After a big brunch Jack was full to bursting, as always, having finished his own eggs Benedict and Claire’s barely-touched Mickey Mouse pancakes. They stopped briefly for a swing in the community park, but because of the cold they didn’t stay long. At home, while Claire napped, they stayed busy straightening the house. Jack sensed that they were avoiding talking about things, which was fine with him, actually. Pam mopped the kitchen floor while Jack busied himself organizing the playroom their living room had become. He found himself glancing frequently at the TV, his urge to turn it on and surf the news channels almost more than he could bear. Finally, when the TV’s calling nearly overpowered him he went upstairs and cleaned the shower with the special cleaner Pam insisted he always use (he found the “scrubbing bubbles” just made the rinse take forever, which maybe was the whole idea). He let his mind probe the TV scene from Fallujah, careful not to think about it directly. Instead he let his brain sort of wander around and sneak up on the thought casually, like a college kid trying to strike up a conversation with a pretty girl at a party that he knew was out of his league. It didn’t shed any new light, however, and he finally forced his mind away.
The afternoon was relaxed and comforting in its normalcy. He played with Claire and then the three of them watched Elmo Goes to the Firehouse.
“Elmo! Elmo!”
By the time dinner was over Jack felt pretty much himself again, and he sat on the couch reviewing his lesson plans while Pam got Claire ready for bed and tucked her in. He was absorbed in his lesson about DNA and RNA, when abruptly he felt the call of the TV again. The picture of Fallujah leaped back into his consciousness and, feeling guilty as hell, he listened intently for the sound of his wife reading a story to his baby girl. Then he picked up the remote and turned on the TV, madly mashing the volume button until the sound of the Fox News reporter was little more than a whisper. Feigning indifference (for whom he didn’t know), he flipped again through his lesson plans while the reporter droned on about some battle in South America he couldn’t give less of a shit about. He listened intently though, for the music which would herald another Update from Iraq segment, his eyes unfocused as he shuffled his papers around for the benefit of the empty room. Another meaningless story—something about a spending bill which a bunch of suits were arguing about in D.C., but this reporter was sure it would pass. Then the music came.
And now another update from Iraq.
Jack dropped his papers, some of them fluttering unnoticed to the floor, and sat forward on the couch, ready.
...in a roadside bomb just outside Al Najaf. There was no official information on casualties in that attack, but confidential and reliable Fox News sources inside Iraq tell us that two Iraqi security officers were killed and one American soldier was wounded...
Come on, come on. Get to Fallujah.
Jack stole a guilty look over his shoulder towards the stairs and then leaned farther forward, the remote in his hand, thumb at the ready to tickle the volume up a bit, should he need. The scene shifted, but not to Fallujah. Some other idiot was talking nonsense from a street in Baghdad.
“Come on, for Christ’s sake,” Jack muttered.
Suddenly the remote was torn from his hands. He spun around on the couch, his remaining papers hitting the deck, and turned to face his wife, a kid caught flipping through his dad’s Penthouse, shorts around his ankles.
“P…Pam,” he stammered.
“Enough, Jack! Jesus, what are you doing!” Her lip quivered. She clicked the TV off with an angry flourish, then sagged her shoulders and dropped her head. “Enough,” she whispered again, then turned on her heel and walked out of the room into the kitchen. She sobbed, her face in her free hand. Her other hand continued to grip the remote.
Jack set his pencil, a remnant of his illusion of indifference to Fox News—apparently now his own personal heroin—gently on the table in front of him and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He felt tears of frustration in his eyes. He had to have some answers.
Didn’t she fucking get it?
He had to know what had happened to his men. He had to know whether he was having some bullshit, armchair posttraumatic stress, like the psychiatrist on The Today Show had warned Katie Couric of (“So much violence and death coming into our living rooms, Katie.”) or if he were losing his mind, or if…well, if it were something more frightening. He didn’t know how he thought Fox News would help him find those answers (hearing familiar names wouldn’t really answer that question, would it?), but goddamnit he had to find answers somewhere.
