It takes us almost week to reach the States. We transfer via helicopter from that Coast Guard cutter to another one, closer to shore, and then later via helicopter once again to shore. We set down at a Coast Guard station in South Carolina. After thanking the pilot and the crew, we’re met by a junior officer.

The past few days have been fraught with tension and strained silence. We slept uncomfortably in the same hard, narrow cot, barely big enough for one person, much less two, but it’s all we had, so we made it work. It forced us to a level of physical proximity we were in no way ready for. We could barely manage a basic conversation about inane, simple things, because even a discussion of the simplest thing was weighted with the burden of all the things still left unspoken between us.

Now, here we are. Back in the States, together…with no home, no car, no clothes, no possessions.

Ava had a few belongings back on Dominic’s fishing boat—Ava explained who Dominic is, how he rescued Jonny and then helped Ava find me; I owe that man a beer, if nothing else—Ava used the cutter’s radio to contact Dominic and let him know she was alive, that she’d found me, and that we were heading back Stateside. Dominic agreed to ship her belongings to her, once we figured out where we were going. She also used a phone to get a hold of Delta and let her know she was alive, and that we were together.

It’s a long, complicated process, reestablishing identities as functional members of society. We are at the mercy of the federal government, leaving us in a weird sort of limbo. The Coast Guard passes us off to some other official, I’m not entirely certain which department she’s with, only that she’s a frighteningly efficient and brusque middle-aged woman with bottle blonde hair named Judy. Judy takes us through the complicated maze of paperwork and the days of waiting it takes to obtain birth certificates, driver’s licenses, social security cards, and bank account access. Our previous address no longer physically existing makes it that much more complicated.

While we wait for birth certificates and everything to arrive, we live in a cheap motel with a tiny kitchenette, and Judy provides us with a prepaid Visa card for expenses. It’s a strange sort of purgatory. We are uncomfortable with each other, steeped in tension and awkwardness and a cold distance, but we still aren’t ready to talk about everything that happened. We need to: it’s a stress on our minds, and a burden on our hearts.

But we have no life yet—we are merely existing, subsisting from day to day.

So we wait.

We prepare simple meals and watch movies on cable.

We avoid talking.

We don’t touch.

We sleep in the same bed, but on opposite sides, a huge gap between us.

It is painful, awkward, and difficult.

Finally, after more than two weeks, we have enough identification to enable us to resume something like normal life…if only we knew where to go, or what to do.

Fortunately, money is not an issue, once we regain access to our bank accounts.

When Judy finally announces that we’re officially on our own again and drives away, Ava and I sit side by side on the bed in the cheap motel in which we’ve lived for the last month, tension brewing between us.

After a long silence, Ava speaks. “I have an idea.”

I glance at her. “I’m listening.”

“We buy an RV, and we just…drive. We explore the country. Eventually, we’ll find somewhere we want to stay, and we just stay there.”

“And while we’re driving, we talk,” I say.

She nods. “Takes the stress off of having to figure out where to go, what to do.”

“It’s a good idea.” I want to touch her, but I don’t want it to be awkward. I don’t mean sexual touch, I just mean hold her hand. “Let’s do it.”

She offers a small, hesitant smile. “Yeah?”

I nod, smiling back. “Yeah. It’s perfect.”

My heart hammering, I reach down and take her hand in mine and thread our fingers together.

Ava shudders, a shaky sigh escaping her. “Why is it so strange just to hold hands?”

“I don’t know, but it is.”

A tear escapes from the corner of her eye. “I hate this awkwardness, Chris. I hate it so much.”

“Me too.”

She gazes at me, and I see a million thoughts rippling across her features, none of which I can truly read. “It’s too much, Chris. Everything, it’s just…it’s too much. I have so much to say to you, so many questions to ask.”

“I know.” I stare at our joined hands. “I do too. But...where do we even start?”

“I spoke to Dr. James, in the hospital where you recuperated. I mentioned that same thing, that I don’t even know where to start.” She looks down at our joined hands, pointedly, and then back to me. “He said I had to begin at the beginning.”

I laugh. “Sounds like something he’d say.”

She stands up. Paces away. Her hair is long, bound in a ponytail. She tugs it free of the ponytail, runs her hands through it; her hands are shaking.

She stops, on the other side of the room from me, her back to the bathroom. She’s staring at me, breathing hard.

