If that were the standard, every commander in this Army would be relieved by Thursday.”
“She wasn’t concealing it from me, sir.
My daughter was.”
“Your daughter was nine and had been given a mission by an adult.” He let that sit.
“Colonel, you got a report on Saturday and you acted on it inside twenty minutes, at maximum personal cost, in front of your entire chain of command and both families.
I watched you do it.
That is not the failure.
That is the only part of the whole thing that anybody should be talking about.”
I said, “Yes, sir,” because there was nothing else to say.
At the door he said one more thing.
“How much travel have you got on the books for the next six months?”
“A fair amount, sir.”
“Bring me the calendar tomorrow.
Not all of it needs to be you.”
He took four things off my schedule over the following two weeks.
He never mentioned it again and neither did I.
Part Thirteen: Putting the House Back
We started with the photographs, on the second Saturday, because Dr.
Roshan had suggested that the first repair should be something physical that Hannah did with her own hands.
They were all still in the house.
That was the thing.
Nothing had been thrown away — it had all been moved to the hallway, or a drawer, or the top of a closet, and it had happened so gradually that neither of us could reconstruct the order.
We got all of them out onto the dining room table.
Nineteen framed photographs and four albums and a shoebox.
Hannah put the Oregon one back on the refrigerator herself.
It had been in the second drawer down in the kitchen, under the takeout menus, for seven months.
Then we did something I hadn’t planned.
She asked whether we could put some of them somewhere that wasn’t the wall — she said, and I remember the phrasing because it is very much hers, “not so it’s like a museum.”
So we built a cabinet.
It took four weekends and it is not a good cabinet.
It’s in the hallway between the bathroom and her room.
The door doesn’t sit quite flush and there’s a run in the stain on the left side because somebody applied it too thickly and would not be told.
Inside it: the albums.
Rebecca’s recipe cards, in her handwriting, in the metal box her mother gave her.
Eleven letters.
Her reading glasses.
A ceramic bowl she made in a night class in 2013 that is genuinely quite bad and which Hannah loves for that reason.
The hand cream.
Anything Hannah wants is in there and she can open it whenever she likes and she does not have to ask, and nobody has to look at it if they’d rather not, and that turns out to be the entire design brief for grief in a house with more than one person in it.
The rest of that first year was not a montage either.
Hannah got worse before she got better, which Dr.
Roshan had warned me about in advance and which I did not really believe until it happened.
