Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  So I ask Roman to hide the handgun, just before my third trimester, because that’s the time I have to get off the medication, by every doctor’s suggestion. “Just put it somewhere else,” I say, one hand rested on my swollen stomach, cupping the underbelly of my pregnancy. “Somewhere where I won’t find it.”

  Roman nods, but the gun never moves from its drawer. I only know because I checked once, just to know if it was there.

  * * *

  But in the summer of 2015, after the first time I hold my daughter against my chest, both of us bloody and panting and dazzled, I know in that moment there will be parts of me I will never fear again. There will never be another suicide scare. As long as she is here, I’ll never worry about the gun in the drawer or hitting a wall on the freeway. I can be re-formed here with a squirming baby resting against my bare chest. Her tiny toes press into the suppleness of my stomach, my body softens, my heart softens, as I stare down at this tiny thing, the girl with the deep-gray eyes and wet wisps of golden curls. I run one finger against the curve of her cheek and am saved. I can’t be on medication while breastfeeding and I don’t need it. I curl that little girl in my arms, enchanted, singing a soft song into her ear, tears dripping off my chin. It doesn’t matter how different I am from everyone else. I can still love wholly, with all of me, and that’s all that matters here.

  “You’ll be my greatest adventure,” I whisper to her, a clichéd line I saw on some chalk-painted wooden board in Hobby Lobby, but it rings true for me. Adeline rewires my brain in a way no prescription ever could.

  Closing

  Does that mean this is my happy ending? Of course not. The demons aren’t gone forever. That’s not how this works.

  Sometimes I’m convinced Roman doesn’t love me anymore. He meets this accusation with a baffled stare, or a roll of his eyes, and, “I love you, babe. It’s all in your head,” but how can he? What is there left to love here? I am the woman who once spoke six languages, who climbed Mount Fuji, Le Mont-Saint-Michel, and Skellig Michael, but for whom now getting off the couch to wash a sink full of dishes is too hard.

  PTSD is a sneaky motherfucker. I would have been prepared for the anxiety, the irrational thoughts, the OCD and health fears. I know what those are, know my triggers, know when to seek help because I can recognize when I’m sinking. But the depression sneaks up on me. It’s subtle and quiet. I don’t realize it’s there until I’ve sunk most of the way down, sobbing over the kitchen sink, rubbing my eyes with the back of my hands as my daughter asks from her high chair, in her tiny, high voice, “What wrong, Momma? What wrong?”

  I don’t know how to tell her that I don’t love me anymore. I was once something great and vicious and now I’m flat and dull. I don’t know how to describe that loss to her, that she’ll never meet the great woman I once was. “It’s okay, baby. Mommy’s just sad but you make me happy.”

  She brightens, her cheeks curl just like her father’s, and she pipes back, “Make Momma happy!”

  “You do,” I gasp, cupping one hand around her cheek. I smile with tears streaking down my face. “You make me happy.”

  In a few days the episode will pass. I won’t cry all day. When Roman comes home, I’ll hold up my face for a kiss, smile and feel it. He won’t seem distant to me, his hugs the perfect duration of time and effort. So what the fuck? What the fuck is this?

  This is a different kind of demon. This creature sits on my shoulders and drags me down. And then the thing lifts off, dissipates suddenly, giving me just enough time to stand up, straighten, blink the haze from my eyes, to feel good. Then it returns again. Rinse and repeat.

  “It may be time to think about going back on medication,” my psychiatrist suggests. It’s not something he says lightly.

  “But I don’t want to!” I don’t want to have to get off it again for the next child, if we have one. I don’t want to go through the vertigo and the nausea and the headaches, the weight gain. What I want is to be fine. I want to just be better already. I want to be over it by now.

  I want the impossible. Doesn’t everyone?

  * * *

  I’m always looking for closure. If I can find the proper ending, will I be able to move on then? Just close the book on my trauma and put it behind me? In the summer before Adeline is born, I think I can find closure in Sergeant Pelton, whose abandonment had been the biggest betrayal. The sergeant I had trusted the most for protection, who had turned on me. I just need to hear the right words, I think, and then I can move on.

