He opened his eyes and pulled back. “I’m sorry I was mean to you, Liz. I was kind of out of it.”
“It’s all right. I’m sorry that my being here didn’t help you as much as I thought it would. But when I heard you were hurt, I just had to—”
“Did anyone tell you what’s going to happen next?” he asked her unemotionally.
“Sort of. You’ll have rehab.”
“I’ll be transferred to Balboa, the Naval Medical Center. Some people go to other places once they’re healed up a little, but some stay there, live in barracks. Two to three months. Then I’ll be medically discharged or medically retired. After I learn to walk on a fake leg.”
“Prosthesis,” she corrected, pushing her long hair over her ear.
“Yes. Fine. While I’m doing that, you get ready to graduate. Right?”
“I’m ready now, except for a couple of papers and finals,” she said. “I’ve been getting all As.”
He almost smiled but caught himself. “Listen, I know you want to help me, but the best thing you can do for me right now is understand—rehab is going to be a big job. Full-time. I’m not coming home until I’m through that.”
“But we’ll be in touch,” she said, nodding, smiling tremulously. “We can finally have phone calls again.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Rick?” she asked, tilting her head, tears gathering in her eyes. “Will we have phone calls?”
“Sure,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Don’t start crying, Liz. I can’t take care of you right now, you have to get that. You have to be strong because I can’t take care of you. Taking care of this is enough work.” He waved at the stump with his free hand. “I can’t be worrying that something I did or said made you cry. Cut it out.”
She sniffed back the threat of tears and held her mouth in a rigid line so her pinkened lips wouldn’t tremble. “I’ll be fine. It won’t take that long. And at least it’s not Iraq.” She sniffed again. “It’s just hard to say goodbye to you again, that’s all.”
“It probably wasn’t a good idea for you to come all this way. If I hadn’t given up a spleen, I’d have been out of here in forty-eight hours. On a medical transport to the States. Kind of hard to catch up with.” He saw the stricken look in her eyes and quickly said, “But hey, it was real nice of you to come and I appreciate it. I’m sorry I was so mean—I had no idea what I was doing, saying.”
“I know. It’s okay. I love you, Ricky.”
Say it back, he told himself. You can’t not say it back, that would be cruel. But he didn’t want her to know he still loved her, it wasn’t good for her to be bound by that. And then he reminded himself, he wasn’t going to break it off with her here, like this. That would come later. So he took too long but he finally said, “I love you, too, baby.” Maybe adding baby would lessen the blow of his hesitation. “Sorry, my brain is like mud. All these drugs, you know.”
“Jack said in another few days you’ll get used to the pain drugs and be more lucid.”
He almost smiled. His Lizzie didn’t use words like lucid and understand the meaning. “Right,” he said. He pulled on her hand. “Now, come on, give me a nice little kiss goodbye, be strong for me, and we’ll catch up later, when I’m settled in rehab. Huh?”
She leaned toward him and gave him another kiss, another kiss like she might’ve given her brother if she had one.
“At least I know you’re safe now,” she whispered. “I’ll still miss you, while you’re in rehab.”
“I miss you already,” he whispered back, not wanting to, not meaning to. “Now go on. Don’t drag this out. It’s too hard.”
He turned and watched her go, seeing Jack standing in the doorway, glowering. Oh, he’d pissed off the big man. Too fucking bad, he thought. Maybe everyone would have been better off if he hadn’t made it. He brought bad karma.
He turned back to the wall and struggled with self-pity. Just thinking about those phone calls he used to have with Liz, back when they were younger and talked every night, was enough to make him cry like a baby. He couldn’t believe the level of self-loathing he felt, that he brought so much pain on people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he couldn’t see the end of his own pain. The empty space where there was supposed to be a leg and foot hurt like hell. He couldn’t imagine how that was possible, but the doctor explained something about neurons still delivering the message to his brain that his missing limb hurt. The stupid neurons didn’t know his leg ended above the knee.
He heard the sound of one of his roommates, a thirty-five-year-old guy he knew only as Stu, using the trapeze over his bed to heft himself out and transfer to his wheelchair. Then he heard the squeaking of the wheels and hoped Stu was going for a ride down the hall.
But no. Stu wheeled himself in front of Rick. Stu wasn’t sent out of Landstuhl because he’d been stationed here when he had an accident that caused a spinal cord injury. Stu had his legs, but he wasn’t going to be using them.
“Interesting,” Stu said, looking up at him. “Beautiful girl, adores you, and you shut her down. You have a brain tumor?”
“Maybe,” Rick said, looking away. “That’s one thing I haven’t had yet.”
“I know the leg hurts, but your lips don’t.”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“This is a little town here, this ward. It’s impossible to mind your own business. And you’re FUBAR, man.”
“Well, we knew that,” Rick said, smiling meanly. “No reason for me to fuck her up, too.”
“From what I heard, just minding my own business in this little town of ours, you already fucked her up, and now you’re cutting her loose. We need to get you a new MRI on your head—you definitely have a brain tumor.”
