting with Henry in one of the chairs, feeding him the bottle and looking out at the ocean. He was awake, staring up at me as he guzzled down that bottle, and his little hands would—” my throat catches, and I have to start over. “He would grab at my hands. Squeeze my finger with his hands as he drank. Just blink up at me. He’d smile, sometimes, and milk would dribble down his chin.” I laugh, and it’s half sob. “That’s what I remember.”

  Dr. James is quiet a while. Eventually he nods slowly. “It is a good memory. Yes?”

  I nod. “Yeah. It’s a good one.”

  “Hold on to it, my friend. You have been through very much, I think. Remember the good things. There is sorrow, to be sure, but there is also joy.” He stands up, and pats my shoulder. “Let the sorrow pass through you, and cling to the joy. It is all we can do, sometimes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But of course.”

  “No, I mean for getting me to talk about Henry.”

  Dr. James just smiles at me, waving. “I will return tomorrow. Perhaps we can see about those casts, yes?”

  It will be wonderful to be free of the casts, to have mobility again.

  But…there is still so much I don’t know about myself, and my past.

  10

  [From Ava’s handwritten journal; November 18, 2016]

  Our first Christmas after we moved in together was the most wonderful and memorable holiday of my life.

  We agreed a month ahead of time that we would give each other two gifts, one expensive and one inexpensive—the first no more than $250 and the latter no more than $50. We agreed no pressure, no extravagance, just something meaningful and heartfelt.

  I got Chris a waterproof, shockproof tactical chronograph, because when in doubt, getting a guy a nice watch probably won’t go unappreciated, even in this age of smartphones and always knowing what time it is. Chris wore that watch every single day for years; that was the expensive gift. The inexpensive one was actually the more meaningful one: I found his camera, stole his memory card, went through the photographs, and found a bunch of the best and most artistic ones he’d taken, compiled them into a photo book, which I had printed on glossy paper and bound in a fancy hardback with his best photograph as the cover. It had, secretly, cost more than the fifty dollars we agreed on, but it was worth it, because he had been visibly moved and emotional, seeing the photographs of his travels bound like that, and had barely been able to get out words of thanks and appreciation.

  He’d given me a Coach purse I’d heavily hinted at several times, and had printed and bound into a small paperback all the poems and prose he’d written about me, including the love notes and cute Post-It Notes we’d shared.

  Honestly, those two items, the photo book and the book of poems and prose he’d written are the only two items that were in our Ft. Lauderdale condo or on Chris’s boat which are irreplaceable. I treasured that book as dearly as my wedding and engagement rings, and opened it to read his words of love whenever I needed the reminder or encouragement.

  But it was the gift of time shared with Chris that was so important to me. On Christmas Eve, we had put on our comfiest pajamas and curled up together under a blanket, turned off all the lights so the cheap pre-lit Christmas tree with our handful of ornaments provided the only light. We’d shared a bottle of wine, and we watched Christmas movies until we fell asleep there on the couch. I’d woken up briefly, in his arms, as he carried me to our bed, and then I was snuggled back in his arms. There was Christmas music playing somewhere as I fell back asleep.

  I’d woken again to dawn streaming in through the windows, and Christian already awake. He was still in bed, staring at me with love in his eyes. We’d been together for several months at that point, had moved in together a few months prior, and we would say things like “I love that about you” but we’d never said the words “I love you” to each other. Not outright. It wasn’t a game, we weren’t waiting for the other to say it first, I wasn’t scared of saying it and I don’t think he was either, we just…it hadn’t felt right. It was there, the idea that we weren’t just together, weren’t just dating or living together, but were truly in love—the knowledge was there, waiting to be expressed at the right time.

  When my eyes flickered open and fixed on his, he’d smiled at me, shifting closer.

  “Merry Christmas,” he’d whispered, nuzzling my cheek with his.

  “Merry Christmas,” I’d whispered back, smiling up at him.

  And then his lips found mine, and we’d gotten lost in a kiss, a long, slow, searching one. Christian had been the first to break away. He’d dragged his mouth away from mine, staring down at me, breathing raggedly. Lifted the edge of my pajama top and kissed my belly. My ribs. I’d arched my back and extended my arms over my head, and he’d shoved the top up and over my breasts and ripped the garment off and tossed it aside, and then he’d resumed kissing me…but not my mouth. He kissed my neck, my chin, my throat, my shoulders, my breasts, and I’d buried my hands in his hair and moaned his name as he kissed his way south, hooking his fingers into the waist of my pajama bottoms. He removed those as well, dragging them down my legs, following their path with his tongue, and then when they were gone and I was naked, he kissed and nipped back up to the juncture of my thighs. He’d gone down on me, then. Slowly. Unhurriedly, leisurely. His tongue and fingers brought me to orgasm again and again, until I was shuddering and shaking and breathless and screaming his name, and then I’d shoved him away and pushed him to his back and climbed astride him.

