Withering Hope (12 page)

Tristan sleeps in the cockpit again. Despite feeling his presence in the cabin was an intrusion the night the fever overtook him, the place feels empty without him. Falling asleep becomes harder than before, and I find myself staring at the ceiling for hours at a time. My thoughts don't fly to Chris often, like in the beginning. Perhaps my self-imposed ban on thinking about him is turning into something that comes naturally. Or perhaps my mind knows that the way to make living in this place bearable is not envisioning what the alternative would be: Chris's ability to make me laugh, and a life in which my biggest worry would be losing a case; not starving or succumbing to disease or walking into a nest of vipers—which I almost did. Twice.

And because my mind apparently needs something to obsess over, once I stop obsessing over how my life would be if I weren't stuck here, I start obsessing over something else.

Tristan's nightmares.

I hear him thrashing in his sleep every night, even though he closes the door to the cockpit. I wonder why I never heard him before. I suppose I was too busy with my own thoughts.

Now that I know about the nightmares, I can't help hearing them. They happen every single night. No exceptions. A few times I find myself hovering in front of his door, wondering if I should go in and wake him up, try and soothe him. But I don't. He wouldn’t appreciate it; he's adamant to keep to himself. And I’m not sure that would help him at all. But I'd like to try to help him, like he helped me the day we talked about my parents. I carry his words with me all the time—they’re like a talisman, those words—they work even when I am not actively thinking of them. From time to time, I revisit my old inner cracks, carved by guilt and loss. I find the cracks are less painful with each visit.

Now, if only I could do something so the cracks carved into him, by whatever happened in his past and causes him nightmares, wouldn’t hurt so much. He’s become important to me in a profound, almost vital way. Listening to him cry out is unbearable. And if it's unbearable for me, I don't want to know what it feels like for him.

One morning we find paw prints just outside the fence. Huge ones. Tristan says they must belong to a feline of some kind. A cougar, or maybe even a jaguar. After the discovery, we're more alert than ever when we venture outside the fence. One more threat looming over us in the months we still have to wait before we can start our journey back.

"I
know this one. It's nice," Tristan says on the day that marks two months since we crashed and almost two weeks since the spiders bit us. His eyes light up as he reads the snippet of the poem I scratched in the mud again. This has become an almost daily thing—like an unspoken agreement. When we sit to eat dinner, or sometimes—like now—breakfast, we write a few lines in the mud.

I don't recognize any of the poems he writes down, which is a bit embarrassing since he quotes authors that anyone who was a top student (which I was) should know. At any rate, it feeds my need for reading new things. It's like a small escape every day. It breaks the repetitiveness of our survival tasks; it's something new to look forward to—something new that doesn't revolve around the act of procuring food.

It's a luxury, and we both indulge in it.

His poems intrigue me. Edgar Allan Poe isn't the only writer he likes. Thomas Hardy is one of his favorites among many, many others. But no matter which poet he quotes, all the verses have something in common: they speak of pain, darkness, and acts that are beyond forgiving.

I don't understand why he's into this kind of literature. There is beauty in it, sure. It's just a bit depressing. In the beginning I thought it was just his taste, but now I suspect it might be something else.

In our question rounds during chores, he's careful to stay away from unpleasant topics, and I've learned not to push him. But when he scratches words in the mud, things change. His eyes have that same tide of emotion they have when I accidentally slip into topics he doesn’t want to discuss. That's why I suspect his refuge in depressing poetry is related to those less joyous experiences he keeps from me. With every poem he shares, that inexplicable urge to hug him—or find a way, any way, to comfort him—grows. I want to make his dark cloud disappear. I need it to disappear, because I can’t stand to see him tormented.

I'm learning almost as much about him from the few lines he writes in the mud every day as I do from our questioning when we do chores. I counter with poems that couldn't be more different. They're cheerful and light. It's not that I was ever into cheerful poetry; I was never into poetry at all. I like novels. I'm surprised I remember any poems at all. The last time I read poetry, I was a high school senior. For some reason the sunny, bubbly poems stuck. At any rate, Tristan seems to show as much interest in my poems as I do in his.

When we finish with the poetry session, I hand Tristan the bow and arrow. "This is your chance to impress me." He claims he feels well enough to teach me how to shoot.

He frowns, positions the arrow, and pulls the string of the bow. I try to memorize every action, every movement of his muscles, hoping to be able to reproduce them when my turn comes. His wide shoulders hunch forward, his strong arms gripping the bow and the arrow. The muscles on his arms and shoulder blades are flexed; I can see their sharp contour beneath his shirt. The muscles on his stomach are tightened, too. The defined packs on his abdomen are visible through his damp, clinging shirt. He told me time and again that in order to hit the target it is most important to find my balance and keep myself centered. He claimed I could achieve that if I contract my abdominal muscles. I’ve tried, but I see now that I haven't done it properly.

Tristan aims at our makeshift target. And misses it by two feet. I start laughing. "I'm not impressed."

I am still laughing when Tristan releases the second arrow, which hits the target right in the middle. As do the third and the fourth. He launches the fifth one up in the air at a bird that passes over us. I yelp, covering my mouth with my hands when the bird lands on the ground, the arrow stuck in its chest. He aims the next arrow at the target again, hitting straight in the center cluster. The same with the arrow after it.

And that's when the pieces of the puzzle start coming together, one arrow at a time. His knowledge of survival skills, like building a fire from scratch and the edibility test. His nightmares.

