Homefront Hero (20 page)

With what felt like his final thoughts, John surrendered to God this woman they both loved. “Take her even as I beg You not to,” he whispered, a tear of his own falling onto Leanne’s cheek as he held her near. He told her “I love you” over and over, hoping each of her shallow breaths was not her last. If he never heard the words from her, the hundreds of times she heard it from him would have to do.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

G
ray.

Vague gray and a strange coolness.

Leanne felt foreign inside her own skin, as if she were outside her body looking in from a curious distance. She felt pain, and yet the sensation wasn’t nearly as sharp as before. It was a hollow ache, a dry and dusty feeling as though she’d blow away in the slightest breeze.

Papa was holding her. She was cradled in his arms, a little girl again. She could sense the steady rise and fall of his chest, feel the warm linen of his shirt against her cheek. Only her feet weren’t curled onto the brown velvet of his sitting chair, they were on something cool and smooth. She thought about moving, about lifting her head to look around her because the sounds were all wrong, but her body seemed disconnected from her thoughts. She didn’t seem to have any strength, not even to open her eyes.
Am I dreaming?
And then the more confusing thought:
Am I dead?
She felt like only a soul, surely, all thought and feeling but without substance. And then again, far too heavy to move.

The scent was wrong. This was not Papa, but still familiar, still comforting. The shoulder was not Papa’s, but yet strong and trustworthy. It came to her like a single candle lit in a dark room, a tiny circle of light changing the darkness.

John
.

She had been sick. Blurry impressions of light and pain and struggle floated past her awareness. She had been very sick. Yes, that explained why she felt too weak and thirsty, why her skin felt as if it would crack open if she moved too quickly.

John
.

This was John’s shoulder against her cheek, his chin resting above her head. His arm encircling her. She wasn’t sure how she knew, only that it couldn’t be anyone but him.

The hospital. She remembered that much now. The image of her blood spattered on the dormitory sink came back to her. Influenza. With enormous effort she forced her cracked lips open and asked her body to breathe. Both her chest and throat felt ripped and raw, yet she could feel the air slipping in and out. She was breathing.

She was alive. Some part of her recognized the impossibility of that fact, recalled enough of her circumstance to know it shouldn’t be.
Lord,
she reached out in prayer, movement still beyond her ability,
have You spared me? Do I live?
Leanne let out a small gasp, the marvel of her survival sending a surge of joy through her fragile limbs.

The sound made John shift slightly in his sleep, a soft and weary groan tickling her ears. She was alive. Leanne forced her eyes open, willed them to stay so until the swimming images before her gained clarity. Her first sight was the stubbled curve of John’s chin, tilted back against the wall. Even in his rumpled state, he was without a doubt the most handsome man in all the world. They were on the floor of some small room with a handful of other beds. She remembered being here, gazing out the window and wishing for death to take away the pain. The memory returned the large ward’s horrors to her mind, the rows upon rows of ill and dying, how she understood now why they begged for death. The image of Charles Holling’s lifeless eyes just before she’d pulled the sheet up over his face washed over her vision, making her frightened and dizzy until she returned her gaze to John’s sleeping face.

He must have taken her in his arms and held her there on the floor—for hours or minutes she couldn’t say. He had been beside her, had cared for her. Fleeting images of his face and voice came back to her, blurred by fever and pain so that she could not remember the words, only the tone and how much comfort it had brought to her. She had a vague memory of him singing—which made no sense at all—but a very clear memory of him pleading for her to stay, to fight, to live.

And she had. She had survived, and she would survive. A tiny, powerful core of truth pulsed somewhere under her ribs like a heartbeat, telling her that her life was no longer in danger. Leanne wet her lips again, pulled another burning breath into her lungs, and pushed one word out into the morning air, “John.”

He started, jolting to a bleary consciousness with another groan. It seemed to take him as long as it had taken her to remember where he was, to pull his head from its propped angle against the wall and look down. When he did, it was as if the sun rose in the blue sky of his wide eyes. He blinked with disbelief, his face melted into an expression of such joy and relief that Leanne felt tears sting her eyes. He pulled a hand across his eyes, as if to wipe away a dream, then looked at her again. He worked to form a word, producing only a tender sound; the eloquent John Gallows rendered speechless. Instead he bent his forehead to hers, and she felt the warmth of his tears steal between the rough stubble of his unshaven cheek. “You’re here. Thank You, Lord. Thank You. Thank You.” He rocked her gently, his chest heaving in a way that made her wish she had the strength to throw her arms around him. “You’re here. You’ve lived. You’re here.”

Leanne closed her eyes for a moment, letting the pure joy push away the aching weakness.

