Damaged Goods (Don't Call Me Hero Book 2) (27 page)

I looked away from Julia when I heard a door open. A small, grey-haired woman in a dark blue dress appeared in the doorway. “Cassidy Miller?”

I raised my hand. “You found her.”

“I’m Dr. Susan Warren,” she introduced herself. “Come on in.”

I hesitated briefly and looked to Julia for encouragement.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Julia offered.

I turned back to the doctor. “Is that allowed?”

Dr. Warren gave me a gentle, placating smile. “Of course.”

The doctor’s office was equally as sparse as the waiting room outside. The only furniture was a stiff, maroon couch, a slightly more comfortable-looking office chair, and a wooden end table. With the exception of a framed diploma, the white walls were bare. The room looked almost as sparse as my apartment, pre-Julia, instead of a well-established practice.

“I don’t like distractions,” Dr. Warren explained as she ushered us inside. I wondered if my face had revealed my thoughts or if she got that question all the time. “Why don’t you have a seat?” she urged.

Julia and I sat down on the couch. Her hand slid into mine, and our fingers seemed to know the way because they immediately intertwined like that was what they’d been made to do.

The doctor closed her office door. The metal latch slid into place, resembling the sound of disengaging the safety on a revolver. It was appropriate, I supposed; I felt like a loaded weapon.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me today, Cassidy,” Dr. Warren began. She took her place in the empty chair and crossed her legs at the ankle. “Let me start by telling you a little bit more about myself. I’m a licensed psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders. The majority of my clients have trauma-related issues.”

She pulled a drawer open from the end table and produced a pen and yellow legal pad. “It’s my job to assess the extent and root of your injury. I’m really looking for key three symptoms that are common to those suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The first is flashbacks—re-experiencing the trauma in nightmares or real life.”

Julia’s hand rested on my knee. “Yes. She has those.”

I nodded. “The nightmares are pretty frequent, and a few times the flashbacks have happened while I’ve been awake.”

Dr. Warren made a note on her ledger. “The second symptom is avoidance,” she continued. “Do you find yourself staying away from sights, smells, and sounds that might remind you of the primary trauma?”

“Fireworks,” Julia quietly murmured.

Dr. Warren looked to me for clarification.

I cleared my throat. “Two summers ago I had my first incident,” I told the doctor. “I was at a minor league baseball game with friends, and when the fireworks went off at the beginning of the game …” I trailed off.

“It’s okay, Cassidy,” Dr. Warren gently coaxed, “nothing leaves this room.”

Julia’s hand tightened on my knee, encouraging me to continue.

“The sound of the explosions triggered my first flashback,” I said. “I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was in a baseball stadium in St. Paul one minute, and the next, I was putting down suppression fire in Afghanistan. When I finally realized what had happened, I hid out in the women’s bathroom and stayed there until the fifth inning. I’ve avoided fireworks ever since.”

Dr. Warren continued to make notes, which made me mildly uncomfortable. It was a strange sensation knowing that she was writing about me.

“So what’s the third symptom?” I asked.

“It’s called hyper-arousal.”

“Well, I do have quite the sex drive,” I inelegantly blurted out.

“No, it’s not exactly that,” Dr. Warren corrected. “Hyper-arousal is usually identified as being irritable or agitated all the time. It usually impacts one’s ability to sleep.”

“Oh, I, uh, no,” I stumbled. “I guess that’s not me.”

Julia shook beside me with stifled, silenced laughter.

“Does this mean you can’t help me?” It was almost disappointing that I wasn’t suffering from a third symptom.

“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” the doctor said. “My diagnosis is a little more involved than only three questions.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“What kinds of medications are you currently on?” she asked as she continued to write notes.

“Nothing.”

Dr. Warren raised an eyebrow. “Nothing?” she repeated. “Your previous therapist didn’t have you on any SSRIs—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors? Like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, or Lexapro?”

“No. No drugs.”

Dr. Landsen had offered to write me a prescription, but I hated to take even aspirin for a headache. They didn’t work the same for everyone anyway, and you could build up a tolerance overtime.

“Okay.” She made another note in her notebook. “What about exposure therapy?”

“What’s that?”

“Your counselor slowly re-introduces you to the traumatic incident. Kind of like returning to the scene of the crime.”

“Go back to Afghanistan?”

“No, no,” Dr. Warren chuckled at my confusion. “More like re-introduce you to scenarios that you’ve been avoiding—like fireworks perhaps. Or, some soldiers avoid going to the beach because the sand reminds them of the desert. The goal is to rewire your brain so it’s not so easily triggered.”

“Oh. No. I haven’t done any of that.”

I began to wring my hands in my lap. The more Dr. Warren spoke, the worse I felt. If there were so many therapy options, why had no one suggested them to me? It made me feel cheated and overlooked.

Dr. Warren set her pen down. “Maybe it would be easier if you just told me what your previous therapist had you doing?”

“We didn’t do anything. We talked—or more accurately,
I
talked and he listened and asked a few open-ended questions. And every once in a while I go to the local VFW to listen to other vets share their experiences.”

“This is why I suggested we see you, Dr. Warren,” Julia chimed in. “I’m sure Cassidy’s therapist is a well-meaning man, but he’s ill-equipped to be dealing with someone like Cassidy.”

Someone like Cassidy.

Dr. Warren sat back in her chair and folded her hands over her knee. “Well, we do have access to something called Virtual Iraq where we’re able to create an experience similar to a battle zone in the Middle East—visuals, sounds, smells. I usually see results by the fifth session.”

