She had been told this happens sometimes. Be understanding, the wives were advised before their husbands came home. Give it time. So she gave it time, even as his anger sharpened and he told her she would have to change if their marriage was to survive. “How?” she asked him. “You have to figure it out on your own,” he said, and then asked her in a mocking tone if she was smart enough to do that.

  He had been back for two years at that point, still a corporal (his promotion to sergeant would come posthumously) whose job at division headquarters included summarizing casualty reports. Did that affect him? How could it not, she decided. The next year, his third year back, was when he started throwing things and describing how he was going to kill himself. He was going to hang himself from the deck. He was going to drive off the Milford Lake dam. He was going to light himself on fire in the shed. He was going to cut his brake lines and go for a drive down a hill. He was going to take off and disappear and she’d never know whether he was alive, dead, far away, just around the corner …

  Well, okay, she began thinking.

  She wasn’t without fault in all that came next; she understands that. He accused her of having an affair. She hadn’t. He accused her again. This time she had. She stopped it and again found herself begging him like crazy for forgiveness, but this time she had provided him a reason for his rage. They separated. She moved out. Visited. Spent the night with him. Got pregnant. Promised to “stay together and work things through no matter what.” Moved back. Stayed.

  Through all of this, she sought no help and confided in no one. As for Jessie, he did get help from time to time, but little of it seemed to make a difference. At one point, he spent three weeks in the Kansas City VA hospital, and Kristy remembers visiting him. “His posture was slumped. It seemed like everything just drooped. His eyes drooped. His cheeks drooped,” she says. “All they did was drug him.”

  After that, he was admitted to Fort Riley’s WTB, where just like Adam Schumann and Tausolo Aieti and Nic DeNinno, he met with a case manager, the chaplain, the pharmacist. He got to know Kevin Walker, who was his platoon sergeant when he started, and, later, Michael Lewis and the other sergeant who would find him dying in the bathroom, both of whom Kristy would call from time to time for support as he worsened. He got occasional counseling and was prescribed the twelve medications that would be mentioned in the post-suicide medical report. He also attended suicide awareness training and was given a laminated card on how to recognize the signs of suicidal behavior, which was found tucked into his wallet after he was pronounced dead.

  The months went by. He spent days at the WTB and nights at home. He kicked the laundry basket. He overturned the coffee table. Kristy began taking notes.

  Now it was April. He was arrested and jailed for domestic battery, and Kristy, fearful for Summer’s safety, took off with Summer to her parents’ house.

  May now. He was in the psychiatric wing of the Topeka VA, medicated, calmer, and to Kristy’s eyes almost worn down. “I think he was starting to find his solution.”

  June 12 now, and he was barraging her with texts. 7:45 a.m. “Are you awake yet?” 8:08 a.m. “Please know I love you very much.” 8:09 a.m. “Thanks for taking such great care of Summer.” 9:14 a.m. “I love you more and more with each passing day.” 9:41 a.m. “Would you please call me?” 10:04 a.m. “Please find some time to talk with me.” 10:11 a.m. “Please don’t just turn your back on me. I need your support. I can’t do this by myself.” 10:23 a.m. “Please work with me.” 10:27 a.m. “I need you to stick by me.” 10:38 a.m. “Please find a way to enjoy my company.” 10:49 a.m. “Would you please call me?” 10:55 a.m. “Please find some time for me?”

  July 8 now. He would be getting out of the hospital the next day, and Kristy stopped by the house with a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, and a box of Lucky Charms so there would be food waiting for him when he came home.

  July 15. “Are you doing ok” Kristy texted him.

  “No.”

  “What’s going on? Did you eat dinner”

  She waited for him to answer.

  “Summer says ‘hi’ (actually just dadada)” she texted.

  No answer.

  “Mom & I are going to Sears to look at washing machines”

  No answer.

  She texted him a phone number of a crisis hotline someone had once given her. “If you are not going to reply to me, please call”

  “I called that number and its not in service” he wrote back a few minutes later.

