The Light of Hidden Flowers (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

I no longer required the strong medication to fly. The Xanax had done the trick, but coming off of it was no easier than recovering from the stronger medication. Now back in DC, I picked cotton balls from my throat, ears, and eyes, trying to shake off the killer flight. My fat cow’s tongue barely fit inside my papery mouth. My ears rang the same annoying tone that played when the television people tested for an emergency.
If this were a real emergency . . 
.

Exhausted and hazy, I deplaned and beelined to the ladies’ restroom, where I splashed water on my bleary-eyed face, slapped my cheeks, and subdued my tornado hair into a ponytail. “You made it!” I said to my reflection, as though it still baffled me that the Boeing jumbo jet hadn’t plummeted into the ocean. I stopped at the first Starbucks and ordered a shot of espresso and a water bottle. I tore open a packet of sugar and poured it into the strong coffee, downed it, and then twisted off the cap to the water bottle. I chugged half the bottle until my stomach felt sloshy with liquid.

I proceeded through customs and the baggage claim, and was on my way to ground transportation when my medicated haze began to clear, leaving me with just the buzzy disorientation of jet lag to deal with. Jenny was scheduled to pick me up at two o’clock. The plan was that she would cruise by the Arrivals curb, and I would just hop in.

I found an edge of a bench and plopped down my bags onto the sidewalk and then sat, glancing at each passing car, trying to locate her whale of a pearl-colored Cadillac. I was excited to see Jenny, to fold into her warm arms, to inhale her familiar scent. I was happy to be home. I fished around my purse for a pack of gum, found it, and chewed two bracing pieces of spearmint, still trying to clear the gauzy film from my mouth.

Jenny was late. She’d probably just run into traffic, but I was beginning to worry. I set my shoulder bag onto the ground and bent over to root through the pockets for my cell phone. As I searched the bag, a tide of legs and feet and suitcases and children in strollers slid along the upper periphery of my vision until my eyes were drawn to a shiny prosthetic leg halted before me. I noted how neatly it sprouted from a colorful Nike sneaker, how tanned and muscular its opposite leg was.
God bless our veterans,
I could hear Dad say. Such a patriotic, grateful man, a veteran himself who never forgot his buddies who hadn’t made it home.

I tucked down more deeply into my bag and finally located my phone. I started a text:
Everything okay—

“Missy?”

The familiarity of the low male voice that had spoken my name hit me hard, like tasting Kool-Aid after thirty years and remembering exactly what it felt like to be five years old. I froze, the dissonance of knowing and not knowing at the same time striking a sort of paralysis in me.

“Missy?” he said again.

I looked up. In front of me was a mirage. A hallucination, a figment of my deluded brain. In front of me was my history, stepping into my present. Perhaps I was still asleep on the airplane, in my jet-lagged Xanax haze, loopy and dopey and dreaming a bunch of nonsense.

“Missy,” he said for a third time.

“Joe?” I squeaked.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Seriously, Joe? You’re here.”

“I’m here,” he said now. A statement.

“Joe,” I repeated and, without an ounce of forethought, I popped off the bench and into his arms. I hugged him more tightly than I’d ever hugged anyone in my life because seeing him erased fifteen years, and touching him brought me back to the last time I felt deep love for a man, and holding him meant that he was real and so was I.

He didn’t pull away and neither did I, until finally he had the sense to ground this moment in reality, to acknowledge that fifteen years was forever ago, and certainly there was a lot of time to account for. He released me, but we withdrew only inches from each other, and though I knew I had no right, I took the liberty, anyway: I placed the flat of my hand against his cheek, and then traced his thick eyebrows across his brooding eyes and let my finger find the crevice of his top lip. As I blinked, I paused with my eyes closed because feeling him and smelling him brought me right back; at that moment I could taste his lips without even kissing them.

“You’re here,” I said, still struggling to register this illusion. “You’re really here.” All these years I questioned whether my memory was reliable, or whether the image of him I held on to was an artificially beautified version of him. But my memory was spot-on because Joe was before me and the peak of his lips and angle of his jaw and generosity in his eyes were there, just like I recalled.

