Chapter Text
April 16, 2021 - Friday
He feels it first thing, in the soles of his socked feet, padding from the corner cot to the bay window, where his plant rack holds vigil. The cold always seeps in overnight when the fire burns low. The forecasted high is twenty-five today; after the low fifties of the past three days, it stings like a broken promise. He’s never liked wearing socks, but out here going barefoot will most certainly lead to frostbite.
On his way he fishes out his slippers from underneath the leather recliner and steps into them. The fire is dying in the wood-burning stove that squats in the center of the room; by themselves the electric baseboards are too weak to keep it comfortable. Steve still hasn’t figured out what Joe was thinking when he went with those instead of a propane furnace. Maybe he didn’t want a flammable tank close, as if he knew his new cabin would become the scene of a paramilitary ambush less than a year after its construction, or maybe it was a cost-cutting measure. At some point Steve’s going to look into converting them. It’s on his list, that never-ending list.
His indoor firewood pile is depleted. He should’ve fetched more last night from the shed, but couldn’t bring himself to go outside in the frigid night. He’ll go in a bit, once the sun is up, however capricious the warmth it adds.
With the temperate weather these past days, some ground and foliage had started to poke through the ever-present snow. All that effort has been reset now: a fresh two inches coat the ground, erase any hint of spring. His plants look vibrant against the monotone background.
He built the rack himself, out of cheap lumber from the home improvement store outside Missoula, two shelves mounted on two angled beams, fashioned specifically to the height of this particular window so all seven four-inch-pot plants—three on the top, four on the bottom shelf—receive equal amounts of sunlight.
He checks the Marble Queen Pothos first, the one that started it all. It’s thriving, full vines happily spilling out from the corner of the top shelf. One of the older leaves near the soil has yellowed; he picks it off. The Philodendron Micans next to it is pushing out three new leaves. It sits in the middle, dark green foliage velvety and seductive. Next to it is the scraggly Neon Pothos with its two thin vines and sparse leaves. No matter what Steve’s done, bottom rack or top rack, keep it damp or let it air out, give it plant food or rainwater, the little plant has refused to grow any fuller.
It just doesn’t like you, Danny would say. It’s got good taste.
He lifts it to see if it’s root-bound, but no. Returning it to its place is when he feels it, the cold draft, from the corner of the window. Is that maybe why? He tugs the rack six inches in the other direction, away from the faulty pane. He must not have done a neat enough job installing it. This window was one of the first things he did when he arrived a year ago, custom fitting it into the gash left by the RPG in the south wall of the living room. Maybe he should be grateful it withstood the Montana winter at all, considering the state he was in back then. Isn’t that what he’s supposed to do, adjust his expectations?
It’s Friday. Two more days until he sees Danny.
—
At these temperatures, the air feels like running into someone’s fist: his nose aches like it’s broken, his teeth pull like they’re about to fall out. He hurries across the barren ground to the shed where he’s learned to keep the majority of his firewood since that first November snowstorm buried it.
He turns the corner of the cabin and a large body lurches toward him. He’s back against the wall, in a defensive crouch before he has a conscious thought, much less employ one of those fancy strategies of Tennant’s. His heavy breath whitens the air, then pales away.
It’s a buck, the buck—Asshole. It springs over terrain, much nimbler than its above-average stocky body promises, leaps across the driveway and beats it to the edge of the woods. There, it stops and looks back, as if wanting to know who’s responsible for startling it. It still has its single antler.
All this time, all this work, and here Steve is again, shaking like a stray because of a goddamn deer. On quavering legs he draws himself to his full height, takes a few stomping steps toward the animal. Asshole snorts, as if in derision, and disappears into the bush.
—
Their feud started in the summer, before Steve made peace with his houseplant hobby but after he impulse-bought the Marble Queen Pothos at the general store—its spade-shaped, variegated leaves reminding him of Danny, of Danny’s hair, the way it used to be, full and sun-kissed. He’d just finished with the new bay window and was looking for something to keep his hands full between calls. Something else, that is—none of the higher acuity items on the to-do list of meaningful repairs seemed to qualify.
So he watched some online videos and read some blogs and rolled up his sleeves for a comprehensive backyard garden: six large raised beds and non-genetically modified seeds he had to drive all the way into Missoula to obtain. He planted everything that would have enough time to grow in the roughly two frost-free months left: lettuce and spinach and kale, carrots and beets, broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower. He wanted to grow tomatoes because most of Danny’s recipes feature them prominently, but it turned out one can’t do that at six thousand feet altitude without a greenhouse. It was too much work to educate himself on that as well, so he didn’t. After all, he’d need a project for next summer too.
