“If it can be worked out,” Jack said, “I’d like to bring you home to Virgin River to stay with me and Mel. We can get you to rehab several times a week—”
Rick looked down into his lap. Every time he did that, the stump shocked him. “Listen,” he said quietly. “I appreciate it, I do, but I already told the caseworker I didn’t care where they sent me for rehab. Because I don’t want to go home with a walker or crutches. Without a leg.”
Jack was mute for a second, staring at him. This was the first he’d heard of this. He grabbed a chair from across the room and pulled it right up to Rick’s bed and spoke quietly so as not to be overheard by the other patients. “That’s not necessary, Rick. It’s not as if you can keep this a secret. I called Mel, told her your condition so she could tell all those people waiting to hear. It had to be done.”
“I know. I’m not trying to keep it a secret. I’m alive, that’s enough. But if there’s going to be a struggle, I don’t need everyone watching.”
“You sure you want to take that route?” Jack asked. “Because I don’t see a lot of watching, but maybe a lot of supporting. We’re on your team. You can’t be as happy to be alive as we all are to have you alive.”
“Listen, can I just do this my way? This isn’t going to be simple. Do you know how much is involved in getting a leg? Learning to use it? I just heard a little about it this morning and it sounds like—It takes a long time, it hurts, it’s hard to manage, do you realize that?”
“I absolutely do,” Jack said. “Me and Liz, we’ve been reading up. Talking to people. Learning the ropes. So we can do whatever you need us to do.”
Rick looked away. “I need you to leave me alone.”
Jack was speechless for a second. Then he gathered himself up and spoke. “Okay, I’m done screwing with this. You have to see Liz now. Today. A couple of days ago you—”
“I know,” he said, not making eye contact. “It was the pain. I know I overreacted. I’ll see her. I’ll tell her I’m sorry about how I acted.”
“Look at me,” Jack said sternly. When Rick met his eyes, Jack said, “I know you’re not in a good place right now, but this will pass. I’m going to send Liz in. At the least, tell her you didn’t realize you were being mean and that you appreciate her coming all this way and sitting in a hospital lobby all alone, scared to death to show her face around you.”
“Listen, Jack,” he said, meeting his eyes. “Don’t you get it? I’m bad luck. I’m not good for people.”
Jack’s head jerked to attention. “What?”
“Bad things happen to me, around me. Things don’t go right when I’m around. It started when I was two.”
Jack was astonished. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Rick shook his head. “My parents died. My grandma got real sick. One strike and I got my girl pregnant. Her baby died. I went into the Marines and the squad clearing the street for us died. I got blown up. Come
on.
I’m a walking disaster.” He laughed unkindly. “No, I’m a disaster who can’t even walk.”
Jack leaned toward him. “You’ll get a new leg that will work almost as good as the one you lost and you can get on with your life. It’s the stuff of life, we have some shit to deal with and we move ahead. You’ll move ahead, too.”
“Did your parents die when you were barely two? Did your first baby die? Did you get blown up in the war?”
Jack had a tempting moment. He never focused on the things that had gone terribly wrong—it was hard enough to put them away when you didn’t think about them all the time. It was a horrible trap, letting yourself list the stuff in the negative column. He’d always stayed away from that. But Rick’s questions were like a challenge and he wanted to stand up, bear down on him with a glare and shout,
Yeah, I held more than one Marine while he was fucking dying and there was no way to save him—it gets me screwed up sometimes. I couldn’t find a woman to bond with till I was forty! My mother died too young! My baby sister was raped and beaten! My wife, my heart, almost died of a hemorrhage! My boy Rick got blown up in the war. It wasn’t the same stuff, but it was nasty stuff that made me weep.
Instead, Jack calmly looked at Rick and said, “A lot of what happened to you—it happened to me, too. Because I was there with you. Someday you’re going to find out that when someone you care about suffers, you suffer right along with him.”
