“You guys don’t have to do that,” I protested. “I’m fine. I don’t need babysitters, especially when you all have—”
“Allison Alexandra Luther!” my mother interrupted sternly. Full Christian name. Never a good sign. “You know darn well that that’s not how our family does things. Until you get out of intensive care, one of us will always be here during visiting hours.” She bent to kiss my forehead, giving Charlie the opening she’d been waiting for to reach down for a fistful of my shoulder-length hair. My mother patiently untangled my hair from her chubby baby fingers and straightened herself up. “I love you,” Mom said fiercely. “Get better.”
I promised I would.
I managed to stay awake for a full forty-five minutes of Jake’s visit. He chatted with me politely, showing me pictures of his daughter on his phone and making quiet jokes about his wife’s latest fitness craze without once mentioning the attack or attempted kidnapping. When my eyes started to close, he just kissed my forehead and picked up the remote for the overhead television. Jake was probably the most laid-back of all the cousins: always polite and soft-spoken, quick to smile or to go along with one of Sam’s madcap plans when we were kids.
In fact, one of those madcap plans was how I came to acquire the herd. When I came back from the hospital in Germany three years ago, I was in rough shape. My physical recovery had gone well—too well, in fact. The army had never seen anyone recover from what had happened to me, and the doctors who’d treated me in Germany were baffled to the point of suspicion. No one came right out and said I must have been lying about those days in the desert, but I got enough sidelong looks that I wasn’t real surprised when they told me I was being honorably discharged.
The first thing I did when I finally returned to Boulder was to have an enormous fight with my parents. I didn’t set out to create problems, but my overprotective, endlessly worried parents had just assumed I’d move back in with them and take a job working for my father. They were genuinely shocked when I refused to do either.
Their next offer was to send me to college on their dime, which I also turned down. Finally, they tried just throwing money at me, offering me free access to a trust they would set up for me “until I got on my feet,” whatever that meant. I refused that, too. Instead, I couch-hopped at my cousins’ houses, took a job at the Depot, and started looking at apartments in one of the few really cheap—and really scuzzy—parts of Boulder. The crappy neighborhood didn’t trouble me in the least, mostly because I’d dealt with a hell of a lot worse than a couple of low-grade muggers who might be dumb enough to jump me.
My parents, on the other hand, absolutely lost their shit when they heard about my housing search. Voices were raised, hurtful things were said, and for a moment there it looked like nobody was gonna get anything but coal that Christmas.
It was Sam who finally brokered the peace between us. She and John were living in LA then, but she came back to Boulder for a month when I got out of the hospital, to make sure I was okay. Sam managed to convince our parents that I needed some time and space to myself, at a job that wouldn’t cause me any real stress or require me to sit motionless in front of a computer all day. Then she came to me, begging me to accept a compromise: I didn’t have to take a dime of our parents’ money, but I would allow them to give me, free and clear, the remote three-bedroom “fishing” cabin they barely used anymore.
“Just let them do this for you, Allie,” she’d pleaded. “Let them take care of you a little, so they can sleep better at night.”
“I’m not in charge of their sleep,” I’d told her stubbornly. “And that’s not my name anymore.”
She’d sighed. “Babe, I am your goddamned twin. You can try to convince everyone else, yourself included, that you’re a different person now, but you will always be Allie to me. Now take the fucking cabin and get over yourself.”
So I took the cabin.
After a couple of weeks, the family’s excitement over my return died down, and everyone went back to their own lives. Sam flew back to LA, but she called me every night, and my parents insisted on weekly visits. Even so, I was only pulling about thirty hours a week at the Flatiron Depot, and I found myself with a lot of free time all of a sudden.
That’s when the night terrors started.
I dreamed of my dead friends from the Humvee, the sensation of being dragged through hot sand. I dreamed of the desert, of blistering lips and blood drying on my skin in the hot sun. Each night I woke up screaming, with the taste of sand in my mouth. I switched my work schedule to the night shift, hoping that sleeping in daylight would banish the dreams, but it didn’t help. Now it was just lighter outside when I woke up, drenched in sweat, frantic with adrenaline, desperate to save people who were long since dead. I never said anything about the nightmares, but Sam somehow knew. Maybe I sounded tired on the phone, or maybe she had a spy in the family who had noticed the bags under my eyes. At any rate, she tried to get me to talk about it, but I just couldn’t go there.
As far back as I could remember, since long before the army, I had felt a darkness around me, a black cloud following me around. Like it was waiting to consume me. Being with my happy-go-lucky sister seemed to push it away when we were kids, and the regimen of the army had done the same. But when I came home from Iraq, the cloud seemed to gain strength, manifesting as the night terrors.
And they kept getting worse, until I was so sleep-deprived that I had a hard time telling the difference between waking and sleeping. Not that I would admit it, of course. Sam knew something was wrong, but no matter how much she cajoled, pleaded, or threatened on the phone, I insisted I was fine. I didn’t want her to feel guilty for not being around, and when push came to shove, I could be as stubborn as she was.