“I hate you for leaving me—how about we start there?”

She says this quietly, but the words drop like bombs.

“I hate myself for leaving,” I whisper back. “And I hate you for the way you withdrew. You left me too, Ava. You were there physically, but you might as well have been a thousand miles away.”

Tears trickle down to her chin. “I just…I couldn’t—” she shakes her head. “I didn’t do it to hurt you.”

“It did, though.”

Her eyes lock on mine, crying freely. “I know.”

“I was grieving too, and I went through it alone.”

She doesn’t look away, and the agony in her gaze mirrors my own. “I know.”

Tears threaten at the corners of my own eyes. “I needed you, and you weren’t there. You ignored me. You pretended like I didn’t exist.” Anger is building, wrapped in and around the pain like vines.

Ava wipes at her eyes with both hands. She walks slowly toward me, sits on the edge of the bed, a foot of space between us, but it may as well be a mile. She sits upright, legs pressed together, hands folded on her lap. Her spine is straight, her loose hair, kinked from the ponytail, is draped over one shoulder. Her chin is tucked against her chest, and she breathes slowly, deeply, and carefully.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Chris.” She whispers it, her voice as fragile as a skin of ice over a barely frozen pond.

“It is?” I had no idea—time, dates, holidays, none of it has meant anything up until this moment.

She nods, gaze still averted. “December 24. Tomorrow is Christmas Day.” She glances at me cautiously. “Do you…do you remember last Christmas?”

I have to think carefully. “Um. We were in…Jamestown? St. Helena. I called you.”

She nods. “That was…a really difficult conversation.”

“It’s a little fuzzy,” I admit.

“It was almost as awkward as this is.” She smiles, but it’s a bitter curve of lips devoid of humor or warmth. “You had that woman on board with you. Martha?”

“Marta.” I try the name, search for meaning or memory embedded in the syllables. “Martinique.”

A fragment of memory assaults me:

A fumbling kiss, whiskey-stained lips. A sense of wrongness, the unfamiliar weight of breasts in my hands that are not Ava’s, a kiss that lasts too long…

“Does she figure into your memories?” Ava’s voice is thin, brittle, and sharp.

I lean forward, wipe my face with one hand. “Somewhat,” I answer, at length.

“You slept with her.”

I shake my head. “No. Nearly, but no.”

She nods. “Ah, I remember now, there was a letter.” She glances at the ceiling, recalling. “You said you still loved me, and that you stopped going any further with her because she wasn’t me.”

I nod. “It was just…wrong. It felt wrong, in the same way it would feel wrong to put a shoe on the wrong foot. But it felt wrong morally, too. I was absolutely hammered at the time, and I was lonely, and upset, and melancholy, and I don’t even know what else. But it just wasn’t right. You and I were separated, and there didn’t seem to be any hope of us getting back together again, not after…everything. But I knew I still loved you and that what was happening with Marta wasn’t right.”

Ava doesn’t respond for a minute or so. “Did you get my packet of letters?”

It takes effort to recall, but eventually, I do. “Yes. You had a similar situation, did you not?”

She nods, not looking at me. “Yeah.” Now she glances at me. “Even though I get mad and jealous about Marta, I know, intellectually, that I don’t have any room to feel that way.”

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Desperate to ease the tension, I twist in place, facing her. “It’s Christmas, and we’re here, together. That’s worth celebrating isn’t it?”

A hesitant smile. “I guess so.”

“So, we go somewhere and have a nice dinner. Spend Christmas together, and then we go buy an RV, and we start driving. No pressure. We work through things bit by bit.”

“That sounds doable.”

I stand up, and she follows suit. We’re facing each other, space between us, and I feel every single inch of that space like the stab of a knife. This tension, this pain, this coldness…it’s too much. I hate it.

I gaze at Ava, let my emotions well up and boil over. “When I was in that hospital in Africa, I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I couldn’t remember my name. I couldn’t remember my childhood, or how I got there, or what happened, nothing. All I had were images of you. Not even real, full memories, just…you. Your face. A sense that you were…important to me, but that doesn’t state it quite strongly enough. You were all I had. You were everything. I filled notebook after notebook, writing about you. Trying to remember more about you. More about us.”

“God, Chris…” she blinks back tears yet again. “That must have been horrible, and so frightening.”

