Swerve

by Inglath Cooper

  He goes from room to room, opening doors, closets, looking under the beds. The house is single level, so once he’s done, he steps through the French doors off the living room and disappears into the backyard. I see the flashlight from his phone swoop from one end of the fenced lawn to the other.

  When he comes back in, he says, “Do you have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “You should. I’ll bring one by in the morning.”

  “But I don’t have a permit.”

  “We’ll call it a loaner. Meanwhile, you should get one and apply for concealed carry.”

  “You’re kind of scaring me.”

  He lets his eyes meet mine then, and the seriousness in his look further unnerves me.

  “If this Sergio is involved in your sister’s disappearance,” he says, “and Madison told him that you were with me tonight asking questions, he might come looking for you.”

  Fear jolts through me. And right behind it, a stab of anger that my life, Mia’s life, has been taken hostage by a likely psychopath so lacking in conscience that he had taken the life of a beautiful, young girl tonight. “Do I need to be afraid?”

  He gives me a level look. “I have to be honest with you. I don’t know.”

  I am suddenly frozen with the awareness that I do not feel safe in my own house.

  “Is there someone else you could stay with for a while? A friend?”

  “Yes, but then I would be putting her in danger too.”

  He blows out a sigh, and says, “You can stay at my place tonight. It’s not much, but you’ll be safe.”

  “Oh. Thank you. But I couldn’t. You know, I’m probably overreacting. I’ll be fine. If I hear anything at all, I’ll dial 911.”

  He stares at me for several long seconds, glances at his watch, and says, “It’s already one a.m. Why don’t I just sleep on your sofa?”

  Relief cascades through me. I can’t summon any vestige of pride that might make me deny being afraid. I am afraid. “That would be . . . are you sure you don’t mind?”

  He shakes his head, and then with a half-smile adds, “As long as I don’t have to sleep with Pounce.”

  ~

  I FIND BLANKETS and a pillow and make up the couch for him. I start to feel self-conscious when I realize he has no clothes except for the ones he’s wearing. My brain does a quick flash of him sleeping under these blankets, and my imagination starts to run away with me.

  I quickly finish tucking in the edges, fluff the pillow, and turn around to find him standing right behind me. My chest collides with his mid-section. My instant thought is abs of steel. I step back so quickly that my leg hits the edge of the couch, and I fall backward.

  He stares down at me for a moment, then offers a hand to pull me up. I ignore the gesture, shooting up on my own and putting several yards of distance between us. “Would you . . . I have a new toothbrush and toothpaste. Can I get those for you?”

  “Yeah,” he says, his gaze still locked with mine. “I’d appreciate that.”

  “It’s the least I can do. Is there anything else you need?”

  I hear myself say the words, feel the undercurrent, and do not wait for him to answer. I head for my bathroom, opening the drawer and rummaging for the toothbrush and toothpaste. It is only when I’m about to head back out the door that I glance in the mirror and notice the flush in my cheeks.

  Knox

  “Grief does not change you. . .It reveals you.”

  ―John Green

  SHE DISAPPEARS INTO the bedroom, waiting for the overconfident cat to clear the doorsill before she firmly shuts the door behind her.

  He flicks off the lamp before taking off his shirt and jeans and sliding under the blankets. The sofa is a good foot shorter than he is, so he tries several different positions before conceding to his feet hanging over the far arm.

  He stares at the dark ceiling above him, wondering what made him offer to stay here tonight. He realizes it is definitely out of character for him, but then what had happened to Madison Willard was beyond anything he’d thought to expect.

  Tomorrow, he’ll make sure Emory has a gun for protection and knows how to use it. Then tomorrow night he’ll be back in his own bed. Waking up to find out that something has happened to Emory Benson isn’t a regret he wants to add to his list.

  Because it’s already a long list.

  Sounds come from her bedroom, drawers opening, closing. He hears the soft tone of her voice, a meow from Pounce.

  He closes his eyes, waiting for sleep. But the images that start to pan through his mind aren’t exactly sleep-inducing.

  Emory Benson isn’t his type.

  He doesn’t go for serious, driven women who expect a relationship to have a purpose, a destination.

  He’d made that mistake once in his life, even though he wasn’t put-off by the realization going into it. But then the vows his wife had taken had not included any expectation of PTSD and all its accompanying demons. She hadn’t known he would come home a different man. For that matter, neither had he.

  ~

  Five Years Ago

  WE DON’T GO into things expecting them to change us.

  Knox certainly hadn’t.

  The end of his deployment should have been a cause for celebration.

  The night before he had left to return to the states, he had Skyped with Mariah. She was so overjoyed that they would only be apart another twenty-four hours that she could not stop smiling. He’d sat inside the tent, sweat trickling down the back of his neck, his gaze glued to the screen, a smile he did not feel inside pasted on his face as he’d listened to her plans for what they would do when he got home from Afghanistan.

  “I am going to devour you,” she said, “as soon as we get through the door of this house. If I don’t attack you in the car first, that is. And I might. It’s been a year, Knox. Oh, my Lord, I have missed you so much, baby.”

