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Pre-deployment

Blake and I had eaten our supper and settled in on rough upholstery in the living room. Blake sat up, attending to reruns of Family Guy, Futurama, or King of the Hill, while I nestled against the worn denim and soapy scent of his favorite Silvertabs, savoring the scent while I could, knowing that at any moment comfort could be washed away in a wave of nausea. In the early stages of pregnancy, I was learning a new vocabulary and extending definitions. Morning sickness was not confined to mornings.

Blake was learning, too. He paced the living room until I emerged from the bathroom after each wave of sickness. His eyes weighted with guilt, he would ask if there was anything he could do. He had learned to choose restaurants that offered a salad bar, so that at least if my stomach turned when my entrée reached the table I could find something to eat. So as we settled into our evening, he tried to stifle his laughter, hold his body still so that I could rest. His fingers followed the curve of hair along my temple. The ground outside lay frozen beneath thick snow, but inside I curled into Blake’s warmth, allowed his hollow laugh, muffled by flesh and fabric, to slow me into sleep.

But then something wrenched me awake: the smell of sienna powder; the sight of it dusted over apple slices sparkling with sugar; the soft flesh of caramelized fruit buried beneath crisp brown-sugar-and-oatmeal earth; the taste of it all blending, bleeding syrupy, cinnamon sweet. The craving had hit, and suddenly I felt myself springing from the couch, frantic for fulfillment.

I moved with such urgency that Blake followed instinctively, his long stride matching mine until I lunged at the fridge. He paused at the edge of the kitchen counter while I clawed at the fruit drawer. “Apple crisp,” I explained. “I’ve got to have some.” I watched his wide-eyed panic transform into a pinched confusion as I asked, “Do you want some?”

“Apple crisp?” His voice softened into a near laugh, his head bobbed in disbelief, “Apple crisp? No, no thanks.”

He left the kitchen and fell back onto the couch, legs stretched over cushions, arms tucked in at his sides, while I frantically peeled red-streaked yellow skins with a flimsy paring knife, filling a bowl of salt water with yellow-white apple moons. I checked the recipe scribbled in the back cover of a family cookbook, then pulled a chair to the stove front and stepped up to scour for ingredients inside the white, pressed-board cupboards.

After a few moments, my disbelief bubbled over. “You’ve got to be kidding!” The urgency in my voice jerked Blake back to the kitchen, where I continued digging through cookbooks, bags of flour and sugar, and plastic shakers of seasonings and spices in the baking cupboard. His wide eyes anticipated an emergency as he asked, “What’s wrong? What do you need?”

“Cinnamon. I’m completely out. Can you believe it?”

He smiled, lowering his brow as if reasoning with a child. “You mean you can’t make apple crisp without it?”

Something about the way I scowled, the way my shoulders dropped as my hands clung to the lip of the cupboard, the way I shrieked disbelief must have communicated the urgency of pregnancy cravings, because before I could answer, Blake was at the door, lacing his hunting boots. I moved to the frosty sliding glass doors that led to the deck and watched freshly falling snow fill the dotted-line his heavy boots left behind as he made his way across the parking lot to the convenience store to see if they sold cinnamon.

Watching him leave, I wanted to cry, because even though Blake and I had grown up in the same small town and had attended the same church and school all our lives, even though we’d said many goodbyes and spent months and years separated by state and country lines, watching him go—even across the parking lot—reminded me that he would be leaving again soon. Sometime after the wedding we’d scheduled for Memorial Day weekend 2005, probably before our baby’s October due date, Blake would be going to Iraq.

Seven years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, Blake and I walked together across a snow-covered driveway, abandoning a noisy party for the familiar, tight space of his dad’s dusty pickup, where we could speak softly, let our words linger like the smell of cigarettes in the worn upholstery. We’d spent many nights in that truck, driving around with his older brother, Brock, a case of Old Mil light, and piles of our favorite CDs. But that New Year’s Eve, we were alone.

Blake and I were rarely alone together. We spent time with friends, drinking in the dugout after summer baseball games, sometimes skinny-dipping in the pool in the middle of the night, or watching TV in his grandparents’ dairy where we slouched on rusty folding chairs surrounded by animal pelts and camouflaged jackets. I’d had a crush on Blake since junior high, when I watched his 7th grade basketball team play while I waited in my short blue and gold pleated skirt to cheer for the 9th grade game, so I wasn’t surprised by the way Blake and I tended to drift away from parties and into our own intimate conversations. I was surprised, though, that our friends noticed so quickly and began to ask, “What’s going on between the two of you?” I didn’t have an answer, yet.

