Learning to Stay (12 page)

I turn the key in the lock and push our front door open. And I lose any semblance of calm I had the moment before.

Cupboards and drawers are hanging open, couch cushions are sprawled across the living room floor, and books have been pulled into heaps beneath the bookcases. It doesn’t appear as if anything is missing. It’s just been ransacked.

And then I see the mirrors.

One at the end of the hallway, one above our dresser in the bedroom, and another in the bathroom—all three are spidered with hundreds of breaks emanating from one single point of origin.

Scenarios start to pinball inside my head. Have we been robbed? Did Brad get into a fight with someone? With himself?

“Brad?” I call, tentatively at first, and then louder, until I’m yelling for him. “Brad! Babe? Brad!”

I search the house until I finally find him sitting on the back step, smoking. After his mom died of lung cancer, it used to take everything that he had not to lecture complete strangers on the inherent
evil of cigarettes. Now he’s up to a half a pack a day, as far as I can tell. His new habit concerns me, but it’s a conversation for another time.

I sit down next to him. “Uh, babe?” I ask, not knowing how to broach the topic of the current condition of our house.

He looks at me as a stranger might.

“What happened?”

Brad shrugs, then asks, “What do you mean?” almost as an afterthought.

“To the house,” I say. “It’s been ransacked. Did someone break in?” I try to keep my voice even, to quell the panic rising from my chest. I can’t decide which would be the better news: that we’ve been burglarized, or that Brad did this himself.

“Dunno,” he says after a while. “Don’t ’member.” His words slur.

“Did you do all that?”

“I’ll clean it up,” he says. His voice is flat and almost inaudible.

I reach over and place a finger on his chin. I try to turn his head toward me, but he resists, staring straight out into the yard and the brittle cold settling in around us.

“Baby, did something happen? I don’t understand.”

Brad nods. He keeps nodding in place of talking. Finally, he says, “I tried to go and get a job.”

“Well, that’s good, babe. No?”

He shakes his head. “No one wanted me.”

“Where did you apply?”

Brad shrugs. “I just walked. Bunch of different places. Gas stations, restaurants, stores on State Street. I’d tell them I just got back from Iraq, and they almost looked scared. One guy threw my paper in the trash when I left. I saw him through the front window. He looked at it and threw it right in the garbage.” He flicks his cigarette angrily. Sparks scatter.

“It’s a tough market,” I say. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. You only
need one yes.” I run out of clichéd platitudes. I can imagine how frustrating Brad’s day must have been for him, but he took the initiative to go looking for a job. Inside me, a small ember of hope and positivity smolders.

There’s one more thing I need to ask, though.

“Baby—the mirrors? What about the mirrors?”

Brad is quiet for a long time. A minute, maybe two or three. And right as I’ve given up on him responding to me in any real, meaningful way, right as I’m about to stand up and go inside, Brad says, “That guy looking at me? I didn’t know him.” He is sad when he says this, as if he’s talking about an estranged friend, someone who let him down, betrayed his trust.

I take Brad’s hand between both of mine. I run my fingers over it, the top first and then the palm, looking for cuts from where his fist might have struck the mirror. There are none. His skin is warm and chapped rough as usual. Its contours feel as they always have beneath my fingers. I know its ridges, its topography, like Braille. And I think,
This hand, this skin—at least these I know
.

For all of my recent past—first at law school and then as the lowest totem on Early, Janssen, and Bradenton, LLC’s pole—the measure of my success has been directly related to how much information I can cram into my brain, synthesize, and retain. I can’t bake a cake or replace windshield wiper blades, and I don’t have the first clue about how to balance a checkbook, but damn if I can’t research the hell out of any issue thrown my way. I’m doubly lucky—not only am I good at research; I also like it. It relaxes me in a way not much else can. Some people exercise; others meditate or do yoga; still others drink up a snifter of scotch. I set myself adrift on a sea of information.

I should be doing any number of things right now—preparing discovery documents for
Rowland v. Champion Construction
, reviewing materials for a court appearance I have this afternoon, answering the glut of e-mail that floods my in-box around the clock. Instead, I am reading everything I can about deployments and reunions. And I am an island of calm, unadulterated efficiency—legal pad to my right filled with notes, my printer humming steadily with the reproduction of interesting or informative articles, five tabs open on my Internet browser so I can reference and cross-reference the resources. After last
night, I have decided to stop waiting for the situation to take its course, to improve on its own. I am determined to help the process along—to fill in the gaps of all I don’t yet know. Of all that isn’t quite working for Brad and me. Of all that isn’t quite making sense.

I am reading an article titled “Reuniting with Your Deployed Spouse” when I see two terms I have heard often, but never thought to apply to Brad. At the end of the article is a column headed by the words,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
on the left, and
Traumatic Brain Injury
on the right. Under the headings are listed
Common Symptoms
of each, but from what I can tell, there is so much overlap that the lists could have been easily combined: trouble with memory or concentration; difficulty organizing and completing daily tasks; impulsive behavior; easily confused, irritated, or angered; changes in sexual activity; feeling anxious or jittery.
Check, check, and check.