  Before Josephine and I embark on our summer cross-country trip from California to Texas, we agree to meet up in our old stomping grounds, beautiful, old Monterey, for a picnic with some other linguists. Josephine is still enlisted and in a Farsi refresher course, where she met Sergeant Pelton for the first time, whom she then befriended, long after Fort Polk, so long after that none of it should matter anymore. But it does. Every photo of him on her Facebook page turns in my gut. There he is laughing, diving off a boat into the ocean. There they are, drinks in hand, lounging by the beach. I don’t know how to say, You can’t be friends with him, so I say nothing.

  So I bury my toes into the cold sand, fortifying myself with one arm wrapped around my waist, the other clutching a hard cider bottle. Don’t hug me, don’t hug me, I internally hiss, seeing Sergeant Pelton’s bald head turn in my direction, watching his face brighten, the excitement reaching his vivid blue eyes.

  “Ryan!” he crows, opening his arms, and stomps through the shifting sand, his flip-flops kicking up dirt behind him. He engulfs me then holds me out at arm’s length, hands planted on my upper arms.

  I flex. I’m thinner then, hard from years of CrossFit, from obsessing over what I eat, even if the medication has forced me up a size. But I’m still all lean muscle, and so I flex, because the last time he saw me was before Iraq, right before he left for another post, back when I was fat, what the Army labels a shitbag soldier: anyone who doesn’t make weight or breaks tape. Back then I was still writhing down in the dirt, begging for a scrap of attention, for someone to validate me.

  “You look great,” he says. He seems genuine. Instead of my confronting him, rejecting him, we dig a bonfire pit together, taking turns with the small shovel, throwing cold, dark sand onto the beach.

  The sun sets and I down another hard cider, feeling the alcohol settle down in my stomach and warm my limbs. I stare at the bonfire, the flames reaching up and casting shadows against the bluffs behind us. I press my cheek against the cool bottle, and I ask him.

  Sergeant Pelton sits beside me. “I don’t remember,” he says of it all. I stare at him, with his head tilted just so, as if he is sympathetic, and I’m not satisfied.

  “There are huge holes in my memory from my time there at Fort Polk,” he says, and he then tells me why, the trauma that disrupted his life and his memory, and it’s his story to share, not mine, but I’m still not satisfied.

  “You don’t remember me going to those CID appointments?” He shakes his head no. “The time I crawled under your desk before formation and just cried?”

  He arches his eyebrows. “No, not at all.”

  “The report? You read the report.”

  “No. I don’t remember.”

  “You kicked me out of your platoon,” I accuse.

  He shook his head again. “No, I didn’t. You got moved for some reason. I don’t remember why.”

  I hate that he’s so convincing. I hate that his story makes sense. I hate that he has a perfectly good reason and that I don’t get to have my day, my moment of anger, I don’t get to stand here and rage at him. I hate that my trauma, my pain, the events that shaped my whole adult life haven’t been worth remembering to those who had once meant the most to me.

  He can’t apologize, or explain why he did it, why he failed me, and that doesn’t seem fair at all. And mostly I hate that I still like him, and that maybe I still want him to like me. I should have grown beyond this, yet sometimes I’m still the little girl who
wants her daddy to turn around and notice her, struggling to keep up with him on the stony path. So I don’t tell him to go fuck himself. I don’t tell him that it’s not okay. I don’t get my closure from him.

  * * *

  The rest have moved on. Social media has tightened our world and I see our faces in little flashes from inside timelines. Female King has remarried, Locke is traveling the world with her own backpack, Sergeant Daniels has children. I sit behind a computer and type in a name, chest tight in apprehension, squinting at thumbnail pictures as I scroll down, examining all the Kevin Hales out there in the world, looking for the one I know. I don’t find him. I wonder if I remember the spelling of his last name correctly. Was there an s maybe? An odd y? I squirm in my seat, scrolling down, hating that I’m looking, morbidly entangled because I don’t want to see his face (would I remember his face?). I don’t want to find him looking back out at me (would I know if he was?). And yet I look. I want to know where he is, so I can place a pin in that part of the map and avoid it. I picture him in the Midwest. I don’t know why. Perhaps someone had once said he was from there. If he’s out there somewhere, I’ll never see him then. I’ll never accidentally stumble into him on the street; he’ll never walk into my CrossFit box, or one of my university classes. But I can’t know for sure because I never find him on social media, no mutual friends, no familiar face. I’m relieved. I’m not relieved. There is no closure here, either.

