War Flower

by Brooke King

  “Hmm . . . maybe that means you’re getting better.”

  “I don’t know, it could’ve just been a fluke.”

  “So you’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

  James had processed out of the army in Germany and had come to California for the boys’ birth, but I had made Nana and Grandpa promise not to tell him about what was going on with me at the time because I just wanted him to focus on the babies. They had kept their promise because it wasn’t until after the boys were six months old and we had already moved to Florida to be closer to his family that I woke up one night screaming. He had found out about my nightmares in the worst possible way. After some very long conversations and several futile attempts by James to make me go to the VA, we made it a point to avoid the words that should be spoken about my nightmares. We thought of them as my silently understood struggles that most of the time I blocked out as if they didn’t exist. It was just as well, because I never really wanted to talk about them and he never really wanted to listen—a match made in denial heaven. Most of the time I didn’t tell James because he had a habit of ruining moments, moments where we could connect as a normal couple, but James and I weren’t a normal couple. We never talked about politics or war; instead we exchanged stories and laughed at how ridiculous our day had been, and somehow by laughing our lives away, it kept both of us from crying about the pain.

  Instead of James’s usual goofiness that he used to ease the tension, he divvied out an asshole remark as he walked toward the bathroom, “You’re not gonna start crying when I leave the room are you?”

  “No, jackass, I’m not, but if you don’t leave,” I said, picking up a nearby decorative pillow on the bed, “I’m gonna throw this at you.”

  “So, I can go take a shower?”

  I threw the pillow at him. Catching it, he jumped onto the bed, wrestled with me, and then paused to kiss me before he crawled off the bed and walked into the bathroom, leaving the door cracked slightly. Over the years, James had learned how to tell when I needed him and when I just needed to be left alone. Most of the time, though, I had to give him some sort of an emotional cue to let him know I needed him, but tonight he could tell that I just wanted to be left alone.

  After the boys were born in November 2007, the nightmares had become less severe and less frequent. I had come to the conclusion that it was my pregnancy that had heightened their severity, but even now they were still happening. Yet, they had changed slightly. Instead of them being morbidly graphic, like a battle scene from Saving Private Ryan, they had become emotionally jarring. Yet, I had changed too. I had become a more emotional creature because I was a mother, but the added stress of being a full-time student in my junior year at Saint Leo University and a part-time worker made the emotionally charged nightmares just as gruesome and painful. The stress of all my obligations left me stretched thin and worn out again, and it seemed that as my stress level went up, the nightmares became more prevalent, but sometimes I also had flashbacks that came without warning and were triggered by my daily life.

  A month prior to the nightmare I had in my bedroom, I had just come home from picking up the boys from daycare and from a long, exhausting day at school. The end-of-the-day ritual began with the boys unpacking their backpacks and tossing their shoes off, letting each one remain wherever it had landed. In the kitchen I had started dinner, frying potatoes in a skillet. The sizzle of the bacon grease hissed in the pan and wafted the smell into the air.

  My kitchen was small and modest, befitting the house James had secretly bought for me as a peace offering for dragging me from my family in California to his family in Florida. After we moved in, I made the house my own but could never get over the vaulted ceilings in the kitchen and living room that made the house echo like a cave, vast and deep. The living room was more like a great room, which I nicknamed my “lovely room of death” because it was where James hung the mounted kills from his hunting excursions. In the living room a large wood entertainment center housed the flat-screen plasma TV that the boys flipped on every day when they came home from daycare.

  That day in the kitchen when I heard loud suppressive gunfire coming from the living room, I instinctively slammed my body to the floor. Sprawled in a low prone position on the wood floor, my heart thumped hard, like a loud drumming in my chest. As I crawled to my feet and walked toward the living room, a swell of anxiety rose in my body and quickened my pulse. I had hit the floor with my black plastic spatula in hand and still had a death grip on it when I walked around the corner past the fridge and into the living room, where my three-year-olds were inadvertently watching the movie Iron Man. I hastily snatched the remote from the coffee table with my free hand and turned the channel to Nick Jr. Doing an about-face, I whipped around and walked back into the kitchen. I could hear my kids complaining about how I had changed the channel away from the superhero movie, but I tuned it out.

