Jack tries to sleep curled up on the floor now. But I don’t think he even sleeps. Not even in the bedroom, a different place each night. He cleans closets while we sleep. Punishment for what he’s missed, punishment for what I’ve failed to do.
ARMY WIVES HAVE a rule of thumb. The bliss of homecoming cannot last for longer than seventy-two hours. Sometime in those three days, we long for our days of solitude, at least once. My time comes within the first twelve hours. The night of the welcome home ceremony, the kids have a Harvest Carnival at their appealing little Catholic school. I can tell the crowd of easygoing people catches Jack off guard. He is jet-lagged, and beyond that, he feels out of place. I don’t go out of my way to help him feel content. He stands at the indoor bouncy house and watches the kids play, neither of us quite grasping that he is here. He is physically present.
Standing on the other side of the school auditorium is one of Jack’s soldiers, one he barely recognizes. I am well acquainted with his wife, who is infamous with our rear detachment cadre. She has finagled to get her husband home on leave so that she can pass off a new pregnancy as his. Seeing his wife bursting with pregnancy, I wonder if he even suspects and if he will see the baby for the first time and recognize nothing of himself. I never should have pointed them out to Jack. It is my gossipy instinct, to share with him something that has been a huge source of drama and speculation for our rear detachment team. Her very name has sparked fury and outrage from the whole cadre. She epitomizes the image of the bad army wife.
Jack’s face blazes red when I gave him the thirty-second rundown of the drama. He reaches into his belted khakis and untucks his shirt, possibly a reaction to unfetter himself and dissuade a rising tantrum. At any rate, I regret pointing the family out. He hisses at me, “Does she not know what her husband went through to get back to his family?”
And as awful as what the woman has done, and as grotesque as I find her very existence, I want to blaze back at him, “Do you have any idea what we went through to wait for you?” But I don’t. I will pick my battles. This one is not worth it. Our demons are our own.
ABOUT A WEEK before Thanksgiving, when we’re up to here with forced family time, I stand in the kitchen alone and cooking dinner on a Friday afternoon when Mira texts and asks if she can borrow an egg. I immediately text back, “Get your Koreana ass over here.”
She is at my door within the minute. Looking as relieved as I feel to be in each other’s company.
“I have a function tonight,” she says. “Some kind of themed Hail and Farewell, and I need to get the kids fed before Mike gets home to pick me up. He’ll be here in an hour.”
“We have time for wine.” I open a bottle and pour us each a glass. The bottle is empty within thirty minutes, and both of us are a little drunk. It isn’t even five o’clock.
I won’t remember what we talk about, if anything. We just need this time together to unwind from the stiff discomfort of having our husbands home. We need to exhale and let it hang out. Our husbands’ presence is like that angry in-law who visits and refuses to take the hint that it’s time to leave. These men won’t be leaving, well, at least not for another year.
Seeing Mira’s rosy cheeks makes me feel at home. “Mike’s gonna be so pissed that I’m drunk already.” She slurs her words and seems almost proud of herself. That woman needs to learn to hold her booze.
That night, after Mira leaves and after we finish a family dinner, I soak in a long bubble bath. Jack can tell I’ve been drinking, but he doesn’t let on that it bothers him. He walks quietly into the bathroom. “Ang. Please talk to me. I can’t sleep. You’re different. Cold. What happened? Please tell me what you’re hiding,” and he turns and walks out. He doesn’t even wait for an answer.
Really? I’m the one who has changed? And I thought the “reintegration period” last time was rough. This time he doesn’t even sleep with me, ever. Not because he doesn’t want to share a bed with me, but because he doesn’t sleep at all. Each morning when I’ve gotten up in the past month since he returned, there’s a new set of closets, perfectly rearranged and organized while the rest of us slept.
Just exactly who is the fucked-up one in this scenario?
His words hit me right in the face, and I let them sink in, allow my defense mechanisms to relax, just for a moment. And I’ve thought I hid it so well. Maybe that race has brought it out again. And I am convinced the issue lies with him, the heavy cross to bear. He’s the one who is sleeping only an hour or two at night curled in a ball on the hardwood floorboards, the ones with the taunting gouge from his stupid recliner. He’s the one with memories of dead children and of men who will never again sit at their mother’s dinner table and the ripples of dealing every day with a bully breathing down his neck. I harbor one little secret in comparison. So I step out of the tub and put pajamas on and walk downstairs and sit next to him.
I tell him the whole story of Sackets and why for years I’ve screamed when he walks into a room without my expecting it and why I choose to run on a treadmill and why I can’t wear anything tight around my neck and why I can’t stand being held down and tickled. He takes the news exactly like I expect, at first. That it was a violation of him, a personal affront against him. He can’t grasp why I didn’t call the police and why I couldn’t bring myself to tell him all these years, and I don’t really have an easy explanation for that. But at least now it’s out there. It feels good to dump something in his lap for a change.
WE STRUGGLE THROUGH the holidays and various welcome home celebrations and military balls as a family and command team. Those words piss me off. We feel like anything but a team and barely speak. Both of us still too weary and bruised to indulge in the arduous work our marriage needs. Jack brings the weight and intensity of the Iraqi war zone back with him and dumps it into my previously relaxed living room. I am reminded of lyrics from a favorite song: “When I get home I wanna pick up the pieces. When I get home I wanna believe in Jesus.” All of this makes the actual deployment seem like the easy part. Without Helen, our earthy, crunchy, hippy therapist, we probably wouldn’t have survived. Each week, she reminds us to fake it until we make it, and this advice seems like an attainable goal. We are proficient at glossing over what lies beneath the surface.