The Great Escape

“It’s true, all right.” She needed to shut up, but she hurt too much to stop. “Life is too hard for you, isn’t it, Panda? So you live it at a coward’s distance.”

“It’s more than that, damn it!” He clenched his teeth, ground out the words. “I’m not exactly … emotionally stable.”

“Tell me about it!”

He’d had enough of her, and he headed for the stairs. She should have let him go, but she was drained, furious, and out of control. “Run away!” she called after him, too out of control to see the irony in accusing him of what she’d done herself. “Run away! You’re a champ at that.”

“Damn it, Lucy …” He spun around, his eyes dark with a misery that should have stirred her pity but merely fired her anger because all that pain spelled the death of something that should have pulsed with life.

“I wish I’d never met you!” she shouted.

His shoulders dropped. He braced one hand on the banister, then let his arm fall. “Don’t wish that. Meeting you was … There are things that happened.”

“What things? Either spill your precious secrets or go to hell!”

“I’ve already been there.” His fingers were white where they gripped the banister. “Afghanistan … Iraq … Two wars. Double the fun.”

“You told me you served in Germany.”

He came down off the bottom step, walked around her, moving just to move, ending up in the living room. “That was easier than telling the truth. Nobody wants to hear about the heat and sand. Mortar attacks, rocket grenades, IEDs exploding without any warning tearing off legs, arms, leaving holes where a heart should be. I have images seared on my brain that’ll never go away.” He shuddered. “Mutilated bodies. Dead kids. Always dead kids …” His words trailed off.

She curled her fingernails into her palms. She should have guessed.

He stopped by the living room fireplace. “When I got out, I joined the police force, thinking nothing could be as bad as what I’d already seen. But there was more blood, dozens of Curtises—all dead before their time. The migraines got worse, the nightmares. I stopped sleeping, started drinking too much, got into fights, hurt people, hurt myself. One night I was so drunk I begged a guy to blow my head off.”

The pieces fell into place, and she leaned against the door molding. “Post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“A textbook case.”

This was what he’d been hiding—the fate of so many who’d come back from those wars. She struggled for some kind of detachment. “Did you see a therapist?”

“Sure. Ask me how much it helped.”

She had to seal off her own feelings. If she didn’t, she’d fall apart. “Maybe you need to try someone else,” she said.

He uttered a bitter laugh. “Find me a therapist who’s seen what I’ve seen—done what I’ve done—and I’m there.”

“Therapists deal with issues they’ve never experienced all the time.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t quite work with guys like me.”

She’d read about the difficulties of treating veterans with PTSD. They’d been trained to be guarded, and even the ones who knew they needed help were reluctant to open up, especially to a civilian. Their warrior mentality made treatment problematic.

“One guy I served with … He’s spilling his guts, right? Next thing he knows, the shrink’s turning green and excuses himself to throw up.” He headed toward the window. “The doctor I saw was different. She was a specialist in PTSD, and she’d heard so many stories that she’d learned to detach. She detached so much that it felt like she wasn’t even there.” Some of the anger seemed to leave him. “Pills and platitudes aren’t enough to fix that kind of crazy.”

She started to tell him it was all in the past, but that was obviously untrue, and he had more to say.

“Look at this house. I bought it during one of the manic times. My adult revenge for Curtis. Some revenge, right? Remington had been dead for years. Who the hell knows what I was thinking?”

She knew. All those trips to Grosse Pointe to spy on the family he hated … and the family he so much wanted to be part of.

He gazed out the window at nothing. “This guy I know … His wife touched him in the middle of the night, and he woke up with his hands around her throat. And a woman I served with … She grabbed her baby from day care, convinced the kid was in some kind of mortal danger, and took him on a five-hundred-mile road trip without telling anybody, including her husband. Nearly ended up in jail for kidnapping. Another guy … He and his girlfriend were having an argument. Nothing important. But out of nowhere, he slammed her into the wall. Broke her collarbone. Do you want that to happen to you?” Bitter lines bracketed his mouth. “Luckily, time took care of the worst of it for me. I’m okay now. And that’s the way it has to stay. Now do you understand?”

She locked her knees, braced herself. “Exactly what am I supposed to understand?”

He finally looked at her, his expression stony. “Why I can’t give you any more than I already have. Why I can’t give you a future.”

How did he know that was what she wanted when even she didn’t?