The Bracelet (Everlasting Love)

by Karen Rose Smith

  She was gazing at him with wide eyes, and her voice trembled. “I’m fine, but are you?”

  “I told you this wasn’t going to work. I told you I was different. I can’t stop these reactions.”

  “You were defending yourself,” she said as if she understood, yet not completely.

  “I don’t know what I was doing. I just know I’m not who I was. If we can’t even sleep together—”

  “We can sleep together. I just shouldn’t wake you suddenly. Or—” she hesitated for a moment “—I just have to do it from a distance.”

  “Laura—”

  She sat up, sat before him naked, pleading for what the two of them could have. “Give us a chance. Let me figure out how to help you.”

  For a year and a half, Laura attempted to make them into what they’d been before. Brady had worked hard at trying to be normal, trying to forget, trying to go on. But normalcy was something he’d feared he’d never really feel inside again. Before he’d left for the service, he’d loved Laura. He’d fallen hard and fast. But after he came back, he couldn’t get there again. She still turned him on. Sometimes he felt a sort of peace in her presence. He didn’t want to be with anyone else. But his soul was confused. Ethics he’d learned in his childhood had gotten smashed. Wasn’t a life a life? Was one person’s life more valuable than another’s? After World War II, Americans cheered their soldiers when they returned home. Now they didn’t.

  How could he take Laura to the latest Robert Redford movie and feign interest in it as if he’d never gone to Vietnam? How could he go dancing with her and just slough off a burden he couldn’t seem to put down? How could he pretend they could find happily-ever-after when he had trouble merely getting through today?

  If they had sex—always with protection after that first homecoming union—he didn’t stay the night. He’d hold her until she fell asleep and then he’d leave. He couldn’t take the chance that she’d witness one of his nightmares. He couldn’t take the chance that he’d hurt her if she awakened him.

  A month after he’d gotten home, he’d found a job in the design department of an air-conditioning firm. It wasn’t what he wanted to do. He had ideas for vending machines already on paper. There were more running around in his head for robots that could do assembly workers’ jobs. But he needed a paycheck. He needed a place of his own. He needed to feel he had control over something.

  There were too many times he didn’t. Flashbacks occurred when he was startled. He’d scared Laura out of her wits a couple of times.

  One Sunday afternoon they’d gone to the park to feed the squirrels. A helicopter had flown overhead. As soon as he’d heard the thwat-thwat of the rotor blades, he’d had a flashback, started shaking and taken cover behind a line of bushes. For a few awful minutes, he’d been back in Nam. He’d been oblivious to everything after the helicopter passed over. By the time he’d stopped shaking and realized he was in a park with squirrels and swings, not in a fight for his life, Laura was by his side, as white as a bleached shirt.

  She’d wanted him to get help…had begged him to. By help she’d meant a therapist. He’d stubbornly refused. How could he ever explain panic crawling up his spine, hypervigilance that turned a snapping twig into a gunshot, restlessness that made it impossible for him to relax? But most of all guilt he knew could never be washed away?

  When he’d rented a small house, he’d transformed the basement into a workshop. In his spare time, and when he couldn’t sleep, he’d work down there, driven to make prototypes, apply for patents, sock away enough money to open his own company someday. Neither he nor Laura had mentioned marriage.

  Unexpectedly, his turning point had come on a Sunday in late January 1973. His mother had invited Laura and him for dinner. Snow had begun falling that morning, but they hadn’t paid much attention to it. They could always stay the night at his parents’.

  As usual, he’d been going through the motions that day, attempting to deny the sadness in Laura’s eyes…as well as disappointment and something even deeper that made him feel he’d betrayed her in some way.

  She’d gestured at the picture window and the falling snow beyond. “Let’s go outside.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You’re as restless as a caged tiger. Outside you can breathe easier.”

  To his dismay, most of the time Laura saw too much. But he didn’t argue with her. He went to get his coat.

