We put the argument behind us as best we could, and good-bye was another tearful affair, though less so than the last time. It would be comforting to think that it was because we were getting used to it, or that we were both growing up, but as I sat on the plane, I knew that something irrevocable had changed between us. Fewer tears had been shed because the intensity of the feeling between us had waned.
It was a painful realization, and on the night of the next full moon, I found myself wandering out onto the deserted soccer field. And just as I’d promised, I remembered my time with Savannah on my first leave. I thought my of second leave as well, but strangely, I didn’t want to think about the third leave, for even then I think I knew what it portended.
As the summer wore on, my dad continued to improve, albeit slowly. In his letters, he wrote that he’d taken to walking around the block three times a day, every day, each journey lasting exactly twenty minutes, but even that was hard on him. If there was a positive side to all this, it was that it gave him something to build his days around now that he was retired—something aside from coins, that is. In addition to sending letters even more frequently, I began to phone him on Tuesdays and Fridays at exactly one o’clock his time, just to make sure he was okay. I listened for any signs of fatigue in his voice and reminded him constantly about eating well, sleeping enough, and taking his medication. I always did most of the talking. Dad found phone conversations even more painful than face-to-face communication and always sounded as if he wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone as quickly as he could. In time, I took to teasing him about this, but I was never sure if he knew I was kidding. This amused me, and I sometimes laughed; though he didn’t laugh in response, his tone would immediately lighten, if only temporarily, before he lapsed back into silence. That was okay. I knew he looked forward to the calls. He always answered on the first ring, and I had no trouble imagining him staring at the clock and waiting for the call.
August turned to September, then October. Savannah finished her classes at Chapel Hill and moved back home while she began hunting for a job. In the newspapers, I read about the United Nations and how European countries wanted to find a way to keep us from going to war with Iraq. Things were tense in the capitals of our NATO allies; on the news, there were demonstrations from the citizens and forceful proclamations from their leaders that the United States was about to make a terrible mistake. Meanwhile, our leaders tried to change their minds. I and everyone in my squad just kept going about our business, training for the inevitable with grim determination. Then, in November, my squad and I went back to Kosovo again. We weren’t there long, but it was more than enough. I was tired of the Balkans by then, and I was tired of peacekeeping, too. More important, I and everyone else in the service knew that war in the Middle East was coming, whether Europe wanted it or not.
During that time, the letters from Savannah still came somewhat regularly, as did my phone calls to her. Usually I’d call her before dawn, as I always had—it was around midnight her time—and though I’d always been able to reach her in the past, more than once she wasn’t home. Though I tried to convince myself she was out with friends or her parents, it was difficult to keep my thoughts from running wild. After hanging up the phone, I sometimes found myself imagining that she’d met another man she cared about. Sometimes I would call two or three more times in the next hour, growing angrier with every ring that went unanswered.
When she would finally answer, I could have asked her where she’d been, but I never did. Nor did she always volunteer the information. I know I made a mistake in keeping quiet, simply because I found it impossible to banish the question from my mind, even as I tried to focus on the conversation at hand. More often than not, I was tense on the phone, and her responses were tense as well. Too often our conversations were less a joyous exchange of affection than a rudimentary exchange of information. After hanging up, I always hated myself for the jealousy I’d been feeling, and I’d beat myself up for the next couple of days, promising that I wouldn’t let it happen again.
Other times, however, Savannah came across as exactly the same person I remembered, and I could tell how much she still cared for me. Throughout it all, I loved her as much as I always had, and I found myself aching for those simpler times in the past. I knew what was happening, of course. As we were drifting apart, I was becoming more desperate to save what we once had shared; like a vicious circle, however, my desperation made us drift apart even further.
We began to have arguments. As with the argument we had in her apartment on my second leave, I had trouble telling her what I was feeling, and no matter what she said, I couldn’t escape the thought that I was being baited by her or that she wasn’t even attempting to alleviate my concerns. I hated these calls even worse than I hated my jealousy, even though I knew the two were intertwined.