Walker
What are the chances I’m going to get my sight back?” I ask Doctor Monroe before I’ve even sat down in his squishy chair.
There’s a pregnant pause and then he speaks. “That’s up to you, Lieutenant. There’s nothing more I can do. You have to confront the trauma head-on if there’s to be any hope of lifting the blindness.”
Frustration bites at me. “But I just want to move on,” I growl at him.
He replies very quietly, as if countering my outburst. “Sometimes we can’t move on until we’ve looked back and dealt with the past.”
I scowl, my fists punching the chair. “I can’t.”
“I think you can.”
Now I’m angry. Why doesn’t he get it? “I can’t!” I yell. “You don’t understand! I think about it all the time already. I can’t get away from it. It doesn’t matter how much I confront it, how much I look back, it doesn’t get me anywhere. There is no way of dealing with it.”
“There is.” Doctor Monroe answers in that ever-calm voice of his. “It’s called forgiving yourself.”
I laugh, short and sharp. It comes out like a whip cracking against bare skin.
“If you can’t do that, Lieutenant—”
“Don’t call me that,” I snap. “I’m not a lieutenant anymore. I’ve applied for a discharge. I’m going to be a civilian soon enough—call me by my name. My real name.”
“Is that what you want? Because you know you can stay in the military. There are options.”
“A desk job?” I scoff. “What am I going to do? Learn to read Braille?” I laugh again, this time even more bitterly. I shake my head at him. “I don’t want to stay in the marines. I’m not a marine anymore.”
“I thought it was once a marine, always a marine. Isn’t that what they say?”
“Not in this case,” I shoot back.
All those qualities he made me list off during that session we had are all just lies, adjectives they use to make us believe we’re better, stronger, more capable than other people. They’re lies they tell kids like Dodds who don’t have any other options and nothing better to believe in, and idiots like me who should know better. But now I’ve seen the truth, faced it in a way none of the PR people who make up those adjectives ever will. We’re as weak and vulnerable as everyone else.
And what I know is this: there’s no honor in dying on a dusty road in a foreign land for a cause you don’t even understand, screaming for your mother who’s ten thousand miles away as you bleed out, begging for someone to save you. There’s no peace to be had in knowing you’re fighting for something bigger than you, there’s just horror when you come to realize in that moment—that infinite time-stretching moment—how insignificant you really are, how, in a blinding flash, you can be reduced to nothing but ash and bone and a boot lying tipped on its side.
And that cancels everything out.
All that bullshit they spout about heroism . . . they tack a silver star to my shoulder and think that’s all it will take to make me feel better, to erase the memories? Five people dead and a silver star is my reward. My punishment.
“And then?”
I realize the doc is talking to me. Waiting on an answer.
And then . . . nothing. And then . . . nothing will ever be the same again.
“And then I don’t know,” I say because he’s still waiting on an answer. “I might go stay with my brother.”
As soon as I say it I know I’m talking out of my ass. I can’t stay with Isaac. What am I going to do? Tag along with him to glittering art openings? The blind brother who can’t even make small talk about the art on display? I just want to hole up and hide. I want to hole up and hide with Didi. His daughter. Because in bed with her, holding her in my arms, is the closest to peace I’ve come since that day, the closest I think I’ll ever come. Last night was the first night I’ve had with no nightmares.
But I can’t tell him that. I can just picture his expression if I did—his glasses fogging up with fury. Yeah, a mental patient probably isn’t too high on the list of potential suitors for his daughter. And how can I run away and hide with her—with a girl who has a bright future? A future I’d be holding her back from. I can’t do that to her.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve started thinking about the future,” Doctor Monroe says, “even if you’re reticent in thinking about the past.”
Yes, I have started to think about the future. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that my future points one way and hers points another.