He started by repairing the crack in the ceiling. It had appeared the month after he left, and I slept under it for the eleven months that followed. Now that he was home, though, the crack seemed to be growing, and I worried the ceiling was going to cave in on us in the middle of the night.

I helped him slide our bed from the center of the room, watched as he carried a bucket of spackle up a step ladder and began to smear it into the fissure. As he worked, the muscles in his face relaxed. He seemed to like doing it, even as I became bored watching. I left him to it and went to the kitchen for a soda.

Later, as I cut carrots for a chicken potpie, he came into the kitchen, wiping his speckled hands on a rag. He was smiling.

What else you got for me? he asked.

I told him, Nothing. The rest of the house was in fine shape, I thought. His face tightened again, like his skin had shrunk. He hesitated, then went to the refrigerator.

You want a beer? he asked.

The knife became a phantom in my hand. Cold air from the refrigerator settled across my neck. Was this a test? I didn’t say anything because I did want one, but I couldn’t have one, and I worried that he would hear the truth in my lie if I said no.

I heard the refrigerator close and the cold air went away. He left the kitchen and went into the garage. Angry noises came through the door, first shuffling, then clanging. I focused on chopping the carrots and tried to breathe through the rising panic.

*

I forced myself on him as soon as I was able to work up the courage. In those early days he was like a loaded spring, practically shaking with the effort of containing himself, but my life as I knew it depended on getting him to fuck me.

I waited until he got into the shower one day, then stripped naked in our bedroom. It wasn’t that I thought he would find my nakedness appealing, only that I needed to eliminate any barriers to our sex. This wasn’t about seduction or pleasure, it was about the biological path of least resistance. At least, it was about the illusion of it.

The shower lasted longer than I expected, and I began to feel bloated and vulnerable in my bare skin. One of his uniform blouses lay on the floor, and I considered putting it on under the ruse that it was a bit of sexy dress up, but the creak of the shower knob froze me.

He appeared in the bathroom doorway, a towel wrapped around his waist. It was as if he knew my plan and had armored himself. I pushed through the nerves and went to him. I undid his towel and pulled him towards the bed by his cock. He stumbled after me, grew rigid in my hand. I laid back and spread my legs, then grabbed his ass cheeks with both hands, the way he used to like.

That was probably where I went wrong, giving him too many things at once in such a fragile state. I saw him spasm, knew what was coming and tried to direct his orgasm inside me, but it happened too fast. He convulsed, and it was over. He looked down, stunned, at the mess he had dumped on my thigh.

It’s been months, I said, even as the full weight of my failure dug a heel into my gut. Don’t worry about it.

He shivered. I’m cold, he said. He retrieved his towel and left the bedroom without getting dressed.

An electric drill whirred to life somewhere in the house. What was he working on now? Still lying on the bed, I wiped his semen off my leg with three fingers and shoved it inside me. It only hit me how stupid I was being, how blinded by desperation, when a wave of nausea swept up my throat.

*

My belly grew, but he never touched me anymore, so I could hide it with an apron or by wearing unseasonably warm sweaters. The unit’s post-deployment lull was over, and they were back to training in earnest, so his days were longer. I spent most of my time in front of the TV, avoiding the other wives and their gossip. On an Army base, gossip sustained the spouses. While their soldiers were off doing serious things, it allowed them to give meaning to meaningless parts of their own lives, though I guess in my case they’d have had the chance to talk about something really scandalous.

My gosh, they might say. Did you hear? Yes, from a different battalion. And an officer, at that.

One morning as spring turned to summer, the sounds of demolition jolted me awake—scraping and yanking and crashing. He wasn’t in bed. My phone said it was four a.m. I put on the two-sizes-too-big robe I’d ordered from Amazon and went into the living room.

He was halfway through tearing down the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. Pieces of drywall littered the floor, and a cloud of white dust choked the air. I covered my mouth and nose with a portion of the robe.

Once, in a fit of morbid curiosity, I had looked up images of injured soldiers on the internet. He was about to deploy, and I told myself it would be good to be prepared, to understand what might happen to him. It had been a mistake, and the scene in my living room reminded me of those terrible pictures. The lumber was like bones. Insulation like muscle. Wiring like veins. For the first time, I had a sense that the house was a living thing. And he was tearing it apart.

