Falling Into Place (24 page)

Dr. Musik spent her formative years on Long Island, a suburb of New York City, with her family, in the town of Babylon. The Musik clan was like something out of a Frank Capra movie, with parents deeply in love and well-adjusted children who you knew would grow up to be good, responsible people. Her mother, Claire, was a physician’s assistant working for a neighborhood doctor in a friendly, old-fashioned office. Jill’s father, Tony, was a district foreman for New York Telephone, having worked his way up from lineman over his nineteen-year career. Despite being separated by twenty-two months, Jill and her big brother, David, were as close as two siblings could be. Their bond was exceptionally strong, exempt from the rivalries and petty jealousies that most siblings suffered through. Her brother always took painstaking care to let Jill know how important she was to him, taking her to the park, concerts and picnics despite the protestations of many a girlfriend. Jill idolized her brother with a love that could never diminish.

Jill herself was something of a unique child. Born with a calculating mind and a curious nature, she questioned everything from a young age. From Sunday mass to Santa Claus, baseball to physics, if Jill didn’t understand something, she sought answers with a tenacity few could match. She was the type of kid who took apart her Easy Bake Oven at 6 years old to learn how it operated, endlessly obsessed with the nuts and bolts of life. By middle school, she had developed a reputation as a troublemaker amongst her teachers due to her inability to accept rules and regulations that didn’t sit right with her. Her parents tried to explain the world as best they could to young Jill, but not everything was easily quantified. When faced with the hard-to- define aspects of life, they would resort to a simple mantra: “Do the right thing and the world will take care of you.” That simple intonation seemed to calm the rampant curiosity forever swirling in Jill’s head, at least for a little while.

Aside from her need to analyze and decipher the world around her, Jill was a typical Long Island girl. She had many friends and, despite her overall problem with authority, she did well in her studies. All in all, she was well-liked and popular, forever wondering what the future would hold. She dreamt of eventually getting a place near her hometown, meeting a nice guy and settling down for a normal, happy life. Due to her idyllic upbringing, where nothing bad had ever happened, it seemed such an easily obtainable goal. Unfortunately, that all changed in the winter of 2002, as Jill was in the middle of her second semester of college at Stonybrook University, where she was studying Business Management on the advice of her parents.

David suddenly dropped out of college to enlist in the U.S. Army, motivated by the events of 9/11 to serve his country. During his second tour in Iraq, the elder Musik sibling was injured by a roadside bomb, losing his left leg just above the knee. After months of rehabilitation and therapy at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, he returned home a different person. Sullen and withdrawn, David was unrecognizable to his sister, suffering from both Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and severe bouts of depression. Jill tried everything to help him, even taking a semester off from college in an effort to recreate the happiness of their shared youth. Despite all their unconditional love, support, and the best psychologists money could buy, his family was never able to reach the troubled veteran. After long months of anguish and pain, David Alan Musik took his own life on July 4, 2007, leaving his family shattered.

Tony and Claire blamed themselves, their inability to reach their eldest child more than either could bear. The guilt weighed heavily on their psyches, eventually breeding anger, resentment and bitterness toward the world in general and each other specifically. Jill was forced to watch her parents disintegrate, neither capable of expressing or sharing their guilt and grief. They began to live disconnected lives, unable to spend any time in the same room except for the briefest of moments. It wasn’t long before silence permeated the house, a tomblike quiet filling the air where once love and laughter reigned. It broke Jill’s heart a second time as she struggled with her own feelings of loss.

After much soul searching, Jill decided to transfer to Ithaca College in upstate New York for the upcoming fall semester. She lived in the on-campus dormitories in a desperate and transparent attempt to escape the memories presented by the house she’d shared with her brother. The grief-stricken young woman felt a mixture of shame and guilt over leaving her reeling parents alone, but she needed the change, for the sake of her own sanity. After a period of severe depression, she sought counselling to begin dealing with her losses, thanks to her best friend and roommate. In order to give herself a completely fresh start, she also changed her major to clinical psychology, with a minor in applied psychology, her focus on the treatment and care of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injuries. She was determined to spend her life working with veterans and their loved ones, vowing never to let anyone else suffer the same tragedies she’d experienced.

