His Road Home (3 page)

“As the dulcet tones of archaic Icelandic, Madam Wife.”

Rey snorted at his friend’s comment, and Grace realized she wasn’t the only one lost. The way these two obviously cared about the man in the bed made her reluctant to expose Reynaldo’s lies. Because a real fiancée would presumably expect details, she asked, “What’s going to happen next?”

“Best guess, they’ll close the wounds this week and if all goes well, after six or nine months of physical therapy, he’ll go home,” Theresa answered.

The nearest doctor to Pateros was at the county hospital in Brewster. She couldn’t recall if their town had services for the disabled. “No way.”

Theresa’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t you live there?”

“I’m in Seattle.” And she didn’t go home much except holidays, but her schedule was irrelevant. “Besides the...” She waved a hand at the empty space in the bed. “Why can’t he speak?” Wanting an explanation this much felt selfish, but she needed him to be able to talk.

The other woman flipped pages. “TBI—traumatic brain injury—can manifest different symptoms. Rey’s exhibiting expressive aphasia.” More pages. “His tests don’t show apraxia—that’s language processing problems, basically input. Aphasia is disconnect in the output, the link between his brain’s language center and his mouth.”

“Not sure those two were ever connected,” Wulf said.

Rey lifted a middle finger to reply.

“See? You still manage output,
compadre.
”

Neither woman allowed the men to sidetrack them. “How long until he’s better?” Grace asked.

“I practice internal medicine, not neurology, so I can’t say.” Her eyes narrowed at Grace. “How well do you know Reynaldo?”

Grace had been half-prepared for the interrogation shift since Rey’s friends had arrived. She wrapped her arms around herself and glanced at Rey to see if he wanted her to reveal the truth. His half-closed eyes and shallow breathing made him look exhausted. Part of her wanted to place her hand on his forehead, but touching him with an audience would be too awkward. “We’re from the same town. Everyone knows everyone.”

“How long have you been engaged?” The other woman’s gaze focused where Grace’s ringless left hand protruded from her crossed arms.

The direct question filled her with dread because she’d been a crappy liar her whole life, unable even to blame a dirty floor on the dog when she’d forgotten to remove her shoes inside. “Since the news announced it.”

Instead of throwing accusations, Wulf punched his friend lightly on the shoulder. “Cruz, man, there are easier ways to get a woman to say yes.”

“As if you can give advice.” Theresa’s husky laugh hinted at secrets with her husband. “I don’t remember wine or flowers when you asked me.”

Grace didn’t know where to look when Rey’s friends smiled adoringly at each other, so she glanced at Rey, who was watching her, not his friends.

When he intercepted her gaze, Rey’s eyes rolled up and his tongue stuck halfway out.

At least they had their reactions to the other couple’s affection in common.

Wulf and Theresa caught Rey’s expression and laughed too. “What did you always call that? My kitty eyes?” Wulf rested his hand on Rey’s shoulder. “Join the club, buddy.”

These people loved Rey. She couldn’t imagine telling them the engagement was a lie, one their friend had started, not without a better explanation that wouldn’t leave them as bewildered as she felt. The best she could offer was a smile.

* * *

Cruz didn’t think he’d ever remained this silent except on a mission. He always instigated a debate or posed a hypothetical. If he could get his mouth to work, he’d ask Wulf about the end game in Denmark two months ago, but he was too tired to try.

Wulf stepped away from his wife—funny to think of him married to Doc—sat next to the bed and braced his arms on the bed rail. “Never expected to see you play the strong, silent type.”

“Sss-uck.” He’d meant to say he was shit out of luck, but the meaning was identical.

The wetness in his buddy’s eyes made Cruz want to swivel his head toward the window or cover his face, anything not to see tears, but Wulf was still talking. “If I could trade—”

Cruz slashed his finger through the air over his throat to signal his friend to stop. They both knew life didn’t make bargains. It just dealt hands. You played them as they fell.