In the truck, I leaned across a console filled with gum wrappers and change, a shotgun angled against it. My thin fingers dangled from the faux-leather console, fluttered just above Blake’s knee as he asked me about the literature classes I was taking in college. “Did you know rye was one of the staple foods in Salem and other places where people went on witch hunts? Some scholars think that the ‘bewitched’ women were really just high on fermented rye.” Blake was always up for a discussion or a debate, so he egged me on and challenged my newly acquired ideas. “Or maybe they were really witches that just happened to eat rye.” I loved the way his eyebrows peaked playfully as he questioned me, but I had questions for him, too.

“So, what about you?” I asked. “Why aren’t you going to school this year?”

“I’m joining the Guard,” he said. “Basic training starts next week and then AIT.”

The answer surprised me, even though it shouldn’t have. His older brother, Brock, was in the National Guard, and Blake had mentioned the possibility before. I squinted at Blake through the dark and asked, “You’re sure you want to do that?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he answered.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea,” I back-pedaled, trying to look into his downturned eyes, “it just seems like a big deal. What makes you so sure?”

“Because I have no idea what I want to do or what I want to be.” He traced the seam of his Levi’s. Then he looked up, but not at me. He looked through the windshield and said, “I’ve always known I would join the Army. I just know I can be good at this.”

All I could imagine of military service was camouflage uniforms and weapons. I’d never handled any kind of gun, except for the time my uncle took my cousins and me out to the slough by Grandma Evie’s and showed us how to fire a pistol. But in the dairy on a summer night I’d watched Blake meticulously piece a rifle back together after cleaning metal pieces I had no name for. I knew he was comfortable with guns. “So you aren’t going to go to college?”

“No, I will,” he said, “just not until fall.” My breath hung, visible in the January cold, as I wondered what to say next. After so many nights, so many conversations, and Blake still at a safe emotional and physical distance, it seemed significant that he was sharing these plans with me. But I remembered my cousin’s wedding reception six months earlier, how Blake placed his hands over the royal blue lace of my bridesmaid’s gown but held his forearms stiffly between us while the chords of “Desperado” carried us from side to side, how he pulled me towards him for an unexpected, rigid hug during the final note and whispered, “You look beautiful,” and then disappeared for the rest of the night. He seemed comfortable now, and I didn’t want to scare him off. So I held words and breath in my chest until Blake surprised me with an audible exhale and the words, “It would be nice to have someone to write to while I’m gone.”

The first letter with a return address of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, arrived a few weeks later. Back at South Dakota State University for spring semester, back in the four bedroom apartment I shared with four friends from high school, I tore the letter open in the kitchen and I read my way down the hall to my corner bedroom. The letter was short, one small sheet of unlined Army stationary. Blake was fine. Basic Training wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be, but he wanted me to have his address in case I had time to write.

I had time. I wrote a letter immediately, posted it the next day and began a daily mail check, anticipating another envelope from Fort Sill. When it finally came after two weeks, I blushed as my eyes flittered over his apology for being too busy to write and his appreciation for my letter. That was enough incentive for me to write more regularly. Letter after letter on the same college ruled paper. Summaries of every experience I thought might make him laugh, every idea he would engage if he were there with me. When I read Trainspotting and A Clockwork Orange in my Contemporary British Lit class, I wrote a casual critical paper for him, knowing he would have seen the movies and would add them to his list of novels he should read someday. When a Far Side joke from my desk calendar made me laugh, I tore it out and folded it between pages of blue lines and my erratic combinations of upper and lower case letters, cursive and printing.

Blake’s letters and postcards came intermittently, but I read and reread them every day, hearing his voice in my head as I followed the crooked lines of his choppy cursive. “Amber, I know I promised you a letter,” he wrote, “but this is a big postcard.” It was a big postcard, a 5x7 picture of illumination flares going off at night. I laughed when, after a couple sentences about the weather and the frustrations of downtime on an Army base, Blake wrote, “I know this is pretty crappy, but I’ve already put a stamp on it and have written some, and I don’t think I’ll have time to write another.” I’m sure my smile softened and my fingers curled over my collarbone as I read on:

“I thought a lot about home today and for the first time I was homesick. I forgot to lock my locker and caught it before I left when I needed to get my gloves. I said to myself, ‘Blake, what are you doing?’ It made me feel good because it’s all last names here and that is what I used to say to myself at home. So, you can imagine how nice your letter was.”