  * * *

  “He’s from Wyoming,” my dad says suddenly, during my most recent visit to Maine.

  I blink at him. “What? How do you know that?”

  “What do you mean, how do I know? His name is _____ and he’s from Wyoming.”

  My father says Kevin Hale’s real name, a name I haven’t heard in decades, the name I haven’t said in just as long. I stare at him, mouth open. “How…how do you even remember that?”

  “Ryan.” He stills, levels an unflinching stare at me. “That’s not something you forget.”

  Maybe, all this time, I was looking for validation in all the wrong places. My father is the only one of my family to remember his name. It’s somehow a well-preserved thing between just the two of us that I didn’t know we shared until this moment.

  “His unit hated him, you know. They wanted nothing to do with him.”

  I shake my head, baffled. “What are you, the FBI? How do you know all of this?”

  He does that short laugh of his—one part at himself, the other part at the world. “I just did a little digging. You know what kind of dirtbag you need to be for your unit to hate you that much? They couldn’t wait to get rid of him. He’s gotta be behind bars now.”

  “Is he?” I exclaim.

  “Or he’s dead. Someone like that, you don’t live in normal society. Dirtbags like that do that sort of thing again and they get caught or they get killed. He’s taken care of.” There’s such conviction in the way he says that. I’m not sure I agree. I always thought he was out there somewhere, married with children, living a perfectly normal life, telling everyone about that one time some crazy bitch tried to cry rape against him. It never occurred to me that there was another possibility—I like my father’s version better. It’s idealistic and pretty and maybe even possible. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  * * *

  Maybe there isn’t closure for this sort of thing. Maybe this is closure enough. Maybe you never actually get over rape or war—you just have to carry it always, and it sits inside you, filling in the places where other things are lost and gone. I’m not okay. I’m not all better. I never tied myself back up and became like everyone else. But I have moments of vivid lucidity. I have flare-ups of exhilaration and ambition and delight. Sometimes, I laugh fully. I still open my arms up to the sky, spinning on a single foot to make my daughter laugh and to laugh with her. I dance like a horse, leap like a deer, twirl around with her in my arms, and I see a future here. For me, and for her. I see her finding love, her first heartbreak, the first time she’ll rise up from the ground, dust herself off, and push forward.

  I survive the demons and live in the interims. I’m not better, but I’m not broken, either.

  Acknowledgments

  I was never sure I’d actually get here, the last page of a published book, the one now sitting in your hands. I had hoped (and wrote), and dreamed (and wrote), and despaired (and wrote), and now here we are. My grandest dream has come true, and this most certainly is not an accomplishment I did on my own. First, I’d like to thank my brilliant editor, Millicent Bennett, who took something raw, scattered, and probably a bit melodramatic, and made it sleek, structured, and—let’s face it—comprehensible. Millicent, this book would not be what it is today without your unending dedication and hard work. You’ve managed to edit while always making me feel confident and supported, which was essential, because I’m such a needy writer. Thank you for listening, collaborating, and turning my story into more than I ever could’ve imagined.

  I also would not be here if not for my agent, Eve Attermann. Eve, I can’t thank you enough for taking a chance on me based on nothing more than a few pages of work. You’ve supported and encouraged me, and probably had to hold my hand a lot more than most authors, and for that, thank you. You always, always, have my back. You make for the best battle buddy ever. Thank you also to Siobhan O’Neill and Svetlana Katz, who are fighting hard to, literally, get my book out there in the world.

  Jake Halpern: How can I ever adequately thank you? You took the time to read the work of some random girl from the gym, then encouraged her and passed that work along. It may not have seemed like a big deal to you, but to me, it was everything. I can only hope that I’ll one day be able to pay it forward for someone else, just like you’ve done for me.

