All I Have Left (32 page)

Sometimes you’re so severely broken, just sure that nothing in this world can fix you. And sometimes, it’s easy to be healed with the beating of a heart that has nothing left to give.

It doesn’t stop the anger though.

August 2003

Grayson was able to go home from the hospital 18 days after the accident. He seemed good too. Better than ever. But I knew it wasn’t over.

He hadn’t dealt with it. We just didn’t talk about it. Even months later, we acted like it didn’t happen.

Just like it started with us, distracting one another, it seemed we tried that again.

This time, it came crashing back on us the first time we tried to have sex since that day.

Grayson stopped after just two minutes, his head fell to my shoulder and his shaking took over. “I can’t do it…I can’t fucking do it!” He said, more angry than anything.

“Why?” I swallowed over the painful lump in my throat pulling his sheet up over my body, afraid of what was coming next.

“What do you want me to say?” He pulled away completely and sat up swinging his legs over the bed. Staring at the wall, his voice was low and pained. “All I see when I touch you like that is them,
fucking you
.”

The sob that left my mouth shook my bones. He realized he’d made a mistake saying those words, he just kept saying, “I’m sorry…so sorry…I just can’t—” even though everything he said was exactly the same thing I was feeling. I felt his pain because I was living it too.

This was going to take a lot of time to get past for both of us and it was slowly killing me inside knowing the normalcy we’d found was shattered in such a short period of time. We couldn’t even be intimate with one another. How much more would we have to endure?

It was a good thing Grayson was unconscious that night because Shane wouldn’t have walked away from that. Grayson would have killed him. I know that. And he would be the one in prison instead of Shane.

He still wanted too. I saw it in his eyes every time he looked at me. I was the reminder of that day now. He said he would gladly spend the rest of his life in prison if it meant Shane was dead. It wasn’t comforting to me because I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any of that.

I wanted us to work, to be an
us
again, something we hadn’t been in a long time.

I found him two hours later, crying, with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. The past had finally reared its ugly, blood sucking head.

“Grayson?” My hand shook as I reached for the door knob.

He stood from his place on the bathroom floor, and walked down the hall, never looking at me. I followed as we walked into his bedroom. He came back to the bed, swaying and then collapsed on it, his face in the pillow. My hands went to his back, rubbing it. “Grayson…please talk to me. Baby please…we have to talk about it.”

“Make me forget,” he twisted, his arms wrapping around my waist, holding me so tight I thought his life depended on it. “I can’t forget…I can’t…”

It’s hard to let go of the past. It’s part of you. And that’s hard to forget. It happened.

We needed to talk about it. We had to. It needed to start from the beginning though.

“Tell me what happened over there.”

“Why does it matter?” he wasn’t looking at me but I felt his body tense and go rigid.

“I need to know, Grayson.” I said softly rubbing his back. “For us to be together, I need to know what you went through.”

He rolled over to his back and stared at the ceiling, his left hand still on my bare thigh. When I looked at him, his eyes filled with so much emotion I never thought I’d find the end of it. It was hard to read. He sat up, running his hands over his face, groaning. He was torn as he sat on the edge of his bed, his eyes guarded and tortured with fear.

He looked back at me like he wanted to say it, say something, and I waited but nothing came.

He swallowed, shaking, his eyes sad.

Then something flickered in his eyes. He blinked and it was gone.

That’s when he finally opened up to me.

He moved to sit beside me on the bed, facing me.
“After I left, I was stationed in New Mexico. It was rather quiet there. We mostly just ran training drills and what not. Time seemed to go on agonizingly slow. I never stopped thinking of you, not for one moment.” He touched my cheek with his calloused fingertips, and then pulled away. “My training in the Army was in Special Forces, specifically in Counter-Terrorism. In November of 2001, my team was shipped to Iraq on a mission. Me and another guy, Matt, were out one afternoon a couple weeks after we got there on clean up as we called it. It’s just combat search and rescue. We would go out and look for other soldiers who hadn’t returned to the base. About an hour into it, we came across a deserted town about twenty miles from the base,” he stopped, and looked away.

I knew it was going to hurt to know how much he suffered. To know he could have died over there and I would have never seen him again.

“It was a set-up from the beginning” he muttered uneasily. “To make a long story short we came under attack and were captured. Matt and I were stuck down in an underground bunker.”

“What did they do?” I was oblivious to a lot of things that went on after 9/11. I was scared to know how bad it was.

That fall, after Grayson left, was when 9/11 happened…living in Pinckard, Alabama, we were sheltered from the battles being fought half way around the world. All I knew was that was I missing Grayson more and more every day.

I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday though. I remember the day they sent in our troops too. I remembered thinking of Grayson and wondering where he was and praying for his safety.

Was he alive? Would he make it?

To know the truth, to know he was suffering it was harder than I imagined. I had no idea that after war,
this
is what’s left of a person.

