by K. L Randis
After a year and a half of physical therapy, multiple dinners to shake hands with superiors who commended me on my brave heroism while under attack, and visits to the doctors who patched me up when I first came state side, I recoiled into an alternate life amongst locals in a small, sleepy beach town.
The realities of becoming a civilian again hit me in the face like a soccer ball.
“I’d like to get an idea of available job opportunities around here,” I said when I got to the counter of the unemployment office, something a fellow wounded warrior told me to do while we passed time talking between hospital beds.
When I signed off on the discharge paperwork I filled out, I was considered seventy-five percent disabled. Injuries from war were on a sliding scale gauge that had no rhyme or reason; a lost limb and hearing loss would make you fifty percent disabled, but PTSD, partial blindness, and a random shoulder pain from lugging equipment around would be considered sixty percent if the person filling out the paperwork asked the right questions. This calculation would be added up, multiplied by some unknown factors, and then spit out to give an estimate of how much the military thought you’d need to be compensated.
The end result? Not much, especially if I ever developed issues down the road from combat, mentally or physically. Disability percentages were calculated at the time of discharge, which was smart on the military’s part—they documented problems with exiting military personnel before any long-term effects started to show.
Not that it mattered anyway. It was never about the money, and my parents had left me plenty of it when they passed. I had spent years perfecting my training, learning to be a hardened machine, and a killer when needed. Then they patched me up the best they could, put a bus ticket in my hand, and I was on my own.
The military built us to thrive in an environment where we depended on camaraderie, someone always having your back, and a culture of family that extended outside of your blood born relatives. They never taught us how to survive on our own when we were discharged.
“What kind of skills do you have, hun?” the lady behind the glass wall asked me, shifting papers around on her counter in no apparent order.
“Hand-to-hand combat training, advanced weapons training, survival tactics—I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?”
“I meant what kind of career skills do you have? We can try and narrow down what to look for but I’d need now what kind of relevant job skills you’re able to bring to the table.”
“Well, I just spent one and a half tours in Iraq, so unless you have any jobs calling for a hit man, I guess I’m out of luck.” I walked away from the counter before she could respond, thrusting open the doors to the parking lot so violently I thought for a moment I broke one.
They don’t teach you how to not kill people when you leave the military. There’s an awful lot of time spent teaching us tactics to combat, shoot, and take hostile threats down…but they never explained how to undo that training. I was hyped up, taught to be angry at enemies and the injustices that terrorists brought to our country, and then I came back to civilian life and I had no where to put that anger.
So, I kept to myself.
I found odd jobs at construction sites, laboring until the clang of metal or a machine would set me off and I’d have to go looking for a new job. I punched bosses in the face when they tried to control me, brawled with coworkers about their political stances, and stared at the ceiling at night wondering if sleep would ever happen for me again.
Then Pippa happened.
She was stretching on the beach that day, staring into the ocean and looking as lost as I felt.
The race we had was unintentional; I really was just trying to burn off steam from losing my job a day earlier. Her spirit was intoxicating, and she challenged me in a way I hadn’t felt in so long.
It built slowly, at first, but the more time I spent with her the more I started to feel again. Emotions resurfaced I hadn’t felt since Mackenzie; since seeing my parents’ faces when I told them I got my acceptance letter to Yale University. I felt euphoria, like how I’m sure Cpl. Freddy felt when he exited the bathroom at that local pub hours before deploying to Iraq the first time, a smile on his face the length of China and a woman exiting shortly after, dabbing the corners of her mouth.
I’m sure it was how LCpl. Nelson felt when he found out he was going to be a father for the first time.
When I found out Pippa was training for the Boston Marathon I knew I had to be a part of it with her. We trained for months, in every element of weather, stealing kisses on the beach and holding hands under the table at Lorenzo’s Pizza shop when we carb-loaded.
She was everything I never knew I needed.
She had walls up, I knew. I also knew she had her reasons, like I did. I wasn’t going to be stupid enough this time around to let someone amazing walk out of my life without showing her how much she meant to me.
I thought being at the finish line of the Boston Marathon with military dog tags that symbolized a promise to her etched into the back of them would be a moment we would both never forget. I put them in a small blue box that morning, excited to give them to her when she finished.
Pippa wasn’t the type of woman who would take my words for truth. She’d need to see how serious I was about her, over time, to get her to finally start taking us seriously and see that we were more than just running buddies. I wanted to spend as much time as I could with her smile right in front of me, and the past behind me.
Then, the explosion happened.
Screams erupted.
I watched Pippa fall to the ground.
I blanked, and when I came to I was at her side, blood in my hands as I held her head. There was a man standing near us and I didn’t recognize him. I know I assessed him as some kind of threat to Pippa, I don’t know why.
Then, everything went black.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Meet me at the beach, our spot.
