Dear Heart

5. Ollie

 

5

Ollie

In his first therapy session with Dr. Ambrose, six months ago, Ollie had been asked a simple question: Are you glad to be back home?

He'd stared stupidly at Dr. Ambrose's mild expression for ten full minutes, slack-jawed and numb inside. Was he glad to be back? The truth had been, except for the fact that he wasn't following orders under the desert sun, he hadn't felt like he was back. Every car alarm, every barking dog, every disgruntled shout between neighbors at three in the morning had triggered a panic attack. He'd laid curled up for days on the moldy old sofa inside the garage, huddled up in the fetal position, hyperventilating into the sour cushions, waiting for the sound of footsteps over sand, the click of hot shell casings pinging against steel.

He'd hated himself with every breath, and willed himself to sit up and take hold of his frayed nerves every second. He'd thought home would bring him back down off the ledge. That it would quench the napalm fire of anxiety, fear, and rage in his veins. But it hadn't. His body had made the journey back to Queens, but he was still in Iraq, still in hell, with no return ticket.

Slowly, so slowly, other impulses began to push back against the panic. Hunger. Thirst. Cold. He'd found that a few fingers of bourbon eased the raging sirens in his brain. And his fingers still knew how to take cars apart down to their bones and fit them back together again stronger than before. He'd stumbled across a box of his old comics, and lost himself in the bright colors for hours, turning dusty pages, face hurting when he tried to smile at the banter between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm.

Big and Little Gino brought him pizzas. Mrs. Lin brought him soup and rice. Tyson from the market set aside milk that was about to pass its sell-by date for him, and kept him up to speed on the neighborhood gossip. Through gritted teeth and the combined efforts of his little community, he started taking apart the wreck that was himself, and piecing it back together, one rusted part at a time.

He wasn't healing, but surviving. Learning how to pretend. Playing the role of a man who could shop, and could work, and fix up his own living space, so he could go about the business of being alive.

And then he'd seen Wendy's face in the paper.

He felt the old familiar trembling of panic inside him now, as he stared down at her upturned face. It was different this time, though – not the shapeless panic of IEDs and stray rifle rounds, but something acute and deeply personal. A worry that whatever he found in her blue eyes would kill him.

She swallowed and said, "You – you took it with you?"

Of course I did, he wanted to say. How could I not? But he said, "Yeah."

Wendy glanced back down at her self-portrait again, eyelashes flickering as she blinked. "You stopped returning my letters," she said, and her voice broke his heart.

His own voice was a fractured thing. "I had to."

"Why?"

"Because I..." Suddenly he was back in a tent, in a stolen handful of minutes, alone with his mail. He read Wendy's latest letter, read her cheerful anecdotes about school, and her waitressing job, and this guy she'd gone out with a few times. His fingers had hovered over the paper, pen poised at the top of his response, and he realized he couldn't write what he needed to: Wendy, I love you, I always have, I should have told you forever ago. I love you, and I miss you, and I need you all the time, and I hate it here. It's terrifying. I throw up I get so scared. We put Tabasco sauce in our eyes last night to keep them open, to keep from falling asleep. Oh God, I hate it, I hate it, and I love you, I love you, I love you. Wait for me. Please, oh God, wait for me.