by Shay Savage
It’s good to move on.
“Are you good to talk to me?” he asks. “When I heard you were here, I had to come and check on you. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing so well. I have to admit, I’m also glad to hear the gunshot was not self-inflicted.”
“You think I would have shot myself?”
“There were times when I thought you were capable of that, yes.” He sits down on the rolling stool by the bed and lays his notebook on his lap. He pulls a pen from his pocket and opens up a blank page. “It’s been a long time since we talked, though. You’re going to have to catch me up.”
I look at him for a long moment as I remember all the sessions I’d had with him in the past. We always talked about my experiences while I was deployed because there was nothing in the present I either could talk about or was willing to talk about. He’d occasionally offer me some insight, but I’d never gotten much out of it.
“No,” I say as I shake my head.
“No?” Mark cocks his head and looks at me quizzically. “You don’t want to talk?”
“I don’t want to talk about the past,” I tell him. “I want…I want…”
I can’t find the right words. I lick my lips and concentrate, but I don’t know what I want to say.
“I have a girl,” I finally tell him. “Alina. I want to make things right with her.”
“Are you fighting?” he asks.
“No, not at all.” I’m not saying the right things. “The last girl dumped me, and I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want to fuck this one up.”
“All right, Evan,” Mark says as he holds up his notebook. “I have to get a few things out of the way first so I can complete your assessment. Then let’s focus on the new relationship. Does that sound okay?”
“Yeah.”
We go over everything I remember and everything I don’t. We talk about how I feel physically and how I feel about being out of it for nearly two months. I tell him that I don’t seem to feel the same now as I did before.
“How do you feel different?”
“I just…I don’t think of things the same way.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Things that used to get me really upset just…well, they don’t anymore. I don’t care.”
“An example would help me understand.”
“Like, I’ve got all these businesses, right?”
“I understand you had quite an inheritance, yes.”
“I don’t even want them. I don’t want anything to do with them. I’m supposed to care. I’m supposed to run them like Rinaldo did. I told him I would. That promise wasn’t made lightly or anything. I mean…I meant it when I told him I would do it. But now…”
“Your priorities have changed?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Priorities. That’s the word I wanted. Those things that were important just aren’t on the priority list anymore. It’s not even that they moved down—they aren’t there at all. I keep waiting for Ralph to show up and tell me how screwed up I am, but he hasn’t.”
“Who’s Ralph?”
I pause, realizing I slipped up. I never should have mentioned him.
How is he going to help me if I don’t tell him?
“Ralph is kind of hard to explain.”
“Try.”
“I dunno.” I shrug and look at Mark. “He’s my imaginary friend, I suppose. He’s usually around when I haven’t slept and I’m stressed out or having a panic attack. I know he isn’t real, but I see him anyway.”
“Did this start after you woke up here?” Mark asks. He’s doing his best not to look concerned, but it’s not working. His fingers tense around his pen.
“No, it’s been a while now. I used to see him all the time, but he hasn’t been around lately.”
“So you don’t think it has to do with your injury?”
“No. I first started seeing him after I got out of prison. When Lia was around, he stopped appearing. He came back when she left.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Mark’s making furious notes in his little notebook.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Sometime before Rinaldo died, I believe. Things in my head are kinda jumbled. The timelines are messed up, I think.”
“That’s not uncommon.”
“I think it was around the time Alina moved in with me,” I say. “I think the last time I saw him was just before that.”
“Can you describe Ralph to me?”
“He’s…he’s…” I pause and collect myself. “He’s a kid I killed in Iraq. An insurgent kid. He was heading for our base when I shot him.”
“I remember you bringing that up before,” Mark says. “You refused to give me any details and never mentioned having hallucinations about him. Why the name Ralph?”
“It just fit.” I shrug. I really don’t have a better answer.
“Tell me more about this kid in Iraq.”
“I used to talk to myself a lot,” I tell him. “That always kind of pissed me off. Like, it was admitting I was crazy. Talking to Ralph is still crazy but different. Does that make any sense?”
“I can at least understand the difference,” Mark says. “Can you tell me about the real Ralph?”
Mark’s tenacious; I have to grant him that. I go over the story slowly—from the first moment I saw the kid in my crosshairs to exactly seventy-five seconds later, when I pulled the trigger. By the time I finish, I’m sobbing.
“Who does that?” I choke out the words. “Who sends their kid out there like that? It was a fucking battle zone. And he knew…I could see it in his eyes. He knew he was going to die. He was either going to be shot or he was going to blow himself up. Someone just sent him out there to die! Why? Why the fuck would anyone do that?”
“It was war, Evan,” Mark says quietly. “People do things in a war that they would never do under other circumstances. You did what you needed to do to protect your unit.”
“I didn’t protect them,” I remind him. “They all died a couple of months later.”
Mark passes me a handful of tissues from a box on the side table, and I take a few minutes to get myself back together.
“Shit, I don’t usually do this.”
