Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (34 page)

“It says here,” Brannan had said, the folder open on the steering wheel, her eyes narrowing incredulously, “that you
spit
on somebody today.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Katie admitted, lowering her voice and her eyes.

Brannan had conferenced with Katie’s teacher many times about her behavior. Brannan said she mirrored her dad’s overreacting and yelling. She said she was “not a normal, carefree six-year-old.” In the car, she’d asked Katie to name the alternatives to lashing out that they’d talked about. Sometimes, Brannan had told me, Katie asked her to pray with her that her teacher would like her. Once, she’d asked Brannan to take her to a hypnotist so he could use his powers to turn her into a good girl. Looking in the rearview mirror as she drove, Brannan occasionally turned around and swatted lightly at Katie, trying to get her to stop picking at the open sores she dug into her own legs with tiny anxious fingers.

Back at the house, Shilo had barked at Katie a lot. Shilo barked at triggers, and Katie was a trigger, with her loudness and impulsive kid-ness. There was something else about kids, too, for Caleb. One of the memories that caused him the most trouble was the time he picked up the pieces of Baghdad bombing victims and found that lady who appeared to have thrown herself on top of her child to save him, only to find the child dead underneath.

Katie remained cheerful despite Shilo’s barking. She ate her afterschool pancake snack and went and got dressed for tap-dance class. She came downstairs looking sweet as pie in a black leotard, pink tights, and shiny black tap shoes. On the way to class, where we dropped her before Brannan dropped me off, she said, apropos of nothing, “One time, a bad guy in Iraq had a knife and my dad killed him.”

Brannan scolded her, but kindly. She didn’t know why Katie adapted this story about Caleb’s confiscating a weapon from an insurgent into a story about bloodshed, but she wasn’t happy that she kept repeating it. She’d recently ruined one of her classmate’s birthday parties by bringing it up, there at the Chick-fil-A.

Back in my hotel room, I stayed in the shower a long time. When I came out, I tried to engage with Nico. But I was still full of searing agitation. I told him I wanted to watch TV.

“I get that,” my father had said on the phone when I told him about my TV needs once. “When I was doing all the bad things I was doing, and I knew I was eventually going to get caught, I remember sometimes when we were all watching TV together I could forget about it for a little while.”

I just wanted to watch TV for an hour, I told Nico—I wasn’t allowed to shut down for the whole time I was working anymore, making it harder to process everything and open up later. This time I had Nico for optimum safety and emotional support. I wasn’t going to wander the hotels and restaurants of a strange city by myself. I was going to process as I went. But I was invoking my Denise-approved right to one hour of reprieve. I took it, staring at some show on my laptop in bed while Nico continued his English studies on his. Then I felt better. More decompressed.

We talked. We lay next to each other. We kissed. As soon as he put his hands on me, I panicked.

No no no!
my body cried.

At the very least, if there were no dissociation or breakdown to be had, active excitement ruined me. When Nico and I kissed, my heart started beating faster. When my heart started beating faster, I wanted to stop and run from the apartment, or hurt or dismember him in a rage.

“Slow it down,” Denise always said, as we were deconstructing these moments on the table. The point was so that I could start to recognize them better as they were happening, learn to listen to what my body was saying about them, and eventually, see them coming. “Go back to that moment. What happened in that moment?”

What happened in the moment, when my heart started beating faster, was that my body didn’t associate being excited with sexiness anymore. It was a sign of mortal fear or encroaching episodes.

It made my body think,
Get out of there
.

This, it occurred to me in a sad moment there in the Homewood Suites, would not be happening if I were drunk.

I lay back, sighing angrily, sadly, accepting defeat. Sometimes it passed; this time it didn’t. We would try again later or the next day. Nico remained undeterred and always ready to try again. His resilience was stunning. I didn’t know how many times I could put my hands on someone and watch her flip out before deciding I never wanted to try touching her again, but I doubted it was very many.

