Walker
She’s a beauty.”
I turn around and see Isaac strolling down the jetty toward me. He pulls his sunglasses off and grins at the thirty-foot sailboat I’m standing beside before turning to me. “Didi?” he asks.
I shrug and look away, glad I’m wearing sunglasses.
“She know you named a boat after her?”
I shake my head. Isaac knows I haven’t spoken to her. “I don’t think she’d be that impressed,” I tell him. “Her boyfriend probably has a luxury yacht moored in San Tropez that he whisks her off to on the weekends.”
“I doubt he’s named it after her, though,” he says, one eyebrow lifting in a sardonic smirk.
Whatever. I hop on deck and Isaac follows suit. I probably shouldn’t have named the boat Didi. It was a whim. I was thinking of my grandpa calling his boat Chiara, but now, every time I see the name, picked out in glossy white against the hull, I feel as if a fishing hook is snagging in my gut. Eight weeks and still the pain shows no sign of abating. I heard from Sanchez, who heard it from Valentina, that Didi is back dating that actor Zac Ridgemont. I found that out the day after I named the boat after her. The day after I finally sent her the letter it had taken me weeks to write. I drank an entire bottle of whisky that night. Every day since, I’ve tried not to think about her, tried instead to focus on the present, just like the chaplain, or the Buddha, or both of them, ordered.
I open the cooler and hand Isaac a cold beer, and we settle on deck, looking out over the masts and rigging at the open ocean ahead of us glinting chlorine blue. Aegean blue, I revise. Miami could be a whole lot worse, that’s for sure. And on the upside, it sure beats Afghanistan.
“I’m thinking of taking her out on a maiden voyage down to the Keys,” I tell Isaac, running my hand over the side of the boat. It’s amazing what a three-carat diamond translates into in boat terms. It covered the down payment, and my retirement and injury pay covered the rest.
“So long as you’re back next week for the exhibition,” Isaac says, taking a swig of his beer.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t miss it,” I tell him. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.
“How’s the job going?” he asks.
I smile. “Actually, it’s going pretty well.”
I got a job working as a boat builder, fixing up old boats, and putting my degree to use working with a design team on building new ones to contract. It’s my dream job. No chance of anyone dying on my watch or of stepping on an IED, which is a bonus. My dad is still pissed. He set up a meeting with an old army buddy and lined up a job for me working for a military defense company, one that supplies guns and bullets to the army as well as to countless insurgencies around the world, but I told him I wasn’t interested, that I’d had a lifetime of bullets and war. He told me it was far more profitable than boats. He’s probably right, but I guess it’s all about how you define profitable.
“You spoken to Mom?” Isaac asks, interrupting my thoughts.
I shake my head. “Nah, every time I call she wants to know why Miranda and I haven’t set a date for the wedding. She’s in denial about us breaking up.”
Isaac throws back his head and laughs.
“I told her if I married Miranda we’d have to rewrite the wedding vows to take out the part about in sickness and in health.”
“You’re better off without her,” Isaac says. “I still can’t believe you dated her as long as you did. Girl was psycho.”
I laugh to myself. My dad said the same thing. It’s amazing to me now that I ever saw anything in a girl like Miranda. How I could ever have thought that was love.
After the chaplain paid his visit, I thought for a long time about what he’d said about suffering and about living. I thought, too, a lot about Dodds in his coffin, in his grave. And what I decided was that either I could follow him down there into the darkness—end up dead myself, or as good as—or I could do what the chaps told me to do: fix my eyes on the present, accept what is, and live each day as best I can.
So while every day still has its challenges, and while loss has wrapped its iron bands around my chest again, I’m learning to live with it. There’s work to do, amends to be made. A life to live in lieu of all the lives lost.
I’m staying busy, trying every day to keep my head above the surface. Being by the water helps.
“Smile,” Isaac says suddenly, and snaps a picture on his iPhone, then chinks his beer bottle against mine.