“That’s why,” Rick said. “That’s why I want to be left alone. So you don’t have to. Suffer.”
Jack stood up. “Not that simple. Sending me away isn’t going to make me feel a lot better, but I’m not getting into that with you till you have some time to adjust. I’m going to tell Liz to come in now. Be nice to her. I’m going to take her back to California and I don’t want her crying all the way home.”
Rick made a face that was most definitely a grimace. As he looked up and saw the determined set to Jack’s jaw and his narrowing eyes, he knew there was no way out of this. It terrified him. If he couldn’t hang on to the anger, he was going to break down and cry like a girl. He would
not
cry in front of Liz; he would
not
cry in front of these wounded soldiers. “Fine,” he said to Jack. “Tell her to come in.”
Rick took a lot of deep, fortifying breaths while he waited. Then he looked over his shoulder and saw her standing uncertainly in the doorway to the ward. God, she looked more beautiful than he’d remembered, than the vision of her in his dreams, of which he had far too many. He scowled. He wasn’t sure he could do this. He stared at her and crooked a finger, bidding her to come closer. She walked slowly across the room until she stood in front of him.
For a second he almost hated her; at least he hated the look of pain in her eyes. He wanted to shout,
You think it hurts to get yelled at? Try this!
He attempted a small smile and said, “Be careful, Lizzie. Don’t get too close. If you rub up against the wrong place, I’ll go through the roof.”
“Can I kiss you? If I don’t touch any other part of you?”
Bad idea, he thought. But he was stuck—everyone in the room was watching. Without even looking he knew Jack was standing in the doorway, making sure Liz was safe from him. “Lean over toward me. Real careful.”
“I know about the phantom pain,” she said. “I read all about it. I’m staying far away from where the leg was.”
He tilted his head and studied her for a minute. This was going to be harder than ever because she wasn’t put off by the sight of the bandaged stump. There was no question about it—nothing in her feelings had been changed by this. And that was such a big mistake on her part.
He put out his hand, on his left side away from the amputation, and pulled her closer to that side. She leaned toward him and he met her lips for a short, unsatisfying peck of a kiss. Behind eyes he briefly closed he remembered making love to her, before and after the baby they’d lost. Wonderful, beautiful, fantastic love that could sustain him for a lifetime. It all came back to him in a colorful, sensual flash; he could smell her skin, taste her sweet body. And then in an equally quick flash, he tried to picture making love to her without his leg.
He opened his eyes and pulled back. “I’m sorry I was mean to you, Liz. I was kind of out of it.”
“It’s all right. I’m sorry that my being here didn’t help you as much as I thought it would. But when I heard you were hurt, I just had to—”
“Did anyone tell you what’s going to happen next?” he asked her unemotionally.
“Sort of. You’ll have rehab.”
“I’ll be transferred to Balboa, the Naval Medical Center. Some people go to other places once they’re healed up a little, but some stay there, live in barracks. Two to three months. Then I’ll be medically discharged or medically retired. After I learn to walk on a fake leg.”
“Prosthesis,” she corrected, pushing her long hair over her ear.
“Yes. Fine. While I’m doing that, you get ready to graduate. Right?”
“I’m ready now, except for a couple of papers and finals,” she said. “I’ve been getting all As.”
He almost smiled but caught himself. “Listen, I know you want to help me, but the best thing you can do for me right now is understand—rehab is going to be a big job. Full-time. I’m not coming home until I’m through that.”
“But we’ll be in touch,” she said, nodding, smiling tremulously. “We can finally have phone calls again.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Rick?” she asked, tilting her head, tears gathering in her eyes. “Will we have phone calls?”
“Sure,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Don’t start crying, Liz. I can’t take care of you right now, you have to get that. You have to be strong because I can’t take care of you. Taking care of this is enough work.” He waved at the stump with his free hand. “I can’t be worrying that something I did or said made you cry. Cut it out.”
