Thank You for Your Service (24 page)

Her lesson learned, then: it came to her six days later.

She was in Sacramento, at the funeral home, just her and Summer and Jessie, who was in a propped-open casket at the front of the room. Visitors would be along in a while, but for now, on this day, the day before his funeral when he would go in the ground and she would have nothing to figure things out by except for her bruised house and her hidden
texts, she had two hours on her own to consider him as he lay in front of her. It was the same amount of time as a meeting in the Gardner Room, but here there was only one case to consider and one person to do it.

She went up to the casket and held his hand for a while. She used her fingers to brush his hair. She took a seat in the first pew, all the way to the right, and while Summer crawled around her legs, she thought about who Jessie had been before he died, before he kneeled in his own blood, before he sent her so many texts that began with the word “please,” before he thought about punching her fucking nose and watching it bleed, before he needed those towels folded, before he saw a pink mist, before he held a skull together, before he went to war. She thought all the way back to the beginning when she was at that church dinner, so bored, and he took the seat across from her.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“Paperwork,” he said.

That’s all it took. One routine question, one silly answer, and right then she felt herself tipping over the edge and falling in love. Just like that. No way to explain it. It just happened. And that was her lesson learned, that she had married a wonderful man.

Now it is Adam Schumann who is in Sacramento, standing alone at the airport curb. It’s warm out compared with what Kansas had been, and yet something about the air makes him want to shiver. Even in Iraq, at least on the good days, he didn’t feel this unnerved.

The flight from Kansas City to Salt Lake City might be part of the reason—he wanted to sleep but ended up next to a snorer who kept sprawling onto his shoulder. The flight to Sacramento was worse—this time he was next to a man who reeked of liquor and could barely buckle in, even with a seat belt extender. But the bigger reason, and probably the real reason, was the older man now approaching him, who is decked out in an earring and one of those California tans.

“Fred,” the man says, extending his hand.

“Adam,” Adam says warily, and then, wondering what he is getting himself into, climbs into Fred Gusman’s car.

Patti Walker is responsible for this. Since Adam had stopped by her office that day, she had been looking for a program for him, and when neither Topeka nor Pueblo had room, she found one in California called the Pathway Home. Fred Gusman was its director. The program was fairly new, not well known, and much more unconventional than the others. Topeka, for instance, was part of the VA system, and Pueblo relied on insurance payments; this one was opened with a five-million-dollar grant from private benefactors that covered the first three years, and was now scraping by on fund-raising and donations. Pueblo was four weeks and Topeka was seven weeks; this one was four months minimum and often longer. Still, when Patti called Adam to tell him
about it, he said yes on the spot. He had lost fifteen pounds over the past few weeks and was up to two packs of cigarettes a day. Patti was thrilled.

Saskia Schumann

Saskia was not. The idea that Adam would be gone for so long, and that he had decided to go without even discussing it with her, had left her fuming. She wanted him to get help. She had been the one begging in the furnace room. But four
months
? And not sixty miles away in Topeka, where she and the kids could drive over and visit him, but seventeen hundred miles away in California? “Well, Patti wants him to go to the California one, so I guess he’s going to the California one,” she said angrily. “Guess Patti was able to decide my life for me.” Later, after talking to Patti, angrier still, she said, “Of course, Patti used my favorite quote: ‘Stay strong. You’re a soldier’s wife.’ Makes me want to puke.” But an opening was an opening, and in the same way that Tausolo Aieti had ended up in Topeka and Nic DeNinno had ended up in Pueblo, Adam was off to California, leaving behind for Saskia a flower on the nightstand and a note that said “I promise to be a better man when I return.”

In the car now, Adam looks out the window as Fred steers away from the airport and asks how his flights were. They had talked once by phone, but that was it. They know nothing about each other.

“Miserable,” Adam says.

“So how’s your wife?” Fred tries.

“She’s okay,” Adam says. “Just nervous. Like I am.”

“Well, when you see the place, you’ll probably think this is beautiful,” Fred says. “A lot of trees. A lot of grass. Green.”

Adam is far from the first person to sit across from Fred Gusman in these circumstances. In the three years since he left a high-level job at the VA to open Pathway, a few hundred combat vets have been through the program, and every one of them had been as nervous as Adam. Fred keeps a running tally of who has come his way. Sixty percent had tried to kill themselves. Seventy-three percent had quit or been fired from a job. Eighty percent had tried school, of which eighty-three percent dropped out. Most pertinent to this moment, every one of them felt disgusted with himself for needing to come here, and Fred knows to keep these drives low-key.

“What’d your case manager tell you about the place?” he asks.

“Not much. I’m in the dark,” Adam says.

Fred points to some distant buildings on the horizon. “That’s Sacramento, our capital city. Not the biggest city in the world,” he says.

“A lot bigger than what I’m used to,” Adam says.

Now Fred angles southwest, away from the city, and soon they are cutting through farmland that is at least a little reminiscent of Kansas. “So what’s the population where you live?”

“Junction City?” Adam says. “I think about thirty thousand.” He has an empty soda bottle in his hands, and he begins crushing it over and over.

“So how many deployments have you had?”

“Three,” Adam answers, and then, after a pause, says, “It’s the last one that did it.”

“Well, what you’re going to have the opportunity to do is push through some of these things,” Fred says. “A better quality of life. That’s the main thing.” He mentions that the program has three psychologists and three family therapists, that there’s a massage therapist who drops by sometimes and a yoga instructor, too, that the guys go fly fishing and at the moment are out bowling. There are no locked doors, he says. No demerits. No privileges to be earned or lost. Nothing like that. “Over time, you’ll figure it out,” he says. “We tell everybody to keep an open mind. Especially the first week or so. It can feel a little awkward.”

