by Ivy Jordan
“Sawyer? Are you coming to dinner?”
I blinked myself back to the present and started down the hallway. I could see my father sitting at the kitchen table, just like he had been the day before, and prepared myself for another awkward exchange. I didn’t want to subject myself to this, but it seemed I had no choice, and we’d need to talk sooner or later.
Instead of talk, though, Dad stood up with his meal and walked away. He went to the backyard to eat, touching his hand to his Bluetooth as though any of us believed he had a phone call to make. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the nerve he had. I’d done nothing to him. Nothing, at least, that I hadn’t remedied.
“Oh, don’t let him bother you, dear,” Mom said. She brought me a plate of food, and I thanked her, managed a smile. She deserved better. She always had.
When we sat to eat, she made the conversation. “Did you go to work with Pete today?”
“Yeah, a little. He just made me mow the lawn.”
“Well, you could mow the lawn here!”
I looked up from my plate. “Does it need mowing? I’ll do it tomorrow morning.”
Mom laughed and took a sip of her water. “Oh, I’m joking. Your dad hired a lawn crew to come by on the weekends. We don’t have to worry about it anymore. Terribly expensive, though.”
“You let me know if you need me to do it,” I said.
She nodded. We fell quiet again, eating, and I thought that would be the last of the conversation. She had one more thing to bring up, though.
“Did you talk to Pete about anything?” she asked.
Something in her tone brought back memories of her asking me if I was in trouble in class. It was the tone she took when she knew something, but she was asking to see if I would tell the truth. I wondered if she’d talked to Pete since I left his house; I doubted it, but at the very least, she’d have gotten some kind of promise out of Pete to talk to me about it.
“Yeah, we talked about therapists,” I said.
That was the right answer. Mom’s eyebrows went up, and she smiled. “Oh, I’ve heard that they’re absolutely wonderful for some people.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. She wasn’t being particularly subtle, and she had to know that Pete would have told me about their conversation.
Sure enough, she sighed. “Shoot. I suppose you know I talked to Pete. I just… I just think it would be good for you, Sawyer. I can’t expect you to tell me or Pete or your father everything about what happened, you know?”
“I know,” I assured her. And it was true that I wouldn’t tell her or Pete or Dad anything. Least of all her or Pete—I might tell my father, just to get back at him. The stories I had weren’t just gripping tales; they were deeply fucked-up and disturbing. I didn’t want to burden my family with the content, nor did I want them to carry the guilt that came with knowing I’d been through that. I’d seen other people from my SEAL team have families fall apart over guilt like that.
“So what did you and Pete decide, then?” she asked.
“I think it’s worth a shot,” I said. I didn’t, really. There was no sense in trying to quell what had happened to me by constantly bringing it up and talking about it with some stranger. Still, it was worth a shot to keep my mother at ease.
“Oh, Sawyer, that’s wonderful!” Mom beamed, and I instantly felt reassured about my decision. I wouldn’t have wanted to see her face fall the same amount that it lit up.
“I hope so,” I offered. I was never much for boundless enthusiasm.
Mom, however, certainly was. “I’m going to set up your appointment on Monday with Dr. Rodgers. Dr. Rodgers is a very successful psychiatrist, you’re going to love it, and that’ll be this Monday at… let me write down the address.” She got up to go find a pen and paper on the kitchen counter.
I hadn’t heard of a Dr. Rodgers, but then I’d been gone for six years. I was starting to regret my decision just based on my mother’s enthusiasm; something told me she’d already made the appointment and had been hoping I’d keep it, which further entrenched me into the emotional guilt of the situation. She came back to the table and scribbled an address on a piece of paper.
I was in it, now. I helped her clean the dishes and talked about other things. Mostly, we discussed the new grocery store being built down the street. While she prattled on about it, I thought about whether it was too late to back out of this therapist deal. It made my gut churn to think of sitting on a couch feeling sorry for myself for an hour a week for the foreseeable future.
Hopefully this doctor wouldn’t push pills my way. That, at least, would be a relief. It was the problem I’d had overseas, and I had no intention of taking any medication. Some soldiers got horrible night terrors or panic attacks that needed medication; I’d been lucky enough to avoid those since I’d come home.
Once I’d helped Mom with the dishes, I went to my room. There was no sense in waiting for Dad. He’d either wait outside all night to avoid me or come inside and ignore me, and both of those things pissed me off. Just as well to go to my room if I was going to sulk.
Tired from the work I’d done at Pete’s, I hopped into bed and reached over to turn off the light on my nightstand. As I did so, I saw a familiar framed picture. It showed a much younger Sawyer standing with an only slightly younger Eugene, both grinning, holding up fish. Sawyer was sitting up on Eugene’s knee.
I pulled the photograph down onto its face and flipped the light off.
Chapter Eight
QUINN
I wasn’t sure whether I’d need my diagnostics manual, my initial paperwork, or a million other things, but I didn’t have room for them in the office, and so I decided to bring them with me to work. I loaded what would fit onto a dolly and lugged it most of the way to my office, and when I got halfway down the hall to my waiting room, I saw Sawyer sitting in one of the chairs.
