Before I Fall

by Jessica Scott

  I love the silence of my place. I take my medication, the one that will wind me down but not too much. It's not time for sleep yet. Then I settle into my homework.

  Except that my phone vibrates on the table next to me.

  Hey we’re meeting up at The Pint.

  I frown. We?

  Me, Caleb and Nathan. Nathan is celebrating or some shit.

  What's he celebrating?

  No clue. Quit bitching and just meet us there.

  I have homework. I need to get it done, but I figure I can meet the guys for burgers and beer. Well, maybe not beer. Not really willing to go down the fun little wormhole of beer and anti-anxiety medication. I did that a couple of times. And the few memories I have involve police.

  Too many people have pulled too many strings for me to be here for me to screw it up. I text Josh that I'll be there in a bit and get one of my assignments done. I crack open the stats homework, but my eyes cross at confidence intervals.

  Beth will help make that clear tomorrow. I finish my reflection essay for ethics. I'll reread it later to make sure it's at least marginally coherent. Then I grab my keys and head into the downtown area where the old tobacco mills have been repurposed into luxury apartments and a foodie paradise. Gentrification at its finest.

  I'm not so unaware of the history of the area not to notice the clear lines of demarcation between the problem areas of town and the newly upscale areas. You don’t have to be a local to see it. It's stark and there are few areas that serve as bridging areas. Streets are either well off or poor.

  The Pint is a microbrewery and there is so much hipster essence vibrating off the walls, I'm sure the guys have picked the wrong place. It's a far cry from Scruffy Murphy's on Broadway where I used to mix it up with guys in the Ranger Training Brigade. The Pint stays open all night, transitioning from a bar to a diner in the early morning. It’s a strange mixture of businesses, but it works.

  "Slim pickings on bars?" I ask, slapping Josh on the shoulder.

  "Wait ‘til you have the summer ale before you complain," he says.

  I get a beer and pull up a chair to the table. Nachos and potato skins appear magically from the kitchen. Josh is right. The summer ale is awesome.

  "What's the occasion?"

  Nathan raises a beer. "To lost friends."

  Ah, shit. This isn’t a celebration. I feel like stabbing Josh for not warning me about this. I don’t want to commiserate over people I don’t know. I’ve got enough of my own bad memories.

  Caleb raises his glass and I do the same. Solidarity and all that. You never leave a buddy alone when nights like this happen. I wish I didn’t understand that. Caleb and Nathan had been deployed together, apparently. "Big firefight outside of Ramadi when we were not fighting in Anbar." Caleb makes air quotes around "not fighting." "Nathan always takes the anniversary hard. Figured I'd get you two sticks in the mud out to help me run herd on him tonight."

  Nathan is already well in the bag. The fact that Caleb is looking out for him tonight makes me respect Caleb, at least a little bit.

  Nathan leans in a little closer. "You know what pisses me off?" He's slurring. "The fact that all these fucking pussies in this goddamned place have no idea what we've sacrificed for them."

  A big guy sporting a thick black beard and trademark hipster glasses looks over at the pussies comment. Both arms are covered in full-sleeve tattoos. And they’re big arms. A hipster who likes the gym, apparently. Ah hell. Scruffy Murph's it isn't, but clearly, Nathan running his mouth isn't going to go unobserved. I hold up a hand to Glasses. "He's having a bad night."

  "Clearly." And Glasses is German. Excellent. Never met a German who didn't appreciate a good bar fight, but I'm hoping that maybe hipster Germans are different from the guys who hang out in the fest tents at Oktoberfest.

  Hopefully, it won't come to that.

  But Nathan is not going to simply drown the memories. And as he gets down and dirty with his, some of my own decide to come out and play.

  Jack Johnson's “Flake” comes on. My throat closes off, and I take a sip of the beer. It’s impossible to swallow. I can smell the fucking sand again. It got into all the nooks and crannies but right now, I can feel it burning into my cheek again as I lay face down on the ground. The rocket fire keeps coming and through it all, “Flake” keeps playing on my iPod as I pray that I won’t die beneath a pile of concrete and debris in this shithole country.

