Don't Go (2 page)

Salinas was already being transfused, and Mike needed to salvage as much tissue as he could from the lower leg. His goal was to control any hemorrhage and clean, debride, irrigate, and pack the wounds, emplace a cast or external fixation if necessary and get Salinas onto a transport. Each minute counted and the FST was in constant motion, but Mike had learned to slow time down while he operated, all the while assessing the variables that meant life or death in combat theatre.

Mike cut around the first wound, a glistening cavern of blown-away flesh, nine centimeters long. The bullets had shredded, burned, and shattered everything in their path, including the tibia and fibula, embedding bone fragments in the remaining tissue. Still it was only a GSW, a gunshot wound, and Mike had gotten used to the idea that a soldier who merely got shot was lucky.

He felt eyes on him as he worked and looked up to see Joe Segundo talking with Oldstein. It wasn’t Mike’s concern, and he made the cuts he needed, excising the purplish tissue and salvaging the healthy red and pink. The wound didn’t smell bad and wasn’t that filthy; in contrast, homemade IEDs were stuffed with trash, so when they blew up, they caused bizarrely dirty wounds, embedded with pens, rocks, pins, nails, and even kid’s toys.

Mike tied off the veins, noting that the wound was remarkably clear of blood flow, thanks to a battlefield tourniquet by a combat medic, the medically trained infantrymen, the 68W who acted as first responders. Medics were able to stabilize a wounded soldier in fifteen minutes, and the one who had treated Salinas had written on his bare chest in purple marker, per procedure, so that the soldier was traveling with his medical records:

GSW

R LEG

4 HOLES

3 ENTRANCE

1 EXIT

tourniquet 3:15 am

Mike felt as if he were being watched again and glanced up to see Joe Segundo, now talking to Chatty. He wondered what was going on, momentarily distracted. He’d heard that the 556th might get reassigned up north, which would be a problem because they weren’t ready to roll out yet. When they had to go, Chatty would tell them the way he always did—
to the Batmobile!

Mike accepted a roll of Kerlix bandages from his nurse, Linda, and began to pack the wound, which stopped the bleeding by pinching off leaky vessels and pressing them into soft tissue. The technique was called tamponade, from the French, which also gave rise to the word
tampon
. Mike loved knowing stuff like that and he loved being a podiatrist, though they all kidded him because he worked in silence. His nurse, Linda, liked to joke around with Chatty, who was singing,
I’m too sexy for my cape,
and Linda sang back,
I’m too sexy for my gloves
, then Chatty sang,
Who needs latex, it gets in the way,
and the OR erupted in laughter.

Mike kept his hands in Salinas, who would become The Kid With The Lucky GSW. He remembered his soldiers by names he gave them, like The Kid With The Big Freckles, The Kid With The Lazy Eye, and The Virgin. He would never forget The Girl With Hair Like Chloe’s, because he had to amputate her left foot after an IED blast. Her injuries scored nine on the Mangled Extremity Scoring System, the tactlessly-named MESS scale, when anything over seven was predictive of amputation. He still replayed that procedure in his mind when he couldn’t sleep, thinking of Chloe.

He tried not to think of his wife now, but he wasn’t succeeding. He loved his wife and he hated not to be home on their baby’s first Christmas. His only consolation was that his tour ended in a month, and he was counting the days. Emily was only a newborn, a month old, when he deployed, and the photos Chloe emailed him showed how much she was growing. They emailed and Skyped when the 556th returned to base to resupply, but the contact only intensified his longing for her, the baby, his home, his practice, his very country. It was all too much, and afterwards, he would block it out, mentally. If Mike was a superhero of anything, it was that. He was the Batman of Compartmentalizing.

Joe Segundo walked to Mike’s table, his dark eyes concerned over his surgical mask, which cut into his fleshy cheeks. He was a short and blocky Texan, whose jarhead haircut fit perfectly under his scrub cap. He frowned when he saw Salinas’s wound, up-close. “Bone salad, yo,” he said, with a touch of a Tex-Mex accent.

Mike glanced up. “What’s going on?”

“When will you be finished?”

“Me? My tour is up in one month.” Mike was joking, but he could tell by Joe’s eyes that he didn’t smile under his mask, which was strange. “Joe, what’s up? Something on your mind?”

“Can we talk when you get a break in the action?”