He picked up a sledgehammer and buried it in the wall. I saw the way he moved with such practiced violence. He pulled it out and swung it sideways, snapping a two-by-four in the middle. When he stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead, I managed to ask what he was doing.

This place is cramped, he said. I’m opening it up.

Before I could respond and remind him that we didn’t own the house, he was bashing again. I retreated to the bedroom and crawled under the covers. I stayed there until five-thirty a.m., when the sounds of the destruction stopped, and he left for physical training formation. I don’t think I blinked the entire time.

The wall was mostly gone, just a few hanging wires and the piles of shattered refuse on the living room floor. I moved carefully around them on my way to the kitchen, stepping over the threshold where the doorway had been. I made tea and sat staring at the chaos and drank the tea. I tried to think up an explanation for what I’d seen, but quickly abandoned any hope of finding one. The Family Readiness Group had warned us that things might be different at first, that the things our husbands saw and did left scars on them whether or not they got shot or blown up. If that was what he was showing me, I couldn’t know for sure. We had barely spoken since he got back, and certainly not about what happened when he was at war.

I took a deep breath and coughed when some of the dust caught in my throat. The couch was filthy with the stuff, so instead of watching the TV I got back into bed. I lay on my side and sobbed while watching videos on my phone of soldiers returning home to surprise their families.

*

He never rebuilt the wall between the living room and the kitchen. I tiptoed around the fallout, flinching whenever I accidentally stepped on a crumb of plaster. I fished three splinters out of my feet before I learned to wear shoes at all times.

When I asked what he had planned, he told me to calm down, that he just needed to borrow his squad leader’s truck sometime and he’d get all the debris out of here.

You’re the one screaming, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The next week he disappeared into the spare room with his tools. It sounded like a war was happening on the other side of the door. I didn’t understand how one man, even with all that equipment, could make so much noise.

I wondered if there was some place for me to go. Would there be a single sympathetic ear on the entire base, or was I, to these people, the worst sort of woman there was? What questions would they have? Would they even know where to begin? Did I?

Something shattered, startling me. The ceiling light I hated, probably, the one that looked like a tit, and along with it whatever hope I still held at getting out of this unscathed.

I called Bonnie. She was a sergeant’s wife, and she was active in the Family Readiness Group. She’d said to call if I ever needed anything.

When I explained what was happening, she sighed as if she knew something. What she might have known turned my stomach.

She told me to get somewhere safe, that she would call the Commander and the First Sergeant, and they’d come over right away.

Get somewhere safe?

She said it sounded like PTSD. That on top of everything that had already happened, he was probably reacting to the news that the unit was deploying again next year. I needed to get somewhere safe because his behavior was going to be unpredictable.

Of course, she added, you can’t mention the deployment to anyone. Operational security is still very important.

I hung up on Bonnie just as he kicked on the motor of some mechanical tool. It rumbled and then came the high-pitched sound of a fast-moving blade cutting through something hard. Then it was the rumble again, followed by more crashing.

He hadn’t told me about the deployments—neither what had happened on the first one, nor that there was another on the horizon. I laughed and shook my head. I was angry with him for keeping these things from me. In the moment, the irony of that mattered very little.

I swung the door open without regard for what might have been behind it. He was swinging the sledgehammer into the wall. It stuck in the sheetrock, and he stumbled backward when he yanked it out.

When he saw me, he told me to get the fuck out.

I asked him what the fuck he was doing.

I’m improving our position, he said. We’re always supposed to be improving our position.

Our position?

Yeah, our position. Whatever, our house. He let the sledgehammer fall out of his hand and clatter to the floor. What if we have a baby? It’ll need a nursery, won’t it?

He just stared, a statue with living eyes, until I left the room. Someone was knocking at the door, banging on it like the police, saying his name over and over, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer. He started destroying the house again, and I retreated to our bed, while they knocked and he bashed, until it all got so loud that I had to cover my ears and scream.

I screamed until I felt hollowed out. It was freeing to feel so empty. Whoever it was at the door forced their way into the wreckage. They talked to him in careful tones. I listened through the wall, and the hole inside me grew until I had to hold tight to the edges of the bed for fear I might float away.

– R. B. Miner