  I knock back another pull from the beer. Not a pleasant memory, that’s for damn sure. But not much else I can do beyond ride the wave until it decides to leave me alone. Until next time. Or the time after that.

  Because it’s a funny thing about going to war. It never leaves you alone for long. It’s always there. Lurking. Waiting. Skulking in the dark.

  And as I sit here with Nathan and Caleb and Josh, it dawns on me why I feel comfortable with them in a way that I haven't felt around most of my classmates.

  They've been there. They get it.

  I take another pull off my beer and wonder how things are going for Beth at the hospital with her dad. I wonder if her dad has nights like this where the memories come out and play and all you can do is sit back and hope they'll eventually leave you alone again.

  I want to text her. To see how she's doing.

  But I don't. Because I'm off kilter enough to know that I shouldn't be around people tonight, and Beth doesn't need to put up with my shit.

  I'll take a cab home later. My homework will have to wait.

  Because it looks like I'm crawling into the bottle with Nathan and Caleb and Josh.

  Chapter 11

  Beth

  I'm trying not to cry. I'm so angry I could scream, but there is little that moves an already unsympathetic nurse like calling her names for something that is completely not her fault.

  "We can inject his back, but we can't give him any more of his current pain medication," she tells me.

  "He doesn't have an appointment for another week. What is he supposed to do?" My voice is level, and I'm proud of myself. It's a small victory in a losing fight.

  "I can give him prednisone. It's a steroid that will help with the swelling. And I can do some muscle relaxers. But he's triggered our medication system. There's no way for the doc to override it and prescribe him Oxy."

  "So he's supposed to just be in pain. What about withdrawals?"

  "I'm sorry. I wish there were some other way to deal with this, but there isn't. The new system locks certain patients out, and your dad is one of them. The doctor will talk to you about alternative medications."

  My throat locks up and my eyes burn. I do not want to cry in front of this woman. He's going to be hurting for more than a week until his appointment.

  Which means he's going to crawl into the bottom of a bottle to manage the pain. I want to climb the walls and scream at the unfairness of it. But I don’t because having a tantrum doesn’t solve anything. It only gets security called.

  In the end, I nod and ask what paperwork I need to fill out.

  A few hours go by before they inject him. A little while after that, he’s already moving better. I get his prescriptions, but it's still another hour before we can leave. It's almost midnight. An early night for us, all things considered.

  I stop by the pharmacy and deal with the reality that I can’t pick up everything the doc has prescribed. I take the prednisone and the Tramadol, leaving the Flexeril until I get paid. I hope. I’m not convinced the Tramadol is a good idea, but the doc staunchly refused to prescribe my dad’s normal medication. They're not going to do much good, but the double dose of prednisone has worked a little bit in the past. Maybe it'll hold him over until next week. And hopefully the non-narcotic pain medication they gave him will hold him over and not send him into withdrawal.

  He's stiff but able to get out of the car on his own. He leans on me as I help him into the house and into bed.

  "You get your homework done?" he asks as I'm untying his boots.

&
nbsp; "Most of it. I've still got a little bit to do."

  "You should get some sleep. You're too young to work this hard."

  I toss one boot on the floor, nudging it beneath the bed so he won’t trip over it if he gets up in the middle of the night. "It's only temporary, Dad. Once I get a job and get us insurance, I'll take a break. Maybe a nice vacation to the beach after we get your back fixed."

  I pour him a stiff drink and hand it to him. I know the injection won't last. The heating pad beneath his back is more to make me feel like I'm doing something for him than actually helping. But he gets cold at night so the heating pad helps there, too. Maybe someday, I'll be able to afford to turn the heat up.

  "Night, sugar bear," he says as I pull the blanket over his hips.

  "Night, Daddy." My voice breaks, and I leave before he catches it.

