Learning to Stay (13 page)

“But what happens if we get out there and can’t keep going?”

“You just keep swimming,” he said, his tone turned serious. “One arm in front of the other. One kick after another. If you need to, you flip over and float on your back to rest. Then you keep going. You’ll get there.”

And we did. I dragged myself up on the opposite shore, as elated and spent as a triumphant conqueror. “See?” my father said, gently chucking me in the arm as we reclined in the hot summer sun, grass tickling our backs and legs and arms.

“One arm in front of the other,” I agreed. And then, in a whisper, as if I’d divined some universal secret, I said, “Just keep swimming.”

It became a motto of sorts for me. After my parents died. Then on those long, lonely nights in Marquette, where I hardly made a friend because of carrying a course overload and working almost full-time to pay my way. Then throughout law school. And now.

Keep swimming. Anything for a mile.

You’re mixing metaphors,
my inner critic scoffs.

Seriously? I want to tell her. We’re seriously going to worry about mixed metaphors right now?

“Actually,” I say into the phone, “moving my husband to the top of the waiting list would make things easier. You know, click, click, click, and done!”

The woman from the VA doesn’t bite. Not surprisingly, my humor has a negligible effect. “I have some spousal support groups I can set you up with,” she says. “If you could give me—”

I can’t take any more. I disconnect the call while she’s still talking.

So now it is after three o’clock in the afternoon and I have ended up precisely where I started. If I were doing this for my job, I would ask to talk to supervisors and I might threaten a long list of legal actions that I could take. But in that position, as an attorney representing a client’s best interests, I would have some sort of authority. I would have the benefit of bravado and bluster, because at the end of the day it’s my job, not my life.

Our life.

But as me, I can’t exactly threaten to sue the military. I am not unique. I am one of hundreds of thousands of wives or parents or veterans themselves, having to crawl blindfolded through this arcane, unreasonably massive, nonsensical system.

Brad is not on my health insurance and I can’t enroll him until the fall. Paying out-of-pocket for physical and mental therapy could cost us tens of thousands of dollars, if my estimates are correct, and that’s money we just don’t have. Now the VA can’t see him for almost six months.

I am not only beyond frustrated; I am out of ideas.

I’m also, apparently, out of time.

Zach pokes his head in my door. I didn’t hear him knock if he did.

“You almost ready?” he asks.

I look up at him, and my face must be as blank as my head, because he says, “To review?
Rowland
? With Bradenton?”

I keep staring at him. I have no clue what he’s talking about. “Didn’t we do that yesterday?”

He shakes his head. “I sent you an e-mail about it last night, after you left—remember? She wanted us to come up with a detailed timeline for the case and run it by her today?”

None of this sounds familiar to me. Of course it wouldn’t, since I haven’t so much as read through most of my e-mail today.

“Jesus Christ, Sabatto, we’re going in to discuss a full game plan with her in twenty minutes, and you haven’t prepared anything? What the hell have you been doing in here?”

“I—I—”

I’m usually a champ at thinking on my feet. An exasperated judge told me last year that I could talk a dog off a meat truck. But there is no getting around the fact that I can’t bill one single minute of my time today.

Zach walks around to my side of the desk and I try to close the windows on my computer—not one of them having to do with Early, Janssen, and Bradenton or its clients. He looks at the open browser windows, and then at me, and then he sighs and walks out, slamming my office door behind him.

I lean my head against the back of my chair. The former business consultant on my moot court team was fond of saying that when you have too many priorities, you have no priorities. I assert that the same goes for worries. I close my eyes, and instead of thinking about Zach or
Rowland
or the VA hospital or a husband I can’t seem to help, I think about that lake from my childhood until I can almost inhale the smell of pine, moist and heavy, and the faint musty-crisp scent of the lake. I picture myself in the water with my dad. I feel it, cold against
my legs, my abdomen, my clavicle, my scalp. I feel it move through my hands as I pull my way across, arm over arm.

I gather my file on
Rowland
and a fresh legal pad, and start down the hall to this meeting I’m not prepared for, but my thoughts still aren’t on
Rowland
. They’re on Brad, and that little girl I used to be.

It feels as though I’m only treading water. And right now, I can’t see the other side. But I vow to figure out how to tow both of us to shore.

Soft yellow light spills from windows that I pass by as I plod my way home in the dark. It is late and I’m exhausted. I switch my workbag from one shoulder to the other every block or so, trying to alleviate the day’s stress that has pooled in my trapezius. Every window holds enviable scenes—families sitting down to dinner, or cleaning up from just having eaten; a mom helping a young boy with his homework, and then a few more doors down, two kids—a boy and a girl—chasing each other around the living room with glowing light sabers; and on the block after that, a couple sitting in front of a fire, reading. Her legs are tossed over his lap and covered by a blanket. His hand rubs her knee absentmindedly. Every house, every window, backlit by butter, is a showcase of a life I’d like to have.

I wish I weren’t so reluctant to see what was right in front of me this whole time. Brad and I are so off track that right about now, I wish I were anyone but me.

But I am me, and Brad is Brad. I hear my mother’s voice in my head: “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”

Tears spring to my eyes at the thought of my mom. God, I miss her. Movies and books always focus on graduations, weddings, births
of children and other big moments when daughters pine for their deceased mothers. But they get it wrong. Would it be great to have my mom around for those high points? Sure. But times like these are when I feel her absence most acutely, when I’m being hollowed out, breath by breath, by longing.

