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“Christ,” he mutters as I climb off him. “Bianca, don’t go—”
“Stop!” I press my palms against my ears and scream. “I’m not her, and I don’t ever want to hear her fucking name again.”
He calls after me as I run toward the rec room, but there’s nothing else to say. His obsession with her can’t be broken, and it’s time I accept that.
Chapter 48
Madden
—PAST—
The transition from Germany to the wounded veteran barracks at WRNMMC is an agonizing one. My days are filled with physical therapy, and the move doesn’t signify a change in that anytime soon. Progress is slow, painful, and frustrating as fuck. But once I accomplished all the items on their checklist—walking, eating, and dressing on my own—they tell me I’m fit enough for outpatient care, which is fine by me.
They put me up in a one-bedroom suite on the medical campus, with an open offer to move me to a different hall should I choose to have a family member visit. I dismiss that suggestion and focus on my recovery while I try to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with my life when I get my medical discharge. This wasn’t the way I was expecting my service to end, and it feels like another failure on my part. One in a long series of fuckups that I can’t come back from.
Wyatt is constantly in my thoughts. When I’m awake, eating, breathing. It doesn’t matter what the fuck I’m doing. He’s there in my mind. I can’t let go of those last few minutes, replaying them like a bad movie, trying to navigate a better outcome somehow. I’ve convinced myself I could have done something differently, and I want to go back and redo it. Because the alternative is that I’m stuck here, living a life without meaning while his baby daughter grows up without either of her parents.
It's fucked up, and I’m angry all the goddamn time about it. When it isn’t Wyatt in my thoughts, it’s Johnson and Garcia and the rest of the men who died that day. They had families too. Somewhere, their parents are grieving their loss, and I still can’t wrap my head around it. Why was I the one to come home, and they weren’t? It’s a constant reel in my head, and I can’t stop it. The psychologist at the hospital calls it survivor’s guilt. I call it the fucking truth.
The only way to manage my thoughts is flipping them onto paper as rapidly as they appear. For the first week in Bethesda, when I’m not in physical therapy, I’m laying down lyrics like it’s my full-time job. These songs are darker than anything else I’ve written before. I channel all the chaotic ideas in my mind and spin them into something useful until my guitar arrives. It takes me another two weeks before I can even hold it for more than a minute without dropping it. And after that, it still hurts like a motherfucker, but I do it anyway.
Pain is my new normal, and the doctors tell me it might never fully go away. I keep thinking that’s probably what I deserve. Because as long as I’m breathing, I robbed the men who aren’t. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to sleep. And I don’t know how to be a civilian anymore, which becomes glaringly obvious when I’m back among them. I can’t relax. I can’t sit down and bullshit or eat a meal without scoping out the exits in the cafeteria. Every loud sound makes me flinch, and car alarms make me duck for cover. When I see someone walking into a crowd, I find myself wondering if they’re going to blow us all off the map. And when I hear a thunderstorm, I look for smoke, and I smell the blood, but my eyes are playing tricks on me.
In those moments, I can still see skulls cracked open, gnarled bodies, and limbs scattered among the wreckage. It doesn’t matter if I know it isn’t right. My brain tells me it is. I’m on alert, always ready as that trickle of sweat drips down the nape of my neck, a reminder that the calm doesn’t last. I feel like everything is muted. Everyone around me talks, lives, breathes, but not me. Inside, I’m still in a combat zone, and I don’t understand why they can’t see what I see.
During my deployment, I had a purpose, and now there’s nothing. I don’t know how to navigate the empty seconds that occupy my life, so I follow the routine. The only thing I know. I make the bed. Tidy my space. Shower. Shave. Appointments. I don’t know how to exist in this world anymore. I don’t remember how not to be a Marine. They trained me to go to war, but they never told me what to do when I came home.
