Chapter 24 Nate
twenty-four
nate
The papers sat on my kitchen counter like a live grenade, and I couldn't stop staring at them. Sarah Elizabeth Davis. The name that had once meant everything to me, then nothing, and now…
I poured myself a glass of water with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, my mind spinning back to another version of myself—one I'd worked so hard to forget.
* * *
Biloxi, Mississippi. September 2005.
The smell hit you first… mold, sewage, and something else, something organic and wrong that you learned not to think about too hard.
Hurricane Katrina had come and gone a week ago, but the devastation still looked fresh, like the storm had just finished carving through the Gulf Coast with deliberate cruelty.
I was supposed to be helping coordinate relief efforts, but mostly I was just trying not to throw up.
My fatigues were already soaked through with sweat despite the early morning hour.
My head felt like someone had been using it for target practice, and I wanted a drink- a beer, a shot, anything- so bad, I was shaking.
I hadn't yet fully recovered from the night two weeks ago, the night Chief Petty Officer Parker had found me passed out in my rack at 0400, reeking of vodka and vomit.
Based on the empty bottle he found on the floor, Chief Parker calculated, with the same clinical precision I'd later learn in nursing school, that my blood alcohol content had probably peaked somewhere north of .4. Potentially lethal. Should have been lethal.
"You know what you did, Crawford?" Parker had said, personally marching me to the shower and pouring black coffee down my throat until I could stand upright. "You not only almost destroyed your entire military career, you almost fucking died."
I'd nodded, but honestly, neither prospect had seemed particularly tragic at the time.
"Lucky for you, there's a hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and they need volunteers for disaster relief.
So I told the CO you'd volunteered to deploy to Biloxi to ride it out at the Seabee base and help with recovery efforts.
" His voice carried the kind of disappointed authority that cut deeper than any formal reprimand.
"We'll deal with your other problems when you get back. If you get back."
That's how I'd ended up in Mississippi, supposedly coordinating with relief organizations and the USNS Comfort, but mostly just trying to stay sober long enough to not get anyone killed.
Then the Red Cross nurses showed up, and everything changed.
There were about twenty of them, a motley crew of women ranging from fresh-faced twenty-somethings to silver-haired veterans who looked like they'd seen every disaster the world could throw at them.
They'd been deployed from hospitals across the country—Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, everywhere—and they moved with the kind of practiced efficiency that reminded me of the best corpsmen I'd known.
"You Crawford?" The woman addressing me was maybe forty-five, with salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail and eyes that missed nothing. "I'm Linda Kowalski, team supervisor. We're told you're our Navy liaison."
"Yes, ma'am," I managed, trying to project competence despite feeling like death warmed over.
"Good. We need someone who knows military logistics and won't faint at the sight of blood." She looked me up and down with the kind of assessment I recognized from battlefield triage. "You look like hell, sailor, but you're standing upright, so you'll do."
What followed were the longest and most educational weeks of my life.
These women—and they were all women, I realized, which challenged every stupid stereotype I'd carried about nursing being somehow "lesser" than what we did as corpsmen—were nothing like I'd expected.
They worked eighteen-hour days in conditions that would have broken lesser people.
No electricity, no running water, no real medical facilities.
Just skill, determination, and an apparently bottomless well of compassion.
I watched them deliver a baby in a Walmart parking lot while the mother waited in line for FEMA assistance, the asphalt so hot it burned through the soles of our boots.
I saw them counsel a man who'd lost his entire family while simultaneously treating his infected wounds and helping him fill out insurance paperwork.
They were nurses, social workers, therapists, and case managers all rolled into one.
"How do you do it?" I asked Linda one evening as we cleaned up after treating what felt like our thousandth patient of the day. "How do you just... keep going?"
She looked at me with those sharp eyes, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she could see straight through to the mess I was inside.
"You do it because someone has to," she said simply. "And because tomorrow there'll be another person who needs help, and the day after that, and the day after that. You can either be the kind of person who shows up, or you can be the kind who finds excuses. But you can't be both."
The truth of her words hollowed me out, because I knew exactly which kind of person I'd been since coming back from Iraq. The excuse-finding kind. The kind who drowned his problems instead of facing them.
Two weeks later, when Hurricane Rita threatened to make landfall and the evacuation order came down, I got to see what "showing up" really meant.
"All non-essential personnel need to evacuate immediately," the Red Cross coordinator announced during our morning briefing. "Buses will be here in two hours."
I expected the nurses to start packing, to follow protocol like any sensible person would. Instead, Linda stood up and crossed her arms.
"We're not leaving," she said, her voice carrying the kind of quiet authority that brooked no argument.