I nervously licked my lips. “That sounds expensive.”

“It is,” she confirmed, “and I’m not sure we need to go that route just yet. What I’d like to try, if you’re open to it, is something called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy.”

“English please, Doc. I’m a soldier, not a Ph.D.”

Dr. Warren gently smiled. I wasn’t worried about offending her. If she dealt mostly with other traumatized soldiers I was sure she was used to a little coarseness.

“We’re going to rewrite your nightmares so they have a positive outcome,” she explained. “First, I want you to right down a description of the reoccurring nightmare. Then, you’re going to rewrite the ending to create a new, peaceful ending. And each night before bed, I want you to close your eyes and see the new story in your mind. Play it over in your head like a movie.”

I looked over at Julia. “Still think I’m worth the hassle?”

+ + +

I sat on my couch in the living room with the television droning on in the background. I stared at the blank lined page of a notebook that Dr. Warren wanted me to fill with my thoughts and memories. I sighed heavily.

Julia looked up from her book of court cases. She rarely sat on the couch without one of the oversized volumes in her hands. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t even know where to start,” I complained.

“At the beginning, obviously.”

“But there’s more than one flashback.”

“Start with Terrance,” she suggested. “How did he lose his legs?”

“I.E.D.,” I grunted.

“I know that, but what else?” She was gentle and always patient with me, and somehow it never felt condescending or patronizing.

“Our whole team was hanging out in the safe house, except for one guy—Reilly. He didn’t make the trip because he’d been up all night right before we were scheduled to head out, shitting out his insides.”

Julia shot me a look of warning, but I ignored it. If I was going to tell this war story, I was going to do it my way. I knew she hated coarse language, but there was nothing soft and sanitized about combat.

The empty page continued to mock me. “I can’t do this. I’m not a writer.” I threw down my pen in frustration. It got stuck between the couch cushions.

Julia pulled the notebook out of my angry hands. “Why don’t you dictate to me?” she suggested. “I’ll write it down for you.”

I wiggled my eyebrows. “Sexy secretary?”

“Focus, Marine,” she chastised.

Mindful of my hair, she took off my glasses and put them on herself. “Do you even need these?” she teased. When the glasses settled on the bridge of her nose, her caramel-colored eyes widened behind the thick lenses. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Yes, you do.”

She pulled off my glasses and stared at them as if they were an alien artifact. “How are you a police officer with such bad eyesight?”

“They’re called contacts,” I deadpanned.

“I know, but I didn’t realize they let you carry a gun being so blind.”

“I’m not piloting a space shuttle.” I didn’t find it necessary to remind her that technically I wasn’t carrying a gun anymore. Those privileges had been revoked the moment Inspector Garnett had met with me.

“I suppose not.” She retrieved my discarded pen and touched it to the blank page. “Now tell me, how did you get to that safe house? What was your mission?”

“They’re called directives.”

“Fine,” she rolled her eyes. “What was your directive?”

“Intelligence had located the hiding spot of a top al-Qaeda operative. My team was sent to retrieve the target and return him to the base for questioning. I was on the radio outside of the hideout, making sure every working component knew what they were supposed to be doing. The whole thing went off without a hitch. We went in, apprehended our guy, and we were out within minutes.”

I heard the light scratch of the pen against paper as Julia began to record my story. I didn’t know if I was talking too quickly for her, but once I got started, there was no slowing me down.

“When we reached the safe house, everyone let down his guard. The safe house was a shithole, but the roof and walls were solid. We’d gotten the bad guy, and while we waited for the convoy to pick us up, everyone celebrated in his own way. All the other guys were in the living room, doing shots and probably making too much noise. Pensacola and I were playing cards in the kitchen. We’d all been so amped up about getting this operative, that it never occurred to us that we might not really be safe.”

I took a deep breath before continuing.

“Pense was being lazy. He told me that since I hadn’t had to do any real work—I’d only been on the radio—that I had to be his legs for the rest of the night.”

I swallowed hard at the lump that kept rising in my throat.

“I got up to get him a soda from the fridge. It was an ugly ass fridge—something straight out of the 1970s. I was standing with the door open when the I.E.D. went off.” I laughed, but there was only bitterness in the sound. “A fucking refrigerator door saved my life. If Pensacola had gotten his own damn Mountain Dew, I’d be the one with no legs.”

I stared straight ahead. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Julia, but I could tell she’d stopped writing. She hadn’t known—
couldn’t
have known—about the circumstances surrounding Pensacola’s injury. I didn’t want to see her reaction to this new information.

“Everyone else on my team died in the blast,” I continued. “There were body parts—everywhere. Guts hanging from the walls. Their bodies were so mangled, it was like a horrible jigsaw puzzle that would never be put back together. All of them—dead. Sergeant John Warner. Lance Corporal Fred Sawyer. Private First Class Davonte Thomas. Private First Class Michael Polanski. Sergeant Taylor Carson. Corporal Isaac Rosenthal.” I choked on the final few names.

Julia carefully set the notebook and pen on the coffee table. A reassuring hand came to rest on my knee. “I think that’s enough for today, soldier.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The noise of the surrounding world became muffled each time I ducked my head under the water. One arm moved over the other as I skimmed just below the water’s surface. The satisfying pull and strain on my shoulder blades was like a welcomed, old friend. It would feel good to work myself to exhaustion. Afterwards, my body would ache, but in a satisfying way. I’d always enjoyed the feeling of pushing my body to its physical limits, which was one of the reasons the Marines had first appealed to me.