Learning to Stay (17 page)

“Ma’am, I wish I remembered,” he says. “I do.” I’ve instructed Brad to work in his service, to acknowledge the issues he’s encountered since returning. And to apologize. Apologize a hell of a lot, I told him.

“I have these spells,” Brad continues. “They started a while after I got back. Sometimes I look around me—once, I was wandering around the UW business school—and I can’t remember how I got there. I have no memories of walking there. Since I’ve been back, I just show up places all of a sudden, like I apparated to them.”

“Apparated?” Margie Valhalla says.

“Sorry, ma’am. It’s a Harry Potter reference.”

“Oh,” Margie says. “I’ve been meaning to read those. They’re good?”

“They’re excellent,” Brad says.

“I think my grandson would like them. He’s nine.”

“He definitely would, ma’am.”

“So you didn’t want to hurt me?” Margie asks.

“No, ma’am. Never. Promise. I don’t remember being in your house. I don’t know why I would’ve been there.”

Margie Valhalla studies my husband. “You know,” she says after a while, “I had a son. He served over there. Four tours. He didn’t come back.”

I didn’t tell Brad this ahead of time, and when he tears up, I’m glad I chose not to. It sounds cold and calculating, but my duty as Brad’s attorney is to boost his chances of not having to spend one additional day in jail, or God forbid, prison, than he absolutely has to. If I have to manipulate the flow of information to achieve that result, so be it.

Plus, I wanted them to have as authentic a conversation as possible, and in all honesty, I wasn’t convinced he’d remember even if I had told him about Margie’s son.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. So sorry,” Brad says. His voice is thick with emotion.

“He was a little older than you,” Margie continues. “What happened to him, it was a waste. And not just because our own bullets got him. If it hadn’t been ours, it would have been theirs, or one of those blasted bombs. He kept going back. He kept going back because he didn’t know how to be here anymore. He grew up here. It was his home. And you know what he told me?” She looks at Brad, who shakes his head. He is hanging on her words. “He told me that this—his
home
, where I lived and his wife and their two boys lived—felt like a foreign country to him. He said to me, ‘Ma, I don’t know the rules here anymore; I don’t fit in. I can’t stay.’ And I couldn’t fix him. Try as I might, he couldn’t be fixed. He would’ve died no matter what. It was just a matter of time.”

I am looking across the table at Margie Valhalla, but out of the corner of my eye I can see Brad’s shoulders shaking. He is crying silently. He knows.

“That’s how you feel, too?” Margie’s voice is soft and gentle, like a warm breeze.

Brad nods. He studies the table. He nods again.

Margie leans across the table and pats Brad’s hand. She turns and looks at Jason Omar, who is seated to her right. “He’s been through enough,” she says. “He’s given enough.” Then she looks me dead in the eye and says, “We all have.”

Margie Valhalla rolls her chair back, grips the edge of the table with one hand, and pulls herself to her feet. “I’d like to be done now,” she says tiredly. This might go down on record as the shortest restorative justice session ever, but no one is going to press a seventy-nine-year-old lady into staying longer.

Instead of exiting out the door behind her, though, Margie Valhalla walks around the mediator to the opposite side of the table
where Brad and I are seated. When she reaches Brad, she takes his hands in hers and whispers to him, “You be a good boy now, okay?”

Brad bites his lip and nods. “I’m trying, ma’am,” he says.

“I know,” Margie says. She brings his hands to her lips. “I know you are. You just keep on doing that.” Then, squeezing both his hands, she looks at Brad and smiles sadly. She puts her coat on and slings her purse over her arm, and on her way past him, Margie stops and places a hand on Brad’s shoulder and lets it rest there, as if she’s going to say something else to him. Instead, she pats it twice and continues toward the door.

I turn to Brad, wanting to share an intimate, celebratory moment with him. One look at my husband, though, and I realize those sentiments are misplaced. His hands rest on the tabletop and his head rests in his hands, as though it’s become too heavy for him to lift. His shoulders are rounded into a slouch. His breathing comes out quick and shallow. There is nothing to celebrate here. Not for any of us.

