Denver, Colorado. June 17 2007

My name is Jessica Mason.

My husband, Steve, was a soldier. We don't have children, and I work at the local library, a quiet job that felt a million miles away from the life he had. Since returning from his second tour in Iraq, Steve was never really the same. His last tour had been especially brutal, and one of his friends, a corporal named Johnson, had been killed by an IED. Steve took that hard, carrying a grief that was too heavy for him to bear alone. I'm at the library daily, organizing and cataloging books, while he's at home, a man adrift in his own memories.

He'd been having nightmares ever since he came back. He'd wake up in the middle of the night screaming, his body thrashing and fighting the blankets as if they were an unseen enemy. The weekend before it happened had been horrible; he barely slept at all. He just sat on the couch, staring at the walls, a haunted look in his eyes.

On Monday morning, I got up and went to work, hoping the routine would bring some normalcy back to our lives. I had on black pants and a navy blue blouse, a professional uniform for a quiet day. At the end of the day, I locked up the library and drove home. I stopped at the Safeway on East 31st Avenue in Denver and bought some groceries—pork chops for dinner and a carton of milk, simple things that were part of our old life. After that, I went to our house on Leyden Street.

I got home and parked the car in the driveway, the familiar crunch of the tires on the gravel a comforting sound. Steve's car was also in the driveway, its dust-covered surface a sign of how long it had been since he drove it. I got out of the car, grabbed my purse, and got the groceries out of the backseat. I fumbled with my keys a bit and walked to the front door. The porch light was on, but the house was dark.

I opened the door and went inside, calling out his name, "Steve?" but he didn't answer. The silence was unsettling. So I went to the kitchen to put the groceries away. As I put the bag on the counter, I felt a sharp, blinding pain on the back of my head. I fell forward, and the bag of groceries slipped from my grasp, the contents spilling onto the floor. The carton of milk broke open, a white puddle spreading across the tile. I grabbed my head, my fingers tracing the line of a deep cut, and tried to turn around. As I turned, I saw Steve, his face twisted in an unrecognizable rage, holding a gun at me. I saw him move to hit me with the butt of the weapon, and then the world went black.

When I woke up, it was dark. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear Steve, a low, guttural whimpering. I tried to stand up, but I couldn't. My hands and feet were bound tightly with what felt like rope. I was lying on the floor. My eyes started to adjust to the dim light, and I could make out the shapes of the furniture in our bedroom. The curtains were closed, and a single, pale shaft of moonlight came through a crack in the blinds. I could see my husband, curled up in the corner of the room, his face buried in his knees.

I tried to call out to him, but the sound was muffled. He had put a sock or something in my mouth, a dirty one from his duffel bag. He heard my muffled cries, stood up, and walked over to me. He started babbling, his words a frantic, nonsensical jumble about IEDs and someone named Johnson. He seemed very irate, his face a tight mask of anger and fear. He was pacing and waving the gun around, his movements erratic and unpredictable. I knew he wasn't my Steve anymore.

Then, all of a sudden, he got quiet. He walked over to me, sat down on the floor, and grabbed hold of me, pulling me to his chest. He started crying, and I still could not speak because of the gag. I could feel the tears soaking through my blouse as he held me, his body shaking with sobs. I tried to get my hands free, pulling and twisting at the tight bonds, but I couldn't. Steve stopped crying and started yelling again because I was trying to get free. He was in a rage, his eyes wild with a mixture of grief and madness. He got up and hit me again in the face, the impact a sharp sting of pain. He was throwing things around the room, smashing framed photographs, breaking our alarm clock, and punching the wall until his knuckles bled.

I noticed the gun on the floor, a dark, gleaming shape against the pale carpet. I don't know when he put it down, but he did, a brief moment of clarity in his madness. I tried to talk to him, to make him understand that I was still here, that I was his Jessica, but I could only make muffled sounds. I just kept looking at him in the darkroom, his wild shadow pacing around and around. I saw him stop, his eyes fixed on the gun on the floor. He slowly walked over to it, picked it up, and held it to his head. I heard the shot, and then he fell to the ground. The quiet that followed was the most terrifying sound I had ever heard.

Sincerely,

Jessica Mason