  I don't cry in front of my dad. I did once, right after mom left. I was sixteen and he was sitting at the kitchen table back when he could still do things like that. There had been a bottle of tequila in front of him, and he'd been tossing back shots. I'd cried and asked him when mom was coming home.

  He'd offered me a shot. Said she wasn't so I should cry and get it all out of my system. She wasn't worth my tears.

  I'd sat with him that night. Yeah, I tried the tequila. I don't know why people drink that stuff. It was terrible. I didn't get much beyond the burn at the tip of my tongue before I turned back to water.

  But I never cried in front of him again after that.

  It wasn't shame or anything. I just never wanted him to think any less of me. He'd gone to war. He'd done so much in life to make sure I would be able to follow my dream of going to school. If I couldn't handle a little stress in life, what kind of person did that make me?

  I swipe at my eyes as I try to finish my ethics assignment. I'm not going to cry about this.

  My dad came home. He's alive when I have friends whose dads didn't. I'm not crying over some stupid policy and the mindless drones who enforce it like storm troopers.

  Except that I am.

  Hot tears spill down my cheeks, and I finally surrender. I cover my face with my hands. A single sob breaks free and I tamp it down. I don't want my dad to hear me in our tiny house.

  But my heart aches tonight. Because he's hurting and there isn't anything I can do to fix it. I don't have that job yet that can get us insurance and money to pay for whatever surgery he needs that will fix his back so he won't constantly be in pain.

  There has to be some way to fix it. The VA has scheduled appointments for surgeries. Surely that means they can do something, right?

  The tears keep coming. I bite my hand to make them stop, but I can't. My chest is tight and tonight, it's all coming out. I find one of our dish towels and cover my mouth. Another sob breaks free and it hurts. It fucking hurts that I can't fix this.

  That I might never be able to fix this. That my dad might spend the rest of his life in pain because I haven't been able to figure out the medical system that keeps him in pain. There has to be a better way but right now, I can't see my way out of the hopeless morass of the VA system.

  I cover my face with the towel and let the tears come. Because I can't do anything else until they stop.

  And I still have homework to do.

  Noah

  I make it home alive. I'm pretty sure I left the cabbie a good tip. I've got his card in my pocket so I can call him in the morning and he can take me back to wherever I left my truck.

  I'm not really drunk. Just kind of fuzzy on several levels. Things feel thick, and I can't quite make my feet work right. But I finally make it through my front door, and I think I get it closed behind me.

  Bed. There it is. I crawl into it and lay face down long ways. I suppose I should take my shoes off, but they're at the other end of my body and that seems like a really big distance at the moment. I see my stats book on the chair. I have the sudden urge to know if Beth is awake.

  I shouldn't text her. It's late, and she works so damn much. If I text her and she's not awake, I'll be the biggest dick for waking her up. I lower my head to my phone. Damn it I just want to hear her voice.

  Memories suck. I want to hear her tell me about her dad and chase away the sound of that fucking song that haunts me.

  I would have been fine if not for that damn song. And it’s stuck in my head now, which makes matters worse.

  Don't text her. Don't text her.

  My phone vibrates in my hand. I don't dare hope that it's her. That would be more than a little freaking weird.

  It's Josh. Make it home okay?

  That is such a soldier thing to do. Checking on your buddy. It's embarrassing for me to admit how weird it was that there wasn't a phone roster handed out on the first day of class. No one was appointed class leader to make sure that everyone was accounted for. All the students were essentially on their own, and it was a completely foreign idea to me. No one needed to check on anyone else. I wasn't responsible for anyone but myself.

  I have to admit that it made me feel a little useless. I made sergeant at twenty, which meant that I spent most of my brief life as an adult watching out for other people. Checking on their barracks rooms, making sure they were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there. Making sure I had everyone accounted for after indirect fire hit our base.

  Making sure everyone left was on a flight home when we left country. Counting people had become second nature to me - and now I didn't have to do it anymore. None of us did.

