It wasn't the house we had grown up in. My parents had decided to downsize shortly after my twin sister had left home for college. And that hadn't been long after the fight that saw me thrown out of the house and my enlisting in the army.
My name is David Smith, and I had just three days before retired from the army after serving twenty-three years. I had been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq where I worked my way up from private to sergeant kicking in doors on counter-insurgency operations up until a booby trap blasted shrapnel all along my left arm and leg. That got me flown out to Germany for surgeries and a month of rehabilitation. It still didn't sit right with me that I got the same Purple Heart as my two squadmates ahead of me in the stack who didn't survive. After that the army assigned me to train the next waves of door kickers to not make the mistakes I had made. It had been a good career. I prayed that what I taught the boys helped them come home once their jobs were done.
I walked up to the door of the house and knocked.
"It's open!" called a voice from inside.
I entered into a modest living room with a couch, coffee table, and two bookcases. The bookcases were bare, their contents presumably in the boxes on the floor.
"Hey, it's me," I announced.
A woman who exceeded my forty-one years of age by a mere fifteen minutes stepped through the doorway to the kitchen and right up to me for a hug. She was dressed a Pearl Jam t-shirt and tight jeans. I was in a short sleeve PT shirt and fatigue pants, both far too old to be fit for inspection.
"Hey, Dana," I said hugging her back. She held the hug as if we hadn't just seen each other the day before at mom's funeral, but since the last we saw each other before that was five years before at dad's funeral I didn't mind the duration.
She relaxed the embrace only enough to look up the head and a half difference between us. She had beautiful brown eyes, eyes people had once said were exactly like mine, and her dark brown hair was cut short to fall at her jawline.
"Thanks for coming," she said.
"I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner. It isn't fair that you had to take care of everything here on your own."
"Mom had advanced directives in place, so the funeral was taken care of. And I wasn't alone, Robbie and Simone were a real help with the first part of the packing at least."
"Sounds like you raised them right. You said they headed back home last night?"
"Yeah, they got the red eye back to Phoenix. I had to put my foot down that they wouldn't miss any classes helping their old mother at this."
"Hey now, don't go talking old, we're kind of joined at the hip in the age department and I'm not looking over the tops of any hills quite yet."
"In case you hadn't noticed you are a retiree." She gave me one last squeeze and stepped back. As she did she let her hands run down my arms. She stopped when she felt my scars, her eyes glancing down to see what had been covered by the suit I had worn yesterday. I could see her swallowing back some emotions even if she turned without looking back up to my eyes.
"There's some coffee in the kitchen," she said walking away. I paused for a moment to take in the sight of her. She had matured since we last spent any appreciable time together. She was the mother of twins herself, eighteen year old Robbie and Simone. Still, she was fit, clearly following an effective training regimen. Her choice of jeans showed off the curves she had gained to nice effect. She was perhaps even more beautiful than on that terrible night.
"David?"
I shook my head to clear away the reverie. She had stopped in the doorway looking back at me, her body turned in profile to the sunlight coming in from the kitchen windows. Yes, absolutely beautiful.
"Sorry, I was wool gathering there," I said.
She let a moment pass between us, then said, "Come on, we have work to do."
"Yes, ma'am, on your six."
Dana gave a real smile at that.
"I might come to like that," she said.
I followed her into the kitchen and over coffee caught up a bit and went over the plan for the day. This was perhaps the first time we'd had to talk in person outside of a funeral. We had exchanged letters, and I could never possibly say how much those letters meant to me when I was deployed. In those years she told me about life at college getting an accounting degree. She told me about what was happening with our parents, probably relaying what mom had written to me in letters I never opened. I had kept the ones where Dana told me about getting married and later having her twins kept at the bottom of the stack. Those challenged the equilibrium I had struggled to build in those years. A few years later we had discovered Facebook and kept a closer correspondence that way. That was how she told me of her divorce when she caught him cheating. She had made me promise not to go AWOL to deal with the asshole. I kept the promise and arranged for leave before flying across the country to put the fear of god into him.
She and her kids had already cleared out a study and the guest bedroom downstairs. I was going to paint those rooms while she packed up the master bedroom upstairs. I took a few measurements for square footage, then made a list for drop cloths, brushes, rollers, and the rest. As I was heading out I called out to Dana that I would come back with burgers for lunch. She told me what she wanted and it was exactly as it had been since we were kids.
Getting the paint was a real fiasco as it seemed no one at the chain hardware store seemed to know a damn thing about customer service. I was looking up professional supply places on my phone by the time someone trained to use the color matcher arrived to make the blend.
