Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
“Of course she would have.” Stella moved closer to me, wrapping an arm and a leg across my body.
I put my arms around her and held her close. “It just wasn’t that clear-cut all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like what I was talking about earlier. Sometimes it was hard to tell if we were actually accomplishing anything or not. There was a lack of … clarity as to what winning would look like. And there was a lot of death.” I swallowed hard. “It’s not an easy thing to live with.”
“No. It can’t be.”
“You have to do things you know are wrong on a human level. Things that violate your strongest moral convictions, but you can’t stop to think about that. You can’t stop to feel. So you learn to … kill your feelings too, I guess.”
She nodded. Pressed her lips to my shoulder.
“Except …” Stop fucking talking, said a voice in my head. But I couldn’t. I fucking couldn’t. “You can’t just kill some feelings. Maybe you try, but it doesn’t work that way. You end up killing all of them.”
Stella sniffled and nodded. Kissed my shoulder again.
“Then you come home and you can’t talk about shit, and you realize how against the war everyone is, how no one thinks we should be there, nobody thinks it’s worth the cost, and you’re like … fuck you all. You sent us there. People are dying for this. People are killing for this. Was it all just political bullshit and lies? I violated some of my deepest held beliefs for this war. Was it worth it?”
She wiped off her cheeks. “I don’t know.”
Congratulations, asshole. You made her cry some more.
“Is that why you think you don’t feel anything?” she asked quietly.
“I know I don’t.”
She picked her head up and looked at me. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true.”
“When you were talking about your mom just now, you felt something. I’m sure you did.”
I set my jaw stubbornly. “That’s different. That’s a memory.”
“Still. It made you feel something, didn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I thought about the photos Bones kept sending me. How I could hardly stand to look at them.
“You’re a man, Ryan, not a machine. But you had to perform like a machine during war, which you were carefully trained to do. Then you come home, and you’re expected to be a civilian again, but no one tells you how. No one tells you how to process all the grief and guilt and regret you’ve buried in order to do your job. They expect you to just ‘be a man’ and get on with it. That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.” I shouldn’t have been amazed at her ability to grasp the situation—I knew how good she was at reading people. And I liked how she didn’t insist I had to forgive myself. I didn’t want to be absolved of anything. I wasn’t like my father, who claimed absolution by quoting Proverbs. Maybe there was a God and maybe there wasn’t, but if there was, I sure as hell didn’t expect him to pardon me for what I’d done.
Stella was looking at me like she wanted to say something else, but was holding back.
“What?” I asked.
She sat up and propped herself on one arm. “I want to ask you something, but I don’t want you to get mad at me.”
“I won’t get mad at you,” I said.
“Grams said you were married?”
This was the last thing I wanted to talk about right now. But I felt like I owed her the truth. What else did I have to give her? “Yeah. I was.”
“For how long?”
“About five years. But I was away for about half the time. I re-enlisted right after we were married.”
She nodded. “Is that what broke up the marriage? The separation?”
I exhaled, putting my hands behind my head again. “It was a lot of things. I wasn’t a good husband.”
“I don’t believe that either.”
Christ, she was as stubborn as I was. “Ask her if you don’t believe me.”
“Where is she now?”
“I assume back in Cleveland with her new and much improved husband. They might even have a baby by now.”
She thought for a moment. “You didn’t want kids?”
“Nah. I’m not dad material.”
“But do you want them? Even if you think you wouldn’t be good at it, I mean. Is being a father something you think about?”
“No,” I lied. “No wife and kids for me. I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.”
She traced a scar on my rib cage, her eyes on her fingers. “Is that because you think you’d disappoint them? You said something earlier on the porch about always setting yourself up to disappoint people.”
Okay, now she was getting a little too deep inside my psyche. Better to retreat. “No. It’s because I don’t want them. I like living alone.”