“Leave it alone.”
“Maybe you don’t get this yet, but people care about you. They come running all the way from the States when you’re hurt. And you’re going to walk back into that homeplace of yours, looking just like you looked before you left until you take your pants off. Everything’s going to work just fine. But you’re too lame to see that right now. You working on pissing everyone off till they hate you? You could just be happy you have this much going for you. How about that?”
Rick glared at him. “No, Stu. I can’t just be happy.”
Five
Jack thought about sending Liz home and staying around Frankfurt until he could see that Rick was on his way to San Diego, but in the end he decided to go with Liz and let Rick have the space he was asking for. He didn’t think Rick was being logical or smart, but stubborn went a long way. Rick verged on irrational, and yet, as Jack was beginning to understand, this behavior was not out of the ordinary for a young man in his situation. After all, he was hurting all over, physically.
So he said to Rick, “You’re leaving in the morning and I’m going back tonight. I’ll get in touch by phone and once you’ve had a decent start on your PT, I’ll come down and visit. Just a real quick visit—you don’t have to put out the china or anything. I just want to check in.”
“You don’t have to,” Rick said. “I can just let you know how I’m getting along.”
“This might be more for me than you,” Jack said. “And if you need anything, even just someone to talk to, call. If you need me, I can come. Got that?”
“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”
Jack put a hand around the kid’s neck and pulled him briefly against his chest, holding him close for a second. Even like that, Rick was so far away. He didn’t hug back. He put one hand on Jack’s arm and that was it. For a brief and terrible moment, Jack wished Rick would fall apart, take his comfort.
When Rick and Liz’s baby was born dead a couple of years ago, Rick had needed Jack’s and Preacher’s strength to keep him on his feet, to keep him from crumbling. He’d needed the men he’d grown to think of as fathers to bolster him so he could keep Liz from losing it. They’d spent hours talking, supporting, soothing, lending the strength of their experiences.
Right now Rick didn’t want anything from anyone, and for Jack this was horrible. It was like being rejected as a father figure.
“Hey, Jack,” Rick said. “It was nice of you to come all this way. Sorry I’m not good company.”
Jack smiled at him, a completely indulgent smile. “Rick, there wasn’t anything else I could do. Like it or not, that’s the way it is with best friends. If it was me in the bed, you’d be right here.”
A flicker of emotion crossed Rick’s features, but it didn’t last long. “Thanks. Have a good trip home.”
Normally Rick would have told him to give Mel his love, but on this visit he hadn’t even asked about her or the kids. In fact, he asked if his grandmother was holding up and that was all. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, see anyone, think about anyone. The way he was isolating himself from feeling not only worried Jack, it was completely familiar to him. Jack had been in a few bad situations in the Marines and he’d been too goddamn stoic for his own good. But, he reminded himself, he had somehow grown out of most of that. He had survived the traumas of combat.
The one who surprised him more was Liz. Jack was afraid he’d be dragging a weeping, sniveling seventeen-year-old basket case back across the Atlantic, but Liz, although troubled and sad, seemed to be in control of her emotions. “I’m afraid, you know,” she said to Jack while they sat together on the airplane. “I’m afraid he doesn’t love me anymore. But I understand I can’t know that for sure until he gets better. And he will get better. I was terrified that we’d get to Germany to find out he was—” She couldn’t finish.
Jack squeezed her hand. “I know, kiddo,” he said. “Listen, he’s hurting and he’s screwed up right now, but he has no idea what he’s getting himself into. I offered to bring him home to my house and drive him to PT as many times a week as he needed to go and he rejected that. He said he didn’t want anyone watching his struggle. Well, I talked to the social worker right before we packed up and left. When he gets to the hospital in San Diego, everyone will be watching him. They have a new care unit they call C-5—Comprehensive Combat and Complex Casualty Care. There’s a large amputee unit that combines everything from orthopedics and psych to drug treatment. He might be kicking and screaming the whole time, but as long as he’s there, there will be treatment for whatever is going on with him. And that missing leg isn’t all that’s going on with him.”
“What is going on with him?” she asked. “Because I’m not sure I get it.”
“Any guess.” He shrugged. “Could be what they used to call battle fatigue, but it’s really just the shock of seeing terrible things, doing things you wish you hadn’t had to do, denial, rage, fear. Add on top of that, he got hurt real bad and is minus a leg. He can get a good prosthesis, but he can’t ever get that leg back. He’s wounded, worried about the future and, for that matter, worried about the past. His war past. He’s going to the best possible place to get help with that. You and me? We can’t help him as much as they can. Bad as it hurts that he doesn’t want our help, it’s probably the best thing that could happen.”
“I hope he gets himself back,” she said. “Because no matter what, I’m probably going to love him forever.”
She leaned her head against Jack’s shoulder in the narrow, confining airplane seats. Without looking at Jack, she said, “Remember back when I was pregnant?” Then she laughed hollowly. “Fifteen and pregnant. God. Talk about hurt, scared and pissed off….”