  They didn’t know what to do at first, but then Laura smiled. “I’ll race you to the oak.”

  The three-story oak was the tallest tree on the property. “I’ll give you a head start,” he offered.

  “Don’t you dare. If I win, I win fair and square.”

  Then she took off, lumbering through the snow in her boots. He raced after her, and for all of three minutes, he felt free with the wind and snow brushing his face, the cold air stretching his lungs. When he passed Laura, he didn’t feel triumphant, just grateful she’d suggested this. As he reached the tree, he put out his hands to stop himself and grabbed on to the trunk to keep from sliding in the snow.

  Soon Laura stopped beside him, bent over, her hands on her knees, breathing hard. She looked up at him and her blue tam pressed her bangs to her forehead. Her cheeks were red and her breath came in white puffs. “Okay, so you beat me. No surprise there. Now let’s do something I can be good at.”

  “Such as?”

  She grinned at him. “Making snow angels.” She fell down onto her back and swished her arms and legs, impressing an angel into the white powder.

  Brady didn’t follow suit.

  “Come on,” she coaxed. “Didn’t you do this when you were a kid?”

  Watching Laura lying in the snow with the abandon of a child, making wings for herself and an angel’s robe, struck him as…ludicrous. He couldn’t do something so inane. It was silly, so childlike. They weren’t kids. He couldn’t pretend to have fun with her. He couldn’t play when everything inside him told him he had no right to play…or to be happy.

  His expression must have shown what he was feeling because Laura sat up. “Brady?”

  The snow fell heavier, almost like a curtain between them. He felt such a separation from her. His insides twisted, his stomach hurt, his chest became tight. “I can’t do this, Laura.”

  “Do what? Make angels? Are you cold?”

  He was cold, all right, cold to his very bone marrow. So cold he felt as though nothing would warm him up again, except maybe the fires of hell the nuns had talked about when he was in grade school. Did hell really have fire? Or was it just a place with complete aloneness. He couldn’t be any more alone than he was now.

  “I can’t do this, Laura,” he repeated. “I can’t pretend we’re a couple and everything’s fine.”

  Since he’d returned home, she hadn’t criticized him, she hadn’t turned away from him, she hadn’t gotten angry with him. But now he saw anger and the spirit that was Laura’s.

  She got to her feet. “I’ve tried to give you time to heal in your own way. I’ve tried to give you space. But I want us, Brady. I want to marry you and have lots of kids and plant daisies along our picket fence. I love you, but I can’t be with you anymore, not unless you get help. You can’t do this on your own. Your mother made some calls—”

  “You talked about me with my mother?” The wind swirled snow around them and rustled through the trees.

  “Why not?” Laura asked defensively. “We’re both worried about you. Don’t you think it hurts us to see you in pain?”

  It hurt him to see the disillusionment in Laura’s eyes. “It’s never going to go away, Laura. It’s never going to get better. I’ve got pictures in my head that are burned there.”

  “You won’t get better if you don’t do something to make it better. I don’t know if a therapist can help, but you’ve got to try something. You can’t keep living like this, closed off from everyone. We can’t be together if you close yourself off from me. If you want me in your life, you’ve
got to put yours back together again. I love you too much to watch you slowly destroy yourself like this.”

  “I can’t talk about—”

  “Yes, you can.”

  She almost tripped in the snow struggling to get closer to him. Grabbing on to the tree where he stood, she pleaded with him. “You’ve got to do something. If you don’t, we can’t be together anymore.”

  The truth and resolve in her words hit him like a deadly blow.

  At his complete silence, she waited a moment and then walked away from him.

  He wanted to call her back, but he couldn’t. He just stood there in the snow, letting it collect on his lashes and his shoulders, feeling a burden of guilt so great it almost brought him to his knees.

  Brady spent the next three weeks without Laura, in no-man’s-land until his sister, Pat, called him. “What’s this I hear about you and Laura breaking up?”

