Beyond the Point(110)
THE WEATHER WAS unseasonably warm for late November. As they drove off post, the road shrank to two lanes and the scenery morphed from strip malls to cotton fields. The plants had dried into dark brown stalks, and some of them still held bright white bulbs of cotton, the ones the harvesting machines had missed. Dani looked out the passenger-side window. Every few minutes she heard Hannah sigh, as if she had to remember to keep breathing.
It should have been me. I want it to be me. Those were the words that Hannah had sobbed into her pillow the night before. And she was being serious. Dani had never sat with someone in so much pain for so many hours. And while she sat there, listening to her friend cry, all she could do was listen. Tim’s life wasn’t the only one that had ended. The life Hannah was going to have, the children she was going to raise—all of that had ended, too. Like they’d come to a fork in the road with God in the center. He’d pointed Tim and Hannah in separate directions, their momentary love lost forever.
Avery pulled the car off to the side of the road, under a canopy of large oak trees.
“Let’s just stop here,” Avery said, putting the Honda Civic in park. “I have no idea where I’m going anyway.”
They all opened their doors and started walking along a gravel road, surrounded on both sides by fields of cotton. Hannah was wearing one of Tim’s old sweatshirts. She looked so young, Dani thought. Her hair was bleached nearly as blond as Avery’s from all the days she’d spent under the desert sun. Somewhere buried below the sadness, Dani knew, the old Hannah was still there. Despite the sorrow, there was still a clearness in her eyes. Dani looked around and started to chuckle.
“What?” Avery said, turning to look at her.
“This is where you take me?” Dani laughed. Looking at Hannah, Dani whispered dramatically, “Did she bring me out here on purpose?”
Avery looked at Hannah with furrowed eyebrows. “What?” she asked. “What did I do?”
“You take us out of the house to cheer us up, and this is where you take me?” Dani said, putting a hand on her chest in disbelief. “Taking me on a walk through a cotton field? All you white people! Should have known all along.”
Avery started laughing and so did Hannah. Dani, feeling the momentum of their release, frolicked through the cotton field, bending over and inspecting each plant for blooms. She stuck her butt up high into the air.
“Do you want me to start picking? Is that what you guys brought me out here to do?”
Deep in the brush of one plant, she found a white puff, covered over with leaves. She held it up in the air and then threw it at Avery, who ducked, unnecessarily. The cotton flew only a few inches from Dani’s body. The laughter was real and deep, and seeing Hannah smile for the first time since she’d arrived back home touched a place inside Dani’s heart that hadn’t moved in a long time.
“Ahhhh, my gosh,” Avery sighed, grabbing her cheeks. “I’ve missed you girls.”
“Bringing me out here to pick cotton. As if that’s gonna cheer me up,” Dani said, but her words were cut short when the phone in Hannah’s jean pocket started to ring.
Hannah held it in her hand as though she were trying to compute a difficult math problem. She walked over and handed it to Dani. It had been this way ever since Hannah had arrived home a few days earlier. She couldn’t deal with people calling to offer their sympathy. She didn’t know what to tell them when they asked how they could help. So, she either ignored the calls or passed the phone to someone else to answer.
Dani couldn’t blame her. In the week since she’d left London, she’d received more than fifty work e-mails, none of which she’d had time or energy to answer. What did it matter now if Gelhomme sold thirty million or forty million razors? If life was this short, Dani wasn’t sure that she could spend hers in an office with Laura Klein. How could she go back to London and care about a commercial or a digital banner ad ever again? How could she go back to making money but no impact in the world?
Standing in a field of cotton, thinking about how her ancestors had fought to free her from this place, she realized that she couldn’t repay their sacrifices with a purposeless life. It was clear to Dani that God had sent her to West Point so that she could know these women. So she would be right here, right now. Beyond that, nothing was certain.
Dani took the phone from Hannah’s hands and answered the call.
“Hello? Yes. . . . Okay. . . . Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
After the call ended, Dani held the phone in her hand like she’d just spoken to a ghost.
“That was Arlington,” she choked out. “They only have one opening in the next six months.”
The whites of Hannah’s eyes were whiter than the cotton in the field, her irises bluer than the sky. Dani couldn’t bear to see her friend bracing for disappointment, but there, in that moment, she saw Hannah’s shoulders fall.
Avery stepped closer and put her hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “Oh, Hannah, I’m so sorry.”
“No. The opening . . . ,” Dani replied, her eyes welling with tears. “The opening they have is December fifth. He said we could have it.”
32
December 2, 2006 // Fort Bragg, North Carolina
The Saturday before the funeral, Avery walked down to Hannah’s house at noon with her fingers wrapped in the sleeves of the same sweater she’d worn the night Noah picked her up for their very first date. Could you call it a date if the person picking you up was engaged to someone else? Could you grieve a relationship that should never have even happened?