The irony that she was upset that she had gotten the marriage she bargained for, and no longer wanted, wasn’t lost on her, but it did nothing for the squeezing pain that threatened to cut off her air. Not only was she second choice, he didn’t want to share the most fundamental things about himself, the things that mattered most.
He had hurt her. She wasn’t crying, but JJ didn’t cry much. The main way he could tell was the bleak look in her eyes, the fragile way she had lowered herself to the sofa. He hadn’t meant to. He would cut off his arm before hurting her. “Come on, JJ. You’re bound to know by now I want to be with you.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that you enjoy being around me, and you love the sex. I know you believe in fidelity, so if you were going to be on leave, of course you came here. I just thought, I hoped, when you came back, it meant there was something more.”
More? It had been more in every way. Both easier and harder than he had had any idea. Easier because just being in the same room with her was satisfying and the sex was off the charts. In bed they had a flawless communication like he’d never before experienced.
But it was harder, too. He could feel her frustration when he couldn’t tell her what was going on with him, couldn’t explain why her suggestions wouldn’t work. He hated what he was doing to her.
Now that she knew he might not ever be a SEAL again, he wondered how long it would be before she thought he was too much trouble—especially with all her other responsibilities. If she knew the full extent of his problems, she might even want to send him to a hospital for trauma cases. Some place that would straighten him out or at least take the burden of his care away.
He would take himself away before that happened. He’d go away now, but she needed a “visible” husband, and right now it was the one thing he could do for her. Every time he made love to her, he tried to show her how he felt.
“JJ—”
She waved him away. “Don’t worry. You haven’t done anything wrong. It was my mistake. I’ll get over it. I think I’ll change clothes.”
In the bedroom, she pulled on loose jeans and an old sweatshirt. Back in the living room, she went to the box where they stored walking shoes so that they didn’t track so much sand into the house.
David watched her impassively, his fists on his hips. “What are you doing?”
“I think I’ll go for a walk.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
“It’s dark. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’ll take Brinkley.”
“I know he would try, but he’s not a trained guard dog.” David pulled his much larger shoes from the box. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”
JJ swallowed a lump in her throat, trying to be as low-key as he was. “I’d rather you didn’t. I really need to be alone.”
“No problem. I’ll walk protection detail. I’ll be behind you. If you want me to, I’ll make sure you don’t see me. You won’t know I’m there.”
“You would walk behind so I could be alone and be protected at the same time?”
He gave her a patient look and went back to tying his shoes.
“But we just argued. Or at least, I did. Aren’t you pissed? Happy to have me out of your sight for a few minutes?”
“It doesn’t matter how I feel.”
The statement hung in the air. He had just stated a profound truth about himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel, didn’t want to feel, or was afraid to feel. It was that, as far as he was concerned, his feelings were beside the point.
The clear brown depths of his eyes lit with the dry, understated humor she had come to love. It was so much a part of who he was. “I’ve protected people I like a whole lot less than you.”
No matter how hurt she was that he wouldn’t share what he was going through, JJ couldn’t deliberately hold him at a distance. She chuckled. “I do need a walk. Why don’t you come with me?”
The ocean was calm. Small, wide-spaced breakers made leisurely trips to deposit their cream on the shore. The tide was going out. They walked on the wet sand just beyond the pale glow of scallops of foam left by departing waves.
They walked the beach silently. JJ was still dealing with the newly revealed facts of her marriage.
After she thought about it for a while, she realized no adjustment was necessary. She felt the same way she had felt for a long time. It distressed her that he closed off part of himself from her, but she didn’t have less than she’d had before she married him. She had more. In every way. Which reminded her that she needed to talk to him about his brothers and sister—hers too, now.
“Lucas stopped by Caruthers today.” He had taken to doing that again. Dropping in for just a minute. The staff enjoyed his visits. He was careful not to stay too long or get in the way. “I think I’ve got the Riley problem solved. Lucas wants to invite your brothers and sister to stay at his house over Christmas.”
“You don’t have to do this, you know. I’ll pick up Riley and take him to Charlottesville.”
David’s objection was immediate and no surprise. However, JJ was ready for him.
“Sorry, no deal. You made me Riley’s guardian.”
“If anything happens to me.”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, it has.”
“You think I’m incapacitated, don’t you?”
“I think you’re making poor decisions. There are other doctors. Other places you can go. But I’m not going to go around again with you. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten much better at telling when someone is willing to listen. It won’t matter what I say… you’re not listening to me. Riley and Elle and Harris are coming here for Christmas. Deal with it.”
“Does Lucas know what he’s letting himself in for? Riley has a longer vacation than the twins do.”
“He likes Riley. They get along. When he’s had all he can stand of Riley going on and on about one of his enthusiasms, he just nods off. And Lucas has wanted a bigger family for years. I think he’s delighted to have some honorary grandchildren.”
“How do you feel about it?” That was another thing. He might disregard his feelings, but David had no difficulty understanding her feelings or listening to them. In fact, he understood her remarkably well.