  Returning to my place at the stove, I gave in to the overwhelming sensation of sadness that swelled inside me. The stress of the day coupled with a flashback of being in Iraq brought tears welling in the corners of my eyes. Setting the spatula down, I gripped the rounded edges of the stove, bent over at the waist, closed my eyes, and pointed my head at the floor. The swell of sadness crept over me like a hot flash flare that had ignited in a burst of unbridled burning. Unable to control the feeling any longer, I began to sob, muffling the sound of my weeping with my hands over my mouth. One after another, each tear came rolling down my cheek and plummeting to the floor below like a steady-dripping faucet. Overwhelmed with a deep misery, I stepped back and fell into a corner of the kitchen, butting my body in between the sink and the pots and pans cabinet. I tucked my knees to my chest, folded my arms, buried my head in the voided space between, and cried uncontrollably.

  From inside the kitchen I could hear the echoing argument of the boys as they fought in the living room over who got to sit on which couch. Realizing that the fight was not going to stop and that being a mother right now outweighed my own despair, I raised my head, wiped the tears from my face, and used the countertop to stand up.

  “Boys, stop fighting,” I said, letting my shaky voice reverberate off the ceiling. “Don’t make me come in there . . .”

  The fighting continued in the living room while I tried to wipe away my tears and snot with my hands, rubbing each swipe from my face onto my denim jeans. I tried to compose myself but found that the only thing I could do was cry. A relentless stream of tears rolled down my cheeks and dripped onto my embroidered white blouse. The screaming from the living room had become louder, but I was powerless as a mother to do anything but cry in the kitchen. I could hear Bowen, my oldest twin boy, screaming for me.

  “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

  I could not move. It felt as though if I took a step, the floor would swallow me whole. Bowen’s screaming got closer and closer to the kitchen. In panic, I tried to compose myself, but before I could wipe away the tears he had reached where I stood.

  “Mommy, I’m hungry and Zachary won’t stop kicking me. He keeps . . . he keeps kicking me off the couch, Mommy.”

  I stood there, wrecked with sadness as tears ran down my face. Bowen stood in front of me, begging me to be his mother, but I could not even function as me, let alone as a parent. I turned from him, so that I could wipe the rest of the tears off my face and collect myself.

  “Mommy . . . Mommy . . . Mommy . . . Mommy, I’m hungry . . . Mommy, I want a snack.”

  Bowen’s shouting coupled with the flashback made the sadness turn into rage, a compound feeling of fullness in my chest. The sensation flooded every emotion out of my body like a tsunami wave, inflicting it upon the closest thing to me, my son. I spun around and quickly grabbed Bowen by his shoulders. Shaking him violently, I shoved my face three inches from his and in a half-shouted scream said, “Get the fuck out of the kitchen!”

  I crumpled to my knees, surrendering to my moment of emotional deteriorat
ion and broken failure as a mother. It was Bowen’s first step into my world of suffering. Frightened for what I might have seen, I hesitated to look up at my child from my shattered expression of grief on the floor. Bowen’s face was glazed over with a mixed look of terror and surprise, as if he had truly seen my nightmares. His lips quivered as he started to cry. Tears welled up in the corner of his deep blue eyes, spilling the salty tears over onto his cheeks. Taken aback by what I had just done to my own child, I covered my mouth, stood up, and stepped back from Bowen. Remorse and regret swelled in my heart, supplanting my sadness and pain. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen crying.

  In an attempt to soothe him, I stretched out my arm and moved forward to hold him. He stepped back from me and pulled his hands to his face, trying to shield himself from me like a wounded animal sheltering itself from a vicious predator. I put my hands over my mouth again to cover up the shock and dismay on my face. Sobbing and breathing through my hands, I watched as my own child cowered away from me, recoiling backward into the wall behind him. Paused in that moment, transfixed on his frightened face, I thought, “I’m a monster.”

