War Flower

by Brooke King

  “This has to fucking stop, Brooke. Get your shit together or that’s it.”

  At the sound of his threatening voice coming through the phone receiver, I started to cry.

  “Or what? You’ll leave me?”

  “Fucking stop this or I’m hanging up.”

  “You hang up and I’ll blow brains all over the wall.”

  “Fuck, that’s it. You put that fucking gun back and get fucking help for this shit or I’m divorcing you.”

  “Go ahead. You never loved me anyway. This whole fucking marriage is a fucking lie.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Your mom told me on our wedding day that the only reason why you were marrying me was because you knocked me up.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You never loved me and you never will.”

  “Come on, Brooke.”

  I sobbed uncontrollably; a sharp pain stabbed into my heart. I knew now what heartbreak felt like. I could hear it in his voice when he said my name. It was true. His mom had been right; he never loved me and this fragile marriage that we had was close to crumbling.

  “Please stop this, Brooke. Put the gun away . . . is this what you really want? You want to leave me with these kids all by myself? You want to do that to our boys?”

  I sobbed into the phone, the tears collecting down my chin, coagulating with the snot that oozed over my upper lip. I tried to compose myself.

  “You need help, dammit, and there’s nothing I can do from here. Can you at least put the gun away and when I get home, we’ll talk. Can you do that for me?”

  At the sound of the syllables bringing together the resonance of losing everything, knowing that there might be another way to get rid of the pain in my chest, the nightmares, and flashbacks, and all the sadness, I answered with a shaky and sobbing okay.

  He said he was going to go get dinner, that he would call me before he went to bed, and to go put the gun away. I switched the safety back on. The storm had subsided. James had talked me off the ledge, pulled the pistol away from my head. Still to this day I don’t know why I pull back from the darkness, why I feel as though I must walk alone in this darkness, the never-ending circling of pain, fear, and the remembering of who I was when the world stopped at my feet and I truly felt for the first time. All the shame of pulling the trigger on my M4, the sorrow for the lives I took, the pain from the shrapnel slicing into skin, the smell of the body’s blood rotting in the cab as I walk toward the truck that is only in my dreams, the sadness I feel when I realize that those soldiers, the ones I put in the bags so many years ago, are all but buried somewhere in the United States in a six-foot grave that only took two days to dig, but me, the lowly mother, the soldier, the person who feels the need to wrap my lips around steel, she feels the survivor’s guilt, the shame of living instead of committing myself to the six-foot grave those many years ago in Iraq. And every time that feeling comes up after flashbacks or nightmares, triggers that spurt from anywhere my body roams, I push them back down into the locker full of hurt and shut it up tight, but lockers are also meant to be opened, and that urge to pull the trigger will come again, and next time there may be no stopping it.

  *

  There were times when I was younger that the silence in my house on Underwood Street was punctuated by the aftermath of violence, booze binges, and attempted suicides stopped by my childhood voice begging my father to live.

  I watched Dad walk around in circles in the kitchen, dangling a bottle of liquor in his hand, the masquerading dance of a man whose sanity was no better here in northern California than it had been in San Diego. The only thing that had changed was that he had traded heroin and cocaine for marijuana and booze. His stumbled dance of intoxication reminded me that this type of binging was better than that of a year ago in San Diego, where, instead of taking us for ice cream like he promised, he had taken John and me to a crack house and left us in the garage so he could go hit the vein and trace trails for hours. My ten-year-old self couldn’t comprehend that this new situation, our life now, was Dad’s recovery, that he was trying to get clean for us, and that the more sober he became, the more the pain of losing my mother to another man, his failures as a student in college, and the repercussions of youthful recklessness came flooding back, as well as the urge to kill himself. What I could comprehend was that I was far away from my grandparents, living in a house that smelled like mold with my dad barely able to keep a job and put food on the table, but I tolerated the surroundings, the booze-fueled binges, and the attempted suicides because Dad was getting clean of hard drugs and this small fishing town of Trinidad, California, though beautiful and friendly, was his last-ditch effort.

  He stumbled to the living room and looked through the sliding glass door. The rain was coming down sideways, slicing through your skin, shaving a man clean if he stepped into the wind just right. It was getting dark. We hadn’t eaten dinner yet and probably wouldn’t if I didn’t attempt to make it myself. Dad had used the last bit of money to buy a bottle of whiskey. He leaned his head on the sliding glass door and stared out at the rain.

  “It’s really coming down.”

  I walked into the kitchen, looked in the cupboards. A can of refried beans. Some rice. Pasta. What was left over from the food bank line had been mostly consumed by week one of the tropical storm that had knocked out the power. The fridge wasn’t to be opened or the milk would spoil, but my stomached growled, John whined, and Dad stood there drunk. At half past six I knew that I would have to make dinner, that Dad was not fit to be Dad, and that the fire had to be lit in the stove soon or we would freeze tonight, the house too cold to sleep in, our bodies jittering and shaking as we clung to one another while lying on the floor near the potbelly stove.