“I think it will work. Esperanza will love having guests to do for. We can go over there for dinner, and they can come here. You can take them around while I’m at work.”
They talked over plans. After a while, David said. “It’s going to be hard for them. Their first Christmas without their mother.”
JJ didn’t point out that it was his first Christmas without his mother, too. He’d have some reason that that was beside the point.
Chapter 49
JJ SURVEYED THE ENTRYWAY AT LUCAS’S HOUSE, TRYING to decide what to do about Christmas decorations. She had done nothing last year until she’d felt so guilty she’d called a florist and had them deliver a door wreath and decorated tree for Esperanza to put wherever she wanted to.
Her grandmother had always transformed the house into a Christmas extravaganza, an exuberant overabundance of arrangements of holly, ivy, nandina, and magnolia in every room, boxwood garlands up the balustrade, spruce wreaths on every outside door, red velvet bows on everything, including the grandfather clock JJ was looking at right now. The plethora of red and green was so unlike her grandmother’s usual understated elegance that the house had felt as if some excess of emotion within her grandmother had finally exploded.
After listening to her grandfather’s story at breakfast the other morning, JJ thought maybe something had, and, instead of being so restrained, her grandmother would have been better off to find a balance between self-control and self-expression all year long.
JJ was finally learning that lesson herself.
Ham materialized beside her. He followed the direction of her gaze. “Me and Miz Beth, we always strung garlands up the stairs.”
“I know. Unfortunately, what goes up must come down. It will make a
lot of extra work for you and Esperanza.”
“How ’bout I make some of those greenery arrangements? I know how. Miz Beth and me, we’d work on ’em together.”
In the past, JJ would have told Ham not to bother; she’d order something from the florist. Now she said, “If you feel like it, that would be lovely.”
“How many?”
“You know which vases she used. Make as many arrangements as you like.”
The jerky little nod of his head was Ham’s only sign of assent, but that was Ham. Ham didn’t waste words. He also didn’t walk away, so she knew he had another talking point on his agenda.
“Your man. He’s got shell shock, don’t he?”
“Shell shock?”
“That’s what they used to call it. Guy had been in battle, shells exploding all around him. Sometimes there wouldn’t be a mark on him. Afterwards he was a little strange—sometimes a lot strange. He couldn’t sleep. Stared at nothing. Shook.
“In Vietnam, they told us won’t no such thing as shell shock. It was ‘combat fatigue.’ ’Course, soldiers kept getting it, so then, they called it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“Guy feels out of it. Disconnected. He don’t know who he is, but he’s not himself. Can’t focus. Can’t make plans. Doesn’t always remember what he did yesterday. Family can’t put their finger on it, but they know he don’t behave like he used to. Don’t live up to his responsibilities. His wife leaves him. His folks, they try, but they don’t know what to do. After a while, he figures they’re better off without him. He’s a grown man—they’re not supposed to be looking after him. He doesn’t make sense to anyone, least of all to himself.”
“Ham, you’re talking about yourself, aren’t you? Do you think traumatic brain injury is why you drank?”
“I reckon why a man’s a drunk don’t make no never mind.”
JJ saw that he wasn’t going to answer. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by probing further. Still, his nonanswer was an answer of sorts. His reaction to being asked to discuss his own experience and draw inferences from it was similar to David’s. The fear that David didn’t want her to know about his problems lessened.
“Watch out for your man, JJ,” Ham told her. “He don’t know how to ask for what he needs.”
Chapter 50
“I AM BOUND AND DETERMINED I’M GOING TO FIND somewhere that can help David. I’ve read brochures on the Internet until I’m cross-eyed,” JJ complained to Bronwyn. She was unloading on Bronwyn, and she knew it.
David stonewalled her every effort. She was in the dark trying to understand what he needed. But after Ham’s revelations, she understood David was not deliberately being obstructive. “I see lots of therapies, but nothing that fits him. What’s going on with him is so subtle, yet so pervasive. But the programs I can find are designed for someone much worse than he is.”
“That’s true.”
“Being competent is so much a part of him. If they ask him questions about his self-help skills, they’re just going to make him mad. One woman just wouldn’t listen. She asked, ‘Can he dress himself?’ I told her he could put on his wetsuit by himself, surf for six hours, and remove it by himself.”
She huffed in frustration. “Do you know what her next question was? ‘How about preparing simple meals for himself?’” JJ laughed ironically. “I know they have their list they have to go through. It’s just so frustrating trying to ask for what he needs, when I don’t know exactly what that is, myself.
“And you know the other thing? I’ve finally realized the ‘therapy’ they are talking about is to teach him skills and strategies for coping with the brain damage. I’m not faulting that, but I finally understood nothing they do will actually heal the damage. It’s like the difference between a broken leg and an amputated one. With both, you might need crutches, but if the leg was broken, it will heal. You will have two working legs again. Oh, Bronwyn. I understand why he wants to deny that the TBI is a problem. I want to deny it, too.”
JJ swiped at tears she had sworn she wasn’t going to shed. “You know what he told me? He dreamed he died in Afghanistan, and it felt wonderful. He was happy. I’m not sure he’s happy he lived. And now I read about the high incidence of suicide in those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Are you worried about suicide?”