Though Nico constantly struggled for balance in his new uprooted-ness, he managed to find a foothold some days. Luckily, this seemed to be one of those days. You could feel it in him, even around him, the ground stronger underneath your own feet in his proximity. I accredited some of it to his natural-born qualities, and some of it to his nationality. He had been raised to experience the present. I had been raised to live in the future: I ate breakfast so I could get ready for school, I sat through school so I could go home, I did my homework so I could get ready for dinner, I ate dinner so I could watch
Full House
. Nico ate dinner so he could
wring every available bit of pleasure and taste and human company
out of an evening. When he could locate himself in the present, it was as if he carried the weight of centuries, the bricks of a whole village, inside him. Those times, when he lay down next to me, he sunk like a thousand pounds of soft, rare stone.

Today, he said, “It’s OK, no problem.” He held onto me while I cried.

And so we spent our time. I went to work, and came home. As in California, how I felt in Alabama depended on the day. One day, we drove to a BBQ shack on Mobile Bay for dinner and I ordered rum and pineapple juice, like someone who drank for fun, not someone who drank because she wished she were dead. Another day, I came home and changed and we ran laughing to the pool. Another night, when we tried to have sex, it went so poorly that it ignited a huge fight.

“You should get a
non
-crazy slut,” I was spitting at him toward the end of it, because I had used to be one of those, and I wanted to be one again so badly. What beautiful, virile Nico needed was the old me. I had been able to go from zero to sixty and back in twenty hot, fast minutes. I had desire, and then I had orgasms. Ta-da! Now I kept thinking I had desire, but when I went after it, I ended up feeling terrified and gross. At first, I wished that would stop, but since it was increasingly appearing like that wasn’t going to happen soon, I started wishing I’d never liked sex in the first place.

“There’s no permission or accepted precedent,” Denise said sympathetically about this once, “socially, for a woman to just approach sex like ‘I wanna FUCK.’”

Oh, but I had. Whether because of my overtly lusty parents or the unapologetically smutty dykes I’d come up with, I had used to do that, and what a miracle I had been. I hadn’t realized the miracle at the time. How I missed that girl now. Nico had been the last person to kiss her, and I was glad he’d only barely met her. If he’d known her well, he would’ve missed her, too, and I couldn’t have dealt with that.

There was the time in Alabama where we drove past a haunted house together and I tried to explain to him what a haunted house was, and he said, “They grab you like
this
?” and caught me off-guard with a hand to my right breast, and I curled up into a strict ball, knees into my chest, sliding my back down to the seat of the passenger seat, arms wrapped around my legs, a weird low, involuntary moan escaping my mouth.

But hey, man: Don’t take it personally.

Nico retracted and turned rigid, and like that we drove for blocks, a cold silence settled between us. When we got back to the hotel, he said he felt sick and took a nap. After he woke up, he was tense and cold until bedtime.

Possibly I should mention here that in addition to being worried about me, and the immigration thing, the ninth anniversary of Nico’s father’s suicide fell in the middle of our trip to Alabama.

*   *   *

Every morning, I woke up and drove to Brannan’s house. There I sat in her living room, observing or doing my own work as she worked, and going with her wherever she went. Whenever Caleb emerged from his room, I’d chat with him, and he would tell me he felt like shit, or how he was glad Brannan did the work she did, because it was good for her big heart and for other people who were going through what they were. When Katie came home from school, I’d play games with her. When Shilo came through the room, sure as a dope hound would’ve gone for pockets stuffed with junk, the trained PTSD service dog jumped onto the couch and put her paws on my chest.

When Brannan took breaks, she came and sat by me, and we talked about her work or who’d had what kind of recent episode. Whenever that person was me, she saw my guilt about the impact on Nico.

“It’s his choice,” she said, whether to stay with me or not.

Brannan was an avid defender of that choice, and not a fan of people telling other people they shouldn’t be in their relationships. People asked her all the time why she didn’t get divorced. Even when they didn’t have the balls to say it, she knew that’s what they were thinking. She admitted that she’d thought about it. Vietnam veterans with severe PTSD are 69 percent more likely than other vets to have their marriages fail. Brannan knew plenty of spouses from more recent wars who’d done it. She also knew that 65 percent of active-duty suicides, which were so high as to outpace combat deaths, were precipitated by broken relationships. But it wasn’t the concern that Caleb would kill himself that kept Brannan with him—it’d happened before that he’d downed so much medication and booze that she told him he was going to die and he said, “Well, what if I don’t care?” Her fear that he’d commit suicide and leave her guilty and their child fatherless wasn’t her reason.

