Home Front(129)

She went to the end of the bed and stood there. “Sarah Merrin?”

“What’s left of me is.”

Jolene’s heart ached for this woman—this girl, almost; she couldn’t be more than twenty years old. She saw the empty blanket where Sarah’s legs had been. “You’re still Sarah, even though it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you left her somewhere, over there, right?”

Sarah looked up.

God, she was so young.

“Do I know you?”

Jolene moved slowly away from the end of the bed. As she walked, with only the slightest hitch in her gait, she felt herself gliding back in time, and for a second she was the woman in the hospital bed again, and a young marine named Leah Sykes was coming up to her bed, smiling, offering hope in the fact of her stance. Jolene hadn’t appreciated it enough then—she’d been so broken—but she had learned, over time, how much that support had meant.

She moved to the side of Sarah’s bed.

Sarah looked down at Jolene’s prosthesis, then up at her face.

“I’m Jolene Zarkades. You wrote me a letter. Two, actually. I’m sorry it took me so long to get here. I was … depressed and pissed off for a while.”

“Chief?”

“It’s just Jolene these days. Hi, Sarah,” she said gently.

Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.

“I’m a runner,” Jolene said softly. “It took a while, but I’ll be a runner again. I ordered a tricked-out new metal prosthesis. It’s called a blade. Supposedly, I’ll be able to run like the wind.”

“Yeah, I hear a lot of shit like that. People actually say, ‘Oh, it’s just your legs, thank God it wasn’t worse.’ They wouldn’t say that if they had a stump. Or two.”

“You’ll lose things, I won’t lie. But you’ll find things, too.”

Sarah lay back in her pillows, sighing. “Teddy’s coming back today. He’s just finishing his tour, and I’m what’s waiting for him. Lucky guy. I don’t know what to say to him. Last time … well, he had trouble looking at me, if you know what I mean.”

Jolene knew better than to hand out some shiny bit of optimism. She understood now that some things had to be fought for to mean anything. There were journeys in life no one could take for you. She couldn’t tell this girl, this soldier, how to handle her life or her injury or her marriage. All she could do was be here, standing as tall as she knew how, and hope that down the road, this would be remembered, as she remembered the woman who had stood by her bedside in Germany, all those months ago. “I’m just going to stand here, okay?” she said to Sarah. “Be here with you.”

“I’ve been alone,” Sarah said, sounding young, almost childlike.

“You’re not alone now.” Jolene stood a few inches away from the wall, listening as Sarah talked about her childhood in West Virginia and the man she’d loved since ninth grade and the fear that she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Jolene said very little. She listened and nodded and stood there. Not once did she sit down, even though her hip started to ache.

As night fell, she saw Michael come up to the open door.

He saw her standing there by Sarah’s bed, and he smiled. She thought about the letter she’d written him all those months ago, those few simple words: I loved you beginning to end. No wonder she hadn’t been able to say anything more. What else was there?

She’d had to go to war and lose almost everything to find what really mattered.

I’m so proud of you, he mouthed. At that, she felt something open up inside of her, in the deepest, most untouched part of her heart that for years and years had been hers alone.

Tears stung her eyes, blurred her vision until he was the only solid and true thing in this bright, unfocused world. She could feel her tears, streaking down her cheeks, taking years of hurt with them. She wiped them with the back of her hand until her tears were gone, a memory.





Epilogue


Summer comes, as it always does, in a wash of light and expectation. One day it is cool, wet spring, and then, as if at the turn of a switch, the sun returns. Long, hot days bake the pebbled shores of Liberty Bay, turn the already-weathered dock into brittle, silvery slats of wood trimmed in dune grass. Shorebirds call out to one another, swooping and flapping above the peaked blue waves.

Jolene sits in the Adirondack chair on her small deck, watching Michael and Carl teaching Lulu how to fly a kite. Betsy and Seth run along behind, laughing, waving their hands in the air. Mila is their adoring, cheering audience. The day smells of kelp steaming on the rocks and charcoal burning down to ash in the barbecue pit.

Every few seconds, someone yells: “Look, Mom!” and she looks up, smiling and waving. It isn’t that she can’t walk along the beach. In her new prosthesis, she can do almost anything—she runs, she skips, she chases after her five-year-old. She even wears shorts and rarely feels self-conscious.

She is here, separate from them, because she has something to do … something she’s been putting off. She can’t do it with them, but neither can she quite do it without them.

Lulu’s giggle floats on the air.

Jolene reaches down for the letter in her lap. Her hand shakes as she picks it up and sees her name in her best friend’s handwriting.