I nod. “Yes, it was. That’s why I was there so long. Even after my broken bones healed, I had massive gaps in my memory. I knew your name—I knew that you were my lover, wife, girlfriend—that you were my everything. And that’s all I knew. I started writing about us, about you, and gradually my memories started to come back. It took a long time, and it was…painful.”

“Why painful?”

“Because I remembered…” I have to stop, clear my throat, and blink hard against tears blurring my eyes. “I remembered Henry. I remembered him dying. I—I remembered how we dealt with it, or more accurately, how we didn’t. I remembered drinking myself into a stupor every day for months. I became my dad, which is the one thing I swore to myself the day I left home that I’d never become. I became him.”

“No, you didn’t, Chris.” She steps closer, gazing up at me, love cautiously bleeding through the pain and doubt and fear and distance. “You didn’t.”

“My father was a violent, drunken pig. He was a worthless piece of shit, and he made my life utter hell every single day until I left home at seventeen.” I can’t stop the tears from falling. “And I became him anyway.”

“You never became like him, Christian. Never.” She takes another step closer. “You drank to numb the pain. You drank because…because I was—because of how I basically abandoned you, on top of losing your son. You were alone, and you were hurting, and you drank because it was the only thing you knew how to do to cope.” She touches my face, gingerly, hesitantly. “You never hurt me, Chris. Not once.”

“I have this memory of waking up on the beach outside our condo in a pool of my own vomit, still drunk, and starting to drink some more, just to escape everything.”

“I remember.” She breathes carefully. “I went outside once, to get a breath of air. I found you passed out in the sand.”

“You sat down beside me and you told me you fucking hated me.” I choke on the words. “I was awake enough to hear that.”

You shake your head and step closer yet, reaching up with one shaking hand, but drop it before touching me. “No, no. No, Chris. I was talking to God. To life. To whoever took Henry from me. I wasn’t talking to you.”

I find it hard to form words past the lump in my throat. “If this is going to get better, we have to be honest…with ourselves and each other.”

Ava nods twice, head bobbing, wobbly. “You’re right. I was, in part, talking to you. Not just you, though. At that point, I did blame you, and I did hate you. But only because there was no one else to blame and it just hurt so bad. You never became your father, Christian, I swear. You never hurt me. You never had a negative word for me. Even when I was…whatever you want to call it—unresponsive. In bed, not eating, ignoring you, wishing I could just die…you tried so hard to reach me.”

Her eyes drop to her hands.

“You made me food three times a day, every day, for weeks, for months. Even when your own pain had to have been so deep, you tried. And I just—I couldn’t…I couldn’t make myself snap out of it. Nothing mattered. I didn’t want to live. I wanted to die, but my body wouldn’t let me.” She looks up at me now, her blue eyes wet. “I haven’t forgotten how you tried to take care of me. You told me you loved me so many times. You tried—” her voice breaks, and she sits back down again, shoulders shaking as she weeps.

“I gave up.” I sit beside her. Close, this time. Not quite touching, but almost. “I gave up.”

“What else could you have done?”

“Stopped drinking and kept trying?”

“Then why didn’t you?” She doesn’t mean it as an accusation, but genuinely asking.

I shake my head and shrug. “It hurt too bad. Everything hurt. I was going crazy. I didn’t know what to do. I’d lost Henry, and it felt like I’d lost you, too.”

“You did. I wasn’t…I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t there. I was empty. Less than a shell of a person.”

She’s struggling to stay composed, and only partly succeeding.

“Alcohol wasn’t letting me escape enough, I guess,” she says. “I think, deep down, I knew if I kept going the way I was, I’d end up drinking myself to death, and so I left instead.”

Her tear-silvered eyes search mine. “I was devastated when you left. When I woke up and discovered you were gone, it broke me more than I already was.”

I can’t breathe. I can’t stop the tears, this time. I’m not a crier—I don’t even know the last time I cried. But this? I can’t stop this.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, tasting salt on my lips. “I’m so sorry.”

Ava shakes her head, reaches up and wipes at my cheek with a thumb. “Christian…don’t. God, please don’t.” She hiccups, a sob escaping. “I’ve never seen you cry.”

I can’t speak. I can only shake my head and endure the hot burn in my throat, the silent fall of salty tears on my cheeks, down my chin.

