STORY SUMMARY

 

When EMMETT, 60's, is accidentally woken up by KERRY, his wife, as she packs to leave him, he gets up to pee and goes back to bed. Realizing her seriousness, he follows her in pajamas all the way to the train station where he convinces her to spend one last day together before she leaves.

 

Emmett spends a desperate day trying to win his wife's affection: a trip to the Brooklyn Bridge where they first met, a pathetic attempt at sex, a five-star restaurant and other grand gestures, but all fails. "I thought we would die together," he implores. "I don't want to die with someone," she retorts, "I want to live with someone." At Kerry's urgings, Emmett visits a veterans' center where they discover that, like many veterans, Emmett can't remember a single detail from his service in Vietnam.

 

As tension between them slowly thaws, Kerry is moved by his sincere efforts and vulnerabilities. Their old spark and playfulness is reignited, and the two kiss for the first time in years. Torn, Kerry pulls back and confesses that she's leaving Emmett for another man.

 

After the initial shock, Emmett obtains a gun and goes on a mad rampage, first in their apartment and then through town, looking for his nemesis. Before shooting her lover, Emmett realizes that Kerry has never been happier, and lets her go.

 

Back on the Brooklyn Bridge, about to jump to his death, Emmett has an epiphany. He makes it to the station in the nick of time where he finds Kerry and recounts a single detail from his service in Vietnam: he can remember thinking that he had to get back home, to smell her hair again. And with this memory, as the floodgate of old pain opens, he wins back not only his wife, but his ability to feel.

 

In today's political climate, I was inspired to write a human and intimate story about the effects of war on men. Based on my father, himself a veteran, this is a story of one of the luckier men who returned from Vietnam, supposedly intact. But as his wife argues: the man she married never came back. Throughout the story, the couple's daughter, a peace activist, keeps the current war in Iraq in the backdrop, so that we are left to wonder, as we watch Emmett's struggles, what effects today's war will have on our men for years, or for generations to come. A dark and honest story with a hopeful ending, the script brings even the toughest guys to tears.