Free Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter

can. She can have it all. Sara wonders, briefly, whatthat woman would think of a woman like her, but she already knows the answer.
    She lies down on her bed, then gets up and walks back into the office. In her desk, she’s kept file folders of e-mails from Jason, printed out and carefully arranged according to date. Sometimes when she printed them, she would think,
They’ll want these for his biography
, and other times she’d simply think it would be fun to share them with him when he gets home. She’d never sat down to reread them but she’s sure when she does, she’ll see a stark chart of his evolution in thinking about himself, and about the military, and about the war. She fusses through a few early sets, and then pulls out one marked “SQT,” her own title for a series of mails that arrived throughout that first tranche of training after Jason left Coronado. Close quarters combat was one thing he would study during that time, but it was also something he would return to even after assignment to a Team. It would become, she imagined, what he would spend much of his time doing abroad—although once he went abroad (
abroad
is not the word he would have used), the letters became less and less about what he was doing and more and more about what he remembered of being at home. Or, about history. Once he was in the Teams, he never wrote anything too close to his own situation, and she knew that was for a reason.
    The first letter starts out like they all do: “Dear M.”
    Dear M.,
    How are you? Is the house quiet now? Do you prefer it like that? I know the answer.
    So Otay Lakes: that’s where we are. Jump school used to be at Ft. Benning, where Buddy Glass recovered from pleurisy. Did you remember that? Buddy was in the army; I bet he got a better bed.
    We are here for a kind of recovery, too; recovery from real training. (That’s a joke.) We’re here for Tactical Air Operations. It’s a bit of the best bits and the worst bits about any holiday: a little restful; a little dull; lots of long stretches of waiting broken by moments of discovery.
    The moments of discovery come in the air, mostly. Jumping out of a plane is not nearly as terrifying an experience as I imagined it might be. I’d never really thought about heights until that wide-open aircraft door, nothing to halt my fall but sky. We never lived anywhere higher than the second floor, did we. I realized, looking down—rather than up—at the clouds, that I had spent almost my entire life at low altitude.
    Once you jump, you really can imagine, for the briefest moment, that that isolation, calm, and sense of freedom can last forever. At the very start of the jump, things move fast. Then once your chute opens they move very slowly. It’s peaceful. It’s exhilarating. Then before you know it, it’s landing time, and there’s the ground rushing up beneath your feet. Fast. And you know you’ll be all right because you have to be all right. And then you are grateful when you are. Very grateful.
    Air’s a major source of transportation for us. You once told me that when you look at words on a page, you only notice when they’re not working. So with chutes. Of course, certain death being the outcome of malfunction in this case is a factor that focuses a guy’s mind.
    The chutes are beautiful. Sometimes you might open your chute, look around, and see tens of other chutes opening, too, one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. I think of them like ice cream cones—colored ice cream cones in the air. Here is a picture.
    What else: yes, I am eating enough. And yes, they let us sleep more now. And no, I am not getting into any trouble. Yet.
    Love,
    Jason
    She had printed out the picture attached to the e-mail: the ice cream cones. He must have taken it from the ground, after landing, and it was truly beautiful. It was strange that something where a group of young men were risking their lives could look so elegant, so effortlessly coordinated. She thinks about the