side and then the other, working my hands in tandem. He rolled his neck, then took a final drag of his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. The sallow light from the lamp beside him illuminated only one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow. The memory of him lying on his back on Stan’s futon came back to me just then. He had seemed like a stone wall, nothing but muscles and uniform and an elaborate set of fighting reflexes ready to go. Now it seemed as though all of that had pulled inward, like blood retreating toward the heart when one is in danger of freezing. But pride still guarded the perimeter of his mind from invaders like me.
“We’ll go,” I affirmed, letting his silence be his answer. “You and me.”
“Sure.” He let his head drop back against the easy chair. “You always smell like Starbursts.”
I laughed and scratched gently along his hairline, and he cocked his head like a dog getting its ears scratched. Candy had cut his hair in the kitchen the other day, buzzing him with the clippers after she’d trimmed each of her boys. The white of his scalp showed through clearly beneath his dark brown hair. He smiled, and I rested my hands on his shoulders. Eyes closed, he crossed his arms over his chest and laid his big hands over mine. “You kill me, Jill,” he said. “You really do.”
I headed upstairs to my bedroom and curled up around Cade, who had propped himself up on the pillows to work on his laptop. He draped his arm lazily across my back and continued to peck at the keyboard with his left hand.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Okay. He said he’d go.”
“That’s good. You must be persuasive.”
I burrowed my head beneath his arm and breathed out a sigh against his chest. Guilt gnawed deep in my belly, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I thought back to the evenings I had spent with Stan, and how even as his arms had comforted me, I knew where the boundaries lay—where I belonged, and with whom. I had felt so lonely then, but my kind of loneliness was nothing more than physical separation from the one I loved. It was nothing next to Elias’s kind—to be broken and sick, shell-shocked, lost inside his own mind that could never quite come home.
I told myself I meant no harm by it. That I carried no intention of touching him in any way that wasn’t chaste. And if he liked it a little more than he should, then perhaps he would remember that he was a twenty-four-year-old man, and he would get up from his easy chair and go out in search of a woman who could offer him more. One who wasn’t pregnant with his brother’s child.
If it had worked even a little, then it would have been worth the world.
Instead, it didn’t work at all.
* * *
The following Wednesday morning Elias climbed into the Jeep without any apparent nervousness. He said almost nothing for the long drive, taking charge of changing out the CDs at intervals, and that was all. At home he never listened to music, but on the floor behind the passenger seat he had a padded black case packed full of CDs arranged in little plastic sleeves, and his taste in music disarmed me. All of his selections were women with sweet soprano voices—Alison Krauss and Faith Hill and Kate Bush. It was a world apart from the music that blasted from the stereo at gun-club meetings. But it seemed to soothe him, and he gazed out at the scenery the whole way, chain-smoking with the window rolled down.
At the VA hospital we settled into the waiting room for a little while, and when they took him back I opened a magazine and prepared for a long wait. But within fifteen minutes he was back again, a pink form and a prescription in one hand, looking satisfied.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it. They’re taking me off the Prozac and putting me on something else.” He held up the paperwork. “I told them I just wanted something to calm me down, and didn’t need all this antidepressant shit that screws with my body. So that’s that.”
“So what they gave you isn’t an antidepressant?”
“No, it’s just some sort of anti-anxiety medication. Pretty cool. It sounds a lot simpler. And they gave me better pain meds, too. You were right.”