Mike thought it was an odd request. “No, I gotta finish this kid, then I got another GSW. Why, are we rolling out?”

“The other GSW isn’t an urgent. Oldstein will take him. Come find me when you’re done, okay?”

“Okay.” Mike let it go, figuring that it was about the FST or Army politics, as usual. Army MEDCOM was always on their case about one thing or another, and Joe loved to vent to Mike, whose odd-man-out status made him like Switzerland. It was probably nothing.

But later, when they told him that Chloe was dead, Mike remembered one thing:

I forgot to say my prayer.

Chapter Three

Mike climbed the jetway at Philadelphia International Airport in a sort of trance, numb. His backpack hung off his shoulder, and his iPod buds were plugged into his ears, though he played no music. He’d turned off his phone in Afghanistan, to avoid the condolence emails and calls from his former partners and friends. The one call he would have answered wouldn’t come, ever again.

Mike lumbered into the gate area, where the fluorescent lights hurt his eyes and the Christmas music bled through his buds. It was inconceivable that Chloe was dead. She was worried about him, not the other way around. They’d even made wills and upped their life insurance, in case he died. So it made absolutely no sense that she had died in a household accident, a stab wound, an SW. His
wife
. It wouldn’t have happened if he’d been home. He had failed her. Chloe had died alone.

He fell behind the excited and happy travelers, a swollen scrum of scarves and puffy coats who bustled along, rolling suitcases and carrying shopping bags of wrapped gifts. He kept going, head down and one boot in front of the other, past the Jamba Juice and a Gap decorated in red-and-green lights, blue-and-white menorahs, and signs
30% OFF EVERYDAY PRICES
. The most time the Army would give him was ten days’ emergency leave, so there was a lot to do in a short time, and Mike told himself he’d get it done, just like in surgery. He’d drape the blasted flesh and perform the steps in the procedure, which was burying his wife and making arrangements for the care of their child.

He tugged out his earbuds, tucked them in his pocket, and felt his senses assaulted by the sights, sounds, and colors. Afghanistan was tan and brown, except for what was gray; the dry earth was a gray-brown powder that the soldiers called moondust, and the flat-roofed Afghani houses of the Kunar Valley were hewn from gray-black indigenous rock, built into the mountains and covered with gray stones and grayer rubble. Camp Leatherneck, where he’d first flown in, was in the gray-brown-red desert, but at least it had a portable toilet, and he’d been in camps that smelled like smoke and feces, which they burned, creating a stench all its own.

Mike shook it off, trying to leave it behind, but caught betwixt and between. The aroma of fresh pizza filled the air as he passed the Sbarro’s, and he caught a whiff of a flowery scent from a perfume kiosk. It reminded him of Chloe, so he tried not to breathe. He reached the security exit, where the crowd crammed together into a chute. They’d all be dead if they came under enemy fire, and he felt a bolt of reflexive fear. His heart rate picked up until he reminded himself he was home. A TSA lady smiled at him, showing a gold tooth, but he looked away.

“Mike! Over here!”

Mike spotted Bob, who clearly wasn’t himself, showing the strain. Robert Ridgeway was a tall, sandy-haired lawyer, usually a commanding presence, but tonight his shoulders slumped in his camelhair topcoat and his brow furrowed all the way to his hairline, with its expensive layers. Mike threaded his way through the crowd and hugged him.

“Hey, Bob,” he said hoarsely. He wanted to hold it together, in public. “Thanks for coming.”

“I’m so sorry, Mike.” Bob hugged Mike back awkwardly, either because of the backpack or the emotion.

“I still can’t believe it.”

“I know, Mike.”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Bob gave him a final squeeze, then let him go. His smallish eyes were a weary blue, and he looked older than his forty years. “What can I say?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing to say. It’s not possible.” Mike tried to clear his throat, but it wasn’t working. People glanced over, seeing it wasn’t a typical holiday homecoming.

“Let’s go. Did you check anything?”

“Nah, I got it.” Mike didn’t remark the naïveté of the question, which touched him. He hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder.

“I parked in short-term, so no muss, no fuss. Traffic’s crazy.” Bob walked down the corridor, and Mike fell into step beside him, trying to recover. Maybe he wasn’t as good at compartmentalizing as he thought.

“How’s Danielle taking it?”