Wulf’s gaze travelled to where the top sheet’s military corners lay undisturbed by the three dimensions of a man. “Doc ran a 5-K last month.” He bowed his head, shoulders slumped. “You’ll be up and walking too. That’s for sure.”

Rey’s stumps hurt like hell, but they were his lesser worry. Recovery would be hard work, but he’d picked fruit and he’d survived Q ``Course, so he knew whatever he wanted his body to do, it would. But his brain wasn’t a muscle he could shove at a weight machine until it fired straight.

“We’ll dance at your wedding.” His friend was still discussing legs. “You will too.”

He wanted someone to understand, and the man he’d spent eight years eating dirt with seemed like the obvious choice, so he pointed at the empty mattress. “Dry-on.”

“Dry...on... Drive on?” When Cruz nodded, Wulf whooped.

But when he pointed at his head and tried to say
worried
, it emerged
w
-
w
-
wor.

“Work? Word?”

What would he trade for speech? Would he trade both balls? One? Tough call, since he wasn’t confident they worked, despite what urologists promised, but his brain sure as hell wasn’t pulling its weight.

“Enough charades.” Wulf fished a newspaper from the trash, found a pen and shoved them at his face. “Try this.”

The piece of paper offered a path. His hand had scabs, but he could already feed himself and hold his own piss-pot. He could do it.

He tried the pen in his right hand, then his left, but it didn’t feel less awkward, so he switched to his right again. The audible scratch of the pen crossing the paper released the tension that had squeezed him like a compression bandage. With a pad of paper, he would write messages the nurses could read to his mother and sister, and ask for Tabasco with his eggs, and apologize to poor Grace for dragging her into his clusterfuck. This pen would free him.

Through his peripheral vision he noticed Grace lean closer, and he wrote,
Thank you.
I’ll explain after they leave
.

Wulf sank in the chair and raised his hand to cover his eyes and forehead.

Rey froze. Without even the scratch of the moving pen, the silence took on weight.

Grace bit her lower lip and wouldn’t meet his gaze. Theresa looked at him and his notes—she was a doctor, she understood bad handwriting, didn’t she?—but her face was smileless.

Finally looking down at what he thought he’d written, he focused on the reality, not the wish. His sentences weren’t even words. Strings of letters covered the paper, mostly capital E and H and other square shapes, backward and sideways like an eye chart.

The pen snapped in two, then hit the wall across from him.

He wasn’t confused inside. He could read the news ticker on television and sort it from the announcer, so why the fuck couldn’t he communicate? Why couldn’t he control his mouth or his hands?

From his first conscious hour at the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, he’d accepted that he wasn’t returning to the field with special operations, not missing both legs. Some amps stayed in the army at desk jobs, even double amps, and he’d begun a mental list of how to continue his career. No more action, but once he achieved independent movement, he’d anticipated terrorizing fresh meat at Q-``Course or evaluating candidates at Special Forces Assessment School.

All the jobs on his career list had one mission-critical common denominator: speech.

* * *

Like a true fiancée, Grace had nodded and laughed with Rey’s friends so late that the April evening had chilled and the parking lot lights had illuminated. Walking to her rental car, she returned her sister’s calls.

Jenni didn’t pause for hello. “Grace!”

“Are you at Mom and Dad’s?”

“Outside walking Po-Po. They have one fat dog.”

Grace had phoned because if she didn’t, it would be weeks before her family forgot, and her mother might be worried enough to call her boss in the morning. That didn’t mean she actually had anything to say to Jenni.

“On the drive home, I had time to think.” Jenni’s voice slowed until she sounded almost apologetic. “I’m sorry I wasn’t paying better attention to what you said at the airport. Do you or do you not know Rey Cruz?”

“I’ve never spoken to him until today.” As she slid into the car’s cocoon of air-freshener and normalcy, relief that she had one person with whom she could talk openly about her problem filled her. “Not ever.”

“You mean he had a picture of you in his wallet, but you don’t even know him?”

“Yes.”

“Whoa. Creepy.”