  I’d just sat on his thighs for a moment, gazing down at him, my hands cupping my breasts, presenting them for him. He’d lifted up and nuzzled them, licked his hot tongue around one nipple, and the other. I had held his face to my breasts, spine arched to press them into his mouth, and I watched in love and rapture as he devoured them, kissing and nuzzling and licking
until I could bear it no more. I’d risen up, reached between our bodies and gripped his erection, and slid him inside me, gasping his name as he filled me.

  We made love slowly.

  We never rushed, exactly, but sometimes sex was faster than others. In books and movies it’s always endless, entire nights of passion. We had those, too, of course. But when you live together and have busy lives, sometimes all you really have time for is ten or fifteen minutes together before sleep, or in the morning before you get up, or whatever. That’s just real life. You’re not in a hurry, exactly, but you have things to do and you want each other and you need the renewed intimacy, but you just…you’ve got shit to do.

  That Christmas morning was…it was just…

  I don’t know.

  Crazy intense, and so deliberately slow.

  I’d braced my hands on his shoulders and smiled down at him and hoped he saw how much I loved him, and he moved in me, his hands caressing my ass in affectionate, possessive circles as his hips pivoted with achingly tender thrusts, as slowly as he could move and still consider it movement. My love for him blossomed and expanded and exploded with each slow incremental slide of his cock into me, and my love grew even more with each agonizingly beautiful inch of withdrawal. Slow, and slow, and slow. No words. No screams or growls, no curses or chanting names, just our physical connection, his body inside mine, our union. His eyes on mine.

  My hair was draped around his face, and the sun was shining, and there was only us in the whole wide world, only this moment.

  Only my love for this man, a love so deep and wide and full and fierce that I knew in that moment that it would never end, would never stop growing, would never die, could never be replaced.

  Our climax wasn’t a nuclear detonation. No, this time, it was something else. A syrupy-slow slide into desperation, his sweat-slick arms wrapped around me, my hands clawing down his chest, leaving marks, our bodies heaving together, writhing, our breathing ragged and synched, the orgasm lasting and lasting until we were left limp and collapsed together.

  When it was over, I lifted up, my hands in the pillow on either side of his face, my hair curtained on either side of his face. I know my face must have shone like a beacon, then, with my unutterably enormous love.

  A long, silent moment, then, like that—him gazing up at me, his love as clear on his face as on mine, our bodies still joined.

  “Christian…” I murmured.

  His palm cupped my cheek, and I nuzzled into it.

  “Ava.”

  “I love you,” I’d said.

  “I know.” This, with a ridiculous smirk.

  I slapped his chest. “This isn’t Star Wars, you geek,” I’d said, but I was laughing when I said it.

  He rolled us over, then, so he was above me, his body hard and large and beautiful, his hair shaggy, scruff on his jaw; he’d palmed my cheek and he kissed me, a hot demanding kiss, one he controlled, claiming my mouth and showing me exactly how he felt, as if his expression and our lovemaking hadn’t already accomplished that.

  When he pulled away, it was only far enough that his lips were free from mine so he could speak. His nose was against mine, his weight on me, and I felt his words against my mouth.

  “I love you, Ava.”

  And then he’d wrapped me up in the blanket from our bed, cradled me in his arms, picked me up and carried me out of the bedroom and into the living room.

  He’d gone to find my presents, and when I saw him with his for me, I went to get mine for him, and then we sat together on the couch, both of us still naked, wrapped up together in the blanket from our bed, and opened the presents together.

  We eventually made breakfast—chocolate chip waffles and bacon—and drank a pot of coffee, and watched a movie. Took a shower together, wherein Christian pushed me up against the tile underneath the spray and filled me and fucked me hard and fast and I got myself off in synch with him, my fingers flying around my clit as he fucked me.

  And then we watched another movie.

  Ate leftovers for lunch, and each other for a snack, there on the couch.

  That was what we did, all Christmas Day: stayed naked, tangled up together on our couch, watching Christmas movies, snuggled under a warm blanket.

  We spent later Christmases other ways: at my parents’ house, them at ours, and we went out to Illinois to be with his mother the year his father died. But my favorite Christmas was always that one. Because an entire day spent watching movies and making love is always a perfect day, but mostly because it was the day Christian told me he loved me.

