living in daydreams

It’s late. So late that Diego should probably be in bed right now, but at least he’s had something for dinner, even if you did have to resort to a Happy Meal. It’s fine. You just need to get through the next hour, you tell yourself. Glancing at the rearview mirror as you break for a red light, you catch sight of the dark circles underneath your eyes and stress lines embedded into your forehead. As with so many other things in your life lately, you don’t have the time or the energy to worry about how to fix it. The light turns green and on cue Diego prompts you enthusiastically, “Go mama!”

You ease your foot on the gas and make a mental checklist in your head.

Get home.

Get Diego to bed.

Check on Frankie.

Pretend it doesn’t cut you bitterly when he lies and tells you he’s fine, if only so you’ll leave him alone.  

Get yourself to bed and release your tears into your pillow, crying yourself to sleep before you wake up tomorrow, put your mask on and do it all over again.

Diego cheers happily as you pull up in front of the house, but you take a deep breath, trying to gather the strength to go in. Life has been about just getting through the day lately, and tonight is no different. It had been nice to get out of the house tonight, though a Kindergarten showcase has never really been your idea of an exciting evening. Clearly it wasn’t Frankie’s either, since he’d opted to stay home instead. Well, it was his loss. Diego had been cast as a sunflower in the class showcase and seeing him up on stage, radiating with joy as he’d sung and danced with the rest of his class, was totally worth it. Hopefully it’s still worth it tomorrow when he wakes up tired and grumpy.

“Race you inside, Mom,” he calls, the second you unbuckle him. He throws open the car door and hustles out, a blur of green tights and yellow stage make-up as he rushes to the front door.

You laugh to yourself because you have the key and you’d locked the door when you left, in case Frankie fell asleep while the house was quiet. He barely seems to sleep at all anymore, but you’d told yourself it would be great if he managed to get some rest, if only to stop from feeling so bitter that he hadn’t wanted to attend Diego’s performance.

To your surprise, when you get to the front door, it’s already open. When you step over the threshold, you see Diego with Pope, who looks to have taken up residency at your dining room table. Presuming he’s here to see Frankie, you set your handbag down and hang up your coat.  

“Mom, Uncle Pope is here!”

“I can see that, baby,” you reply, setting your eyes to Pope. You hadn’t seen his truck in the driveway, but that doesn’t shock you. Like Frankie, it’s his job to be discreet, only seen when he wants to be. “Hi Pope.”

“Hi,” he replies, tone sounding cheerful enough, but his expression looks somewhat morose, his features tight and downcast. He’s serious when he needs to be, but usually when he visits he’s wearing a grin, drinking beers with Frankie, showing up with gifts for Diego. The way he’s sitting at the table now with his arms folded and fingers tapping restlessly on his biceps is making you feel a little uneasy.

“You here to see Frankie?” you ask him. “Where is he?”

Pope looks away from you, turning his attention to Diego. He smiles down at him, telling him what a great sunflower he must have been and that he’s sorry he missed it. Then he clears his throat and gently places his hands on Diego’s shoulders.

“It’s pretty late right, niñito?” He asks and Diego nods. “Why don’t you go upstairs, brush your teeth and put on your pajamas? You can choose a book and I’ll come up and read it to you in a little bit.”

Diego buzzes with excitement, visibly thrilled to have someone else to play storyteller tonight, but your uneasiness only doubles, settling in your stomach like a heavy boulder. You have no idea where Frankie is, why Pope’s here so late or why he is willingly signing up to bedtime stories just to get Diego out of the room. But as soon as Diego skips across the room to you, you put your questions on hold to say goodnight.

“Sweet dreams, my darling. I love you,” you tell him, pushing a hand through the errant brown locks falling in front of his sunflower-painted face to lean down and press a kiss to his forehead. “Don’t forget to wash this beautiful yellow faceprint off when you brush your teeth.”

“Okay. Love you, Mom.”

As soon as he’s out of the room, the sound of his light footsteps on the stairs sufficiently distant, you start in on Pope, belatedly realizing not only did you not see his truck in the drive, but you didn’t see Frankie’s either. He can’t be at work; he got his license suspended a few weeks ago when he got caught with coke in his system during a routine drug test. You remember how distraught he’d been when he’d had to tell you, confirming what had only been suspicion on your part until then. He hasn’t been coping–you knew it. You could see it. Ever since he came back from that trip to Columbia. The one that had claimed Tom’s life. But he wasn’t accepting any of your offers of help either; shutting you down every time.

You feel your heart plummet to your feet and through the floor– your imagination leaping to the worst possible assumption of why Frankie’s not here and what Pope might be about to tell you.

“Where is he, Pope? Tell me where he is! Tell me he’s okay!” you demand frantically, feeling distraught. Your heart rate floods your ears with a deafening rhythm and you don’t even realize how hard you’re panicking until Pope gets to his feet and sets his hands heavily on the edge of your shoulders.

“Hey, hey,” he says, trying to calm you. “Hey.” He ducks his head a little, trying to put his face directly in your eyeline. “It’s okay. He’s fine. He’s good.”

You swallow the rest of your immediate worry on your tongue and fight to take a breath. Drawing it in through your nose, you slowly feel it expand your lungs, filling your chest. At your sides, your hands are still shaking. Pope keeps repeating quiet reassurance as he helps you take a seat in one of the chairs at the table.

“Sorry,” you apologize to him when you can finally speak again, breathing and heart rate under better control. “Habit.”

Pope nods understandingly. Frankie’s line of work has had you in this position of fear more than once before, and while you know that there’s obvious risks to what he does, each time it takes you by surprise with how the panic and dread consumes you so physically. Racing pulse, gasping breaths, ice cold veins, sweat collecting at your brow, mouth bone dry. Frankie’s landed in hospital upon his return only a few times, usually only nursing bruises, cuts and stitches, but it doesn’t erase your fear.

“I’m sorry for not letting you know I was going to be here,” Pope apologizes, guiltily.

You try to shrug it off. “It’s not like you need my permission to visit Frankie. I’m sorry for overreacting and thinking the worst.”

Despite all his training and stealth, the way Pope’s face falls apart gives him away. You feel your brow furrow, the wave of dread threatening to drag you back under.

“Pope,” you say, hearing your voice a mere squeak of desperation. “What’s going on?”

He takes a long, deep breath of his own and scrubs his hand over his face. When it’s gone, his face still looks just as stressed. “Frankie….” he starts slowly, sounding like he still hasn’t decided the best way to break this to you, despite however long he had been waiting here for you before you arrived home. “Frankie decided to get some help for well….for everything.”

You feel your head spin, trying to take that in. It hits you in two waves. First, Frankie finally decided to get help? Where, when, who, how? You want to ask. Secondly, the way he generalizes with the phrase ‘everything’ gives you whiplash. You’ve been convinced it’s PTSD, and you’ve been telling Frankie as such for months now. You don’t have a medical degree, but you can detail the intricate hell Frankie has been living through. The sleeplessness, the night terrors, the closed off way he’s been, the struggles he’s faced with you and Diego, icing you out and searching for solace in the bottom of a beer bottle. Despite your pleas to help him, this is the first you’re hearing of him actually being receptive to it.

