“We won’t be gone long. Just dinner with one of Daniel’s clients,” she tells me.
Her husband, Daniel, is surprisingly a really nice guy, considering he’s an investment banker with slicked-back hair and his closet doesn’t have one pair of jeans or cowboy boots in it. I know, because I checked when Kat told me I could borrow anything I wanted from him until she could go to the store and pick some things up for me. I turned down her offer and spent fifteen minutes fighting with her about how I could damn well go to the store and buy myself a pair of jeans and a few T-shirts. And then I spent an hour sitting in the driveway, keys in the ignition of Kat’s SUV that she let me borrow, with shaking hands, sweaty palms, and an undeniable urge to throw up all over the front seat at the idea of driving a car down a busy highway and then attempting to interact with a mall full of people, bumping into me, asking if they could help me, and filling my head with too much noise.
After I threw up in the driveway, I stormed back into the house, threw the keys on the kitchen table, and told Kat I’d make her a list. She gave me that same pitiful, sympathetic smile she always gives me and never batted an eye at my request for peach-scented candles that I scribbled at the very bottom under boxer briefs.
I have been reduced to letting my sister buy my underwear. I thought I’d gone as low as I could get, but obviously I was wrong. Not only did she go out and buy shit for me, she did it using her own money, which pisses me off even more. Every time I even mention the idea of getting a job, she tells me to take it easy and that we can talk about all that once I’ve had time to adjust. It’s demoralizing needing your baby sister to fulfill all your basic needs.
Kat gives me a smile and a small wave, heading out the door to her husband. I breathe a sigh of relief when the door closes behind her.
“She’s too easy to tease. It’s almost not even fun at this point,” Rylan complains, grabbing the remote from the coffee table in front of us and aiming it at the television.
“When are you going to shave that shit off your face and cut your hair?” I ask, taking in his full beard and the mess of hair he piled on top of his head with one of my sister’s hair ties.
It didn’t take long, with the assistance of hospitals and round-the-clock care and IVs full of nutrients, for both of us to gain back a lot of the weight we’d lost over the years. Once our major injuries like broken bones and cracked ribs were healed and we were given the okay, we immediately hit the gym to start building muscle mass. We were nowhere near the tip-top shape we were in after our year of deployment, right before we were captured, but at least we no longer looked like prisoners of war, half-starved and wilting away to nothing, like we did when they first found us.
“I don’t know, I’ve kind of gotten used to it,” he muses, scratching the hair on his cheeks before pointing to the disaster on his head. “The hair is definitely staying. What you see here is called a man bun. I guess it’s all the rage with the ladies now, according to Google.”
I laugh, shaking my head at him. It feels good to laugh, even though I can’t joke as easily as he can about what we endured. That’s how Rylan is, though. That’s how he’s always been. He doesn’t dwell on the past, no matter how bad it was. It doesn’t make a difference that we were used as human punching bags every day for five years, it doesn’t matter that we never thought we’d come home again, and it doesn’t matter that we were seconds away from dying and had made peace with it and were ready for it to be over. We didn’t die, and that’s all that matters to him now. He’s the only reason I’ve been able to wake up every morning and keep moving forward, keep building myself up for the only goal I’ve had my mind on since we were pulled out of our prison.
“So, how long are you going to pussyfoot around before you go find her?” Rylan asks casually, flipping quickly through the channels. “Or are you still thinking about taking down her mother first?”
I’ve had plenty of sleepless nights in the last few months to think about what I should do. Plenty of hours of lying awake after a nightmare, wondering if what I heard in the moments before we were rescued was real.
“You heard it, too, I know you did,” I mutter quietly.
Rylan switches off the television and turns to face me on the couch.
“We were both out of it, man. Shit was exploding, men were screaming, and the goddamn building was falling down around us when the cavalry charged in. Who knows what the fuck we heard?”
I look away from him and stare at the wall across the room, filled with pictures of Kat and Daniel from when they were dating, on their wedding day, on their honeymoon, and on the day Lilly Elijah was born. I wonder if all of this will ever stop feeling bittersweet. I’m proud of my sister and happy for her that she’s created such a great life for herself, but it kills me I missed out on all of it, and it makes me feel like shit that I’m jealous of her life and her beautiful little family. It’s a reminder of all the things I don’t have. I also wonder if Lilly Elijah will want to change her name when she’s older, when my sister tells her the story of how she was named after her dead uncle, who turned out not to be dead at all.
These are the sick and twisted thoughts that float through my mind on a daily basis. These are the things bumping around in my twisted brain that have kept my ass on this couch for two weeks instead of looking up Shelby’s name on the Internet and finding out where she is now. These thoughts and the memory of what I heard that last day in Afghanistan.
“Why in the hell, when the shit was hitting the fan, would those fucks say what they did?” I ask quietly, remembering the words as clearly as if I’d just heard them yesterday.
“Kill him. Now! The money will stop if we don’t do as we were ordered.”
I continue staring at the photos of all the things I missed, knowing there could only be one person responsible for making me miss them.
“Maybe they were just hangry and didn’t know what they were saying. That’s another new word I learned from Google,” Rylan smiles, attempting to make a joke.