I can hear Ace’s snores through the wall and Gunnar competing with them in the living room. The sleeping beauty in my bed doesn’t snore. She doesn’t stir. She lies perfectly still.

I should check her vitals again.

Hopping up, I pluck my first aid kit from the side of the room and pull out a flashlight. I check her pupils and they dilate properly. No change there. Her pulse is actually stronger than before, so that’s a nice improvement. Her breathing is steady.

She just looks like someone in a deep sleep. Not someone who survived a plane crash. The only way you can tell she’s been through anything is from the bump on her head. That’s already reducing in swelling too, although the color is still the same hue you see when the sun slides behind the mountains and dusk turns everything into a blue rainbow.

I heard Ace in here chatting with our guest. It’s probably a good idea to talk to her, it might even help bring her out of this. The thing is, I’m not good with idle chitchat. Even when I had a therapist breathing down my neck, trying to direct my conversations, I had a hard time spitting out my words.

Of course, those didn’t feel like the friendliest conversations. Just another tick in the box that needed to be done so the military could see us out the door. It’s funny, when you go on deployments overseas, you always expect that you might be picked off in a firefight, or that you’ll be coming home with a few less buddies than you headed over with. When you have those ideas, when you allow yourself to go down those dark paths, you always imagine it will be because the enemy will take you out. Maybe you’ll hit an IED. Maybe you’ll get ambushed. Maybe one of you will get nabbed and be used as an “warning” to other SEALs of what can happen to them if they don’t back off.

You never expect to watch men in your unit, your brothers in arms, die because of something like an equipment malfunction.

Something in my mind flips like a switch and it’s all in front of my eyes again. The flames. The ball of fire engulfing our SEAL delivery vehicle. The muffled screams of our guys. Ace and I were on lookout when it blew. My first thought was they drove over an IED. It didn’t make sense, they were behind the wire, on the base. How could that happen?

The answer was, it didn’t.

Faulty wiring. That’s what they called it. Nobody to blame or turn the anger onto, no enemy to seek revenge with. Just a shitty circuit board in the vehicle, that’s what killed six guys in a flash. Six legacies wiped clean. Six families that lost a brother, a father, a son. Six men I’d give my life for, taken too soon.

The military didn’t want it getting out that almost an entire SEAL team was wiped out on a mission because of some badly crossed wires inside a US military owned vehicle. They paid Ace and I hush money and forced us out the door. Those little chats with the therapist that they made us go to were just part of them giving us the boot. After the life we grew up in, the military and especially the SEALs were the first thing Ace and I really belonged to. It was the first thing we really let ourselves believe in. So, it hurt like hell to see them cover that up. It wasn’t right.

Even after we sent the families some money and high-tailed it up here to get away from all that shit, it never settled into my gut. It always plays on my mind. It’s funny how, when you feel like you have right on your side, and then your eyes are opened like that, you never see anything the same way again. It’s hard to believe in heroes when the only ones you ever looked up to let you down.

I sniff loudly and clear my throat. Wiping my eyes on the back of my hand I snap back to reality. The here and the now. There was nothing I could do to help those guys. I couldn’t save them. But I might be able to save her. I look down at the beauty in her deep, uninterrupted sleep. “I will do everything in my power to help you,” I whisper my promise.

Ace had the right idea, I should be talking to her. I might not feel like making a one-sided conversation, but a little reading can do the trick. I slip off the side of the bed and put my medical supplies away before heading over to my bookshelf. Running my fingers over the spines, I breathe in the scent of the old books I’ve collected and lugged around with me over the years. Many of them are tattered and dog-eared after being thumbed through and well-read again and again. My hand hovers over the small library and stops at a book of poems. I wiggle it free from its brothers and sisters and plunk back down in the chair by the bed, cracking the cover.

I read through the most famous ones first, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “The Road Not Taken” were ones I studied in school as a young boy. I remember how Ace used to cringe whenever we had to learn poetry. He wasn’t a fan of all the flowery language and preferred his messages short, simple and sweet. If he ever had to ax one of those things, it was always the sweet.

I always enjoyed it though. The same way I enjoyed making up stories for people, I liked getting lost in the short stories of poems. They were like a little glimpse into a moment of someone’s life. Their deepest, and often darkest, thoughts shared in a few verses. To me, it felt like reading someone’s diary and realizing that you have the same fears and rage, the same depressions and laughs as that person. It made me feel understood in a world that usually made me feel alone.

My fingers flip through the pages and I automatically stop at my favorite poem of his. Robert Frost always summed up perfectly how I felt as an outsider looking in and realizing how far I still had to go before things would change for me. I begin to read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to her, delivering each line in a slow, deliberate tone. My voice is barely above a whisper as I share the poem that means the most to me with a perfect stranger. Now I’m letting her read my diary. I wonder if she’ll understand me any better after taking a peek inside?

“And miles to go before I sleep,” I read the words I have memorized by heart.

“And miles to go before I sleep,” she murmurs and rolls over in the bed.

I drop the book on the floor with a bang and jump to my feet. My mouth is open as I stare at her, wide-eyed, waiting for her to stir again. It probably takes more than five minutes to finally move. I sit on the edge of the bed and wait for her to give some other indication that she’s conscious, but there’s nothing. The only proof I have that it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination is that she’s lying on her left side now instead of her back.

“Hey.” I give her shoulder a slight shake. “Are you up?”

Nothing.

“Hello?”

She’s back in her dream world. Since it’s night, I should probably leave her alone. Obviously, the crash was a lot for her and she needs to recuperate. I make my way back to the chair and pluck the book up from where I dropped it at my feet, but I don’t look away from her. I can’t help but wonder if she just repeated the line because she heard me say it? Or was she uttering the poem from memory, knowing that last line is written twice? I watch her in silence and wonder just who this woman is and finding myself more intrigued than ever about what kind of person she really is.