Going Overboard (12 page)

I turned onto my back and settled into the throw pillows. Owen snored faintly, and I could feel his thin breath on my neck.

How long has it been since someone hugged me? I wondered. Sure, Ford gave me hugs, and Jody and Courtney occasionally draped their arms around my shoulder or patted my back to say hello, but when was the last time someone gave me a tight, meaningful hug? The kind that squeezes your ribs and makes you feel compact?

So often we take human contact for granted, I think, until we realize we haven't had much of it for quite some time. I lay there stroking Owen's fine, fluffy hair and thinking about a study I once heard about children who fail to thrive and grow if they don't receive enough contact with another human being. Would the same thing happen to adults? I wondered. Could an adult actually fail to grow and thrive without enough affection?

I was fading in and out of sleep, and each time my eyes fell shut, I had visions of Dr. Ashley's blue eyes and the dimples on his cheeks.

That night I dreamed Dr. Ashley was guiding me into Dustin's favorite restaurant with his hand at the small of my back. Then we were sitting at a table together and he reached over to pat my hand. “There's no other place I'd rather be right now,” Dr. Ashley said. He leaned across the table, placing his hand on the side of my cheek, and kissed me slowly, until I had chills down my back and warmth in my stomach.

7
I GUESS YOU COULD SAY I KNOW MY &%$@ NOW

T
he last Tuesday in January, Jody and Courtney came over to watch the president's state of the union address. Under normal circumstances, when our husbands were home, the three of us would ditch the men and get together to watch
Sex and the City
or
Friends
; it was pretty funny that now we were gathering over wine and chocolate cheesecake to watch politics.

Yet no one was laughing when President Bush announced the United States' plan to attack Iraq even without support from the United Nations. His words seemed to wash over us, and none of us dared say aloud what they might mean for our husbands and our families. None of us mentioned “war.” It was as if we had detached ourselves and were living in a realm separate from our normal lives. Time lost all meaning. I couldn't remember what day Dustin had left, or how long he had been gone. But it seemed like forever already.

Everything—the detachment-turned-sudden-deployment, the tension in Iraq—just sort of happened, the idea of it seeping into my consciousness like a creaky floorboard, so that when people
began talking in line at the grocery store about “the war with Iraq” and “troops heading to the Middle East,” it felt like old news to me. It was like watching friends and family
ooh
and
aah
over a newly announced pregnancy, when the mother-to-be has known all along—since that first twinge in her belly and funny taste in her mouth—that she is expecting.

“My husband will be in a war” was all I could think. And the thought never stunned me. It was almost as if the circumstances were meant to be a part of my and Dustin's lives all along, yet we were only just now remembering.

The most painful sort of déjà vu.

It was around this time that I began to feel sick with loneliness. Like grief, the reality of deployment hits everyone at different times, and my time was now. My trigger had been pulled, and the reality of a long deployment with a yet undetermined ending seemed unbearable. I had hit my “wall,” as it is sometimes called, and momentarily felt I couldn't go on.

Days were running into nights and I often couldn't remember if it was Monday or Tuesday or Sunday. But what did it matter anyway? Weekdays are for work and weekends are for family. But I wasn't working. And my family wasn't together. I had slipped through society's loophole and was neither a single girl who could go out and party with her friends, nor a married woman making dinner for her family every night. It was as if my life was on hold, and the long days feeding into restless nights—made even more restless with a newborn baby—began to make me feel heavy and tired.

If only I could curl up in bed and sleep away the next few months, I often thought. But then Ford or Owen would do something really cute, or they would smile at me in a way that was oblivious and innocent, and I knew I had to muster the courage to go on. If only for them.

Ford began asking lots of questions. “Where is Daddy?” he
would say, and “Why did Daddy leave us?” How do you explain “serving the country” to a two-year-old? I wondered. My answers—“Daddy's on that big ship, remember?” and “He's away doing his job”—always seemed to leave Ford more confused than ever.

I felt myself spiraling down to depression. I was so mentally and physically exhausted, my bones ached.

My one saving grace was the toilet.

No, really!

A mental buffer military spouses can depend on is the fact that household chores continue despite all else. The car doesn't stop needing gas. Filters continue to need cleaning. And windows still need washing.

Most military spouses eventually find comfort in these daily tasks. One might even say they become a distraction, whether you realize it at the time or not.

My first “distraction” was the guest bathroom toilet that wouldn't stop running. At first I tried ignoring the steady swooshing sound—which sounded a lot like a miniature waterfall—coming from the bathroom. I even tried willing it to stop. (I had seen something once on
Oprah
or CNN about using brain power to cause things to happen.) But by midafternoon I had had enough and picked up the phone to call the old safety net: my mom. Who, in turn, passed the phone to
her
safety net: Dad.

“Check and see if the chain is hanging from the arm,” Dad said.

I put my hand in the cold water of the tank. “What arm? What chain?”

“There should be a thin metal chain hanging from a bar, and a rubber cap on the end of it,” he said.

I will point out here that I am adamantly against toilets. Not that I don't use them, of course. But I use them for their purpose and move on. I find no pleasure in hanging around, reading a
magazine, and having more contact with the toilet than necessary. In college once, my roommates submitted me to the worst kind of torture by tying my arms and legs and placing me bare bottomed on a public commode.

Porta Potties are my enemy.

So it was no surprise then that I winced when I put my hand farther into the water and sloshed it around. “I can't feel it, Dad,” I said.

“Feel it? You should be able to just see it, Sarah! Are you looking in the tank?”

“No,” I said. “I'm afraid to. I don't want to see what's in there!”

“Sarah, it's fresh water!” I pictured Dad's eyes bugging out of his ruddy face, the way they do when he gets impatient. “And you've already got your hand in it anyway!”

