RECONSTRUCTION
“JESS?”
She’s asleep, curled on her side. I’ve put my uniform on and am almost ready to get to work.
“Yeah, Jeremiah? How are you feeling?”
“I’m through it.”
She looks relieved and wary at the same time. I sit next to her on the bed and brush her bangs from her eyes.
“Jess, I’m trying my best to learn how to love you.”
“I know.”
“But I need an answer again.”
She sighs. “Oh no. Here we go.”
“Look at me.”
Her dark eyes flash my way. She looks so wounded, so full of hurt and suspicion that I want to either hug her close or flee.
You have got to do this.
“I know I’ve asked you so many times you’re ready to hit me, but I want to just take a step back and try to be an adult.”
“Sounds encouraging.”
“I want to forgive you. I need to forgive you. And I need you to forgive me.”
Between us, we’ve got a lifetime of debts we owe to each other for what we’ve done.
“But I need to understand why you shut me off.”
She pulls a pillow over her head. “Jeremiah, how many times do I need to tell you?”
“Don’t do that. Look at me. We can’t bullshit each other anymore.”
She slides the pillow off her face and sits up.
“Why are you doing this? We’re just going to go in circles again.”
“No. I need to know if we can get past this.”
“Are we being serious here, or just vindictive?”
I take her hand. “Serious.”
“Okay,” she says slowly. “You may hate me after I tell you, though.”
Stay quiet and give her the space she needs to tell you.
“Part of me resented you. A lot.”
“You did?”
“The longer you were gone, the more I started hating you.”
“Why?”
She looks fearful. “When we got married, I was only eighteen. You told me how to dress, what to do, where to go … how to style my hair.”
“It isn’t easy being a Marine’s wife … there are certain expectations,” I say in self-defense.
“No, you were being overly controlling.”
She waits for me to answer, but I don’t know what to say.
Don’t try to win or crush her. Just listen.
“Jeremiah, you dominated my life. When you left, for the first time in my life I had to think for myself. Before you, my parents took care of me. With you gone, I had to take care of myself. I didn’t know how.”
“So you partied.”
“Yes. It got out of hand. I got in too deep and didn’t know how to stop.” She pauses, then adds softly, “I wanted to hurt you.”
“Wait, who’s being vindictive now?”
“You wanted the truth.”
I have to fight off a wave of anger.
“What else?”
“I couldn’t deal with it,” she says flatly.
“What do you mean?” I let go of her hand. She looks even more nervous and vulnerable now.
“I mean like the man I’ve always loved—the only one I’ve ever loved—is suddenly torn away from me! For God’s sake, do you have any idea what it was like wondering every night if you were alive or dead?”
“I got to the point where I didn’t think you cared.”
“Every day, there were Marines coming home in boxes, Jeremiah. That was too real. I was just a girl … for God’s sake, I’m only twenty-one now! Everyone else my age was out having a good time, living life. Carefree, you know? I couldn’t take lying in bed without you, wondering if somebody was going to knock on my door to tell me that you’d been killed.”
“I’m sorry.”
That breaks her rising anger. She suddenly bursts into tears. “No. Don’t say that, I am so ashamed of what I did.” Her hands go to her face. “I abandoned you. I broke trust.”
“Yes you did. And when I came home, I did the same thing.”
“With the affairs?”
“Yes. I wanted to hurt you. Punish you for all you put me through in Iraq.”
Our relationship for two years has been based on mutually assured destruction. A thrash-fest with no bottom.
“It needs to end,” she says.
“I know.”
“We’ll never make it otherwise.”
I nod and clasp her hand again. “I know. I want to be with you, Jess. I want to be a good father.”
“This is a good first step. Keeping your dick out of other women is a good second one.”
I feel like I’ve just been slapped.
“I deserved that,” I say with resignation.
“Yes, you did.”
“And you need to stay out of limos with other men,” I counter. On New Year’s Eve, I called her again from Fallujah. She was in a limousine on the way to Las Vegas with a bunch of men. As I tried to talk to her, I heard them yelling, “She picked us, Fool! She picked us!”
The memory of that cruel moment makes me shiver.
“Okay, we can hack at each other all morning like this.”
“That’s the sad part. We can,” I reply.
She pulls the covers over the swell of her pregnant belly. She’s always been rail thin, and now that she’s showing she’s terribly insecure. “What now?”
“We move forward. We try to forgive.”
“Can we leave it in the past?”
“That’s the first step,” I tell her.
I stand up and lean toward her. This catches her off guard and she recoils from me, unsure of what I’m doing.
We have a lot of trust issues to work though.
I kiss her blond hair and walk for the door.
“Jeremiah, where are you going?”
“To jump school, baby.”
For the first time in months, we both smile.