December 6, 2003
Blacksburg, VA
0940
She had been grateful for the light morning traffic and her red Corvette; they allowed her to arrive an hour earlier than the normal drive time. Now that she's here, Mac wonders what she's doing. The doubts so quickly buried in wake of Harm's letter are returning, with a vengeance. What did she know about taking care of a teenager? She could barely manage her own life. The man she dates is not the man she loves, and even if she did, you can't build a life with someone who isn't there. Her closest friends and colleagues had distanced themselves from her; well, honestly, it was more her than them. She could not cope with the guilt and resentment she felt every time Harm was mentioned. She didn't ask him to come for her, but he did; only to be rejected by the woman and the Navy he loved. She had cost them their emotional leader and the answers they wanted from her were either too personal or classified.
She was mocked by the voice of her father reminding her that her own mother had left. It reminded her of her drunken past. The chorus of voices continued to mock her; from Mic: "You just don't want to be alone", and Harm's "All the men in her life are dead or wish they were." How could she help Mattie when she had so badly hurt the man who tried to help her? Would she even accept the help? She wanted to do what she had been doing since she left her father's house; what she had done after Mic and Paraguay; she wanted to run.
"Marines don't run." The voice of Col. Mathew O'Hara echoed in her head. This was not uncle Matt; the kind man who took her in and saved her. This was the man who valued principles more than his life or his freedom. "You are not your mistakes, Sarah. You can face them and learn from them, or run and be destroyed by them, the choice is yours." The battle with her nerves and the voices ends with the question Dr. McCool asked her. "Why do you always choose to be alone?"
She didn't want to be alone; she wanted the family she never had. One that is marked by love and caring, not abuse and abandonment. She wanted it so badly, she nearly married a man who did not hold her heart; when the one who did push her away. When he did seem ready to talk, she followed in her mother's footsteps and ran away. She told Sturgis that Harm wasn't ready to hear her confession of love, and her perception of the events in Paraguay seemed to prove her right. Until the revelations of the last few hours.
Mac was not the only one with a ghost. Whether it was Diane, his father, or anyone else, he had refused to let go only after there was nothing left to lose. The ghost of dead fathers lost loves, missing mothers, and their own failure to learn from mistakes, had defined their past, and now Harm's life and the future of the girl she was about to meet hung in the balance. As she prepared to ring the doorbell and start a conversation with no clue how to actually start, Mac reached in her right pocket for something she retrieved from Gunny Walters. The object that represented everything she had resented and still loved most about him. The gold wings that linked him to his past and broke her heart, would now represent the anchor he had always been and a future once thought out of reach. With a gentle squeeze, the ghost began to fade, and with them the scared, almost desperate woman she had become. The weight of the disaster that had been her life was pushed aside. For the first time since Harm left JAG four years ago, his Marine was back. She smiled at the thought. His Marine sounds good to me.
The Marine on the outside may have silenced her doubts and regained her nerve. The girl now pacing the living room had not. The sense of loss and abandonment, that began with the death of her mother and the disappearance of her father, returned with Harm's accident.
Rationally, Mattie knew the accident was not Harm's fault, but it seemed unlikely he could help her now. She thought she had been left alone again. Mattie promised herself that she would never open up like that again. Everyone died or abandoned her. She was better off alone. No one understood, she thought. The visitor at her door would change her view. The conversation to come would change their lives in ways neither could have known. The moment was brought together by a man who may never know what a difference he made in both their lives.