While she was away her parents grew farther apart, legally separating over a year before Jill finished her studies at Ithaca. After graduating magna cum laude, Jill decided to go back to Stonybrook for her doctoral studies, mostly so she could be closer to her mother. While never diagnosed, Jill firmly believed her mother had suffered a nervous breakdown after David’s suicide. Claire was a mere shadow of her former vibrant self. Mrs. Musik had systematically stopped doing all the things she once loved: gardening, lunch with the girls and days at the beach, among other things. Most of Claire’s friends had moved on after numerous failed attempts to reconnect with her. She hardly left the house these days except to go grocery shopping or for various doctor appointments. Her mother’s situation was such a concern for Jill that after one year she decided to move back home while she continued working on her thesis.

During those years in graduate school, perhaps due in part to living in that house again, Jill had a somewhat schizophrenic personality. She went through periods of both out-of-control partying and laser-focused studying. As more and more aspects of her life seemed out of her control, Jill reverted back to her natural proclivity for defying any and all authority. After all that had happened to her, she once again began questioning everything, no longer willing to accept whatever life gave her. She took it upon herself to question every rule or regulation put forth by the university, pushing boundaries at every opportunity.

As in her youth, once more she needed to know the reason why things were done the way they were. If that reason wasn’t good enough for her, she sought to change the status quo, by any means necessary. Whenever Jill did begin one of these campaigns, her parents’ old mantra: “do the right thing and the world will take care of you” would play on a loop in her head. Lord, how she hated those words now. Didn’t David do the right thing? Didn’t he? The world sure didn’t take care of him. Each time she thought of that simplistic, trite platitude, and how she had believed it all those years, she got sick to her stomach. Jill vowed to be true to her own voice, to do what
she
thought was right and to hell with anyone who disagreed.

Due to the notoriety she achieved with her anarchistic ways, Jill had a great many friends and lovers, all of whom adored her free- wheeling, uninhibited attitude. Inevitably, these good time friends and temporary paramours got left behind a few weeks later when she switched gears, returning to her hyper-studious demeanor. This somewhat dysfunctional cycle continued unabated through her doctoral dissertation, causing quite a few hurt feelings and many a young man’s heart to break. Despite her bizarre behavior, Jill was well-liked by her fellow doctoral candidates, just as she’d always been growing up. She eventually earned the nickname “Elevator” Musik, due to her “up and down” personality. Most classmates and friends spent her final year calling her
Ellie
or
Vator
.

After earning her doctorate, Jill began working at several VA hospitals on Long Island, while continuing to live with and care for her mother. She spent more and more of her time at the hospitals, giving therapy to returning military personnel and other veterans in need, but it didn’t seem like enough. Needing to do more, to raise the public awareness of the devastating effects of PTSD, Jill started posting her thoughts and feelings online in a blog called
Nurturing Valor
. After only 6 months, she had over one hundred and thirty thousand followers as well as major magazines and newspapers linking to her blogposts, including
Stars and Stripes
and
The New York Times
. She also wrote articles and editorials for other publications, which garnered her guest appearances on local news programs and podcasts around the country. Jill felt that if her words and message could help even one person avoid the pain her family suffered, it would all be worth it.

All her hard work and determination brought Jill to the attention of the National Defense Support Administration, a very specialized government agency. The agents of the NDSA were used exclusively in support of The Power Elite, America’s only government- sanctioned superhero team. The super team formed spontaneously 4 years earlier, when it’s various members came together to save New York’s South Street Seaport from an attack by the legions of The Crimson Barracuda, an undersea eco-terrorist. Even before the battle was over the members of the team, Achilles, Eris, Bolt, Seraph and Ambrosia, were instant celebrities, trending on all social media. As the public demanded more information about them, the media feeding frenzy went into overdrive. These heroes were the lead story for weeks, with every sighting or tidbit of information creating days of new headlines.