He pulled back and touched every part of her face, cherishing her existence with eager fingers. “I’m not dreaming? You are really here?”

“Yes.” She remembered, looking at his eyes, saying goodbye to him in her heart as she felt the darkness pulling her down. “I’m here.”

“I was sure I’d lost you.” His voice broke as he pulled her carefully closer. She felt her heart pound in her chest, wonderfully alive despite her still-frail state.

“I love you,” he whispered close to her ear, and she felt it flood her soul like warm sunshine. “I told you over and over last night when I feared…” She was glad he didn’t finish the thought. “I yelled at God that He couldn’t have you because I loved you too much to lose you now that I’ve just found you. And then you worsened, and I couldn’t ask Him to keep you in such suffering, so I…” He pulled back again and stared into her eyes. “I love you and you’ve survived. What else matters now?”

He was actually rambling, running words together like an excited schoolboy, and she let his joy flow over into her. John’s exuberance radiated life and hope, and she gulped it in with every trembling breath. “Love?” Of course he loved her, for she loved him. She loved him. The fire in his eyes kindled the clearest truth—that she had always loved him.

“Yes.” His smile was brilliant beyond anything she’d remembered. “Love. I would have suffered through loving you and losing you, but it seems God is kinder than that.” He kissed her forehead, and it spread throughout her body as though it filled her with light and sparkles. “I’ll thank Him every day forever, I think.”

“You stayed with me. How I love you for that. How I love you.” It took so much effort to lift her arm, and the thin gray hand that stroked his unshaven cheek seemed to belong to an old woman. He placed his hand atop hers, the way he had done on the hilltop back before all the darkness, and Leanne reveled in the warmth and strength of his touch. She yearned to give him grand words, to shout her feelings from the rooftops, but her body was still far weaker than her spirit. She was filled with too many emotions to hold back the tears.

“Are you all right? Do you hurt? You’re still so frail.”

How could she feel so weak and so alive at the same time? The room seemed to spin around her, and she was grateful for the anchor of John’s embrace. “I’m terribly thirsty,” she admitted. John tried to grasp something behind her—a glass, perhaps, on the small metal table she knew the hospital kept beside some of the cots—but couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t hope to get up with her in his arms. It would be difficult for a man with two healthy legs, much less his troublesome injury.

“You trapped yourself with me,” she noted. He’d made the choice to stay no matter what happened when he’d pulled her onto his lap. There was something lovingly noble in the gesture. “My hero.” Her smile was worth twice the effort it took.

“My damsel. My lovely, living damsel.” He chuckled, attempting the rise they both knew was impossible. They were indeed stuck together on the floor, and while she could not manage a laugh, one bubbled forth from him. “Miss Landway!” he called, splitting the quiet dawn and waking the other patients in the room. “Madison!”

Ida burst into the room, the alarm on her face melting as she sagged against the doorway in relief and joy.

“Look what I have to contend with. Look at my splendid problem, Miss Landway!”

Ida’s hands flew to her chest, then to her mouth, a tearful little whimper escaping her smiling expression. “She lives!” She rushed over to place an assessing hand on Leanne’s cheek. “Her fever’s broken. Mercy on us all, we’ve a survivor. You’ve survived, Leanne. You’re the first one here.”

“I have,” Leanne said, letting her head return to the support of John’s shoulder. Truly, he had the most wonderful shoulders.

“She has indeed.” She felt John’s jovial laugh tumble through his chest in little shakes that made her smile. “And I’d waltz her around the room…if I could get off the floor. Which I can’t.”

Grinning, Ida broke her own rule of quiet by shouting “Dr. Madison, come quickly!”

He must have been close by, for within seconds the doctor dashed in the door to show the same shock of pleasure Ida had. “Land sakes, she’s still with us.”

“No fever,” Ida pronounced, stepping away as she gestured Dr. Madison over. “She’s come through it, Doctor.”

Madison squatted down to check her pulse, clasping a hand to John’s shoulder with a smile. Something had changed between those two, Leanne could see it in the way their eyes met. The enmity between them had dissolved, replaced by what seemed to be a deep friendship. What all had God wrought while she slept?

“Not yet strong, but delightfully steady. You’ve turned the corner indeed, Miss Sample, and I couldn’t be happier.”

“I was wondering,” John said with a stiff groan, “if we couldn’t all be happier
off
the floor. I fear at the moment it’ll be a week before I walk steady.” He stole a look at Leanne, giving her a tentative squeeze, “but I’ll be the happiest limping man east of Chicago.”

Madison laughed. “You will at that.”