“Jenny’s not coming,” he said. “In case you were worried about her. She and I coordinated.”

“You talked to Jenny?” The thought of my two favorite people conspiring to surprise me nearly launched me into a bout of tears.

“I talked to Jenny,” he said.

Now we separated a little farther, far enough that my hands—hands that were respecting no boundaries—found their way to the terrain of his muscular shoulders, sliding down his tanned biceps. My eyes scanned his body and when they found their target—Joe’s legs: one there, one not—I lurched into his arms again.

“I lost my leg in my last tour,” Joe said.

“I see that,” I whispered into his neck. My mouth on his flesh felt entirely at home.

“I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Is that why you’re wearing shorts?” I laughed.

“I figured I’d get it right out there,” he said. “Just in case.”

I hugged him tighter. “Just in case what?”

“I didn’t know if you would care . . . about it.”

I pulled from him, looked into his gorgeous eyes. “Of course I care about it. For
you
. Not for me.”

He smiled. “As I recall, I owe you a cup of coffee.”

Joe was parked in the lot across the way from the Arrivals curb. He led the way and I followed behind him, wheeling my suitcase. When we reached his van, he opened the back and approached my suitcase, ready to heft it into the back.

“I got it!” I said, aware of how clumsy, how slightly elevated my nervous voice sounded. “I’ve been lugging this thing everywhere. I could put it in.”

“No, I got it,” he said, and lifted it easily into the back.

“Do you want me to drive?” I asked, the words springing from my stupid mouth before I could call them back.
He drove here, dummy,
I reminded myself. Surely he could drive.

“I’m all set,” he said.

A half hour later, we settled into a dark booth of a diner. We ordered our meals: a Reuben for me, a turkey club for Joe, a giant pile of fries for us to split. Two homespun milk shakes. We stared at each other, and hacked through the silence with stilted starts and stops. To me, Joe looked exactly the same. His hair was perhaps thinner, his skin a tad rougher, some lines etched into the corners of his beautiful hazel eyes. Finally, we found our rhythm.

“I’m so sorry about Frank,” he said.

“I still can’t believe he’s gone,” I said. “A year ago he was fine. The deterioration was especially fast for him . . . because of the stroke.”

“In a way—”

“It’s good, I know,” I said, finishing his sentence. “It was horrible seeing him as less than the man he was. It was like monsters had invaded his brain.”

“It’s hard to believe that he was human, after all,” Joe said. “I kind of thought of him like a guardian angel.”

“He had a special way.”

I gazed at Joe. Really looked at him. In front of my eyes was my love from fifteen years ago, and to me he looked exactly the same.

“Your dad used to tell us,” Joe said, imitating Dad: “‘Kids, who you are and what you’re made of isn’t a dissertation. You should be able to sum up your beliefs in a sentence or two. If
you
are clear on who you are, then people will trust you.’”

“Yep.” I remembered. Dad and his elevator speech.

“I was there,” Joe said solemnly. “At the funeral.”

“What?” Goosebumps rose on my arms. The thought that Joe was nearby, as we buried Dad, made me want to cry.

“I’m sorry I didn’t stick around,” Joe said. “I chickened out. Convinced myself it was a bad idea, and kind of crept away before you saw me.”

I thought back to the funeral, how when Taps played, I had been thinking of Joe. Had he been only feet away from me at that moment? “I love that you were there,” I said. “And as much as I would have loved to have seen you then, I wouldn’t trade the reunion we just had at the airport.”

Joe swallowed hard. My tough high school boyfriend had always been sentimental.

“Tell me what happened to you, Joe,” I said, and then, brushing aside any doubts about the inappropriateness of my actions, I covered his hands with mine.

We stared at each other for a moment before Joe began. “I had been on patrol in Afghanistan. A routine mission. We were getting ready to cross a canal when all of a sudden I was thrown into the air and tossed into the water. The guy behind me—my buddy Allen—had stepped on an IED. God knows how I missed it.” He shook his head. “Allen didn’t make it, but I didn’t know that. Not until later.”