I flipped the postcard over in my hand, savoring the last sentence. I studied the postcard’s orange flares, the quote appearing beneath them in small caps. “A coward dies a hundred deaths, a brave man only once; but once is enough.” I knew Blake would have noticed the quote, because he always noticed everything, always planned his words and actions carefully. I wondered if he imagined himself a coward. I remembered “Desperado.” Blake had always insisted we end a night of beer drinking with that song. He always sang every word, and though not on key, he followed every slide from note to note. I suspected his letters were an attempt at bravery.

I could be sure after the next postcard came. Blake wrote that he was preparing for a 21 task test, but that he wasn’t worried because “the Army is set up for the stupidest man alive.” Then he added, “Speaking of witch,”—and yes, he did confuse the homonyms—“are you seeing anyone from class or anything?”

With hundreds of miles and three states between us, Blake’s letters slowed my breathing, drew my eyes shut so that I could feel his presence. I fell asleep at night with a pen in hand, the spine of a notebook pressing into my cheek, Blake’s letters beside my pillow. In my dreams, Blake and I were like World War II couples I’d seen on TV or in media images—white-capped soldiers kissing young wives in fur-collared coats on the pier. A couple drawn together by military service. I had cast myself in the role of his something-to-come-home-to.

A few months later, on the 4th of July, I was the one coming home to Blake. That summer, I had crossed my first international border, traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico for a month-long study-abroad trip. In Mexico, I felt my world expanding suddenly as I learned to communicate with street vendors and the bouncers and waiters who worked at the disco my friends and I visited on weekends. By the time I returned to South Dakota, I’d changed my class schedule for the coming semester, having decided to double major in Spanish and English. But I’d also spent hours in Oaxaca scouring souvenir shops for gifts for Blake and his brother, Brock.

I returned home just in time for the 4th of July street dance, where I presented Brock with his volcano-topped ashtray that funneled smoke from stubbed out cigarettes through the top of the snow-tipped mountain, and Blake with his bottle of orange flavored Mezcal. Blake and I spent the night sneaking to my car to drink shots of the stinging alcohol. By 4 am, he had drunk the worm, and the two of us had found our way to the baseball field, where we stood under a cottonwood at the entrance to the park.

Blake laughed nervously as I wrapped my arms around his waist, then he squeezed my bony hips with his thin fingers.

“So, what is this?” I asked. “What’s going on here?”

Blake pulled me towards him and we hugged like awkward kids at a junior high dance. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. Or something. It’s just that you’re Amber, you know.”

I didn’t know, I told him.

He placed his hands on my shoulders, putting distance between our bodies as he looked me in the eye and explained. “You’re Win’s daughter. Betty’s granddaughter. You’re smart and beautiful, and you’ve done so much more than I have. You’ve been to Mexico, learned another language. And I just don’t think I can do this. I can’t ask you out, because I’m afraid I’ll fuck …” He censored himself. “I know myself. I’ll mess it up.”

I was flattered, but as Blake explained how he held me up on a pedestal, I shook my head no. “What do you mean I’ve done more than you have? You’re in the Army—because you believe in it. Not because you want your college paid for, but because you believe you can do some good. You put off going to college for that. Don’t you think that’s something?”

He shrugged while I continued to shake my head. “And anyway, you’ll fuck it up by not trying, too.” I laced my fingers in his and pulled his hands together at the small of my back. “You have to try. We have to. Because I can’t stand it anymore. I need to know what this is.”

Finally, with a shy, closed-mouth kiss, he agreed.

Three years later, after abandoning the challenge of chasing after Blake for a new challenge—teaching English as a Second Language in Mexico—I sat on the tile floor of my Guadalajara apartment, coiling a phone cord around my finger as I waited for my dad to explain the reason for his call. I knew it was important, because I always called home. Mom always grumbled about her confusion over international prefixes and the cost of international phone calls, and Dad didn’t even seem to know it was possible to call out of the country, so something significant had to have happened.

I’d seen Blake each time I visited home, felt the pull of his body as we cruised country roads in his brother’s truck, listening to our playlist of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Piano Man,” and “Tracks of my Tears,” felt the brush of his thigh against mine as he sang “Desperado,” but I’d kept any lingering attraction I had to him, any lingering hope of a relationship, from moving to Mexico with me. I thought I had moved on. But when my dad’s voice rumbled, “Blake’s going to Iraq, I thought you’d want to know,” my vision crossed, blood rushed through my veins, my eardrums throbbed, and I found myself reeling back toward Blake like a tape measure curling back into its casing. I pictured his wide grin, his uneven penmanship on the back of postcards, the childish picture of a deer and evergreens he’d sketched to fill up one page of stationary. I remembered his profile against a frosted truck window, the glance of his eyes towards me as he said, “It would be nice to have someone to write to while I’m gone.” I was supposed to be there when this happened, I thought. I was supposed to give him something to come home to.