I hovered my thumb above the screen of my phone, barely remembering to breathe. The last time I had seen Jackson was at the hospital with Meg, yet here he was, popping up in my text messages like a memory that refused to fade. I couldn’t just leave things the way they were since seeing him last, I had to face him, so I tapped on the screen and hit send before I had a chance to second-guess my decision:
I’ll be there in ten.
The second time I witnessed Jackson attempt to kill himself, he was standing at the ocean’s edge with a .22 in his right hand.
The early September breeze whipping off the clashing waters, mixed with the darkened skies as the sun began to set, told me that we would be alone for a while. I squinted down the coastline anyway, hoping someone would be flying a kite or walking a dog to witness what was about to happen.
There was no one.
A softer, seaweed-colored haze surrounded his blank pupils. They were a lot like his personality, a mixture of steel and cotton that didn’t know how to coexist together.
At that moment the structural frame that kept him together was unfolding.
Jackson’s shoulders were hunched as if he were about to get sick—the adrenaline of my showing up to the beach moments before he off’ed himself seemed to shake his confidence in what he had been planning to do.
“You told me when I was hospitalized that this would get easier,” he whispered, his eyes locked with mine. He turned his head toward the water, a flicker of air pushing dark strands of hair across his forehead. For a moment I considered grabbing the gun and heaving it as far as I could into the depths of the ocean. I knew better. He would find another way, any way, to end the pounding in his head. He was barely thirty but had a chiseled physique and a fast mile. He’d be head first into the ocean within seconds to find the gun at that point. If he didn’t find it, he would simply choose not come up for air.
Right then, I was his air.
“I did say that,” I confessed. “This isn’t you,” I said. I nodded toward the gun. “I know you.”
“You don’t know anything!”
I flinched as angst forced his trembling hands to rest on the top of his head, the .22 pointed inadvertently in my direction.
In response, I lowered myself to the chilled sand to avoid the barrel of the gun. Patting a spot beside me, I lured him to do the same. His body language told me he would never let me in that easy, but if I could get sand into his hands, I could distract him enough from the agony his face was telling me he felt.
“Do you know what today is?” he asked, wiping his nose on his sleeve and coughing to cover up the pitch in his voice.
“I do,” I said, nodding, my eyes widening at the realization that I suddenly knew what had set Jackson off.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” he muttered, more to himself. The wind threatened to drown out anything else he said, so I patted the spot next to me with one hand while letting sand drift through my fingers like an hourglass in the other. He watched the crystallized strands flow to the ground, sighing deeply.
That’s it, come back to me now.
He crouched, a slight shudder in his left knee, and the next knee followed. The gun came to a rest on his right thigh. Shoulders still hunched, he refused to look at me.
I mistakenly reached out to touch his left thigh and he flinched, looking up and then back down at my hand.
I turned my palm toward him. “Feel the sand with me,” I suggested. I was unsure if he could hear the thudding in my chest over the wind.
He stared at me for a moment, then back down at my open hand. Nodding, he rubbed his beard before inching his fingers toward mine.
When our hands interlocked, I put pressure around his fingers and started to bury our hands beneath the cold surface of the sand like a squirrel. Once our hands were mostly covered, we took turns squeezing the sand between each other’s fingers in a slow and rhythmic motion.
“You know why I’m doing this?” I asked, knowing that he wouldn’t look at me when he answered.
“To bring me back,” he replied.
“Yes.” I shook my head and we sat in silence a few minutes longer, watching the waves stealthily inch closer.
“Where’d you get the gun, Jackson?”
“It was my dad’s” he replied. “Hey, why are you crying?” Jackson’s voice alerted me to the trickle of tears running down my face that were being supplied by adrenaline.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re not.”
“I don’t know either,” I confessed.
“Huh?”
“You said earlier that you don’t know who you are anymore.”
He nodded.
“I don’t either,” I whispered.
With our hands interlocked beneath the sand, he had no choice but to let the gun slide down his thigh and fall in-between us so that he could cup my chin in his hand. “We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” he asked.
The burn from trying to hold back tears was evident on my face, I was sure. “Yes, Jackson. We’ve been here before.”
“So what happened? Why are we here again? What did we do wrong this time so that we’re right back to where we started?”
“It’s not anyone’s fault. We didn’t do anything wrong, we just…”
“We just what?” he asked, his breath lingering on my lips.
I closed my eyes, trying to fight the urge to do what I knew I shouldn’t do. “We can’t do this.”
“We can,” he coaxed.
His leaned on his free hand so that our noses were almost touching. The sun had disappeared long ago and the only way we could make out the shapes of each other was courtesy of the stars peeking out from above. “We can do this, we can fix it.”
“I don’t know if we can…” Shifting my weight, I used my shoulder to gently push against his chest so I could breathe, so I could give myself the space I needed to think clearly.
“Pippa, I love you.”
My knee-jerk response to him telling me he loved me for the first time flew out of my mouth. “There’s no way you can.”
“You have no idea, Pip. I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you, you have to know that.”
