This morning, 1154 hours

My phone rings and I startle into sitting. “Tyler” shows up on the caller ID, but when I pick up, it’s Mom.

“Hi,” she says, cheerful. “Tyler and I are here at MEPS with Spencer.”

“Oh, good,” I say. Spencer’s recruiter had told Mom that he didn’t know if family would be allowed in to watch the swearing-in ceremony; the necessary escort staff for civilian visitors would be busy in the ceremony itself. He’d called yesterday from the house when he came to gather Spencer and Spencer’s small, limp plastic bag with toothbrush and deodorant.

“I just got my butt handed to me by a civilian,” he said when he hung up. “They said they can’t take you, they’ll be too busy. It has to be a recruiter.”

This recruiter, who I’d hated since the first day I avoided looking at him, said that his superiors wouldn’t allow him to come up for just one recruit’s family. I suspect him of lying, as I already know he’s manipulated. That’s what recruiters do.

Tyler and Mom had gotten a hotel room near the airport to try going up to the base in the morning to see Spencer sworn in. If the entrance had been sure, I would have gone; if Tyler and Mom had left from here, I would have gone. But the ambivalence of loving Spencer but not being proud of his choices, and the overenthusiasm of Mom and Ty when it came to the Navy, kept me back.

“I’ll meet you guys at the airport,” I’d said yesterday, on the phone in the grocery store. “Call me in the morning and let me know where and what time.”

“So where am I supposed to meet you?” I ask Mom.

“Here,” she says, “I’ll give you to Tyler.”

Tyler takes the phone. “What information do you need?” he asks in a clipped voice.

I remember that he wanted this to be him, to be a Navy man, and reply in moderately high spirits to assuage him.

“I just want to make sure we meet before we go through the gate,” I say.

“We’re not going through the gate,” he says, still gruff.

“Right, I mean through to the departure gate.”

“We’re not going there.”

“But Mom has a paper that says military family can go through to the gate,” I say.

“The airport rules might say whatever, but they told us here that we can’t go through to the gate. I guess two other times, it went really badly, and they don’t let family go through.”

“Oh, okay, so it’s a Navy rule,” I say – and bite my tongue hard on the revelation that the Navy can’t “let” or “not let” me do anything. “So where are we going to meet?”

“At the security checkpoint before you go in,” Tyler says, “where they check the luggage.”

“Okay, wait, do you mean the place where all the security is, or the Continental desk?” I ask.

“The security checkpoint,” Tyler repeats.

“But that’s not where they check the luggage – they check it at the desk. Does he have luggage?”

“Go to the security checkpoint,” Tyler repeats again.

“Not the Continental desk, then?”

“GO TO THE SECURITY CHECKPOINT.”

I half-laugh at his inexplicable refusal to clarify. “You do realize,” I say, thinking of all the conversations on predestination and free will I had in college, “that saying something more slowly doesn’t actually make it more clear.”

“You’re really starting to tick me off,” he says, and pronounces each of the last words deliberately, as though considering a physical assault. Tick. Me. Off. “It could not be more simple.”

“Okay, whatever,” I say, “give me back to Mom.”

Instead, Tyler hands me to Spencer.

“What do you need?” Spencer asks, slightly more tense than usual, as though he’s playing a video game while we’re talking.

“I just want to know where me and Mary should meet you,” I say. “Tyler said the security checkpoint -- that’s the place where they X-ray your bags, right, and all the security is?”

“That’s what it means,” Spencer says.

“Well, that’s what I thought too, but then he said ‘where you check your luggage,’ and that’s not the same place. That’s at the gate. So I’m meeting up at the x-ray area, right?”

“Yeah,” Spencer says. “Is that all?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“See you later,” he says.

“Yeah, see you later.”

I hang up and feel my family like a wall beside me, all three turned away and hard. I am alone in my room.

I play through the scenario in my head, where I see Tyler at the airport and explain that his imprecise language had confused me, that “check” had two meanings in an airport, that if he’d varied his statement even slightly, I would have understood. Tyler doesn’t accept it. I tell Mom.

“This is the security checkpoint, Alicia,” she says and points to X-rays and conveyer belts and wands flashing over people’s bodies, finding belt buckles and keys. “You know that, you’re not stupid.”

Except that I didn’t know, and therefore was stupid.

Or “you knew that. I don’t know why you had to give Tyler a hard time.”

Or “you know that. Why do you have to be so manipulative?”

I sigh and turn over, hoping to get back to sleep, but they are still with me, the family-wall they have become. They present a united front against me.

Why would it have to be manipulative? I wonder. Why couldn’t it be that I just didn’t know? What has it done to me that my questions growing up were answered with this – this misapprehension of my personality, my meanings, of intentions?

I sigh again, and I can feel the pain of the encounter dropping down through my heart, splitting what had been healed, finding new old wounds to make smart.

They don’t know how deep they’re going, I tell myself. They can’t realize what they’re doing.

They’re splitting me in half, cutting me off from my love for them. My heart is a Siamese twin – on one side, love for God and friends and self, all built carefully, wholly internal and intense for years, where I lived through high school; on the other side, love for family, living like a parasite off the gains of outside truths, outside interactions, outside love.

They are removing themselves from my heart, removing their half. They insist, the small and blackened bits of history lodged in them at fatal intervals, on being on their own, on being unfathomable, on being “honor” and “duty” and “defense.” I try to fathom them but get nowhere. I try to care for them and get nowhere.

I am leaving for the airport in half an hour.