Basic Training

Five weeks ago.

It hadn't been sudden or unexpected. It hadn't been a surprise. Despite that, Adrianne found herself looking for her girlfriend Samantha at the grocery store or in the line at the ATM. As she drove past a bus stop, the teen waiting there turned her head, and Adrianne almost stopped the car in seeing a familiar tilt of chin. But the chin wasn’t attached to the right face—the only face she craved to see.

When Adrianne got home, she got out a blank sheet of paper and pen, but stopped after writing, “Dear Sam.”

She didn’t know what to say, not to a piece of paper. She left it lying on the kitchen table with just the two words on it, the pen crosswise against them, like a knife cutting the words in half.

* * * * *

Seven weeks ago.

“You can’t go.” Adrianne’s hands were scrubbing the same spot over and over on an already-clean dish, but her eyes focused on Sam.

Sam was sitting at the kitchen table, her booted feet kicked out in front of her, hands crossed over her stomach. Although Adrianne knew it was deliberate, an act of nonchalance, it still pissed the hell out of her. There was fear beneath Sam’s calm, there had to be. The images of sand and camouflage and guns were so frequently on the news that one could claim desensitization, unless being sent right into it.

But when Sam didn’t move or respond, Adrianne threw the plate she was washing into the sink. It broke with a dull thunk.

Sam dropped her eyes to Adrianne’s stilled hands. Told her, "Stop being dramatic."

“Why should I stop?”

“It’s not like you.”

Adrianne’s eyes were wet, but she ignored the moisture. “Oh, I’m sorry! Like the decision is irrevocable. You don’t have to go.” Adrianne always pulled out the “dictionary words” when she wanted to annoy, knew it made Sam feel small.

Hiccups rose up in Adrianne’s throat, and she took a step away from the sink, not knowing what to do next.

Sam frowned, then stood, but didn't move closer. “Don’t, Addy.”

“I can’t… I can’t…” She pressed her lips together as her throat closed. Regardless, the words escaped into the air, unsaid. Sam turned away and walked out of the room.

As Adrianne moved back to the sink to pick up the pieces of the broken plate, she felt like the shit she was. She doubted her mother would notice one missing dish. Her brother took out the trash, and he was about as observant as a bulldozer, so he would never tell. Still, she wanted to take all those pieces and glue them back together, to make something whole out of what she had wrecked. To go back in time.

The front door closed quietly as she dumped the pieces into the trash. Sam never made a fuss, not like her. But Adrianne could still hear the loud crash of the unslammed door over the splash of running water.

* * * * *

They wasted three days. Three precious days out of those last two weeks left to them, before Adrianne swallowed her pride and called. Sam had outwaited her, as always.

“I’m sorry,” Adrianne forced out the familiar words. It seemed like she was always apologizing. It didn’t help knowing that she was often wrong—she was the hotheaded one, the one to blow her cool over an imagined insult. It didn’t help that this time, the insult wasn’t so imagined. “I'm sorry about the fight. I should have listened to you without getting mad. But I just don’t see why—”

“Addy!” Sam’s voice was sharp.

“Okay. I won’t say it." She heard the pique in her own voice, and suddenly laughed at herself for how childish she sounded. It was hard to hold a grudge against Sam, even if she tried.

She could hear the answering smile in Sam’s voice. “My parents are gone.”

“Okay.”

“Come over.”

It was always like this. They fought—or, rather, Adrianne fought, like a single racquetball player bouncing the ball against a wall. But when they came together, there was no disagreement. There were lips and warm skin, the supple twining together of limbs, hands, teeth, tongue.

Afterwards, Adrianne stroked a palm down Sam’s cheek, following the concave hollow of neck to collarbone. She felt the pressure of her lover, the regard like a weight. But when Adrianne glanced at her, Sam looked away.

“Two months,” Sam said. She wound a strand of Adrianne’s blonde hair around one finger and let it spring back. Her eyes followed the hair rather than meet Adrianne’s gaze. “I’ll see you again, after Basic.”

“And then you won’t. You’ll be deployed right afterwards.”

“Write me a letter or an email once in a while.” Sam finally looked up, grinning. “Blondes do know how to write, don’t they?”

Adrianne laughed helplessly. “Bitch.”

“Skank.”

More laughter, over the hollow feeling. The center of her had been missing ever since Sam told her she planned to enlist after their high school graduation.

* * * * *

Ten weeks ago.

“You’re kidding, right?”

For once, Sam wouldn’t meet her eyes head-on. Shrugged.

“But your brothers have done it. Your parents don’t expect you—”

Eyes hardened and moved back to Adrianne, front and center. “Why not me?”

“You’re a g—”

“If you say girl,” Sam interrupted. “I will whup your white ass from here back to where it came from.”

That shut her up. It always did. “But Sam—”

“But nothing. I’ve told you because you deserve to know. This isn’t opinion. This is fact.”

So Adrianne had shut up. She had believed Sam when she said it was too late to change her mind.

* * * * *

But maybe it hadn’t been too late—then.

Now, it certainly was.

