The explosion deafens me. The earth quakes, and a gust of hot wind knocks me back. I find myself crawling on all fours, searching for Tillis or Unger. I find Unger dead, his legs blown off. I scream for help, but no one comes. I see another IED planted just yards away, right where my commanding officer is running. I scream out Nooooo! and launch that direction to tackle him before he can reach it, but the distance grows longer and longer, and I can’t quite close the gap between us. The bomb goes off and we both go flying.
I sit up suddenly, blasted by the air-conditioning in my dark bedroom. My heart beats wildly, and I’m drenched with sweat. Then I realize I’m not in my bed. I’m on the floor against the wall. My hands are bloody and shaking. It was another bad dream, a flashback to that day when it seemed everybody I knew was in bits and pieces, scattered over the Afghan terrain.
How did my hands get bloody? I look around. There’s a broken glass shattered on the floor. I must’ve crawled through it. I will my hands to stop shaking as I get up and turn on the lamp. I pull the shards out, then try to clean the wounds.
I need to see my therapist as soon as daylight comes.
I watch TV, hoping to distract my brain from the terror. Andy Griffith plays for hours until the sun finally comes up. At eight o’clock I call Dr. Coggins. “Doc, this is Dylan Roberts. I need to see you,” I say to her voice mail. “Please, can you get me in today? It’s important.”
I hang up, feeling unheard, but in fifteen minutes she calls me back. “Dylan, I can get you in at ten. Can you be here then?”
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
I take a shower, washing off the dried blood, but I can’t make my hands stop shaking. Sara Meadows’ death has dragged me back in the wrong direction. Regression, Dr. Coggins will say. Maybe I should tell the Pace family that I can’t continue this work. Maybe I can’t continue any work, ever.
I go and sit in my therapist’s office and tell her about the dream, about finding Sara Meadows dead, about my search for a murder suspect. She calms me down, as always, reads me Scripture, prays over me. It’s why I chose her, a shrink who believes in Christ and the spiritual warfare that goes on around me, adding to the memories of physical warfare still replaying in my brain. She understands the science of PTSD, but that’s not all that matters to her. She makes me describe the worst hour of my life again, then two more times, forcing me to remember details. It’s called cognitive repetition therapy, and it’s designed to make my subconscious stop vomiting up the images in my sleep. If I can go there awake, maybe someday I won’t have to go there in my dreams.
“You’re making progress, Dylan,” she says when we’re almost done.
“How do you figure that?”
“You called me. You came here. You cooperated. You want to get better. That’s a huge step.”
I swallow hard. “I don’t want to be disabled for the rest of my life. I’m thirty years old.”
“You won’t be. I know you can’t see these incremental changes, but I do.”
On our way out, I tell her I’m going to be traveling. “Call me if you need me,” she says. “Make an appointment when you get back. Don’t disappear on me, Dylan.”
I hope I don’t disappear on myself.