“H...he what?”

Pope swallows. “There’s a really great program out of state,” he explains, “they’re said to be the best. Highly qualified and well recommended. They help Veterans exclusively. They gave Frankie a place in their program and he took it.”

You’ve given Frankie binders worth of pamphlets and research the last few months, but none of them included a place out of state. You didn’t even think of it. If the place he’s gone to is out of state then he must have found it himself. A faint ember of pride flickers inside of you for him, proud of him for seeking and accepting help. Though it still doesn’t explain why he didn’t tell you about it.

You look back at Pope. “How come he isn’t here to tell me this himself?”

Pope’s eyes cut to the floor before they come back to you, looking big and glassy, as apologetic and guilty as the rest of him. “He said he had to go and he asked me to be here for you and Diego when you came home.”

Suddenly, the missing piece of the puzzle slots into place inside your head. Why Frankie didn’t want to come to the showcase. You feel tears sting your eyes, blurring your vision. “Pope?” you ask in a weak voice.

“Yeah?”

“When did he tell you about this place? This out of state program.”

Pope’s head drops. You guess he’d been hoping you wouldn’t put it together. Maybe he’d hoped Frankie wouldn’t have done it this way at all, but you don’t blame him for following Frankie’s instructions, no doubt wanting Frankie to go through with his plan of getting help.

“Pope.” You’re on the edge of bursting into tears, but now that you assume, you need to know. You need him to confirm it so you can face it. Accept it.

He winces when he looks at you, as if it hurts him to do. Or to say. “Last week. He mentioned it to me last week. Said he’d been accepted and they’d given him a start date. Made me to promise to be here tonight when you got home.”

Vacantly, you nod. You feel resounding hollow. You feel angry. Confused. Mostly, you feel hurt. Overwhelmingly hurt. The agonizing feeling sprouts in your chest and bleeds through your entire body, seeping into your bones. From your head to your toes, every inch of you grows unbearably heavy. You almost can’t believe it. Frankie deliberately chose not to mention his plan to you. Not a word of it. And by design, he chose tonight to leave, knowing you and Diego would be out at the showcase for most of the night. Long enough for him to leave without any goodbye.

Tears spill over and streak down your cheeks, racing each other to your chin.

Tenderly, Pope’s hand stretches out to touch your arm. You quickly smack it away with a flick of your hand and he flinches, not used to such a cold reaction from you.

“Don’t touch me,” you warn him, getting to your feet. You stand tall, straightening your shirt, trying to steel yourself. You feel heartbroken inside, but until you can close your bedroom door, slip beneath your covers and fall apart in the darkness, you need to pretend you’re fine. Diego is waiting upstairs and he will want to know where Papi is for his goodnight kiss. And tomorrow, he will have questions about where his Papi is, when he will see him again and where he’s gone. Those will fall to you. This house will just be the two of you from now on. The weight on your shoulders has felt unmanageable for a while now, but you refuse to collapse underneath it all until you know Diego is in bed asleep.

“Thank you for telling me. You can go now,” you tell Pope curtly. You don’t want to shoot the messenger, but you don’t want to have a breakdown in front of him either, and you're teetering on a knife's edge.

“Come on,” he protests. He lifts his hand again but lowers it when he remembers how that had fared last time. “I know this is upsetting for you.”

“It’s not,” you lie through your teeth as tears still trickle down your face, some sliding down your neck. “I’m glad Frankie is getting help. I hope he gets well again. You should go.”

His eyebrows set, challenging your dismissal. “Frankie wanted me to--”

“Fuck what Frankie wanted,” you bite back.

Pope chews his lip. “At least let me keep my promise to do the bedtime story? I don’t want to let Diego down.”

You can’t stop the scoff that leaves your lips. As if Diego won’t be let down tomorrow when he wakes up to hear that his father took off without a goodbye.  Still, the more reasonable part of your brain wants him to have this, a nice moment with his Uncle, before you have to break his heart tomorrow.

“Sure,” you say reluctantly, “go do the bedtime story.”

He nods in thanks and goes to move for the hallway, but stops himself after only a few steps. “I really am sorry,” he says.

“You have nothing to apologize for. You want Frankie to get better. So do I.”

His lips quirk, as much of a smile as he can muster tonight. Once you’re sure he’s left, you pick up a coaster from the table and throw it as hard as you can across the room. It’s one of the decorative ones Frankie had bought back from one of his work trips for you, claiming it was hand painted, so meticulous and beautiful, just like you. It glowers at you from where it lands on the floor near the wall, taunting you. You squeeze your eyes shut tight, hoping, but when you open them again, this is still your life. Your sad reality.

On your way to the stairs, you pause outside the door of the spare room, the one Frankie had voluntarily moved himself into weeks ago. The dagger in your chest twists when you open the door and find it empty. Besides the staple furniture, there’s no sign of him at all. No clothes on the floor, no photo frames on the bedside tables, no shoes in the closet.

Fresh tears fill your eyes as you shut the door and lean your head on it, biting down on your hand to muffle the sobs, not wanting them to echo up the stairs and disturb Diego’s story time.

You have spent so long watching the light leak out of Frankie, and wanting desperately to fix it. You’ve dreamed of the day he would agree to talk to someone, go to a meeting or see his Doctor, and each day you’ve felt him slipping further from you, but you never imagined a scenario like this. One where he would specifically wait for you and Diego to be out of the house so he could leave without any word of it. Making Pope break the news and pick up the pieces.

You lift your head off the door and then drop it back against the hardwood, again and again but it doesn’t help. The pain inside your chest still feels worse than anything else.

Three weeks later, you’re shopping with Diego for his friend's birthday party, trying to convince him that the $100 toy he picked off the shelf as a birthday gift is far too expensive. Your phone rings, the ringtone blaring out of your purse as you try to reason with him.

“Pick something else please, honey. Something cheaper,” you instruct with a sigh as you rummage through your purse, swatting away baby wipes, car keys and lip balm to fight your way to the phone at the bottom.

Diego skips back down the aisle, his attention caught by a large shiny transformer. You roll your eyes and glance at the screen of your phone, shocked to see Frankie’s contact ID showing.

Heart in your throat, you slide to answer the call and lift the phone to your ear. “Hello?”

“H-hey,” a nervous voice replies. “It’s….it’s Frankie.”

You nod lamely, and then belatedly remember that he can’t see you. “I know,” you force yourself to articulate with words instead.

In the last three weeks you've toyed with the idea of making a call like this yourself; wanting to know he’s okay, wanting to tell him he’s in the right place, despite the way he chose to leave. You never brought yourself to do it though, instead taking his actions as a clear sign of where you two stand. But your heart flutters in your chest now, wondering if he’s about to change that. About to tell you he misses you. That he loves you. You can’t help but hope.

