Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.

He couldn’t explain to her that he needed the trees and the quiet as a correction for what he saw on the job, how crossing a bridge and having that physical barrier between him and his beat felt like leaving one life and entering another.

The quiet of the house when she kept to her room was not the peaceful silence of a library, or anywhere near as tranquil. It was, Peter imagined, more like the held-breath interlude between when a button gets pushed and the bomb either detonates or is defused. He could feel his own heartbeat at those times. He could track his blood as it looped through his veins.

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”

He told her he’d been thinking about it for a while, about a thing she’d said a few weeks back: that not all problems looked the same, but that didn’t mean they weren’t problems.

History isn’t about memorization, he told them. It’s not about studying, burying your head in a book. It’s in our daily lives; it’s now, living inside us.

wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.