Nothing stays the same though, and I did change. A great deal. It’s impossible for life to stand still and of course, it never will. Change is inevitable in all of us.
The year Neil joined the army was also the same year everything changed at home for my family. Hell, everything changed all over the world.
September 11 happened.
My father was on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington D.C. during the attacks. He’d been there for business and on his way to Los Angeles when the plane was hijacked and taken down. One of the sixty odd British nationals to lose their lives on that fateful day. My father was ripped away from us and we would never see him again. I guess that was the moment when I passed out of childhood and left it behind me. The innocence of my prior life was gone. Forever.
Time to grow up.
The horribleness of that year was really clouded for me. There are some things I remember clearly that were insignificant at the time, and other things I should have memories of, but are just…gone.
Like Dad’s funeral for instance. I know we had a service for him, I’ve seen the pictures in an album, but I don’t remember a thing about it or being there, or who came to pay their respects, or if I even spoke to them. I have nothing but blankness about that day. However I do remember stupid things like what shoes I was wearing when we watched the news on television, and saw the pictures of fires and wreckage and crashed plane parts that had taken my gentle and loving father from me.
My red Chuck’s with black laces.
It’s funny how our subconscious can hold onto some memories and not others. Like the letter that Neil sent to me personally, shortly after it happened. I remember that very well, because I still have it safe in a box with all my other precious mementos.
Dear Elaina,
There aren’t proper words to express the depth of my sadness for your unbearable loss. I want to be home in England more than anything right now, but it is out of the question for the time being. Your father was the best of men. He loved his wife and children and worked hard for you all so you could have a safe and comfortable life. He was a true man in every sense of the word. This mad world we live in could use a great deal more men like George Morrison in it. He will be greatly missed. I wish so badly that I could be there for you and Ian, and your sweet mum right now. Please know that I am thinking about you and sending my love to you all. You are never far from my thoughts, Cherry. Don’t you ever forget it.
Yours always,
Neil
His letter was written hastily on military-issue stationary, which spoke to the hectic pace the army was keeping right after the attacks. Neil was busy fighting a war against terrorism and I was busy trying to grow up, and attempting to accept the fact that I had only one parent left in my life. Ian was busy at university and his career in law. Our mum was busy drowning her grief in glasses of gin.
We were all very, very busy getting on with our lives and doing our jobs. Isolated. Alone.
My dad had done well by us though, and there were settlements from his life insurance, the airlines, and the US government, so money was not the issue. No, it was more so the void and abruptness that we were forced to accept that he was never coming back to us.
Never.
I understood the finality of death then, and took my newfound knowledge to heart, closing off a little of myself, in an effort to prevent such terrible hurt from ever happening to me again.
Foolish, foolish girl.
My mum has always loved to cook. She still does, and just like that very first night when Neil joined our family for dinner, she embraced him as a son whenever he was on leave from the army, with huge home-cooked dinners. It was a given that he would come to see us, but now when Mum cooked in her kitchen, a hi-ball glass of gin and tonic stood at the ready to see her through. I cannot fault my mother. She was still a good mum and devoted to my brother and me with all her heart, she just wasn’t as “present” or aware of my activities following the tragedy, as she normally would have been.
I had the open road of freedom dumped in my lap at a time when I needed censure.
As a confused and grieving teenager, I embraced the opportunity. Hell, I grabbed onto it with everything I had and then some.
By the summer I was seventeen, I had experienced just about everything you wouldn’t want your teenage daughter doing. Yes, that was me. Parties, alcohol, smoking…boys. I sampled just about everything, and came out of my experience a little older, somewhat wiser, and a lot insecure about myself, and with no idea about what I wanted for my life. Well, I knew one thing I wanted.
Neil.
I still wanted him.
And Neil had been right about one thing.
The boys were all over me as I matured. I think he would have wished I was more selective in who I allowed to be “all over” me. Actually, I knew he wished I were more selective. I noticed the hard looks from him whenever he was home on leave, evaluating my boyfriend of the moment, his dark eyes ever watchful. The fact that he paid any attention to me at all was both wonderful and the bane of my existence. He was taken, you see. Neil had a girlfriend that just wouldn’t let her claws out of him.
He would never look at me as a woman while she was wrapped around his cock. That was what I believed, anyway.
I had run through a slew of guys since he first went off to war, while Neil had stuck with Cora and been her loyal man. Why, I did not know. I couldn’t stand her and knew she messed around with others, blatantly behind his back, whenever he was deployed. I often wondered how he couldn’t see right through her. Or if he did see, and just didn’t care. I figured his mates had been telling him what she was doing when he wasn’t around. Ian had to know and should have told him, I reasoned. Was Neil with Cora just for the sex? Ugh. I hated to think about them together, and at the same time, I tried to forget about him. Forget that he would never belong to me. Forget that our time could never come. Forget about ever having the man I loved all for myself.
The following summer after I finished school, was when we crossed over into a new and strange territory together. The “ringing” of our proverbial bell came to pass, as it were. The spark that started a flame, that started a blaze, that started a forest fire, that would leave burns and scorch marks in its wake? This became part of our landscape.
Neil came home on a leave from the army that summer. When I was still eighteen, and he was twenty-five. That was the time when it finally happened for us…