That afternoon, while I am in my car en route to the office, Jason Omar calls to tell me that Margie Valhalla has advocated dropping all charges against Brad.

“With the stipulation that you get him some help,” Jason says. “Understand?”

“I’m trying,” I say.

“Do better than that. If I come across Brad’s name again, I’m throwing the book at him.”

“There won’t be a next time,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Counselor?” Jason asks.

“Uh-huh.”

“I know this couldn’t have been easy for you. You do good work. That firm is lucky to have you. So is your husband.”

My breath hitches and a sob wells up out of nowhere. I take a deep
breath, swallowing it back down. A few kind words and I’m choking on emotion like a dog on a chicken bone.

“Thank you,” I squeak, right before I hear the click of the call disconnecting.

Perhaps it’s not the words. Perhaps it’s the acknowledgment behind them. During the restorative justice session, I saw a moment pass between Margie and Brad when his eyes brightened and he seemed, if not his old self, then at least one far removed from the person he’d been since his return. A small intense flame of jealousy sprang up in me and I thought,
Why can’t he respond to me like that?
She was a complete stranger. A stranger who formed a stronger bond with my husband in an hour than I had been able to establish in months.

He’s needed someone to understand him; I’ve only been trying to fix him.

I see that now—the transformative power of being understood. Maybe all I’ve been needing is for someone, anyone, to say, “You know, you got dealt a bad hand. It sucks. But keep up the good work,” because at this moment, it’s as though I’ve been floating like a boat with limp, deflated sails, at the mercy of the wind and weather. And Jason Omar’s kind words might as well have been a full-on gale.

The radio is playing a catchy tune that was the anthem of last summer, overplayed by pop radio DJs everywhere. Every time I heard it then, I rushed to change the station. It was too upbeat, too happy, too carefree for how I felt, with a husband halfway around the world enmeshed in a war with few clear objectives. But today, Jason Omar’s recalled words ring in my ears. “That firm is lucky to have you. So is your husband.”

Today, when I reach for the radio, it’s to turn the volume up, and I start to sing along.

It takes time for Jason Omar to prepare and file a nolle prosequi, and to find a judge to enter it on the record, so I have to wait until my lunch break the next day to pick Brad up from jail. He looks tired and sallow, and he stares out the passenger side window as we drive away.

“Everything okay, babe?” I ask him. Okay is relative these days.

He shrugs. I reach for his hand and squeeze it. “We’ll forget this ever happened,” I say. “It’s going to be fine.”

“I know,” he says.

“Then what’s wrong?” I turn down the volume on the radio.

“Because I have forgotten it,” he says. “But I still did it. I scared that poor woman to death. Maybe I was going to shoot her. I have no fucking clue if I was going to shoot her or not. And I don’t remember a goddamn thing. Who does something like that and doesn’t remember?”

I squeeze his hand again. “It’s going to get better.” I am all rainbows and unicorns these days since pulling off the improbable, if not impossible: confiding in Zach to great success, orchestrating a deal that gets my husband off an alleged attempted-murder rap, with upsides for everyone else involved, and getting back to business on
Rowland
—all in a matter of days.

Brad shakes his head. He’s quiet for more than three blocks.

“I’m hungry,” he says eventually.

“We don’t have anything to eat at home—sorry.” I give Brad a sheepish look. Grocery shopping is something I tend to avoid at all costs. I realize it’s a necessity, but I also hate it. Usually, my feelings toward going to the store outweigh the fact that I know I need to. Left to my own devices, I’ve eaten corn or green beans straight from the can for dinner just to avoid grocery shopping. “We can stop on the way home and grab some sandwich fixings,” I offer.

Brad doesn’t object, so I overshoot the turn to our house and pull into the Copps down the street.

“Why don’t you come in with me?” I suggest. “So we get what you really want.” But that’s only part of it. I feel better when I can keep my eye on Brad—when I can gauge the slightest of shifts in his mood or change in his carriage, all subtle clues as to what I can expect to happen next.