All told I was an hour later than I expected getting back to the house with lunch. I had called Dana to let her know I was behind schedule, and I thought she sounded like she was fighting back some emotions. I didn't push and ask why, our mother had just died after all and Dana had always been the more forgiving of the two of us.
"I'm back!" I called coming in the front door.
"Kitchen," responded Dana. The tone of her voice flashed back memories of mom when she was angry about something. I brought the food to the kitchen and I found Dana sitting at the kitchen island, back to the doorway. I stepped around her to set down the food. She turned to me with a sad look and forced a smile for my sake. Near her on the island were a stack of mismatched journal-sized books and a glass of wine.
"I'm not sure how well that's gonna pair with the onion rings," I quipped, "but the cheeseburger should be a complement."
Her smile became sincere for a moment at that.
"Thanks, I needed a laugh, and this," she said taking the burger I offered. "They got it right?"
"No ketchup, no onions, extra pickles. I even peeked inside," I said completing the ritual. We had both been picky eaters as kids, but MRE's had beaten that out of me in a hurry. I finished distributing the food, including milk shakes for the both of us.
"I'm going to unload the truck before eating."
"No, we are," she said.
"Sit down, you've been working all morning."
The good humor slipped from her face.
"Not as much as I hoped. And there's no point in letting your food get cold."
She juggled the bags and larger accessories while I lugged the two five gallon buckets of paint into the house. Between us it was a single trip, so once the supplies were in the guest bedroom we returned to the island.
I sat across from her and tucked into the food. In a transition from my burger to the milkshake I looked up and saw that had barely been picking at hers. She was lost in thought, her eyes glancing at the books.
"What are those?" I asked.
Dana jumped at the words, pulled hard out of her memories.
"They're mom's diaries." She fought to keep her face still as she said that, but all the years apart had not dulled my being able to read the emotions as they passed. My sister was hurting, and it was because of something she had read in those books.
I set my lunch aside. My appetite was gone.
"What did she write?"
Dana closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, and swallowed.
"What do you remember about that night?"
The proverbial elephant in the room.
"Everything," I said. "You and mom got into an argument. I was coming to see what was going on and dad was coming from the other direction. I was just outside the door to your room when you said something like, 'you can't stop us', and she slapped you. I stopped thinking at that point, I just jumped in, got between the two of you and shoved her backward, hard enough that she fell over. Dad grabbed my arm and I just wheeled on him."
Memory of the impact of my fist to my father's face made me flex my hand.
"I hit him, and I think from there it was just rage on rage. There was nothing in me then that would've stopped me from killing him if I had gotten the upper hand. Suppose I should be grateful that he was the stronger man in that moment. I regained my control when I fell onto the front steps. Dad was yelling, 'Don't show your face here again,' and slammed the door on me. Then I got in my car and drove to some parking lot where I didn't sleep for the rest of the night. The next morning I convinced a recruiter to let me enlist once he cleaned my split lip."
Dana had tears running down her cheeks despite her stony expression. Her eyes were staring through and beyond me at that point in the past.
"That night was years coming," she said. "Do you remember that we were supposed to double date with Shari and Alex that night? And they both canceled on us and we decided we'd just go out together?"
I nodded. "Yeah, I do. Some early release movie."
"The American Pie sequel. We were going to eat at a proper restaurant as the date had been planned, and then the movie." Dana licked her lips nervously. "And maybe something else afterward."
They way she said the last pulled my attention back to her from my memory. My pulse quickened with an old feeling I had tried to bury the past two decades.
"I was putting on makeup when mom came into my room and flatly said that we weren't to leave the house that night. I demanded to know why and she said that if our dates canceled there wasn't any reason to go out. My voice started rising when I accused her of treating our dates as if they were the chaperones for you and me. She snapped back that she knew I was trying to seduce you. I yelled back, 'Well David and I are going and you can't stop us!' Then the slap and everything you said. When dad slammed the door I ran to my room and yelled for you from my window, but you were already in your car and driving away."
We sat in silence for a moment, both of us wiping away tears.
"Why," I asked, the buried shameful feeling clawing its way back to the surface, "why would mom think you were trying to seduce me?"
Dana looked up and caught my eye. She made the perfect combination of a laugh and sob.
"Because, you sweet beautiful silly boy, I
was
trying to seduce you. I have been in love with you since we were sixteen, and I was sure you loved me just as much. When Alex and Shari canceled I realized it would be my perfect chance. We would go out, have a dinner like adults, watch a sexy movie, and after I would ask you to drive to Miller's Lane where I would profess my love to you and we would make love and you would be my first and I would be yours."
The end of her last sentence came out in a rush, as if it just broke free of as much repression as my real love for her was.
"I don't think," I said, "that I would have been brave enough to go through with it."
Dana looked stricken, like I had just thrown her dreams to the ground.