  But there's good ol’ Josh, checking on me. I was supposed to be the sober one. Not tonight, apparently.

  My phone vibrates in my hand again.

  Yep. In bed now. My thumbs feel fat and clumsy, and I have to squint to make sure I've typed what I meant to type. LT used to harp on us about the perils of drunk texting. It was part of his weekly safety briefing speech: don't put anything in a text that could be used against you in a court martial.

  Sleep tight. Don't let the sand fleas bite.

  Not funny.

  Sand fleas were definitely not funny. Nasty little fuckers. Amazon.com must have made a small fortune shipping flea collars to us. Man didn't the commander flip out when he caught us wearing flea collars around our boots. He'd said the permethrin treatment should have worked fine. Yeah, well it hadn't, and we were getting tore up.

  One of my soldiers had been evac'd back to the states with leishmaniasis, which had left us a man short in the stack for patrols. Things had gone to shit shortly after he'd left, too. Lucky bastard missed out on all of the fun stuff.

  I lower my head to my forearms and let myself drift in a hazy fog. I'm going to pay for this tomorrow. I've never been a big drinker, so when I do drink, I pay for it. I was never one of those guys who could stay out until PT formation, puke on the run and keep going. I a nonfunctioning ball of misery when I'm hung ove; there's was no other way to put it.

  My phone vibrates in my hand again. A phone call, not a text. I squint but can't read the number so I just hit the green icon.

  "Y'allo." Silence. I squint and make out the number. Oh shit, it's Beth. "Hey," I say, hoping that I'm not slurring.

  "Were you sleeping?"

  "Nope, just lying here." Mostly the truth. I don't think sleep is in my future any time soon tonight. More like drifting on fuzzy clouds until my alarm goes off. "How's your dad?"

  Silence again. "Beth?"

  "He's okay. They gave us a really hard time about his medication. I feel like it was a waste of a trip."

  "Are you all right?"

  "I...Not really."

  Tomorrow, part of me will be really fucking happy that she called me tonight. Right now, though, another part of me hurts for her. I can hear the pain, the fatigue in her voice. "Is there anything I can do?"

  A quiet sigh. "I don't know. I just...I didn't want to sit here alone in the dark."

  Fuck fuck fuck. I could go to her if I hadn't been drinking. I don't want to tell her that though. I’ve
let her down. Left her alone.

  Maybe there's another way.

  "Did I ever tell you about the time we filmed a music video downrange?"

  A choked sound that I hope is a laugh. "No I don't think you mentioned it."

  "Yeah. You know that 'Call Me Maybe' song?"

  "How could I not?"

  "We totally did choreography and everything. LT put it up on YouTube but then it went viral and the brigade commander found out about it. He was not amused."

  She laughs and some of the tension around my heart eases off a bit. "What happened?"

  "Well, LT got a sharply worded ass-chewing while the rest of us got the sergeant major's boot in our collective asses along with extra guard duty."

  "I don't suppose this video has been immortalized anywhere? It sounds like something my dad would like."

  "You don't want to check out my dancing skills? I was on top of a container in PT shorts and a reflective belt with three other dudes doing a line dance."

  She's laughing again and I smile. "I think I like the image of you as business school student. I'm not sure what seeing you dancing would do to my impression of you."

  "It's very masculine, I swear." I'm resting my head against my forearm, holding the phone to my ear. It’s kind of surreal, lying there in the dark, talking to her as the world spins slowly beneath me.

  "Noah?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "Thanks for making me laugh."

  My eyes burn suddenly. Her words make me think she hasn't had a reason to laugh in a long, long time. I know the feeling.

  "Any time. I'm full of stories about me dancing in Iraq."

  She makes that warm sound that I'm starting to love. "Good night, Noah," she whispers.

  "Good night, Beth."

  The silence is back, but now, it's a good silence. The song is gone from my head, replaced with a happier memory of that fucked up deployment and the comforting thought that Beth called me tonight when she needed someone.