The Way Home (12 page)

“H
OW ARE YOU
this morning,
askar
?”

He opened his eyes slowly. Sunlight slanted in beneath the meager drape of fabric covering the small window. “I don’t know. How long has it been?”

“Since the tea became sweet?”

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Immediately, she knelt beside him and tipped a cup of water to his lips.

“Yes,” he croaked after taking a small sip. “Since the tea became sweet.”

“Seven days.”

Seven days of hell. But he was alive. "Let's not do that again real soon.”

“Oh that, we agree.”

Because he heard a soft smile in her voice, he smiled, too, something that he realized he hadn’t done since he’d come to, chained by his ankle in that cave.

Suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for all she had done for him, for all she had been to him, he reached for her hand. “Thank you.”

She wove her fingers through his, squeezed, and inexplicably, the darkness in his heart lifted. He didn’t think about it. He brought their linked hands to his mouth and kissed the back of her knuckles.

The action was spontaneous and achingly intimate.

Just as suddenly, it was over.

She tugged her hand out of his. “I must prepare the morning meal.”

Then she was gone, leaving him wondering what the hell he’d been thinking. Well, that was pretty damn clear. He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought at all. For an instant, neither had she. For once, she’d responded in a way that wasn’t an offer of comfort or aid. She’d touched him out of affection. He’d reacted in kind.

And it had scared the hell out of her.

Hell, it scared him, too. And, unexpectedly, aroused him.

He stared at the ceiling, experiencing what it felt like to be a man responding physically to a woman and instinctively knowing he had not lived his life in a sexual vacuum. There had been women. Possibly one special woman. Was one waiting for him even now? Would he ever remember her if there was? And what would it matter if he never got out of this damn country and reclaimed his life?

Frustrated, fighting defeat, he willed his thoughts away from the softness of Rabia’s body and the fullness of her lips. Thinking of her that way was one-hundred-percent out of line. Thinking of her that way would not happen again.

But the house was small, the walls thin. There was no way to distance himself physically or mentally. For long moments, he listened to her speak softly to her father in the cooking room. For the first time in seven days, the smells coming from her kitchen didn’t nauseate him.

And for the first time since he’d come to in that cave, he decided that it was time to see his own face.

He stared at the wall beside his pallet and the small mirror that hung above the wooden table. Flat-out, unadulterated fear
accelerated his heart rate. What if he didn’t recognize his own face?

What if he did?

What if seeing his image triggered his memory and he didn’t like the man he’d been? What if who he’d been was so horrible that his mind had been protecting him with the amnesia?

There was only one way to find out.

He lay there a little longer, gathering his courage, then, moving slowly and carefully, struggled to sit up. Winded and weak, he gripped the table for support and eventually made it to his knees. Several steadying breaths later, when the vertigo hadn’t reared its ugly head, he managed to get one foot under his weight, then the other, while constantly repeating his mantra.

No sudden movements.

Do not dip your head.

Do not turn your head.

Do not look down.

Still, the room started spinning wildly. He gripped the table for several seconds before the world righted itself again.

Heart slamming, knees threatening to buckle, he drew several bracing breaths, then faced his nemesis in the wavy, mottled mirror—and experienced another loss so acute that it trumped all others.

The eyes of a stranger stared back at him from a face half covered by beard and skin stained dark by the henna dye Rabia had applied to help disguise him in the event that he was spotted through a window.

He’d been certain he’d at least recognize his own face, and in truth, he had put off looking for fear that he wouldn’t . . . and still he wasn’t prepared for the tears that suddenly clouded his vision at yet one more blow fate had seen fit to deal him.

Shock and curiosity finally beat out despair, and he studied this man who was him and whom he didn’t know. The eyes looking back at him were brown, the skin drawn, the cheeks sunken; streaks of gray were threaded through the tangle of dark hair and beard.

Despite the weakness, he had, for some reason, decided he was not an old man. He’d been certain he was in his thirties. Now he wasn’t so sure. The emaciated man staring back looked much older. Maybe it was his eyes. The eyes looked a hundred years old. Eerily empty. Because of his injuries? The opium? The absence of self  ? Had he lost his soul when he’d lost his memories and been sent into a time continuum where he’d aged by decades? Or was his soul merely as damaged as his body?

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a thought persisted. This was not who he was or had been. He was not all about darkness and despair. As much as he feared he’d be disappointed, he believed deep down that he had not been a bad man. This pitiful, weak man had not been a part of his life before he’d lost himself. He’d been someone. He’d been some
thing
. He’d been vital and driven and real.

The man he saw in the mirror was none of those things. This man was a ghost. A shell. A man without a future because he had no past.

The familiar taste of fear, sharp and sour and overwhelming, pooled in his mouth. Would he ever find himself  ? Would he ever remember? Or was he stuck here in a hellish limbo for the rest of his life? Like he was stuck in this hostile country with no hope of rescue.

Shaken and defeated, he drew several more deep breaths and settled himself down. If he gave in to the fear, the darkness
would eat him alive, and he’d be begging Rabia for opium again.

Composed but still unsteady, he turned his attention to the pitcher of water on the small table. A bar of coarse soap and a clean rag sat beside it. He used both to wash his face, a small task that felt monumental.

