Chapter 40
chapter forty
Mateo
I backed into an open space at the back of the car lot and threw my truck into park. My hand lingered on the key fob like I might make the decision to rev it up again and peel out of the local VA hospital. Natalia squeaked against the seat, her thighs tacky on the hot leather as she twisted in my direction with a proud, empowering look on her sweet face. That face could make a man do anything. Like buck up and walk into an appointment with a government-mandated therapist for the first time.
Veterans Affairs medical services ranged from therapy and mental health services to general practitioners, preventative measures, illness, injuries, dentists, you name it. I had never used any of my benefits out of pure laziness. Really, if I was ever sick it was easier to be seen in an urgent care than jump through the hoops of making appointments for the same result. I was like any other adult turned off by the idea of making phone calls and filling out paperwork unless it was damn near detrimental.
But when I made the choice to finally talk to someone about what I’d been going through, finding someone qualified, who knew the minds of men and women who had been deployed, felt like the smartest, most natural thing to do.
“Are you nervous?”
“I guess you could say that.” Ahead of us the gray double doors of the brick building opened and closed. Another guy around my age walked out into the stifling June sunlight in an olive drab T-shirt, squinting and sticking his hands in his shorts pockets.
“Don’t be,” Tally said. Her soft, tiny hand reached over to rest comfortingly on my knee. I hadn’t realized it was bouncing until it stopped. “Just be yourself. They’re professionals. Remember that nothing you say is wrong, because it’s not a test to pass or anything like that. You’re going to do great.”
The corner of my lip twitched upward. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about. I don’t want to waste this guy's time, either. What if this is all just normal everyday struggles and I’ve chalked it up into something it’s not?”
“Just because your trauma isn’t the same size as somebody else's doesn’t mean it deserves any less attention,” she said. “Some people need an unbiased sounding board, and if that’s all this is for you, then that’s fine, too. There’s no mandatory life-altering prerequisite to therapy.”
The stigma around it was what had deterred me for so long. I thought I didn’t have enough of a reason to seek out professional help when there were real veterans struggling, real statistics showing how hard the acclimation from military back to civilian life really was. In my mind, if I wasn’t in danger of becoming one of the twenty-two a day, I was wasting time and resources. But what I never thought about was how there was a time each of those vets was in the same boat as me, embarrassed to ask for help, unwilling to self-reflect, hoping that they might be able to figure it out on their own.
My commitment to showing up today was a step in the right direction. Maybe the beginning of something completely unexpected if it went well enough. The difference in my life from just six months ago was stark, and glazed with potential to be a point that I looked back on years from now as the beginning of everything. The turning page from part one to part two. The day we got engaged, the world shifted on an axis, and like dominos, the rest fell loudly and chaotically into place.
For the most part.
I put my hand over Tally’s and squeezed it gently. “I won’t talk about our thing,” I told her. “If you don’t want me to.”
“I want you to talk about whatever you need to. It’s a big part of your life, and if it unlocks some kind of doorway to understanding more about yourself then I would never tell you not to. This is strictly about you, Mateo. Be as selfish as possible. It’s all confidential.”
She was so adorably supportive, and I hated myself for ever thinking this would be a burden for her to manage. Lifting Tally’s fingers to my lips, I kissed each knuckle, then flipped her hand and pressed my lips to each of her fingertips and her palm. She slid her open hand against my stubble, resting it on my jaw and running her thumb across my cheek.
“Selfish, got it.”
Dr. Henry Brinckler replied to every answered question with another question. It felt very much like an adult conversation with an inquisitive toddler. The kind that had you questioning the validity of your information after the sixth consecutive, “Why?”
My expectation was to be picked apart and scrutinized, but it was more like getting stripped down to the core aspects of myself. How old I was, what I did, where I was deployed, my family dynamics, why I decided to show up at therapy for the first time and then why I thought this was the right time to take that step.
Doctor Brinckler, Brinck, as he told me to call him, sat across from me in a matching dark green velvet chair with a round coffee table between us. There was a psychology textbook and a geode in the center of it that I couldn’t stop staring at, and I caught myself sliding my palm up and down the arm of the chair several times while I was answering his open-ended question.
Doc had a pad and pen resting on his crossed knee, but didn’t use it, like it was more decorative than functional, and I found that I was waiting the entire time to say something interesting enough for him to record. Until it was all that I could think about, and I was irritating myself with how much I wanted to feel like a real, damaged case and not just another veteran coming into the office with the same story he’d heard a thousand times before, and the same advice to be given.
I told him about Angelo, and that spiraled into the misplaced resentment I once felt for my brother, and how we didn’t see one another for years, then the wedding planning, the best man debacle, and Vegas a couple weekends ago when he stood up for my wife and got himself thrown in jail overnight to defend her honor.
My tangent lasted fifteen minutes before I ran out of material and even then Henry stared into my soul with a contentment that was more blasé than impressed and more curious than interpretive.
“You don’t want to write any of that down?” I gestured to the pen and paper.
His head tilted. “Do you want me to?”
Lodging my tongue in my cheek I hid my chagrin. My arms crossed over my chest. “I thought that’s what we were doing.”
Doc’s bright blue eyes narrowed and his jaw twitched so quickly into a smirk I almost missed it. Then he picked the pad up for the first time and scribbled something short and direct onto it. Which was just about the worst thing in the world that he could have done. Now instead of worrying over why he wasn’t writing anything at all, I was twice as worried over the few words in black ink that somehow defined everything about me.