It took considerable effort—and pain—to untangle Leanne from the circle of John’s arms and get her laid out onto the fresh sheets Ida had managed to find and set on the bed. No one cared at the bother—it was far more celebration than anyone at the hospital had seen in too long. Every inch of Leanne felt cracked and dry, and yet still she smiled. John made glorious protests as Dr. Madison eased his stiffened body from the floor. “You’ll pay for that night under her weight.” He laughed, giving John’s shoulder a friendly shake.

“Gladly,” John said, fixing his gaze on Leanne again with dazzling warmth. She marveled again at his vigil over her. She loved him dearly, every boisterous, defiant bit of this man God had sent to her side. Surely God was laughing this morning at all doubts she’d expressed at the Almighty ever getting through to a soul the likes of John Gallows’s.

Ida had managed to somehow find a second pillow, and she propped Leanne up, fussing about her like a queen’s handmaiden. She brought a chair from the other side of the cot and handed John a tin mug of water. “You can tend to your damsel in distress for ten more minutes,” she clucked like a proud mother hen, “then it’s time for the both of you to get cleaned and rested.”

There were still people in the room as John leaned over her to help her sip the water, but she forgot all of them in the depths of his eyes. “Drink, my love.” His voice held a new, tender quality that spoke to the deepest parts of her heart. The water was bliss to her throat, cool and wet and wondrous. John looked at her as though he couldn’t help but do so, as though she were a treasure instead of the rumpled sight she suspected she was. Still, he was doubly handsome to her in his unkempt, unshaven state, so perhaps the same was true of him as he looked at her. She felt herself blushing under the directness of his eyes, that dashing regard that had won far lovelier hearts than hers. He fingered a lock of her hair as he yawned. “Now rest.”

“You, too,” she replied, yawning, as well. She was so very tired, so grateful to be enduring a dull ache instead of the stabs of pain she’d known before. “Sleep well…” and with a boost of courage she added, “my love.” She drifted into sleep recalling the sparkle in John’s eyes that followed her words. She loved him. He loved her. They lived. Tomorrow could bring anything, and she would have enough.

Chapter Thirty

D
r. Madison looked at John from over the top of his glasses as they sat the next day in the tiny room that had become the doctor’s quarters. “You’ve pushed yourself too far, but I suppose you don’t need me to tell you that.”

John leaned back against the room’s single chair. It hurt to stand. It hurt to do anything anymore. “You know what I’m looking for.”

Madison took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve hardly the right equipment to make an assessment, especially under these circumstances.”

John had given enough speeches to know propaganda when he saw it. “I’m long past pretending, Charles. Out with it.”

There was a long pause before Madison answered. “No, I don’t think you’ll heal. Not properly. Not enough.”

John felt the world tilt a bit and grabbed the arm of the chair for support. He’d prepared himself for this, had known on some level that this was coming, but it still felt like a punch to the stomach to hear it aloud. “I’m done, then.”

“In service, yes. Honorable discharge, decorated I’m sure, but—” he gave John a steady, direct look “—flying is out of the question.” Madison took a deep breath before adding, “If you’d have gone…”

“Who can say what would have happened if I’d gone to Chicago and France?” John stood up and turned toward the room’s only window. He hated how the sound of casket-builders’ hammers still punctuated the air. “Not that I haven’t turned it over in my mind a dozen times. I could have gotten what I thought I wanted.” He turned and looked back at the doctor, wincing at the pang that accompanied the move. “Then again, I could have gotten what I deserved.”

“Who can say what any man deserves? I’ve conferred with doctors from seven other bases, and I still can’t explain why Leanne and the others live while hundreds more do not.” Madison dropped his gaze. “We’re not done here, John. Not by a long shot.”

The randomness of influenza, the jarring lack of logic in who fell ill and who escaped, gave heavy weight to such questions. It was why Leanne had spent so much time talking about God’s grace to her patients. To him. John returned his eyes to the window and the clear blue sky framed within. “I’m not fit to rejoin the service.”

Madison came up behind him. “Do you regret it? Staying?”

“No.” John didn’t even have to think about it.

“You’d be all-too-human if you did.” Madison tucked his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “To admit your regret doesn’t belittle the act. It may even make it more heroic, if you ask me.”

“I think I loved her even then,” John explained, amazed at how easily the words came. “In the way I made the choice to stay so easily, with such certainty. I knew, somehow, that my place was here. No, I don’t regret it, Charles. I’m alive, and so is Leanne.”

“And two more besides,” Madison added. “But not enough live. We’ll not be able to lift the quarantine for days, perhaps even weeks.”

John managed a smile. “What matter is that? My battle and my prize are already here.”

