Beyond the Point(105)

The memory made Dani smile.

If Dani wanted to cook, she had to grocery-shop from a handwritten list, but Wendy had so much experience in the kitchen, she knew what they needed by heart. Ingredients for lasagna and chili filled Wendy’s cart, as they roamed the aisles mindlessly. As they walked side by side, Dani wondered how grief would affect Hannah’s appetite. And not just for food. She wondered if Hannah would ever again have an appetite for life.

“So, what’s it been like at the house?” Wendy asked. She pulled four cans of diced tomatoes off a shelf and put them in the cart.

Dani sighed. “Really quiet. Tim’s parents got here this morning. But there’s just nothing to do until Hannah gets back. So it’s just . . .”

“Hurry up and wait,” Wendy said, finishing Dani’s sentence.

Dani nodded. “I can’t stop thinking about her. Over there, still waiting. It’s got to be excruciating.”

“It’s hard now. But she’s still in shock. The hardest parts will come later. Six weeks from now. Six years.”

“I just don’t understand how this could happen,” Dani said. “It still feels so surreal. It feels like a mistake. Like he’s still out there.”

“Mark said when Tim was in his class, he was late every single day. That he never completed the reading.”

“I could see that,” Dani said, and then smiled. She remembered sitting against the trees during Beast, helping him memorize passages from the plebe handbook. “He was so fun. I think that’s what I’m worried about. Hannah can be so serious. Tim . . . he always made sure she had fun.”

Wendy stopped, looked at her cart. “Oh shoot,” she said. “What am I doing? I forgot the stuff for the soup.”

“I’ve been doing that too!” Dani said. “I can’t think straight. I feel like I’m walking through a cloud.”

“I guess, in a way, you are,” Wendy said.

And then they turned the cart around and walked back to the beginning.

A FEW HOURS later, Dani and Wendy unpacked the ingredients they’d purchased at the grocery store and got to work making lasagna in Avery’s kitchen. Tomato sauce and cheese were off-limits for Dani’s anti-inflammatory diet, but suddenly all those dietary rules didn’t seem to matter anymore. They needed to eat. And if she had pain, she had pain. At least she was alive to feel it.

Her knife sliced through a raw onion, pulling sharp tears from her eyes. Meanwhile, Wendy smashed garlic cloves to release them from their paper skins. Dani cut fast and hard, letting the anger and her sadness come through the blade. Soon, the kitchen filled with the savory aroma of minced garlic and onions simmering in oil. Wendy stirred them together with a wooden spoon.

“You know,” she said, looking at the little white pieces caramelizing in the heat, “when the girls were little, I used to hate it if Mark got home from work and I hadn’t started on dinner. So I would just chop some onion and garlic real quick and sauté it in a pan. That way, when he got home, the house would smell like I was cooking, even if I had no idea what I was going to make yet.”

“Nice trick,” Dani said.

“I’ve always found it interesting that when you cook, everything has to be sliced, peeled, or smashed in order to be used. The best flavors come out when the ingredients are broken and exposed to heat.”

Dani nodded.

“I think that’s true for us, too. Faith isn’t really faith until it’s beat up and put through a fire. When you’re crushed, you feel like you’re dying. But you’re actually coming to life. When you’re broken, that’s when the best of you comes out.”

As good as that sounded—as true as it felt—it didn’t make the sting of the onion in Dani’s eyes any less painful.

Later, when the lasagna was baking in the oven, Wendy stood at the sink cleaning dishes.

“What ever happened to that guy Avery was dating?” Wendy asked. “The one that came to Boston?”

“Noah,” Dani said. “To be honest, she hasn’t said anything about him since I’ve been here. I don’t know.”

“And you?” Wendy didn’t look up from her work. “Any guys in London I should know about?”

Dani shook her head.

“Well then. When are you going to tell me about the wedding?”

Dani sighed, handed Wendy the dirty cheese grater, and then sat down at Avery’s kitchen table. “How much time do you have?”





29


November 23, 2006 // Fort Bragg, North Carolina

On Thanksgiving morning, Avery woke up fully clothed, sleeping next to Dani. It was still dark. The only light in the room came from an orange floodlight outside, cutting through the blinds. After two years of five A.M. wakeup calls for her job with the Army, Avery no longer had the ability to sleep in. She envied Dani’s even breathing, the sure sign that she was deep in a REM cycle, and wondered how late she’d stayed up talking with Wendy Bennett, who’d driven down from West Point a few days earlier.

Wendy had rented a hotel room nearby, for her and Mark, who would fly in for the funeral and drive back with his wife. As time went on, more and more family and friends would arrive, Avery knew, filling hotel rooms and the Nesmiths’ house. Avery worried that Hannah would feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. She worried too that Hannah wouldn’t even want to see Avery. It was possible Avery had damaged their relationship beyond repair.