He wasn’t a fool; he’d seen the deer patrolling the area. He knew what he planted was the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet for wildlife. He had a plan: an eight-foot fence around the garden, the materials of which cost a fortune in currency and half a lifetime in duration to haul down from the home improvement store in Missoula in his low-end, also impulse-bought mainland Silverado.
When it came to installing it, however, he couldn’t go through with it. Chickenwire this tall transported him back to Halawa, of being confined and always having to watch his back. He was barely sleeping as it was then; putting up that fence was going to set him back. He returned it to the store and instead invested in other repellents: shiny objects that jerked around in the slightest breeze, chemical spray that stunk up the whole place but was still better than the tight, sour feeling in his gut, and even noise devices with motion sensors. They worked too, for August and most of September. Through the panes of the back door, he watched the does and yearlings come through, poke around near the garden, then get chased away by one of his gadgets.
This one buck, however, then two-antlered, did not care. It stomped through Steve’s noise emitters and nosed away his spinning CDs and went to town first on the lettuce and kale, then the carrots. Steve found the bodies the next day.
He doubled down on the repellents. The cauliflower fell next.
It was still September. He could plant another round of lettuce, maybe some radishes, kale. Radishes weren’t abundant in Hawai’i, but he’d had them before, on the mainland, liked their biting flavor. Kale was frost-hardy. At this point he and Tennant had gotten a handle on his sleep schedule, he could live with a fence. It wasn’t like he had to spend more than an hour in it at a time. He could build the gate larger and leave it open when he was inside. He could cope. Wasn’t that the best he could hope for anyway, wasn’t that what he got told, over and over again, focus on coping, memorize its strategies?
Up the fence went, in the space of a week, and into the ground the fresh kale and lettuce. Every morning, regardless of what kind of night it’d been, Steve drank his coffee standing by the back door, peering through its window at his garden. Like the little houseplant, it settled the constant roiling in his gut.
It lasted four weeks before Asshole, no doubt in a fit of famishment, barreled through and killed what was left. Steve found its left antler tangled in the decimated fence, incontrovertible forensic evidence of the massacre. He didn’t try again.
—
Four logs are left in the shed. He has to look again, peer behind the door; he spent the entire month of June cutting wood and splitting logs, drove out to the bulk store on Lolo Junction for an extra two cords just so this wouldn’t happen—running out of firewood in March like a schmuck. Then again, he never expected needing it into April.
No, Steven, not a schmuck—a goddamn tourist, that’s who, Danny would say, if he knew. Live trees take at least six months to dry out and burn. The deadfall out there is either buried or frozen, and venturing out for it in this cold is out of the question. His fingers ache at the mere thought.
They ache more clearing the snow from the driver’s side door, where it accumulated because he didn’t manage to park the Silverado quite under the carport. He should’ve looked for one with a remote starter, but he’d been out of it when he bought the dark gray pickup, and getting out of LA before Mary realized what was going on with him had been his primary priority.
Some of the snow has slithered into his sleeve. Sharp and annoying, it bites at his skin, leaves his sleeve damp. At these temperatures, getting anything damp means it’ll stay that way the rest of the day or he has to trek back into the cabin to change. He doesn’t.
Sand, Danny would complain about, getting everywhere. What about snow? That gets everywhere too, leaves its mark, damp and cold. In Steve’s opinion, it’s a thousand times worse than sand.
Snow melts, Steven, he can hear Danny point out. Snow melts and disappears. Sure, it makes things wet and that’s annoying too but then it dries out, so it is a finite annoyance. Sand does not disappear. Sand abrades. In perpetuity. It is not the same.
He’s never seen Danny around snow, never took Danny up on his offers to go to New Jersey together for one of his winter trips. Why didn’t he go? It would’ve been nice to have those memories now.
—
Winter road maintenance in Joe’s neck of the woods is a joke. The county prefers to concentrate their efforts on Missoula north and the ski resorts south. Around Thimble, Montana, about ten meandering miles from the cabin, one might glimpse a county plow truck on Highway 93, but never on the town roads. Those remain in the residents’ purview.
In addition to the cabin’s three-quarters-of-a-mile driveway, Steve is in charge of the several miles of packed-dirt forest service road that coils down the mountain to the nearest neighbor, former Army man Dexter Graham, and is his only connection to civilization. He has lost count of the hours he’s spent plowing this winter, with the engine power of this Silverado only a fraction of the one in Hawai’i. He should’ve researched more before buying, but that’s what needed to happen in that moment, so that’s what he got.
