Page 87 of Cul-de-sac

Chapter Thirty

One of Aiden’s most vividchildhood memories is that of the front door slamming.

He flips over in bed and opens his eyes as the memory expands to include what preceded the slam: his parents’ faces contorted with rage, their fists pounding at the air in frustration, their voices spitting fury into the narrow space between them, like venom from a pair of warring cobras.

Damn that new therapist anyway, dredging up all this shit. Like it’s going to do any good.

His problems, like his flashbacks, are the result of two tours in Afghanistan—the things he saw in that dusty wasteland, the things he did.

As his previous therapist explained, when faced with danger, your body gets ready to fight, flee, or freeze. Your senses go on high alert, your heart beats faster, and your brain stops normal function to deal with the threat. This is healthy. But with PTSD, your brain doesn’t process trauma the right way. It doesn’t view the memory of the event as being in the past, and as a result, it switches to danger mode and you feel stressed and frightened, even when you know you’re safe. This is called a flashback.

Something Aiden has been experiencing with more and more frequency the past few months. Especially since his old therapist retired and this new one—who insists on bringing up irrelevancies from the past—has taken his place.

How is talking about his childhood going to make anything better? Is it going to make the flashbacks stop or his nightmares go away? Is it going to make the insomnia disappear or improve his self-esteem? Is it going to save his marriage?

He stares at Heidi, asleep beside him, her deep auburn curls stretched across the whiteness of the pillowcase, like a series of incriminating question marks. He knows he’s losing her, that it’s only a question of time before she leaves him.

Like his father left him.

“Tell me about your father,”the therapist says, as Aiden watches this afternoon’s session play out in his mind.

“Nothing to tell.”Aiden hears the feigned indifference in his voice.“I hardly knew the man. He left when I was nine.”

“That’s old enough to have some idea what he was like.”

“He was a bastard,”Aiden says.

“What makes you say that?”

Aiden glares at the man sitting across from him. Dr. Stephen Patchett is close to sixty, but looks easily a decade younger. Probably helps that he has all his hair, Aiden decides, understanding that his father is roughly the same age, and wondering if he, too, has managed to keep from going bald.

Dr. Patchett leans back in his chair and waits, crossing one leg over the other to reveal a pair of yellow-and-black polka-dot socks peeking out the tops of his Air Jordan sneakers.

“Was he abusive?”the therapist asks when Aiden fails to answer.

“How do you mean?”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No.”

“How about emotionally? Was he distant? Withholding?”

Aiden pushes a lock of invisible hair away from his face.“Not that I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

Aiden pushes aside the unwanted image of his father cradling him in his arms after he’d fallen off his bicycle.“I remember my parents were always fighting,”he says instead.

“Was there anything specific they fought about?”

“Not really.”Aiden pictures his mother and father sniping at each other from across the room.“She’d say one thing; he’d say the opposite. Just to be difficult.”

“You understood he was saying things ‘just to be difficult’ when you were nine years old?”

“I understood my mother was unhappy.”

“And it was important to you that she be happy?”

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