“Thanks for the photos you sent,” he says appreciatively.

You blink dumbly, before remembering the picture of Diego in his uniform on the field for his first soccer game that you’d sent to Frankie, without any comment. The next day you’d sent one of Diego falling asleep in the back of the car, ice cream dried in the shape of a moustache above his top lip. After that, it became a habit to send one every few days. The last one you’d sent was just yesterday; a picture of Diego with the next door neighbour's cat curled in his lap, a giant smile on his face as he petted it.

“Sure. Anytime,” you manage to reply.

“They help,” he says thickly, “on hard days. It reminds me why I’m here.”

You stay quiet, looking down the store aisle to see Diego reach out for a large stuffed toy, nearly as big as he is. “Mom!” he calls excitedly.

You shake your head. He pouts but he puts it back and grabs another, this one a teddy. “Matthew’s favorite toy is teddy bears!” he shouts, brandishing a plush one that at least looks a reasonable size.  

“Is he there?” Frankie’s voice asks in your ear, hopeful. “I was hoping I could speak to him.”

Your heart soars and gets shot down in one breath. You’re so glad Diego will get to finally hear from him, but the ambiguity of further ignoring the situation between you both makes you ache.

“I’ll put him on,” you say quickly, lowering the phone before you’ve even finished your sentence, hoping he can’t hear the hitch of your breath. “Diego,” you beckon. “Come here, honey. Someone special is on the phone and wants to talk to you.”

Diego comes running, still clutching the teddy. You exchange it with him for the phone, adding the plushie to the shopping cart.

“PAPI?” you hear him exclaim excitedly. “Oh my gosh!”

Over the next six months, you can count on one hand the ways in which you see your now practically estranged husband.

A photo of him on your Lock Screen as a video call notification pops up.

Glimpses of his face as you answer the calls before handing your phone to Diego.

Curt, polite waves once the two of them have exhausted themselves in conversation and you have to end the call.

That’s all you see of Frankie for the next six months. Half a year passes like that. And he says nothing.

Well, not nothing technically. Turns out, when Diego is the topic, Frankie can talk at some length. After his first call, he calls almost every other day and checks in on Diego each and every time.

How is he going in preschool? Has he recovered from the cold he had last week? What time is his play date this weekend?

It’s not just questions either. You send him a video of Diego reading a small picture book and Frankie returns a long text, the length of which resembles a novel, praising the smarts of his son and thanking you for sharing it.

For someone not even in the state, he’s as attentive a father as he can be. But about the two of you and the state of your marriage he says nothing. Less than nothing. A few times you wake in the middle of the night to the chime of your cell phone, hoping to see a heartfelt ‘I miss you’ text, only to be disappointed by a data limit warning courtesy of your service provider. The date of your wedding anniversary approaches and you wait with baited breath, but there’s no mention or acknowledgement of it, not even when he calls on the date, unscheduled. Turns out he’s at the zoo and he wants to show Diego the giraffes via video call.

It’s frustrating. It’s hurtful. It’s maddening. If it weren’t for the ring that used to sit on your finger, now worn on a thin chain around your neck, you’d wonder if your marriage ever existed at all. You have all the hope and sympathy for him and what he’s working through, the years of trauma he must be unpacking in order to save his life. You fight to respect his privacy and his journey, but part of you still feels abandoned. Though you fought and prayed for him to get help, you never considered not being a part of his healing. You imagined helping him through it all, doing whatever’s needed or asked of you. So far, all he’s asked is that you don’t visit, and don’t bring Diego to visit - not until he gives it the okay.

He doesn’t talk about how he’s doing. You hear only via Pope that Frankie’s apparently stopped using, stopped drinking and had his suspension lifted thanks to clean drug tests and being in the Veterans program. He’s got a local job as a helicopter pilot and is doing well in his therapy appointments, but he hasn’t once mentioned coming home yet.

It’s made for a confusing situation. You love him, but you feel rejected by him. You want him here, but you know it’s better for him to be where he is. You’re married to him, but that relationship now feels unacknowledged. At social events, you don’t know what to say when people ask where Frankie is. At a school function, a parent who has a kid in Diego’s class quietly asks you if you and Frankie are now divorced and you nearly explode into a mess of bone-wracking sobs at the mention of it, because you have no idea how to answer that. Are you divorced? No. Are you together? There’s no clear answer to that either.

Luckily, you don’t have to pretend with the boys; Pope, Benny and Will. Will returned a few months ago and was obviously informed about Frankie’s absence before he stepped foot back in town, because he’s never brought it up with you. In fact, the only sign that he even knew anything of it was the tight, lengthy hug he’d pulled you into when you first caught up with him at a BBQ at Pope’s house when Pope made the long awaited introduction to his girlfriend, Maria.

She’s wonderful. Absolutely delightful. You can see how Pope is so captivated by her, why he chose to keep her to himself for so long. The way you catch him looking at her often leaves you longing for Frankie, for that feeling of being loved, that comfort of belonging to someone. Despite the jealousy you feel, having Pope and Maria for friends is absolutely invaluable. You wish you could clone them both so that every person, every parent, could have friends like this.

Benny and Will are good at stopping by and playing with Diego, tiring him out in the backyard with endless games of tag or a flurry of Nerf bullets, but Pope and Maria are like a two-man care team. They make a habit of coming over for dinner or inviting you and Diego, always with a small gift for Diego and a bottle of wine for you. Once Diego is tucked in bed, the three of you sit at the table and talk for hours, laughing, commiserating and enjoying each other’s company long into the night.

You can’t thank them enough, even when it hurts. Because while it’s sweet to look out the kitchen window and see Pope kicking around a soccer ball with Diego, it’s also yet another reminder of Frankie, of the fact that he’s gone, and how things have changed.

When six months turns into seven, things get a little rocky. You go out one night with your coworkers and come home stumbling out of a shared Uber. You fumble your way in your front door only to be greeted in the dim lights of the house by a very judgmental looking Pope. He looks like he’d woken from a nap on the couch, the flatness of one side of his hair and the bleary look in his eyes giving him away.

“Thank fuck you’re home,” he breathes in relief, but his tone is short, like he’s more pissed off than relieved. “Any longer and I was about to send a search party.”

You chuckle just a little as you step out of your heels, thankful to feel the cold tile under your sore feet.

“What’s funny?” Pope asks, folding his arms. He casts a glance down at his watch and it reminds you of your Mom when you’d come home past curfew as a teenager. “It’s 4am.”

“Didn’t realize I had a curfew, Mom,” you chide him, shrugging off your coat and hanging it on the hook before moving past him to the kitchen.

“A curfew? No,” he answers, following you. “But you do have a son.”

You frown comically at his stupid remark. “It’s not like I took him with me, Pope. He was here, safe and sound with you.”

“Yeah, but it would have been great to know when you were coming home to him. I was expecting you at one am at the latest.”