That last week and a half flew by, and it was suddenly D-day—the day before departure. The army was still catching up with providing adequate co-ed training facilities, so women training for combat weren’t just living in the next town—they were moving halfway across the country. The bus left the next morning, early.

“Write.”

“Yes,” Adrianne said.

“I love you.”

“Yes,” Adrianne said.

Sam hugged her, hard. The angles of her face had changed. They were foreign to Adrianne, a map of a different place. A different time.

“When's the bus?” she asked.

Sam pulled back. Wound a strand of Adrianne's blonde hair around her finger and let it slowly slide off again. “I’m sorry,” Sam said finally, not looking away from the curl of yellow hair she was playing with. “You probably shouldn't come tomorrow.”

The words were like a punch in the gut. Sam was not furtive in hiding the two of them from her family, but there were some things they didn't talk about with their parents right now. Perhaps not ever.

“Okay,” Adrianne said instead, like the inevitable tick of the clock. They hadn’t touched, really touched, since making up after the last fight, and she knew what Sam’s hug had been for. Adrianne wanted to be brave, like a military wife, but it was proving an effort to even smile.

“Okay.” Sam seemed distracted. So Adrianne just stood there like a lump and watched as Sam walked down the driveway and turned left at the sidewalk to go home. Sam looked back at the last moment—looked back and waved. Then she was gone, and Adrianne went back inside.

The next day, she heard Sam laughing at the grocery store. She saw Sam walking down the street. Sam's favorite song was on her shuffle play. When she walked by an electronics store, soldiers hunkered down on the many TVs, surrounded by grit and dust. They all had Sam’s face.

When Adrianne went home, she took out a pen and paper and wrote “Dear Sam” in black, indelible ink. She couldn’t manage anything else, so she went to bed. Her pillow smelled like Sam’s shampoo.

She went for a walk in the park and saw Sam at the water fountain. Running around the track. Riding a bicycle. Adrianne went home and wrote: “Dear Sam.” Her eyes were dry as bone when she went to bed.

Her cell rang in the morning from the kitchen table, where she’d left it the night before. “Addy,” her mother called to her in Sam’s voice. She dragged herself out of bed to pick up the phone, and it was Sam speaking.

Only it wasn’t.

After two weeks, she was thrown into a paroxysm of guilt. She bought a new ream of paper and tried harder. “Dear Sam,” she wrote. “Dear Sam, Dear Sam, Dear Sam…”

The letters disconnected from the page and became meaningless, floating through the air like dragonflies. She went back to bed.

Adrianne’s mother noticed in the third week. She talked at her daughter, asking stupid questions and not listening to the half-hearted replies. “Go away,” she finally told her mom. Her mother went. Friends from high school stopped by. Even her brother tried, but only in the bored way of a teenager, too cool to really care.

She didn’t know what day it was when there was a quiet knock on her bedroom door, and Sam’s voice said, “Adrianne.”

She sat up, startled. Only it wasn’t Sam—the voice was similar, but older.

A woman came into the room, outlined by light from the hall. It wasn’t until she sat on the bed that Adrianne saw that it was Glenda, Sam’s mother.

She was shocked, as if a ghost had returned after an exorcism. Adrianne braced herself for a motherly lecture, but Glenda said nothing for several moments.

Adrianne studied her, seeing her as if for the first time. Glenda’s hair had streaks of white in it and was pulled back tightly from her scalp in a thick braid down her back. She smelled familiar, like Sam’s lavender soap, but she looked tired. “I know you miss her,” Glenda finally said.

The statement was so absurd that Adrianne laughed. Realizing how rude that would seem, she said, “Yes.” But she couldn’t think of what else to say. Glenda’s eyes were soft, like her daughter’s.

“I miss her, too," Glenda said. "A mother’s love is special—just like other types of love can be. Even though she has her own way to walk, it doesn’t mean love needs to stop.”

“Right.” The anger leaked into Adrianne's voice, she knew it did, and she couldn’t seem to stop it. “But she didn’t do it for herself. She did it for you—so she wouldn’t be left out. How will you live with yourself if she doesn’t come back?”

Just like when Adrianne argued with Sam, the angry words bounced off Glenda with little impression. “Love can stop,” Sam’s mother told her. “Or it can go on.” With that, she put her hand on Adrianne’s bright blonde hair, a brief touch. “She misses you,” she said gravely before getting up and walking out.

Adrianne lay back in her unwashed sheets and stared at the dark ceiling. There was a lamp on in the hall, and Glenda had left the door open. The light seeped into her room, creating shadows. Almost, she could see Sam’s face in the twilight.

Almost.

The next day, she got up and showered. Washed her sheets, cleaned her room, and recycled the mess of papers with only two words on them.

In her desk drawer, she found a pair of scissors. She weighed them in her palm, considering, then wound a strand of her hair around one finger. A quick snick of the scissors, and she let the cut strand of blonde hair drip off her hand and into an envelope.

A week later, her mom handed her the mail, and she saw the letter on top addressed to her. She took it into her room and sat on her bed in the dark. With both hands, Adrianne held the unopened envelope against her face.

And she cried and she cried and she cried.