  He didn’t just say it because I said it first. He didn’t say it back. He made sure of that—the kiss, rolling us over so he was above me, that was his way of making sure I knew he wasn’t just saying it back, but saying it because he meant it.

  When I think of Christmas, I think of that day.

  11

  [Conakry, Guinea, Africa; date unknown]

  “You are not well, are you?” Dr. James asks.

  I shake my head. It’s all I can manage. I’m reduced to rocking back and forth. Unable to write, because I would only write that moment out, again and again. I have written it so many times I have filled half a notebook with it, until my hand cramps on the pen so badly a nurse must force my fingers to release it.

  “What is it you have remembered?” he asks.

  I only hand him the notebook, and he reads:

  [From a handwritten journal; date unknown]

  It’s the same dream, the same memory, over and over and over again, driving me mad.

  I see her, above me. Hair draped around my face like a dark curtain.

  No…not HER—

  You.

  Ava.

  I see you above me, Ava. Your hair is an inky black curtain around my face, obscuring the sunlight, which is glimmering and glinting through the strands in brilliant scintillating refractions. Your smile…it is an expression of the purest love possible on this earth. It is beyond comprehension, beyond description. Your eyes are the vivid cerulean of the High Sea, and they pierce into me and see my soul and somehow, see something within me worth loving with such purity. Your skin is flawless cream and ivory. Your lips are redder than the most scarlet apple.

  This is all there is to the dream. Your hair, the sunlight peeking through it, your red lips and pale skin and blue eyes. And that look of the purest love that could ever exist.

  Again, and again, and again.

  No words, no sound, no sensations or smells. Just that look on your face, and the upwelling of raw ecstatic joy it causes in me. I cannot fathom it. I cannot pierce the memory, nor dredge it for more. I dream it, every night. I close my eyes as I sit on the veranda in the hot sun. I see you, waking and sleeping, and I am mad with the seeing of it, desperate to know you, desperate to know if I have truly seen such a look directed at me, desperate to know…you—

  And myself through you.

  Who was I that you could gaze at me like this? That you could love me, like this?

  I have but the tiniest fragments of myself, so far: a capacity for the written word; a vague notion of unhappiness as a child; the sea; a son, Henry, who died, and the icy ghost fingers of dread the knowledge of his death engenders within me, though I know not why; and you, for you are truly an intrinsic part of me, Ava, in a way I do not know if I can even now comprehend.

  The dream, the dream, always this dream.

  You, you, you.

  Sometimes I wallow in the madness the dream catalyzes inside me. I linger in it. Allow myself to be mad with it. Allow myself to chant your name and allow the vision—the dream, the memory—to repeat in my head like a looped GIF, the splice between frames perfectly married in an endlessly repeating moment: your head drawing down to mine, your hair draping around my face and pooling on the pillow, your lips curved in that secret smile of purest love, your eyes flicking back and forth as you gaze down at me.

  I want to drown myself in that moment.

  Am I t
ruly going mad? For days now, that vision has been in my every thought, laced through every moment, awake and asleep. I dream it, and when I awake with a start, lonely and mourning the loss of such love, I close my eyes to steady myself and yet there you are, staring at me, all over again.

  There is no escape from it.

  WHY?

  Why must I be taunted with it? Why can’t I make it stop? Or remember more?

  What came before? What comes after?

  Did you kiss me? That look, that smile, did it morph into a kiss, into more? Into us, drowning in each other there in the sunlight? Or was that moment what came after we made love? Was that the look you gave me in the moments after we both climaxed together, clinging together, gasping, and loving each other as fiercely as our bodies would allow?

  I don’t know…

  And I want more than almost anything else in this world to know, to KNOW.

  That vision is taunting me, haunting me. Teasing me. It is a cup of water just out of reach of a man dying of thirst.

  Sometimes I’m so mad with it I nearly wish I could dig it out of my head, drive it away from me forever.

  Other times I’m so besotted with it I want to live always in that single moment, cling to it like a drowning man to a spar in a storm.

  All I can do, however, is endure it.

  * * *

  Dr. James flips back and forth through several pages, and finally removes his spectacles and looks at me closely.

  “I can see that the same thing is written over and over many times, this central image of your vision of your wife, this woman, Ava.”

  I nod.

  “Can you explain why?”

  “It’s all I see. Over and over and over again, awake and asleep—I see her but I can’t remember—I can’t remember what came before, or what came after.” I rock back and forth in my chair, squeeze my eyes closed and mutter her name a few times—Ava, Ava, Ava. “I can’t remember. I just can’t remember.”