Trauma Read Online Free PDF Page B

of a shrink.
The asshole who walked out on Agnes when she needed him most—see
him
climb the stairs of a blazing tenement with sixty pounds of gear on his back to save a kid! Cassie was watching us closely.
    “You two going swimming?” Leon O’Connor said.
    “Yes, we are, aren’t we, Daddy?”
    “Sure.”
    “You have a good time, sweetheart.”
    Sweetheart. He calls my daughter sweetheart. I should have him arrested. I should give him a medal. I should get the fuck out of here. Instead I made conversation.
    “You work in the city, Leon?”
    “Brooklyn.”
    “Why did you go into the Fire Department? You mind my asking?”
    “It’s what the men in my family do. You kind of take it on board when you’re a kid.”
    “Never wanted to buck the system?”
    “Daddy, can we go now?” She was hopping from foot to foot, suddenly uncomfortable having two daddies in the same room.
    “Nah. You?”
    “Me? Oh, I always wanted to buck the system.”
    “Yeah, so I heard.”
    In the cab on the way to the pool I pondered that remark. A humbling encounter, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. He would have heard Agnes’s account, and it wasn’t hard to guess how it would play in the moral theater of Leon’s mind. A familiar sensation occurred then, and I didn’t attempt to suppress it, the welling of anger and within it a flame of resistance:
I did the right thing. Agnes will understand that one day.
At the same time, streaming in like a tide was my acceptance of the inevitability of her version of events, with me at fault, me the shit. What else was this Leon to think of me?
    “Daddy, what are you
doing
?”
    I realized I was staring out the window of the cab and that my hands, clenched tight on my thighs, had begun furiously kneading the fabric of my trousers. “Sorry, honey,” I said, “I was thinking about something else.”
    With Agnes that second night I again held back from asking what it meant that she should come to me like this. I had to respect her discretion. But at the same time I wanted to know, and she knew it. Afterward, as she smoked, and again we watched the lights on the ceiling, she said, “So why don’t you ask me? I never knew you to be reticent before, not about things like this.”
    “So tell me.”
    “It’s not what you think.” Suddenly she pushed back the sheet and, swinging her long legs over the side of the bed, sat with her back to me, tapping her cigarette in the ashtray on the night table. Her head sank forward, one hand covering her face. In the gloom I saw her shoulders shaking, but there was no sound. “What’s going on?” I whispered.
    My hand was on her spine but she shook me off. She stubbed out the cigarette and left the room. She returned dry-eyed, wrapped in a bath towel that she shed as she got back into bed. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
    “You sure about that?”
    I loomed over her, peering into her face. Did it still work? Could I read her like I used to? But no, a new layer of emotion had silted and hardened upon what once had been a virgin bed of trust. She may have offered me her body but she wasn’t about to give me her heart, not now.

    Danny never missed a meeting. He was a raw-boned and taciturn man who gave off a strong feeling of separateness.
Don’t touch me,
he seemed to say.
Come no closer.
I understood from the others that he’d been a tough soldier who’d watched his buddy die. Something happened to him after that, and four months later they shipped him home.
    He seldom talked, and when he did his voice was so low we had to strain to hear him. I never heard that quality of silence in the group at any other time. One night, though, he described how his buddy died. He spoke as if there were a gun to his head, and in a way there was: he had an alien inside his brain, a foreign body he could neither assimilate nor expel. His squad was ambushed out on patrol. When fired on you throw yourself down. His buddy threw himself into the