For the first week that Ross was gone, I struggled to pass the time, since it would be another ten days before the moving truck arrived. We’d made it to California in three days and found a house to rent as soon as we hit town, in the hour before the real estate office closed. We were in such a rush to claim an address—road weary, short on cash, mercilessly crossing off items on the to-do list—that we ended up in our empty house with no refrigerator. We only discovered this standing in the kitchen with a six-pack of beer and a pizza in our hands, prepared to eat and then fall asleep on the living room floor with towels rolled up under our heads for pillows.
“God damn it,” Ross said. “Another thing to do.” We laughed and ate our dinner, then curled up together on the floor, listening to the click of our dog’s toenails on the floors as she paced in the dark, new space. We had time to get a refrigerator and an air mattress before Ross left for SERE school. After that, I spent the time wandering the town on foot with Abby. My goal was to avoid racking up any more expenses on the already strained credit card and to wear myself out enough to sleep at night instead of lying awake worrying—about money, about where the hell I was going to work, about the blurriness of our future at the end of the year, but mostly about Ross. The truth was that we’d spent the last three years at such a hectic pace that I felt like I hadn’t gotten a chance to really get to know him. There had been no honeymoon, and the nights spent cramming for tests, simulations, and flights left little room for anything else. One of the first things my brother had told me when I told him Ross and I were dating was, “You know, he’s a really private guy. Don’t take it personally.” By now, I knew what he meant. I knew just enough of Ross to understand that behind the joker and the performer were vast stretches of territory that were inaccessible to most people. He was like a national park that wasn’t built for tourists—a great visitors’ center, but then no roads, very few paths, and a breathtaking wilderness I’d only begun to explore. I hated taking the risk that he might not be the same when he came back, that I might not even know what had changed or been broken, and that I had no clue how to handle any of it. The empty house, the empty days before my mother came out to help, and then the mover showed up, gave me plenty of room to really think about what we were doing, and for the first time in three years I had the time to get really, really scared.
—
He came back fifteen pounds lighter. He came back with hollowed-out cheeks and greenish shadows on the skin around his eyes. He came back with two long yellow-green bruises running over the tops of his shoulders and down his chest, like suspenders.
“What is this from?” I asked, putting my hands lightly on either side of his chest when he took his shirt off for bed, and slowly images formed in my head. I could feel his ribs moving beneath my palms, too close to the surface. There’s a word for this, and we’re not allowed to say it. Its definition was still months from being officially debated on the Senate floor after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation techniques. Suddenly I took my hands away. I didn’t want this in my head. I didn’t want the sound of him gasping for breath or choking, even if the experience was for his own good, even if it was meant to prepare him and help him fight back.
“I can’t tell you.” It’s a guilty feeling, this thing that sits between us when he’s had to say that. How do I support him when I don’t know what’s happening to him? Over the years I have come to understand and accept that this is Ross’s dream, but there have been times when I have wondered if there is such a thing as a dream that costs too much. There is a line we have approached, that night after SERE school and several times since, where I search my heart and know that my desire to understand Ross’s experience in the Navy only goes so far. I’m not sure I can keep doing this—starting over, going it alone for long stretches, missing him, worrying about him, signing our lives over to a largely mute and incomprehensible bureaucracy—if I know about every single cost exacted along the way. When I’m feeling generous, I call my hanging back behind this line “practicality.” In my darker moments, I call it by other names: “weakness,” “willful ignorance,” and “dereliction of duty.” If loving someone is knowing them, knowing all of them and accepting them for who they are, then perhaps my love is imperfect, lacking. Perhaps I am a coward.
Early the next evening I started to drive Ross to nearby Fresno for a nice dinner, a forty-five-minute drive through flat, open cotton fields and raisin vineyards. He was quiet and kept fidgeting with the radio, loud music, different music, no music, he couldn’t decide. I noticed that he was digging his fingers into the edges of the seat and clenching his mouth.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, I just . . . it’s all so open out here. There’s so much space.”
I saw, suddenly, the lazy open blue of the sky and straight lines of the fields around us as he must have—miles and miles of nowhere to hide, more space than he’d seen in weeks. I pulled over and slowly turned the car around.