Home Front (29 page)

“Ma?” he said, bending down to waken her.

“Huh?” Bleary-eyed, she sat up.

“There are some of—”

Before he could finish, the doorbell rang again.

This time it was four wives, standing on his porch, each holding a foil-covered casserole dish and a bag full of groceries. They gave him sad, knowing smiles and hugged him—all without tears—and then started organizing the food they’d brought. In no time the house smelled like frying bacon. They were making breakfast for the girls.

By nine o’clock, the girls had walked into this quiet, crowded house of theirs. Lulu had taken one look at the commotion and crawled up into her grandmother’s lap. Betsy had put in her iPod earbuds; she sat in the corner, listening to music and playing some electronic game.

Michael was about to go say something to her when the doorbell rang again.

Exhausted by the thought of more help, he went to the door and opened it.

In his rumpled state, it took him a moment to process what he was seeing. A familiar-looking woman with a pert little haircut, wearing too much makeup, stood on his porch. She was holding a microphone. “I’m Dianna Vigan from KOMO TV. Are you Michael Zarkades?”

He nodded dully, noticing that people had begun to place bouquets along the fence line. Someone had tied a yellow ribbon around the stanchion beneath their mailbox.

“Your wife flew into battle with her best friend as her copilot, Warrant Officer Tamara Flynn? I understand they met in flight school when they were still teenagers. You must be so proud of your wife. How do—”

“No comment.” He slammed the door and stepped back, so upset that it took him a minute to notice that the room had gone quiet. The guardsmen and the wives—and his family—were all staring at him. He had failed in some way; that was obvious. What was it they wanted him to say? That he was proud of her?
Proud
that she’d been shot down?

How could they expect that of him? How could he even form the word now, when his world was falling apart?

Sixteen

It was one of those foggy days in Seattle, where it seemed there was no sky at all, just layers and layers of gray. Jolene could hear the ferry’s foghorn in the distance, rippling like the water it floated above; a seagull cawed.

Betsy loves feeding those gulls
. How many times had they stood on the ferry deck, hand in hand, lashed by a cold wind, throwing food to the beady-eyed birds who seemed to float so effortlessly?

A car horn honked.

She frowned, confused.

The sound changed, became an insistent
beep-beep-beep
.

She realized suddenly that her eyes were closed. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow. No. There was something in her mouth.

She came awake slowly, fought to open her eyes.

Overhead, instead of sky, was a white ceiling tracked with harsh lighting. She blinked. There were machines clustered around her, tall stands with monitor heads, like thin washed-out mourners, clucking and beeping.

The something in her mouth was a tube. Another tube went into her chest from the machine to her right.

A giant sucking sound came and went, rising and falling.

She heard footsteps, then a door opened, closed.

She needed to
think
. Where was she? What had happened?

A tall man in a white coat came to her bedside. He was wearing purple gloves and a white mask over his nose and mouth. He pushed back the curtains that created a semicircle of privacy.

A bed. Yes. That was it. She was in a bed.

“Chief,” the man said. “You’re awake.”

She tried to speak, but the tube made her gag.

Pain. She was in
pain.
It came to her suddenly, swallowed her; had it been there all along? Beside her, a monitor started to beep faster.

“Calm down, Chief,” the stranger said through his mask. “You’ve been in a terrible accident. Do you remember? Your helicopter was shot down.”

His voice drew out the word, elongated it: ac-ci-dent.

Smoke. Burning bits of metal.
Tami.

Adrenaline surged through her. Pain spiked—where was it coming from? She couldn’t tell, couldn’t isolate it.

She wanted to ask about Tami, about her crew, but she couldn’t make anything work. She stared up at the stranger, thinking
please …

She imagined herself reaching out, grabbing the man’s arm, demanding to know how her crew was, but she couldn’t do any of it. She thought of Tami, remembered holding her, promising her they’d be okay.

Blood on her face … everywhere.

The man did something to the bag hanging by her bed, and, slowly, the fog came back, rolled around her, softened the view until she was far away from here. She was on her own back porch, with her feet up on the railing, listening to the high squeak of Lulu’s voice as she ran around the yard and to the even, reliable whooshing of the distant waves.

*   *   *

Pain snapped her awake.

Jolene opened her eyes, gasping, desperate to fill her lungs with air. The tube was out of her mouth now. How long had she been here, drifting in and out of consciousness?

She couldn’t track the passing of time. When she woke, it was a barely there kind of waking; she was foggy, confused. A few times nurses had come into her room, and she’d pleaded with them for news, but all she ever got were
poor you
looks of sadness and a promise to call the captain, but if he’d ever came back, she’d been asleep.

She was awake now, though. Her bed was angled up a little, and some of the machines were gone. The overhead lights were harsh, unforgiving. In the small window to the right she could see that it was rainy. For a muddy, drawn-out second, she thought she was home …

She studied the room—saw the small metal chair positioned by the window, and a TV tucked up in the corner between the wall and the ceiling, and gray-painted walls. Then she slowly looked down. Her right arm was in a white plaster cast from elbow to wrist. But that wasn’t what got her attention.

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.