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There were a lot of scheduled social events with the squadron that felt like supervised tutorials in how to enjoy being back together, and the unfortunate truth was that we needed them. We sat across from each other at parties, Stella and I with our own language and inside jokes, Ross and Jake with theirs, and a strange gulf between us all now that we were on home turf. In the coming days, Ross was adrift in the new house, frequently asking where things were and being met with the reply, “I’m not sure.” Outwardly innocent exchanges between the two of us nevertheless seemed to carry the same undertones—I ferreted out what I interpreted as criticisms of how I’d handled things alone for six months; he fired back from what he heard as attacks for being gone in the first place. In the blank white kitchen, in the box-filled garage, in our half-dark bedroom under strips of streetlight slicing through the blinds and over the constant rumble of jet noise, we fought. He was suddenly everywhere, it seemed, and it was unnerving. I zipped from the bathroom to the closet after showering, my towel wrapped so tightly around me it stung the skin under my arms.
The base house had three bedrooms, enough for us both to claim a study if we gave up the idea of a dedicated guest room. We retreated to our separate studies often. His view was of our tiny backyard full of gopher mounds. Mine was of the front corner of our neighbors’ house. The other strange thing about living on base was that everywhere I looked, I saw alternate versions of Ross and me. No old people for neighbors, no civilians, just pilots, pilots everywhere. Rob and Lily, the neighbors, had a rosebush out front and a forest of potted plants along the edges of their back fence, and bamboo wind chimes that bonked and clacked in the breeze at night and made it sound like a real neighborhood. Two cushioned chairs sat on either side of their front door, and in the mornings when the weather was nice, they would sit out there and have coffee together. Our front porch had a potted geranium, which stubbornly refused to die despite my neglect, and a broom for whacking at black widow nests. Ostensibly writing, I spent long hours sitting in my study wondering how much room a crib would take up and if I would ever have a need to find out.
I don’t know what Ross thought about while he was in his.
It took weeks, but eventually we made peace with the spaces separation had left in our lives and worked to find our way back to each other. We made peace on our first official couch, purchased with money I’d squirreled away during deployment, we made peace in the kitchen with loud music and dinners of real food in portions enough for two, we made peace in the garage and started unpacking the wall of boxes, and we made peace in the bedroom, where I eventually forgot about my towel again.
CHAPTER 13
When Ross and I were first dating, we took a trip to climb the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado. I had never climbed real cliffs before, only the brightly colored plastic knobs of indoor climbing gyms. You feel realistically human-sized in a climbing gym, substantial and weighty, and people on the floor are able to hear you when you say you are terrified and they offer suggestions about where you might want to put your foot next, or they just say reassuringly, “You’re not going to die.” On a real cliff face, you are an afterthought, lint, something that may or may not blow away with the next strong wind. Your voice feels tiny, a squeak under the great blue dome of indifferent sky, and there is no guarantee that anyone can hear it.
At one particularly bad moment, I was clinging with two fingers and a toe to a wall with no other visible holds, and Ross was so far above me, and the wind was so strong, that he never heard me shouting, and then all-out screaming, for him to let some slack into the rope so I could remaneuver. I couldn’t see what was above or below me, but I knew there was a very real chance I would finally find out if our knots were well tied. I cried and leaned my face into the cold, iron-tasting rock, waiting to see if I would lose bladder control or my shaking fingers and toe would give out or the next strong wind would shove me off my hold. None of that happened. Instead I took a deep, shaky breath and somehow found another toehold.