“Maybe you should.” Mark stares at me. “It’s good to see some emotion come out of you, Evan. That’s not a bad thing at all.”
“Maybe getting all sensitive will help me keep the girl this time.”
“Alina is important to you.”
“Yeah. You met her?”
“She was here when I came to check on you the first time,” he says. “She seems very sweet. She obviously cares about you a lot.”
“I really like her, and she seems to understand me. Even though she knows what I can be like, she’s stuck by me. Still, I’m not sure about it all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I thought the same thing about Lia.”
“That was the woman you left Chicago to be with, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to her?”
“She left me.” I feel my chest tighten up as I remember. “I came home—I’d been gone a while, and she didn’t know where I was. I found a note saying she’d left. My dog fucking died for her, and she left me.”
“You never told me about that.”
“It was right before we left,” I say as I take a breath to calm myself. I don’t want to give Mark a lot of details. “She was…well, there was an intruder in the apartment. Odin tried to protect her and was shot.”
“Wow. That’s a loyal dog.”
“He was.”
“Finding a note is a difficult way to discover a relationship has ended,” Mark says. “You don’t get a chance to talk about it before the decision is made. Have you talked to her since?”
“No. I’m not going to, either. I can’t go back to that, and I don’t want to. She made the decision, but I’m respecting it.”
“Fair enough.”
“I just don’
t want to fuck up what I have now like I did the last time. I made a lot of mistakes, and I never really apologized for any of them. I didn’t care. I don’t want to be like that now.”
“What do you want, Evan?”
“I want to take it all back. I want to take back all the horrible shit I’ve done in my life and make it all disappear. I want to start all over.”
“You can’t make it all disappear like it never happened, Evan. You have to figure out how to live with the consequences of your actions. You can learn from them—make sure they don’t happen again—but you can’t take them back. Some actions are simply irrevocable.”
Mark leans forward and places his hand on my arm.
“However, you can still start over.”
Mark finishes up his paperwork and schedules some time with me for tomorrow. As soon as he leaves, there’s a figure in the shadows along the wall. I watch as Ralph approaches the end of my bed.
His expression is different. When I’ve seen him before, he’s always looked either sad or angry. This time he looks…proud.
“You are different now, you know,” he says.
“Am I?”
“Can’t you tell?” He sits down on the stool and spins side to side. He looks more childlike than he ever has before.
“Maybe.” I crumple one of the used up tissues in my hand, squeezing it in my fist. “If I leave that part of me behind though…what’s left?”
“Someone better.”
I stare at him and notice him becoming more and more transparent as we speak.
“I think I’m done with you,” Ralph says. He stands up and walks over to the window.
“So that’s it?” I ask. “You just disappear?”
“You don’t need me anymore.”
“Why did I need you in the first place?”
He smiles and shakes his head slowly.
“You’ve lost what you needed to lose. The question is what have you gained?”
*****
The hospital staff is surprised by how quickly I recover. Physical therapy is a bitch, but I’m used to pushing my body to extreme limits. It feels a bit like basic training again and brings back some good memories for a change.
The mental stuff, well, that’s a little different.
I still don’t recall being shot. The memories of earlier in the day are pretty clear, but from the time I remember playing with Maisy to the time I woke up in the hospital, there is nothing but a brief glimpse of Don, dead in the alley.
Mark Duncan keeps referring to it all as a miracle.
“So, what?” I ask him. “Maybe I should have been shot years ago?”
“No, Evan—definitely not. I don’t want anyone thinking that this kind of damage is somehow beneficial. In fact, this is probably the most unusual and bizarre thing on the books when it comes to head wounds. The fact that you survived has odds of a million to one, probably higher. There may be other issues you haven’t encountered yet. I also don’t want you assuming that because you’re feeling better right now means your journey is over. You may feel calmer at the moment, and that’s good, but it doesn’t mean you are suddenly cured. PTSD doesn’t just disappear.”
“But everything feels different,” I tell him. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope. I want him to understand, but I can’t divulge what I’ve been doing with my life. “All the…the desire for violence in my head… I can’t say that it’s gone, but I know I want things to be different.”
“Evan, you basically had a lobotomy by bullet.” Mark crosses his arms. “Do you realize how few people ever survive such a thing?”
“Phineas Gage,” I say.
“Not a bad comparison.” Mark nods. “He wasn’t shot though—he had an iron rod blasted through his head. It also made him more violent and unpredictable.”
“But I’m the opposite. I don’t feel violent.”
“The brain is a baffling thing. There is still a lot about it we don’t understand. We do know it has a remarkable way of self-repairing. New neural pathways are generated to replace the ones that have been damaged. Even Gage improved drastically over time, and that was with what they knew two hundred years ago.”
I nod. Our session is over, and Jonathan is waiting outside the door.
“You’re due to be discharged,” Mark tells me. “I can’t force you to see me after you leave here, but I’d like you to consider it. My phone number hasn’t changed. If you ever want to get together, please let me know.”