Needing water, you ignore his last remark and reach for the cupboard that houses your glasses.

Undeterred by your avoidance, Pope switches on the kitchen lights, pursuing both you and the ensuing argument. You wince at the sudden brightness, taking a glass to the sink, keeping your eyes on the tap as the water fills.

“What the hell is that on your neck?” Pope accuses, coming to get a closer look at whatever he’s crowing on about.

You reach your freehand to your neck, wondering if it is a bug or something, but your fingers touch a patch of sensitive skin instead. Oh, you think to yourself as the water overflows in your glass and spills out over your hand that holds it. You probably should have kept your coat on. Or maybe not have made out with that cute guy at the bar.

“Were you with someone tonight?” Pope questions indignantly, his fingers brushing the collar of your shirt as he stares at the evidence. “Were you with another guy?”

Equally as indignant, you switch the tap off and bat away his hand. “So what if I was?”

“You have a husband!”

“Do I?” You argue, matching his outraged tone. Meeting his eye, you give him an icy stare feeling the liquor in your bloodstream no match for the hurt and ache that’s been living in your bones. Baiting, you glance around the room dramatically. “Funny, because I don’t see a husband here, Pope.”

His anger melts away, melding into something mixed with pity and pain.

“Merida,” he curses, looking visibly stricken.  “Frankie—“

Your simmering rage ignites like fuel on a fire, flaring at the mention of Frankie’s name. You understand he has a duty of care to Frankie as his best friend and all, but you also don’t care. Pope has been here, seeing you fight and struggle and he was the one that had to break Frankie’s news to you. If he can’t understand then no one can.

“Take a look around, Pope!” You shout. “Frankie’s not here! He left.”

“He left, yes. To get help. To get better.” He pleads on Frankie’s behalf. And that’s just the problem. You've been living your life pleading for Frankie, but the cold reality is that he’s not here and if he does care, he certainly doesn’t show it or say it. And you’ve finally tired of waiting.

“He left without a word, a goodbye or so much as a call or a fucking note,” you remind Pope, shattering his rose tinted glasses. You’re sick of them. You’ve been trying to frame this positively for months now. You’ve been trying to desperately hold on to the fact that Diego still has a relationship with his father, that Frankie is getting help, but that doesn’t resolve the hurt of the way he left, or the heartbreak of the way things deteriorated between you two long before that. And now you’re being questioned about your commitment to this marriage? The one Frankie walked out on? You don’t want to fight to keep a lid on your anger anymore. Don’t you deserve to let it out at least once before you go back to dutiful mother tomorrow?

Pope curls his lip in a scowl. It only eggs you on. The lid has well and truly blown off tonight.

“Not that I should have expected him to mention it, I guess,” you laugh, so bitterly that it’s not really a laugh at all. “He was barely speaking to me when he left. Hardly ever looked at me either. We stopped talking about anything that wasn’t absolutely essential. Stopped having sex. He moved into the guest room just to get away from me, as if sleeping beside me was too much of a hardship. He moved his stuff in the spare room before you came over for beers. That’s why you had to get a ride with Benny when you couldn’t drive home. Because he was already living there. Just to get away from me.”

Ever dutiful to his brother in arms, Pope can’t help but continue defending Frankie. It’s like it comes out of his mouth on autopilot. “I’m sure that’s not true. It wasn’t to get away from you. He probably just didn’t want to wake you with the nightmares he was having.”

You scoff. “And not talking to me? Not touching me or looking at me?” You prompt. “What’s your excuse for that?”

“That wasn’t him. You know how much he loves you. That shit? That was the PTSD. Not Frankie.”

You close your fist around the glass on your hand. “That’s the most fucked up part,” you tell him solemnly. “The longer you live with it, the harder it gets to differentiate. PTSD doesn’t have a face, Pope. But Frankie does.”

You draw a long sip from the cup and let it fill your mouth before swallowing. A drop spills from your lips and races down your chin, so you wipe it with the back of your hand. “It was Frankie’s face I’d see turn away from me. It was his body that recoiled from my touch. It was his eyes that couldn’t look at me anymore. It was him who rejected me.”

“I’m sure that’s why he left–so that he can get well again. Back to his old self. We all know how much he loves you. There’s no arguing that.”

“Loved me,” you correct him darkly. “He loved me. Then. But not now. I’m so fucking tired of pretending that I’m not hurting. What am I even waiting for, Pope? You told me yourself that Frankie’s doing so much better. That he’s working again. Making a life. Why should I sit here and pine for him when he doesn’t give so much as a second thought about me?”

Pope refutes that. “He does think about you, all the time. The reason he’s doing so well is because he wants to be well enough to come back to you and Diego and be a better version of himself for the two of you. I know it’s hard waiting for it, and I keep begging him to let you guys visit, but he won’t let me or Benny or Will see him either. You know what he’s like–he’s stubborn and he likes to see things through.”

“And how long would you have me wait?” you ask. “While he’s working to his own schedule and refusing to speak to me about it, do I just sit here and cry myself to sleep for another six months? A year? Five?”

Pope grits his teeth, frustration tight on his forehead and visible in the clutch of his fingers curled around the edge of the countertop. “I’m not saying that it’s fair,” he growls. “But the ball is in Frankie’s court and I can’t rush him on this.”

You feel your lips curl disdainfully. “You can’t rush him and I can’t wait for him.”

“So, you’ll see this man again then?” Pope questions, looking like even asking the question makes him feel ill.

You respect his loyalty to his friend but you feel some power in imagining him relaying your night to Frankie and it finally triggering something within him. Forcing him to address your relationship. To tell you to your face if he’s done with you. Or, hopefully, to come clean and tell you if he still wants you. It’s a frightening seesaw of love or heartbreak, but anything has to be better than this holding pattern you’ve been caught in. You deserve an answer. You deserve love. You want that love to be Frankie, but if it can’t, let him at least have the decency to tell you and let you go. Holding on so tightly to something that grew thorns to protect itself from you has been painful, and you’ve reached breaking point.

Hardening your gaze, you draw a deep breath and gather a substantial dose of courage, enough to lift your eyes to Pope’s and say, “Yeah, I think I will. And if Frankie’s got a problem with it, you can tell him to take it up with me.”

On the sixth day, you had been about to book a plane ticket and fly out there to find him yourself when you heard the front door creak open and he had walked through it. 

You had been so relieved to see him, so deeply comforted by the sight of him again that at first you hadn’t noticed anything was wrong. Physically, he had come home with just a few cuts, some bruises and a faint scar high on his cheekbone, but you can see now that he’s carrying a great weight mentally. There’s something there, cumbersome on his mind and unbearably heavy on his shoulders. Something he clams up and refuses to talk about, but it lingers all the same, embedded in all your interactions and often obvious in his muted demeanor. 

When he’d first returned, his reunion with Diego had brought an alleviated grin to Frankie’s face, but you haven’t seen a genuine smile from him since. 

