Fade to Black - Proof (10 page)

“She is really
everything to me,” he concluded.

Then he talked
about his little Claire Bear, his joy, the physical product of his love for
Pam. He found himself telling stories like a proud dad, going on and on, and
apologized.

“Don’t be
silly, Jack. It sounds like you have a wonderful family and a very healthy,
loving relationship with Pam.” The psychologist was smiling.

“I’m very
lucky. I know that.” Jack wiped another tear from his cheek, unsure why the
hell he was crying now. “I feel bad that I’ve kept some of this from her.”

“What have you
kept from her?” the psychologist asked.

“Well,” Jack
paused. “The bad stuff. I mean, some of the things we haven’t talked about yet.”
Dr. Lewellyn nodded as if he understood and jotted something in his notebook.
Jack thought again of how he was afraid to tell Pam about Simmons visiting him
at school, of his “breakdown,” and meeting with Stuart Anderson and the school
nurse. Worse, he thought about his lie about the nightmare on the couch the day
before, seeing the bloody bathroom and Simmons in the backyard.

“Can we talk
about the war in Iraq for a minute?” Lewellyn asked.

“Yes,” Jack
said, but he felt his stomach flip. “But I really think I should tell you about
some other things—some very disturbing things. You asked why I felt compelled
to come in today. Well, these other things, these things that happen when I am
awake
,
are the reason.” Jack realized he was pleading. He had come in unsure if he
could even talk to this stranger, and now he was begging to tell him the most
frightening part. Once he had opened it up, he had to get it out, like draining
pus from an abscess.

Dr. Lewellyn
pursed his lips and thought a moment.

“Ok, Jack.
Let’s talk about the things you see when you’re awake.”

So Jack spoke
again without pause, except in response to Dr. Lewellyn’s occasional, “Hold on,
Jack.” He told his story in as much detail as he could recall, his voice
cracking at times, tears running down his face again. He spoke freely, holding
nothing back, interjecting at times his emotional responses—not just his terror,
but his feeling of connection to these men he felt he really knew. He talked of
his desperate need to tune into the news, hoping to catch the names of the men
who had died in the street in Fallujah, and his haunting belief that he would
know not only the names, but also the faces. Bennet, Kindrich. Simmons, and of course,
Sergeant Casey Stillman. He talked fondly of his men and gave some of the
details of their lives. He spoke of his particular fondness for Simmons, the
carefree boy from Albany. He (or Casey) had taken Simmons under his wing,
hoping to train him to be a truly tough and career-oriented Marine. Then he
cried when he again relived the visits from Simmons, and the way he had been
calling him to come back to them, to his men, his Marines. He talked of the
bizarre guilt he felt that he was not there.

When he was
done, he laid his head against the back of the leather couch, exhausted again.
He looked at his watch and was amazed to see that he had been talking for over
an hour. He looked at Dr. Lewellyn, who was flipping back through many pages of
notes in his tidy leather notebook. Jack said nothing more as the psychologist
reviewed what he had told him. He had expected to feel great anxiety about what
the doctor would think. Instead, Jack felt only a tired sense of relief that he
had gotten the story out—he had purged himself in some way. He closed his tired
eyes and waited.

Finally he
opened his eyes in response to the sound of Lewellyn setting his leather-bound
collection of Jack’s madness on the wood and marble table. Dr. Lewellyn’s warmth
masking any judgments he might have formulated.

“Would you
like something to drink, Jack?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jack
answered quietly.

“Coke okay?”

“Great,” Jack
answered, though he really preferred Sprite.

Dr. Lewellyn
walked stiffly over to a small refrigerator next to his desk and got two cans
of soda out. He walked back and handed one to Jack, then took his seat, sipping
his own soda as he did. He sat quietly for a moment, apparently thinking about
where to go next in his evaluation. Jack drank deeply from his own can and
realized his throat was dry as a bone. The first swallow burned as it went
down. Then he waited patiently.

After a few
minutes Dr. Lewellyn looked at Jack and smiled.

“What do you
think of the war in Iraq, Jack?”

Jack felt
confused by the question.

“What do I
think?”

“Yeah,”
Lewellyn said, setting his Coke on the table. “What do you think? Are we right
to be there?”

“Well, it’s
not really for me to decide,” Jack answered without thinking. “I mean, we
follow orders. The commander in chief makes the call. We’re there as a force to
project his policy.”

Lewellyn
considered this a moment.

“Jack, who in
your family is in the military?”

“No one,” Jack
answered. “My dad was in the army in the early seventies, but never went to
Vietnam. My mom was always home with us.”

“Do you have
any close friends in the military? Anyone you know who is over in Iraq? Have
you ever considered a military career?”