“How long you been doing this?” Adam asks.

Fred laughs a little. “For forever,” he says.

“Yeah?” Adam says.

“Since four years after the Vietnam War.”

“Oh. That
is
forever,” Adam says.

They keep going and are now flanked on both sides by high hills, and Adam is staring out at them in silence, thinking how odd they look, how smooth, like they’re coated in velvet or something, when a sudden noise startles him. It’s an approaching motorcycle zooming between cars at full throttle. It pulls even for a moment and then flies past, and if this were ten years ago, the young guy straddling it with his shirt tail flapping behind him could have been Adam himself, on his way home to sit in the sun and meet the new girl in the basement apartment.

“Jesus!” he says as the motorcycle disappears somewhere ahead and the noise fades.

He takes a deep breath.

“Everybody has ups and downs,” Fred says.

“Story of my life,” Adam says.

“Well,” Fred says, telling him one more thing about the program, “you’ll be with a lot of ups and downs.”

They’ve been driving for more than an hour now, and as they emerge from the high hills and head north past the town of Napa into a landscape of vineyards, Adam says to Fred, “It just feels like I’m in another country.”

“I’ve never seen a tree like these,” he says a few minutes later.

“I’m so damn nervous.”

Now Fred is pointing again. This time it’s at a hill, on the slope of which is a collection of white buildings. Inside one of them is Adam’s room. It has a mattress, a closet, a sink, and a window, and outside the window is a hundred-foot-high palm tree that Adam will soon be obsessed with climbing to the very top.

Maybe he’ll just jump.

Maybe a swan dive.

“There’s the Pathway Home,” Fred says, turning toward the entrance, and a few minutes later, Adam is inside.

A week later, the flower on the nightstand dying, Saskia sends her vanished husband a text message, sends him another, sends another saying “Call me,” sends another, calls him and leaves a message on his voice mail, wonders if he’s not answering because he’s in therapy, wonders if he’s out fishing, wonders if he’s out bowling, wonders if he’s at a restaurant, wonders if he’s picking up a knife pretending to cut into a steak, wonders if he’s aiming it at his chest instead, wonders if he’s stabbing himself, wonders how she’ll tell the kids, wonders what she’ll do now that he’s dead, and after sending twenty texts without getting an answer, her stomach hurting, her nerves shot, she says: “It’s not going well. I’m a mess. A hot mess. Right now, I’ve probably lost five or six pounds since
he left. I have yet to eat a meal. We constantly fight. If I see Patti Walker, I might punch her in the face. We’ve been fighting all week. Yesterday afternoon we kind of patched things up. At five-thirty, I called him and said, ‘You need to talk to Zoe. She’s not listening to me.’ He talked to her, and then I got back on the phone and he started yelling at me. Screaming. You could hear him smashing things. You could hear things breaking.”

She says: “I can’t do this anymore. I’m an absolute mess. He never should have gone out there in the first place, and it irritates the hell out of me that Patti Walker is his little pawn. She called the other day and asked if I needed yard work to be done. Well, I can do the fucking yard work. I told her how bad he was doing, and she said, ‘Well, you have to be patient.’ I’ll tell you what. If one more person tells me to be patient, I’m going to need a fucking institution. I mean I know she’s trying to help, but she’s influencing him. The ‘stay strong, you’re a soldier’s wife’? I could have taken a gun and killed her that day. He’s not a soldier anymore. He’s fucking screwed up.”

She says: “I knew this thing was a bad idea from the start. When I have a bad feeling about something, I’m usually right.”

She says: “I’m pissed. I’m pissed. I really am fucking pissed. I won’t get over it. He gets to go fishing. He gets to go out on weekends. I can’t do any of that. I’m always getting the short end of the stick. I am here, taking care of everything. This is not why I got married and had kids, to do this on my own. If I could take it all back, I would. I wish I had never met the man.”

She says: “
I’d
like to stay in a hospital for a couple of weeks. And sleep. That would be great. Medicate me.”

She says: “Fuck. I didn’t even have any help after I had a baby. And then he
dropped
him.”

She says: “I feel like my heart is ready to explode.”

She says: “I hate that man so much right now.”

She says: “All I can think about is how much I hate him but how much I want him home.”

When did she become this way? That’s something else she keeps wondering, because ten years ago, when she was the girl about to meet Adam, she had a vision of how her life was going to go and it didn’t include such rage. The basement where she was living was supposed to be a first stop, not a continuing theme. She had moved there straight out of high school because she was tired of having a curfew and it was what she could afford. “I had fun. Partied. Drank. Hung out with completely older people. I wasn’t bad, though. I didn’t do stupid stuff. I didn’t drink and drive. I didn’t sleep around,” she says of the girl she once was. She understood that some people paid attention to her because of her looks, and she didn’t mind that, but she had her own way of seeing herself. She was going to have a career of some sort, in some kind of office, and a closet full of business clothes. Single, strong, dependent on no one—that kind of life. She’d start in a basement, save money, go to school, and end up wherever. She was open to anything. She glowed in those days. She had so much confidence, and compassion, too, and now the most compassion she can muster is when she is running errands around town and sees young wives with their soldier husbands.
You poor fuck
, she thinks.
You have no idea what it will be like in five years
.