"You were in the Army," I say.

Tristan's knuckles whiten on the bow, his jaw tightening. He lowers the bow, walking to the target to collect the arrows, and then picks up the fallen bird. Not once does he glance in my direction.

"Tristan?" I ask. "Am I right?"

He slumps on the tree trunk that serves as a bench, and hunches over the arrows, inspecting their tips.

"Yes. I was deployed in Afghanistan." His voice is freakishly calm, almost impassive. I sit next to him, a sudden wave of admiration engulfing me.

"We should find some poison to dip the tips of the arrows in," he blurts out.

His words bewilder me so that I don't have time to ponder whether he's trying to change topics or really plans to poison the arrows. "Why? That would make whatever you shoot with a poisoned arrow inedible, right?"

"Not for the animals we intend to eat, but for predators.” I know he’s thinking of the paw prints we discovered the other day. “If a jaguar makes an appearance, I'd need about five arrows to take him down. Jaguars are very fast. I'd never have time to shoot enough arrows. If the arrows are poisoned, we'll have a better chance."

"How will we find poison? I mean, most things around us are poisonous, but it's not like we can drain—”

"I don't know yet." He rests his jaw on his palm. The tuft of dark emotions in his gaze tells me he's not thinking about poison for the arrows, but a different kind of poison.

"That's what your nightmares are about, aren't they?" I ask. "Your time in the Army."

He doesn't answer, but I won't be deterred. "If there's an elephant in the room—or well, the jungle—I don't want to keep ignoring it. We can talk about things. It can be liberating." I remember the talk we had about my parents a few weeks ago, and how I felt so much freer afterward. When Tristan doesn't glance at me, much less answer, I add, "I hear you every night, you know."

That makes his head snap up. "You can hear me?"

"Yeah." His gaze holds so much anxiety and desperation that I'd like nothing better than to bury myself in the ground, ashamed that I'm intruding in a matter so private.

He swallows hard, looking away. "I'm sorry."

I blink, confused. "For what?"

"I didn't want to disturb you. I thought if I closed the door… I didn't realize I was so loud."

"You're not disturbing me. You don't have to keep sleeping in that cockpit. There is enough room in the cabin, and I don't get scared by nightmares."

He smiles sadly. "No, but you will resent me. Even if you can hear me when I'm in the cockpit, it's better if there's a door between us."

"I won't resent you. Tristan, come on, trust me on this one. You need to be able to rest. The cockpit is nowhere as comfortable as the cabin. We'll deal with those nightmares."

He glances at me, his expression unreadable. Then he hands me the bow and some arrows.

When our fingers touch, an electrical current shoots through—just like the day he told me I look good when I wear white. Only now, I realize with a jolt of my stomach, it’s even more intense. I’ve been paying attention to these reactions from him. They happen often lately. They are becoming harder to ignore, but I try my best. Something else is getting harder to ignore, too.

This sense of guilt I can’t place.

"Let's get you to shoot straight,” Tristan says in a voice that doesn’t sound quite right. “I'll deal with my nightmares."

I smile. "Let's make a deal. I let you teach me how to face the forest; you let me help you face your nightmares."

"You won't give up, will you?"

"Should I take that as a yes? You'll sleep in the cabin?"

"Fine, I will,” he says with an uneasy smile. “Now, concentrate on the target and shoot."

Despite having memorized every movement of his muscles when he was shooting, I can't reproduce them, much less shoot with his accuracy. Or any kind of accuracy.

"So why aren't you in the Army anymore?" I ask after we call it quits for the day and gather the arrows.

Tristan hesitates. "It's a hard life. It started to take a toll on me. And… I dropped out because I wanted to spend more time with my wife. I'd been deployed almost continuously since I enlisted, so she spent the first two years of our marriage alone. Not the life she hoped for," he says. "In the short periods when I was home, things between us were tense. Very tense." His eyes search me, as if hoping I might interrupt him or switch subjects. But I don't. I leave it up to him. If he decides not to say anything else, I won't press for more. I’ve already pressed enough.

"I hoped that if I returned home and took a regular job, things between us would get good again."

"And they didn't?"

He shakes his head, a bitter smile on his lips.

"Why?" I gesture to him to help me build a fire to roast the bird he shot with the arrow. The fire I build every morning to signal rescuers I no longer believe will come is already ablaze, but the way it's built doesn't make it useful for cooking.

"One reason was we had grown apart. We had spent too much time away from each other, and our experiences were different. So naturally, they shaped us in different ways. Celia was an elementary school teacher and spent her days surrounded by kids. I spent my days in Afghanistan surrounded by gunfire and people in pain or dying."

I look away from his hands when he starts plucking the bird.

"What was the other reason?"

"Hmm?"

"The other reason things didn't work out between you?"

"That other reason… that would be me." An odd noise chokes from his throat, and when he speaks again, his voice wavers. "Or rather, the post-traumatic stress disorder."

"Oh."

"I was diagnosed after I returned home. I was permanently angry and avoided people. People also avoided me, even people who had been my friends. Some feared me. I couldn’t stand hearing certain sounds. I had horrible nightmares. They used to be much, much worse than they are now. And Celia… she started wishing I'd go back in the Army again. She couldn't deal with me at all. Started avoiding me during the day. Slept in a different room at night, and then started sleeping over at a friend of hers, saying she couldn't rest. That she could still hear me."