He rose slowly to follow his wife into the kitchen, knowing somehow the way Pam would suggest he find his answers. He didn’t know why it made him feel angry, but it did. He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen and watched his beautiful wife slapping left over fruit cocktail from a Thomas the Train kiddie plate into a clean margarine tub (poor man’s Tupperware, she called it). Her body shook, with fear or anger—maybe a little of both. He knew even from behind her that tears streamed down her cheeks, and he felt guilty as hell.
“Pam?”
His wife stopped punishing the fruit chunks and leaned her hands on the counter, her shoulders sagged and her head dropped, a blue plastic spoon clutched in her right hand so tightly that her knuckles were white. She said nothing. Jack didn’t see where the remote had ended up, but saw that the tall plastic trash can’s lid was up and had a pretty good guess. From upstairs, he could hear Claire talking to herself as she often did before she drifted off to sleep, happily oblivious that Pop was losing his marbles. Her voice was soft and far away, and held an innocence that could only mean she didn’t know that daddy should soon be wrapped giggling in a sheet on his way to a padded room somewhere and the peace of mind dulling, psychiatric drug therapy. Jack waited a moment then cleared his throat nervously.
“Baby?”
Pam turned around slowly, the blue spoon still clutched in her hand, fruit syrup dripping onto the linoleum floor. Jack shifted his weight nervously and looked at his feet. How could he make her understand? Pam sighed heavily, her eyes red and her cheeks wet with tears.
Jack’s chest tightened when she dropped the plastic spoon to the floor and covered her face with her hands, fruit cocktail syrup smearing on her cheeks. Her body shook and so he walked heavily across the kitchen towards his crying wife and took her into his arms. Pam pressed tightly against him and laid her head against his chest, still crying. Not sure what to say or what else to do, he just rocked her gently. After a moment she pushed softly away from him and turned her anxious eyes up to meet his. Her beautiful face looked frightened and eager for comfort. Jack kissed her forehead and she closed her red eyes again.
“It’s gonna be okay, Pam,” he said and closed his own eyes, hoping he sounded more convincing than he felt. He opened his eyes and saw she watched him expectantly.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she said, her voice full of anguish and fear. “I’m so sorry, Jack. I’m just very scared and confused.” Pam gripped Jack’s hands tightly in her own. She blinked the tears from her eyes.
Here it comes.
“Baby,” she said, then paused and sighed heavily. “Jack, I need you to do something for me.” Her eyes held his.
“Anything,” Jack said as he stroked her cheek, reading his lines and playing his role perfectly.
“Please, Jack,” she sobbed a little again. “I want you to see someone, a counselor or something. Please, baby. I‘m so scared for you. Please, let’s go and see someone. Someone you can talk to.” Pam leaned against her husband, not able to look him in the eyes anymore.
“Ok,” Jack sighed heavily. “Ok, Pam. I will. I promise I will.”
He knew it wouldn’t help. What in the hell would he say? How could he possibly explain to a stranger how he felt, the awful things he saw in his sleep, and sometimes even when he was awake. How he could tell them things he couldn’t even tell his wife? He realized Pam was still talking.
“…therapist. Or maybe a
psychiatrist. I heard about this on Good Morning America. Post stress, or something, it was called. It’s from all the shit on the TV. All the horrible things right in our living room.” She held his face in both her hands now, looking at him, her eyes pleading.
“No,” Jack said and pulled away a bit. Pam’s eyes filled with tears again. “Not a shrink. I…I…Pam, I couldn’t tell this to a stranger. I need…” he sighed heavily. “Maybe the battalion surgeon.”
Pam’s face wrinkled in confusion.
“The battalion…” Jack realized his mistake. “Our doctor,” he corrected. “Our primary care guy?”
“Oh,” she said leaning back against the counter. She unconsciously wiped syrup from her sticky hands onto her jeans. “Doctor Barton,” she said and her eyes locked on his again. “Soon, Jack?” she asked, her voice unsure.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” Jack said and turned away, leaning an arm against the wall. Pam came up from behind him and wrapped her arms around him again, hugging her head against his back.