I tightened my grip over his knuckles. Fought the urge to lean over and put my mouth on his hands.

“At the time, I wasn’t even aware of what had happened to my leg. All I knew was that a bomb had been detonated and I was fighting for my life. Somehow I dragged myself out of the canal. Somehow I was medically evacuated. I remember being on the helicopter, looking up at the medics. I remember their eyes. They weren’t shocked by what had happened to me, to Allen. They just looked weary—sad and weary, like they were sick and tired of this happening so often. Like they were drained from seeing whole men taken apart.”

When Joe paused, I saw that the waitress had delivered our food. He looked down at his club sandwich and said, “Let’s eat!”

“I’m so sorry you went through all of that,” I said.

“I’m honestly not sorry for myself,” Joe said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you earlier. I liked that you didn’t know, that you only knew me for me. When people see me now, I’m not just Joe anymore. I’m Joe with the prosthetic leg. I don’t feel sorry for myself, but I can’t force other people to not feel sorry for me.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said, “but I know I already did what you must loathe: say that I could get my own suitcase, drive the car. That must be aggravating.”

“People just want to help. I get that.”

We paused, ate some fries that happened to be ridiculously delicious. We dipped into a communal mound of ketchup.

“Tell me about your children,” I said.

His eyes lit up, and he set down his sandwich. “My youngest, Jake, is a belly-laughing giggle monster. He’s my reminder of everything good and pure in the world. He’s nine and that blows my mind, because it’s true what everyone says, I could swear he was just born. Of course, the effect was heightened. He’s grown up for me—all the kids have—like time-lapse photography. I was deployed for much of their childhoods. I’ve missed a lot of years.”

“He looks just like you,” I said, remembering photos from Facebook.

“Olivia is eleven going on eighteen,” Joe said. “We call her ‘The Mayor’ because she is involved in everything and everyone’s business.”

“She sounds hilarious,” I said. “She likes to act, too? I think I saw photos of her in a play.”

Joe laughed. “Yeah, kind of. Olivia doesn’t so much want to act as she wants to lip-synch.”

“And then there’s your oldest—Katherine, right?”

“Yes, Katherine—Kate,” he said, his face changing from lighthearted to serious.

“What’s she like?”

“She’s one of those amazing kids who practically raised herself. She’s hardworking, studious. Straight-A student. High honors every semester. We’ve never had to stand over her to do her homework. She’s just a good, good kid.”

“A real smarty-pants,” I said. “Thirteen?”

“She’s fourteen, now.” Joe’s voice caught, like he was choked up.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

A half smile. “She struggles,” he said. “She’s a bookworm, and kind of lacks the skills to fit into middle school, you know? A lot of the girls her age are fighting over boys and jockeying for position with friendships, and Kate’s at a loss on how to play that game. She’s going to be fine, though. She’s going to be an awesome adult. Still, she’s alone a lot of the time, and the girls hassle her. There’s been some bullying. It’s a painful time for her, for me.”

I looked wistfully at the window. I knew exactly what that was like. “It is hard,” I agreed. “Clearly, I was—am—the same way, and the kids weren’t always nice and school wasn’t always a breeze. Despite my efforts to fit in, I knew I didn’t.”

“You always seemed excessively cool to me,” Joe said. “The most self-possessed person at Abraham Lincoln High. Like everyone else could play their silly games. You had bigger plans.”

“That was later, in high school,” I said. “When you and I met. It was easier by then. Getting good grades was important to more kids by then, and I knew college was right around the corner, and . . . well, I had you. That helped.”

Joe grinned.

“But in middle school,” I said, “it was grueling. I remember, once, I was in the science lab with a group of girls. We had just taken an exam and had about ten minutes to kill before our next class. One of them got the idea to play hide-and-seek, and the teacher said it was okay. We all hid except a girl named Sandy, who was ‘it.’ One by one she found everyone except me. I was just behind the door! But she and the other girls were talking, and Sandy was saying that she found everyone, and all the other girls agreed. I just stood there. A minute later, they gathered their bags and left. I slipped out from behind the door and left, too. None of them even noticed.”