It’s not just him either. He’d gone on the mission with his former Marine buddies, Tom, Pope, Will and Benny, and they’d all come home like that. Well, those of them that had made it home at least. Poor Tom hadn’t been so lucky. As a result, the other four had returned with a brokenness to them, a little bit of light drained out of their eyes, a haunted look on their faces that left them refusing to say a word about the trip. 

But it’s Frankie you live with, so it is his slow unravelling that you’ve had a front row seat to. It’s him you’ve seen struggle. 

Struggle to get through the day without a drink. 

Struggle to concentrate. 

Struggle to sleep. 

When he first returned, you used to wake up at all hours of the night to find the space in bed beside you empty, or see him with his eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling, sweating, haunted by nightmares. He’s struggled to let you in and stopped letting you close, moving you from husband and wife to strangers who slept in the same bed—that is if Frankie ever slept. The nightmares and flashbacks seem to keep him exhausted but awake.

He struggles with Diego too. You know he loves his son, and must have missed him something fierce, but he seems unable to express it. He can’t stand to sit and read to him anymore, and gets frustrated when Diego cries or doesn’t listen. He just walks out of the room and disappears for hours, escaping either to shut himself away in the garage, slink off to work or to Benny’s house, leaving you to pick up the pieces. 

And that’s what it feels like; like all that's left of him is pieces. You’d farewelled a full, complete man when he’d left for Columbia, but it’s as if there was a mix up of some sort, and they’d only sent home various pieces of him.

Telling yourself it was just the stress of the trip and pain of losing Tom got you through the first few months, but as time has gone on, things have only worsened. He’s grown detached, just going through the motions mundanely, disconnected and uninterested in life around him. You’ve tried to be patient with him, desperate to help him in any way you can, but he shuts down any conversation so abruptly that you don’t get a chance. 

It’s been killing you to see him hurting like this, but he wraps himself in barbed wire, keeping you at a distance. You long to pick up all his pieces and put him back together; to see him smile, hear him laugh, to have your Frankie back.

You miss his gaze, his touch, just being close to him. He’s taken multiple jobs overseas in the years you’ve been together, some halfway around the world, but in the same room together, even sitting on opposite ends of the same couch, there’s never been more distance between you both. There’s no warmth to your interactions, none of the lengthy deep conversations or silly little jokes you’d share. 

He even touches you as little as possible. 

The best example of that is tonight, as you sit around the dinner table, plates in front of each of you full with the meal you had spent all afternoon tending to while Benny chased Diego around the lawn and Pope and Frankie watched, drinking beers out near the garage. Benny is making a show of zooming forkfuls of food to Diego’s mouth, like a spaceship, leaving your young son shrieking in delight. 

You glance at Frankie’s hand, noting it ball into a frustrated fist as he tucks it on his knee under the table. It’s the noise; the volume and pitch of Diego’s reaction that must be getting him worked up. 

As a gesture of care, you rest your fork on the edge of your plate and ease your hand to rest atop of his, but he withdraws his hand, retracting it from you. Wincing, you try to swallow the bitter taste in your mouth and reach for your glass of wine to wash it down. 

“Can I have the salt, please?” Pope asks. 

He’s at the other end of the table so Frankie has to pass it along to you first, and it’s hard to ignore the way he pulls back a little as he offers it, holding the very edge of it so your fingers don’t brush as you take it from him. It stings like it always does whenever he pulls away like this. 

You miss the days he would touch you almost constantly; his hand in yours as you walked, one hand on your thigh as he’d drive, his arm around you on the couch, his fingers resting on the curve of your ass as he’d hug you tight against him. 

He barely brings himself to look at you these days. He sees you, standing there in front of him or across the room or in his peripheral vision. But he doesn’t look at you. His head is always down or his eyes are cut away, and if his eyes do meet yours, they’re dark and glassy, every glance quick empty as if he can’t bring himself to let them linger on you for any longer than necessary.

It’s an absolute change from what you’ve known of him since you first met him. He used to love to look at you. He used to do it for hours, as if it was his favourite thing to do. You’d often wake up to find him propped on his elbow next to you in bed, looking lovingly at you, and you’d groan and push his face away, complaining it was creepy. He’d laugh and pepper your face with kisses, waxing poetic about how pretty you are. 

He used to look at you with absolute fiery heat too. If you’d bought a new dress and decided to wear it, if you were in your swimsuit during the summer, or even if you were in your ratty old pyjamas. You’d feel his stare, feel the heat spread across your skin like wildfire and see the desire in his eyes. Fuck, you miss it. 

You miss him, even as he sits right next to you at the table.

Benny overloads the next forkful of food and Diego’s laughter is so loud it breaks the sound barrier as half the mash potato slides off the fork and hits the table before it makes it to his mouth.

“For fucks sake, Benny,” Frankie complains. His face is tight with annoyance, frustration settled in the hard line of his lips, and anger burrows down into his furrowed brow. “He’s got two good arms to feed himself.”

Benny disregards him as easily as ever and refills his fork. “This way is much more fun, right, Little Fish?” he asks his young partner in crime. 

Diego beams in agreement, ushering Benny’s next forkful to his mouth with his flailing arms, like an aircraft marshal directing a plane on a runway. 

Frankie slices his knife through his steak with so much force that it scrapes ear-piercingly on the plate. 

“Let the kid eat his own food,” Pope tells Benny, backing Frankie as per usual.

Benny pouts but gives Diego back his fork, realising he’s outnumbered. 

“They’re the fun police, aren’t they, Little Fish? See, Pope, this is why he likes me more. I’m actually fun.”

“He doesn’t like you more,” Pope argues as he poises a forkful of veggies at his lips. “He’s just seen more of you.”

“Is that why you moved back? You want to come for my title of ‘Favourite Uncle’?” 

“Your title?” Pope scoffs. “The one you got by default because Will left and I was in Australia?”

Will had taken off almost right after Tom’s funeral, saying something vague about finding a new purpose and making the joke that it’s hard to be a motivational speaker without any motivation. Benny had teased that it was a mid-life crisis, but you know Will had taken Tom’s death the hardest. It hadn’t shocked you that he needed to find himself to find some peace. 

What came as more of a surprise was Pope’s return from Australia a couple of months ago. He’d quietly mentioned he had bought a house in the area and was planning on actually sticking around for once. At the time, Benny had told you he suspects Pope has a new girlfriend he’s hanging around for, but you aren’t sure if it was a genuine suspicion or another of his jokes. 

“I earned that title by being here and doing fun stuff like making your fork a spaceship, right, buddy,” Benny directs to Diego. He gets a laugh from Diego then looks to you and gets more solid confirmation in the form of your nod. 

Benny has been great with Diego, even before Columbia, but especially afterwards. He somehow has the patience Frankie doesn’t when Diego is past nap time and screeching for a bedtime story in a decibel and defiance that drives Frankie to absolute frustration. Benny will often swoop in with a book in hand and take Diego to bed, sit with him on his tiny racecar bed and read the story with a variety of different voices and unwavering enthusiasm. 

