The next twoweeks taught me the meaning of “marital bliss”. For the first time in the weeks since Jackson and I stood up in front of a priest and promised to love a stranger, we felt like newlyweds. We caught each other staring, admiring the handsome men we’d married, and blushed when that handsome man turned out to be us. We discussed renovating my house, or selling it in favor of one that had enough room for a child to join the family.
We had sex. This probably seems obvious, but the quantities involved require their own line item. We had alotof sex.
And I was happy. Blissfully, stupidly happy in a way I hadn’t realized I could be. My life felt whole, and I felt like I fitted into it at last. No struggling through school or wondering who would want a man who received his medical discharge before his doctorate. No more cutting off an entire piece of myself to fit into values that couldn’t find a place for all of me, either. My parents could hop, skip, and fuck right off.
Hisparents wanted to gift us a honeymoon. A real one, not our small-scale trip idea of a week in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. Even with international tensions the way they were, we could drive the Ring Road in Iceland or have ourselves some hygge in Denmark. Heck, we could bang it out to rocking mountain views in a Swiss chalet, then go for a ski and some top-notch chocolate.
We did have a few hitches in the works, naturally. Laramie (of course it was Laramie) had gotten on Jackson’s case about coming for a weekend, just Jackson, to spend time “like we used to” before Laramie disappeared into his final training and then deployed. I wasn’t even unsympathetic. Change is hard. Now and then, I wished I could see my brother, too, without my parents and their venomous influence. Maybe then we could build a relationship on our own foundation, not the one Mom and Dad had put down for us.
Jackson refused. He told Laramie that until he tendered an apology and stopped acting like an asshole to me, there would be no times like there used to be. That request didn’t come from wanting to spend time together. It came from wanting to disrespectme, and Jackson wasn’t having it. Laramie maintained I would break Jackson’s heart. Jackson said he loved me, and that Laramie needed to have his back in happiness as well as grief.
I make all this sound very reasonable and eloquent. That’s not how it was. There was a lot of yelling and some cow metaphors. The end result was that the brothers made up. Laramie didn’t apologize but did have Jackson talking fondly about times where the brothers had stood back-to-back against the world, and we all swept it under the rug.
Dana tried to intercept me at school on the regular. I had developed plenty of patterns throughout the school year, going from third period to the teacher’s lounge ten minutes after the class ended, using certain hallways, taking my break while sitting on a particular wall that overlooked a lovely, landscaped garden. As the days ran like sand out of the school year’s hourglass, I caught her lingering in “my” spots more often to chat me up when I arrived.
The topic always turned to Joan, no matter how often I said I didn’t want to discuss it. Eventually, I started telling her once I didn’t want to talk about it, then when she started up again, I excused myself mid-sentence to walk away. Then I started changing my patterns.
I didn’t want to report her to the administration. I didn’t want to have to set up mediation or a complaint. I just wanted to get through the end of the school year so I didn’t have to see her at all. Summer vacation might kill the topic off without a confrontation. Joan might pick up another boyfriend and forget about me. Though the few times my phone worked, I still found it jammed with Joan’s requests to talk to her.
Until I didn’t. One day, the phone sat empty. Stranger yet, I didn’t find Dana waiting to ambush me in the teachers’ lounge. I really hoped they’d given it up as a lost cause and decided to leave me alone.
A few weeks after the Mail Call Mixer, Jackson didn’t come home at his usual time. He’d left a brief message on the main house phone that said he’d be late, but his voice had sounded terse and I’d heard a lot of commotion in the background. Base happenings, then. The knot of nervousness in my stomach refused to go away.
I made dinner for us and left his portion in the microwave, graded more poorly written final essays on major beats in world history, decided Jackson wouldn’t want food poisoning, and wrapped his food up for the refrigerator. I’d just made my way through yet another batch of final papers, this set on American history, when Jackson’s headlights flashed over the drawn front curtains.
“How the Space Race Shaped American Politics” (which would be getting an A+, by the way, because that student had done a terrific job with their research and had brought a mature understanding to the topic) could wait. I set my red pen down, shoved Jackson’s dinner in the microwave again to reheat, and met him at the door.
He looked drained. Not a good sign. Their unit was meant to be debriefing, undertaking easy training and recertification, and doing busywork to keep them occupied while they rested up from their last Martian deployment. He shouldn’t come home hours after his release time, exhausted but edgy, as if adrenaline and determination had joined forces to create a supervillain with powers to leave a man both tired and wired at the same time.
“Hey, babe,” he said, and I didn’t like his tone, either. I couldn’t put my finger on why. It reminded me of the audio equivalent of cradling bad eggs, knowing one slip would break a shell and release a heinous odor.
“Hey, you,” I said, and kissed him. He smelled of chemical propellant. Ammunition. “I put your dinner in the microwave. It’ll be done in a minute.”
“Thanks. I’m fucking starving.” I expected him to go fling his reeky clothes into the washer, but he walked me to the couch instead. He was holding a plastic bag with a box in it, a detail I hadn’t noticed when he walked in.
The box landed on my lap as soon as I sat down. “What’s this?”
“Open it,” he said. Excitement bled over the exhaustion. It was adorable.
What else could a man do? I opened it, and found- “Oh, my God. Is this a new phone?”
“It is.” He grinned like a fox. “I’ve been checking with Supply for weeks. They finally got one in. We’ll get it provisioned on base soon. That way, we can get one of the SIM cards for family.”
That was abigdeal. Army-approved phones are allowed to make calls and send messages on the network they set up for direct dependents. With one of these phones, I could send secure texts and emails to Jackson if he were deployed, even to Mars. I couldcallhim on Mars, during periods when they opened the network for family contact anyway, without having to go use one of the relay phones on base.
Not only did I have a new phone at last, I had an official phone for military spouses, and I’d be able to contact Jackson when he deployed. I threw my arms around his neck to hug him. “Thank you. You are the best husband a man could have.”
He crushed me tight against him and didn’t reply. The embrace said enough.
When I drew back, I held the phone box, and I said, “Now drop the other shoe, love. I know something’s up.”
He winced. “You’re going to need that phone. They’re sending me back to Mars in three weeks.”
A loud protest rammed itself against my clenched teeth. I kept it jailed there, unspoken and unneeded, because,What the fuck? You just got back. You need more time and we were supposed to have months more for you to unwind and I don’t want you to go yet!isn’t productive.
Instead, I set the phone down, squeezed his hands, and said, “Let me go get your dinner, and you can tell me what happened.”
* * *