“I finally got your phone message, that you were being deployed. I’d been in class when you called, and I tried calling back over and over and over. I left a message with your superior for you to call me as soon as you could, but…it was too late. And then a week later, your family called me. Everyone was there, your brothers, your momma and dad—and he was crying—”
She didn’t want to relive it, but the memories were undammed, and the way in which Travis’s pained, confused eyes continued to hold hers, she sensed he could handle the news. Wanted to hear it. All this time, she’d been afraid of what it might do to him to learn the truth, how another loss might hurt him, but right now, his hands and imploring eyes pleaded with her to open up, she had to let it out.
“Your momma was normally so strong. I didn’t recognize her voice at first.” Nerves had twisted to life in her stomach at Deborah’s unusually subdued voice.
She looked down, rested her cheek on his shoulder, and let the memories loose.
“Are you there, Skylar?” Deborah’s voice held an unmistakable shake.
“Yes, ma’am.” Deep breath.
She’d been so sure in that moment that she’d been reading too much into Deborah’s short greeting.
“Skylar? Harold, Toby, and Tyler are with me. Honey, are you somewhere where you can sit? Do you have someone with you? A friend?”
Students were going about their normal routines, listening to music, dashing off to class, unaware that her world was about to implode. An old library chair sat a couple paces away in the freshman dormitory. She wasn’t able to sit, as if a fish in a bowl, watching the workings of the world around her. Toby, his rebellious little brother, didn’t made a single quip or sarcastic remark. Tyler was home from college in the middle of the spring term. It could only mean one dreadful thing, news about to slam her like a Mack truck.
“Yes,” she lied.
“Skylar. There was an—”
She remembered, clear as day, the deep breath Deborah had taken. It had been such a harbinger. Odd, how little things, generally forgotten, could stand out so strongly over time.
He wasn’t dead. He was holding her now, and she didn’t want to be trapped by these memories and a life lived thinking he was any longer.
“Do you want me to say it,” a deep voice muttered in the background. Tyler, the oldest brother, was always ready to do the heavy lifting for the momma all those boys had loved.
“Debbie, why don’t you sit.” Harold, Travis’s father, said.
Throats cleared as Deborah, having gotten her voice back, soldiered through it. “Skylar, there’s been an incident.”
Skylar’s hands started shaking, and the receiver corded to the wall threatened to tumble from her grip. Naively, she wondered: Had Travis been wounded? Was he missing in action? Grievously injured?
“I’m so sorry to tell you. I know how much Travis meant to you.”
Deborah saidmeant. Past tense.
That word tumbled through her mind as if in slow motion.
She closed her eyes, her head shaking as if Travis’s family could see her through the receiver—“Travis was killed in the line of duty last night, in Afghanistan.”
She’d misheard. That was it. She gripped her stomach harder, unbearable pain growing in strength, twisting, twisting, cramping. The next words, like an echo in a canyon, distant and yet resonating so deeply, they continued to echo.No survivors. Roadside bomb.
She pinched her eyes now at the numbness assaulting her, as she spilled the words from her lips with Travis’s arms so tight around her and his face buried in the crux of her shoulder and neck as she recounted everything aloud.
“I didn’t hear you right. Can you repeat that?” Repeat that. So stupid.
“You heard me right. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry,”
Deep, gruff sniffling in the background was unmistakable. Travis’s brothers and father were clearly trying to muffle their emotions for her sake.
“No…” Skylar shook her head, her voice rising desperately, her fingers clenching her belly harder, harder, cramping intensifying. She demanded, “No, I didn’t hear you right! I didn’t, I didn’t—”
“He’s gone, Skylar. Come home,” Harold Dixon said, his deep voice thicker, gruffer and more abrupt than it was normally. “Come stay with us—”
The cry ripping from Skylar’s throat as she collapsed to the floor rang in her mind across the years as a sob tore from her throat now, clinging to Travis so hard she was sure her nails were drawing blood.
Lost between past and present as she recounted the details of the hospitalization, the miscarriage that the doctor had said was probably due to such high levels of distress and how hard she’d knocked herself when she’d collapsed as she’d lain in that hospital bed, hooked to wires, the pain, miscarrying so far along, a poor college student with no money and a dad who’d hung up on her when she’d called, sobbing, to tell him what had happened. Thrown out. Rubbish. Not wanted.