“Joan. I don’t want to talk to you. Please leave me alone.”
I recognize now that this was potentially a mistake. When someone is spamming you this way, if you answer, you teach them that fifty messages won’t convince you to reply, but fifty-one will. Your annoyer will text you fifty-one times ever after, knowing that’s your limit. That’s where you’ll reward their efforts.
I hoped to establish a clear communication that I was done. One last effort to open the door for her to leave with dignity. It’s also easier to get a restraining order if you’ve straight-up stated that you don’t want more communications, I think, so I gave it a run.
Another message popped up. I noticed, as I read it, that lifting the phone up to reply had jostled the charger cord, and my battery life had started to fade fast.
“Bastian, I need to see you. Meet me?”
“For the last time, I do not want to talk to you. I am going to block-”
And there went my phone charge. No amount of finessing the plug would bring it back. I sighed and stuffed it into my pocket. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have blocked her when I saw the first messages tonight. Though, I wondered if it were better this way. Once my legal coverage kicked in, I could take these messages to a lawyer and have them draft a cease-and-desist letter.
I couldn’t worry about Joan right then. I needed to get my melting ice cream home, and pray that Jackson hadn’t melted, too.
* * *
Jackson sat on the couch when I got home, in a posture of abject defeat. His arms rested on his knees with his hands dangling down, his shoulders slumped, and his head hung low in regret. When I stepped inside, he looked up with reddened eyes that said he had been crying.
“Bastian. You came back,” he said hoarsely.
I mustered a smile. “Of course I came back. I just went out for ice cream. I got you butter pecan. That’s your favorite, right?”
All at once, he lunged up off the couch to wrap his arms around me. Keys and plastic bag fell to the ground so I could flail my arms into a return hug.
“I’m sorry,” he said, face pressed into the side of my head. “I’m so fucking sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.”
I stroked his back and sides with my hands as I held him. “That was pretty shitty,” I said, but I kept my voice soft and tender. “It hurt. You know I didn’t want to leave my family.”
“I know. That was why I said it.” A big sniffle shook him, the hiccupy breath of a child who’d cried their eyes out. “To hurt you. I’m so sorry.”
“I forgive you,” I said. Because I did. I forgave him. That didn’t mean it was over, but it did mean we could begin to work through it. “We need to talk about it, though.”
“Yes.” He pulled away from me to search my face. Whatever he found there, which I hoped was earnest forgiveness and a lack of judgement, eased him. He led me over to the couch to sit.
Ever thoughtful, he spared a moment to shove the ice cream into the freezer before he sat down next to me. He leaned forward again, forearms on knees, hands clasped for him to stare at while he spoke.
“I left a soldier behind,” he said, after a painful span of heartbeats. “He was wounded, and I left him to die.”
All of me wanted to jump in and assure him I didn’t believe that. Tell him I knew there had to have been mitigating circumstances, reasons and justifications. I didn’t. I just nodded.
Listen to understand. Not to respond.
“We’d ranged out with another fireteam towards the Russian base in Noachis Terra. Not too close. We had some long-range equipment command wanted us to set up on the lip of one of the craters. There were reports the Russians were-” He stopped.
“Clearance,” I said. “The Russians were doing some shady shit.”
“Yeah.” He winced a grateful smile. “Got shadier when we found a bunch of them up there. There was a firefight. We dealt with them. They dealt with us, too. All of us had wounds. Suit punctures. Three of the other team dropped. Fourth was hurt bad. We retreated, dragging the wounded, and headed back toward our extraction point.”
Mars is incredible. Mars is awesome. Mars is a hellish battleground, just like the name implies. I set my hand on his knee in sympathy but didn’t interrupt.
“Extraction was a long way off. We’d thought we would be all right, but our oxygen readings kept dropping too fast. Suit breaches were getting worse. We were all bleeding. Paulie estimated we’d run out of air before we could make the ships if we kept up that pace.” He took a deep breath, then another, as if his body remembered those minutes when his air thinned out and threatened to blow away.
I saw where this story was going, and my heart ached. The pit of my stomach felt like I’d chugged a pint of liquid lead.
“We had to move faster,” Jackson said. “There was only one way to do that. Even with Mars gravity, that wounded soldier weighted us down. We could either leave him behind, or we could all die.”
There it was. I forced myself to swallow down the acid taste of hard choices. “And you did the right thing and left him.”