“No,” he said. “Every time I left, another guy was coming off the helicopter to take my place. You’ve got to understand—this wasn’t a place I spent much time.”
We left soon after, and I spent the long drive home wrestling with a knot of emotions I couldn’t untangle. When I was little, I had pictured him being away at sea in something more like a pirate ship’s quarters, somewhere with a round porthole window where he could spend time staring out at the water and missing all of us. I’d seen an animated movie that had informed much of my thinking about the distance between my dad and me when he was at work, and how we thought of each other. In it, a Russian immigrant mouse named Fievel sings to the night sky and his scattered family, “And even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star.” From what I’d seen of the P-82, life at work was stressful, loud, and exhausting, and there wasn’t much space for anything else. The realization that my father had far less time to miss me than I did for him hurt like a gut punch.
—
The day before Stella and I drove to San Diego I got all my hair cut off. At the time, I said it was on impulse, just one of those times when you need a change, but the truth was that I’ve never been that impulsive. Work-ups had been like a slow fade between Ross and me. I could feel him changing gears, making preparations to unplug from home life for an extended period. The haircut, from below my shoulders to a pixie, was my attempt to shed the identity of someone sad and about to get left behind and to morph into someone energetic and capable, someone who met adventure head-on and had no time for moping.
Stella and I met up with the guys at the Navy Lodge on North Island, where the sudden shock of my new haircut caused Ross to pause a couple of beats before he said he liked it. The two of us took a walk on the beach not saying much while Stella and Jake were occupied with rigging up a complicated structure of light-blocking blankets around their youngest son’s Pack ’n Play. I envied their busyness and how having little kids seemed to create its own small world of regular emergencies, a world that left no room for prolonged thought. At dinner that night, I let the adult conversation float over my head as I drew crayon butterflies and dragons for the kids.
The next morning, Ross and I showed up at the Stennis just moments after an improvised “Hajji attack” meant to simulate a perimeter breach for the sailors who act as the boat’s security in port. The air was still electric and every time someone called me “ma’am” it was with the overly loud, sharp edge of hyperalertness. Fake blood was spattered all over the ground and the enlisted boat crew leaving for liberty in their freshly unpacked civilian clothes tracked bloody footprints out of the port and into San Diego.