Pope sighs loudly at the verdict and cracks open another beer. 

“Is Benny giving you a ride home?” you ask him casually. You’ve been counting the beers he’s had, knowing his truck sits out in your driveway. 

He frowns, his thick eyebrows knitting together as he lowers the beer can from his lips. “No, I figured I’d take the spare room like I used to.”

Anxiety builds in the pit of your stomach and you glance at Frankie, but his downcast eyes don’t leave his plate, and bitterly you realise that he’s going to leave you to circumvent this disaster on your own. 

“You, uh, you can’t take the spare room,” you stammer, trying to invent an excuse on the fly. “We’re, um, we’re…...re-organizing the garage so it’s stacked full of stuff.” 

Pope fights a laugh, and you want to kick yourself for such a silly excuse. A crowded room is no deterrent to a man with the job he has. He’s slept on the ground, in the bushes, on the side of a mountain, probably on a pile of rocks. 

“Not a problem for me,” he affirms. “I can ignore the mess. I only need the bed.”

“It’s buried in stuff,” you lie, tripping over your own words in an effort to get them out of your mouth fast enough to dispel his idea. “The whole room--it’s just absolute chaos in there.”

It’s a shitty lie and you feel ashamed to say it, knowing that it’s not true, and he’d easily be able to see that for himself if he were to open the door, but it feels almost more shameful to tell him the truth. 

To tell him that he can’t stay in the spare room because that’s where Frankie stays. 

That’s the bed that houses Frankie’s pillow. The closet where Frankie’s clothes hang. The room Frankie escapes to when he wants time to himself, which is more often than not lately. 

The fact of the matter is, your marriage might look together from the outside, but if people were to get a peek in, they’d see the truth. Both of you are barely hanging in there, separated by a giant divide that you can’t seem to reach across. 

Over the table, Pope looks at Frankie and grunts, “so much for mi casa es tu casa, eh, hermano?”

“Tienes tu propia casa,” Frankie shrugs.

Benny looks to Pope and grins like a Cheshire cat. “I’ll drop you home,” he lures, “if you admit that I’m the favourite Uncle.”

Pope scoffs and drains the rest of his can. “I’m a man of principle, Benjamin. I’d rather pay the cab fare than repeat a lie like that about my own Godson.”

Benny splutters, so incredulous that his fork drops to his plate. “It’s not fair for you to be his Godfather and his favourite Uncle. Stop being so damn greedy.”

They bicker playfully back and forth, and though it’s usually an argument that would give you a headache because you’ve heard it a thousand times before, you instead blow a low sigh of relief, thankful for the change in topic. 

Absent-mindedly, you use your fork prongs to toy with a piece of cauliflower on your plate until you hear the faint chatter of conversation still to a stop. Frankie’s hand enters your peripheral vision and reaches for your plate. 

“I’ll clear,” he says simply, getting to his feet. 

Benny isn’t quite finished, but manages to get another heavily loaded forkful to his own mouth before he loses his plate to Frankie’s waiting hand.

“We’d better head out, Benny,” Pope says, smacking his hand to his own jean clad thigh. Clearly he’s picking up on what you already know; that Frankie has reached the limit of his social battery this evening. 

When you all gather at the door to say goodbye, Diego whines in protest of Benny leaving but his grin comes out when Benny says he’ll be back soon. He promises a playdate at the park tomorrow as if he’s taking a blood oath, crossing his heart and sealing it with a pinkie promise, but his theatrics only make Diego laugh louder as he salutes him in reply. 

As predicted, Pope gets in the passenger seat of Benny’s truck and the minute you see the headlights leave your driveway you feel your body exhale and deflate. Finally, there’s no need to wear the mask anymore, no need to pretend that everything's okay and you're every bit the happy family you’ve always been.  

Diego tugs at your shirt and asks for a hug so you lift him to your hip. Sweetly, you kiss his forehead, burying your relaxed deep breaths in his soft hair. 

“Come on, baby,” you tell him, “Mama will take you to bed.”

His brown eyes flash, the sweet brown pools of chocolate taunting you, so similar to a shade of Frankie’s that you haven’t seen in so long. 

“Read story?”

“Of course,” you vow. “With the voices.”

He claps and cheers all the way to the bedroom.

Thanks to Benny’s afternoon of soccer, he falls asleep by the end of the first book, but you take a minute to admire the solace you feel from his peacefulness before you have to steel yourself to head back downstairs to Frankie. 

You find him in the kitchen, rinsing off the stack of dirty plates on the counter. He rests them, dripping, on the granite and you take your place opposite him and begin slotting the dishes into the rack of the dishwasher. It’s companionable silence, though you find yourself itching to fill it with a funny joke or a flirtatious flick of water like you normally would. Tonight, as per usual, it feels as though some of the air has been sucked out of the room. 

You know Frankie could go the rest of the night without uttering another word, but your self control slips. 

“Why didn’t you help me out?” you ask after placing the last dish. 

“With what? The bedtime story?” he guesses. “You’re better at those than I am anyway. He doesn’t like it when I won’t do the voices.” 

Dismissing the conversation, he turns to the sink and runs the hot tap over the frying pan you’d used to cook dinner. 

Anxiously, you stand rooted to the spot, wringing your fingers. You briefly consider ending the conversation here to save yourself the trouble or the argument that might ensue. Lately, you’ve found yourself choosing an easy lie over an honest truth, preferring silence to fighting, but tonight, you push it. 

“When Pope was asking to stay in the spare room,” you edge, “you went silent and let me fumble my way through a bogus excuse.”

With his back still to you, you can only imagine the pained expression on his face as you watch his shoulders sink, his body slumping as he scratches the scrubbing brush over a stubborn stain. 

“We don’t owe him and his big nose any explanation of our sleeping arrangements,” he says, the words falling quietly from his mouth.

Your teeth sink into your bottom lip. “We do if he wants to sleep in the bedroom that you’re occupying.”

“What was I supposed to say? Did you want me to tell him I’m sleeping downstairs because I’m having nightmares again and I don’t want to wake up my wife?”

Here he goes, using the nightmares as an excuse again. The same one he had used the first time he proposed moving himself to another bedroom. You had asked him not to, promising him that being there for him was far more important to you than sleep ever could be, but a week later you had arrived home to find that he had moved all his stuff while you were out. When he had explained that sometimes he needed some space after a nightmare, too caught up in it and panicked to handle someone’s touch, you had chosen to stay silent and take the easy lie, all the while knowing the hard truth. 

As much as you wish you could blame it solely on that, deep down you know it’s not just the nightmares. That’s not the only time it feels like there’s a canyon size divide between you both. It’s always there, sometimes you can just feel it more than others. Like tonight at the table when you had placed your hand over his and felt him pull away. 