When I called Blake, though, he didn’t seem to need me. I could picture him, in his worn grey t-shirt, baggy carpenter jeans, hair tousled and sleepy expression when he came to the phone. I told him how I’d learned about his deployment, how I felt I really needed to talk to him before he left, how worried I was. I expected his response to be slow, weighted with regret.

Instead, he chirped dismissively, “Oh, yeah. We head to Fort Sill in a couple of weeks.”

“Wow, Blake. I’m sorry.” I paced as far as my phone cord would allow, wishing I could explain how much he still meant to me, how much it still mattered to me that he return safely, how I would probably abandon my boyfriend of 2 years and my job in Mexico to return to Bryant, South Dakota if he needed something to come home to.

“No, don’t be sorry,” he laughed. “This is what I’m supposed to do. This is why I joined the Army. You shouldn’t worry about it at all.” I remembered our New Year’s conversation, his reasons for joining the military. Apparently I still didn’t understand, because the duty that seemed like a burden, a tragedy to me, a reason to call and console was expected, welcomed even, by Blake. “It’s really nothing to be sorry about,” he told me. Blake’s confidence, his willingness to change the subject and find out what I was up to in Mexico, was reassuring, but it was disappointing to know that the identity I had imagined for myself—his something-to-come-home-to—had been my own construction. He really didn’t need me at all.

“Okay, well, good luck,” I said at the end of our call. It seemed like the wrong thing to say, so I tried again. “Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah, you, too,” Blake said. “And, hey, thanks for calling. Really.”

When I moved back to South Dakota on Memorial Day weekend of 2004, I didn’t think the return had anything to do with Blake. I thought our story was written in the past tense. But I remembered the recurring events of that narrative—the amateur baseball games on Wednesdays and Sundays, the Old Mil light, the slow drives over gravel roads—and during that first week home, found myself walking through the dark toward the baseball field. I knew the game would be over, but the players would still be there, scattered around the dugout and on coolers along the third baseline.

I was two blocks away when I heard Blake laugh. It was a drunken laugh, a series of loud staccatos that stopped me in the middle of the street. My pulse quickened, and I froze. I knew that if I didn’t turn around, didn’t walk back to my parents’ house on Main Street, I’d be walking toward Blake.

When I stepped into the dugout, gravel slipped beneath my feet, and several players turned toward the sound. Conversations paused, open mouths hovered on the lips of cans, as people squinted to make out a new face in the dark. I recognized Blake’s slender frame, his dangling-armed posture, even in the shadows, and exhaled relief as he responded, jumping up from the worn, green bench. “Amber? Is that you? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were home.” He rushed towards me.

“Just moved back this weekend,” I said. “So, yeah, I’m home.” I hesitated, glancing at my feet, and was surprised when suddenly Blake’s arms were around me. It was an awkward, firm hug that trapped my arms at my sides.

Blake left his arms around me as he pulled back and asked, “For good? You mean you’re staying?” I slid my hands up to the small of Blake’s back and leaned back until my stomach pressed into his hips and our eyes met. As I tilted my head, but before I could stutter an answer, a red-headed kid lifted his baseball cap, scratching his head and walking toward us as he said, “Jensen, who’s the girl? You act like she’s the love of your life or something.”

“It’s Amber,” Blake said, grinning, still looking me in the eye, holding me there, tightly, in his arm. “I can’t believe you’re here.” He shook his head. “We beat Castlewood tonight—and we never beat Castlewood—and now you’re here. What are the odds?”

Blake turned, one hand cupping my elbow, the other reaching into a cooler beside him. He shook droplets of water off a silver can and led me to a bench in the dugout where we assumed our familiar positions—bodies turned into one another, knees brushing, my head titled down so that I peered up at him as I talked. We returned to our comfortable conversations—baseball and hunting stories I’d heard twenty times before—and our habit of retreating from the rest of the crowd as the night went on. Soon Blake was confessing to me how he had spent the last several years figuring himself out.

“I used to worry about stuff, about not doing things right. In college, I couldn’t even pick up the phone to order a pizza, sometimes, so you can imagine why I couldn’t call you.”

