Page 6 of The Summer We Mended
“Your brother is here, too,” Lily sighed.
“Mama,” Anna said softly.
Lily tensed.Her first thought, irrational and immediate, was that someone else had died.
“Luke’s been deployed,” Anna said quickly, sensing her mother’s panic.“He left this morning.It happened fast.We barely had a day’s notice.Yesterday was spent getting him packed and doing everything we needed to do before he left.”
Lily sank onto a wooden chair, her knees weak.“What?Where?”
“They can’t say exactly,” Anna replied.“But it’s serious.At least a year.Maybe more.”
There was another heavy silence that followed as Lily swallowed hard.Her stomach clenched as she wrapped her head around the words.A fast deployment wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn’t a good thing either.Usually, because he was a fighter pilot, it meant that he was needed somewhere and fast.
Anna and her husband, Luke, had gotten married just days after he’d graduated from the Air Force Academy, but they’d been together since their junior year of high school.Anna had been through a lot as a military wife: long periods of time without talking to her boyfriend/husband, deployments, and crazy schedules.Lily knew that her daughter always worried about her husband, but today, there was something different in Anna’s voice.
“Why wasn’t there any notice?Did something happen?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but it does happen sometimes.It’s all classified, you know?”Anna replied slowly.“Luke is highly decorated, so there are times that he’s handpicked to do the job.”
“Handpicked?What does that even mean?”
“Just the way it sounds, Mom.He’s one of the older fighter pilots, which means he’s seen more than some of the newer guys.Sometimes he’s requested by whoever is the head of the mission.”
“An honor and a curse,” Lily muttered under her breath.“And the twins?How are they handling it?He’s not been deployed like this since they’ve been born.”
“We live on a base, Mom, so they understand it as some of their friends have parents deployed, too.We’ve always prepared them for it.It’s the same as the training missions he would do.They’re sad, of course.Blaze has stepped up and has a permanent swell in his chest because he thinks he needs to be the man of the house now.”
“Bless his heart,” Lily said, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
Lily shut her eyes.The twins were so full of life, funny, and intelligent.They questioned everything and barely stopped moving.She was exhausted just thinking about it.Maybe Lily should offer to stay with Anna and the kids; maybe a change of scenery would do her well.
“And you don’t know when Luke will be back?”Lily continued.
“No.I…this feels different, Mom.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know how to explain it, but…it just feels different.School is almost out, but I’m going to take the kids out of school a month early.They’ll e-learn for the remainder of the year.It’s just a month or so.I just want to come home to the island.”
Lily opened her eyes.“Home?”
“To the Vineyard.With the kids.I can’t do this alone, Mom.I need help.I need to breathe.I need to not be alone while Luke’s gone, because I’ll go insane.It’ll be nice to be there with you, especially now that Cody is home.Uncle Henry and Aunt Claudia, plus Jess and Maisie.It’ll be good for me and the kids to be around family.”
Lily stared out at the empty beach beyond the porch.The sand stretched endlessly, as the sun began to set in the sound.She’d spent the last year convincing herself that isolation was healing.That distance was safety.That silence was a sanctuary.Her family didn’t like to allow her that, but she’d gotten to the point where most of them weren’t coming by daily to bother her, anyway.
But the sound of her daughter’s voice cracked something inside her.
“I’ll make up the guest room for the twins and make sure your room is cleaned up,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.“When will you be here?”
“I’ve already got the car packed up.I…I didn’t know where we were going to go if you didn’t say yes, but I know that we can’t stay here.When he was deployed before, we didn’t have kids, and…I don’t know, it just feels so different now.I’ll go crazy here.I can’t do it, Mom.”
“I understand,” Lily breathed.
Anna released a long breath on the other end.“Thank you, Mom.We should be there sometime tomorrow.”
Lily ended the call and sat still for a long while.She closed her eyes and inhaled and exhaled slowly a few times.She remembered back to when Luke graduated from the academy and had his first duty station in Colorado.It was the first time Anna hadn’t lived in the same state.She had already been struggling with Cody’s enlistment, and then she added Luke and Anna leaving her, too.She had struggled with it—anxiety and worry, not sleeping, and a lot of pacing.David had been her rock.
“They’ll be back, Lily,” David had said as he wrapped his arms around her waist.“Colorado is a long ways away, but they’ll always come home.”