“What was that?”
“Very important notes.”
I let my head fall back on the soft edge of the chair and started counting the points on the popcorn ceiling. Maybe therapy wasn't for me. Or maybe I’d watched too much television that portrayed going to a psychologist as some mind-altering, eye-opening experience where the doctor said one slightly poetic, riddle-esque thing and the plot came crashing down around them. Everything all of a sudden making sense. Like Fleabag.
I did not want to fuck a priest, so my problems might be unsolvable.
“Do you think you seek validation from the people in your life as a grading system for your worth?”
Oh, fuck. I stood corrected.
I readjusted in the chair. “I think I feel valuable to my friends and family when I’m providing for them.”
“Do you need to provide something to feel valuable?”
“Isn’t that how it works?”
“Should you not be enough on your own without a form of currency attached to it?”
“Are you going to answer everything I say with another question?”
He scratched another word onto the lined pad and my skin started to itch. Not because of the writing anymore, I was more worried over the thought of attaching all my value to acts of service. It brought me back to Delta, being the point man for my unit, because being the go-to in a high-stress environment like that did make me feel like I was providing something invaluable to the men I served with. Being the leader, the captain, was the most important and worthy I’d ever felt. When I came home the rush of that depleted. I wasn’t a soldier anymore, not in the way that I was used to. The full heart, body on the line, dying for my country soldier. I was a civilian, and there weren’t many things I could do in life that felt as important as that. The high was what I’d been trying to recreate. To fill my cup with, and I was struggling hard with the reality that I might never do something that would make me feel quite as indispensable again.
It was why I was afraid of letting down my family, why I couldn’t say no to anything. I wanted to be all the things I could possibly be at once. The best son, the one who didn’t complain, the one who was available, the one who had space in his house for extended stays, and a beautiful wife, and possibly grandchildren. It was why it was so fucking impossible for me to give up control at work and hire someone to help me with TechOps after Pike left. My clients expected a certain level of quality from me and I couldn’t chance letting a new face, or a new hire, half-ass it. I felt valuable for offering Pike that job, and I’d feel valuable again when I hired Angelo.
Then there was Tally. I never thought about why I was so accepting of the sex work, so eager to join in on it, so open to it. I always chalked it up to…being there for Tally. I wanted whatever she wanted, and would do anything for her, so being part of her life in that way was never something I hyperanalyzed. But maybe the reason I agreed to join her on camera was because it would make me more valuable to her. Until two minutes ago I also never viewed myself as a good to be exchanged, either. I wasn’t fully convinced I did, but I was more inclined to pay attention to the way I interacted with the people in my life on account of it. Did I think that she might find me expendable if I never started sex working with her? Was that the driving force in becoming an online pair? That if I didn’t do it, she might find someone else who would? All the memories of our first conversation surrounding it came rushing back.
No.
That wasn’t it.
I loved working with her. It was as much of a joy for me to make her films as it was for her to do the directing and choreography. We were well oiled, no pun intended, and we cared deeply about one another. I had all the free will in the world with Tally, and if I truly wanted to stop working on camera tomorrow, she would never ask me again, no questions.
But I didn’t want that. I was certain I didn’t.
“The military has been half of my life,” I said. “It was the only thing that mattered, until it didn’t. That change was like jumping off a cliff and hoping I missed the rocks at the bottom and landed on something soft or wet.” I found a piece of bark on the tree outside the window to stare at. “Maybe you’re onto something, Doc. I could be trying to recreate a familiar feeling, but if I’m being honest I was the kind of kid growing up that was more worried about pleasing my parents than anything else. I joined the Army and that was the worst thing I could have done, because it was the first time I’d chosen a thing my parents didn’t completely approve of. They made that very clear. Then I got discharged and instead of going back to New York I moved to Florida to avoid them for even longer.”
“Because you thought if you avoided them you couldn’t be responsible for disappointing them? Or the burden of value would become too heavy?”
Something about that hit a nerve, but felt correct. True.
“Maybe,” I agreed with a low murmur. “There’s a lot of stress that comes from it, that provokes other kinds of panic. I shut down when I don’t feel?—”
“Worthy?”
I swallowed, tugging the collar of my shirt away from my hot skin. Doctor Brinckler wrote one more thing down on his notepad and uncrossed his legs, placing it on the table between us. He rolled his sleeve up and looked at his watch.
“That’s about all the time we have today,” he said. “It goes quick, doesn’t it?”
“Time flies when you’re trauma dumping,” I jeered.
Henry stood and his crow’s feet deepened with his smirk as he headed toward the door, swinging it open and stepping a foot outside. His voice carried and I could hear him telling his receptionist he was taking an hour for lunch.
He was out of sight, and I couldn’t help myself as I passed the notepad on my way to the door, needing to know what he wrote down. After all, he’d left it in plain sight on the table. I glanced at the paper, turning it toward me to read what was important enough to write down. As soon as I did a humored scoff gusted out of me. The top of the page said Grocery List and below it he had listed bread, milk, and condoms.
My tongue clicked against my teeth, and I reached down, tearing the yellow page from the legal pad and shoving it into my pocket. I half expected him to be standing in the doorway as a witness to the little joke, but he never came back.
Before I left the office I made another appointment.