“I’ll do that,” I tell him. “Take care of yourself.”
We shake hands, and Mark is on his way. As he leaves, Jonathan comes in with a report on business activity. He tells me all about the new bookkeeper he’s hired and how he now has monitoring software in place to watch for discrepancies. We go over some numbers and shipments, but I’m only half paying attention. When he’s done, I speak up.
“Jonathan, we need to talk about something else.”
“What’s that, boss?”
“I don’t think I can do this anymore, Jon.” I look at his face and watch his confused expression. “It’s not because I was shot—at least, I don’t think it is—but I just can’t. I never wanted it in the first place. I only did it because Rinaldo wanted me to.”
“I know, brotha.”
“You and Eddie-boy, you got everything under control,” I say. “I think maybe we should just keep it that way.”
“Are you going to leave?” he asks.
“No, I want to stay in Chicago. I’m not running away. You can even keep the shit in my name if you like, but I don’t want to control it. I don’t think I have it in me anymore.”
“You’re serious about this, aren’t ya?”
“I am. You know what you’re doing. I kinda hope maybe you’ll decide to take it all in another direction. You’re a smart guy, Jonathan. You could take all this capital and really turn it into something else. It doesn’t have to be the way it’s always been. In any case, I don’t want a hand in it.”
“I get ya, Evan. I’ll talk to Eddie-boy and let you know what we’re gonna do.”
“Sounds good.”
Jonathan stands. He pauses near the door for a long moment to look at me.
“You’re different now, aren’t ya?”
“Yeah,” I say softly, “I think I am.”
*****
“Are you sure you want to look?” Alina asks. She clasps her hands together and gnaws at her lip.
“Are you saying I’m not pretty?” I smile at her. “I’m good. Bring it over.”
She hands me the mirror, and I take a look at the side of my face. There’s a long, nasty scar from just above my left jaw all the way into my hairline. When I touch the top of it, pushing some strands of hair aside, I can see the rest of it. There’s no hair growing over the scar tissue.
It’s not all red and rough—the surgery was over a month ago. It’s actually not as bad as I thought it might be, and it’s bound to fade more with time.
“I dunno,” I say, “I think it looks kinda sweet.”
Alina rolls her eyes.
“What? You don’t think it’s sexy?”
“I think you’re sexy,” she says. “The scar doesn’t matter. I just need to get you back home so I can show you exactly how I feel about you.”
“Why wait?”
“Here?” She looks over at the door. “Anyone could walk in.”
“Yeah, so? It’s not like I’m handing you cash right at the moment. They can’t exactly charge us with public indecency—this is a private room.”
“Do you really think you’re up for that?”
I reach over and take her hand. While I look into her eyes, I press her palm against my stiffening cock.
“Definitely.”
She wraps her fingers around me through the sheet. As she begins to stroke my shaft, I push the back of my head against the pillow and close my eyes.
“Oh, yeah. I’m definitely up for this.”
Alina giggles, releases m
y cock, and pulls back the sheet. She glances at the door for a second before pushing aside the hospital gown and grasping my cock again. As she wraps her fingers around me, she looks into my eyes and uses her other hand to palm her breast.
“You are so fucking beautiful,” I tell her. “You better get those clothes off before I come all over your hand.”
She runs her fingers down to my balls and then back to the tip of my dick. Giving me a sly half-smile, she starts to undress herself as I watch. I lick my lips as her skin is revealed, and as soon as there is a pile of clothes on the floor, I grab her hand and pull her onto the bed beside me.
I have to roll to my side for her to fit on the small bed. Once she’s against me, I press my lips to hers. She opens her mouth to me, moaning as our tongues touch. I caress her bare skin, reveling in the heat of her body.
“Turn around,” I tell her. “Get that ass over here.”
Alina rolls so her back it to my chest, and I pull her up against me as I lie on my side. I stroke over her stomach with one hand as I press my lips against her shoulder. I kiss up the side of her throat, and I suck her earlobe into my mouth.
“Give me your leg,” I whisper. “Push that ass up against me.”
With her leg lifted and knee bent, I grab hold of her thigh to give my cock access to her pussy. The heat against the tip makes my cock throb in anticipation, and I waste no time as I line up and push forward. I slide into her easily and feel her muscles grip my shaft.
“Oh, fuck…it’s been a while.” I have to hold my breath to keep myself from moving at all. The warmth around my cock feels too good, and I don’t think I’m going to last long.
Alina reaches back and loops her arm around my head. With my face tucked against her shoulder blade, I begin pushing in and out of her slowly, listening to her quiet moans with every penetration.
“Jesus, Evan…that feels so good.”
“Gotta make up for lost time,” I whisper. “Keep quiet now. You don’t want the nurses thinking you’re lying in here being fucked, do you?
“Mmmm…”
I find her breast with my fingers, stroke her nipples, and slide my hand down to her stomach. Grunting, I pull back and thrust into her quickly as I locate her clit with my fingers and start to circle the little nub.