“No,” Jack
answered honestly. It felt funny somehow, like it wasn’t quite true, but he
didn’t know why.

Lewellyn
considered this for a moment. Then he did something else that surprised Jack
and made him a bit uncomfortable. He got up and sat on the couch beside Jack,
leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He rubbed his face. Jack was again
overcome by how familiar he looked. Then the psychologist put a hand on his
shoulder.

“You’re not
crazy, Jack.” he said plainly. “You know that, right?”

Jack shifted
uncomfortably again. He sure as shit did not know that. It was, at the moment,
his biggest fear other than falling asleep or seeing a dead Marine in his
backyard.

“I guess,” he
said. “Doc, I just want this to stop. I feel like it
is
driving me
crazy. And it’s killing Pam, too.” His voice was pleading.

God, please
make this stop
.

“I know,
Jack,” Lewellyn said, confidence in his voice. “And we will. We’ll stop it
together.” He leaned back on the couch beside him and stretched out his back.
Then he looked at him again. “Jack, Barton is right. You do have a terrible
stress disorder, like PTSD that soldiers get after combat. I don’t know why,”
he said honestly, causing Jack to grimace, “but we’ll figure it out. Together.”

Dr. Lewellyn
got up and headed for his desk where he grabbed a piece of paper from a book
like a prescription pad.

“Jack, if you
can take another day off I would like you to come back tomorrow at ten a.m. Can
you do that?”

“Sure.” Jack
answered, his voice nervous but full of hope. Dr. Lewellyn handed him a slip of
paper and Jack looked at it. It was an appointment card.

“In the
meantime, I’m going to phone Jim Barton and ask him to call in a prescription
for you. It’ll help you sleep and you shouldn’t have any nightmares, okay?”

Jack sighed
heavily, visibly relieved and closed his eyes. “Thank God,” he said.

“Now the only
problem is it’s likely to make you feel a little hung over in the morning, okay?
You’ll sleep, but you won’t dream much, and that’ll make you feel poorly
rested.”

“No problem,”
Jack said enthusiastically. He didn’t care if he got cancer from the damn thing,
as long as he didn’t go back to Fallujah, riding in the body of a dying Marine.
Jack thanked the doctor profusely, shook his hand, and then picked up his
insurance card from the receptionist and left. In the hall he leaned back
against the wall and felt tears well up again, though he was unsure why. He
cried quietly in the hall for a few minutes, then collected himself and headed
for the elevator.

He was going
to be all right. David Lewellyn would help him, and he would be fine.

As the doors
closed on the elevator, Jack felt the tug of familiarity again. He definitely
knew this guy, but had no idea from where.

Chapter

12

The pill worked. Whether by
placebo effect, or by activating—or inactivating—some chemical pathway in his
brain, Jack didn’t know or care. After an awkward evening where he promised his
crying wife that the psychologist would be able to make everything  all right,
Jack slept without dreaming. When he woke up he still felt tired and had a
vague headache, but those side effects did little to diminish the relief he
felt that another night had passed without a visit to his personal purgatory. He
found himself stiff and uncomfortable in the same position he last remembered
from the night before.

Jack lay
beside his sleeping wife, lost in thought. The sigh of her breathing had an
amazing and calming effect on him. He lay beside her, stroked her hair, and
thought again about his meeting with Dr. Lewellyn. He decided he trusted him, that
he liked his easy style and the way he let Jack lead the conversation. He still
felt anxious and unsure, still terrified truth be known, but he was also filled
with hope. If a few more painful and emotional hours with the psychologist
would help him put all this behind him, it was well worth it.

As he lay
there, he let his mind drift back to the images of Fallujah. He tried to let
the pictures from his dreams unfold like a remembered movie. He tried to pick
out some detail he had missed, which might give him a satisfying “Ah-ha!” of
insight as to the root cause of his nightmare. He thought a lot about Dr.
Lewellyn’s words, that they could find what caused his obsessive thoughts about
a war seven thousand miles away, and that the insight might help him make it
stop. True, he was horrified by the images of the war that came via the talking
heads into his safe and quiet world, but weren’t millions of others? He hadn’t
seen many of them chasing visiting corpses down the halls of the neighborhood
school. Why did he feel so personally connected to all this? He came up with
nothing, but he was haunted again by the unsettling feeling that he was indeed a
part of it somehow; that it owned him. He belonged there for some reason.

Come back,
Sar’n. You belong here with us. We need you.

Jack
shuddered. Simmons’ words—young Simmons from Albany. Jack closed his eyes and
let his hand run over Pam’s warm, soft shoulder. She stirred and sighed.

