“I hadn’t seen him for… a year. Maybe two,” I tell her. My memory from the first few years after I left the Marines is hazy and full of holes, huge gaps where I know time passed but I’ve got no recollection of it. “So when he called me up and wanted to go drinking, I didn’t realize—”
What, that his problem was quite so bad? That Hernandez was calling me out of the blue because he’d destroyed every other relationship he had? That this wouldn’t be his first attempt, only his last?
“—how far gone he was,” I finally say, which doesn’t do it justice. “So we got drunk, went back to his place. I passed out on the couch. And he shot himself in the bathroom.”
A million things have slipped through the cracks in my brain, but that night couldn’t be one of them. It took so long: the walk from the couch. Opening the door. The distance between seeing what was inside and understanding it.
What no one tells you is that tragedy doesn’t strike, it slithers. It’s slow and steady and takes its time with you. It felt like I stood there, door open, for an hour while I put the clues together: the noise that had woken me up. The blood. The smell of gunpowder. Mike, unmoving.
“We weren’t even that close any more,” I tell her. “I always wondered if it was something I said to him.”
Kat says nothing, and finally, I look back at her.
“You’re supposed to say of course not, there was nothing you could do, things happen, blah blah blah,” I say.
“You already know,” she says. “You’re here because you know.”
Here’s what I don’t tell her, not yet: that Hernandez wasn’t the first, just the loudest. That the guys who killed themselves by getting loaded every night until they drove off a bridge, or who overdosed, or who died some other accidental death were tragic but Mike Hernandez was shameful. That his death was an admission of weakness that everyone wanted to sweep under the rug so they could blame anything but the truth that he’d been failed.
I don’t tell her that I’ve never wondered why Mike couldn’t live with himself anymore. I’ve only wondered why I can.
“Two weeks later I went to a combat PTSD support group for the first time,” I say. “And I felt guilty. Like I was taking advantage of him, somehow. That’s where I met Gideon.”
Kat nods, and looks at our hands for a moment. I bite my lips together, wondering what she must think of me right now. But she stayed.
Holy shit: she stayed. She’s here, holding my hand, the two of us together in a silence that feels like being wrapped in clouds. I don’t know what I wanted her to say, but maybe it was this. Maybe it was nothing.
“Can I tell you something kind of terrible?” she says, after a little while.
“God. Yes. Please,” I say, my thoughts getting too loud.
“I’m kind of glad that Earth Sciences 101 wasn’t your rock bottom,” she says.
“You’re glad that things got worse from there?” I ask, and her eyes go wide.
“That’s not what I’m—oh, shut up,” she says when I start grinning. “I’m glad I wasn’t the worst thing that happened to you. For completely selfish reasons.”
“I wish you’d been my worst problem.”
“You used to come to class black and blue,” she says, and our hands are still joined, and she’s absently rubbing the pad of her thumb over my knuckles. I want her to do it forever. “I don’t think I was even your worst problem that semester.”
“No,” I admit. “I had a bad habit of getting blackout drunk and starting fights.”
She takes a deep breath and rubs her eyes under her glasses with her other hand.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s exactly as bad as I always suspected.”
“I’ve got a nasty scar from being slashed with a broken bottle,” I tell her. I don’t know why now, except it feels right: here in the morning sunlight, Kat leaning across the breakfast bar, wearing my shirt. Looking nothing at all like she might leave. I want to hand over a list for inspection, say: here it is, everything that’s wrong with me. Do your worst.
“The one on your ribs?” she asks, and doesn’t even look surprised.
“Oh, come on,” I tease her. “Have some mercy and tell me you thought that one was from knife-fighting to save an orphan.”
“If you had a scar from saving an orphan you’d never stop telling everyone about it,” she says.
“Sure I would. I sleep sometimes.”
Kat squeezes my hand one more time, then releases me to walk around the breakfast bar. I turn toward her on my stool and she comes up to me, standing between my legs, suddenly so close that I feel like she’s washed over me.