My surprise, despite knowing full well I had an appointment with him today, led me to stop abruptly. A few books and papers fell out of my dolly, and I bit back a curse.
“Oh, sorry,” Sawyer said, and he got up to start helping. He picked up a few of the books.
“I can manage it,” I insisted, scrambling for a few papers.
“Are you sure? Oh, I don’t want to get these out of order or anything.” Sawyer looked at a few papers as though they were alien species, eyebrows furrowed.
“Don’t worry about it.” I stood up and found that he’d already stacked a bunch of papers and set his hand on the dolly.
I smiled at him. “Well, thank you.” I walked with him back to my office, holding the door for him and the dolly. He set it down near my desk and I went around to see what I needed to unpack.
I didn’t think I needed anything outside the initial paperwork. “Alright, Sawyer, I’m just going to need you to fill out a little bit of paperwork first.” I handed him the new patient sheet. Luckily I already had his insurance information and all that technical stuff through his mother, so there wasn’t any need for me to bother with all that. It usually ate up half a session, getting through paperwork.
While he filled out paperwork, I did my best not to blatantly check him out. He’d cleaned up a little, not that he’d looked back the day I saw him. He wasn’t wearing a baseball cap, and I could see his dark hair was cropped short to his head. He’d shaved, though, and the bareness of his face accentuated the straight nose and furrowed brow line. His jaw, I imagined, could cut something.
It was his eyes, by far, that startled me most. His skin was tanned from outdoorsmanship and his hair dark but his eyes were a bright, light blue, almost like ring lights set in his skull. They were startling, absolutely, but stunning nonetheless. I bit my lip and set my legal pad against my clipboard. I could keep this together. He was lovely, sure, but plenty of people that came into my office were lovely. I didn’t develop crushes on them. I clicked my pen and swirled it on the corner for a moment to make sure the ink was still flowing.
When I glanced back up, Sawyer had
just finished the sheet.
“I’ll just file this,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I smiled and slid the paper behind my legal pad. “So, Sawyer, have you been to a therapist’s office before?”
“Once, overseas.”
“Alright, good. I’m just going to remind you about the confidentiality laws. I’m not allowed to tell anyone outside this room anything you tell me in this office unless I believe that you or someone you know is in imminent danger.”
“Imminent danger?”
“Losing their life,” I clarified. “And if you report neglect or abuse to me, I’m obligated to report that to local authorities too, if it’s happening to you or if you’re inflicting it on someone else.”
Sawyer nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
“At your previous therapist’s office, did you have anything that you focused on?”
He shook his head. “No, we didn’t really talk much, actually. They were always full of people with problems, so they tended to just push Prozac and not ask questions. A lot of people come out of it addicted to that kind of stuff because of it. I couldn’t take medications, and didn’t want to, so I opted out altogether.”
“Well, I don’t like to prescribe medications,” I said. “Sometimes I have to, in patients with severe problems. Sometimes a patient needs something to help them sleep, or something like that. But I advocate for lifestyle changes before medication.”
“Like a lifestyle coach?”
“Sort of.” A lifestyle coach, but with an actual psychology license, and a license to prescribe most psychiatric drugs in the state of Texas. We were starting to talk about me too much; I veered the conversation back over. Sawyer didn’t seem like the sort of person to do too well with, ‘So, what brings you in?’ So I decided to try for more specific questions that he couldn’t worm himself out of.
“So, Sawyer, how long were you overseas?” I asked. I clicked my pen and offered him a small smile.
“About six years.” Sawyer leaned back a little. He didn’t lay down on the couch, but to be fair, few people did. It made people feel awkward to sprawl out on a stranger’s couch. “I left in May in… yeah, five years and eleven months.”
It still boggled my mind that he’d been gone that long. “Where did you start out training? Did you go directly overseas?”
“No, I went to boot camp in Texas,” Sawyer said. “There was an old camp in West Texas, and it’s been moved to Georgia, but that’s where I did boot camp. I didn’t go overseas until I’d broken into the SEALs.”
“And how many years ago was that?”
“Took about two years from entry,” he said.
He’d gotten into the program quickly, then. Most people took a decade or more of intensive training to become a Navy SEAL. Sawyer had melded into it without much of anything. “That’s impressive.”
“I’d done JROTC and trained a lot of my life,” he said, as a sort of downplay to his achievement.
I took a few notes on my pad. “So after you joined the SEALs, you went overseas. Where were you stationed over there?”
“Well, the main base of operations was in Afghanistan,” he said. “But the SEALs went pretty much everywhere, and we set up base wherever we went. But Afghanistan is where we were officially set up.”
“Were you with a team?”
“Yeah, me and some people.” Sawyer looked a little distracted for a second, and I knew I’d hit something of a lead.
“Were you close to them?”
“Not really.” Sawyer shook his head. He didn’t say anything after that; I got the feeling he was lying and staying quiet to avoid any kind of prying.
“Well, have you gotten in touch with any of them outside of the military? There are a lot of veterans programs in Austin that can help with stuff like that.” I thought of the brochures I had in my desk advertising for different coffee shop meetups and AA meetings aimed to attract veterans. It was a really great thing, it seemed, for veterans to be able to share experiences with people who really understood. Sawyer was a bit younger than most of them—well, a lot of younger than most of them. But he seemed smart enough not to care about that.