“He’s not creepy.” He was frustrated and frustrating, complex and difficult, but she hadn’t received one creep vibe.

“Did he tell you why he had your picture?”

“He has a brain injury and can’t talk.”

“Isn’t that convenient.”

“It’s like a stroke.”

“Are you sure? You’re not a good judge of men.”

“You have so much experience? There’s three hundred men where you live, maybe fifty in the key cohort between the ages of eighteen and forty.” She projected fish populations for a living; counting bachelors in Pateros wasn’t challenging.

“Bottom line, you delivered the box, so you’ve done what you have to do.”

Reminded of the responsibility sitting in the trunk, she squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know if I have.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Last night you didn’t want to go. He lied—”

“It’s more complicated.” Propped on the headrest, she tried to marshal words for her instincts. “His friends are going back to New York. I don’t feel right leaving him alone, and I have the week off.”

“His mother’s on her way.”

“When?” Hope flared that someone would share the burden.

“Luisa—remember his sister?—took their mother to the bus in Wenatchee Friday, and she caught the train in Spokane. She should arrive Monday.”

Imagining Rey’s mother worrying alone for days broke her heart. “Why didn’t she fly?”

“You have been in the big city. Why do you think she doesn’t want to fly? Doesn’t matter that her son’s a hero, does it, if they ask the wrong questions at security?”

“Oh. Right.” His mother was probably undocumented. “His dad?”

“He died a long time ago.” Her sister’s voice went quiet. “Forklift accident when we were kids. We were too young to know, but people are talking about it again. He was off the books so they didn’t even get insurance or worker’s comp. Burns me up.”

She thumped her skull onto the padded seat. This got worse. “I’ll stay until she gets here.”

“I didn’t tell you all that to guilt you. You don’t owe him.”

“Maybe I do.” Images of the young man with the missing arm, the laughing guy flirting with her escort from his wheelchair and Rey, propped in his half-empty hospital bed, swamped her. “Maybe we all do.”

“This is not a patriotic duty. You have a duty to pay taxes, not to pretend to be engaged.”

“Don’t you think there are places in between?” It wouldn’t hurt her to keep him company, maybe read to him or watch a movie.

“Be careful, okay? That’s advice from your sister.”

“Puh-leeze. You’re way too young to sound like Mom.”

“Speaking of, they’re super excited about your engagement. No idea how you’re going to reveal the truth that you’re not going to be coming home more to visit.” Her sister snickered. “They’re counting potential grandkids.”

“Oh, shut up.” Deciphering Rey might be easier than deflating her parents’ nuptial expectations for their firstborn.

* * *

The little guy’s long blue shirt fluttered as he tumbled from the opposite bank. His head bobbed once, but the canal was too deep, always too deep. Every night Cruz watched him disappear underwater.

Cruz dropped his rifle and fumbled to unclip the chest strap of his assault pack.
Stupid
, he tried to yell, but the weight of his gear pressed too hard for him to breathe, too hard for his warning to rise above a moan.
Don’t be stupid.
He’s not worth it.

Instead of listening, his dream-self took the big hop over the lip of the irrigation ditch. The three strokes to reach the kid used up all his air. Each time he struggled to hand the boy up to his older brother, wiry arms clung to his neck like suckers. He peeled the runt away, but the arms came back and strangled him.

He needed air. He needed to breathe. He opened his mouth.

Nothing.

Chapter Three

Grace came back. That surprised Cruz more than anything since he’d stepped on the mine. Today she brought a Canyon Fruit Cooperative box, or rather, she escorted the navy kid carrying the box for her and thanked him profusely.

“Apps?” Sitting in his wheelchair felt and looked closer to normal, even if he couldn’t talk. He missed his legs, missed using the john like a man, missed more than he had imagined, but he could get through that. Soldiers did. The lost words were another matter, and he shivered, thinking these garbled sound-fragments might be his best effort. “Ah-pul-z?”

“Cards, I think.” She heaved the container from the guest chair onto a table that shuddered under its weight. “I’m supposed to deliver them.”