  “I’ve missed you too,” he said. And he had. But why couldn’t he feel that? Why did he feel as if he had been soaked in some kind of numbing solution so that a real feeling seemed incapable of finding its way from his brain to his heart?

  He stared at his wife’s face on the laptop screen, noted with detachment that she might be even more beautiful now than she had been when he’d last seen her just over three hundred and sixty-five days ago.

  To deal with their separation, she had made her already healthy fitness habit a near addiction, running six miles every single morning and teaching a spin class five days a week.

  “I can’t believe we’re finally going to live like normal people,” she said, leaning in to the camera and giving him a glimpse of the cleavage revealed by the neckline of her workout shirt. Her skin was still flushed from the class she’d finished teaching just before their call.

  “I know,” he said. “Me either.”

  And he couldn’t. Because for the life of him, he didn’t think he had any idea what that was any more.

  But he had done his best to show excitement over the life they would be living together for the first time since they had gotten married.

  The thing was, sitting there, listening to his happy wife, he didn’t know how to tell her that he wasn’t the same man she had married.

  And he didn’t know if he ever would be again.

  ~

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Mariah to start to realize this.

  In fact, awareness began to happen their very first night home together.

  They had finally fallen asleep in each other’s arms sometime after two a.m. Mariah had made good on her promise, bringing his tired body to life twice before exhaustion had claimed them both.

  The nightmare came at its usual time, two hours or so after falling asleep. He woke Mariah before the dream woke him. She shook him gently, saying his name over and over again until he rose from the depths of the nightmare, tears streaming down his face.

  “Baby,” she said, fear in her voice. “What is it? You’re having a dream. I’m righ
t here.” She slipped her arms behind him and pulled him to her, cradling his head against her chest. She began to cry. “Tell me. What happened?”

  It was a long time before he could speak. When he finally did, his voice did not sound familiar to him. More like that of a man he might have met a few times but didn’t really know.

  “In one year, our unit found more than six thousand IEDs. Over two hundred men injured. Thirty-six killed. Five of them died right beside me.” Once he started talking, he couldn’t stop. “And every time, I watched a life combust before my eyes. Not just the life of that soldier, but the lives of all the people who loved him. And every time, I did what I had to do. Get him to safety as fast as we could. Even if it was too late, it seemed like we owed that soldier whatever dignity we could give him. And then we had to go back to being the soldiers we’d been trained to be, blanking out what we’d seen, telling ourselves it couldn’t happen again, that it was a fluke. But it wasn’t, and it did. Over and over again.”

  She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, hugged him as tight as she could, as if she could bring him back, hold him together. And he let her. He wanted the comfort, needed the solace, desperately craved feeling normal again. Feeling something. Anything. But the only time he didn’t feel numb was in the dreams. And what he felt there was terror.

  “It’s not human,” she said next to his ear. “You were sent there to make a difference for our country, for our world. And you were tested to every extreme limit imaginable to make sure you could handle it, that you would be able to face those situations and do what needed to be done. And I know you did. But what about what happens afterwards? Does anyone prepare you for what it’s like to see that kind of horror? For how it will change you?”

  She leaned back and looked at him, her voice rising when she added, “My God. What can I do? How can I help?”

  He leaned against the headboard of the bed, pulled her into the curve of his arm, maybe to offer her comfort, maybe to prevent her from seeing in his face what he was struggling to hide. Because she was right. He wasn’t handling it. He felt as if someone had planted him in quicksand, and his boots were getting heavier and heavier, sucking him down inch by inch, pressing the air from his lungs.

  He kissed his wife’s hair, wished he could tell her everything would be all right. But for the first time in his life, a life he had defined by his own ability to fight his way forward regardless of the obstacles thrown in front of him, he wasn’t sure that it would be.

  ~

  THEY BOTH TRIED.

  But the man Mariah had married was not the same man who came home to her from Afghanistan.

  With every passing day, Knox watched the growing awareness of this reflected in his wife’s eyes. He saw her joy in having him home fade to alarm over the fact that for the first time since she had known him, he was sleeping in. Getting up at eleven or later when he’d always been up with the sun, getting a run in before breakfast. But he wasn’t able to go to sleep at night because he dreaded the dreams waiting for him there, and so he couldn’t fall asleep until exhaustion pulled him under, even without his acquiescence.

  Mariah planned things she thought he would like doing, things they had once enjoyed doing together. Hikes. Long bike rides. Movies.

  But he felt like a voyeur in his own life, like his soul had been removed, and he could only view the life going on around him as a bystander.

  Mariah’s patience knew no boundaries. And so he hated himself all the more for his growing resentment of her attempts to pull him back into their marriage, their life together. Fair or not, her insistence on making him happy again made him realize she would never understand what it was he’d witnessed in Afghanistan or how it had changed him.

  How could she?

  It wasn’t fair to expect that she ever could. He knew now that he had deliberately set fire to his marriage, presented his wife with a reality that she couldn’t possibly choose to live with.

