“I...” She stared but seemed to not know what to say. Only when he looked down into her eyes did she blurt, “My father killed himself.”
Fuck. Whatever he’d been expecting her to say—maybe some crap about peace talks and nonviolence being the answer—it hadn’t been that.
“Christ, Annie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...” He put thebucket down by the door and raked his fingers through his hair. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
She shook her head. “No. I want you to know. Delta. The war. They changed him. They made him into something I didn’t recognize. If you could have known him before...” She had a faraway look in her eyes as if she were in another time and place. “He was funny and kindhearted, always smiling and doing nice things for my mother and me. They’d married out of high school, and everyone said they’d never seen two people more in love. He doted on her—adored her—and me. I remember his carrying me around on his shoulders everywhere when I was young, and taking me fishing and to the park. He even tried to take me hunting one time.”
Her mouth quirked, and he couldn’t help wondering how that had gone. Something occurred to him, and he groaned. “Don’t tell me you are a vegetarian?”
“Okay, I won’t.” She managed a smile. “But I hope you have something other than fillet of Mickey planned for dinner.”
“Protein bars?”
“That’ll work.”
“Did he give you that?” He indicated the watch she was fiddling with. He’d noticed how careful she was to protect it in the rain and suspected it was special.
She nodded. “On a trip to Disney World before he left for Iraq. It is one of my best memories of him.”
Dean wasn’t sure if she would continue, but she seemed to want to get it off her chest, so he didn’t stop her.
“After my dad went to Iraq, he started to change. He was more irritable when he came home. He couldn’t sleep. He’d snap at me and my mother a lot. And he drank more—a lot more. Not beer like he used to but Jack Daniel’s.” She wrinkled her nose. “I still hate the smell of whiskey. But all that was nothing compared to after he was recruited for Delta and went to Afghanistan. He wouldn’t talk about it, but whatever he did over there—whatever they changed him into—he came back a different person. It got really bad after he was nearly killed by an IED. He’d lose his temper at the smallest thing, and his anger was terrifying—he’d go into this dark rage. Hewithdrew from my mother—and from me. He lost track of things and even forgot my birthday. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when they started fighting.” She closed her eyes as if she could block out the sounds. When she opened them again, he could see the horror. “He hit her. My smiling, loving father who never raised a hand to a woman in his life backhanded my mom so hard across the face that she needed stitches.”
Dean started to reach for her, wanting to give her comfort, but she shook him off and stepped back. “No, let me finish. I need to say it all. Do you know I’ve never told anyone this?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “He was drunk, but it wasn’t an excuse. He knew it as well as everyone else did when he finally woke from his haze in jail. My mom didn’t waste any time. She packed a few things and took us to a hotel, planning to leave the next morning for Florida, where my grandparents live.”
Up until this point there had been very little emotion in her voice, but that was about to change.
“I was a teenager. I didn’t understand everything that was going on. I didn’t like what had happened to my dad, but he was still my dad, and I loved him.” She looked up at him, pleading somehow for understanding. He did the only thing he could and nodded. “I snuck out of the hotel to go back to our house to see him before we left. To ask him to work it out with my mom. I didn’t want to leave.” She drew a deep breath. “I was the one who found him.”
Ah, shit.
Dean hadn’t said it aloud, but she turned to meet his gaze as if he had. Her eyes were so glassy and full of pain, it felt as if he had a vise around his chest, squeezing out his breath. “He was so ashamed and so filled with self-loathing at what he’d become—at what our military had turned him into—that he put a bullet through his head.”
Dean had waited long enough. This time she didn’t resist when he drew her into his arms. He wanted to make it all better for her and take away all the hurt. But as that wasn’t possible, he did the only thing he could and just held her.
She let him for a few minutes, but then seemed to collect herself and pulled away. She dabbed a single tear from her eye and looked up at him. “So now you know. That’s why I said what I did.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard a story like that. A guy in Retiarius had killed himself a few years back after leaving the Teams. You didn’t come out of what they did unscathed, but it didn’t mean they were all violent volcanoes waiting to erupt, either.
He should just let it go. He had no reason to change her mind. It would be easier when they parted if he didn’t. But it somehow became the most important thing to him at that moment that she not see it that way. “Your father needed help, Annie. He should have gotten it. I’m not making excuses, but things have changed since then. There’s been more training, and the people in charge know the signs and what to look for. I don’t know what your father saw or did or what caused him to do what he did—and PTSD is a serious problem—but there may also have been a physiological explanation for what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said he was nearly killed by an IED?” She nodded. “There were probably a half dozen other blasts that you didn’t know about—guys fighting over there had to deal with it constantly. The symptoms you describe—forgetting things, not sleeping, depression—are hallmarks of brain injury from explosions that doctors have identified in returning veterans.”
She looked stunned. “You mean like the football players?”
“Kind of. I’m not a doc, but as I understand it, it’s in a different part of the brain and doesn’t look the same under the microscope. CTE—the football concussion problem—is a buildup of a protein over time, but what they see with blasts is more like scarring.”
“How come I’ve never heard about this?”
“It’s only come out recently. But the military is taking it very seriously. They now have a written protocol for handling guys exposed to blasts—checklists, test questions, things like that.” He didn’t mention that guys actually learned theanswers to try to avoid being pulled out, so the military had to develop a number of different tests. Not everything had changed. Guys were still resistant to being pulled out, but it was Dean’s job to make sure they were. That included himself. He’d seen a doctor as soon as he reached safety. Apparently he had a hard head. “And guys in combat zones wear tiny gauges on their uniforms that show if they’ve been too close to a blast.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, obviously trying to process all he’d said. “So it might not have been his fault?”
“I’m saying there might have been a reason that had nothing to do with him being a ‘machine.’” He paused. “Look, I’m not saying that guys like your dad don’t have to deal with some fucked-up shit.” He’d seen his share of it. “And that can sometimes mess with their heads and make it difficult to adjust when they get home. But what he did—as a Ranger and with Delta—those guys are some of the best in the world at what they do.” Of course, Dean would never say that in front of any of the Delta boys—wouldn’t want to confuse them on who wasthebest. “No matter what the liberal pundits want to think, until this world turns into Disneyland, we need people like him to keep everyone else safe. People who make the hard choices and difficult decisions so you don’t have to.
“ISIS isn’t going to play nice if we put away our guns and go home. There isn’t going to be a meeting of the minds no matter how hard we all ‘try to get along.’ They have one goal and that is to destroy us and our way of life. That’s it. And they won’t stop until we stop them. That’s the ugly reality whether liberals want to acknowledge it or not. So every time you think about whether we need ‘machines’ like your father, think about the alternative. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be a woman under ISIS rule. Your father made a sacrifice so that you have the freedom to wear those little shorts you had on earlier, get your PhD, and protest a drillship.”
