The Christmas Note (10 page)

“Who’s Kyle?”

“Her husband,” Miriam says, laughing and crying at the same time.

“But I thought her…”

Gretchen hangs up the phone and flings herself into Miriam. Gloria wraps her arms around them, and they are a mass of arms, hair, and tears. Gretchen breaks away, laughing, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. She looks at me and I’m frozen in place. “I thought your husband was … you never told me he was alive,” I say, feeling stupid as soon as the words slip past my teeth.

Gretchen reaches for a tissue. “You never asked.”

“Was that Kyle or the doctor?” Miriam asks.

“Dr. Larimer,” Gretchen says, her eyes pooling again. “He said Kyle tried to move his legs to the side of the bed again today and asked the nurse to help him stand. Dr. Larimer said it took all his strength but he put his feet down and lifted off the bed. Kyle wouldn’t sit back on the bed like they asked but stood there for ninety whole seconds before he took some steps!” She lifts her arms in the air and waves them around.

“I thought he—” I stop. I never asked. Gretchen’s words keep firing into my ears and my head feels hot. I never asked Gretchen one thing about her husband. Ethan had said he had gotten hurt but I never asked what that meant; I assumed he was dead. Since I have met Gretchen I have done nothing but ramble on and on about Ramona; I’ve never asked about what I presumed was her dead husband or her marriage to him. I sat in her home and ate spaghetti and didn’t ask the questions that I thought would make me uncomfortable. I didn’t even ask about her children, who were sound asleep down the hall. She looks at me and I know this is my one shot at a friend, but even now I don’t know what to say. “I thought he was…”

Gretchen hands a tissue to her mom. “It’s okay. I thought he was, too, for a while there.”

A flash of anger balls inside my chest. “No! I met you and Ethan and he told me about his dad and a bomb but I didn’t say anything. I just stood there.” I step past them and head to the entryway, where my coat is hanging. I can’t be here right now. This moment doesn’t include me.

Gretchen follows. “Where are you going?”

I reach for my coat and put my arm in a sleeve. “You need to be with your family and friends right now.”

She pulls the coat off my arm and holds it to her chest. “I am.” Her face is soft, and Miriam and Gloria peek around the kitchen door, looking at me.

“I’m not a friend,” I say, keeping my voice low.

“Then what are you?”

I feel like an idiot. “I should have asked.”

Gretchen hands my coat to me and raises her eyebrows. “We’re not finished baking, so come back in here and ask whatever you want.”

I fumble with the coat in my hands. I’ve blown so many things in my life. I’ve never had this, whatever this new thing is that I have with these women, and I don’t know how to act with them. Half the time I don’t know what to say, but I do know I don’t want to ruin it. I hang up my coat and walk back to the kitchen to finish our cake.

Ten

Every morning I wake up saying, I’m still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

—
J
ACQUES
C
OUSTEAU

GRETCHEN

The Eighty-second Airborne Division had been deployed to the southern region of Afghanistan in August of last year. Kyle’s MOS (military occupational specialty) was infantryman, and he had risen to the rank of Sergeant First Class. His fifteen-month tour (his second in Afghanistan) would be over in November, twenty years in the army would be complete, and he’d be home for good. No more moving around. No more shipping out.

On Kyle’s first day in the province he found a small circle of children to kick a ball with outside the base. He and several men in his unit always found time for the kids in Afghanistan. He said they were always sweet and loving and ready to play. On that morning, September fifteenth, he had gone out to the kids and kicked the ball around with them. They had things like cans or empty food sacks that they used for bases, and on that morning Kyle noticed that one of the food sacks looked fuller, but he thought it was nothing more than the wind that puffed it out. The children threw the ball here and there, not really playing any sort of real game when Kyle suggested they kick it like they had in days past and run the bases. Some of the little ones wanted Kyle to kick it hard, as he had done the day before, and he kicked it so the kids would have to run for it and he took off running. Two other guys from the division were cheering on the kids to get the ball before Kyle made it home, and he pretended to be out of breath running the bases. He ran to first and a little guy around six tried to hold him there, and then Kyle took second with the little guy still hanging on to him. Kyle ran on with the little boy dangling from his waist, not knowing that third base was a bomb.

The report says it blew Kyle thirty feet. It took his arm, part of his head and left him unconscious. Rocks and metal pierced his face, neck, jaw, and chest. The mother of the little boy who had been clinging to Kyle bent over the tiny broken body and clung to what was left of her son. A medic pinned a tag with the word
expected
on it to Kyle’s chest, meaning he was expected to die as they transported him to the army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

The kids and I were going to move from our home in the little town of Spring Lake (near Fort Bragg) into our new house in Grandon that weekend, but then the phone rang. “Is this Mrs. Daniels?” I just knew the call was about Kyle, and I knew that something had gone horribly wrong. He told me who he was, but I couldn’t tell you his name today if I tried. “A bomb exploded, and your husband…” I don’t remember my knees buckling but recall the feel of the floor on my forehead as I pressed the phone to my ear to drown out
Go, Diego, Go!
on TV. My arms shook as I picked up the remote to turn it off. I hung up the phone and called upstairs to Emma, but my voice was gone.