This morning, he doesn’t have it in himself to install the plow blade. He braves the snow-packed road with studded tires alone. For most of the descent he’s all right, but turning onto the highway the truck fishtails, makes his stomach drop.
Danny’s voice is in his ears: what makes you think you’re qualified to drive in this muck, huh, Steven? Having grown up in a pineapple-infested tropical hellhole like you have, you have no idea how to comport yourself in these conditions. I mean, you barely know how to drive when it’s eighty and sunny; you should just stay home whenever there’s more than an inch on the ground, just as a public safety measure.
Danny would know how to drive in the snow. Steve used to watch his hands, strong and capable on the wheel, wonder insolently how they would feel on his body. Once, he’d gotten to touch Danny’s forearms, run the flat of his palms up and down smooth skin and soft hair. It was on the lanai of the stupid couples’ retreat hotel. He’d been helplessly hard, counting on the flimsy napkin in his lap to hide him, so terrified Danny would see.
Main street is clear, no doubt taken care of by Randy and his small business plowing company. Steve pulls up in front of Randy’s other business, the Thimble General Store, a wood-sided, weather-beaten barn at the center of the city with foot-long stalactites hanging off its gutters. The largest store in Thimble, it is about the size of Steve’s Hawai’i living room and consists of two long rows of foodstuffs and one of common household items. Another rack by the single cash register rotates novelty items—that’s where he’d found the Marble Queen last spring.
Today, eight or so scraggly six-inch Monstera plants sit there. With their fan-shaped, cheerful leaves, they are like small tokens from home, where their counterparts grow several feet high with leaves larger than two of Steve’s palms combined. If he didn’t already own a tinier, four-inch version, he’d pick one up today.
Randy’s at the cash register, his coke-bottle readers perched on his forehead while he squints at the phone he holds at arm’s length. When the bell announces Steve’s entrance, he looks up.
“JJ,” he says. Joe Junior. When Steve failed to supply a name in the required time, Randy gave him one based on his address. “I got delivery. Check it out.”
He gestures at the plants. Steve smiles. “Not today, Randy. You got any firewood?”
Randy begins his perilous ascent to his feet. He should’ve gotten the knee replacements last year, he’ll tell anyone who shows the slightest interest, but the surgeon thought he was too fat. How’s he supposed to lose weight if he can’t walk, hoss?
“Tourists from Grantsdale bought my last. Everyone’s running low. Let me see if any’s left in the cellar.”
Steve trudges out after him. Randy’s son-in-law, Billy, is recruited, and helps them load the quarter of a cord into Steve’s truck. It’s not until most of it is stowed away that Steve realizes Randy’s sold him half of his personal supply.
He brings it up inside while Randy’s ringing him up. “Don’t worry about it,” Randy says. “I got propane. I’ll be fine until the shipment next week.”
Steve’s touched. “Thanks, man.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it.”
His eyes wander over the small selection of paperbacks by the register while Randy does what he needs to do. A new Jack Carr novel catches his eye.
He’d read the guy’s debut piece over the course of a year, snippets here and there when he was on a plane or stuck on medical leave, and hadn’t completely hated it. Could he do it? Should he do it? Get the fire going, make some tea, curl up with the book. He hasn’t ever done that, not once in his life, but it sounds cozy. It sounds like another one of those highly enjoyable things he’s been encouraged to try.
Would one book set him back? Is it worth it?
He pays for the firewood and leaves the book.
Billy, Randy’s ruddy son-in-law, wearing nothing but a flannel over jeans—unnatural—is crouched by the left rear wheel of the truck. “You see this, JJ?”
Steve approaches. This is a swathe of black rust covering the wheel well almost all the way to the bumper. His stomach drops. “What the hell?”
“Did you swipe something?”
“No.”
“Must be deer then.”
Steve looks up. “What?”
Billy rises to his feet. Steve runs a disbelieving hand over the roughened, eaten-up metal. It is most certainly real.
“Deer,” Billy repeats. “They like the road salt. Some of ‘em like it more than others.”
“What?”
“They lick it,” Billy says, making a circular motion with his hand. “Them tongues like steel wool. They peel the overcoat and then the paint flakes off and you get rust.”
Asshole, this morning, jumping out of nowhere and scaring the life out of him. This is what it must have been up to. “Shit. What do I do?”
Billy lets out a bright peal of laughter. Snow studs his hair, collects in his thick blond brows. Steve shivers on his behalf, freezing despite the knee-length, goose-down parka he doesn’t regret spending hundreds of dollars on. “You take it to the body shop, hoss.”