  Outside I chunked the wood using Dad’s ax that was too heavy for me to wield, but I did it as best I could. John picked up the pieces of kindling and logs and carried them inside, as I continued splitting a log with the wood wedge. Inside Dad continued to drink, lying on the couch, eyes half cast. When the cutting and splitting were done, I went in, stacked and layered the kindling, alternating wood with newspaper. I lit the fire with the lighter I found in Dad’s pants pocket next to his crunched pack of Camel nonfilters. The fire was started in the potbelly stove, so I went to work pouring water into a pan and measuring the amount of rice needed. Behind me, I could hear John carrying on about hating rice, about wanting pizza, but he knew as well as I did that we couldn’t afford pizza and that the only food we could ever afford was the free food that Dad went to get in between working his construction job and getting drunk or high. I groaned at his whining as I set the pot of water on the stove and watched the smoke rise up from under it, creep up the sides, and waft up into the air. Dad turned over, looked at me, smiled, and sat up.

  “Making dinner?”

  I nodded.

  “What would I do without you?”

  I wanted to say die, but I curbed my tongue. I told him I needed to open the fridge and get the milk.

  He responded in a gurgled low tone, “Drink water.”

  With a drunken sway, he got up from the couch and walked outside. I walked to the window and watched as he pulled out his pack of smokes and pressed his pockets for his lighter. I turned to look at the stove. I had forgotten to put it back. From the opened front door, I heard his yelling.

  “Where the fuck’s my lighter?”

  I walked over and handed it to him. He patted me on the head and shoved me back inside, shutting the door behind him.

  I walked back over to the stove and watched the water boil. I had put the rice in and begun stirring it when John came out from our room and asked what Dad was doing. I looked out to see him stumbling down the street in the rain, falling every five feet onto the ground and struggling to get back up. John watched him as he made it past the church, down the hill, and to the stop sign. I stirred the rice. Dinner was more important. I was used to this. The drunkenness. The lonely
stumbling walks of a man who is barely living. The sad disillusionment of his thoughts when they wander to our mother, how she had left him for another man, how it had driven him to drugs. I didn’t have to look over and watch him wander down the street. I knew he turned the thoughts around in his head as he got back up from the pavement again, each fall making him more determined to get to the end of the street. I stirred the rice. John asked if Dad was okay. I looked down the street. He had made it past the lamppost and was almost to the stop sign. On most nights like this he stopped at the sign, looked back at the house, and turned around. Most nights. I took the rice off the potbelly stove and placed it in the sink. I had started dumping the rice into a bowl when John yelled for me to look. Dad had wandered past the stop sign and into the adjoining street, the one next to the cliff. He was across the street and at the cliff’s edge before I realized that he was not coming back. I yelled at John to stay put, to stay in the house, that I’d be right back, to start eating without me. I dropped the bowl of rice on the kitchen table and ran out the door into the rain.

  The wind beat the rain against my face, slapping my hair like plaster across my eyes, but I kept running. Past the church. Past the field. Past the lamppost. Past the stop sign. Across the street. I ran until I caught Dad, his balance at the cliff too precarious. He had lost his courage. His will. His strength. It had been swallowed down his throat. I yelled at him to come home as I held onto the back of his tie-dyed shirt. He swatted at me. Told me to leave him alone. I held tighter, pulling back as best I could, but he only swatted harder.

  “Go away, Brooke. Get out of here. Go back up to the house.”

  I yelled back at him that I wasn’t leaving without him.

  Behind me, I heard John yell to Dad. He asked what he was doing. I grabbed Dad by the arm and tried pulling him back from the cliff. The wind had shifted directions, moving up off the sides, pushing his body toward me and away from the edge. Dad slammed into me, knocking us both over. We toppled back, away from the grassy edge, past the curb, and into the street. The rain was coming down harder now, in fat droplets that banged against the tops of our heads as we lay prostrate on the pavement. I sat up and looked at Dad. He was staring at me. I couldn’t tell if the water running down his face was tears or rain, but his face was upturned in a grimace, eyes squinted open enough for me to see the irises, his mouth open, exposing his yellow, tar-stained teeth. And though I knew what he was going to say, I stayed his speech, grabbing his shirt as I tried to raise him off the ground. I turned to John, told him to get out of the street, to go back up to the house, that we would follow in a minute. John whined about not wanting to leave, but I yelled for him to go, and so he left, trudging with sopping shoes up the hill toward the house. I helped Dad to his feet with an uneasiness that worsened when the wind lifted up from the cliff and swirled around us. It knocked us to the ground again. I turned to look and saw that John had barely made it halfway up the hill before he stopped and sought shelter at the steps of the church. Dad looked at him as well.

  “We have to go. The storm’s getting worse.”

  He nodded.

  “The rice will be cold.”

  He nodded.

  “Dad, now.”

  He looked out at the ocean beyond the cliff. “Brooke, look.”