The evening
had been difficult for Jack, but worse, he sensed it had been a strain on Pam,
as well. She needed some reassurance that he had been unable to give her. He
told her in very general terms of his meeting with Dr. Lewellyn. He shared with
her what he had told him about his dreams and his obsession with the news. He
emphasized Lewellyn’s confidence that he could help with Jack’s “stress
disorder.” Jack cringed as he imagined their next meeting starting with “so,
tell me about your mother…were you breast fed?”

Pam didn’t ask
for more and seemed content that there was hope in this Dr. Lewellyn, but Jack
was sure it must bother her that there were things he didn’t share. His
description of the meeting fell way short of accounting for the intense three
hours he was with the doctor. Jack wrestled with a heavy guilt that he didn’t
share more with the woman with whom he had shared everything, but he couldn’t
bring himself to talk with her about his breakdown at school, or worse, his
visits from Simmons. If Lewellyn thought he was crazy, so be it. It was his
job, if he thought that, to fix it. But there was no way he could bear the
thought that his wife might begin to believe that her husband had slipped the
chains of reason and gone over the edge, into some pit of madness. So he kept
that part to himself, despite the fact that he needed his wife’s support now
more than ever. He had never kept anything from Pam—not ever.

Jack rolled
over now and wrapped his arm tightly around his wife’s waist and hugged her. The
smell of her hair and the feel of her against him filled him with peace and
joy, as they
had
since the day they first lay down together.

“I love you so
much, Pam,” he said, soaking in the warmth of her.

She squeezed
his arm gently.

“I love you
too, baby,” she said sleepily. “I’m so proud of you.”

Jack held her
like that for a long time and watched as the pale light through the window grew
into an orange sunrise. Then he slipped quietly from their bed. He padded
softly down the hall in his bare feet to Claire’s room and stood beside her
crib. He watched her beautiful face as she slept in the growing morning light.
He loved his little girl so much, and he felt happy tears run down his cheeks
as he watched her. How could he ever bear to be apart from his girls? How did
those young Marines possibly stand the separation from family, and the fear of
never seeing them again? He didn’t think he could ever do it. If he was ever
separated from his girls he could never give up on getting back to them, no
matter what it took.

Claire stirred
slightly and Jack bent over, picked her up, and cradled her head on his
shoulder. Then he went to the rocker and sat down. He slowly rocked his baby
girl against his chest. He kissed her hair and stroked her cheek as he sat
there, thinking about the painful morning ahead of him. No matter what it took,
he would sort this out and come back, healed, to his family. No nightmare, no
Hadji bullet, would keep him from his family.

Jack was
stirred from his thoughts, and the comforting feel of his daughter, by the
feeling of someone watching him. He looked up to see Pam leaning against the
door, watching him and smiling. She looked gorgeous, her face glowing in the
morning light, her eyes happy and full of love. Jack smiled back and reached
out a hand to her. She came to him, took his hand and kissed him gently on the
cheek.

“How long have
you been there?” he whispered.

“Just a few
minutes,” she answered then sat in front of them on the small ottoman,
specially built to rock back and forth with the chair. “You are so beautiful,
sitting there holding our baby,” she said, and then kissed his hand. “Would you
like a nice breakfast?”

“I would love
one,” he answered. “Let me put her back and see if she’ll stay down and I’ll
help you.”

Pam rose, kissed
him again, and then held her hand for a brief moment on his cheek.

“I’ll meet you
in the kitchen.”

Claire stayed
peacefully asleep as Jack laid her back in her crib, covered her to her waist
with her blanket, and kissed her on the cheek. He stared at her for a moment
more then headed downstairs to join his wife.

Pam was still
pouring water into the coffee maker when Jack shuffled in. They had long ago
given up what had been an every morning conversation about how they should
program the machine and fill it at night so that they could wake up to fresh
coffee. Jack hugged his wife from behind and kissed her neck. Then he opened
the refrigerator and got out juice, milk, and eggs.

“Eggs okay?”
he asked over his shoulder.

“Sure,” Pam
answered. She took the juice from him and poured them each a glass, while Jack
continued his search for ham or bacon. Finding neither, he grabbed some Italian
sausage instead.

“Spicy okay?”
he asked. He turned and looked at his wife who looked amused. He gave her an
unconscious “What?” look.

“Spicy is
fine,” she said softly. “You slept last night? No nightmares?”

Jack placed
his ingredients on the counter and started slicing open the sausage casings as
he spoke, dropping the spicy meat into a pan, to which he added a splash of
olive oil.

“I did sleep,”
he answered as he worked, “and no nightmares.”

