Lars
I WAS SHUT in my room detoxing again. But this time I wasn’t detoxing from booze. I was detoxing from Molly.
She’d left. Given up on me and on us once and for all.
I’d almost forgotten on my way out of the VA that Molly wouldn’t be in the car waiting for me. I wanted to tell her what they’d said. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t some lunatic. All the voices and noises I heard louder than anyone else–all of it had a name. And I wasn’t crazy. The guy said he could give me some tools to use to deal with some of the flashbacks, without pills and without the bottle.
And without my girl.
I had slammed the door on Jameson when he told me she was gone. I just didn’t want to hear it and more than anything I needed a minute to get a hold of myself.
“That’s all you need,” the doctor said. “Give yourself a minute to calm yourself down. Two, three fifteen minutes if you need it. The people who love you will give it to you and understand. Even an hour in a room by yourself is better than downing a bottle of whiskey in ten minutes.”
I came out a few minutes later. Jameson had been talking on the phone.
“Don’t tell me you were talking to her. I can’t believe you.”
“What?” he said, helping himself to a bottle of water from my fridge. “She’s not the enemy. Both of you are my friends and both of you are idiots.”
Great. More of the tough love from my best friend. I should’ve picked someone else to buddy up with in the desert.
“Oh good.” I sat down on the couch. “Another lecture from the great and mighty Jameson.”
“Shut up. You two are about as stupid as they come.”
I stood up then. I’d had enough.
“Don’t you ever call her stupid again. You can say what you want to me but not one more word about Molly.”
“Why?” He challenged me, chest to chest.
“Because I love her and I won’t stand for it. I may be a drunk but I know what love is.”
He backed off. His shoulders began to shake and then the rest of his body. He was laughing at me.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Dude, that’s almost a line from Forrest Gump. ‘I might not be a smart man…but I know what love is.’ I can’t take you seriously when you quote Forrest Gump and with that accent. It’s just too much.”
His own mocking of me sent him into a doubled over laughing fit.
I had to join him.
He was right after all.
I was about as Forrest Gump as they came when it came to Molly.
When we had both recovered, I looked him dead in the eye.
“You know where she is?”
He nodded.
“I’ve got money for gas.”
He smiled at me. “I’ve got a car and a license.”
“Meet me back here in twenty minutes. It’s about an eight hour drive.”
“You got it.”
He left and I pulled out my uniform. It was tight around my beer gut but still fit. This was what Molly deserved. Her soldier, coming to get his woman.
And I was going to give it to her.
“THAT WASN’T WHAT happened and you know it.”
Jameson and I argued all the way to the Texas line about things that happened in Afghanistan and afterward.
I wasn’t lying.
He was.
“Sometimes flashing lights scare me,” Jameson said out of nowhere. “It doesn’t happen as much anymore. I do this thing where I blink ten times. If the lights are just lights, then I’m fine. They always are, of course. But in my mind they are…”
“I know,” I said, not making him finish the sentence. “Me too. And loud noises. Not any loud noises. I know that a train passing by is going to make a noise. But when the loud noise comes out of nowhere…”
“Yeah, I get some of that too. The dreams have softly gone away.”
“I don’t have dreams when I’m drunk.”
“I guess not. Are they back?”
“Not as bad as I thought they’d be. The doctor at the VA said I’m probably more afraid of them coming back than the actual dream. He wants me to meditate and listen to soothing sounds at night when I’m going to sleep.”
Jameson laughed and got off the interstate.
“This is it. We’re about twenty minutes away. Do you know what you’re going to say?”
I looked out the window. “Yeah, but right now it’s ‘Hey, Molly. I love you. How about giving it a shot with your ex-drunk husband?’.”
When he didn’t say anything, I just looked ahead.
“Well, the good news is that you now have fifteen minutes to make up a speech that will change the rest of your life. And I’ll be here in the car–praying.”
“Remind me not to make you my best man.”
“Please, like you could find anyone else.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence except for the few times I had to direct him from the GPS picture on his phone.
By the look of the outside, it didn’t look like the safest of places. Iron rods decorated the outside of the windows.
I got out of the car but then went back and stuck my head through the open window. “Hey, Jameson, in case I haven’t told you and I’m pretty sure I haven’t, thanks for always giving it to me straight.”
“Just go in there before I start crying.”
I got up the stairs and knocked on apartment K. There was no answer so I knocked until my knuckles felt like they would bleed any second.
“What do you want?”
Molly jerked open the door. Her hair was disheveled and she was in her pajamas…at three in the afternoon.
“I want to talk to you, now that you ask.” It wasn’t really the time for sarcasm, but it’s what I had.
“Lars? Um, yeah, come in. How did you get here?”
I cleared my throat and looked around at her sparse furniture. She was worse than me.
“It turns out that I have a great best friend who will drive me to Dallas even though I’ve been a real pain in the butt the last, I don’t know, ten years.”
“At least you realize it now.”
“I realize a lot of things now.”
She looked up at me. I knew what I needed to say but standing there in front of her was worse than being at that AA meeting.
“I realize that I love you and I don’t care about having kids or whatever dreams I thought I once had. The only thing I care about is sharing my life with you. I care about not wasting one more second of my life drowning in a bottle–drowning without you.”
I had her for a second. Her face changed but only instantly.
“No, that’s not true, Lars. You want a big family. It’s all you talked about.”
“I kind of already have one. I’m just missing you from it.”
She bunched her eyebrows. “What?”
“Well, I have a whole town of people who have been treating me like family for almost a decade. I’ve got parents and tons of brothers, sisters, and nieces and nephews. Some great nieces and nephews too. I’ve already got a big family it seems. But an entire stadium of family doesn’t mean anything without my Molly.”