  I wiped the tears from my eyes, knelt on the floor, stretched out my arms again, and pleaded, “Bowen . . . please, baby . . . I’m sorry. Mommy didn’t mean to yell at you like that. . . . Come here, please.”

  Bowen hesitated for a couple of seconds, then slowly lowered his hands from his face, and walked cautiously into my outstretched arms. As his tiny frame wrapped around mine, I held him in my arms warmly and gently, as though it was the first time he had ever been hurt. “I’m sorry, baby,” was all I could say, over and over again into his ear as I held him to my chest. I pulled him back and, staring straight into his eyes, I said, “I love you so much, honey. You know I love you, right?”

  “You scared me, Mommy.”

  “I know, honey, and I’m sorry.”

  I wiped the tears off his cheeks, brushed his shaggy blond hair from his forehead, and cupped his face with my hands. “Now, what did you come in here to ask me?”

  “I’m hungry, Mommy.”

  “Dinner’s in an hour, honey.”

  He gave me a look of disenchantment that drowned me in a downpour of mother’s guilt. Out of shame for what I had done, I gave in to him. Getting up from my kneeling position on the floor, I said, “Okay, you can have a small snack.” I pointed to the pantry and said, “Go ahead and go find something.”

  As I stood there and watched him slide open the white pantry door and stare up at the tiered shelves full of food, I wiped my own tears from my face and collected myself enough to walk over and help him grab the goldfish crackers off the third shelf. I opened up the box, filled a bowl for him, and watched as he walked out of the kitchen as if nothing had happened. As we walked into the living room, it was hard to tell if Bowen had imprinted that moment into his memory, but somehow I knew that he had. As I stood at the stove again, looking down at the burning potatoes in the skillet, I tried to make sense of what had just happened. I picked up the spatula and flipped the potatoes over, but the only thing I could think of was my own self-reproach.

  The guilt of that day weighed heavy in my mind, even a month later as I sat there in bed wondering if I should double-check the boys while James was in the bathroom, but the sound of the water turning on in the bathroom quickened my pulse and made me think back to the nightmare, to the sound of the shower water running in the stall. I decided that the nightmare was still too fresh in my mind and that I was in no condition to deal with my kids. I leaned back on the decorative pillows behind me and pushed back the tears that were starting to form in the corners of my hazel-brown eyes. Trying to keep my composure, I told James the good news of the day: “I got a B-plus on my Early Brit Lit paper.”

  From inside the bathroom, trying to shout over the sound of running water, he said, “That’s great, honey . . . proud of you.” He swung wide the bathroom door, sauntered out in his boxer briefs, stood in the middle in of the doorway, and said, “You wanna take a shower with me?”

  “The last time you said that to me, we ended up with twins. Can we please just chill out on the baby-making factory for a while before you try to double-stuff me like an Oreo again?”

  We both laughed a little at our luck when it came to having kids, but after the moment passed, James walked back into the bathroom and started the shower. A twinge of pain grasped at my heart as I heard the shower. I looked down at my hands, turning them over and over again, noticing that there really wasn’t much to notice about them anymore. They were my hands, the hands of a mother and a wife.

  Papers from the study packet for the junior-level oral exams were sprawled out over the bed next to various books on famous dead white guys. I must have fallen asleep while studying. I stacked the books and papers into a neat pile and set them on my nightstand. After throwing the decorative pillows off my side of the bed, I peeled back the sand-colored comforter and wafted the lavender smell of softener from the sheets. I curled up in the indentation on my side of the bed, closed my eyes, and began to let the haphazard memory of my deployment fade from my mind, but before I could doze off to sleep again I heard Zachary’s voice: “Mommy.”

  Opening my eyes, I peered at the cracked bedroom door. There stood Zachary with tears in his eyes.

  “What’s the matter, baby? Why are you crying?”

  Sobbing and walking toward me, he said, “I had a bad dream.”

