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“Men know NOTHING about a woman’s reproductive system at all, much less their menstrual period. He’d not have been any help and would probably have gone to the woman I went to in the apartment complex, for help.” She frowned. “It was probably one of my darkest days, other than Ella dying.”
There was silence for a moment and Shep finally said, “I’m sorry, Willow.”
There were no words for how she felt, so instead, she just nodded toward him.
Giving her a wry look, he said, “Do you remember when you called me a dumb box of rocks?”
Groaning, Willow said, “Yes, and it was stupid of me to lower myself to that level with you. I’m sorry I said it, Shep. I really am.”
He held up his hands. “I had it coming, looking back on it. Sitting here and hearing the rest of your family’s trials, it helps me to see how it’s shaped you in some ways.”
“That’s called being empathetic. Something I tried to hammer into your head.”
“Well,” he said drily, “it eventually worked. It took me awhile to get the concept and then let my emotions start coloring my world. I can’t say it’s been exactly comfortable so far, but now; I see the benefits of it. I remember when you would talk to your mother about Ben and what was happening in his life. I never understood why you got so emotional after those calls. Now, I do.”
“I didn’t come completely clean about Ben,” she admitted, “he’s our skeleton in the family closet, and I was ashamed of him.”
“I get that. My father is the skeleton in our own closet.” Shep admitted, a pain letting go in his heart from just speaking the words.
“Every family has at least one, believe me,” Willow told him. “I like that you’re working to become self-aware, Shep. I appreciate you opening up. And I’m sorry I didn’t open up a hundred percent about my own family to you. Maybe,” and she shook her head, “…it might have helped us when we got in that rough patch with one another.”
“Maybe it would have, Willow. We’ll never know.”
She felt the sadness in Shep and saw the regret in his eyes. “We’ve both lost a lot,” she whispered. If only she’d known, then what she knew about him now. “We both, at very important stages of our lives, twelve and thirteen, had horrible things happen to us. I lost a sister and my brother went berserk. You lost your father to another women and your mother was torn apart by the divorce.”
“We’re kind of a sad pair, aren’t we?” he said, his mouth hitching in a grimace.
“Misery loves company,” Willow replied, giving him a half-hearted smile. There was so much grief pouring out of Shep. She saw his pained expression, so she dropped her tone and asked, “What are you the saddest about right now, in this moment?”
“I was sitting here thinking that if we both knew these things about one another during our marriage? Would it have changed the course of it? How differently would we have reacted to one another?”
“The million-dollar question,” Willow said. “I don’t honestly know, Shep. Do you?”
He rubbed his chin, looking above her head at the sunbeams defused through the gossamer curtains on the east side of the room. His gaze returned to hers. “Given where I was at the time? Closed up? Completely unavailable? Afraid to open up? I don’t think it would have made a difference. I was too afraid of my feelings. Afraid of what you would think of me if I shared my family’s nightmare with you.”
“And I didn’t know why you were reacting like that towards me,” she quietly admitted.
“I know. I didn’t help things at all, Willow. I made a hell of a mess that neither of us could stand living with. Something had to give, and it did.”
“It’s never easy talking about the pain we’ve experienced, Shep. It never will be, but in my case, my parents gave me the gift of supporting me, getting it out in words and tears rather than stuffing it back up inside, like you did.” She lifted her hands. “Hearing about your parents’ divorce when you were thirteen, it throws a different light on you, for me. It helps me understand the way you were shaped and fashioned by circumstances within your family. You were on the cusp of puberty yourself, and then to have your father leave? I can’t even imagine how you must have felt by the loss of him as a main support in your life.”
“Yeah, but I think our feelings were pretty much the same: grief. Loss. Confusion.”
“Right,” she admitted quietly, giving him a soft look of understanding. How badly she wanted to just stand up, walk over and wrap her arms around Shep’s broad shoulders. How many loads had he carried on them? And how many did he still carry? She’d had friends whose families had been blown apart by divorce. She’d seen what it had done to her friends. They’d never been the same since. Divorce not only fractured a family, she’d discovered; it also shattered a child inwardly, no matter their age. The only question that remained was: how badly shattered? Would that kid be able to fully heal from the experience or not? As far as she’d seen, children of divorce carried those wounds all the way into adulthood and wrestled with them for the good part of their lives.
She went on to wonder if her and Shep’s own divorce, her walking out on him, had somehow mimicked his father walking out on his mother and himself. It put a whole new spin on the situation and her mind took off at a gallop, knowing she had to have alone time to really feel her way through this new awareness.
“Thank you for opening up and sharing with me, Shep. You have no idea how wonderful it makes me feel. I know you said that you’d changed? But right now? I’m honestly seeing it.” She reached out, tentatively touching his hand then withdrawing her fingers. “It takes real bravery and courage to live and not just exist, Shep. When I met you? You were existing. Not living. But now? I really see you living. That’s a huge change.”
“Well, don’t paint me as any kind of hero too soon, Willow. Remember? I drove you away because all I knew at the time was that I was locked up and completely unavailable to you.”
She shared a tender look with him. Choking back so many feelings, she said, “I always thought you were heroic, Shep, and it sure doesn’t change how I see you now. You and your team risked your lives daily when you were out at Afghan villages trying to give those poor people a better life. You were my hero then. And,” she swallowed hard, her voice going low, “you’re a hero to me now.”
CHAPTER 7
Tefere took the binoculars from Zere, his second-in-command. They lay in a grove of pine trees a quarter of a mile from the Delos School in Addis Zemen. The November weather was cloudy and it had rained the night before. They’d driven up in a rusted white Toyota van from Bahir Dar a week ago. He and his ten soldiers lay in wait, on their bellies, well-hidden so that no one could see them where they’d taken cover within the tree line. Below, he saw three trucks on their way from the dirt-strip airport that was just a mile away. The twin-engine Otter, owned by Delos, the one with the red and yellow stripes running along the length of its fuselage, was constantly landing, and taking off. He’d counted four times today already that it had brought in what looked to be construction equipment.
His hands tightening on the binoculars, he watched as the three trucks pulled into the gravel driveway of the school. On either side of the vehicles were school children, aged between six and seventeen, boys and girls alike, all on their way into the one-story cinder block building. He knew from one of his soldiers, posted here a week earlier, that more than two-hundred children attended this charity school. His lip curled. The children all wore blue-and-white uniforms. The girls were all neatly clean, their hair either in braids, or knotted up on top of their small heads, wearing white blouses and dark-blue skirts. The boys all had short, shaven hair, and were dressed in their own version of the school uniform: white button-up shirts and dark-blue pants. Each carried a knapsack that was blue and white as well, loaded with books. The women teachers, all Ethiopian, stood in colorful dress, their heads wrapped in matching cloth, smiling, touching the children, and speaking to them as they filed in through the double doors. Hatred for the Americans and this charity they supported rose up in Tefere.
