Colt
I walk through the house, calling Alice’s name. When there’s no answer, I move to the kitchen, expecting to find her pouring coffee, but she’s not there either. Turning, I catch sight of her in the backyard, speaking quietly to her hens as she sprinkles feed, a galvanized bucket hooked on her arm.
I knock once on the screen door to avoid startling her and push it open, stepping outside.
Alice turns and, when she spots me, her face splits into the wide smile I’m quickly becoming attached to.
Seeing her out here, framed by the early morning light, brings back every memory of our kiss.
It’s been almost a week, and I can still feel her lips against mine.
Can still hear her soft whimpers as she moved against me.
My eyes travel to the black Australorp, the meekest of the three hens. “Yeah, I let myself in. Hope that’s alright.” I cough, trying to clear the mental image of Alice on her back, legs wrapped around my waist. “Where’s Grant?”
Alice wipes a strand of hair from her eyes. “He went to visit a client over in Jasper.” Her gaze diverts as she adds, her voice a touch higher, “Said he won’t be back until tonight.”
The implication hangs there, that the house is empty for the first time since we kissed. My body reacts before I can stop the mental images. I can’t stay here with Grant gone. If I do, I’m going to reach for Alice again, and this time, there’s no way I’ll stop unless she asks me to.
I glance back at the house, then at her. “We’ve been making good progress,” I say, sounding a little like the sergeant I used to be. “Maybe we oughta’ get out of here for a while. Just to avoid burnout.” I glance up, gauging her reaction, half hoping she says she has a better idea.
Alice’s smile widens. “I’d like that.”
The river unfurls like a ribbon through the dense cathedral of trees. We’re at a spot where the current slows, though closer to the center, the water churns into frothy whitecaps. The air smells of mud and decaying sweetgum leaves, which have already started to drop.
The hardshell kayaks scuff against the truck bed as I haul them out and drag them toward the water’s edge. A bright blue dragonfly darts above the reeds where I drop them. I pull a life jacket out of the first kayak and turn to Alice. “Here,” I say, holding it open for her.
She glances up from the ground where she’s adjusting her sneaker. “Oh, I don’t need it. The water’s like four feet deep here.”
I wait until she stands and then take her wrist, guiding her arm through the sleeve.
“Actually, yes. I’d love a lifejacket, Colt.” She laughs as I finish securing it, clicking the buckles and pulling the straps tight. I tug the jacket a few times to test it, my hands lingering a beat too long.
After I put on my own jacket, we push off from shore, sliding into the water with a thump-splash.
Soon, the only sound is our paddles slicing through the current and a woodpecker hammering at a tree deeper in the forest. We move upstream, traveling beneath a canopy of loblollies and the occasional bald cypress, bent knees peeking out from the surface.
Cicadas buzz peacefully overhead, but come late afternoon their melody will reach a fever pitch.
A hawk swoops down—a Red-shouldered, by the looks of it. I don’t realize I’ve stopped paddling to watch it circle until Alice speaks.
“You really like birds, huh?” she says.
I start stroking again, the water swirling in eddies behind my blade.
It takes me time to find my voice, because I’ve grown more than accustomed to keeping my thoughts inside.
“When I was deployed,” I venture, keeping my eyes fixed on the horizon where the river disappears into the trees.
“Birds became… I don’t know. A good sign.
” I stop paddling, letting the kayak drift.
“They stop making sounds during gunfire. Their silence seemed to coincide with something going wrong, or something coming. So if I could hear them…” I shrug.
“It felt like everything was okay.” Alice finishes my thought for me.
I shrug. “Wasn’t a perfect science.”
Alice doesn’t say anything for a long time. She leans back in her kayak, paddle resting across her lap, and stares up at the vast, pale blue sky. “Why did you leave the Marines, Colt?”
The way she says it opens my ribs. There’s no accusation. No demand. Not even a note of tentativeness. She asks like she’s asking about my favorite meal (steak, mashed potatoes, green beans if there’s any room left on the plate).
And because she asks it this way, I find myself responding in the same fashion.
“I was a section leader,” I say, my eyes on the water.
“I was checking the perimeter. There was a…communication breakdown. My own gunmen were mistaken for enemy fire by another unit.” I force myself to breathe steady inhales and exhales through my nose.
“They were killed in friendly fire. I suffered a secondary injury, but that’s it.
” I tap my shoulder, indicating the scar she touched the last time we were in this river.
“After that, I decided not to reenlist.”
I don’t mention the obvious. How it was my job to keep them safe.
How I failed them, and was presented a Purple Heart anyway.
And how the day I watched my men die was the day I realized everything, all of it, was pointless.
Because after all that, after everything we’d survived—killed by our own people?
Alice sits up. I meet her eyes, afraid of what I’ll see there.
When she speaks though, it’s to say, simply, “That’s a terrible thing that happened.
” She doesn’t offer the platitudes I’ve heard before.
Like how it’s not my fault, or that I did my best. Free passes that make me want to put my fist through a wall, because if my best means people dying, what does that say about me?
Instead, Alice says only, “Bad things happen. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good in the world.” She smiles softly. “Like your birds.”
I nod, because I don’t know what else to do. And because I’m thinking on what she’s saying. That bad existing doesn’t deplete the good. It just…sits beside it. Co-existing. We paddle on, the current picking up as the river narrows.
“What about you, Alice?” I ask, relishing the mild burn in my arms as I paddle.
“What happened while I was gone?” I pause, because the last thing I want to do is put her on the spot.
But I need to know. I need to know so I can ensure she remains happy.
“You seemed so upbeat in your letters. But Maggie hinted that you weren’t telling me everything. ”
Alice looks at me, a forced smile on her lips. “I was happy,” she insists.