Pam looked
satisfied, and kissed him on the cheek. Then she stood beside him, grating
cheese and bumping him playfully with her hip. When the sausage was simmering
in the pan and the rest of the ingredients were ready to pour in, he added the
eggs and cheese to the pan, and mixed it all together. Pam often told him with
a chuckle that if there was no folding, there was no omelet, and you really
just had “cheese eggs,” which was fine with Jack.

As Jack
whipped his sausage and cheese eggs around in the pan, he was distracted by
thoughts of things he had held back from his wife. Even as they worked together
in the kitchen, Jack felt a distance between them, at least in his mind,
created by untold fears and unshared experiences. Pam had been there for him,
had stood by and loved and cared for him, true to their vows. Could he really
repay that by holding back from his partner—from what truly was the better half
of the one person they had become—the things that frightened and worried him
most? Did he really want to go this alone, without his one and constant source
of strength and courage? He looked at his wife, who sat glowing at the table,
and in that moment he decided that he wanted that wall gone. He would tell her
everything—the gunfire, the missing ceiling, the visits from dead Marines—everything.
Most importantly, he would share his fear that he might be going crazy. He
would tell her also of his overwhelming feeling that in some way he was a part of
all of it, that he was a Marine.

He scraped
their breakfast onto two plates, his stomach fluttering. He doubted he would
even be able to stomach the breakfast that moments ago he had hungered for. He
turned to her, a plate in each hand.

“Juice?” he
asked.

“Got some for
both of us,” she said and pointed at the two full glasses on the table. Jack
placed the plates down and slid into the seat beside his wife. He took a couple
of anxious bites despite his wrenching stomach, and then felt Pam’s hand
squeeze his knee. He looked up at her.

 “What is it,
Jack?” She looked at him softly, knowingly. This was a woman with whom he could
have conversations from across a crowded room with just their eyes. She knew
him.

“I have some
things I want to tell you,” he said. He looked at his plate instead of his
wife. “There are more things than just dreams. Scary things,” he said and waited
for her response.

Pam looked at
him, her face anxious but without judgment.

“You can tell
me anything, Jack.”

“I know,” he
said.

He started
with the waking visions he had after his nightmares, telling her of the smell
of dust and gunpowder that lingered in their room, the sound of the Blackhawk,
seeing the smoke‐filled sky instead of the ceiling. He told her of the day
after the first nightmare and how he had what he called an “anxiety attack” in
the faculty lounge, and of the sounds he had heard behind the school. Then he
hesitated.

“What did Dr.
Lewellyn say?” his wife asked, showing no apparent concern that these things might
be evidence that her husband was nuts.

“Well,” Jack
said, grateful for the delay before he came to the visits from Simmons, “He
wasn’t that worried. He said that nightmares can linger, and the anxiety can
produce some hallucinations, more like memories, when we’re awake.”

Pam considered
this a moment. Jack watched her closely, worried what he might see. All he saw
was love and concern. No fear and no judgment.

“Did that make
you feel better?” she asked.

Jack smiled.
All these terrible things that he brought into their lives, and still she seemed
concerned only that he was all right.

“Yes,” he
replied, “but there’s more.”

And he told
the rest. He told her of seeing Simmons in the hallway, and how he had chased
the phantom out of the back door of the school. He spared her the gory details,
but was candid about the reaction of Chad and Anderson. Then he told her the
worst part, of the bloody bathroom and Simmons in their backyard, and how he
told him again that he belonged with them—with his Marines. He told her of
being sucked down in the cyclone in their bed after finding himself lying
beside the bloody body, and how he had again ended up in Fallujah, just another
shot up Marine dying slowly in the dusty street. When he finished, he studied
her face, looking for signs that this was just too much. But again, there was
none.

“Well that
part sounds like just another dream, right?” She asked. She laid her hand on
his arm gently. Her hand felt warm and comforting. He could tell how
desperately she wanted to believe everything was all right or to make it all
right if it wasn’t.

“Well, yeah. I
mean, I guess so.”

Jack thought for
a moment. He hadn’t really thought of that event as a dream. It just seemed too
damn real. More like a haunting. But she was right, wasn’t she? He
had
woken
up on the couch afterward. It had to be a dream.  How bizarre that it hadn’t
occurred to him until Pam said it.

Pam squeezed
his arm and pushed her now cold plate of breakfast away. Then she took his hand
in hers.

“Jack, I love
you. I love you no matter what.” Tears rimmed the bottoms of her soft eyes, but
not enough to spill out onto her cheeks. “Honey, there is nothing you can’t
share with me. I’m here for you. I just don’t want you to go through this
alone.”

Jack forced
himself to hold her eyes with his, which now welled up with tears of their own.
He swallowed hard, and asked the question he had to hear an answer to. His
voice trembled.