“I’ll see,” he said.
I waited for him to elaborate, and it seemed like he wasn’t going to. “So overseas, you and this team. What kind of work did you guys do?”
He sighed. “All due respect, Dr. Rodgers, I understand that you’re under the impression something terrible happened over there. That’s why my mom sent me in here, was because she thought something terrible happened over there. I can’t seem to get anyone to believe me when I tell them that nothing happened out of the ordinary, but I didn’t want her to worry.”
I couldn’t help but notice that he’d shut the conversation down right after I brought up the people in his team, and I made a quick note of that. “You’re only here to put your mother at ease, then?”
“Yes,” he said, seemingly relieved that I understood his plight. Or, at least, appeared to understand his plight; I was all too familiar with people coming in who deflected their reason for showing up onto someone else.
“Alright,” I said. I could try something else, maybe something unrelated to get him to start opening up about personal things that didn’t relate to the military. Sometimes the way people talked about their childhood could reflect on things that happened in their adult lives.
I doodled a small flower off to the side of my notes. “Tell me about where you grew up. Did you grow up in Austin?”
“Small town outside of it,” he said. “We moved into the city when I was coming out of high school.”
Similar to me, then. “Your parents?”
“Yeah?”
“You lived with your mother and father, I mean?”
“Oh. Yeah, I did. They didn’t divorce or anything.” Sawyer cleared his throat. I wondered why he clarified that they hadn’t divorced. It suggested that there was tension in the family that could have led to a divorce; perhaps the root of Sawyer’s problem wasn’t in the military at all, but in his life at home beforehand.
“Did they get along?” I asked.
“Yeah, well enough.” Sawyer rubbed the back of his neck. “My dad’s always been kind of quiet. Mom’s real bubbly and sweet. So I don’t know if it’s that they don’t get along or if they’re just used to each other. They’ve certainly been together a while.”
I nodded slowly and wondered if he saw the parallels between himself and his father. I made a little note of it. He certainly seemed, anyway, like the quiet type, and Kimberly was definitely bubbly.
“I think we’re out of time,” Sawyer said, glancing up at the clock above the door.
I looked at my watch. “So we are,” I said. Paperwork had, as it always did, eaten up a good chunk of our session. I knew I had more that I wanted to talk to him about, but he would come back in for another day, hopefully. “Can I count on you to come back Wednesday?”
“I suppose,” Sawyer said. “I don’t really want to waste your time. There’s nothing about me that I think requires much prodding.”
I smiled at his choice of words, as though I were picking through his brain and poking at what didn’t need to be bothered. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
He smiled at that. “Fair enough.” He got up to walk to the door, and before he left, he turned around. “Oh, Dr. Rodgers, I never got back to you about your invitation to dinner.”
My gut clenched a little to remember that I’d done that. It was before I’d known he’d be turning up in my office, but I still shouldn’t have been out and flirting so blatantly. “Ah, right. Well, Sawyer, I’m flattered you remember, but I really think we ought to keep everything professional.”
Sawyer nodded, and I couldn’t quite read the expression on his face. “That sounds fair,” he said. “Have a good afternoon.”
With that, he was gone. I couldn’t believe I’d turned him down so quickly. The words had rolled off my t
ongue. I’d had to turn down clients before, but never clients that I’d initially taken an interest in. Still, I knew I’d made the right choice. Sawyer was my patient, not my boyfriend, and it would be an enormous conflict of interest to start seeing him outside of my office in a romantic setting. It would be detrimental to his health, really.
I thought about the set in his brow and the way he smiled at me. I’d turned him down for dinner! I sat back in my office chair and buried my head in my hands. I’d really gotten into a mess now.
Chapter Nine
SAWYER
The morning after my therapy appointment, I woke up early to go to Pete’s. It was natural for me to rise early. In boot camp, we’d gotten up too early to fathom, and it carried over overseas. Now, without setting an alarm, I woke up at five or six in the morning, regardless of when I’d gone to bed the night before.
When I went out to the kitchen, I saw my father sitting there. Same chair at the table, different newspaper in his hand, same scowl on his face. I didn’t say anything to him, just poured myself a travel mug of coffee and made my way out. He didn’t say anything to me, either. I didn’t bother thinking about what it meant that he still wasn’t talking to me. I couldn’t make him care about me if he wasn’t going to care after my being gone for six years. If being in the SEALs didn’t make him care, nothing would. I couldn’t waste my time with it.
I drank my coffee on the way to Pete’s with the morning news playing on the radio. The world hadn’t blown up while I was gone, despite the government’s assurance that they’d see it happen if they had any say. While I was overseas, the message was always doomsday. It motivated soldiers to action if we thought the world was in jeopardy. Here, though, the woman on the speaker was talking about seasonal allergies like they were the only thing anyone had to worry about.
When I pulled into the driveway, I could see Pete sitting on the porch and smoking a cigarette. He put it out when I got there like I was a cop come to bust him for drugs, and when I walked up to him, I was already grinning.