“Frankie,” you say on a long exhale. “I–” 

Reading into your tone, he jumps in preemptively. “Let’s not do this.”

So far you’ve been careful not to press him in fear of pushing him further away, but at this point your tested patience and willpower seem to have eroded entirely. 

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep burying my head in the sand about all of this.”

He rests the frying pan on the benchtop before slowly turning to you. “Not tonight, please,” he says, voice pleading with you as much as the glassy look in his eyes. “Just not tonight.”

You close your mouth and open it again, internally debating with yourself.

He moves close, trepidation flashing over his expression. His arms close around your waist, hugging you to him robotically. It’s stiff and it feels formal but your body still sings at the mere touch of him.

“I miss you, Frankie,” you tell him, swallowing around the tears building in your throat but unable to avoid the moisture in your eyes, clouding your vision as you glance up at him. “You’re right here in front of me, and I miss you.”

Frankie’s brown eyes echo a type of pain that you can’t put a name to, one that he tries to hide even from himself, burying it so deeply inside of him. You only see glimpses of it intermittently, in these sporadic, desperate moments where he’s able to bring himself to look at you; really look at you, without his impenetrable brick walls up. 

You blink your tears away and the vision of him standing before you comes into sharper focus, clear enough to see the shame and distaste woven into his sheepish expression. 

In his reply, his words are whispered hoarsely and split in half by a lengthy pause, during which he blows out a heavy, shaky breath. “I’m….sorry.”

It’s rare moments like these that let you think you might be getting through to him, that your diligent efforts to chip away at his rough, hard exterior to slowly unearth whatever tragedies and pain burdened him in Columbia might be working. 

He clears his throat and you hold your breath, the whole world on pause as you wait for his next words, hoping and praying, like always, that this will be the moment he will choose to open up to you. To trust you. To crack open that safe he locked his heart away in, and share his pain with you. To let you hold him and tell him that you love him anyway, just like you always have and always will. 

Just like all the other moments before it however, this too slips away without resolve. 

“Let’s leave the rest of the cleaning up for tomorrow,” he cajoles gently. “Lets go to bed. We can....cuddle.”

Despite the disappointment of not getting through to him, your resolve melts immediately, evaporating like raindrops on a hot sidewalk. The tension bleeds out of your body until you’re limp in his arms, elated by the thought of sharing the bed with him again, even more so at the idea being of his own suggestion. 

“Really?” you ask, voice no louder than a mere whisper, afraid to scare him off or change his mind. Even if it’s being offered as a bribe or a distraction to avoid a fight or circumvent a conversation about what’s going on with him, you’ll take any chance you can to be close to him again. 

His lips press to your neck, and even just the briefest brush of them over your skin sends shivers through you. 

“I’ll stay until you fall asleep,” he promises, dispassionately, as if he’s doing you a favour. 

He is. 

Your face falls but you quickly patch it back into a smile before you turn to look at him. You’ve been craving any inch of affection from him for so long now that you’ll happily take this, take every brief touch. Whatever he’s willing to give you. 

There are familiar dark circles under his eyes, and worry wrinkles worn into his forehead. He looks older than his years now, a few straggled grey hairs scattered through his unruly hair and untamed beard. He’s still every bit as gorgeous as ever, but you don’t want to rip his clothes off like you used to. You want to gather up the pieces of him and hold him until he fits back together. Tonight, maybe what he’s offering is as close to that as you can get. 

His eyes roam your face as he watches you watch him, weariness at home in his eyes, knowing the way you are looking at him. Much to his visible relief, you take his hand in your own and lift it to your lips. 

“Lead the way,” you tell him as your lips brush over his pulse point before you press them to his palm. “Take me to bed.”

In days gone by, he would have carried you, but his back isn’t as good as it used to be, so he settles for keeping your hand in his and guiding you down the hall, up the stairs to the bedroom. He stops you at the foot of the bed, moving away only as far as to retrieve an old t-shirt of his that he knows you often sleep in. 

Coming back to you, he lifts the hem of your shirt up, untangling it from your arms and reaching behind you to unfasten your bra. It falls away, leaving you bare except for your shorts, and you stay quiet as he looks at you, an expression on his face that you can’t quite decipher. 

His tongue snakes out over his bottom lip and for a second you think he might reach up and touch you, slide his hand, or his mouth, over your breast, but he doesn’t. He helps you pull on his t-shirt instead, and then shucks his own clothes. 

As he fumbles with his pants you work off your shorts and tuck your cheek to your shoulder, inhaling the scent of him that’s still clinging to the soft cotton of the shirt. You feel spoilt to have the man himself in bed with you tonight, and you reach out to touch him, just because you can. 

Standing in just his briefs, he follows your touch willingly, walking into your arms and pressing his body close to yours. You rest your cheek on his chest and hear his heartbeat, closing your eyes and letting the thud of it’s beat fill your ears. He’s here, you remind yourself. He might not have come back exactly as he left, but he came back alive, and for that you are so eternally grateful. 

“I love you,” you tell him.

And you do. You do love him, just as much as you ever have, and you’re not giving up on him. Not now, not ever. You want to help him find himself again, and if that means sticking this hard part out, you’re willing to do it.

If it means taking whatever he gives you, you’ll accept that. 

You will keep loving him, keep trying to reach him, keep trying to piece him together again until it works. You don’t know when that will be, but you know you will never give up on him. That Frankie you know and love is still in there somewhere, you just have to find him. 

A few weeks later, Frankie fucks up. He knows it. 

From the minute his boss asks him to come into his office, guilt and shame fill his stomach, weighing heavy like an anchor inside him. Since he got back from the ill-fated trip to Columbia he’s been drowning in self doubt and unrest, and with this latest development it feels like the water is rising again. 

His boss cuts to the chase, announcing that they just got the results back and it shows Frankie failed his last drug test. 

It’s always a risk to take drugs in a job that routinely tests for them, however, in his defence, it had been a while since they tested him last, and he only took the coke because he hadn’t been able to sleep for so long and he was sick of feeling like a zombie. He wanted to be active and play with Diego, stay awake for work and finally smile with you enough to ease some of the permanent worry he knows he’s put on your face. 

His boss doesn’t want to hear his excuse though, so of course, he doesn’t reveal any of that. He doesn’t say that he can’t sleep because whenever he closes his eyes all he ever sees is Tom’s head with that bullet hole pierced through it. 

That all he ever hears when it’s quiet is the sound of the chopper engine malfunctioning. 

That the smell at the gas station makes him flashback to that crash landing in the thick jungle. 

That the feel of Diego in his arms or your gentle touch on his body only reminds him of what Tom’s lost, and what Frankie so very nearly cost himself too. 

When he closes his eyes and lies awake at night, the house is silent but his head is screaming, unrelentingly tortured by all of this. The memories and mistakes all play out behind his eyelids on an infinite loop.

