He also wouldn’t tolerate her not expressing her feelings, for fear of how he might react to them.
She closed her eyes. “Failure. A grief so strong and dark, it can swallow me. Loneliness. A loneliness I no longer should feel, because I have the love of a wonderful Master. So, to feel that way, even for a minute, compounds my sense of failure.”
“Am I more than your Master?”
“Master encompasses everything. Everything I want and need.” She swallowed, understanding the contradiction in her words, but he pressed on.
“Okay. What other things does a Master encompass?” His thumb was moving her ring on her finger, a caress as much as a hint.
It made her smile a little. “Husband.” It was still a miracle to her, hearing it said aloud.
“One more. It’s the most important job a spouse has. My wife told me that, on our honeymoon.”
The smile now bloomed in her heart, in the cracks. It helped, but it also widened them, causing pain. But maybe the right kind. She remembered the first night of their honeymoon, standing on a hotel balcony, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. They were so high up and the beach was so close, it was as if the ocean was right beneath them. Someone had a radio on, playing “I Need You” by LeAnn Rimes. When Jon had joined her at the rail, he’d drawn her into a slow dance. And she’d spoken the words in his ear.
You’re my Master, but you’re my friend, too. Thank you for that. I’ve realized friendship is the most important thing a marriage has to have.
“Friend,” she said. “Best friend, actually.”
“Yeah.” His grip tightened, a quick squeeze. He toed off his polished brogues and propped his feet, clad in thin black dress socks, on the coffee table. Then he picked up the photo album. Laying his other arm across the back of the couch, he glanced at it meaningfully as he balanced the album on his knees.
She settled back in the curve of his arm, inhaling the dry-cleaned linen smell of his shirt and his light cologne as she accepted that shelter. As she did, she let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. Her heart felt lighter, even on this day, the day she’d often felt so weighed down with grief she couldn’t get out of bed.
She’d created the rituals, the cake and tending of poppies, the looking through the album, as a task list to ensure that she honored Kyle the right way. But also because the other way could easily turn into a week in that bed.
Jon had opened the album at a random page. “Tell me about this picture,” he said.
Kyle, around thirteen years old, stood by a boat tied off to a dock. The photo was somewhat washed out because of the brightness of the sun, Kyle’s hazel eyes like hers squinted against it. He had a huge grin on his face. He was standing with his arm thrown around another boy, overweight, with curly hair and matching grin.
“That’s him with his best friend in middle school. Deadhead.” She chuckled at his look. “They all called him that. His real name was Lawrence. He liked zombies. Notice the Night of the Living Dead T-shirt. I’d make them pizza snacks after school, listen to them talk about their day. They’d try to gross me out the way boys do, until I’d run them out of the kitchen and they’d go play basketball in the driveway. Sometimes I’d do bills or paperwork at the table, so I could watch them through the window.”
She realized she was rubbing her thumb over Kyle’s face, his sandy brown hair. In this picture, it had been lighter than Cole’s, but it had darkened to match his father’s by the time he enlisted in the military. “One fall day, I had the window cracked, and I heard Lawrence say, ‘Dude, your mom has an awesome rack.’”
Jon’s eyes lit with amusement. “Well, she does.”
She shook her head at him. “Kyle bounced the ball off his forehead and made this gagging noise before he said, ‘Deadhead, that’s my freaking mom. She’s…Mom.’”
“Do you feel like you’ve lost that identity?”
She pursed her lips. “Yes and no. No, because I’ll always be his mother. Always. But yes, because I lost it before he died, when I let his father turn him against me.”
Thinking about it, she realized that picture was the last one that had been taken before that change began to happen.
“I should have been stronger,” she said. “Should have stood up for myself instead of trying to placate and figure out what I was doing wrong.”
She didn’t need Jon’s affirmation or denial of that. It was an epiphany she’d reached, acknowledging her past mistakes, while understanding that she couldn’t change them. But she could do her best not to make the same ones again.
“There was a core to him that was so very gentle, so different from Cole. Yet he wanted his father to love and approve of him so much. Kyle already had my love, unconditionally, and he knew it. It sounds odd to say, but I think it made him value it less. Maybe because I realized too late that unconditional love doesn’t mean accepting unconditionally whatever your child says or does to you. It also meant teaching him to treat me with respect, because I deserved it.”
She sighed. “But it is what it was. Kyle did well in the military. I'm not sure if he wanted to be in the military as much as Cole wanted to have a son who was a soldier. He was a good soldier, but I noticed from his letters what Kyle liked most was the infrastructure stuff, helping villages rebuild, getting aid to people, that kind of thing.”
Jon stroked her hair, winding it around his fingers. “What happened to Lawrence? Did they stay friends?”
“Yes. Though he never became much taller, Lawrence lost a lot of weight and became more athletic. They entered the service together, but different areas. In one of Kyle’s letters, he said Lawrence had gone into a special forces branch, like Rangers or SEALs.”
She looked down at another picture and couldn’t help smiling. “This one was the day I taught Kyle to ride a bike. He was six. No training wheels. I was just thinking about that the other day, when one of my therapy patients came in and said he and his wife had been helping his daughter to ride her bike without training wheels.”
She traced her hand over that picture. It didn’t matter she’d just done it to the other one. It was Kyle, at different ages, different memories, and she liked connecting to those moments through touch. “We were both laughing when he figured it out. After a while, he stopped the bike, threw his arms around me and asked me to spin him. He liked that. He was almost too big for me to do it at that point, but I managed it. I’m glad to be getting those memories back, spontaneously like this.”
At Jon’s quizzical brow, she explained, a shadow crossing her heart. “For a long time, the ones that came to mind the most were those near the end. When he treated me like Cole did. Then, the coffin coming back…the funeral. The way Cole acted.”