She picked at the tape with her nails, so he pointed to the butter knife on his breakfast tray, but he must be invisible.

When he tried to maneuver around the foot of the bed to the side table, the Hummer-sized footrest raised to be level with his seat made it like driving a bicycle with an ottoman strapped to the front. His right front wheel locked on the bed frame, but he couldn’t see below the footrest to know whether to go forward or back. Stuck, like a low-rider on a parking barrier.

The ripping tape irritated him. “Stop.”

She didn’t hear, or didn’t pay attention, and kept picking at the package until he barked “knife” like a constipated drill instructor. Her hunched shoulders made him feel both guilty and pissed off, and he wanted to pound his forehead into the wall. Couldn’t hurt his brain much more, but he was too jammed to even manage self-injury. Idiot at the wheel.

He lowered his voice and pointed at the breakfast tray and said “knife” again, but she didn’t turn. Maybe he hadn’t said what he’d intended.

“I can’t do this.” She rested her elbows on the carton and cradled her head. “I have no idea why I’m here.”

If spending an hour with him was too hard, then she could march her tight ass out the door. She was nice enough to look at, but she wasn’t his type. He could make it alone.

Not one word left his mouth.

“My sister in Pateros said your mother should get here today.” She walked to the knife without looking at him and started sawing the tape. “Do you want to unpack? Or shall I?”

Hell, he’d been blown up last week and already done two hours of stretches and mat work with a physical therapist, and didn’t think he looked as exhausted as she did. “You.”

After she stacked envelopes and cards across the foot of his bed, she lifted out a quilt. “This is beautiful apple-print fabric.” She hunted for a tag, the flush returning to her face. “We’ll have to check the cards to see who made it.”

He didn’t see a
we
in this room, and he didn’t need a lap rug or someone talking down to him. What he did need was to pee from all the hydration they pushed in him, but he couldn’t use his jug with her oohing and ahhing over his card collection.

“This is nice too.” She stretched her arms wide to show him a purple and gold Pateros High School banner. Hundreds of people had signed it, covering the fabric with wishes that for some corny reason made his eyes blurry. “Maybe I can loop it over the curtain rod.”

The one-sided conversation continued while she climbed a chair to knot the corners.

If she were his hometown sweetheart, it would be perfect, with her tight jeans at his eye level and her chatting about people they both knew, but they were strangers. She didn’t know him, so the reason she was here was pity—plain, simple pity. He’d earned respect, a Purple Heart and a pension, but not pity. He rejected patriotic do-gooder pity on principle.

“You. Done.” The order came out clearly through his teeth.

“Not yet,” she chirped. She’d misunderstood and thought he wanted to know if she’d finished. If they were truly engaged, he might care, because when she stepped down she’d hold his hand and it would be hearts and flowers and puke, but Grace was competing in the Miss Red, White and Blue pageant. The contest used to require bigger boobs, dyed hair and a willingness to screw around, but apparently after an injury they sent B-list contestants.

“Go.”

She wiped her hands on her jeans and smiled, almost to her eyes. “You want me to take you somewhere? Is that why you’re in the—” The expression on his face must have penetrated her congeniality armor, because she shut up.

“This.” He waved his arm to indicate the unpacked decorations. “For you.” He pointed at her, then lifted curved fingers as if gripping a stick and raising it. “Flag. Not me.”

She paled, then flushed. Shock and anger, he assumed. Good. The emotions would carry her away from him.

“Go.” He pointed at the door. “Go!” Let no one ever say a one-word guy couldn’t deliver the goods loud and clear.

* * *

Grace ran to the ladies’ room for toilet paper to blow her nose. The truth stung, but he’d provided her with an escape. She could return to Seattle secure that she’d delivered the gifts from the good citizens of Pateros. Leaving wasn’t fleeing, it was doing what he wanted, which was good enough.

Emerging from the restroom, she recognized Petty Officer Boichek next to a desperate-looking older woman.

“Ma’am!” The escort waved her closer. “You must know Sergeant Cruz’s mother.”

