“Need help?” a female voice sounds from behind me.

I turn swiftly, trying to hide my reaction to the girl standing in front of me. She can’t be more than fifteen, wearing a crop top, no bra, cigarette in her mouth and the kind of devilish grin I’d seen from the classy females in the veteran’s bar.

I tell her the house number I’m looking for. She points to a building behind me. “Third floor,” she says with a thick Pittsburgh accent.

After thanking her politely, I make my way to the O’Brien’s door, remove my hat, and I knock.

My heart drops the minute Dave’s mom answers. The cuts and bruises that cover her face are faded, but they’re still there. And even if I hadn’t seen pictures of her from Dave, there’s no mistaking who she is. Same red hair. Same freckles. Same damn smile. “Dylan Banks?” she asks, her hand going to her mouth.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“He told me if anything would happen, you’d be the first to check in on me,” she cries, opening the door wider for me.

I don’t step in. Not yet. Instead, I find myself reaching out to her, my arms going around her thin, frail body and I hug her. I continue to hug her as her cries get louder and my heart becomes weaker. After a while, she pulls back, grasping my arms as she looks up at me. “You were his best friend, Dylan.” She cups my face with both hands. “How are you handling it?”

I stare, unblinking, wondering how it is a woman who’s just lost her pride and her eldest son in the worst possible way can possibly be thinking of anyone or anything but the hurt and the pain, because that’s all I’ve felt.

The boys are at school, which is good because it gives us time to sit and talk.

They hadn’t always lived like this, she tells me. They had to move somewhere they could afford once Dave’s dad went to jail. Dave gave the majority of his income to his mother while he was serving and never once asked for anything in return. It wasn’t much, but she made it work. With three boys in school, it was hard to keep up with all the bills. A single bedroom public housing home was all they could afford. The boys share the room. She sleeps on a mattress in the hallway, and Dave took the couch whenever he was home.

It’s strange, the way she spoke about it. There was pride in her voice, in her demeanor—the way her shoulders sat straight and her chin lifted as she told me about things I would consider hardships—only she didn’t consider them that. She considered them battles, ones that she came out of alive and fighting, waiting for the next hurdle to cross.

She’s an amazing woman, strong and defiant and not once did she use the term “suicide” or the fact that Dave took a bullet to his own fucking head. The closest she came to it was “he lost his battle” and maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that’s how she chooses to honor him.

He lost the damn battle.

Now I just need to stop reliving the sight and sound of it and maybe I can overcome it too. Because as we sit on the well-used couch of the tiny living room, pictures of Dave staring back at me, all I can see is the fear in his eyes, his finger as it pulls the trigger, and then the blood as it erupts from the side of his fucking head.

*     *     *

I once told Riley that war was like being unable to wake up from a nightmare. Your body fights it, so does your mind, until something happens that forces you to wake up.

War is what you wake up to.

And it’s also the cause of the nightmares.

And so it goes.

On and on.

And on.

An endless cycle of nightmares.

I don’t sleep.

Because just like the times when I first came home, the nightmares are real and they’re raw and they cause me to plead with my body to keep my eyes open because a single moment of darkness creates the hell in my mind.

*     *     *

Dave,

I think I hate you.

Do you even know what you did?

You left your mom and your brothers behind.

You left me behind.

And I hate you because you haven’t really left me. It’s like everything I do now, I think about you and how you would react to it. What would you say to me?

I know you hate me.

I can tell from all the guilt I carry.

Not from the guilt of not knowing you were suffering, because I’ve come to terms with the fact that you were just really fucking good at faking it. I don’t know why you faked it. You should’ve known I’d be there. Sometimes I think there were signs, you know? And in my mind I go through all the conversations we’d had and all the things we’d done and I come up blank.

It’s the guilt from the way I treat Riley.

Because I see you.

I hear you.

You make me hurt her.

You and your inability to leave me the fuck alone.

Yeah.

I don’t think.

I’m positive.

I fucking hate you.

Forty-Four

Riley

I asked him on the Monday if I should book the hotel for the following weekend or if he had one in mind. He told me he’d get back to me with the details. Four days later he finally replied with an address. I reminded him that I’d taken Fridays off for a while so I’ll be at the hotel as soon I could check in. I told him that I missed him. And that I loved him. Because I felt it important for him to know… just in case he’d forgotten.

Now, it’s close to midnight on the Friday and I’m sitting alone in the hotel room he told me to go to. He should’ve finished at the car pool on base at five, according to his dad, and would have been able to leave soon after. The base is a twenty-minute drive away. At the most.