“I love him,” she said. “I have enormous respect for Caleb. He has never stopped fighting for this family. Now, we’ve had little
breaks
from therapy, but he never stopped going to therapy.” On FOV’s Web site, she once published a love letter to Caleb that explained all the reasons she wanted to stay with him. Because the person who most often asked Brannan why she stayed with her husband was her husband.

She said he was her friend, and her first love, and her rock, and her lifeline. Her young daughter’s blossoming father, her ally, her hero.

She told me she’d learned not to take his symptoms personally, most of the time. She told everyone they had to learn how to do that.

Still, one morning when I walked in, she was exhausted and haggard-looking already. “It’s been one of those mornings,” she said. And that morning was the fourth morning in a row she had said that. She walked upstairs to rouse her husband, which she always did at arm’s length in case he woke up swinging, and I heard his voice bellow through the house as he screamed at her to leave him alone NOW. They had a doctor’s appointment this morning, but Brannan was going to have to cancel it. She told me he’d had a particularly rough and screamy batch of nightmares last night.

When Katie came home from school, as we were playing a game, I asked her if her dad had woken her up last night, being that she was in the next room over.

She said nothing.

Her lack of response made me think that she hadn’t heard me. I tried one more time. “Katie, did you hear your dad last night, did he wake you up?”

Katie, rambunctious and wild, impossible to quiet or calm down, acted as if I hadn’t said anything.

But things would get better that night. Tonight was Lasagna Night. I’d gone and picked up the ingredients that Brannan needed after work last night. This morning, Brannan had browned the meat for Caleb’s favorite dish, talking to Shilo about it. “Daddy will be really happy,” she told the dog sitting on her kitchen floor. “Of course, he’s too cranky to be happy about anything, and he’ll be mad because Katie won’t eat it because I spent all day makin’ it and the only thing she wants to eat right now is pancakes.” The Vineses had invited Nico and me to join them for dinner; I would go back to the hotel later and pick him up. They didn’t make plans to hang out with other couples often, or even relatives, because people didn’t understand that things could come apart in an instant if Caleb had a “bad PTSD moment.” Brannan knew we already knew how that worked.

And dinner was a smashing success! Nico walked into the house in his nice button-down and right out to Caleb on the back porch, the men shaking hands. Brannan put a big bowl of salad and an array of dressings on the kitchen counter with the lasagna, and a frosted Bundt cake with chocolate chips in it. We made ourselves plates, then huddled around the coffee table in the living room. Katie bounced around us, unable to keep her seat in the excitement of the visitors, running to and from her room to bring and show me games and drawings. The men talked about weapons. We made fun of Caleb for being so old. Caleb told Brannan that she should learn a little something about gift expectations from watching us when I asked Nico what he was getting me for my birthday and he said, “Love.”

We talked about our engagement.

We had got engaged.

One day, I had said to Nico, “Yes, I want to marry you.” He was silent for a while as a slow smile permeated his face. He cried a little bit.

“I will make you happy,” he said. Some days later, we woke up smiling at each other and he said, “I was dreaming we were shopping for engagement rings.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “I was dreaming I stepped in a decomposing face.”

Brannan and Caleb were happy for us. Though Caleb warned Nico that if he thought I stole a lot of food off his plate now, it was only going to get worse after I was his wife. The evening was long, and loud with laughter. There was one mildly uncomfortable thing where Caleb told us that the Iraqis were the worst people in the world to deal with, specifically because one time someone fired a missile at his unit and it didn’t explode but lodged in the side of a building and little Iraqi kids were running up and kicking it. He was in charge of making sure everyone stayed back, but the kids kept coming, unsupervised. No one in their community or family was watching or stopping these kids. He became very worked up while telling us about this.