The government quickly realized how valuable such a team could be in protecting the nation from dangers both foreign and domestic. After an exhaustive vetting, Congress passed The Power Elite Amendment, a unanimous, bi-partisan bill that recognized the team as a new, independent law enforcement agency. It also gave all five members high-level security clearance. The National Defense Support Administration was created to help the team both during and after their numerous, high impact battles by coordinating and facilitating evacuations, crowd control and clean up, among other duties. A toll-free hotline was created to field and prioritize the hundreds of emergency calls coming in from around the globe, dealing with everything from cats stuck in trees to exploding volcanoes. To date, there were over two hundred NDSA agents working around the clock to assist the heroes whenever duty called them into action.

Dr. Musik was offered a job in the agency’s aftercare unit, giving therapy to agents who took part in any of the team’s high-risk missions. Feeling this was the natural extension of the work she was already doing, Jill jumped at the chance to make a lasting difference through her participation with the NDSA. Thanks to assistance from the agency and a generous advance, she was able to provide in-home care for her mother, making it possible to move to Washington, DC, for her new position. This was a dream come true and the good doctor reveled in every aspect of her new situation, from finding an apartment to furnishing her office. It was the first real happiness Jill had experienced in a long time. Even though she’d spent the last few weeks feeling better than she had since David’s passing, Jill desperately tried not to listen to the voice in her head saying it was all too good to be true.

Please don’t let the voice be right,
she thought to herself as she stared at the pistol shaking in her patient’s grasp.

“Please, Agent Meadows, you know it’s against protocol to bring your weapon into our sessions,” the therapist said, still desperately trying to maintain her composure.

“What does it matter anymore? Nothing matters now! Don’t you see that?” the patient screamed as he made his way to the door, locking it. “Just stay there, Doc. Don’t move! I don’t want to hurt you but someone has to hear what I have to say!” Jill remained perfectly still, her mind racing, searching for a way to calm him down without inciting violence.

Agent Meadows then moved the couch in front of the door before hurrying to the windows to shut the blinds. The disturbed man ran his hands across the window sills, under the desk top and looked in the potted plants Jill had bought to liven up the place.

He kept gazing around the room, constantly jerking his head back and forth, looking for something that wasn’t there. The agent was frantic and sweating profusely, his eyes wide and ever vigilant against whatever perceived threat his mind had created. He touched his face and head repeatedly, as if trying to wipe out bad memories from his mind without success. For the briefest of moments, he looked bewildered, as if unsure where he was and what he was doing. He looked around cautiously before snapping back into his highly agitated state, rubbing his head once more.

Even if Jill hadn’t spent the better part of the last 7 years studying the effects of PTSD, she could’ve easily recognized the distress signs in the man before her. She’d seen enough angry outbursts, hypervigilance and difficulty concentrating during David’s struggles to understand Agent Meadows was a man on the edge. The doctor knew if she couldn’t find a way to help him right now, there was no telling what he could do, to her or to himself. Dr. Musik waited until he turned in her direction and very slowly raised her hands, palms out.

“Agent Meadows, Darrell, please sit down and let’s talk about what’s bothering you,” she said in an even, calm tone, her eyes full of compassion. “After all, that
is
why you’re here, isn’t it? To tell me what’s going on?”

“Yes! Yes!” the agent replied, taking a step toward her. Suddenly, he stopped as he clutched his head, grimacing as if experiencing a sharp pain. He blinked rapidly and wiped the sweat from his brow with his left arm. “No! I can’t involve you! I can’t!” After a few moments his face softened as he dropped his gaze to the floor. “I should’ve have come in here. I’m sorry, Dr. Musik.”