  “I’m sorry—I will get you a good number”

  “Ok”

  “This is a good number to call,” she texted, passing along a different one. “I just called to check and make sure. They are there 24/7 if you are struggling”

  “Ok”

  July 17. “Did you call that number I gave you?” she texted.

  “Not yet,” he wrote back.

  A little later, she telephoned him.

  “Did you call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Not really.”

  July 19. Now someone was telephoning her. “Corporal Robinson didn’t check in,” one of the WTB sergeants said. “Do we have your permission to go to the house?”

  Lately, she has been taking all of Jessie’s e-mails and text messages and assembling them as a chronology. She worries that her memory is distorting things. If she can think about what happened as an unfolding timeline, and be taken again and again to her moments of trauma as they were unfolding, maybe it will help her make sense of it all. It’s an idea, anyway, and she’s willing to try it. “Little by little” is what those messages have told her so far about how Jessie died. It is the same phrase she uses in describing her coming back to life.

  She has gotten rid of the bedroom furniture, including the bedpost she came to fear. That felt good.

  She has sorted through his clothing and sent all but one of his uniforms to his beloved family in Sacramento, California, where he was born and where he was buried.

  She has begun seeing someone new, a man named Kent Russell, who was her math instructor at the community college she enrolled in a year after Jessie died. “I kept talking to her and thinking, ‘Wow,’ ” Kent remembers of their first conversation. He liked biking. She liked biking. He liked plays. She liked plays. He had been married once. She had been married once. He had a son. She had a daughter. “I’m divorced,” he said. “My husband died,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Was it in the war?” he said. “No. He committed suicide,” she said. Okay. That’s a lot of candor, he thought, not in a bad way. A few weeks later, he was at her house, having barbecue on the deck from which Jessie had once tossed a Christmas tree and threatened to hang himself. A few months after that, she was showing him all of the messages hidden in her cell phone. Eventually he bought her a ring and proposed, and Kristy began planning their wedding. With Jessie, she had eloped. This time would be different. She would wear an actual wedding dress. Kent would wear a tuxedo. There would be a buffet dinner and a buttermilk cake. And then she called off the engagement because she decided one day to get her hair cut, then decided she shouldn’t because Kent wouldn’t like it short, then realized it was Jessie who didn’t like it short, and then realized she was nowhere near ready to get married if she was still making decisions based on her fears of Jessie’s reactions. So she returned the ring, and when Kent said he would marry her whenever she was ready she believed him, and when she got her hair cut and he told her how much he liked it, she believed that, too.

  Is that progress? She thinks it is, as are her decisions to repaint the walls and start seeing a counselor, who often reacts to what Kristy tells her by saying, “Oh my gosh.” Hers is that kind of story, apparently. At the end of the first visit, the counselor said Kristy was suffering from depression. After a few more visits, she changed it from depression to PTSD and gave Kristy something called a “Feeling Word List” with instructions on how to use it. Pick a word, she said, write it down with the words “I feel” or “I felt” preceding it, finish the sentence with whatever comes to mind, and soon enough you’ll own the emotion that at the moment is owning you.

  Kristy looked over the 347 choices on the sheet of paper and chose the word “angry.” “I feel angry that Jessie is still impacting and controlling my life,” she wrote.

  She chose “demeaned.” “I felt very demeaned when he would drag me around to all the offices on Fort Riley and make me smile and show what a happy family and perfect couple we were.”

  She chose “petrified.” “I felt petrified when Jessie overturned the china cabinet.”

  She chose “degraded” and “demoralized.” “I felt very degraded and demoralized when Jessie would yell at me and tell me how much of a whore and a slut I was.”

  She chose “enraged.” “I felt enraged when I got to the point where I beat Jessie with a baby blanket.”

  Then, trying to think of something that sounded more positive, she chose “relieved” and “unburdened.”

