Home Front

Her right leg hardly looked like a leg at all. It was positioned on top of the crisp white covers, bent just a little at the knee. From midthigh down it was a swollen, blackened, festering mess; it looked like an overcooked sausage against the snowy sheets. Four big metal screws held it together, kept it a leg at all. A hose connected the leg to a vacuum of some kind that sucked fluids from the wound, collected them in a plastic bag. At the ankle, splinters of bone jutted out. And the smell … it was terrible, part burn, part rot.

She gagged at the sight of it, clamped a hand over her mouth; bile pushed up her throat. “Oh, my God…” she whispered.

Her door opened, and a tall man in a white coat walked into the room. “You’re awake,” he said, pulling a mask up over his mouth and nose.

He came up to the other side of the bed, stood beside her. “I’m Captain Sands.”

“H-how’s my crew?”

“Chief, you need to stay calm.”

Jolene struggled to move, but she had no strength in her upper body. The meager effort left her breathing hard, sweating. “My crew … and Tami,” she asked quietly, looking up. “Chief Flynn?”

“Chief Flynn is upstairs.”

“She’s alive,” Jolene said, slumping back into the pillows. “Thank God. Can I talk to her?”

“Not yet, Chief. She suffered a traumatic brain injury. We’re monitoring her very closely.”

“Hix?”

“Sergeant Hix is here, too. He took some shrapnel to his thigh, but he’s healing quickly. Your other gunner, Owen Smith, didn’t survive the crash. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, my God.” Smitty. She remembered his bright smile … and the gaping hole in his chest. I’m holding this space for you, Chief. I’d want to talk to my mom.

“Now, Chief, can we talk about you?” the doctor asked gently.

She looked up at him blearily, hating the pity she saw in his eyes. “I’m dying. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”

“You were seriously injured, Jolene. I won’t lie to you about that. Infection is the biggest concern in blast injuries like yours. Everything gets embedded—dirt, glass, bits of metal. We’re worried about gangrene in your leg. We’re debriding it every day. And you lost so much blood, we’re concerned about your liver and kidney function. You’re also scheduled for surgery today on your right hand. Shrapnel damaged a nerve in your wrist. We’re hopeful you’ll regain some use of it, though.”

Some use of it.

“The wounds on your face should heal in time, but we’re watching them closely. Again, it’s the blast injuries.”

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.

He hardly recognized his wife. The right side of her face was scored with bloody, oozing sores, and the left side was bruised and swollen. A deep gash along her jaw had been stitched. Her lips were dry and cracked. Lank hair hung lifelessly from a side part.

But it was the leg that startled him. If you could even call it a leg. Blackened, peeling, bent, and broken, it was twice its normal size; huge metal screws held it in place at the knee and ankle. A pale bone jutted out from blue-black flesh. And the smell …

For a terrible, humiliating second, he thought he was going to be sick.

He breathed shallowly, and only through his mouth, through the mask, but still the smell was there. He knew he needed to be stronger right now, to think of her, but it felt as if he were drowning. He couldn’t catch his breath, get steady.

“Jo,” he said softly, his voice creaky, his breathing accelerated. “I’m so sorry,” he said finally—finally—finding the strength to look at her. He knew pity and horror were in his eyes; there was nothing he could do about it. He shouldn’t have come in here, not so unprepared. She needed him to be strong and certain now, and he couldn’t do it. “I didn’t talk to the doctor … I didn’t know. I should have waited…” He started to reach for her hand and saw the bruising, then drew back. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Too late for that,” she said quietly, tears glittering in her eyes.

“Jolene—”

She turned her bloody, swollen face away from him. “Tami was wrong,” she said softly, more to herself than to him.

“What? What about Tami?”

“It’s too late for us, Michael. You were right about that.” Her voice broke on the sentence, made him feel even worse. She reached out and pushed the morphine button, and in no time, she was asleep.

Seventeen

He’d let her down, again. He’d seen her injured leg and panicked, just panicked. Why had no one warned him? If he’d known, maybe he would have been able to mask his initial reaction.

Maybe. But honestly, he doubted it. Her injuries had overwhelmed him. How was he supposed to help her?

“Mr. Zarkades?”

He turned, saw a tall, gray-haired man in a white coat walk into the room. Above a surgical mask, his gray eyes were serious.

“I’m sorry for the delay, Mr. Zarkades. Emergencies happen fast around here. I’m Captain Sands. Jim. I wanted to talk to you before you saw her.”

Michael felt a rush of shame again, then anger—at himself, at the military, at this man who hadn’t shown up in time, at God. “That would have been nice.”

“Come with me,” Sands said, leading him out into the busy hallway. There were nurses everywhere out here, running from room to room.

“As I’m sure you can tell,” Sands said as Jolene’s door clicked shut. “Your wife has sustained some serious injuries. There are a lot of concerns now but the biggest is infection. Blast wounds, such as hers, are particularly dangerous. You can’t imagine what finds its way into the wound. Bacteria is rampant. We’re debriding the leg daily—taking her into surgery and cleaning it—but to be honest, I’m not hopeful.”