for the fire alarm, they found Ryker standing over my body screaming my name.
“When the girls came out and told me what was going on, I ran in after you,” Tosha continued. Her eyes filled with tears. “I met him in the entryway. He was carrying you like an infant. You looked dead, Natalie, and he was screaming for someone to help you.” Bill lowered his head as she spoke. “When the cops and the fire department came, Ryker was screaming orders at them and trying to get into the ambulance with you. They figured out pretty quickly he was messed up, so they called another ambulance and brought him here.”
Bill spoke up. “I talked to your dad, Hon. He’s on his way.” I’d briefly forgotten that I’d given Bill my dad’s phone number while Ryker was overseas. I wanted to be able to be reached at all times. “Your mom is staying behind with your brother.”
At least I could be thankful for something. I wouldn’t have to face my mom and all of her assertions that soldier boyfriends would lead to no good.
“I’m so sorry, Natalie. Ryker hasn’t been right for weeks. I should have never called you when I didn’t hear from him.” Bill ran his hands through his hair and sat back in the chair.
“He’s sick, Bill. It’s not your fault.” Tosha spoke over me as I stared into the space at the end of my bed. “He needs help and maybe this will be his chance to get it.”
“The police want me to press charges,” I said to neither one of them in particular. Raising my hands to my eyes, I started to cry. “God, this is such a mess.”
And that? That’s when the fight left me. The fight for Ryker, the fight for us, and the fight for anything I thought I knew. In between my sobs of resignation, my dad came in and talked to Bill outside the curtain for a few minutes. Tosha stayed until my dad settled in, then she went back to the dorm.
I barely remember the exchange with my father, except that the nurses expressed concern about some “wounds” on my arms. They told him what they thought it was, and they were right, but I couldn’t tell my dad that. I just nodded when he said I’d be coming home with him and taking a semester off. I was barely passing my classes that semester, anyway, so I’d have to retake most of them.
Before I was ready to leave the next day, with nothing more than a nasty headache, I had to talk to the police again.
“I’ll sign whatever you want,” I said, “I just want him to stay away from me forever.” Walking out of the hospital that morning, I didn’t care if I ever saw Ryker Manning again. My dad told me a few weeks later that Ryker was put on probation and was required to receive a mental health evaluation. I was thankful that he’d at least have the chance to be helped. My mom made it a point, just after Christmas, to tell me I’d done Ryker a favor because with his arrest and probation, he probably wouldn’t be able to reenlist in the National Guard.
I hadn’t thought of that. I just wanted to pull myself out of his downward spiral, so I requested a restraining order; which may have been slight overkill since I was stuck in Pennsylvania for what would have been my Spring semester anyway. I knew that he wasn’t healthy enough to reenlist when he’d started talking about it, and I don’t know if it was a reaction to my mother telling me, but I started to feel guilty about stopping his life from going the way he’d wanted it to.
Still, by the time I got back to campus the summer before what would have been my senior year, but was my junior year re-do, I was living off-campus with a new cell phone and strict orders to stay away from all things Ryker Manning. It was easy to do when I was at home—to not think about him or wonder how was doing—but when I was back in South Hadley, I spent a lot of my time in the first few weeks looking over my shoulder and swearing I saw him. Right up through my graduation day two years later, when I swear I saw him through the crowd.
But. Nothing. He was gone. It was like he vanished into thin