* * *

A week later Leanne sat in a chair for the first time since she’d fallen ill. Ida and Dr. Madison had contrived a room for her in a corner of an upper floor, away from the still-infected patients. Eventually the other survivors would join her when they became well enough to move, but for now Leanne enjoyed the ultimate luxury of privacy.

This afternoon as she dressed for the first time, privacy felt too lonely. She felt lost in the large room and large clothes—her blouse and skirt looked as if they belonged to someone else, hanging loose and awkward on her bony figure. She was gazing in a hand mirror Ida had brought with a hairbrush and a small length of ribbon. It was as if a stranger’s reflection returned her gaze. While only shadows now, Leanne felt as if she could still see influenza’s horrid dark spots on her own face. It unnerved her to know she had borne the purple blotches she’d found so ghoulish on her patients. She was a survivor, yes, but she was also a victim. Would she always see the spots, imagined in the mirror even when her face was full and flush with health? She still looked and felt so sickly. So weak and scarred.

It almost made it worse that Dr. Madison and the rest of the hospital staff reveled in her survival. She did not know how to be this wondrous “first survivor,” or what that meant. John was the one at home in the spotlight, not her, and she had not done anything worthy to earn her newfound significance. John had once said his only heroism was “not dying.” How funny that she now felt the same sentiment.

“I am glad to be alive, Lord,” she preached to the sallow face in the mirror, “but I’ve not the grace to ignore how much of my hair is gone.” Leanne could do nothing with the thinned and lifeless locks influenza had bequeathed her. She’d learned about hair thinning out during a high fever, but it was another, humbling thing to live with the symptom. “How vain I am despite all my reasons for gratitude.” Where was the lovely, pretty-feeling Leanne who’d gazed at John from her place beside him on the magazine cover? She looked at her sunken cheeks and moaned at how far she was from that woman now. “I look old. A crone.”

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world to me.” John’s voice came from behind her. Leanne turned, expecting to see his “charm and flattery” face, the one she’d seen him use during his speeches. Instead, she saw a precious genuine affection fill his features. He meant his words.

John’s appearance was sometimes hard to bear. While pain darkened his expression more often than not, he still possessed the handsome features of his war- hero past. He hadn’t really changed, whereas she felt like a walking war-wound. She leaned back against him as she considered herself again in the mirror. “I see far too much of Private Carson when I look in this mirror,” she admitted, trying once again to force her limp hair to twist up artfully over her pale forehead.

“Shh.” John placed a kiss on the spot where Leanne had affixed the thin curl. “Carson had lost his appetite for life. That’s not something you catch like a disease. It’s something that festers inside a man until disease or wound sets it loose.” He plucked the mirror from her grasp, taking both of her hands and turning her to face him. “You are a true beauty. I look at you and I see a warrior. Someone who has waged a mighty battle and earned her victory.”

She turned away from him. “That’s just it, John, I’ve earned nothing. Don’t you see? You told me once you felt your medal was for nothing, that you were celebrated for merely staying alive. I feel like that. I don’t know why I lived and others died. I’ve nothing to teach or share or contribute. I’m just
here
. It will be weeks until I’m strong enough to serve on the nursing staff again. What am I?”

“You, my love, are the most important thing we have right now—you are God’s gift of hope. You and every other soul who manages to pull through.” His winced as standing began to bother him, so he pulled a chair close to where she sat. It seemed like John couldn’t stand for more than a few minutes lately, and while he was doing his best to gloss it over, she could tell it bothered him immensely. “Can’t you feel how the atmosphere has changed since you’ve healed? Hopelessness doesn’t sour the wards any longer. People don’t come in here with a slaughterhouse fear in their eyes, because they know now that it’s possible to live. Every healthy breath you take, every day you improve, is God’s gift to everyone.”

Leanne rested her chin in her hand. “Goodness, one would think you know how to give a speech.”

“I know the power of inspiration. But yes, I do know what it’s like to feel like more of a symbol than a person.” John kneaded his thigh. “It wears on a soul to know others think you larger than you are. I do understand what you feel.” He smiled. “God was wise to put us together, don’t you think? Together. Us. The very idea still astounds me.” He leaned in and kissed her.

It began as a soft and tender kiss, but deepened to a lingering, delighting, lover’s kiss. The kind of rapturous kiss a handsome man would give to a beautiful woman. He made her feel so loved. His regard, the clear affection in his touch, was a balm to the sting of her unhealthiness. There they sat, sitting because neither of them were able to truly stand, but feeling they were strong together. She knew,
knew
John loved her, even now. Not in spite of her scars, but perhaps even because of them. Didn’t she feel the same way about him, about his wounds? Could she have loved the unwounded John, the arrogant dashing hero too large for life? He wasn’t the same man without the thorn of his lame leg. The way he coped with his injury, with her illness, was so very much a part of how she loved him now. How perfectly suited they truly were for each other. “Very wise,” she whispered when she finally pulled away, breathless from his kiss.