“Thank you, Jack,” she said. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, baby,” he answered without turning around. He thought of Claire, by now asleep in her bed. “I love you both so much.”
Chapter
7
He slept soundly—or at least he had no memories of dreams—but he woke up tired and achy, his muscles tense like he had slept curled up in a knot. His hands, in particular, were sore and he saw that he had deep purple, crescent-shaped bruises in his palms from where his nails must have dug into his flesh. He dumped his pale, sweet coffee into the sink and filled a travel mug to the brim with steaming black coffee before he headed out to his car, kissing his daughter and wife on his way out.
“I love you,” Pam said, her voice tense with worry. Jack felt her eyes studying his face from her seat beside Claire, a spoonful of oatmeal in her hand.
“I know,” he answered tightly. “Me, too.” He wanted to give her more, to say something magic to erase her anxious look, but he had nothing.
He drove to work listening to a Dierks Bentley CD, trying to think about the words to the songs—anything other than the images of Fallujah that flashed in his tortured mind. Instead the images became a slide show set to country music.
Bentley sang about a hot girl in a tank top…
Click.
Kindrich, his brain blown out the back of his head, his face frozen in surprise.
Bentley wanted to kiss the hot chick…
Click.
Simmons lying in the dirt beside him, his face a gory mess of missing skin and bone. That horrible, one remaining eye staring at nothing, the other socket a ragged oversized black hole.
Bentley wondered what the hell he had been thinking…
Jack knew what the fuck he was thinking. He was thinking about how it felt to be starved for air, sucking too little air through a bloody hole in his neck. The terror of not being able to lift his arms, the feel of dust on his face and in his lungs, and the sound of a Blackhawk, kicking up dirt around him.
Thump thump thump thump…
The sound of a horn made him open his eyes. Green light. His hands were tight and white knuckled on the steering wheel and his palms ached. He pulled through the intersection and ignored the angry face of the driver pulling around him, mouthing the word “asshole” as he sped by, his middle finger up in an irritated salute.
Jack mashed the forward button on the CD player, tired of thinking about what he was thinking and where the night might lead. Dierks slowed it down with an angry tune about throwing his girlfriend’s love letters into the river and flipping over his mattress. He wanted to be able to burn the pictures in his head and get on with his life, too.
I hear ya’ Dierks. I hear ya’, buddy.
His first two periods went by in a blur. He felt distracted, but able to keep a train of thought loosely focused on his lesson plans. His students seemed unusually sedate and asked few questions, doubtless reading the heavy mood of one of their favorite teachers. Chad came by in between to make sure his friend was ok, and seemed somewhat satisfied with Jack’s reassurances that he felt much better. Jack told him he was heading to the doctor later “just to be sure.” Chad said he would check on a sub for his last class so Jack wouldn’t have to come back after his free period.
Third period started out normal enough. Jack was talking away about how DNA wrote out recipes for the cell to make things they needed, and how RNA carried the recipes in code to the “kitchen” workers, so that they would make the right stuff. He enjoyed his lesson, actually, and relaxed just a bit as he let his mind focus on cell biology, a nice break from the war in Iraq.
Halfway through, Jack felt a growing sense of dread that he couldn’t explain. Something was going to happen, something bad. His mouth became suddenly dry and he couldn’t stop his eyes from frequently scanning the back of the room. He pushed on with his lesson and forced his eyes to his notes and his mind to the cycles of the cell.
Something is coming. Something bad.
“We’re coming for you, Sar’n,” Simmons’ boyish voice told him, clear as a bell. In his head, right? Jack scanned the room again, his eyes full of terror. He had stopped in midsentence. His students shifted uncomfortably, looking around the room to see what had taken their teacher’s attention and, from the look in his eyes, filled him with fear. They saw nothing and so they looked at each other with growing discomfort.
Sar’n? a sleepy voice asked.