  When she left him, it wasn’t a surprise.

  But it was a relief.

  Because then, he no longer had to try at all. He moved to an apartment and shut the door on everything that had once made him get up in the mornings. And for months, he barely left the place, only going out to get food when he remembered to eat.

  One afternoon, he was sitting in front of his TV, staring at a talking head on CNN questioning America’s role in the Middle East. He wondered if this was how it was for the men who returned from Vietnam to discover that the country that had sent them to fight a battle it declared worthy of so many lives had changed its mind somewhere along the way. Those soldiers had not returned home as heroes but as villains, as if they were somehow suddenly to blame for the tragedy of Vietnam.

  His phone pinged. He glanced at the screen and saw the group text from Ace Conrad, a former SEAL team member. He picked up the phone and read the message.

  Hey, guys. Really sorry for letting you all down. The only easy day was yesterday.

  Knox read the words again, his heart dropping to his stomach.

  Instantly, he knew what they meant. He dialed the number, listened to it ring and ring. As soon as voicemail picked up, he dialed again. Over and over, but there was no answer. And he knew it was too late.

  He sat there on his sofa, staring at the phone screen, suddenly aware of the pull inside him, the awareness that he could take the same out. He didn’t even blame Ace. He knew the why. The pain in his head that never stopped, no matter what medicine or alcohol he threw at it.

  He understood what Ace had just freed himself from.

  He got up from the sofa, went into the bedroom, and pulled his Glock from the nightstand drawer. He went back to the living room and sat down, holding the gun on his lap, one finger on the trigger.

  He had every reason to put the gun in his mouth. Just end it all. The black hole of peace in front of him held the answer he’d been looking for. He wanted out. Wanted the images in his head to stop their carousel rotation. Wanted the numbness that had trapped his heart and refused to let it feel anything let him go.

  But the phone rang. Tanner Billings’ name flashed on the screen. Another team member. He considered not answering, but something made his finger hit the button. He listened as one of the men he’d fought and nearly died with too many times to count raged against the decision Ace had just made.

  Knox listened, and when Tanner finally went silent, all he could say was, “But I understand why he did.”

  Tanner started to cry. Knox listened to his quiet sobbing, picturing the enormous warrior who had saved his ass more than once. And he knew that the fact that Tanner could cry meant he would be okay.

  Knox wanted to cry. But the tears were frozen inside him.

  “You better not, man,” Tanner said, the words barely audible. “Tell me you’re not going to let that shithole we survived end up being the winner. Because I swear if you do . . .”

  “I don’t want to,” Knox said softly. “I just can’t picture anything else making sense.”

  “I’m getting on a plane, Knox,” Tanner said. “The next one I can get a seat on. Give me your address. We’ll figure this out together.”

  ~

  IRONICALLY, IT WAS Ace’s suicide that ended up bringing Knox back to life again. But if it hadn’t been for Tanner, Knox knew without question that he would have followed Ace’s way out the afternoon he’d received that text.

  Tanner arrived at his apartment late that same night, got their airline tickets lined up for Ace’s funeral two days later. The two of them sat on Knox’s sofa and shared their best memories of Ace and the close calls they’d all pulled through together.

  Before the funeral, Tanner made some discreet phone calls and found a psychiatrist who specialized in PTSD and was able to book an emergency session the very next day. He drove Knox to the appointment and sat in the waiting room while Dr. Thomason began a slow drilling into the abscess that had become Knox’s soul.

  With his probing questions, Dr. Thomas
on released enough of the pressure that day that Knox considered the possibility that he might be able to climb his way out of the darkness.

  And on the day that he and Tanner stood by their SEAL brother’s grave, absorbed the sobbing of his wife and three children, and felt the bottomless well of their grief, he felt the first flare of anger for what had been taken from them all.

  That in trying to serve his country, Ace had made a choice that had repercussions he didn’t know to expect.

  In trying to save the lives of innocents, he had ended up sacrificing his own.

  That afternoon, with a cold October wind at his back, Knox wondered what it would take to write himself a different ending.

  ~

  THE STORY WASN’T pretty.

  And there were times when it just didn’t seem worth it.

  After learning that he was getting help, Mariah put a halt to her petition for divorce. Called him one afternoon and told him she wanted to try again.

  But he couldn’t let her. He wasn’t the same. And no matter how much therapy he subjected himself to, that was never going to change.

  “You deserve far better, Mariah, than I am ever going to be able to give you.”

  “Knox, I love you,” she said, crying softly. “I married you because I wanted to spend my life with you. If I’d had any idea I was going to be giving up my husband, I never would have agreed to you going to Afghanistan!”

  “I signed on for every bit of it.”

  “But it’s not fair,” she said, barely able to get the words through her tears. “It wasn’t supposed to mean that we sacrificed our life together for it.”

  “I know,” he said, wishing he had more to offer her. But he didn’t. He simply didn’t.

  Emory

  “You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.”

  ―Shaun Hick

  I CAN’T SLEEP.