Obstetrix(48)

I heard footsteps from the next room. “Lizzie?”

“I had a bad dream, Dad,” I said. “Just going to read a little before I go back to sleep.”

Dad nodded and sat down in the chair in my room. “I think it was the pickles that did it,” he said.

I snorted a little and laid my book aside.

“They have medication for nightmares, just so you know,” Dad said. “I mean, I know you’re a doctor, but I’m not sure if this is in your wheelhouse.”

“This is the blood pressure med, right?” I said. “Not exactly my wheelhouse, but I remember a study making the rounds a while back.”

“I was prescribed it for enlarged prostate, years ago now. I’d heard people say it could help with nightmares, but I didn’t really expect it to work.”

“Did it?”

“Not quite as well as I’d hoped, but more than I’d expected.”

We were both quiet for a minute or two, and then I asked, “Did you have nightmares about Vietnam?”

“Of course I did.” He paused, and then said, “When I first got back, I didn’t talk about them with anyone. Your mom convinced me to talk to her, even if I had to wake her up in the middle of the night, and that helped, actually. Do you want to tell me about your nightmare?”

“Bethany was pregnant,” I said. “It was my fault for not stopping it.” Dad started to say something and I interrupted to go on. “Last month there was this woman, Holly. She got caught with a cell phone—the one I’d found and used to text you. I put it back in its hiding place, but it was found and they beat her and made us sing while they were doing it and I didn’t say anything, Dad, I told myself it wouldn’t matter but I didn’t even try because I was so afraid they’d just beat me, instead. Or they’d beat her just as much and then beat me, too.”

“Ever heard of moral injury?”

“Oh. Yes, actually.” Moral injury is when your trauma is compounded by being in a situation where you felt like your own actions were morally wrong.

“You know I was in combat search and rescue. Flying rescue missions in a prop plane. So in some ways I was lucky. It was a fucked-up war, but I had a mission that made sense to me.”

“Yeah.”

“But the day I had to eject, it wasn’t actually because of antiaircraft fire, I just fucked something up and my engine cut out. I almost hit the ground before I could eject, but I made it out, and then had to hide and try to avoid being taken prisoner and wait for my own rescue mission. Someone from my own unit died trying to rescue me. Father of two. It felt like a bad trade.”

“Is that what you dream about?”

“Sometimes. When your mother got cancer, though, I started dreaming that the cancer was my fault, that I’d given it to her. I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about that, she’d feel like she needed to reassure me and she had enough to be getting on with. But fortunately the medication helped.” He laughed a little. “I actually saw the doctor for the enlarged prostate because I was afraid all my nighttime bathroom trips might disturb her sleep. The drug felt like a miracle, honestly.”

“If these keep up, I’ll talk to someone.”

“You should probably talk to someone regardless, you know?”

“When I get back to Minnesota,” I said. It was hard to know what it would take to make me feel safe again. It was hard to know what would help. My room had two beds, and after a little while, Dad lay down on the other bed, instead of going back to his own room, and I turned off the light again and slept.



* * *



I’D HOPED I’D QUICKLY be on my way back to Minnesota, or at least Minot, but it turned out we were stuck in Idaho Falls for days. All of us: the cult, and also my father’s group of friends, which he called the Task Force. They’d started out with a handful of people he knew from the VFW post in Minot, which meant mostly Air Force retirees. But as the plan had gotten more complex, they’d recruited friends from other branches. Tom was an Army vet who’d driven a truck in Mosul, and the guy I’d encountered on the porch was also former Army.

It was pretty clear that the FBI had a few reservations about how things had gone down: the Task Force’s story was that they had just been working on finding me, that a full rescue was merely a backup plan in case time was of the essence, and then, in fact, time was of the essence (and I backed them up on this).

One of the younger and chattier members of the Task Force got a Facebook message from an old high school friend, saying, “Dude, is this you? What happened?” and told her his version of the whole thing. This high school friend—Matt admitted that he did technically speaking know this, he just hadn’t thought about it until after the conversation—was a reporter at the Kansas City Star, so Matt’s version of the story went very, very public, which set off a big round of speculation about whether his story was accurate, or if I had actually joined the cult and my father had talked everyone into helping him with a kidnapping and forceful deprogramming.

At that point I decided to talk to the press. I mostly hadn’t, back when I was on trial, and although “don’t talk to the press” was good advice to someone facing a felony charge, I found it profoundly annoying to be talked about instead of listened to. Beth set it up, and I spent an hour telling my story to a nice woman with good vibes as she sat with her hands folded in her lap, leaning forward occasionally to ask me for more details, while two people with lights and cameras focused on recording the conversation.