  It goes (almost) without saying that I’m deeply grateful to my mother, Linda Taylor. Thank you for always being my number one fan and supporting me in everything I’ve ever done. The woman I am today is only because of your endless love and support. To my father, Peter Dostie, I’m thankful for your quiet and steadfast love. Thank you for supporting me, even when I didn’t realize or recognize it. You always let me be exactly who I am, and I think it’s you who understands me the most. To my family—David, Jesse, and too many more to name here—and to my many friends, all those at CrossFit New Haven, all my fellow writers at SCSU, to everyone who has uplifted and cheered me on, you all know who you are, and you are loved.

  Pamela Brodman, you’re practically my soulmate. It’s an understatement to say you’ve always been there for me. Thank you for having seen the worst of my crazy and still come back for more. Thank you for reading everything I’ve written twelve times and still agreeing to read it once more. You nurture my writer’s heart, which is to say you nurture me. Thank you for all of it and so much more.

  Dr. Joseph Erdos, there is no question that your years of commitment have literally saved my life. There would be no book without you because if not for you, there’d be no me. Thank you for talking me through every variety of my insanity. You once told me to write just to make it through another day, and look where we are now.

  Which leads me to Tim Parrish. Tim, everyone else helped me along this journey, but you’re the one who started it all. You encouraged me to tell my story and made me feel like I had something worth saying. Thank you for withstanding every panicked email, text message, and frantic meeting. You took someone very green and somehow managed to turn her into, dare I say it, an actual writer. My entire craft I owe to you, and to Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program.

  I also have to thank those people with whom I served (some of whom may or may not be very happy with me at the moment). I couldn’t include everything and everyone in this memoir, but I was lucky to serve with some of the bravest women and men I’ve ever met, and whose own stories could shake the world should they ever tell them.

  And of course my deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Mark Roman Osenko. Mark, you’ve put up with more than any husband sho
uld ever have to. You’ve seen me at my lowest and loved me anyway. You’ve weathered through things that would make lesser men run and carried burdens you should never have been forced to carry. You’ve done it all without complaint and, frankly, I don’t know how you do it. Thank you for helping me pursue my dream and never once trying to dissuade me. I love you. Also, you’re stuck with me now because I put you in a book.

  Last, but perhaps most important, I need to thank all those who made Formation physically possible. Before this, I never realized the massive team that goes into creating and publishing a book. I sort of stumbled forward with a manuscript in hand, saying “Here. I wrote a thing,” and the following people took that raw, fractured thing and helped turn it into the beautiful book you see now. My deepest gratitude to both Michael Pietsch and Ben Sevier, publisher of Grand Central, who saw enough promise in my early draft to let Millicent take a chance on me. Thank you to Karen Kosztolnyik, who has been a huge supporter of this book from the very beginning. To Matthew Ballast, Brian McLendon, and Beth deGuzman, thank you all for your support at acquisition, and all your hard work since. Thank you, Albert Tang, for working hard on getting us the very best jacket. Also to Liz Connor, who tirelessly produced endless different jacket comps so that we could find the perfect design, and who also is the very first person to gift this book to someone else, which is the greatest show of support any author can ask for. To my publicists, Linda Duggins and Kamrun Nesa, I’m so grateful to you for being a huge advocate for Formation, and for being willing to pull a James Bond move when necessary to help get it attention. A special thank you to Amanda Pritzker, Andrew Duncan, Alana Spendley, and Morgan Swift for all your creative marketing efforts and for diligently striving to get the word out there to readers. Which leads me to the sales department, where Alison Lazarus, Chris Murphy, Karen Torres, Rachel Hairston, and Ali Cutrone have bent over backward to help get Formation onto shelves and into readers’ hands. Thank you, Bob Castillo, for helping to make sure the book is flawless on every practical level. Also to Laura Jorstad, my copyeditor, who caught my one hundred and one “shrugged one shoulder”s and overall saved me from being appallingly redundant. Thomas Louie came up with the kickass interior design. Thank you to Marilyn Dahl at Shelf Awareness for the wonderful writeup for Glow. Finally, thank you to assistants Meriam Metoui and WME’s Haley Heidemann for the million and one things you do in between all this. You both are the vital supply lines to this army. Thank you all for going above and beyond the call of duty.