“Yes?” Jack answered to no one, his voice cracking.
Come back, Sar’n. You belong here with us. Don’t leave us, Casey.
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. Jack dropped his hands to his sides, his lesson plans fluttering to the floor. He stared intently at the door in back of the room. Was there movement?
As he watched in horror, his pulse pounding in his temples, a figure passed by the doorway in slow motion. He was dressed in filthy Marine digital desert cammie pants and a torn green T-shirt. Dog tags danced on his thin chest as he walked, limping slightly. He paused briefly in the doorway and turned to Jack, smiling. As he turned, Jack saw that the other side of his face was gone; a black bloody hole gaped at him where the eye and cheek should have been. The smile ended halfway across his face in a twisted mass of scattered teeth and bone. Simmons winked with his one remaining eye and raised a thumb in greeting.
“Hey, Sarge,” he croaked with a thick, black tongue, his missing lips turning “Sarge” into “Sarze.” When he did, dark blood spilled out over his dirty chin and spattered onto his T-shirt. Two teeth twisted loose and fell out of his deformed mouth, which he caught easily in the palm of his dirty hand. He shrugged, embarrassed, popped them back into his mouth like hard candy, and then shuffled on, disappearing past the doorway. Jack felt a dusty wind swirl around him, and coughed as the dirt filled his mouth. He looked up towards the sound of the Blackhawk passing overhead and saw, without much surprise, that the ceiling had swirled its way into a purple sky. He heard the whump of an outbound mortar shell, and then seconds later the loud explosion of the shell as it found its mark. Jack dropped instinctively to the ground, balanced on one knee, an arm over his head.
The room tilted nauseatingly to the left, and Jack struggled back to his feet and steadied himself on the desk in front of him. Then he pushed back, stumbled, and fell painfully to his knees again. He scrambled back to his feet and bolted to the door. As he passed the first row of students, his hip slammed into the corner of a desk, sending a textbook and sheets of handwritten notes to the floor and nearly knocking the young girl there out of her seat. Jack continued on, oblivious to the muted scream of the student, and gripped the doorframe with a hand as he skidded past it into the hallway. His eyes darted back and forth as he looked for the dead Marine he knew would be there.
Empty.
But he heard a click as the door at the end of the hall snapped shut. Jack sprinted full speed down the hall and slammed his full weight into the hori
zontal bar across the door, twisting his right wrist painfully as he did. The door exploded open and Jack found himself outside in the cold air. He panted and his eyes darted around, searching in all directions for the corpse of his friend.
“Simmons,” he hollered.
But there was nothing there. No one. The sounds of gunfire and yelling faded quickly away, and he heard only the sounds of traffic on the street beyond the thin tree line around the school. Jack dropped in a heap to the sidewalk, sitting Indian‐style on the cold concrete, and began to sob.
He had no idea how long he sat there. A fairly long time, he thought, long enough for him to begin shivering from the cold, and for his tailbone to start aching from the hard concrete. He didn’t have a single linear thought. Instead he had a series of disjointed and emotional thoughts, which alternated between the terror of what had just happened, guilt over how all of this was affecting Pam—and doubtless soon Claire—and extreme anxiety over what it all meant. He was vaguely aware that the school door opened twice; he heard the hushed murmur of voices, and then it closed again.
His most consuming thought was the debate over what was real. He felt most terrified by the way his mind kept insisting that it was Casey—and Kindrich, and Simmons—who were real. That would make him the lie, right? His life here, his job, and his home were the fantasy. His brain whispered to him that the horror of his nightmares, that Simmons walking past with his face blown off, that his dying as Casey Stillman, in the dirt in a street in Iraq, were all real. That thought instilled in him the most horrifying fear he could imagine.
Worse than being fucking insane?
That was a close contest, actually.
When his shivering became uncontrollable and his ass ached past the point of being ignored, he struggled slowly to his feet, wrapped his arms tightly around himself for warmth, and sighed. Then he turned to the door, opened it slowly, and went back inside.
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