“I don’t know. A little. He won’t tell me how he feels, but I’m afraid if he becomes hopeless…”
“Okay, I’ve been doing some research, too,” Bronwyn told her. “I’ve found what might be good news. Brain damage is not as inevitably permanent as was once thought. Some researchers feel that some of the injury associated with blasts is caused by damage to the nerve synapses in the brain, and they can regrow. Something that I think worth looking into is hyperbaric oxygen therapy.”
“Hyperbaric—is that like the pressure chamber they use for divers who have the bends?”
“That’s right. Also for diabetic wounds, gangrene. Helping broken bones to heal. Crush injuries. There are reports that hyperbaric oxygen therapy helps TBI. It’s considered off-label, meaning it’s not an FDA-approved use of HBOT—that’s the abbreviation for hyperbaric oxygen therapy—but the Air Force has a grant to research HBOT’s effectiveness with brain injury. I don’t know when they are supposed to release their findings. No reputable medical person is going to tell you it will work, but there is reason to think it might—and no reason to think it will make him worse.”
“Where do I take him?” Not that getting him to agree would be easy. He stonewalled her every suggestion.
“I found an HBOT center in California run by former SEALs.”
“SEALs?” The upsurge of hope made JJ dizzy. “I think he would listen to SEALs!”
“Why don’t you give them a call?”
JJ pushed the off button on her phone. She stared out the window a long time, thinking about all she had learned about HBOT, its role in treating TBI, and treatment protocols.
Raul Chavez, former SEAL and former hospital corpsman, had spent most of an hour listening to her and talking about hyperbaric oxygen therapy and how it worked.
Hyperbaric therapy forced more oxygen into tissues. It wouldn’t restore lost brain cells—he was careful to make that clear. However, it could speed healing. A possibility with mild TBI was that many cells were still alive but not functioning because they were starved for oxygen or had lost connections to other cells. If they could get oxygen, the cells could, in effect, turn on again. They could regrow the tiny connections to other cells and the capillaries that supplied blood.
Raul wasn’t surprised by some of David’s attitudes. JJ was comforted to have someone who understood both the problem and what it meant to be a SEAL.
“He’s in horrible pain sometimes,” she told Raul, “and I’ve begun to think he’s in some pain all of the time. Why won’t he tell the doctors? There are medications that could be tried, but he refuses to consider them.”
“Oh, I can answer that.”
“Then please do.”
“The docs have most likely suggested anti-seizure drugs or serotonin re-uptake inhibitors—antidepressants. If he takes either one, there goes his security clearance. Without security clearance, he can’t operate.”
“So, even if the drugs work, they will prevent him from operating.”
“If they offer the drugs and he refuses them, he is seen as noncompliant. Which would be another reason for medical discharge.”
“He really is between a rock and a hard place. I see now why he would rather try to live with the pain and hope it will go away.
“He either can’t or won’t tell me what it’s like on the inside to have TBI. A Vietnam vet I know told me he has shell shock. He said it’s the same thing as combat fatigue and PTSD.”
“He might be right. Kevlar helmets make injuries survivable that wouldn’t have been in previous wars, and since IEDs are the weapon of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is even more possibility of the blas
t type of brain injury. Some of the symptoms of PTSD are indistinguishable from blast TBI.”
“He keeps saying, ‘I just want my life back.’ At first I thought he was saying he wanted to operate again, but now I think he means something more.”
“Did you know him before his injury.”
“Briefly. Not well.”
“Is he the same man?”
“No.”
“That’s his problem.”
When she finished the call, JJ understood what was driving some of the behavior that had seemed so unreasonable. She knew why David resisted consulting specialists. He wanted to leave no record of being treated for TBI.
Therefore, the best news of all was that it was possible to buy HBOT chambers for use in the home.
JJ thanked the technicians who had driven overnight to deliver and set up the hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber in one of the upstairs bedrooms in her grandfather’s house—the best location, she and Lucas had agreed. “Shoot, if it’s here, I might try it myself,” he’d said. “Maybe it will make my brain work better, too.”
JJ had ordered a top-of-the-line, single-person chamber, made of a shiny white fabric that stretched over a metal form. The technicians demonstrated the set-up procedure and let her climb in to try it. It was roomy enough for two people to sit in, or for even a large adult to lie down.
Feeling the most hopeful and celebratory she’d felt in a while, JJ peeled the paper off the sticky-tab of a huge, red velvet bow. She placed it on the HBOT at a jaunty angle.
Chapter 51
“I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU.” DAVID ALLOWED JJ to take his arm and lead him toward the stairs in her grandfather’s house. Her cheeks were pink, she was smiling, and there was a light in her eyes he hadn’t seen in a while. He knew she was fretting over him. He hated it. She’d married a SEAL because she wanted someone who would stay away. Nothing seemed to convince her he didn’t want or need her to take care of him. She’d finally stopped with her suggestions of topflight neurologists and therapy centers a few days ago.
Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle Page 89