The unit offered Evan a desk job at the armory forty minutes away. He took it. Men asked why he did not put in for another deployment. He said he had a crib. They nodded as if that were the whole answer. It was not the whole answer. The whole answer was a doorway he was still walking toward in his sleep, duffel dropping, smile dying, a man with a glass. He did not say that at the armory. He said the crib. The crib was true enough to sign a form.
In April they tried a counselor because Ruth sent a name and Megan was tired of doing the math alone at the sink. The counselor was a woman named Helen who had a plant and no interest in heroes. She asked Evan what he had wanted in the doorway. He said the sign in the attic and a wife who was only glad. Helen said that want was allowed and it was not available. She asked Megan what she had wanted. Megan said not to do it in the sidelight, and a man who already knew before his hand touched her. Helen said the second want had been available in March and had been declined. Megan did not argue. Darren came to one session because Helen asked whether the third adult was going to be a rumor or a person. He sat with his hands on his knees and said he had known she was married and he had stayed. Helen said good, start there. Nobody was cured. They had a calendar for sessions. Calendars were Evan’s comfort and Megan’s shame and they used one anyway.
Grace learned to roll. She learned to hate the car seat. She learned Evan’s voice at five in the morning and Darren’s on Wednesday evenings and Megan’s in the middle of the night. She did not learn the doorway. The doorway was an adult room. Megan kept it that way on purpose. When a neighbor asked if the baby looked like Evan, Megan said she looked like herself. The neighbor smiled and went back to a hose. The street did not get the glass. The street got a stroller and two men who were not there at the same time unless it was Saturday.
Evan’s bad night came in June. A dream of the bus and the curb and the cream knit, and he woke already angry, and the anger had nowhere to go except the kitchen, where Darren had left a receipt for wipes on the counter. Evan put the receipt in the trash harder than paper required. Megan heard the cabinet. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, which was a different doorway, and said, “If you need to yell, yell at me, not at a receipt.” He said, “I was gone two years.” She said, “I know. I was here.” They did not solve it. They made a bottle. Grace drank. The receipt stayed in the trash. In the morning Evan took it out and put it in the folder where the ultrasound lived, because throwing away Darren’s handwriting did not change the Wednesdays. Megan saw him do it. She did not thank him. Thanks would have been too much like the parking lot.