  “Did you talk to Laura or did you talk to Mom?”

  “Both, but neither of them are saying very much. What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  She let the silence lie for a while. “I guess that’s the problem, huh? You haven’t done anything about Laura since you came home. You’ve been pushing her away. I guess you pushed too far.”

  “I don’t need a lecture, Pat.”

  “Well, you sure as heck need something. Do you want her to find another man, marry him and have his kids?”

  The truth of it was, he hadn’t thought about that, and now at Pat’s words, his heart hurt. “No!” The word was gruff and immediate and full of vehemence.

  “Then what are you going to do about it? If you don’t do something, you will lose her.”

  What had Laura said? If you want me in your life, you’ve got to put yours back together again. He didn’t know if he could. But maybe it was time he put a more serious effort into trying.

  “Brady, I’m sure you risked your life over there for something you might not have believed in. Maybe you think you’ve already taken too many risks. I don’t know. But it seems to me Laura is worth fighting for no matter what you have to do.”

  No matter what you have to do.

  The idea of baring his soul and letting memories flood back terrified him. What was the worst that could happen?

  He’d freak out and they’d lock him in a psychiatric ward.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  There was impatience in his sister’s voice as she warned him, “Don’t think about it too long. Laura could meet the man of her dreams tomorrow.”

  Pat was goading him. Yet she was right. But could he ever again be the man of Laura’s dreams?

  Chapter 8

  The March wind whipped against Brady’s car as he parked beside Laura’s blue Challenger in Montgomery Ward’s parking lot, his conversation with Pat still echoing in his mind. The spaces were all but empty now, except for those taken by the clerks in the stores. Laura would be walking through those doors in about five minutes.

  They were a very long five minutes.

  When he spotted her, he felt a hint of joy again, the old excitement and longing for what they’d once had. It had been seven weeks since he’d seen her. Maybe the most important seven weeks of his life.

  She was wearing a coat with a faux-fur trim around the hood, down the front and around the calf-length hem. A mint-green scarf wrapped around her neck, and the fringes blew behind her in the wind. When she saw his car, she recognized it immediately. She just stood there staring at him.

  If she was as angry with him as she should be, or as hurt as she must be, she might just hop in her car and drive to her apartment.

  So she wouldn’t even consider that option, he climbed out of his car and went to meet her. “Will you talk to me for a few minutes?” he asked, gesturing to his Camaro.

  “All right,” she agreed.

  He couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was glad to see him.

  When he opened the passenger door for her, she politely murmured thank-you and slid inside. This wasn’t the Laura he knew. This Laura was keeping her feelings hidden, her countenance neutral. His heart pounded because he wasn’t certain how she was going to react to what he had to say.

  After he closed his door, he shifted to look at her. She wasn’t taking off her gloves or in any way making herself comfortable. He had the feeling she was ready to bolt. He knew he was on the verge of losing her, but hopefully just on the verge. If he had the courage to do it, he could still turn this around.

  He plunged in. “A month ago, I started going to a counselor who was recommended to my dad. He has an office in his house, so I can maintain my privacy. I’ve had seven sessions with him.”

  “Is he helping you?” Laura was concerned.

  Although he couldn’t see her clearly in the car’s shadows, he started to hope again. He had to be honest with her. “I’m not sure. The sessions aren’t what I expected. I mean, I don’t know what I thought therapy would be. He doesn’t have answers. He just leads me so that I examine what’s there.”

  Silence built in the car. Then Laura moved slightly, facing him a little more squarely. “Why did you come tonight?”

  His voice was husky when he admitted, “Because I pushed you away.”

  “You didn’t just push me away. You shut the door.” It wasn’t an accusation as much as a statement of fact.

  “When I came home, I wasn’t ready to be with anyone. I haven’t been able to let you in.”