“Alice,” I say evenly.
Alice sighs, her cheeks turning a light shade of pink.
She opens her mouth to speak. Closes it.
Opens it once more. “In high school, I dated Travis. I mentioned that.” She brushes a hand over her life jacket, avoiding my gaze.
“One day after school, I was reading a book, waiting for my mom to pick me up. Travis jerked it out of my hands and started reading the scene aloud to his friends.” The pink hue in Alice’s cheeks deepens.
“It was a romance book. And I’d just hit a pretty explicit scene.
” Alice purses her lips, then shakes her head.
“They were laughing really hard, and after that everyone started calling me Dickens, even though that made no sense.”
Alice accentuates these last few words as if she’s more upset by the literary blunder than the bullying. I can hear the pain in her voice behind the deflection though, and it makes me want to find these boys—each one of them in turn—and hurt them. Badly.
“They acted like I was some sort of pervert. And my friends distanced themselves.” Alice looks at me then, nodding her understanding.
“And I get that. I do. High school was…” She laughs, but it sounds hollow.
“You know how it could be. But honestly, I was fine. It wasn’t a big deal.
” Her voice grows quiet. “It’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through. ”
“It is a big deal,” I press. “Being targeted like that? And abandoned? It’s fucked up.” I watch her for a second, thinking through the timeline. “And your parents? They were gone a lot during this time, yeah?”
Alice turns her head, looking at a crane standing motionless in the shallows. “Yeah, but Grant needed them. He was under a lot of pressure with his scholarship.”
“You needed them too.” My voice is harsher than I intended, because it’s not her I’m angry with.
It’s Travis. It’s her friends, her parents even.
And me, because I soaked up every optimistic word she offered in those letters with depression-fueled desperation.
The kind that forms from homesickness, exhaustion, and watching people do vile, nightmare-inducing things to one another.
“You were too young to be left by yourself,” I continue. “You were dealing with shit alone while they were cheering in the stands.”
“I was happy,” Alice interrupts, and even though her eyes shimmer, her chin is tilted stubbornly. “I found things to be happy about, Colt. There are always things to be happy about if you pay attention.”
I shake my head, unable to follow this…this naive line of thinking.
Alice paddles in silence for a few moments, and I follow her lead, doing the same. Her voice is softer when she begins speaking again. “My dad told you about the tide impacting y’alls fishing, but did he ever tell you about tidal bores?”
I squint at her, entirely lost.
Alice stretches her hand toward the river’s current.
“When the tide is rising and coming in, the ocean can push a wall of water up the river. It forms a sort of tidal wave, and that wave forces the river to defy its natural, gravitational pull toward the sea and reverse direction.” Alice laughs at that, almost childlike in her amusement, and shakes her head.
“Our whole lives, we go along thinking some things can’t be changed.
The sky is always blue. A bird has two wings.
” She smiles at the mention of birds. “And a river runs downhill. And then, one day…” Alice snaps her fingers. “Here comes a tidal bore.”
I’m thinking about what she’s saying, and what she’s not saying, when we hit rapids—nothing life-threatening, but enough to require focus.
The water turns white and choppy, spraying over the bows of our kayaks.
Alice lets out a sudden laugh as she navigates a tight turn, her face lighting up from adrenaline.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” she cries out, her laughter ringing through the air.
“You’re doing great.” My eyes are glued to her, ensuring myself she’s okay. I open my mouth to say more. To apologize for not responding to her letters. To ask about the last one I received from her.
The one currently folded in my wallet.
But the sky opens up, the humidity cleaved through by rain. It isn’t a drizzle. It’s a gully washer that turns the river into white noise from the sheer force of it. The temperature plummets as I yell over the downpour, “We need to get out of here. The rapids are too strong further down.”
“I know,” she shouts back, grinning through the water streaming down her face. “I grew up here too, remember?”
By the time we get the kayaks back to the truck and drive to her place, we’re both soaked to the bone. We stand on her porch, shivering, as Alice ducks her head inside and announces that Grant’s still gone.
She bites her lip, her eyes darting to my truck. “You want to…come inside?”
The rain has plastered her clothes to her body, and she’s so beguiling with her wet hair and nervous smile that I desperately want to say yes.
Because this woman is everything I’m not—hopeful, resilient, happy.
And I want to put my mouth on every part of her and tell her exactly how perfect she is.
And that if anyone wishes to hurt her again, they’ll have to get through me first.
But I know…I know…that I still have a lot of healing to do, and I don’t want to drag her down into the regret that darkens my mind.
With Herculean strength, I mutter, “Thanks, but I should go. Need to run to the hardware store and get those rails for the porch.”
Alice’s face falls in fleeting disappointment. “Okay,” she says softly, and for once, Alice doesn’t hide behind a smile. “I’ll see you later?”
“Sure will,” I promise.
I turn and stride toward my truck before I can change my mind. The second I’m in the driver’s seat, I throw the truck in reverse, muttering to myself, “Drive away, Colt. Drive the fuck away.” I start down the road, wipers slapping against the windshield.
It’s physically painful leaving Alice behind.
Every foot of distance between me and Alice with her wide, vulnerable eyes and her full lips asking, You want to come inside?
is like a rope around my neck. By the time I reach the end of the road, the feeling is unbearable.
I can’t breathe. Can’t think. My mind is an endless loop of:
There are always things to be happy about.
There are always things to be happy about if you pay attention.
I slam on the brakes, the tires skidding on wet asphalt. The truck fishtails slightly before coming to a dead stop. I sit there, white-knuckling the steering wheel, the engine idling in the rain.