Anyhow. Cindy went off to her expensive college to study and join a sorority and write for the school newspaper, things she would tell me about but which I couldn’t really picture. We emailed each other sometimes, and I suspect the things I told her about my life were just as hard to imagine.
By the time my first four years were up, I’d done three tours overseas and the thing about it—I hated everything I’d done but I was good at it. Shooting, hiding out, jumping out of airplanes, that feeling of soaring through the dark. Flight. All of it a type of high but then there was also all the death. They tell you, it’s war; it’s different. But it’s not, not really. That’s just what they say so you can try and live with yourself. Thing is, though: you will always know what you did and what you took and what you lost and it’s your life, it’s all part of you, like it or not, and you can never truly separate yourself from it. I signed up for it, I followed through. I accept responsibility. My point is just that you can never really be free from the things you’ve done, and that’s that.
I guess I came back Stateside with a strange mix of self-confidence and anxiety. I could mostly hide the anxiety, especially when Cindy was around, but it was there, and often. The self-confidence came from a number of factors. First, I’d grown about four inches. Late bloomer. I’d put on a lot of muscle, maybe twenty pounds. I looked different and felt different and was different. Stronger. Like I could go places—grocery stores, restaurants, bars—and know my way out. See it all happen like a movie. I could trust myself. Before, I was always afraid. Nervous. Nervous about how people looked at me, nervous about what they thought. When I got back, that wasn’t the case anymore and I liked that. People looked at me different, and in our little town, I was a bit of a hero. Yellow ribbons in the windows and men coming up and shaking my hand, and once, one old lady came up and held my face in her wrinkled little palm and said, “Thank you, son.”
But there were other changes, too. Bad ones, and this is where the anxiety kicked in. Dreams that would swim to me and slink and lurk, and sometimes I forgot where I was and who. I called Jake, who’d gone through all of it with me, and asked him, Did he have them too? Did he duck for cover when a car backfired? Did he have nightmares? Did his heart race every time the phone rang? Did he feel sure sometimes that people around him were looking at him and judging him? He said he was having trouble but he was seeing someone, a doctor at the VA hospital, and maybe I should consider it.
Jake said his family had a cabin way off in the woods, and if I was up for it, we could meet there and just relax for a few days. A long time ago, when Jake was a kid, his father had visions of living full-time in the woods. Which meant the place was nicer than a cabin, by most people’s standards. They’d planted a small orchard, some brambles along the southern side of the house: blackberries and raspberries. There was no electricity or running water, but there was a well that had water, cold and sweet. They’d done it for a while, lived out here, Jake told me, his mom and dad and him, but when his sister came along and his mother miscarried a third child, they called it quits. Jake didn’t go into the details, just said that after she recovered, his mother told his father: it’s the kids and me, or the cabin, and Jake’s dad chose the wife and kids and left the cabin behind.
Anyhow, I told Jake sure, just pick a date, and he said how about next weekend. I packed up the Bronco and followed the directions I’d scribbled out on a piece of paper, and after about a thousand turns, I made it to the cabin. There was still some snow on the ground, I remember that. I went down to the river and caught some fish, and we cooked brook trout on a grill over the campfire. His sister tagged along. Read the whole time, mostly, though she did catch a fish. At the end of the weekend Jake handed me a key to the place and said if I ever needed to just get away for a few days, I was welcome there anytime. He and his sister were the only ones who had the keys, no need to call him if I decided to come. I told him I might take him up on that, and thanks.
It wasn’t long after that me and Cindy got together. By that point I’d been in love with her for almost seven years and I finally just told her. She’d finished college and was home and meanwhile her parents were pushing her to work as a paralegal for a while and then go to law school and follow in her father’s footsteps. Which she didn’t want to do, or at least she wasn’t sure yet. But they were pushy like that, both of them. Used to getting their way, no matter what.