  “You don’t trust me to understand what you’ve been through.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a matter of trust. I’m afraid that if you see what’s inside me…you’ll hate me.” His therapist had led him to understand that this was his deepest fear.

  “Brady! How could you ever think that?”

  “I’ve done things—” After he closed his eyes for a moment against the guilt, regret and self-recriminations, he looked at Laura, felt the root of love that had sprouted at the antiwar demonstration and plunged ahead. “I’m here tonight to ask you to come with me tomorrow to my therapy session. John—that’s the counselor’s name—believes that’s what’s needed here. He wants me to tell him what happened in Nam and he believes you need to hear it, too.”

  “He believes?”

  “I know you and I can’t go on the way we’ve been. We either have to really be together or break apart.”

  Perceptively, she asked, “You think if I hear what happened over there, I’ll walk away?”

  “It’s possible. You need to know who I’ve become.”

  She considered everything he’d said. “If I come tomorrow, what then?”

  “We just have to do this and decide where we are afterward.”

  “You can’t just tell me about your experiences?”

  “John feels it would be safer for me if we do it there. My nightmares are like a horror movie, Laura. He doesn’t want me to get stuck in one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When I have flashbacks, it’s as if I’m there again. He explained it to me.”

  Suddenly Laura clasped his arm. The old warmth was back in her voice. “I’ll do anything to help you, Brady. Just tell me where to go and what time to be there.”

  Her hand on his arm, her touch, her presence in his life were so necessary to him. Relieved she’d agreed to accompany him, he was worried about what would happen after the session. He’d tried to bury his time in Nam. He’d thought that was the best way to go on. But John believed burying it instead of examining it was why he still had nightmares and flashbacks and wouldn’t let Laura get close.

  Brady knew one thing for certain. If he looked at it all again, it would be for the last time. After tomorrow, he and Laura would either move on together or be torn apart. Now he just wanted to get tomorrow over with, no matter what it brought.

  He opened his car door. “Give me your keys. I’ll warm up your car and then I’ll follow you home to make sure you get inside ok
ay.”

  “Are you going to come in?”

  “Not tonight, Laura.” Maybe not ever again. It all depended on what happened tomorrow.

  “Brady! Brady, look at me.” John Markowitz’s usually calm voice was firmer and louder than Brady had ever heard it.

  “Brady, focus on my eyes and listen to me,” John ordered. “You are home. You are safe. You’re in the present and all that you remembered is in the past.”

  Brady could feel the sweat dripping from his brow. His shirt stuck to his back. His body was taut with memories he didn’t want to recall ever again—the booby-trapped Chicom grenade, the smell of cordite, Ricky going down, the shouts, the squad of VC, the arms’ fire, the anxiety and fear…the dead bodies.

  Dropping his head into his hands, he took a deep gulp of air, as if that could drive all the images away.

  Beside him on the couch, he felt movement, then a light hand on his arm. “It was war, Brady. It’s over. You’re here with me.”

  If he looked at Laura, he was certain he’d see the condemnation he deserved. She might pretend she could handle what he’d just told her in front of John, but when they left this office, they’d be over.

  John was sitting in a chair in front of the sofa, and Brady didn’t know when he’d moved there. The counselor said soothingly, “Sit back and breathe deeply. Relax for a minute.”

  Relax? When he’d just stepped out of a living nightmare? No one could understand what the retelling, the reliving and the rethinking did to him. Only another Vietnam vet could. John was the same age as his father and had served in the army, but, stationed in Europe, he’d never been in combat. Brady could tell Laura liked the therapist. In just a few minutes at the opening of the session, John had put her at ease. He’d asked her how she’d felt waiting for Brady and what she’d experienced since Brady had come home and tried to find his way. She’d been forthright, letting her tears spill out, and Brady had felt all the more guilty for them. He’d never meant to hurt her. Since he’d returned home, he had. He’d hurt her by withdrawing, by distancing himself, by walling himself off and not letting her in. But now…