“I know that. I mean to make the deer stop.”
“Oh. Just rinse the salt off when you get home.”
—
Just rinse it off. Steve would like nothing more, but the old hose won’t reach the truck in the carport. He has to park it closer to the shed. Once he manages that, the cattywompus old spray nozzle belches icy brown water across his hip, leaving him drenched to the skin and half-frozen. He can’t feel his reddened, roughened hands by the time he makes it back to the cabin. At least with the fire roaring, it has grown nice and warm inside; at least he had the good sense to take the parka off before getting soaked.
He has half an hour before Tennant. Through the bay window, he takes a picture of the snowy landscape and sends it.
Danny responds almost immediately: What the hell, isn’t it April there too?
Asshole ate my truck.
What??
Smiling, Steve slips his phone back into his pocket and goes to find dry clothes.
—
“Look,” says Tennant, and tilts her laptop. A handsome trailing plant fills the screen, its chartreuse spade-shaped leaves spilling over the top of its shiny gray pot.
A Neon Pothos, thriving, unlike Steve’s. It has to be that cold draft. “Wow, Doc. That’s a beautiful plant.”
“Isn’t it?” She beams. “I’ve been using that plant food you recommended and it took such a turn. I was sure it wasn’t going to make it, but look at it now.”
Houseplants do that, die for no discernible reason, even if you don’t overwater them. "It looks great."
Tennant is studying him. “And how are things with you?”
Steve shows her his plant rack. “Can’t complain.”
“Are you still drawing them too?”
Above the cot he tucked into the closet space of what used to be the study, several sheets of paper hang, sketches of the most compelling leaves of his plants. Tennant told him to try a hobby he never thought he’d enjoy, so he bought the Marble Queen. She also told him to keep a sleep journal. During sleepless nights he started doodling leaves in his journal, then on separate sheets, then actual drawing paper. Another thing he can try and settle the restlessness with.
Danny’s seen the houseplants but not the drawings. If Steve had the talent, he’d want to draw Danny, but online videos only get you so far.
“Not as much anymore,” Steve says. He waves Tennant closer, as if he’s about to spill some big secret. She bends down obediently. This close, her eyes are a clear grey-blue, her eyelashes long but sparse. The thin wrinkles around them make it look like she’s always ready to smile. “You know what happened last Monday?” She shakes her head. “I slept through. The whole night. On the first try.”
Delight brightens her face. Sometimes, when he wants to feel really sorry for himself, he wonders what his life would’ve been like if his mother had been more like her. “Oh, Steve! That’s great, really great. I’m so happy for you.”
And she is, she really is. Not once has Steve had reason to question her genuine desire to help him. Mary did good. “Thank you,” he says, and means everything.
“You’re very welcome. But what about the rest? How was the hypervigilance this week?”
Niggling and persistent like a toxic family member. “It wasn’t bad. Not bad. Really jumped only twice—today, when a deer jumped out at me, which I figured was normal.” She nods. “And last week, with the gas pump, when it clicked off. You know?”
She nods again. “What did you do?”
“The grounding stuff. You know, touch something firm, repeat location, time.”
“Did it work?”
“It did.”
“That’s good.”
Is it? Though he supposes he should be grateful. He spent weeks twisted in room corners unable to function. He’s almost normal now. Almost.
In his silence, he’s given her opportunity to study him. “Look, Steve,” she says. “We’ve talked about this before. Some of these symptoms may never completely go away. You may never feel completely comfortable getting on a plane again or take loud noises in stride. We can’t undo the changes years and years of trauma wrought on your mind and body, but we can find ways to work with them, help them protect you, which is what you know they’re trying to do. So you can still enjoy life, enjoy the things that are important to you.”
He nods. The things that are important to him are all far, far away, and that’s good. That’s good.
“We could work toward a new goal. Is there something you want to do that you don’t feel you’re able to do at the moment?”
Run his fingers through Danny’s hair. Smell the hollow behind his ear. Rest with his head in Danny’s lap. He bets he’d sleep well then. He’d sleep like the dead. “I would like to be able to read a book.”
“What kind of book?”
“Action, adventure. Thriller. You know?”
“You don’t think you can?”
“I’m worried it’ll set me back, if, you know, there are explosions or shootings or plane crashes in it.”
She studies him for a few seconds. “Does the dog die dot com.”
His stomach crumples. Did he hear that right? He hasn’t told her; he’s told no one. Has he? It’s hard to remember things from the time he was going on two, three hours of sleep for days on end. “What?”