“They kept us alive, but only enough so they could torture us for information
—i
nformation we didn’t have. After the first few days, we started to feel like we were never going to get out of there. Days would pass when we wouldn’t see anyone. But we heard them. I started to think we were going to die in that place. Every night I would lay awake and hear the sounds of bombs going off accompanied by constant machine gun fire. I was in hell. Right in the middle of it, the worst place on Earth fighting someone else’s battle, in a fucking hole in the ground, left to die,” he paused, seeming to struggle for a moment, his voice starting to shake. “I told myself that if I ever got out of there alive I would come home to tell you how I felt.” He paused for a long moment, seeming to know what he was about to say next would be difficult. “And never let you go.”

“How did you get out of there?”

He bowed his head, the weight of his admittance heavy, maybe too heavy. “They started to get hostile when we had no information so they began torturing us.”

All those scars finally made sense. I ran my hands over the gun shot over his shoulder, he let me this time and then reached for my hand to hold it in his, a hand three months ago I thought I’d never get to hold again.

“When we didn’t tell them anything they threatened to kill us. Matt was desperate and wanted to lie to them and tell them something but we had nothing
—w
e didn’t even know why we were there and the Army kept it that way in case something like that happened, our mission was to protect the mission. We were search and rescue. We didn’t know shit. I’m not even sure how long we’d been there but one night they led us to a field where a group of men were. They had baseball bats in their hands.”

I could feel his reluctance to continue. It meant telling me details he never thought he could share with anyone.

I flinched at the thought of what he was about to tell me. I knew exactly where it was going. A rush of memories from Shane flooded back, overwhelming and made me feel like I was going to die from the pain. It shot through me, cold and hot at the same time, pricking my skin.

“They were done playing games,” he shook his head, taking another deep breath, his shaking taking over. “They forced me watch as they beat Matt to death with a bat…and he screamed until he couldn’t scream anymore for me to make them stop.”

Oh God
, I…I couldn’t even imagine what he must have felt…the complete and utter helplessness, and then to see me…

“Watch me fuck her against your truck.”

I saw the reaction he was reminded of the day, both days right then. I see it. It was written in his eyes, written in both our eyes.

He could barely get the next part out. “I couldn’t do anything, they had me tied up, all I could do was scream and beg them to stop. But they didn’t. They shot me four times and threw me on the ground next to his body. I was out there, for what seemed like days or even weeks, I don’t even know.” He looked down, his eyes breaking from mine as tears fell. “The next thing I remember I was in a hospital back in New Mexico and my commanding officer told me I was being honorably discharged.”

“How did you…what made you come back here?”

“It’s all I have left. I wanted to see you.”

“I’m so sorry, Grayson,” I cried into his chest. His arms wrapped around me, pressing me into him.

“He was only nineteen years old, Evie. Nineteen.” His voice and tone was one of annoyance, but also regret, his lips pressed to my neck, just once. “He had a wife and a little boy back at home in Texas. That little boy will never see his dad again, his wife will never see her husband and the father of her child again and here I am alive, getting a second chance, or a third chance to do it right,” his voice cracked, and then he cleared his voice.

Drawing back, he
stared at me, his hands on my shoulders and I took a fleeting moment to really look at him as I tried to steady my heart rate. He looked awful. His hair had started to grow back but the scar on the side of his head was a reminder that would never go away. What was worse was that emotional scar was more powerful than any physical scar. It was a scar that split his chest in two.

Trying to control myself, I wanted to vomit, or breakdown and cry on floor…cry for everything, for what he’d suffered, for what he’d lost, for what we’d lost, for what wasn’t able to be forgotten. Everything that I was after hearing that.

I got him to lay down on the bed and I held Grayson tightly, kissing his shoulders, his cheeks, his forehead, everything I could but never his lips.

We lost more of ourselves that night than we wanted to admit. Or maybe ever would admit.

“Don’t
…d
on’t leave me
…
please
…
I can’t,” he couldn’t speak, just held me tightly, almost too tight. “Without you…I can’t.” He wrapped his arms around me and we didn’t move for the longest gut wrenching moment, maybe even hours. Strong arms held me in place, welded together, shaking for different reasons, breathing for the same, numbness for the same.

“I can’t do this without you. I fucking tried. I can’t. I’m sorry I let them touch you like that...I’m so fucking sorry!” his body couldn’t take much more of this. Not only was he still healing physically, but the emotional damage was breaking him apart. Soon there’d be nothing left.

“Shhh…I’m not going anywhere,” I assured him. “But we need help. We need to talk to someone about this.” He knew what I was referring to. “If every time you kiss or touch me, you think of what Shane did, we need help or this isn’t going to work.”

“Okay…okay…” and then the tears coming from him were a little more than I’d seen in a while. “You’re all I have left,” he cried against my skin, tears soaking me, and he was right, in some ways, in his emotionally shattered heart, I am all he has left.

There’s a spot on Dean Church Road I’ll never forget. A spot on that road that turns off onto an old country dirt road. It’s overgrown with trees and so well tucked away you wouldn’t even know it’s there.

But it’s there.

And I’ll never drive by it again and not see my life for what it is right now. I was mad as hell, angry at the world, myself, Grayson, Shane, everyone.

There’s things in this world you’ll never forget. Things that happen to you that can’t be taken back. It’s a scar, a permanent reminder.