Mrs. Cruz was heavier than she remembered from the snack stand at football games, and her cheeks sagged beneath dark eye-bags, but the familiarity clicked.

“
Madre de dios
,
me siento tan aliviado de verte.
” Mrs. Cruz wore black sweat pants and a long patterned blouse, and she wheezed as if she had trouble breathing or was fighting tears when she pulled Grace into her chest. “¿
Mi hijo?
¿
Cómo esta mi hijo?
”

Grace could neither free herself from the shorter woman’s hug nor wrap her arms all the way around her, but she squeezed Mrs. Cruz back. They were the only connections each had in this place, and years of being a good daughter didn’t disappear with someone else’s mother.

“I’ll call a family interpreter,” Boichek said as she dropped a suitcase on the floor. “Can you take her in?”

Three minutes ago Rey had pointed at the door and shouted.

“He kicked me out,” Grace said.

Boichek rolled her eyes. “They all do at some point.”

The urge to laugh at times like this was undoubtedly a sign of dysfunction, but the thought struck her that she’d been too worried about being labeled a fraud. Probably if she told people she’d never met Rey until yesterday, they’d offer her a cookie and a pat on the head.

There was one thing to do. Take a deep breath, and think of salmon. If they jump waterfalls to return home, she could face one angry man in a bed. Explanations would have to wait until he could communicate, or until someone who knew what had happened in Afghanistan arrived, but she could help Mrs. Cruz.

* * *

“Good morning?”

Cruz couldn’t see around the nurse, but he recognized Grace’s voice and the tone of her question, as if she wasn’t sure of her welcome. He pictured her dark hair swinging loosely on her cheeks as she ducked self-consciously. He hadn’t expected her to return a third day, and not so early when he was being washed like a baby, but at least the sheet covered his junk.

“Where’s your mother?” Grace looked to him, not the nurse, so he’d answer for himself.

“Sleep.” She’d spent the night in the chair beside his bed, comforting him each time he thrashed, until 0500 when he’d sent her to rest.

The nurse sponging his neck motioned to Grace, who stood as if she didn’t know where to put her hands while her gaze flitted between the vital signs monitor, the dark television screen and the window. The pause gave him time to notice that instead of the ugly black fleece she’d worn for two days in row, this morning she wore a silky-looking white T-shirt and a short sweater in that yellow-green color women liked. The neckline dipped, showing a silver necklace and a sweet amount of skin. The sweater looked touchable. Maybe she’d dressed up for him.

“How was last evening after I left?” she asked.

“No.” He’d meant
not as good as when you were here
, the effortless drivel he fed good-looking chicks, but he only managed the first sound. The fuck, he was fucked up.

She looked as confused as he felt.

The nurse filled the silence by asking Grace if she’d like to wash his hair. The lie-in-bed-for-a-bath situation was weird enough with a nurse washing him, but having Grace take over after someone shoved the plastic basin in her face was ridiculous.

Men had endured worse than having soft, small hands brush across their foreheads and temples, he supposed. Concentration parted her lips enough that he could see a hint of her teeth and tongue, so he closed his eyes. Mistake, because with his eyes shut, her fingers, the washcloth and the water she squeezed onto his hair were the only sensations anchoring him. Painkillers had dulled his aches, and the hazy edges of his brain were blurred further by her fingers tracing the rim of his ear.

During night ops, if he didn’t have night vision gear, his other senses would open wide until he could almost sense the flutter of insect wings in the air or smell his enemy’s sweat. Grace didn’t smell like an enemy. Behind the protection of his eyelids, he could sort her scents into coffee, rosemary, maybe from herbal shampoo, and that fragrance he could only describe as warm female skin.

She stopped washing and started massaging a neck muscle behind his ear that had stiffened with days of pain. Her fingers became the center of his world. His spine sank into the mattress and he allowed his head to loll to the side. She might not know where to look or what to say, but she didn’t mind touching him. Small mercies, or maybe small tortures.