Brad acquiesces. He trudges behind me like a dutiful dog, and the sight of him reflected in the store’s automatic doors just before they slide apart steals my breath. Slump-shouldered, his face drawn, he is the picture of a man broken.

The grocery store is nearly empty, and I think that if I made it a habit to do my shopping at this time of day instead of after work or on Sunday afternoons, I might actually be inclined to come more often. No one has parked a grocery cart in the middle of the aisle. No one has tried to run me over. We sail through the store. It’s food-shopping nirvana, or the closest thing to it.

As the lone cashier on duty rings up our items—Black Forest ham, bread, mayonnaise, tomatoes, two frozen pizzas, microwave dinners that were on sale (five for ten dollars), toilet paper, shampoo, and apples—a mother with a young boy steps in line behind Brad. Freckled and mop-headed, the boy is maybe four years old. He makes me
want to know what Brad looked like at his age. He is playing with a balloon his mother probably agreed to give him as a way to avoid a toddler-size meltdown and get through her errands. I wonder whether she knows how lucky she is to have this child in her charge, to get to spend afternoons with him. My desire to go up to him and cuddle him and tousle his hair, to pretend he’s mine if only for a second, is so strong that I keep my hands on the counter.
Bend your fingers around this ledge,
I think to myself.
Watch them so they stay right there.

Later, I won’t remember hearing the balloon pop. I will only remember swiping my debit card through the kiosk when I hear Brad yell, “Incoming!” and I am being slammed into the hard floor, teeth first. I feel my lower lip go hot, as if a branding iron is being pressed to it, and I fear that my tooth has gone right through. I lie still for a moment, listening to Brad’s breath, heavy in my ear. I run my tongue over each of my teeth, checking for sharp edges that shouldn’t be there. Thankfully, there are none. I can’t afford an afternoon off for dental repair right now, or the dental repair itself.

The little boy is wailing and his mother has backed him away from us, near a trough of candy bars, two for a dollar, sitting in the middle of the store’s main aisleway. I wiggle free of Brad and stand up. He is still prone on the floor, looking up at me, his face frozen in a mask of shock and horror. I hear the cashier call for a cleanup on checkout twelve—gloves needed—as I bend down to Brad and offer him a hand. My lip is already swelling and I can hardly talk, so I motion for him to come on already and get up. I see the blood on the floor where I was lying and realize it’s coming from me, from my lip. Much too late, I hold a hand against my chin to prevent blood from dripping onto my suit.

Brad struggles to his feet. He isn’t wearing a jacket, and I can clearly see a giant wet spot spreading on his jeans from his nether regions. My husband has just wet himself.

He sees me looking at him. He sees me register what has happened. And then he runs.

I yell for him to stop, but he keeps going. The cashier hands me a wad of tissues, which I hold to my bleeding mouth. Then she tells me to “have a nice day” as she holds out our grocery bags. I imagine that she says this so many times each day, it’s become rote for her—a habit or a tick she couldn’t control if she wanted to. I take the bags from her, struggling to loop them all onto one arm so I can hold the tissue to my mouth with the other, and I can’t help but roll my eyes.

By the time I make it to the car, Brad is nowhere to be found. I throw the grocery bags in the backseat and pace the parking lot, calling his name. There’s no response.

I drive first around to the back of the store, and then toward home. I don’t see any sign of Brad. Then I double back to the grocery store and drive in the opposite direction. No Brad. I double back once again and take a left on Wingra Drive, thinking maybe Brad is wandering the bike path that runs alongside it. When I get to the Arboretum, I turn around and retrace the route. I know there’s not much chance he could have gotten so far as to actually walk into the Arb, and even if he had, I’d never be able to track him by car. Too many trails wind their way through the nature preserve. So I steer through all of the neighborhoods he might be picking his way through instead. But Brad is nowhere to be found. It’s as though he’s up and vanished.