  As Zachary climbed up onto the bed and under the covers next to me, I sat up and stretched out my arms so that he could snuggle into them as if he were a newborn baby. Comforting him with my warmed embrace, I thought to myself, “Like mother, like son.” He started to cry again, shutting his eyes up tightly. I couldn’t help but be moved by the visible pain on his face and the pain I felt inside from my own nightmare. As salty tears started to form in the corner of my eyes, I held him closer to my chest, kissed his forehead, and began to rock him slowly back and forth as I softly said, “It was just a dream, it never hap . . . you’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.”

  You’ll be okay.

  The words hit the back of my throat, tore down my esophagus, and shredded my stomach as I spoke them. I remember the context and the time; they were words that I said to myself in the mirror as I got ready for another day. They ate at me, melting away the sun-weathered skin around my eyes, the crow’s feet lines stretched thin and crisp. The words scraped off the tan from the hours, days, months spent in the sun. They rubbed down the brown in my irises until the green returned. They took turns circling patterns of skin, malleable to the touch, forming and shaping it into a younger version of myself. The mold was worn, beaten, and bent in at the edges, but it was still usable. I resurrected myself every day with the words, bearing my body down deep into the casting, moving my limbs farther until the flesh was pressing up against the rims perfectly. The words trimmed away the excess, which must be put aside and saved for next day when the words must strip away the war and make me new again.

  Suicide Watch

  James was in Puerto Rico—a bachelor party. I was home with the boys; they were five.

  At first I didn’t know what to make of the feeling in my chest—the hardening of my heart, the cracking of my mind—but I couldn’t stop the feeling. I couldn’t stop the pain, and so I went to the safe, pulled out the 9mm pistol, and wrapped my mouth around the steel.

  My hand was shaking. The boys were pounding on the door of our bedroom, but I switched the safety off. I knelt on the floor. There was no coming back from this, but the war inside this bedroom was loud and hateful, and full of shame. The boys called me, but my hand did not stop shaking. I pulled the pistol from my mouth, told them I would be right there, and rested the front sight of the pistol on my forehead. I heard them run into the living room as I called James on the phone. I called and called and called, but I got no answer. The phone, his voice, it was a lifeline that I would have gladly gripped instead of this string of death my hand was wrapped around
now. He did not pick up. He did not answer, and it was then that I knew I could not leave without hearing his voice. The voicemail was not enough. I left desperate messages, begged him to call me. I told him I was worried, that I needed to talk to him, that there was something wrong, but I did not get a reply phone call, and soon the ringing on the other end was going straight to voicemail. I was beginning to lose my determination to hold out for his call. I could not control the tears, the pain, or my willingness to pull the fucking trigger, and when I went to put the pistol in my mouth again, the phone rang. It was him. I remembered having a mixture of relief and pain when he answered with an unsteady hello. The conversation was concern muffled with the grogginess of a man who was half drunk, half high, and in need of sleep, but I was on the other end begging for him to listen, and he had to explain to everyone in his hotel room as his hand muffled phone that I was crazy, that I was this way because of the war, that he had to take the call and would be down at the bar as soon as he got my crazy ass to calm down. I heard the shuffling of feet and a door slam before he spoke. “What’s up, Brooke?”

  “I’m having problems.”

  He sighed, which I learned years later was his way of telling me he didn’t give a fuck, that he would keep up the conversation, but that he had already turned off his give-a-fuck ears.

  “What sort of problems?”

  He listened intently, answered my questions, and tried to console me, and when I told him I had the pistol, that I had broken the lamp, as well as the blinds, and there was a hole in the wall, he asked me where the kids were and I told him they were fine.

  “Bullshit, Brooke. I know you. Fine isn’t in your vocabulary.”

  It was true. For all the “fine” that I was, I could hold a jumbo jet full of “fuck off” as well. “They’re in the living room watching TV.”

  When he asked again, the tone was less sensitive. He warned me to put the gun back, to get my shit together, to stop this while he was gone, but I heard jumbled words as I focused on my static short inhales.