  The swells had risen higher since this morning. Now the waves crested over the fifty-foot rock in the harbor. Boats anchored down now drifted out to sea. The lights on the tops blinking in the chaos of the rain until finally the current swept the fishing boats under, dragging them to the depths of the black unknown. I prayed no sailors were on the boats, but I knew that most of them lived in town and were no doubt standing on their porches watching their livelihood being taken under by the storm, the harsh life of a seaman taking its toll on their mind as the waves crest again, smashing the debris up against the outer rock formations of the harbor. The lighthouse’s beacon cast out horizontally with the wind, marking land to those who did not make it to shore before the storm broke suddenly on Monday. Dad and I watched from the cliff as the sky gave no measure of hope.

  “Dad, you can’t go yet.”

  I had shouted it before thinking, but it made as much sense now as it did then. Dad looked at me.

  “You can’t go until John is taken care of.”

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  “I can’t, Dad. I’m just a kid.”

  I shouted through the rain and wind my plea for him to keep living, so I could be a kid, have a childhood, but his response was always the same each time we came to this point, each time I brought him back from killing himself. He would smile at me, tell me he loved me, that I had an old soul and a good heart that cared for everyone I met, that he was proud of me, even though I knew I hadn’t accomplished anything yet, that I should take care of John because he couldn’t anymore. And each time we got to this point, I would begin to cry, tell him that I could not do it alone, that I’m just a girl, I’m not an adult.

  That day on the cliff, Dad looked at me, said nothing, and nodded his head when I said that I was just a kid. Instead of arguing his willingness to die, he got up from the cliff. We walked past the stop sign, past the streetlight, found John hunkered down at the church, and as a family, we walked into the house on Underwood Street and ate lukewarm rice.

  That day at the cliff is the last memory I have of saving my dad from committing suicide, and I wonder now whether or not my children will remember any of my attempts, whether they will know how many times they stepped into my childhood shoes and saved me from the same failed fate as my father. And just maybe, one day, they will pull me back from the cliff and it will be the last time I try to step off into the darkness alone.

  Diagnosis

  “I think I’m crazy.”

  The VA psychologist looked at me. “Define crazy.”

  “Like, bat-shit crazy.”

  She pulled away from her notepad. Told me to be more specific. Buried her head back into the yellow pad in front of her.

  So, I told her.

  The kind of crazy that dreads Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, and Memorial Day. The kind of crazy that avoids military funerals. The kind of crazy that hits the dirt at the sound of loud noises. The kind of crazy that runs outside to check every helicopter or plane that flies over the house. The kind of crazy that carries two knives in her purse. The kind of crazy that backs the car a ways down the driveway and looks underneath it, just in case. The kind of crazy that checks the locks and secures doors over and over again every night. The kind of crazy that downs a bottle of wine or a half bottle of scotch just to fall asleep. The kind of crazy that has nightmares about dead bodies that rip your flesh and drag you to hell. The kind of crazy that screams violently while sleeping. The kind of crazy that wakes up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. The kind of crazy that gets up every morning and reaches for an invisible rifle. The kind of crazy that still has a full kit of TA-50 loaded to the teeth with ammo. The kind of crazy that shouldn’t have married a soldier. The kind of crazy that uses her kids as a distraction from the truth.

  She stopped writing notes on her pad of paper and looked at me with a stare that let me know that now she was listening.

  So, I continued.

  The kind of crazy I am forces me to live a life in secret agony. The kind of crazy I am leaves me weak and burdened. The kind of crazy I am shouldn’t have come back from Iraq. The kind of crazy I am should have died right the first time from a mortar round. My kind of crazy only has one outcome, and I can tell you, lady, it ain’t living.

  I leaned back in my chair. “Write that shit in your notebook.”

  *

  I was sitting in the chair across the desk from my new shrink. She was looking at me, saying nothing, just looking.

  “I’m not sure what I’m doing here.”

  I started to peel away the cuticle skin from the inside of my thumb with my index finger, a nervous tic.

  “Why do you think you are here?”


  “I don’t know—because my husband and that other doc think I’m crazy.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and mumbled an unintelligible, “I dunno, but if I don’t fix whatever’s wrong with me, my husband says he’ll divorce me.”

  “Do you know what PTSD is?”

  “Yeah. It’s that thing soldiers get when they see too much shit. Shell shock.”

  “Do you think you have it?”

  “No.”

  She turned around, walked to her bookshelf, and pulled out a book. The cover read Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. She sat back down, opened the book, searching for the right page. She found it and put her finger on one of the pages, tapping it in place.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the definition of PTSD.”

  She continued to tap her finger on the page.

  “And?”

  “It’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “Your name’s not under the definition and neither is the word crazy. You must not have PTSD.”

  “This bullshit psychotherapy thing you’re doing. It’s not working, so cut the cute shit.”

  She smiled.

  “Okay. Fair enough. You want to hear the definition of PTSD?”

  “Sure, why the fuck not.”

  So she began to read.

  “The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following have been present: The person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others. The person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.”

  I began to fidget in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs. I thought back to Iraq, my first mission, the bodies, the shredded metal, and all the fucking blood.

  “The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in one (or more) of the following ways: recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions.”