“Terrible. She was in bed the whole first day, crying her eyes out, but she’s coming around.” Bob moved quickly, his topcoat flying open. “The baby’s keeping her in the game, and she’s worried about you.”

Mike knew Danielle would be devastated. The sisters didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but their differences seemed to dissolve after Emily was born. Danielle was the older of the two and she had helped Chloe with everything. “How’s Emily?”

“She’s great. Big. She’s really cute, wait’ll you see her, and she laughs, like, a belly laugh.” Bob didn’t look over. “Danielle will show you. She makes her laugh.”

“Thanks for stepping in. You guys are a Godsend.”

“Not me. Danielle did most of it.”

“Nah, come on. Credit where credit is due. I saw you in that photo at the waterpark. Where was that, Dorney?”

“No, Sesame Place.”

“They have a wave pool?” Mike reached the escalator, piling on behind Bob.

“No. You can’t put that young a baby in a wave pool. It was a kiddie pool.”

Mike reddened, oddly ashamed. He knew Emily was too young for a wave pool. They reached the bottom of the escalator, where limo drivers lined up in front of glowing hotel ads. The crowd flowed to the right toward the baggage carousels, and Mike sped up to stay with Bob, who kept talking.

“Glad I bought the snowblower. Snowed yesterday, for six more inches. You believe this weather?”

Mike couldn’t make small talk right now, so he didn’t try. He knew that Bob felt as awful as he did, but just dealt with it differently.

“I saw online that Kabul and Philly are about the same latitude, so we have the same weather. Weird, huh?”

Mike thought it was typical Bob, who prepared for everything, which he actually liked.

“I was looking at some photos, of Kabul. What a dump! It looks like the Stone Age.”

Mike didn’t want to talk about Kabul, either. The coffee shops and Internet cafes did business among the rubble and burned-out cars. The children played under the bridges, next to heroin addicts. The Afghani people were grateful, anguished, and angry, in equal measure. The Afghan National Army, ANA, and the Afghan National Police, ANP, were willing but unable. The Coalition Forces were gone or out of gas.

“I looked online. There’s, like,
three
cities in the whole damn country.”

Mike didn’t correct him, unaccountably defensive. Afghanistan was a godforsaken country that he loved. The nights there could be so beautiful it was terrifying. Oddly, Mike had thought none of these thoughts until this very moment. He survived in the FST because he kept his head down and his focus narrowed to one wound, one bleeder, one suture. If he did his job well, he disappeared.

“Did you know that Afghanistan is twice the size of Iraq?” Bob motored ahead. “I read that Helmand Province is about seventy-eight thousand square miles. That’s huge. Chloe told us you can hear monkeys howl at night.”

Chloe
. Mike felt a thud in his chest. Bob said her name, and it was like breaking a spell, or casting one.

“Chloe said you saw tarantulas and mountain lions, too. And vultures.”

Mike didn’t want to think about vultures. Every war probably had vultures. The birds of Southern Afghanistan were varied and beautiful, but they all scattered the same way when an RPG was fired.

“What a mess, huh?” Bob led him out toward the exit. “We still got troops there. People die every week, but it hardly makes the news.”

Mike found his mood worsening, his grief descending like nightfall. They left the terminal, joining the noisy crowd at the pedestrian crossing. The cold air braced him and he struggled to acclimate to the density, traffic, and honking horns. Cigarette smoke wafted into his face, and it reminded him of the soldiers, who all smoked or chewed. They weren’t under his care long enough for him to lecture them.

Bob stepped off the curb. “Follow me. I parked where the limos do.”

“Will the baby be up?”

“With any luck, she will.”

“Good.” Mike wanted to hold his baby daughter, a soft little bundle of Emily. She’d barely been as long as his forearm when he left. He would tell her all about her mom. He would make sure she remembered her mother, always. He would show her photos and make sure Emily knew that her mother had loved her to the very marrow.

“Mike, just so you know, we took the crib and toys and brought them to the house. Danielle wanted to keep as many things the same as possible.” Bob barreled along, his breath steamy in the chilly air. “Danielle loves taking care of the baby, and that’s what family’s for.”

“Thanks.” Mike would have to hire a nanny to take care of the baby until his deployment ended and he’d already emailed agencies. His parents were dead, and so were Chloe’s.