“Why you...here?” That might be the smoothest sentence he’d managed yet. His brain fog must be clearing. Or, God forbid, his meds were almost worn off.

“Because no matter why you lied about an engagement, or how rude you’ve tried to be to me, you’re from my hometown and your mother is a nice lady.”

She was honest. He could be too. “Don’t know...mamá.”

“There are, what, six hundred fifty people in Pateros. Of course I knew your mother.”

“Tamale lay—” white students had sometimes called him the Tamale Kid, like a riff off that karate movie, “—dee.”

Through his inept conversation, she focused on her task with the precision of emergency ordnance disposal, first sponging his neck, then blotting with a towel. The line across her forehead might have been a sign that she’d had to wait for him to speak, or it might have been concentration on her task. “Everybody knows her. So? Everybody knows my parents too.”

If she didn’t recognize the difference between how kids treated the daughter of people who owned an actual store, with a cash register and advertisements printed in the football programs, and how they treated the son of a Mexican lady selling food from a cooler, her university degrees were overpriced.

Then she moved her washcloth to his shoulder, where his tattoo proclaimed his allegiances. Her finger, not the fabric, traced the words
De Oppresso Liber
unfurling above the skull, flag and rattlesnake. “What’s this mean?”

“Free.” He couldn’t attempt
oppressed
, so he watched her tongue lick her lips and settled for “motto.”
Work the magic
, he ordered his biceps and it obliged by jumping rock hard and ready. From her wide eyes, he guessed scientist-girl didn’t encounter many guns like that.

She stretched her fingers to try to circle his arm, which experience told him women’s hands couldn’t achieve. The flaming skull was known on the team for its bonus effect on women. “And ODA 5131?”

“Team.” Her hands made the bars on the side of the bed and the tubes and fluorescent lights disappear. He felt like a man an attractive woman could touch, maybe even want someday when he was out of these wraps. He raised his free hand. She might—

“
Buenas dias
,
mijo.
” His mother’s voice sounded tired, and she sagged in the doorway before she let loose a paragraph of Spanish asking how long Grace had been there, had he eaten breakfast and whether he’d talked with his sister, and could he call his sister so she could talk to the doctors and then tell his mother what they said.

His head throbbed. Now he had to listen and struggle to speak in two languages. Shit.

Ten minutes later he admitted that watching his mother and Grace try to communicate was better than daytime talk shows. Grace’s left hand held a cup shape while she imitated the whirring swoosh noise of an espresso machine. “¿
Uno?
Dos?
Con lee-ches?
”

“Lay-chay,” he prodded her with the pronunciation of the Spanish word for milk.

Grace whipped around and caught his grin, and tossed it back with her own laugh. “Do those fingers in the air mean you want a double shot, or two percent milk, or two lattes so you can double-fist?” She leaned close enough that he caught a whiff of her sweet scent again. “My sister the teacher likes to say you get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

“Di-a-di-a—” His fingers mimed a finger-prick test, then a syringe, as he tried to convey that his mother had diabetes so she could buy fruit in the cafeteria instead of pastries. “Bee—”

A loud thump jerked Grace upright.

His mother had collapsed into a chair. She hadn’t fallen, but her skin was gray, she had one hand on her chest and both eyes closed.

“Go!” He scrambled to the call button while Grace sprinted from the room, yelling for a nurse. Using his arms and hips he flopped to the foot of his bed, but he couldn’t touch his mother. Her chair was too far. “¡Mamá!”

She didn’t answer, but her chest moved enough that he felt able to take a matching breath as he yanked out his drip. He had to reach her, so he gritted his teeth against his leg pain and rolled to the gap between the bed bars and the footboard. If he went out face first, like a push-up, he could hand-walk out of it and try to land only on his remaining knee.

Two nurses double-timed into the room and pressure cuffed his mother before he could manage more than his fingertips on the floor. At least they ignored how he was hung up on the edge of the mattress, instead assisting his mother into a wheelchair. Grace was the one who wrapped her arms under his armpits and helped him work backward into place.