  “When Jessie died, I felt relieved and unburdened,” she wrote, and it’s true, she says, she did, but of course the more time that has gone on, the less that’s been the case. Sometimes she envies the army, with those five lessons learned about her husband’s suicide. How did they come up with so many? Because when she goes over the circumstances of all that happened, culminating in the phone call when she learned that Jessie hadn’t checked in with the WTB, she can come up with only one.

  She was in church in Kansas City when that call came, and at first she wasn’t terribly worried. He was probably asleep, she told the sergeant who was calling. Or perhaps he had turned his phone off and forgotten. She hung up and went back into the sanctuary. Then came a second call an hour later, asking for her permission to go to the house. Now she was worried. She hung up and began pacing outside of the sanctuary as Michael Lewis and the other sergeant drove to her house, noted the car in the driveway, noted the keys in the ignition, noted the mowed lawn, opened the door, climbed the stairs, and headed toward a light at the end of the hallway. Here came the cat. Here came the moan. “Jessie?” they called out. “Jessie?” Now came the third call to Kristy, and soon she was on her way to the hospital in Junction City where Jessie had been taken. Her father drove, and she sat in the back with Summer, thinking, “This is not how it’s supposed to be,” and then correcting herself: “I’m not the one who says how it’s supposed to be.” It was a long ride in a quiet car. Mostly she tried not to think at all. At some point, someone called to say the doctors had managed to coax a few breaths out of Jessie, so there was some hope, but the hospital was still an hour away, and by the time she got there he was dead and his trip to the Gardner Room was under way.

  Her lesson learned, then: it came to her six days later.

  She was in Sacramento, at the funeral home, just her and Summer and Jessie, who was in a propped-open casket at the front of the room. Visitors would be along in a while, but for now, on this day, the day before his funeral when he would go in the ground and she would have nothing to figure things out by except for her bruised house and her hidden texts, she had two hours on her own to consider him as he lay in front of her. It was the same amount of time as a meeting in the Gardner Room, but here there was only one case to consider and one person to do it.

  She went up to the casket and held his hand for a while. She used her fingers to brush his hair. She took a seat in the first pew, all the way to the right, and while Summer crawled around her legs, she thought about who Jessie had been before he died, before he kneeled in his own blood, before he sent her so many texts that began with the word “please,” before he thought about punching her fucking nose and watching it bleed, before he needed those towels folded, before he saw a pink mist, before he held a skull together, before he went to war. She thought all the way back to the beginning when she was at that church dinner, so bored, and he took the seat across from her.

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  “Paperwork,” he said.

  That’s all it took. One routine question, one silly answer, and right then she felt herself tipping over the edge and falling in love. Just like that. No way to explain it. It just happened. And that was her lesson learned, that she had married a wonderful man.

  11

  Now it is Adam Schumann who is in Sacramento, standing alone at the airport curb. It’s warm out compared with what Kansas had been, and yet something about the air makes him want to shiver. Even in Iraq, at least on the good days, he didn’t feel this unnerved.

  The flight from Kansas City to Salt Lake City might be part of the reason—he wanted to sleep but ended up next to a snorer who kept sprawling onto his shoulder. The flight to Sacramento was worse—this time he was next to a man who reeked of liquor and could barely buckle in, even with a seat belt extender. But the bigger reason, and probably the real reason, was the older man now approaching him, who is decked out in an earring and one of those California tans.

  “Fred,” the man says, extending his hand.

  “Adam,” Adam says warily, and then, wondering what he is getting himself into, climbs into Fred Gusman’s car.

  Patti Walker is responsible for this. Since Adam had stopped by her office that day, she had been looking for a program for him, and when neither Topeka nor Pueblo had room, she found one in California called the Pathway Home. Fred Gusman was its director. The program was fairly new, not well known, and much more unconventional than the others. Topeka, for instance, was part of the VA system, and Pueblo relied on insurance payments; this one was opened with a five-million-dollar grant from private benefactors that covered the first three years, and was now scraping by on fund-raising and donations. Pueblo was four weeks and Topeka was seven weeks; this one was four months minimum and often longer. Still, when Patti called Adam to tell him about it, he said yes on the spot. He had lost fifteen pounds over the past few weeks and was up to two packs of cigarettes a day. Patti was thrilled.