“Oh,” John said, reaching for a small bag he’d set down near his cane. “You had me so spellbound I nearly forgot. I’ve a gift for you. I know you’ve been far too idle for your liking, but I’m in no hurry to see you push yourself too soon.”

“You,” she teased, “preaching to me about the wisdom of respecting one’s physical limitations? Perhaps the world really is coming to an end.”

“You don’t want to force me to take back this yarn now, do you?”

“Yarn! You brought me yarn?” She grabbed at the bag even as John held it playfully out of her reach. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do right now than to be knitting.”

John leaned in, holding the bag behind him. “Anything?” His eyes sparkled with cinema-star charm.

“You’re dreadful.” She leaned in and kissed him, deftly snatching the bag in his resulting distraction. “Anything productive, I mean. I’m hardly well enough to do much else, and my hands have been itching for yarn and needles.” The bag held the current set of socks she’d been working on. “How did you manage to get these sent over?”

“You said yourself, I’m very persuasive. Look in the bottom of the bag.”

Leanne dug deeper to find two of the softest, plushest hanks of yellow cashmere she’d seen in months. An absolute decadence in wartime, much less during a quarantine. “John!”

“And as you also said yourself, I’m rather fond of breaking rules.”

She fingered the luxurious fiber, soft as clouds and bright as sunshine. “Oh, John, I can’t.”

“You can and you ought to. My secret source says it’s just enough to make a bed jacket or whatever it is you call such frilly things. And I shall have Dr. Madison write out a prescription if you refuse. You’re to be pampered, and that’s the end of it.”

“A yellow cashmere bed jacket? It’s scandalous.”

John’s smile was perhaps even wider than her own. “It’s therapeutic. Look at you. Your color’s improved already.” He picked up the mirror and moved behind her as she sat on the chair. He bent so that they could both see her reflection and held one of the hanks to her neck. Its fuzzy fibers tickled her chin. “Mmm. I’ve always liked you in yellow.”

“I trust,” she nearly gasped as his murmur tingled down the back of her neck, “you were able to secure the sock
you
were working on, as well?”

“Alas, no.” His eyes suggested he hadn’t even attempted to do so.

“Oh, but Captain Gallows, you promised me a sock for the charity auction.” She pulled a strand of the cashmere from its twist in the hank, wrapping it around one finger with nothing short of glee. To knit something for herself, something so extravagant, something from John, filled her with a radiant energy.

“My duties as makeshift quartermaster don’t allow for such luxuries.” He straightened with a groan and returned himself stiffly to the chair opposite her. “I may not be able to walk far, but I’m a champion of stretching supplies for miles.”

Leanne put down the yarn to lay a hand on John’s knee. “How is your leg? It seems worse.”

John’s sigh told more than his words. “It is. Madison said…” He stopped himself. “No bother about that. What shall you knit first? The olive or yellow?”

“Yes, I
will
bother about that. What did Dr. Madison say? Has he been treating you?”

John shifted his weight, as if the leg ached more at the subject. “Nothing to treat, nor anything to treat with. Fevers need ice more than sore legs, pain medicine is more luxury than your yarn there, and…some things just…don’t heal.” He busied himself with the olive army sock, inspecting it with false curiosity. “Impressive heel, my dear. Such neat stitches.”

The John Gallows she’d known didn’t use tones of resignation. She pulled the sock from his hands. “John, stop avoiding the subject. What has Dr. Madison told you?”

John pushed up off the chair, turning away from her and yet leaving his cane on the floor where they had sat. “There’s no point in discussing it.”

“There is every point in discussing it. Don’t keep this from me. Not this.”

John faced out the window, leaning against the sill for a long moment before he spoke. “Madison said I’ve abused it beyond repair. The leg is lame. Permanently. He couldn’t sign off on active service for me now even if he wanted to, even if Barnes demanded it. Which I doubt Barnes will do, as I suspect the general’s hunting for my head as it is.”

Returning to service had been everything to John. He’d sacrificed everything, pushed himself, broken rules and called in favors to make it happen. He’d been on the brink of achieving that goal. The influenza outbreak was supposed to be a detour, not the end. “I am so sorry,” she said, even though the words hardly did his pain justice. “I know how hard that is for you.” And here she was pitying herself because she looked sickly. She had every chance to recover, and now John did not. It seemed unjust.