"Ma'am, I understand your dedication, but—"
"No, you don't. You don’t understand at all." Another nurse, a young woman from Portland whose name I'd never learned, was on her feet now too. "These people have been through hell. They've lost everything. We're not abandoning them now just because another storm might come through."
One by one, all twenty nurses stood up. To a person, they refused evacuation.
"These people are suffering," Linda said, speaking for all of them. "They've been through enough. Evacuate if you want to, but we're not leaving."
I stared at them—this ragtag group of women from every corner of America, every age and background you could imagine—and felt something shift inside my chest. Something that had been broken since Fallujah.
They weren't leaving. When faced with danger, with the easy option of walking away, they were choosing to stay. They were choosing the people who needed them over their own safety.
Rita never made landfall with any real force, but that wasn't the point. The point was that twenty nurses had looked at a community full of scared, desperate people and said, unequivocally, "We're not leaving you."
I'd never seen anything like it.
* * *
I blinked, the memory fading, and found myself back in my kitchen, staring at legal papers that threatened to take away the most important thing in my world. My hands had stopped shaking, but I felt hollow.
I'd carried that memory with me through the rest of my enlistment, through my separation from the Navy, through years of aimless drifting that followed.
I took random classes at the community college—intro to psychology, basic computer skills, whatever filled the schedule and qualified for my GI Bill benefits.
Nothing with any real direction or purpose, just.. . existing.
That's where I met Sarah, in a completely pointless "Introduction to Philosophy" class that I'd only taken because it met the general education requirements and fit my work schedule at the warehouse.
She was twenty-seven, like me, working at a coffee shop and taking random classes without any clear goal.
We were both killing time, both avoiding making real decisions about our lives.
She had an easy laugh and didn't ask too many questions about why a former Navy corpsman was taking freshman-level classes with eighteen-year-olds.
When she got pregnant, neither of us knew what to do.
"I don't think I want to be a mother," she'd said, sitting on my couch with the pregnancy test in her hands. "I don't think I'm cut out for it."
"Whatever you decide, I'll support," I'd told her, and I'd meant it. "One hundred percent, whatever you choose."
We'd gone to Planned Parenthood together, where they'd separated us so Sarah could make her decision without pressure.
The counselors were amazing. Non-judgmental, informative, completely supportive of whatever choice she made.
When we left, I'd told her again: Whatever she decided, I'd respect it completely.
She chose to keep the baby.
"Okay," I'd said, and something had crystallized in my mind with startling clarity. "Then I need to get my shit together. I can't keep drifting around if I'm going to be somebody's father."
Sarah's pregnancy was brutal. Preterm premature rupture of membranes at twenty-six weeks, which meant months of hospital bed rest and medical bills that nearly bankrupted me.
But I was there every day, bringing her books and drinking terrible hospital coffee, holding her hand through the fear and uncertainty.
When Paige was born—tiny and perfect and completely helpless—I'd felt something I'd never experienced before. Not just love, but purpose. This small person needed me, depended on me completely, and for the first time since Iraq, I felt like I had a reason to be alive.
Sarah had looked at our daughter like she was a beautiful stranger.
Three months later, she was gone.
"I told you from the beginning I wasn't cut out for this," she'd said, standing in our apartment doorway with a single suitcase. "I tried, Nate. I really tried. But I can't do it. I'm not mother material."
I'd held Paige—three months old and completely innocent—and watched Sarah walk away. And in that moment, sitting alone with my daughter in our tiny apartment, Linda Kowalski's words had come back to me with startling clarity.
You can either be the kind of person who shows up, or you can be the kind who finds excuses. But you can't be both.
I looked down at Paige, sleeping peacefully in my arms, completely trusting that I would take care of her.
I had to become the kind of person who showed up.
That was when I'd remembered the Red Cross nurses and their unwavering commitment. The way they'd refused to abandon their post when things got dangerous.
I'd applied to nursing school the next week.
That was when the military bearing had really kicked in. Not just for Paige, but for me. Because if I fell apart, she fell apart. If I failed, she suffered.
Eleven years of holding it together. Eleven years of being enough for both of us. Eleven years of proving to myself that I could be the kind of person who showed up, day after day, no matter what.
And now Sarah was back, with lawyers and legal papers and the biological claim that trumped everything I'd built.
I looked down at the custody petition again, and all those old voices started whispering in my head. The ones that said I wasn't enough. That I'd never been enough.
I couldn't save those Marines in Fallujah.
I couldn't save the little girl in the pink shirt.
I couldn't make Sarah want to stay.
And now, apparently, I couldn't even keep the daughter I'd raised from the moment she drew her first breath.
Maybe I'd been fooling myself all along. Maybe Tasha and this perfect weekend had been just another temporary thing, another good moment before the inevitable collapse.
Maybe I really wasn't enough, and it never had been.
And maybe Sarah was just here to prove it.