For an entire year after my mother died, her wireless carrier failed to shut down her voice mail and at times like this, when all I wanted was to hear her voice, I’d call her number again and again just to listen to the recording. One night—a Thursday in March—a man’s voice answered and gruffly told me that I had the wrong number before hanging up on me. Still, I’ve kept her name and number listed in my contacts and in my address book. I sorted through and gave away her skirts and sweaters and shoes, but I can’t seem to part with those ten digits.

I have that same longing to call her now. To ask her what she’d do if she were me. What would she do if the man she married wasn’t the man she was married to, and might never be again?

I shift my bag again at the intersection of West Washington and Park streets. The passing traffic forms a homophony of hum and slush loud enough to pause my internal monologue. I roll my head back and forth, stretching the taut muscles of my neck and shoulders. The light for the crosswalk changes to the white outline of a person, and as I step off the curb, I’m reminded of crossing a street like this one with Brad only days after he returned, and I shudder.

Had I not been by his side, he would have walked straight out into four lanes of heavy traffic on one of Madison’s busiest thoroughfares without so much as glancing in either direction, or at the walk signal, which at that moment was a steady, glaring orange hand. Without thinking, I grabbed him by the collar and yanked back, hard. Brad whirled toward me and I stepped back, holding my hands above my head. Brad caught himself, midlunge, and we both stood there, staring at each other, wide-eyed.

“I take it they don’t have crosswalks over there?” I joked, and I chalked up the incident to Brad’s being inattentive or still trying to get his bearings. Now I realize it had nothing to do with Brad’s being distracted or out of sorts. The signals most kindergartners know—man for
walk
and hand for
stop
—mean nothing to Brad’s scrambled brain.

I call to Brad as I slip off my shoes and hang my coat on the rack just inside our front door. Glassy-eyed and stone-faced, he stumbles out of the hallway. I tell myself I’ve probably woken him from a nap, but the steadily evaporating jug of Jack Daniel’s, which has become a fixture on our kitchen counter, could be to blame. I’ve been adding water to it, little by little, and though I know this is much like shoveling in the middle of a blizzard, it’s the only thing I’ve been able to think to do.

“Hey there, handsome,” I say, and I flash him a lopsided and impish grin. It’s late and I’m tired. I’m not feeling the least bit amorous, and Brad is looking, in a word, rough; but this little household of ours needs a shot in the arm of positivity, of normalcy. When I was a few blocks from home, a voice in my head told me to start trying—really trying—to break this cycle we seem to have found ourselves in. Maybe it was my mom speaking to me, maybe not. But it’s good guidance. If I treat Brad more like I used to—like my husband, my lover—and less like a problem child, maybe he’ll respond in kind.

Only he doesn’t respond. At all.
Keep trying. Keep at it until he does,
I tell myself.

I fish from my bag the pile of papers I printed at the office and spread them out on the table: brightly colored graphs and charts, bulleted lists of symptoms and treatment options, and the forms that the woman from the VA e-mailed me late this afternoon for Brad to fill out.

“What’s all this?” he asks.

I bite my lower lip and take a deep breath. “Can we sit and talk for a minute?”

Brad nods and pulls up a chair. He turns to the papers on the table. As I struggle for the words I want—no, need—to say, his rifling of the papers becomes more forceful and frantic.

“I decided to do a little research, and—”

“What the fuck is this, Elise?” Brad interrupts me. He’s holding up a page with “Signs of Traumatic Brain Injury” printed in bold red across the top. The corner is crinkled where he’s closed his fist around it.

I open my mouth, but speech doesn’t materialize. Brad’s face is twisted into a scowl. His eyes are dark and narrow and brimming with rage.

“You think I’m fucking brain damaged? Is that it?”

“N-no,” I stammer. “I didn’t say that, babe. It’s an injury. Traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder are common—”

“I don’t have a fucking disorder. What the fuck is all this?”

One of the things I have most loved about my husband is his introspective streak. He is always the first one to think through the decisions he makes, to evaluate how and why he is making them, and what those decisions mean or what they say about him. When we were moving into our house, I found a notebook he had been using as a journal, and the first few pages were missives on what he should do for a career under headings such as
Things I’m Good at
,
Things That Interest Me
, and
Weaknesses/Obstacles
. That streak is either gone, or so deeply buried, it might as well be.

I try a different tack. “Brad, this isn’t anything to get worked up over. Seriously. There’re so many people dealing with stuff like this that the VA said there’s a pretty long waiting list. So that’s the bad news.”

“You called the
VA
? About
me
?”

I nod. “All this stuff—the nightmares and forgetting things and—your, um, reactions to things—they can help you with all of that. You just need to call this woman I spoke to and—”

With one sweep of his arm, Brad clears the table of every last piece of paper. They rustle to the ground like wounded birds.

“Fuck you, Elise,” he says, and I wince. “You think this is easy, coming back here? Just because I’m not my cheery old self all the time doesn’t mean there’s something fucking
wrong
with me. I sure as hell don’t have a disorder and I’m not fucking brain damaged.”

“I didn’t say you were. I just thought—”

Brad stands up; his chair teeters briefly on the rear two legs and then flops over backward.

“You didn’t fucking think. You stupid, stupid bitch.”

“I was just trying to help,” I whisper.

He leans over, his face inches from my own, his arms on either side of me—one on my chair back and one on the table. My eyes squeeze shut, but I can feel his breath hot on my face.

“I don’t
need
your
fucking
help,” he says. His voice, his words, are all spittle and snarl. “You think you’re so perfect—take a look in the fucking mirror for once.”

He slaps the table hard with one hand and I feel a jolt as he kicks the leg of the chair I’m sitting on. When I open my eyes, I see the front door being pulled shut from the outside.