I switch back to a browser tab with an article titled “The Walking Wounded,” about soldiers returning with the all-too-common brain injuries that are quickly becoming the
signature war wound
. I skimmed the article before, but not carefully. The term
brain injury
threw me, because Brad was home and fine—he was walking, talking, and for the most part, functioning. He didn’t seem like someone with brain damage. He didn’t have to have a piece of his skull removed to control the swelling of his brain like others in the article; he could carry on a conversation if he wanted to. I thought, until now, that he was irritable or distracted to the point of forgetting things because he was still getting used to life here. But as I reread, I think about how Brad was injured—in an IED explosion that probably sent his helmet ricocheting off the inside of the Humvee and his head off the inside of his helmet. I read a section that talks about the correlation between the length of time someone is unconscious and the severity of the brain injury, and I remember being told that it had taken Brad almost an hour to come to after the explosion. A picture starts to congeal in
my mind—not of a man who is having the typical tough time adjusting to life stateside, to life outside of the military, but a very different one—of someone who is seriously wounded in more ways than one, even if those wounds aren’t visible.

I rest my elbows on my desk and let my head relax into the palms of my hands. I don’t want to see what I’m seeing: words like
brain injury
and
PTSD
and
incurable
in black and white on my computer screen; they lodge in my own brain like splinters. I want to believe that Brad will adjust and things will go back to normal for us. I know, now, that I’ve been fooling myself. I have been blindly, foolishly optimistic. Or, at times, simply blind and foolish.

But then, how could I not have been? I remember one night when Brad and I were unpacking boxes after we moved into our house, and I found the thesis he wrote at Oxford titled “Geopolitical Pluralism and the European Economy in the Post-Soviet World.” I paged through it, struggling to understand even the abstract. It was humbling to think that the practice of putting my nose to the grindstone couldn’t conjure smarts like Brad’s, and I remember looking over at him as he sorted papers across the room, oblivious to the straight-up lust that a cursory read of a graduate thesis had kindled in me. He was easy on the eyes, sure. But that was never the thing that did it for me. It was always his smarts.

And one explosion—something that occurred in mere seconds—has undone all those years of learning. All of those hours studying and making connections. Of neurons and axons building bridges among synapses throughout his brain. It seems incomprehensible that one explosion could unravel the inner workings of Brad’s head—his thoughts, his personality—so thoroughly. So completely. So quickly. Maybe that’s why I never considered this possibility before—that Brad wasn’t simply having a tough time adjusting, that he wasn’t
merely haunted by what he did or saw. Sure, I knew these things, PTSD and TBI and all other sorts of terrible letter combinations, existed. I knew that. But I thought they existed in other people’s lives. Not ours.

I assumed that patience and time would be all the cure we’d need. That Brad would come around incrementally, day by day, until one morning we would wake up and be our old selves, together again. Now, I see how wrong I was. This is a problem much bigger than me. Than us.

In my line of work, solutions often come from working the phone, or if you can, working someone in person. Solutions come from asking for what you want, then negotiating, and once in a while, leveraging the possibility of an unpleasant end result for the other party if that other party does not acquiesce. Solutions are created, not found, as some are so fond of saying—from a policy of always standing firm, from not backing down.

But by three o’clock, I haven’t taken a break and I haven’t done a lick of billable work. I haven’t eaten, and I haven’t found one single answer to what I can do, or to what Brad should do. I started with Veterans Affairs and got passed around what seemed like the entire agency, until the umpteenth person told me I needed to call the National Guard first. The Guard told me to call the TMA—the TRICARE Management Activity office, which in turn told me to call the Guard. The person at the Guard—different from the first few people I talked to there—suggested I try the VA, since Brad’s TRICARE was due to run out soon. The VA told me, probably so they didn’t have to listen to me rant any longer, that they couldn’t put Brad on a waiting list for services until his TRICARE ended. I threw a controlled fit, which I suspected led the man at the VA to offer putting me in contact
with someone “high up” in Health Affairs at the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense. They were certain he would be able to get me some answers. But the contact information I was given for the Health Affairs office was a general number, and I couldn’t get past the automated menu because I didn’t have a specific person’s name to enter into the directory. Then I called the VA back, ready to beg.

“Listen,” I say, “there’s something really wrong with my husband. He needs help.”

“If he’s hurt, you should call 911, or take him to the emergency room,” the woman from the VA says.

“He’s not hurt. He was in Iraq and I think he has a traumatic brain injury. Maybe some issues from post-traumatic stress, too. He needs help. Mental help.”

“Okay,” the woman says. “We have a bit of a waiting list at the moment. I can get him in on June 23.”

“Did you just say
June
?” I ask.

“Yes, June.”

“But it’s January,” I say. “That’s six months off.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do. But your husband will have to call back and schedule it himself—you can’t set up the appointment for him. Please tell him, too, that he’ll need to provide proof that his injuries are service or combat related. I’d be happy to send you the requisite paperwork if that would make things easier.”

My head spins. Isn’t it enough that he was sent to Iraq—to a war zone? That he was injured there? What could Brad possibly give them—a casing from a bullet shot in his general direction? The pieces of shrapnel that hit him, some still lodged deep inside him—painful stowaways that he now has to live with? The request strikes me as utterly ridiculous, but I force myself to breathe deeply, to stay calm. I will help Brad track down whatever documentation he might need.
This is, after all, what law school trained me to do: figure out how to get the information I need and amass it to prove my case.

When I was a little girl—nine or ten at the most—my parents used to take me on vacation to a cabin up north located on some lake I don’t recall the name of. I’m sure that if I went back now, that lake would look more like a pond, but from my little-kid vantage point, you could barely see the shore opposite our cabin and it might have been miles wide. So when, late one afternoon, as the sun was taking its time going down and sequins of gold and orange danced along the water’s surface, my dad suggested we swim across, I thought he was insane. “
All
that way?” I asked him. I remember a playful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He looked so big, so grown-up, so
invincible
that day. I realize that I am older now, remembering him, than he was then.