Glenn’s reaction, when I told him separately a few days later, was almost exactly what you’d expect by now. A pause on the phone. Then, “So what, they just run out of colonels eventually?”
I didn’t laugh at that one. I’d stopped, somewhere in my late forties, finding that particular brand of humor especially funny.
The installation I’d be commanding sat in a part of the country neither of us had spent much time in, and when I mentioned, almost as an afterthought during a family dinner two weeks before my arrival date, that I planned to drive down and see the place informally before the formal change of command ceremony, Glenn had surprised me by asking if he could come along. I still don’t fully know why I said yes. Some old, stubborn hope, I think, that had never quite finished dying no matter how many times it should have.
That’s how we ended up at that gate together.
The change of command ceremony took place eleven days later, on a bright, cold morning on the installation’s main parade field, several hundred Marines standing in formation in their dress uniforms, a band playing, the outgoing commander and I exchanging the formal remarks and the traditional passing of the colors that mark the moment when responsibility for thousands of lives transfers from one set of shoulders to another.
Glenn came to that ceremony too, at my invitation, though I’ll admit I extended it with less hope than I had the first time and more simple, practical family obligation. He stood near the back of the guest section, in a suit rather than his usual casual clothes, and I remember catching sight of him during the ceremony itself, standing very still, watching several hundred Marines snap to attention in my honor, watching the base commander’s flag rise with my new rank displayed on it, watching a formal military ceremony built entirely around the fact that the woman he’d been calling a costume-wearer since she was eighteen years old was now legally, formally, undeniably responsible for the entire installation stretched out around him.
I didn’t watch his face for very long during the ceremony itself — I had a great deal else to focus on, several hundred Marines’ worth of attention required elsewhere. But afterward, during the reception in the officers’ club, he found me near the edge of the room, away from the crowd of well-wishers and fellow officers offering congratulations.
“That corporal,” he said, without preamble. “The one from the gate. Is he in trouble?”
“He’s in a review process,” I said. “It’s not the same thing, though I understand why it might look similar from the outside.”
Glenn nodded slowly, looking down at the drink in his hand rather than at me. “You didn’t rip into him. Back at the gate. I kept waiting for you to.”
“I noticed you waiting,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment. “I think I wanted you to, actually. I think some part of me wanted to watch you lose your temper at somebody, because it would have made the whole morning make more sense to me.”
“Make more sense how?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, he sounded genuinely uncertain rather than performing certainty for an audience. “I think I’ve spent thirty years telling myself a story where none of this was real. Where you were basically playing a very elaborate, very long game of dress-up, like I always said, and eventually the costume would slip and everyone would see what I’d apparently seen all along. And then we’re standing at that gate, and the costume does slip, sort of — your credential doesn’t work, you get thrown in an actual holding cell — and for about ten minutes I thought, there it is, I was right the whole time.”
“And then the officer walked in,” I said.
“And then the officer walked in,” he agreed. “And he wasn’t looking at a costume. He was looking at paperwork that had your name on it, connected to something a lot bigger than either of us, and he changed everything about how he was standing the second he recognized it. That wasn’t performance, Elena. That wasn’t you convincing anybody of anything. That was just — what’s actually true, whether or not I ever decided to believe it.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I’d waited a long time to hear something close to that sentence, and now that it had actually arrived, I found I didn’t need to respond to it the way I once would have.
“I’ve been telling that joke since I was sixteen,” Glenn continued, still not quite looking at me directly. “I think somewhere along the way I stopped even really believing it and just kept saying it because I didn’t know how to stop without admitting I’d been wrong about my own sister for three decades. That’s a hard thing to admit to yourself, let alone out loud at a family dinner.”
“I know,” I said, and I meant it, more than I expected to.
“I’m not going to stand here and pretend this fixes thirty years in one conversation,” he said. “But I watched you today. All of it — the ceremony, the way those Marines look at you, the way that officer looked at you the second he understood who you actually were. I don’t have a joke for any of that. I genuinely don’t.”
“You don’t have to have one,” I said.
He looked at me then, finally, directly, and there was something in his expression I hadn’t seen from him since we were children, something unguarded and a little unsure of itself. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry. Not just for today. For a long time before today.”