“Does the dog die dot com. It’s a website. It lists common triggers in TV and movies, even books. And if they don’t, I’m sure there’s a website that does.”
Steve doesn’t know what to say. “A website.”
“Yes.” She peers at him like she expects him to make the connection momentarily, but then tells him anyway: “Because there are thousands, if not millions, of people out there who are just like you. Not wanting to expose yourself to triggers for the sake of entertainment doesn’t make you weak or damaged. It makes you rational. It makes you human.”
It feels like his humanity stripped away when the plane took off from Honolulu. “Yeah. Might just be easier to skip it, you know? It’s not like it’s essential.”
“No, but if it is enjoyable, you should find a way to do it. I’m here to help you.”
“Look, without Danny—” He’s not sure how to go on. He would like Tennant to discharge him at some point, but statements like without Danny I can’t really enjoy anything aren’t going to make that happen any faster.
Her mouth turns down. “I know. I know. And I’m very sorry. Loss like that changes a person. It changed you. But we have to find a way for you to make peace with who you are now.”
“I have,” Steve says. She calls his bullshit with an askance look worthy of Danny. “Look, Doc, I didn’t—you’re right. This isn’t how I used to be. But I get it, okay? People change.”
“You’re not the same man you were with Danny. It’s natural to grieve the loss of who you used to be along with the loss of him.” She runs her lips through her teeth. “Do you think it’s possible for you not to change in his absence?”
She’s never said it like that before. He glances away.
“All you can do is keep digging at it, keep working through your grief, your trauma, and you do. You are. I see you waking up every day willing to put in the work. That’s admirable. I hope you give yourself credit for that.”
Steve has zero inclination to give himself credit for anything.
Sure, he does get up every morning now, he does put in the work. He doesn’t let himself think too much about why, or what he’ll do if he ever does figure it out; what’s there to do? Where’s there to go?
Nowhere; nothing. This is where he’ll spend the rest of his days, in his personal hell, where it’s winter for nine months out of twelve, and even the summer doesn’t smell like his childhood.
—
Steve’s never had nightmares, not really. He’s had weird dreams, he’s had trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, at times even what he’s recently learned were sleep-related dissociative episodes, but he’s never had nightmares.
He’s never had flashbacks either, at least not what he would consider flashbacks. Intrusive memories, sure, especially immediately after a particularly intense mission, images that pierced through reality and split his focus after ugly crime scenes, but never flashbacks.
The first time he told a shrink was after his first real mission as a SEAL. He was the second-in-command; they were sent to retrieve a US asset held at a terrorist safe house in the hills of Fallujah.
During the approach, they took fire from concealed sentinels. The PO2, a tall, lanky guy with a snorting laugh Steve had met days before, got hit in the stomach just underneath his body armor with a high-caliber round; Steve watched him flinch back, then, in slow motion, the man’s guts fall out, scrape the dusty ground, and his crumpled body follow. When they fought their way in, they found the US asset was already dead. It was a trap; the remaining seven of them barely made it out before the building blew. That, for whatever reason, made it worse.
He stayed in DC for the routine debriefing. Catherine, who happened to be stationed there at the time, took him for coffee. The gurgling of the espresso machine made him think of the sound the petty officer made when his intestines exited his body; Steve had to stand where he was for several seconds before the image let him go.
He told the shrink at the debriefing; he thought he was supposed to. He was grounded for six weeks and had to do therapy twice a week. For two years after that, for every mission intake screening, he was asked about it. He never mentioned anything to anyone again.
Now that he’s had time to think about it, he knows it wasn’t really Danny’s shooting that started it. His slow fall began much earlier, with the sensory deprivation suit and the tank that made him believe Wo Fat was back from the dead, maybe as long ago as the drug-induced hallucinations latter put him through that ended with Steve killing him. No nightmares, no flashbacks. Just the hypnagogic hallucinations.
That’s what Tennant told him they’re called, the dreams that happen on the verge of sleep, before the brain realizes it’s asleep. His were always consistent: he’d close his eyes and he’d fall, sometimes out of bed, sometimes off buildings, rarely off a ravine, wake up just before he landed, or think he woke up. He’d see intruders, either leaning over him or sitting on his bed or, sometimes, pressing him down. Back then, he’d fight and wake up and he’d still be in bed. Breathing hard, heart racing, but still in bed, no threat to anyone or anything. It would take him hours to go back to sleep, but he would, and it was manageable. He managed it.
Then Danny got shot and he couldn’t.