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When the knock comes on the door and they tell her, Kate’s first thought is oh, not Richard?. It’s not thought with any particular desire, so she doesn’t feel guilty about it (much), it’s just bizarre. She’s spent so long mentally preparing to have to tell Jamie that his father is dead, preparing for them to face the future together without Richard, that it feels surreal to have it so inverted. Jamie. Explosion. IED. It would have been quick. He wouldn’t have known about it. She doesn’t cry then.
Nor when she speaks to Richard.
“I can be out of here on the next chopper to be with you. He’ll be in good hands.”
“No, don’t do that,” she says. “Stay with him. I’ll cope. Bring him home.”
Briefly, she is grateful for the way it’s turned out. She can’t imagine having this conversation with Jamie if the situation was reversed, of knowing that he was alone in a foreign country dealing with his father’s corpse.
But she supposes he is some of that. Alone. In the most foreign country there is.
Crooks is her Trusted Person. She doesn’t know him well, in fact, but as the Colonel’s wife it always felt wrong to list any of the other women on the base. Not something they should have to deal with; above their pay grade.
She sits in Crooks’ office and he runs her through the practicalities, the order of events and the decisions that she and Richard will have to make when he returns with their boy. It all slides through her ringing head without touching the sides.
“Would you,” she asks. “Would you mind writing that down for me?”
“Oh!” he murmurs, a soft exhalation of surprise. “Of course, Kate. I suppose this must be…” He breaks off without finishing the sentence, picking up a pen. She watches as he begins to list all the things he’s just said. Neat. Precise. Bullet-pointed.
Bullets. She begins to look around the room, scanning for something, anything to focus on. She suddenly feels tight in the chest, which is ridiculous, because it wasn’t bullets, it wasn’t bullets at all, and…
“Your calendar’s wrong,” she tells Crooks, seizing on it. It’s a little thing on the corner of his desk, facing the door. It’s spiral-bound, one page per day, but clearly someone has dropped it and put it back up carelessly, because it says November 18, but it’s only August.
“Is it?” Crooks asks, nonchalant, continuing with his list without looking up.
“It says November. Someone must have bumped it. You should have the right date showing. I’ll fix it.”
“No, Kate, it’s all right, it’s…”
But Kate is rising from her seat to reach for the calendar. “It’s only right,” she says, “things should be correct.”
She fiddles with the spiral binding, but in the next moment Crooks is there, on her side of the desk, catching her hands.
“Kate,” he says. She looks up. “Kate. It’s the day they come back.”
“What?” she asks. Stupid, insensible.
He tugs the calendar gently from her hands and sets it back on the desk. “It’s the day they’re supposed to come home. Surely you recognise it. I always set my calendar like this when they’re deployed. Call it a silly little superstition for a man just trying to feel useful, but I figure, if that’s the date showing, there’s always some pocket of the universe where they’re already home, already safe.”
“Oh,” Kate whispers. She can feel herself shaking, a vibration that starts in her legs and radiates all the way up her body, rattling her heart in her chest and sending her fingers into spasm.
“I’m sorry it couldn’t work for Jamie,” Crooks says, and Kate heaves a great sob. There’s a sense of something snapping inside her, an overwhelming wave, then the tears are coming fast and hot.
Crooks moves instinctively, not backwards but forward like a true soldier, toward whatever danger has arisen. His hand touches Kate’s shoulder, and then she’s throwing her arms around him, burying her face in his shirt and holding on tight as she wails.
Eventually, when her cries have turned to whimpers, Crooks places a hand on her shaking shoulders. It’s warm and heavy and it brings her back to herself, here with her face pressed against this strange man’s middle.
She pulls back. “Sorry,” she whispers, both for the display and for the added pattern her foundation has left on his uniform.
He smiles gently down at her. “It’s quite all right,” he tells her. He rubs her shoulder. “You know, there’s a phrase I learned in Iraq; it’s Arabic. Ya’aburnee. It means ‘you bury me’. It’s a wish that a loved one will outlive you, that you won’t have to live in the world without them. I’ve always thought it was beautiful, but also a bit selfish, because it’s the going on without them that’s the hard part, isn’t it?”
Kate nods, sniffles, then tips he head back and wipes the tears from her eyes. “Yeah,” she answers. “It is the life I signed up for, though.”
“We all did,” he says. “We also signed up for being there for each other. You’re not alone.”
Kate finds his hand on her shoulder, gives his fingers a squeeze. “Thank you,” she says. Then, hearing herself sniffle again, saves them both from the awkwardness of prolonged physical intimacy by asking: “Would you mind getting me a tissue?”