Walker
Didi,
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
I miss you.
I think about you all the time. Every second of every day.
I love you.
I —
I scrunch up the paper and toss it onto the floor. This is so damn hard. It was never this hard to speak to her in person. I wish I could sit with her now in silence and feel my way to the right words.
Thinking about her makes my throat tighten up, my chest constrict. I fucked up. How do I make it right? Is it too late?
My mom knocks on my bedroom door just as I’m writing her name on a clean sheet of paper.
“You’ve got a visitor,” she says, eyeing the snowballs of scrunched-up paper littering the floor.
My heart leaps. “Who?” I ask. I haven’t been in touch with any of my friends since I got back, and none of them have been in touch with me either, so no one knows I’m back.
“A Major Ryan?” my mother says. “He said you know him.”
The chaps? What’s he doing here?
I swing my legs off the bed, feeling foggy and light-headed as I sit up. I’ve not been sleeping and my head is all over the place. My mom purses her lips at the sight of me. I haven’t shaved in four days and my clothes are rumpled. I spend most of the time just lying on my bed staring at the ceiling.
“What does he want?” I ask, rubbing my face to try to wake up a little.
“I don’t know,” my mother answers, tight-lipped. “Why don’t you come and find out. He’s in the front room. I’m just making him tea. I expect you down in five minutes.” She looks me over. “And straighten up before you show your face, darling.”
I shake my head at her departing back. I’m twenty-four and she makes me feel like I’m four. I have to get out of here—but go where? Do what? Even a trip to the bathroom these days requires as much energy as climbing Mount Everest. I’m back to square one. I’m not sure why I got on the plane and came back here. That’s a lie. I do know why I got on the plane and came back here. It was because there were no other choices, and at that point Miranda could have told me we were getting on a plane to Kabul and I would have gone, I was in such a deep daze. I should never have walked away, though, should never have left Didi. And now it’s too late.
Ten minutes later, having changed my shirt but not shaved, I enter the front room. The chaps is standing over by the window, and he turns and smiles when I walk in, his eyes crinkling.
“Lieutenant,” he says, walking toward me.
“Walker,” I reply.
He nods and sets his teacup down. He holds out his hand and I shake it.
“I’m sorry for the unannounced visit. I hope you don’t mind.”
I shake my head. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”
“Oh, I had some meetings close by,” he says. “Thought I’d drop in and see how you were doing.”
I raise my eyebrows. Meetings nearby? Really? More likely someone put him up to it. It crosses my mind that as a man of God he really shouldn’t be lying, but I let it go because, strange as it is to admit it, it’s good to see him.
“So how are you doing?” he asks, looking me straight in the eye.
I look away, unable to hold his gaze. “Yeah, okay,” I mumble.
He doesn’t say anything and I sink down onto the sofa.
“You know,” he says after a beat, “I’ve been where you are, Walker.” I look up. He sits down opposite me. “I know what it’s like to feel like you’ve failed a friend.”
I bite back my response because the look in his eye quiets me, tells me he does know. There’s pain there, buried deep.
“I didn’t just fail him,” I hear myself say in response. “I failed others.” I stare down at the carpet, squeezing my hands together tightly. “So many others.” It feels as if a knife blade is wedged in my throat and I’m having to push my words past it.
“Sounds to me like you’re shouldering a lot of responsibility for other people’s choices.”
I mull on that. It reminds me of what Didi said to me not even a week ago. Maybe they’re both right. A small piece of my brain recognizes that by shouldering the guilt and blame I’m paralyzing myself as surely as taking a knife and cutting my own hamstrings. The problem is that I’m trapped under the weight of it all once more, and there’s no Didi this time to help pull me to the surface and back into the light.
“Do you believe in God?” I ask suddenly, looking up. I catch the chaps’ bemused expression and it strikes me what I’ve just asked. I laugh under my breath. “Stupid question. Of course you do. I didn’t mean that.”
“Are you going to ask me how I can believe in God? Given what I’ve seen, and the pain and suffering there is in the world?”
I nod. That was the general idea, yes.
He nods thoughtfully back at me. “I get asked that a lot. There are times when I doubt, times when I wonder what God can possibly be thinking, why he asks us to suffer so much.” He spreads his palms wide. “What’s the point of all this pain? What does it achieve?”
I stare at him, expecting him to follow through, but he doesn’t. I wonder if he’s just asking rhetorically, but then he continues. “You know, the Buddha taught that life is suffering. It’s one of the four noble truths.”
I shoot him a semi-amused glance. “Aren’t you Christian?”
He laughs. “Yes, but I think the Buddha had it right on a lot of things.” He nods his head again and sighs. “The truth is, I think, that we suffer when we expect things to go a certain way, when we resist the way things actually are. If we let go and learn to live every day as it comes, to accept the present moment as it is, then I think we can find happiness. Or at least we can put a moratorium on the suffering.”
“That sounds pretty Buddhist to me.”
He smiles. “Christianity teaches that suffering opens you up to grace and helps you appreciate the goodness in the world.” He pauses, frowning, before going on. “I guess in the same the way you probably appreciate your sight a whole lot more now, having been blind for a time.”
I mull on that, thinking about how right he is. When I got my sight back, I saw the world in a completely different way—colors became bigger, became brighter. For a brief stretch, in the hours before Dodds died, I was transfixed by things I’d never noticed before—the scattering diamonds of light hitting water, the million different blues above me, the variations of color in just a strand of Didi’s hair.
“Loss makes you appreciate the little things more,” the chaps goes on.
I think of Didi—her laugh, her touch—and feel the familiar tearing sensation in my chest as if my heart’s being ripped apart.
“You think there’s some big master plan?” I ask, taking a deep breath to try to ease the pain.
He nods. “Yes, I like to think so. I mean, I reckon we’re here for a reason. I believe God has a plan for each of us.”
Some damn plan, I think to myself. The chaps sees my expression, the cynical flare of my nostrils, and smiles sadly. “You see what happened to your men and to Dodds as your fault,” he says, “but it isn’t.”
“Well, whose fault is it, then? God’s?”
“It’s no one’s fault. It just is. You’re struggling to find a reason for it all, to understand it, but there is no reason and you’ll never be able to understand it. So the only course of action, I would counsel, is acceptance of what is.”
I stare at him sullenly.
“You saved Sanchez. Twice.” He smiles. “You might not think of yourself as a hero, but you are.”
A hero?
“You are,” he repeats. “Not just for putting yourself on the line every single day out there and for risking your life to save your men, not just for saving Sanchez’s life twice, either, but for enduring all that and still keeping on going.”
He stands up, and I do too, out of habit—I have to stop myself from saluting. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
“And you will get through this. I have absolute faith in that.”