There was no big good-bye when Ross deployed, no movie star kiss, no tears. Just a silent car ride to the hangar, where I practically shoved him out, and then my satin-sheet-buying trip to Hanford, the marathon cleaning session, and the weeping afterward. We had been saying good-bye for weeks already. Ross said it by rotating the tires on the vehicles, changing the oil, and adding reminders to the calendar for when to fertilize the rosebush and when to take the pets for vaccinations. I said it by buying him a book of stamps and some envelopes and trying not to hover in the doorways while he packed. I attended wives’ club meetings that lasted forever as they covered everything from the trivial to the earthshaking—we’ll do group care package parties; let’s update our wills; how about a weekly pajama party for watching The Bachelor; we should get a power of attorney for signatures; let’s plan a Halfway Party and go out on the town; OPSEC—here’s the code for port schedules (never give it away on Facebook or e-mail!); let’s make squadron yard signs! And here it was again, albeit in an updated version that didn’t mention bridge club or dancing: the Emergency Data Form. This time it came with a call tree and instructions—in case of an incident one of these people will call you, and do not speak to the media. Our worlds, our tasks and priorities, split long before we did.
Stella was an excellent sounding board through all the predeployment chaos, but in the first few weeks after the guys left, it was also an incredible relief to have to get in the car for my hour-long commute to Fresno for work and school. The long drive through miles of flat farmland under hazy sky became my dedicated time to go from being the lonely, left-behind wife in a rural town, three states away from her family, to the capable administrative assistant arranging literary readings, logging manuscripts for the poetry book contest, and helping with the yearly writers’ conference for local high school students. I had deadlines to meet, essays to write and critique, people to talk to about things I cared about that had absolutely nothing to do with the Navy.
In an attempt to reconcile these two worlds, and try to understand my time apart from Ross without putting one long unbroken GONE line through half of a wall calendar, I bought a four-foot-long linear calendar that accounted for time as a gradual changing of seasons. It was covered with beautifully detailed illustrations of what was going on in the natural world at any given moment, and it even gave each day its own fanciful and unique name to avoid the repetition of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on. Weeks, the calendar said, were meaningless man-made concepts. Reframe time, I reasoned, and maybe huge blocks of it spent sleeping alone wouldn’t hurt so much.
By this calendar, then, it was “MoonIce,” and not just another rainy Thursday morning in January with Ross only two weeks gone, when I dropped an old TV on my foot inside a rusty boxcar used as a recycling facility for broken electronics. Lying on my side in the boxcar, gasping as huge, throbbing bolts of pain shot up my leg, I considered my options. I had my phone on me and I could have called Stella, but it was early and she would have to strap her kids into their car seats to come get me. I would need to figure out some way of getting the foot x-rayed probably, but this seemed like a giant hassle. Far more pressing was the question of how I would drive the truck once I got out of the boxcar. Our old pickup had a stick shift and required the use of my left foot on the clutch. I decided to focus on this hurdle, and then reward myself, if I could successfully drive, by going to Starbucks for some more measured thinking. The two paramedics standing in line ahead of me for coffee seemed like some sort of divine coincidence.
“Excuse me,” I said, tapping one on the shoulder. “I hate to bother you, but I was just wondering—if I dropped something on the bridge of my foot but I can still move all my toes, that means it can’t be broken, right?”
“Well, that depends. Did you—can I take a look? Is it that foot?”