But sometimes when it’s day time and he’s awake and it’s loud, things are worse. When his eyes are open, he can see the pain and anguish on your face, and know it’s his doing. When Diego shouts and it’s too loud for his head to take, he finds himself up on his feet and in search of some closed off space to calm his breathing and his racing thoughts, often before he even knows he’s doing it. 

None of it’s right. He knows that. But it’s all reactionary, survival. He might have made it out of the trip alive, but it’s as if his body doesn’t know it. His heart rate hasn’t slowed any since he got home, still wired to be on high alert and unable to shut off. 

Regardless, he gets told that he’s suspended and they take his pilot’s licence. They detail a raft of procedural consequences but Frankie finds it hard to listen. Bottom line is; he can’t fly. Can’t come to work and won’t get paid. 

Before he’s dismissed to leave the office, his boss mentions that he’s technically under review, but very pointedly states that he will need to pass another drug test before they can even consider him coming back to work. And the thing is, Frankie’s just not sure he can. 

The alcohol isn’t enough any more, not numbing him to the degree that he requires in order to function, and he’s got a twisted history with his cocaine usage. He’s previously learnt that it’s not something he can just do once or twice and quit, especially not when he’s struggling like he is. 

On his drive home, the thought of telling you about all this makes him feel physically ill. More sick than he’s ever felt before. His hands feel clammy on the wheel of his truck, and sweat collects on his pale face under the brim of his trademark cap. He resolutely makes a concerted effort not to look in his mirrors, appalled with the sight of himself. 

He’s been useless as a husband and a father since he came back, and he knows it. He sees the pain in your eyes, the trepidation in your movements, as if he’s a landmine and you’re afraid to put a foot wrong and set him off. He can’t blame you. He feels much like a time bomb himself, and it doesn’t take much to explode. 

Diego still reaches for him but Frankie finds it hard to receive his affection. His son looks at him with such joy and wonder, so in love with him, though Frankie can’t for the life of him figure out why. 

What’s there to love, he thinks. He is an old man with a bad back, a drinking habit, and now a coke issue again. He’s the reckless idiot that left to go on the stupid fucking trip to Columbia, thinking that getting a taste of the excitement of his old Marine life with his buddies was more important than being here, being a good man for his family, that family that he loves. The family he now finds hard to look in the eyes. 

He did this to himself, and he knows it. That’s what tortures him. It was him who insisted on going on the trip. The trip which could have killed him. Sometimes, when things are really hard and his brain is beaten up with memories and tortured by sleeplessness, inflamed by the alcohol, part of him wishes it had killed him. It might be easier than living with all of these open wounds, with this pain that he knows he’s causing you, day after day. As if it wasn’t enough to make you suffer through a week of radio silence, making you wonder if he was even alive, only to come back and prolong your suffering. 

He moved to the spare bedroom because he could no longer stand seeing the dark bags under your eyes or the bleary and bewildered look on your face as you woke to him shuffling around at some absurdly late hour once again, but he knows it hurt you deeply.

And he doesn’t mean to recoil, but he’s afraid to touch your beautiful body with all the blood on his hands, and even more afraid to burden you with the horror of the things he saw and did over there. He’s terrified to reveal the man he really is, knowing it’s nothing close to the one you deserve. You keep telling him you love him, but he finds it hard to imagine you’d still feel that way if he told you all the things he’s done in his life; horrible, unforgivable things that still haunt him. 

Distracted, he barely manages to plant his foot on the brake in time, almost oblivious to the red traffic light he arrives at. The truck screeches to a hard stop, jolting him forward in his seat, secured enough by his belt to stop him face planting into the steering wheel. A pile of papers on his passenger seat don’t fare as well, spilling forward into the footwell and scattering. He curses, thumping the dash with the heel of his hand. Fucking typical. 

With a heavy groan, he reaches over to pick up a handful, shocked when he catches sight of the top paper. It’s a brochure to a place that claims to help Veterans. One of many you have given him. The first few were handed to him, but he gave you such a poor reception that you had switched to a more subtle approach, leaving them around the house or in his truck, slipping them inside the letterbox alongside the other mail as if it were a coincidental neighbourhood pamphlet drop. 

He stares at it now in his hand, and the words on the front stick out like thorns. PTSD. Drug Addiction. Employment. Counselling. In the past it hurt too much, too hard to confront, so he’s pushed them aside or thrown them in the bin. Today feels different. Coming across it this way, picking it up by chance after losing his job, feels different. 

More desperate, maybe.

The light goes green but instead of heading straight, Frankie turns left. 

He realises, belatedly, that he’s driving to Pope’s house, but not until he turns on to Pope’s street. He’s heard Pope’s got some new girl hanging around lately; he might not participate in conversation as actively as he used to, but he’s got ears and Benny is loud. 

There’s no cars in the driveway when he pulls in, so he assumes that whoever she is, she hasn’t moved in. Yet. 

He parks his truck in front of the garage and shuts the engine off, staring a while longer at the brochure he’s still holding in one hand. The one that’s staring back at him, as if to say, “I’m your only hope”. 

Maybe it is. Maybe his time of handling things his way, be it by burying his head in the sand or pulling away from everyone, is over. It certainly hasn’t gotten him anywhere, he realises. He’s been deteriorating as a husband, a father, a friend, and now he can’t even bring in any money to the house without a job. His chest aches, wondering what use he is to you now if he can’t even contribute financially. Without the distraction and escape of work, how will he fair? What further destruction is he capable of? 

He’d rather not find out. 

Head clouded with thoughts, heart racing and stomach swimming, he pulls his phone from his jacket pocket and opens his browser. He makes a Google search and skims over the results, before throwing his phone across the truck, watching it slide along the bench seat and collide with the passenger door. Fuck. 

Fuck fuck fuck. 

He tosses his cap off his head and itches his fingers through his hair, wanting to fill his fist with the scruff of it and tear it out of his scalp. His skin is burning, head pounding. 

He unfastens his seatbelt and slides across to retrieve his phone. He drags a heavy hand over his face and unlocks the screen, editing his search. 

He can’t do this healing here. He knows that. He doesn’t know much any more, but he knows that. 

If he’s going to get help, to unlock all the gruesomeness and confront the monsters in his head that haunt his nightmares, he needs to be further away. Unravelling will be an ugly and painful process, and he doesn’t want to put you and Diego through that. 

In a dream scenario, he would click his fingers and be himself again. He would never have said yes to the trip to Columbia. But he doesn’t have a time machine or a magic pill. He has you and Diego and his friends, and he doesn’t want to put any of you through any more suffering. To be drowning you all as you fight to save him, to pull him from the quicksand underneath his feet. 

If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it once and do it right. Then he’ll come home and be himself again, be the man that he wants to be. The man he once thought he was. 

Leaving will hurt, he knows that. But staying here and burning bridges like this will be irreparable and the reality of that hurts more. 

A new list of results regenerates on the screen under his thumb and he clicks the top result. Reads through the information. It’s in the next state, but it’s highly recommended and promises good results.