“I had no idea,” I said. “I mean, I just thought you were shy. I had no idea.”

“It’s okay, really.” We had turned so that we were side by side, but I was conscious of Blake’s t-shirt against my bare shoulder, his knee brushing my thigh. He twisted his neck to look me in the eye as he continued, “Because I’ve kind of figured myself out. First I went to a doctor, he gave me some kind of pills, and I took them for a while. But then I realized, I just didn’t feel like myself. I told myself, ‘You can’t let this ruin your life.’”

“Blake, that’s really amazing,” I said. I shifted uncomfortably, scooting slightly away as I placed my hand on the bench between us. But as I placed my weight on my hands, shoulders raising, I made sure the skin of our arms still met. “You know, I’m supposed to be getting married, Ernesto’s finishing his school in Mexico, he’s supposed to be moving to South Dakota next year.”

Blake didn’t hesitate. “If that makes you happy, that’s great,” he said. “It really is. I’ve met Ernesto, he’s a great guy. But I don’t see a ring on your finger, and you’re not married yet. All I’m asking for is a chance. So, my cousin’s getting married this weekend, and then I leave for two weeks of Army summer camp. Will you come with me to the wedding?”

By the time he asked the question, the edges of our bodies had been stitched up again—a tight seam from shoulder to knee. I answered, “We’ll see.” Within a few weeks, I was on the phone with Ernesto, explaining that my plans had changed. Within six months, Blake and I were picking out baby names and planning our wedding.

The whole story—of how Blake had become my soldier—passed through my mind as I stood at the patio door, watching for his return. He’d only gone to the gas station, had gone for cinnamon to satisfy my urgent craving, but as I waited for him to return, I imagined the urgency I would feel over the next year of my life: after Blake and I were finally married, after our baby was finally born, when I would be waiting for Blake to return from war.

I marveled at how Blake’s activation had caught me off guard. The significant events and dates alone should have been enough to prepare me for my future as a military wife—Basic Training and AIT, the 4th of July, Blake’s first activation, our reunion on one Memorial Day weekend and the wedding we were planning for the next—but I’d been swept up in the dramatic change, the romance-novel narrative of it all. It seemed our roles had reversed, like Blake had become my something-to-come-home-to, like I had moved home to my happily-ever-after. So by the time we found out we were having a baby, by the time we began planning our wedding, I’d stopped thinking of Blake as my soldier and begun reconceiving him as my husband, the father of my unborn child. And then Blake called with the news of his activation. His already deep voice rumbled like low static on an AM radio station when he said, “Amber, my unit’s being activated.”

“Your what? What does that mean exactly?” I waited for his response as the heat of my cell phone melted a flesh-colored film of makeup onto to its own plastic face.

“It means I’m going to Iraq.”

It was all so still new—the wedding plans and the baby names—that I had given myself permission to forget about the possibility of war until that moment, until Blake began apologizing for calling, not telling me face to face, for needing to get it off his chest, needing to just say it. I’d never really considered what it meant to be a military wife, not until that moment, when I found myself at the intersection of expected and unexpected, experiencing the word activated—really feeling it in my gut—and tasting the word Iraq. I realized that although I had known Blake essentially all my life, I was just learning to depend on the sound of his breathing to ease me into sleep at night, the slight weight of his hand on my bulging belly, to appreciate the fact that he would walk through snow for a few simple ingredients. I realized that soon he would be leaving and I wouldn’t know when he was coming back.

From my perch at the patio door, I spotted Blake’s lean body angling into wind-slung snow, his bare hand clutching a paper sack as he returned from the store. I blinked at the sight of him, then hurried to the kitchen and busied myself with the melting of butter and packing of brown sugar. I heard the security door rattle downstairs, and soon he was inside, smoothing his wet hair, handing me a little brown bag, inside a tiny red and white labeled shaker that probably cost four dollars at convenience store prices. I stopped him before he made his way back to the couch and kissed his full, smiling cheek.

Before the end of the night, Blake returned to the same store two more times—once for brown sugar, once more for ice cream. When he made those trips, I stayed in the kitchen, mixing ingredients, wiping counters, and washing dishes. I didn’t want to watch him leave. Finally, after all his work, I settled in on the couch next to him, a warm bowl cradled in my hands, one craving satisfied, at least temporarily.

AMBER JENSEN is an instructor at South Dakota State University, where she also coordinates the Veteran’s Writing Workshop. Now ten years past 27, she is blessed with a family that she adores and work that inspires her.

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