It felt both strange and good to be on his feet, but he knew he didn’t dare test his strength for too long. He didn’t dare count on the vertigo to leave him alone, either, or for the pain in his leg to allow him to walk without a limp.

Or for the sight to return miraculously in his right eye.

The vision problems had come on gradually. At first, he’d thought it was a side effect of the vertigo and the opium. At least, he’d hoped. He couldn’t hold that hope any longer. Looking in the mirror had confirmed his worst fears. Like his memory, the vision in his right eye was gone.

Rabia had done her best for him. But he knew he needed medical attention. He suspected he’d sustained a traumatic brain injury—a recently healed wound at the base of his skull supported that idea. A TBI could account for the loss of vision and the vertigo. And more. Another sign of TBI was the fact that his amnesia had lasted this long, suggesting that it was extremely severe.

Retrograde amnesia, possibly?

RA commonly results from damage to the region of the brain most closely associated with episodic and declarative memory, including autobiographical information. In extreme cases, individuals completely forget who they are. Memory loss, however, can also be selective or categorical, manifested by a person’s inability to remember events related to a specific incident or topic.

Whoa
.

He gripped the table when he felt himself reeling. Where had
that
textbook analysis come from?

The same place as the short frantic bursts of information that flew at him out of the blue since he’d started weaning himself off the opium. Most of the time, it came at him like bullets—rushing by so fast he couldn’t capture it all. He’d see fire and smell burning rubber, hear blasts, feel pain. The next time, he’d see blue skies, glimmering water, winter snow, summer sun.

This was the first time anything had manifested with such clarity. So much clarity it almost set him on his ass.

He circled back to the medical terminology. Was he a doctor? A doctor who was a soldier? That didn’t feel right. A medic, maybe?
Yeah, maybe
.

“Congratulations,” he muttered. “You’ve just solved exactly nothing.”

He still didn’t know who he was or how he’d gotten here or, more important, how he was going to get out.

And go where?

Yeah. Go where?

Very carefully, he eased back down onto the pallet. Winded and shaky, he leaned back against the wall and recovered what little strength he had. When he felt steadier, he reached for the stack of clean clothes Rabia had folded neatly on the edge of his pallet.

If anyone visiting accidentally saw him in the house, they would see a man in traditional Pashtun dress, with a loose-fitting shirt that reached his knees, called a
qmis
, and a vest that covered the shirt and pants, a
shalwar
. He tied the trousers with a string and then, with the rest of his energy, slipped his bare feet into the
chaplay
, or thick leather shoes. Then he rested again.

Several minutes later, he’d regained enough strength to deal with the
pagray
—a turban—and the long strip of cotton cloth that Rabia had taught him to wind around his head and leave one end dangling.

Finally, he reached for a long, wide piece of cloth and draped the
chadar
over his shoulders. Then he lay back down, angered by his weakness and pumping heart but looking like a proper Pashtun man.

Like a man, he thought grimly, lost between a world he had forgotten and a world where he didn’t belong.

Like a man confused about a woman who was a part of that world.

Then he drifted into another fitful sleep.

R
abia startled and slapped a
hand to her breast when she realized the
askar
had joined her in the cooking room.

“You are up and walking,” she said when she had regained her composure.

“Barely. I feel like a toddler taking his first steps.”

“Toddler? I do not know this word.”

He made his way to a low bench in the corner of the room and eased down onto it. “A baby. Learning to walk.”

“You are no baby,” she said, then immediately regretted it when his gaze held hers for a long moment.

She quickly turned back to her stove and the meal she was in the middle of preparing. But she could not stop the thoughts of that moment by his bed several days ago, when he had kissed her hand. Or thoughts of the way she had held him during the withdrawal tremors, the way she had bathed his face and cooled his brow when it felt as though he were burning up with fever.

Memories of her hands on his feverish skin, of his warm body pressed against hers, of his face pressed against her breasts as she had held him in the dark and willed him through the worst of it would not leave her alone.

Her face flushed hot, and not from the heat of the summer day or the cookstove. It was not acceptable to be thinking of him that way. She had already broken many Pashtun laws because of him. Every time she was alone with him or touched him, she went against her tribal customs. Every time he met her eyes and she did not look away or spoke to him without being spoken to, she violated another law.

Now was not the time to be reminded that she was a woman who had once lain with a man. This was not the man who should remind her.

Her hands trembled as she reached for her special and treasured blend of spices to season the small piece of lamb she had managed to barter for. To even think such things was a sin. To act on those thoughts would bring shame to her and her father and her people.

That was why she had worked hard to keep her distance from him when possible. She did not attend to him as she once had. She let him bathe and dress himself. She allowed him to test his physical limits, even as she knew his struggle was difficult.

It had taken him a full week after the opium was out of his system to be able to walk from one end of the small social/sleeping room to the other. Another few days before he ventured out of the room.

Now, today, he sought her out in the cooking room.

From now on, it would become more difficult to avoid him.

She wondered if he had been thinking about the same
things she had. Then she realized he had become very quiet, and she could not resist looking back over her shoulder at him.

His dark eyes studied her with a heat and intensity that had her spinning quickly back to her cooking and praying for forgiveness and strength.