Home Front(74)

She fought the urge to touch her cheeks. My face.

She closed her eyes so that he wouldn’t see how scared she was, but it was a mistake. In the darkness of her fear, she saw her children standing together, crying out for her, begging her to come home. “Please,” she whispered, hating the tremble in her voice. She was a soldier, for God’s sake, and she couldn’t make herself look this man in the eyes. “I can’t die. I have children, Captain. Please.”

He touched her left hand. She felt the cool rubber of his glove on her skin—no human contact; but what difference would it have made? What good was a stranger’s touch when everything she was hung in such precarious balance?

She needed Michael here now. He would take care of her.

Michael, whose love had saved her once before. In the back of her mind, she knew there was a problem with Michael, something that had gone wrong, but then the morphine kicked in and began soothing her, and she was with her husband again, holding his hand, walking along the beach with the man she loved …

*



At two o’clock, on the day CNN announced Jolene’s accident to the world, Michael and Carl boarded a plane bound for Germany.

They landed in Frankfurt on a cold black night, where rain drizzled anemically on the endless concrete buildings and runways of the airport.

When they finally emerged from customs, carrying their suitcases, Michael looked around. “They said they’d send someone to meet us,” he said to Carl. Moments later, a young uniformed man approached them. “Mr. Zarkades? Mr. Flynn?”

“That’s us,” Carl said. “I’m Flynn.”

The young soldier handed Michael a small clear plastic bag. In it were Jolene’s wedding ring and her dog tags and her old watch, its face cracked. He stared down at them. In twelve years, he’d never seen Jolene without her wedding ring. This is real, he thought. He was going to see his wife who’d been wounded in war. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely.

The soldier led them through the airport and into a waiting car. A short drive took them to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

Rain blew in windy sheets across the entrance. Inside the neon brightness of the lobby, Michael and Carl were immediately sucked into a whirlwind of military protocol—there were doctors, nurses, chaplains, and liaison officers waiting to greet them. Everyone stood tall and straight and unsmiling, wearing purple rubber gloves. More than once, Michael demanded to be taken to see his wife, but there was always a reason to wait.

He began to pace, then to get angry. “Damn military,” he muttered, moving up and down the busy aisle. When a neurosurgeon came to take Carl away, Michael had had it.

He marched up to the nurse’s station again. “I’m Michael Zarkades. I’ve flown halfway around the world to see my wife, Jolene Zarkades. She’s a warrant officer, if that matters. I’m sick to death of waiting. Just tell me where her damn room is.”

The nurse glanced up from a file. “Captain Sands has asked you to wait. He wants to brief you himself. I’m sorry, sir—”

Behind them, pandemonium broke out. Michael turned just in time to see a stream of soldiers on gurneys coming through the front doors. Doctors and nurses appeared instantly; a priest came, took one soldier’s hand in his own, made the sign of the cross.

Michael leaned over the counter, saw Jolene’s room number on her file, and headed for the elevators.

*



“MAYDAY!” Jolene screamed, waking up from a nightmare. She jackknifed to a sit, and at the movement pain exploded on her right side. Gasping, she slumped back into the pillows.

As usual, the first thing she noticed when she opened her eyes was her horrible, stinking excuse for a leg. The whoosh-thunk of the wound vacuum was so loud it drowned out everything else, even the pounding of her heart. The pain was excruciating, overwhelming.

But more than her own pain, she thought about Tami: Tami and Smitty and Jamie.

All her life she’d been an optimist, forced herself to be. That shiny hope was gone now. What if Tami didn’t survive? And what in the hell would she say to Smitty’s mother? He showed me your picture about a dozen times … that one where you were playing tennis …

It was her fault. All of it. How would she live with this guilt? Did she even want to?

She reached for the morphine-drip button, thinking that she could sleep through this horror.

Then, through a break in the curtains around her bed, she saw him.

Michael.

*



Michael argued with the nurse and lost.

“You should wait for Doctor Sands. But either way, you are not going in there without a mask and gloves,” the woman said firmly.

“Fine.” He snatched the mask and gloves and walked away. Putting them on, he paused outside his wife’s door, took a deep breath, and went inside.

It occurred to him suddenly, sharply, that maybe he shouldn’t have come rushing in like this, maybe he should have waited to hear about Jolene’s prognosis …

There was a curtain around half of her bed; he couldn’t see her from here. “Jolene?”

He closed the door behind him. The first thing he noticed was the smell. There was a putrid stench in the air that made him almost sick to his stomach. Bile rose up in his throat, choked him.

He wet his lips nervously and moved forward, opening the curtain.