“Good instincts. You could have a future in journalism. Let’s see…I’m thinking we should just stock up on entrees, get a variety. Whatever we don’t eat tonight, we can nuke for breakfast in the morning.”
“True. Don’t know how many more meals we’ll get.” Seelie winced. “That sounded fatalistic.”
“But you’re not wrong. Egg rolls? Crab rangoon?”
“Yes and yes.”
Seelie was a big fan of people minding their own business. She thought the world worked best when everyone left each other alone, and she tried to practice what she preached. All the same, there was another code she wanted to crack tonight.
“Why was he mad?” she asked.
Nell glanced up from the menu. “Hmm?”
“Tyler. He was angry about something before you took him aside. Was it me? Did I do something wrong? I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out if it was something I said, or—”
“No. Oh, no, Seelie. Nothing to do with you. I mean, nothing you did.”
Nell called on some distant memory, weighing her words.
“Do you remember, about five years ago—it’s five years ago this weekend—there was a mass shooting in Brooklyn? A fast-food restaurant in Red Hook.”
Seelie nodded. “Yeah, I mean, I was still living in Buffalo, but it was national news. It was horrible. Something like fifty people died.”
“Tyler was there,” Nell said. “With his family.”
Seelie remembered the photograph on Tyler’s TV stand, the one that vanished when he turned in for the night. Tyler lived alone. She’d assumed a divorce, maybe a bad one. She put her hand to her mouth.
“He only survived out of sheer luck,” Nell said. “He hid under a table, with the bodies of his wife and daughter right next to him, for over three hours while the police tried to negotiate. He watched the shooter execute the other customers, one at a time.”
“Oh my God,” Seelie breathed.
“There was nothing he could have done. I’ve read the police report, seen the minute-by-minute breakdown. If he’d tried to play hero, he would have been killed like the rest.” Nell met Seelie’s eyes. “But he doesn’t believe that. He says he does, but…I know Tyler. He blames himself.”
“I can’t imagine going through something like that. But what does that have to do with tonight?”
“When we were running out of there, I don’t know if you saw, everything was happening so fast.” Nell gave a little shrug. “He froze up. It happens sometimes. A moment will just blindside him—and I’m not talking about being chased by armed maniacs, I mean a sound, a smell—and he goes back there for a while. One time a car backfired outside our office window and he had to go home for the rest of the afternoon.”
“That’s textbook post-traumatic stress disorder,” Seelie said. “He has full-blown PTSD. Like anyone would, after what he went through.”
“Tyler’s only drive, in that moment, was to keep you and me safe. That’s the kind of man he is. And he froze. That’s why he was angry. He was furious at himself for letting us down.”
Seelie blinked. “I say again, PTSD. It’s not his fault. I mean, you can’t just…tough your way through that kind of stuff. That’s like trying to walk off a broken leg. The operative word in the diagnosis is trauma. Also, he didn’t let us down. I wouldn’t have been able to get that door off its hinges. We’re alive because of him.”
Nell wore the resigned, wan smile of a woman who had lived the same discussion, the same argument, more times than she could count. And would do it again.
“I know that, and you know that,” she said.
“Has he ever gotten counseling? He can’t fix this by himself. Some things you need help for.”
“I’ve tried to get him into treatment. Believe me, I’ve tried. I think…somewhere deep down, Tyler still believes he should have been a hero that day. And he wasn’t.”
“And?” Seelie said.
Nell spread her open hands.
“You can’t heal a man,” she said, “if he thinks he deserves to be in pain.”
40.
Tyler returned, two fat brown paper sacks precariously balanced in his arms. Seelie grabbed one and ferried it over to the kitchen counter.
“I return bearing a feast,” he said. He held up a plastic bag stamped Collings and Co. “And reading material.”
“They had a copy?” Nell asked.
“Of all five volumes in the series. I told him I only wanted the second one, and he looked at me like I had two heads. Apparently Gabbard’s books are a bible for competitive chess players. Anyone who plays at more