She sniffed back the threat of tears and held her mouth in a rigid line so her pinkened lips wouldn’t tremble. “I’ll be fine. It won’t take that long. And at least it’s not Iraq.” She sniffed again. “It’s just hard to say goodbye to you again, that’s all.”
“It probably wasn’t a good idea for you to come all this way. If I hadn’t given up a spleen, I’d have been out of here in forty-eight hours. On a medical transport to the States. Kind of hard to catch up with.” He saw the stricken look in her eyes and quickly said, “But hey, it was real nice of you to come and I appreciate it. I’m sorry I was so mean—I had no idea what I was doing, saying.”
“I know. It’s okay. I love you, Ricky.”
Say it back, he told himself. You can’t not say it back, that would be cruel. But he didn’t want her to know he still loved her, it wasn’t good for her to be bound by that. And then he reminded himself, he wasn’t going to break it off with her here, like this. That would come later. So he took too long but he finally said, “I love you, too, baby.” Maybe adding baby would lessen the blow of his hesitation. “Sorry, my brain is like mud. All these drugs, you know.”
“Jack said in another few days you’ll get used to the pain drugs and be more lucid.”
He almost smiled. His Lizzie didn’t use words like lucid and understand the meaning. “Right,” he said. He pulled on her hand. “Now, come on, give me a nice little kiss goodbye, be strong for me, and we’ll catch up later, when I’m settled in rehab. Huh?”
She leaned toward him and gave him another kiss, another kiss like she might’ve given her brother if she had one.
“At least I know you’re safe now,” she whispered. “I’ll still miss you, while you’re in rehab.”
“I miss you already,” he whispered back, not wanting to, not meaning to. “Now go on. Don’t drag this out. It’s too hard.”
He turned and watched her go, seeing Jack standing in the doorway, glowering. Oh, he’d pissed off the big man. Too fucking bad, he thought. Maybe everyone would have been better off if he hadn’t made it. He brought bad karma.
He turned back to the wall and struggled with self-pity. Just thinking about those phone calls he used to have with Liz, back when they were younger and talked every night, was enough to make him cry like a baby. He couldn’t believe the level of self-loathing he felt, that he brought so much pain on people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he couldn’t see the end of his own pain. The empty space where there was supposed to be a leg and foot hurt like hell. He couldn’t imagine how that was possible, but the doctor explained something about neurons still delivering the message to his brain that his missing limb hurt. The stupid neurons didn’t know his leg ended above the knee.
He heard the sound of one of his roommates, a thirty-five-year-old guy he knew only as Stu, using the trapeze over his bed to heft himself out and transfer to his wheelchair. Then he heard the squeaking of the wheels and hoped Stu was going for a ride down the hall.
But no. Stu wheeled himself in front of Rick. Stu wasn’t sent out of Landstuhl because he’d been stationed here when he had an accident that caused a spinal cord injury. Stu had his legs, but he wasn’t going to be using them.
“Interesting,” Stu said, looking up at him. “Beautiful girl, adores you, and you shut her down. You have a brain tumor?”
“Maybe,” Rick said, looking away. “That’s one thing I haven’t had yet.”
“I know the leg hurts, but your lips don’t.”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“This is a little town here, this ward. It’s impossible to mind your own business. And you’re FUBAR, man.”
“Well, we knew that,” Rick said, smiling meanly. “No reason for me to fuck her up, too.”
“From what I heard, just minding my own business in this little town of ours, you already fucked her up, and now you’re cutting her loose. We need to get you a new MRI on your head—you definitely have a brain tumor.”
“Leave it alone.”
“Maybe you don’t get this yet, but people care about you. They come running all the way from the States when you’re hurt. And you’re going to walk back into that homeplace of yours, looking just like you looked before you left until you take your pants off. Everything’s going to work just fine. But you’re too lame to see that right now. You working on pissing everyone off till they hate you? You could just be happy you have this much going for you. How about that?”