“You can’t love me,” I demanded.
“Why not?” he asked, the desperation in his voice mimicking my own.
“Because you have no idea who I really am,” I said. I closed my eyes, not knowing if what I was about to say was going to help or hurt the situation. “I’ve been lying to you this whole time.”
In quantum physics, entangled particles remain forever connected. Actions performed by one impact the other, even when separated by great distances. Entanglement only occurred when particles interacted physically.
I considered the random college lesson lingering in my brain, watching my fingers slide between Jackson’s in the sand. It made so much sense now.
“You were thinking of killing yourself, that’s why you got me that apartment, wasn’t it?” I asked. “That’s what you meant when you said you wanted to make sure I was taken care of.”
He nodded, his honesty with my blunt inquiry harder to acknowledge than the question itself. “The pain just builds and builds, some days it’s just so much. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Pippa. I never had a solid plan. Part of me wanted to throw the gun into the ocean before you even got here tonight. I brought it to get rid of it, but I wanted you here with me when I did it. I just couldn’t help but wonder if I would need it one day and couldn’t bring myself to do it before you got here. I’m sorry if it scared you. I wanted to make sure you were taken care of if I wasn’t here, yes, but I decided to get rid of the gun tonight. That’s why I texted you. I know we betrayed each other. I made you believe I was worth fixing and you made me believe you didn’t know me. But it’s like I can feel you from wherever I am, like we’re entangled in the same web. All this time I was just hoping you’d just show up one day, ready to go at this full torque with me, however misguided that might be.”
“You’re not broken, Jackson,” I replied. “There’s nothing for me to fix.”
“I’d take a civilian job anywhere in this world and help raise your girl. I have hollow spots, and it makes me question how you can fill them so effortlessly. I would relive the bad days a thousand times if it meant I could relive all the days I spent with you just once.”
“So don’t leave me,” I said, placing the gun behind me as I said it. I looked out onto the ocean. “Everyone else seems to hold all the right cards in their hands while you and I sit here feeling sorry for ourselves.”
“Do we?” he asked. “Feel sorry for ourselves, I mean.”
“I’m just sorry,” I said.
“So were you going to show up one day and run into my arms like you wanted or was it just a dream you were holding onto?”
I swallowed. “You’re the part of my story I never saw coming, the piece that fits and stays no matter how much I try and ignore it, and that scares the hell out of me.”
“I’ve seen scary. I lived it. This is not that,” he said.
“So where do we go from here then?”
He licked his lower lip, focusing on the sounds of the surf. “We stop pretending we don’t want to be together.”
“I’m not who you think I am,” I repeated.
“I know,” he said.
“And you’re not who you I thought you were.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“I’ve been lying to you because I’m not the girl made of armor anymore. She’s gone and I’m exhausted from trying to pretend she’s not. I’m not the fearless girl, or the girl who’s going to light up the room with her jokes while I’m feeling so much anxiety…”
“No, but you’re my girl,” he replied.
Tugging on my hand, he coaxed me to sit in his lap. I shifted my weight onto him, sprawling my legs into the sand to our sides. Both of us glanced at the gun sitting a few feet away, and then he moved my chin so I was facing him instead.
“Today is the day Freddy died,
isn’t it?” I asked, running my fingers through his hair.
He buried his face into my shoulder, nodding and exhaling in a deliberate attempt to rid his lungs of any air. “I told you that when I was in the hospital?”
“You did.”
“What else did I tell you?”
“How about I tell you what I’m thinking instead?” I asked.
His hair rubbed against my shirt in response, and goose bumps prickled my arm as the waves lapped in front of us.
“I’m feeling broken, just like you,” I said. “I’m not whole because I’ve been trying so hard to ignore what I’ve been feeling.”
“What’s that?”
“That I love you too, Jackson.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
We agreed to go on a date, a real one.
Trudging through the sand, long after the sun had set and we had thrown the gun into the ocean, we walked back to our cars and planned a date night where we could muddle through all of the baggage and uncertainties from the previous months.
“So did you ever get in touch with Mackenzie when you got home?” I asked between mouthfuls of fries. I was perched on the edge of my couch, surveying the living room and loving how it felt so easy to be in the same room as Jackson.
“I wouldn’t do that to her,” he replied, muting my TV just as our conversation turned serious. “I wasn’t the same person when I came back, and I didn’t want her to forget the person I was when I left.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Want to forget the person you were when you left?”
“That was kind of the point, yes. I wasn’t going to be the Yale student my parents wanted me to be. I joined the Marines so I could figure out who I was on my own.”
“Do you still think about her?”
“Sometimes.”
The idea of Jackson being emotionally attached to another woman vexed me, but I understood it. I didn’t think he shouldn’t have been having those feelings, but I just couldn’t imagine how dismal and dejected his time in the military must have felt. It was a tragedy to love someone but never have the contingency to show them.
