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Still, my better judgment hadn’t failed me completely, and I managed to keep myself from uttering everything that was inside my head or my heart. But there was one thing I felt like she needed to know. And as we cleaned up and then snuggled back together, I worked up the courage to tell her. I reached forthe remote and switched off the television. Then I steeled myself and turned to face her.
“You know I was in the navy.”
“Non-sequitur much?” She turned to smile up at me, and I dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Yes, I knew that. It’s why everyone calls you ‘Ghost.’ A callsign, right?”
“Right. Yeah. So the thing I want to tell you is why I left the navy. Not because of the thing itself, but because I think it explains some of why I am the way I am.”
“How are you exactly, Ghost?”
I smiled at her teasing tone, and her use of my callsign. “I’m careful. In ways I never used to be.”
“Okay.” There was something in her voice that sounded hesitant, and I glanced into her eyes again, trying to read what had caused it, but all I found were the warm brown depths I was beginning to see in my dreams. “Tell me.”
“I was basically asked to leave.” The familiar guilt pooled in my gut and I swallowed hard, working to move past it. There was a good chance this would change the way Emily looked at me, thought of me. But if we were going to really know each other, she needed to know this.
Emily drew in a quick breath, and I felt compelled to explain before she assumed I was discharged for committing some kind of crime.
The truth was that I had, but probably not in the way she must have been thinking.
I took a deep breath, steeling myself and letting my eyes drop shut as I related the story. My truth. “It was during a training exercise on deployment. We were on a carrier in the South Pacific.”
Emily tensed in my arms as I described the carrier deck that day, the rough seas, the decreased visibility. She shivered as Italked about getting clearance to land, about the inexperience of the tower crew, the location of the other jet.
“I’ll never forget that moment when I caught the wire and then pushed the engines to full power like I’d done a hundred times before. But the deck was shifting so violently, what had been level a second before was suddenly not level at all, and the jet veered and skidded to the side.”
Emily’s nails were digging into my arm, and I closed my eyes, telling her the rest.
“There’d been another jet ready to take off as I was coming in, but they’d just called him off for the weather, and he’d taxied back to park. I should never have been close to those planes. Any other day, I’d have caught the third wire and come to a stop.
“But I didn’t. I didn’t stop, and before I realized what was happening, I plowed into his plane, and sent it right off the edge of the deck. With him inside.” I kept my eyes shut a moment longer, dreading what I’d find on Emily’s face. But watching the event replay in my head was no better, so I steeled myself and looked at her.
Emily’s eyes were on my face, full of tears, her lip trembling.
“It was what they called ‘a confluence of events,’” I told her, feeling weak and exhausted from reliving the worst moments of my life. “The navy refers to mishaps like it as ‘the Swiss cheese’ effect.”
“What?” Emily’s voice was small, shaky.
“If you stacked up a bunch of pieces of Swiss cheese, the odds that the holes would align are super slim. Like impossible. They build in hundreds of safeguards to ensure they don’t line up. It takes a lot of bad luck and errors to make it happen. And that’s what happens in most mishaps. This one was called human error, and the court decided that blame could be assigned equally to all parties. Me, the other pilot, the tower.”
I could feel my analytical self taking over as the emotion of reliving that day threatened to blacken the mood, force me to retreat into silence to brood over what had happened.
“I’m so sorry,” Emily said, looking up at me with wide eyes and tear-streaked cheeks. Her tears brought back the moment I’d realized Shazz was in that plane, unrecoverable, sinking. I’d gotten out, shaky, horrified I’d just cost the navy a multi-million dollar jet. And then they’d told me that he’d been inside and my life as I knew it had ended.
“That was the day I killed a man. A friend. And my life will never be the same again.” The darkness that lingered in the back of my mind threatened to rear up and tumble across the landscape of my consciousness, a wave that washed in and covered everything. But I didn’t let it. Pain twisted inside me, but having Emily here, anchoring me to the present, helped.
She sniffled, and I rubbed a thumb across her cheek, sliding away the wetness there.
“God, I’m sorry that happened.” The emotion in her eyes almost broke me, and I squeezed my own eyes shut, wrapping her tightly in my arms. I’d shared the story before, but never like this, never with anyone who offered sympathy in this way. Emily pulled me close and held me, and I felt the event around me again, Jake’s death, the horror and confusion on the deck after it happened. The finality of the thing as I stared into the depths of the roiling ocean, knowing he’d gone, knowing he couldn’t come back. And as she cried, it was almost like she understood all of it more than anyone else ever had.
“It didn’t happen to me,” I told her. “I was part of the cause. It happened to him. And I’ll never be able to fix it, or make it right.”
“I know,” she said, her face buried in my chest. “God, I’m so sorry for all of it.”
“There’s not even an apology I could give, how do you apologize for something like that? It’s so inadequate, so...” Itrailed off, wanting the renewed proximity of the pain to recede again. “I sent a letter to his family.”
Emily pulled back, looking up at me through watery eyes. “You did?” She sounded so surprised.
I nodded, remembering how I’d hoped for a while that a reply might come. But of course it didn’t. You didn’t forgive someone you didn’t know from taking your son from you. “But like I said, there were no words I could offer that would help. They lost their son. And I was the idiot who survived. And I think all of us would’ve changed that—had us trade places—if it were only possible.”