  Saskia Schumann

  Saskia was not. The idea that Adam would be gone for so long, and that he had decided to go without even discussing it with her, had left her fuming. She wanted him to get help. She had been the one begging in the furnace room. But four months? And not sixty miles away in Topeka, where she and the kids could drive over and visit him, but seventeen hundred miles away in California? “Well, Patti wants him to go to the California one, so I guess he’s going to the California one,” she said angrily. “Guess Patti was able to decide my life for me.” Later, after talking to Patti, angrier still, she said, “Of course, Patti used my favorite quote: ‘Stay strong. You’re a soldier’s wife.’ Makes me want to puke.” But an opening was an opening, and in the same way that Tausolo Aieti had ended up in Topeka and Nic DeNinno had ended up in Pueblo, Adam was off to California, leaving behind for Saskia a flower on the nightstand and a note that said “I promise to be a better man when I return.”

  In the car now, Adam looks out the window as Fred steers away from the airport and asks how his flights were. They had talked once by phone, but that was it. They know nothing about each other.

  “Miserable,” Adam says.

  “So how’s your wife?” Fred tries.

  “She’s okay,” Adam says. “Just nervous. Like I am.”

  “Well, when you see the place, you’ll probably think this is beautiful,” Fred says. “A lot of trees. A lot of grass. Green.”

  Adam is far from the first person to sit across from Fred Gusman in these circumstances. In the three years since he left a high-level job at the VA to open Pathway, a few hundred combat vets have been through the program, and every one of them had been as nervous as Adam. Fred keeps a running tally of who has come his way. Sixty percent had tried to kill themselves. Seventy-three percent had quit or been fired from a job. Eighty percent had tried school, of which eighty-three percent dropped out. Most pertinent to this moment, every one of them felt disgusted with himself for needing to come here, and Fred knows to keep these drives low-key.

  “What’d your case manager tell you about the place?” he asks.

  “Not much. I’m in the dark,” Adam says.

  Fred points to some distant buildings on the horizon. “That’s Sacramento, our capital city. Not the biggest city in the world,” he says.

  “A lot bigger than what I’m used to,” Adam says.

  Now Fred angles southwest, away from the city, and soon they are cutting through farmland that is at least a little reminiscent of Kansas. “So what’s the population where you live?”

  “Junction City?” Adam says. “I think about thirty thousand.” He has an empty soda bottle in his hands, and he begins crushing it over and over.

  “So how many deployments have you had?”

  “Three,” Adam answers, and then, after a pause, says, “It’s the last one that did it.”

  “Well, what you’re going to have the opportunity to do is push through some of these things,” Fred says. “A better quality of life. That’s the main thing.” He mentions that the program has three psychologists and three family therapists, that there’s a massage therapist who drops by sometimes and a yoga instructor, too, that the guys go fly fishing and at the moment are out bowling. There are no locked doors, he says. No demerits. No privileges to be earned or lost. Nothing like that. “Over time, you’ll figure it out,” he says. “We tell everybody to keep an open mind. Especially the first week or so. It can feel a little awkward.”

  “How long you been doing this?” Adam asks.

  Fred laughs a little. “For forever,” he says.

  “Yeah?” Adam says.

  “Since four years after the Vietnam War.”

  “Oh. That is forever,” Adam says.

  They keep going and are now flanked on both sides by high hills, and Adam is staring out at them in silence, thinking how odd they look, how smooth, like they’re coated in velvet or something, when a sudden noise startles him. It’s an approaching motorcycle zooming between cars at full throttle. It pulls even for a moment and then flies past, and if this were ten years ago, the young guy straddling it with his shirt tail flapping behind him could have been Adam himself, on his way home to sit in the sun and meet the new girl in the basement apartment.