Ava stares up at me, and there’s a moment of shattered, explosive tension, and then she slams into me. She buries her face against my chest, and her arms circle my middle, and then I’m clutching her against me and she’s racked with sobs and my tears wet her hair.

“I’m so sorry, Ava, I’m so sorry. You needed me, and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for you.”

She’s speaking over me. “No, it was me—it was me. I wasn’t there for you either.”

No more words are needed, then. She lets go, unleashes everything she’s pent up for so long. And so do I. We weep until we can weep no more.

I would say it’s cathartic, but that’s nowhere near powerful enough a word. It’s a flash flood of emotion crashing through us both, and the walls of her heart and mine—they’re blasted away by this.

I feel them fall, like the walls of Jericho.

A memory, an old one, from when I was three or so, drifts into my mind. I’m sitting cross-legged on a threadbare carpet, surrounded by other kids. An older woman with gray hair has a felt board and she tells a story in singsong lilt about the walls of Jericho and the Israelites marching around it, and she has felt shapes to represent Jericho and the Israelites, and we each have a part to sing, echoing her…

The memory vanishes as quickly as it came. I’m not sure why I remembered it, or what it’s supposed to mean, but I feel like Jericho now, after the walls have crashed down.

The silence is different now, broken now by sniffles as the moment of shattering ends.

Ava pulls away, just a few inches, just enough that she can look up at me with reddened, damp eyes. She’s the same as I am now—vulnerable, and needy.

There’s nothing to say, not in that moment.

We are broken together. The shards of our hearts and lives and souls lay mingled together, and all the miles, the months of distance and separation, the pain we inflicted on each other, our guilt, our sorrow, our shame—it’s all there. It’s there in her eyes as they search mine. It’s there in her tears, in the way her hands are clawed into fists in the cotton of my T-shirt.

She needs me.

I need her.

We need each other.

I’ve written of this moment a thousand times. Remembered it. Thought of it. Dreamed of it.

Imagined it.

Fantasized about it.

But now that it’s here, I’m scared of it.

What if it’s not the same? What if she rejects me? What if we don’t fit like we used to? What if it’s too late? What if there’s too much pain and guilt to overcome?

She looks at me and understands what I’m thinking. Her eyes flit back and forth, examining me. Her palm drifts up, touches my cheek. She lifts her chin, and her lips part.

My hand buries in her hair, tangles in her soft black locks, and I pull her to me.

I kiss her.

Ava’s lips are warm and soft, pliable and hesitant. Her response is slow in coming. At first, our mouths just meet, and my breath is snatched away by the power of this moment, how it feels to finally have her lips on mine, to feel this with her. Softer, wetter, and warmer than I remember.

The feel of her mouth evokes a million potent memories, flashing through me all at once: kissing her in the kitchen, sun golden-yellow on us; kissing in our bed, rolling together, naked; pausing in a supermarket aisle to palm her backside and steal a kiss, her laughter against my lips.

Another moment of hesitation, our lips only touching, and then Ava comes alive.

She pushes up against me, and her fist in my shirt tightens, and one hand slides up over my shoulder and her fingers trail against my scalp, and then she’s got a handful of my hair and she’s pulling at me, bringing me down to her, as if to bring our bodies closer together, to erase the last vestige of distance between us.

The kiss shifts and heat explodes, and the world tilts as we slide down horizontal.

Ava is beneath me, and her hands are on my face, one feathering into my beard, pulling my mouth back to hers.

“Please,” she murmurs. “Please don’t stop kissing me.”

I would promise to never stop, I would promise to kiss her forever, but I have no words, and to speak would be to stop kissing her, so I don’t answer. I lose myself in her lips instead, in the frenzy of needing her, and feeling her need for me.

“More,” she whispers. “I need more of you, Christian. Now.”

Her eyes are so blue, so soft, so fiery, that I’m left stunned breathless at the intensity, the cerulean fire of them.

“Ava…” All I can do is whisper her name; it’s all I can manage.

It’s enough, though. She hears everything I’m saying when I whisper her name, thus:

“Ava…”

I kiss her again, and this time the kiss detonates into something else. Something more. We’re both vulnerable, totally bared to each other, all our demons and guilt and pain exposed. Nothing left hidden. There’s so much left to say, but in this moment, what we need to say to each other cannot be expressed in mortal language.

And so we commune, soul to soul, in the physical language of love.