After a long, painful five minutes of Dad failing to see the humor in my fear of toilet water but walking me through the process of plumbing repair anyway, the toilet was fixed, and I felt proud of myself, like I had won a battle or faced one of my worst fears.

But I don't think Dad laughed when I closed the lid of the tank and said with a grin, “So I guess you could say I know my shit now, huh, Dad?”

“Uh, do you need to talk to your mother?”

The following Sunday, Tanner woke me up early. Despite being a patient, even-tempered dog who could almost be overlooked, she was so quiet, at six a.m. she was barking and scratching her paws on the wood of the back door.

I got out of bed and walked hunched and shivering into the living room. The silvery morning light coming through the windows in horizontal beams made me squint and, unfortunately, highlighted all the dust on top of our television. When the stress
of deployment hits, useless household tasks such as cooking and cleaning are unfortunately the first to be forgotten.

Tanner was standing with her nose pressed to the door.

“What is it, Tanner?” I asked.

She barked again and her hind legs nearly came out from under her.

My teeth were chattering. “Do you need to go out? At this time of the morning? Or is there a squirrel somewhere in the bushes?” I peered out the window but couldn't see anything.

Tanner cocked her head and whimpered. Clearly she needed to go, and in a hurry.

“Well, let me get some clothes on,” I said and started to walk away.

But Tanner whined and barked louder. I was afraid she would wake up the boys, so I turned on my heel and said, “Shh! Quiet, girl!”

Her eyes were pleading now, and I knew there was no time to put on clothes. I looked down at my nightshirt with cowgirls on the front, which came down just long enough to cover my rear end. But the backyard was fenced, and who will see me? I thought. So I slipped on a pair of pink flip-flops and headed toward the door again.

“All right, Tanner,” I said. “Have it your way. But make it quick.”

I pressed buttons on the alarm system keypad and waited for it to beep and flash green before I opened the door. A burst of cold air brushed across my legs and the wood blinds banged against the door.

“Go on, girl,” I said, and Tanner scurried over the threshold, limping slightly on her right hind leg. This was a new ailment, adding to the growing list of signs that my childhood pet was aging.

Tanner hurried toward the fence and did her business in the same spot as always: right beside the flowers I'd planted last spring and seen die sometime around Halloween. Lifeless bare twigs poked up through the ground where thriving plants were once covered in tiny blue flowers.

Why that same exact spot? I wondered as I watched her. She could be so neurotic sometimes!

I laughed to myself thinking about the time Tanner chased a leaping gecko into our living room from the back porch. I had run around in my bathrobe trying to catch the lizard in a plastic cup, while Ford squealed with delight, “Mommy, it's not gonna hurt you. The wizard just wants to sit on our couch!”

I had always thought Tanner was mocking me as she watched me hop and leap across the room, screaming each time the gecko got away. She sure could get spiteful!

“Come on, Tanner, let's go!” I called out from the doorway now. She seemed to be finishing up. But after glancing in my direction and seeing me standing there with bare legs and that ridiculous nightshirt, she quickly got interested in sniffing around a pile of discarded seeds under our bird feeder.

I was worried about a cold draft making it into the house and waking the boys, and because this was apparently turning into a morning jaunt, I stepped out onto the concrete patio and closed the back door behind me.

Birds were beginning to chirp from nests high in the trees, eyeing the pile of seeds Tanner was nosing, no doubt. I jogged in place to warm my bare legs, but goose bumps were already spreading from my shins, up my knees and to my thighs. Thank goodness for the privacy fence: I didn't even have on a bra.

“Come on, Tanner!” I called. “Let's go back in.”

She turned and stared at me.

“Come on, Tanner! Now!”

She sat on her haunches and stared.

“I'm not kidding! Come on!”

I involuntarily stomped my right foot—a common signal to Tanner (and Dustin) that I am getting mad. But Tanner just lay down and placed her muzzle on her front paws. She looked at me with sad eyebrows that dipped in the middle.

“Oh, all right,” I said. She could be so demanding. And manipulative!

“Want a treat?” I yelled and she bounded toward the patio.

What a sucker I was! I mean, who had trained whom here? I patted her head and said, “Good girl,” and tried to open the door with my other hand. The shiny gold doorknob was stiff and wouldn't turn. “Oh, come on!” I said and kicked the stoop. Tanner looked up at me and blinked. She seemed to be laughing.

“It's not funny, Tanner! The door won't open.”

She whined and turned in a circle.

I tried the knob again and pushed on the door with my hip.

Nothing.

“No!” I said under my breath. “No, no, no, NO!”

Tanner sat back down on her haunches and looked up at me.

“We're locked out, Tanner.”

I stared at the door in silence for a moment, trying to think of all the neighbors who might have a key to our house. Jody did, of course, but I'd have to walk past three houses to get to hers, and I may
sleep
in a cowgirl nightshirt, but I do have my modesty.

I tiptoed through the wet grass, toward the boys' bedroom window. The blinds were closed, but I smooshed my head against the glass trying to get a glimpse between the slats. I couldn't see anything except the yellow glow coming from the Superman night-light Lauren had given Ford.

Owen would wake up soon, and then, like dominoes, his crying would wake up Ford, who would be scared when he couldn't find me in the house. I had no choice but to leave the backyard and the safety of the fence to find someone to help.

When I came around to the front yard, Brent and Danielle's house still looked dark and sleepy. There weren't any lights on as far as I could see.

But maybe that's a good thing, I thought. Then they'll be too tired to notice my pajamas and unshaven legs.

I rapped my hand on the glass door and pulled on the hem of my shirt, trying at least to bring it far enough down to cover my panties. Puffs of white breath escaped between my chattering teeth. I hopped up and down to warm myself.