Beyond the Point(118)
And who got to decide?
“Do you want to listen to any music?” Avery asked, breaking through Hannah’s thoughts. “My CDs are down there on the floor.”
Hannah turned to look at Avery, whose voice sounded so distant, it was hard to believe they were in the same car. Avery was in the driver’s seat, her hair loose and wavy, like she’d slept on it wet. She offered Hannah a closed-lipped smile. Adrenaline had pumped through Hannah’s veins yesterday, enabling her to survive the three-hour receiving line. But now, she had no energy for false smiles. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she knew she was grateful for all that Avery had done—paying for her family’s flights to Fayetteville, offering to drive to Virginia, taking off work. But those acts of service didn’t make up for the ways she’d been a disappointing friend in the last few years. Hannah hated that she was angry, but she didn’t have any other emotions to spare. So she looked back out the window.
“Avery, please tell me you’ve heard of an iPod,” Dani said from the back seat. “Get with the times.”
“It’s not the same,” Avery replied. “There’s something therapeutic about looking through those CDs. It’s the soundtrack to my life.”
Mindlessly pulling the heavy leather CD case to her lap, Hannah began to flip through the sleeves, each one holding four CDs to a page. Foo Fighters, The Colour and the Shape. Dave Matthews, Live at Luther College. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Third Eye Blind. Avery had always been a nineties alternative junkie, Hannah knew. Tim loved hip-hop and country. The two most polar-opposite music styles, which he claimed weren’t opposites at all. “Rap and country artists sing about life how it is, not how they wish it would be,” Tim had said once. “Pop music is shiny. Rap and country are real.”
Her mind flashed back suddenly to his dorm room at West Point, when they’d pulled an all-nighter studying. At West Point finals were called “TEEs,” short for “term end exams.” He’d forced her to listen to the four-CD set of Garth Brooks’s greatest hits and pulled her away from her computer to dance—terribly—to “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House.” Hannah stopped paging through the binder and put her head between her knees.
As she stared at the dirty floor of Avery’s car, Hannah noticed the edge of a letter sticking out of the purse resting next to her feet. She knew she couldn’t read it yet. Not in this car, with this little air to breathe. The phone at the bottom of her purse lit up. Someone was calling. She fought the urge to chuck it out the window and watch it get smashed by the tires of the car behind them.
“Sixty more miles,” Avery said, placing her hand on Hannah’s back. “It’s okay. We’re almost there.”
THE REST OF the afternoon went by in slow motion. Her parents, sister, and nephew went back to a hotel. Hannah’s brother-in-law said goodbye after the funeral and headed back to Texas, so he could return to work. Avery and Dani went to the kitchen to pull out another of Wendy’s meals from the freezer to defrost. Exhausted from the drive, Hannah told them she needed some time to herself and retreated to her bedroom. Her bedroom. The pronouns of her life had changed. She was no longer a we. Theirs was now hers. His was now nothing at all.
After taking a shower, Hannah wrapped herself in a robe and got back in bed, holding Tim’s clothes against her body and his letter in her hands. His scent was fading from the fibers of his shirts, she knew, and that made her angry. His words, tucked under the seal of the letter, called to her. Even clean, she felt tainted. Even warm, her body shivered. Even embracing the letter in her hands, her soul resisted.
Before the funeral, she’d walked through the house collecting every Post-it note Tim had left behind. Those he’d written months ago. But the letter he’d written days, maybe even hours before he’d died. It wasn’t thick. But it was the last thing she had. For some reason, she felt empty and achy, holding it in her hands. Like if she read it, then he would be really, finally gone. If she left it unopened—even just for a few more minutes, a few more seconds—there would still be more that Tim could say.
She was crying when she slid the pocketknife Tim had left in his bedside table underneath the envelope flap. She didn’t want to risk ripping what was inside. The paper unfolded in her hands, light and ethereal, and the date written in the corner crossed her eyes. November 12, 2006. And then she read slowly, trying to take each word in and make it last.
Dear Hannah,
We’re leaving tomorrow for what they say will be a ten-day mission, so I’m sitting down to write you this letter, to assure you that I love you. I miss you. And we will speak again soon.
I’m not naive. I believe fully in the training I’ve done and in my ability to do this job well, but I also know that what we are doing is dangerous and uncertain. But that’s just life. There’s no guarantee that anyone gets to see tomorrow, and I am no different. My only prayer is that I do well with the days God gives me. I pray the same for you.
If catastrophe strikes here, I will still feel so blessed because I have lived the equivalent of four men’s lives in my short twenty-four years on this planet. I owe it all to God, who met me in that tree the day my parachute failed. And to you, Hannah, my best friend, who had patience with me as I learned to love you with everything I had, and not just a part.
I don’t pretend to know what the future holds. I imagine us bringing children into the world, sipping wine, breaking bread, and growing old together, using our bodies up until they are sore and bruised and wrinkled and aching. But our joy does not depend on that dream coming true. No matter what happens, we of all people can afford to live fully unafraid because we know these breakable bodies house unbreakable souls.