Learning to Stay Read Online Free

Learning to Stay
Book: Learning to Stay Read Online Free
Author: Erin Celello
Tags: Fiction, Family Life
Pages:
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face and my body. I half expect, as I look down, to see my heart lying right there on Darcy’s nice cream carpeting. I think of the night I showed up, shaking and unable to get it together, on Darcy’s doorstep. I made the mistake of watching the nightly news with Peter Jennings, and as he and the reporter calmly narrated B-roll of Blackwateragents being dragged from burning cars and beaten, I couldn’t stop. Because that was exactly where Brad was—in that same city where the charred bodies of the Americans were hanged from a bridge while throngs of people not only stood by, but cheered as if they were at a goddamn street festival. I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up my dinner. Then I drove straight to Darcy’s.
    “I can’t do this,” I said, without even saying hello, when she opened the door. That night, she rubbed my back as I hung my head between my legs and tried to breathe. “You can do this,” she said. “You can and you will.”
    But she was wrong. I’m not cut out for this—for any of it. I don’t know how. I don’t want to know how.
    I look at Darcy. She squeezes my hand. “You don’t know anything for sure yet,” she says.
    “But what about you?”
    “It’s okay. I’ll have my own team of these guys here before you’re even home.” She looks over at the CNO, who nods. He even manages not to frown. It’s nearly a smile.
    I don’t know how she can be so composed, so
with
it, when I already feel myself breaking. Already feel broken. Because it’s not okay. None of it. Not by a long shot.
    “Staff Sergeant Gerlach came here with me. He’ll drive you home, wait with you there,” the CNO says. “One of us will deliver your vehicle if you leave a key with me.”
    I scan the room for my purse, my cell phone, my jacket, and locate them hanging on a spare dining room chair, pushed up against a wall. They all seem so far away, and it reminds me of one of those dreams in which I need to run but can’t coordinate my limbs to move, as though they’ve just then tripled in size and weight. My brain knows what to do; my body, though, isn’t willing.
    I hand my keys to the CNO and Darcy takes me by the shoulders.“The sooner you get home, the sooner you’ll know,” she says. She pulls me into a tight hug. I half expect to feel metal and wires beneath her skin.
    Making my way down the front walk and toward the waiting Staff Sergeant Gerlach, I glance back. There’s a warm glow seeping out into the night from the Rutledge’s little bay window, and it betrays the scene unfolding inside. Even from my perch on the sidewalk, I can see Darcy standing in the middle of the living room, unmoved from where she hugged me, hands over her face, her body trembling.

Two

    Staff Sergeant Gerlach so believes in the economy of words that by the time we drive the few miles from Darcy’s east side bungalow to my house on Vilas Street, almost equidistant from each other on opposite sides of the glowing Capitol, we cover most of my questions: “When will I know?” (Not certain, ma’am); “Is there a chance he’s still alive?” (Can’t say, ma’am); “Could this be a mistake? Might it be another patrol, another unit, and you got some bad information?” (Highly unlikely, ma’am); “How does this work? Do you just drive me home and drop me off? How long will you stay?” (As long as you would like me to or need me to, ma’am).
    I am better at solitude than most. Instead of finding company for the nights I’m alone—which have been many these days—I usually light a candle, put on some Amos Lee or Ellis Paul, and relax into it. Tonight, though, Brad’s absence looms large in our house. The thought that he might not come back here has transformed the familiar and comfortable quiet dark into something heavy and sinister and booming loud. It yells to me that all the nights of my life to follow could look precisely like this one. But because it doesn’t yell as loudly with him there, Staff
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