When Kyle shipped off to Afghanistan the first time, he said, “It’s nothing like it was when my grandfather fought,” he said, referring to World War II. “They stormed the beaches, and thousands of men died a day.” I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to reassure me. He hugged me close. “It’s not like that anymore, Gretch. We haven’t lost as many during this entire conflict as we lost on one day at Iwo Jima.” But the thought of receiving a phone call was always there in the back of my brain, and now it was real.

Ethan whined, begging me to let him finish
Go, Diego, Go!
I knelt down and clutched him to me, burying my face in his neck. Emma knew something had happened to her dad when she stood on the landing at the top of the stairs. She saw me clinging to Ethan and wouldn’t come down, waiting for me to say something.

“Dad’s been hurt,” I said. She burst into tears and ran down the stairs, falling into Ethan and me.

Mom flew to North Carolina and stayed with the kids, and I flew to Germany. That was the longest flight of my life. I didn’t eat; I didn’t sleep; I couldn’t read. I just prayed. I wasn’t angry; I was frozen by the thought of what we are capable of doing to each other. Someone, an unknown face and name, left a bomb where children play in the hopes of killing one of us. It didn’t matter that a child or several children could die as well. They were collateral damage and nothing more. Tears fell to my hands when I thought of the mother who still had to live there, passing her son’s killer in the street or haggling with him over the price of fruit in the marketplace. There would never be any answers for her, just an empty place at her table. Kyle was alive, if even barely, he was alive. He didn’t come home with a military escort. The mother wasn’t even afforded the dignity of an escort for her son.

When I landed I learned that a small piece of metal had been lodged near Kyle’s jugular vein and that he had nearly died during the surgery. My heart pounded in my head as the doctor explained all that
almost
went wrong with the brain surgery and all that could still go wrong. They had placed him in a medically induced coma, and they would keep him in a coma to give his brain time to heal and rest. “For how long?” I asked.

“It varies,” the doctor told me. “But with his injuries I think it can be expected that his brain will need at least a month.” I couldn’t breathe or feel my legs. How could I explain this to the kids? The doctor tried to prep me for how Kyle looked, and even though I said I was ready, I wasn’t. His right arm was missing below the elbow and his head was swollen twice its size on one side with a hollowed-out part on top. Dark red scars with black thread were laid out like tracks over his head, neck, face, and chest and his face looked battered, but it was his eyes that were so unnerving. They were half opened when I walked into the room. They made me jump because I expected them to be closed, but they’d follow me around the room. I kept talking to him, expecting him to pick up a finger or wiggle his foot or something, but nothing happened. He just kept following me with his eyes. I could see him, I could touch him, but it didn’t feel like it was Kyle in the bed.

“Does he know it’s me?”

“Maybe,” the doctor said. He said it in such a way that made me feel he was saying that for my benefit but that Kyle was still somewhere far off inside his brain.

I sat on the bed next to him and held his face, staring into those half-opened eyes. “Come out, Kyle. Come out of there,” I begged. “Oh, God! Tell Kyle to come out. Please.” I kissed his head. “Please.”

Tom and Alice, Kyle’s mom and dad, arrived the next day, and I couldn’t imagine what they were seeing. What if that was Ethan in that bed? My mind couldn’t comprehend what they were feeling. For the next few weeks I held Kyle’s hand and held up pictures of the kids for him to see through those half-opened eyes. I told him I loved him and would take his broken, shelled body home with me as soon as I could. Doctors had no idea the extent of Kyle’s brain damage but always prepped me for the worst: he may never talk like he once did; he may not be able to walk without assistance; he may never drive or be able to brush his teeth. They showed me the X-rays of his brain, and it looked like someone had scooped out a part of it and tiny pieces of rock floated in midair around his head and face. I put my lips up to his head and prayed as I’ve never prayed before. I prayed for a miracle, a sign, a new brain for Kyle. The week I arrived I didn’t eat for five straight days. I never left his side.

On day thirty-two, doctors began pulling him out of the coma. In the wee hours of the thirty-fourth day his hand began to quiver. My heart drummed in my ears and I jumped out of my chair and leaned closer to him, squeezing his hand. He squeezed back and I touched his face. “Kyle, it’s me. Can you open your eyes? Can you see me?” His lids must have weighed fifty pounds; it took him so long to lift them. When he did, he tried to grin.

I crawled into bed with him and yelled for the doctor. Kyle was shocked to see them. He thought we were alone somewhere but didn’t have a clue where that was! He tried to speak, but the words were garbled and I could see in his eyes that that confused him. Doctors tried to explain what had happened to him, and when they did, his eyes glistened. “None of the other men were hurt, Kyle,” I said. “Just minor wounds. That’s all.” It would be more than a week before I told him about the little boy.

“He’s trying to talk,” the doctor said, smiling at me. “That’s a good sign.”

When we were alone I leaned close to Kyle and kissed him. “I know you’re going to fight this out, Kyle! I know you’re going to push yourself up out of the rubble and crow.” His eyes were still, but I could see him in there. “Remember? Remember the rooster? That’s you! You are getting out of this bed, and you are going to talk and walk and drive a car. Do you hear me?” He babbled something unintelligible, and I wiped my eyes. “Oh, yeah? Well, you’ve never listened to me before. Why start now?” His mouth tried to turn up, and I kissed the caved-in part of his head. “Remember the green SUV? I told you not to buy that truck and what happened?” His eyes were dull, looking at me. “It left us stranded on the highway … twice! That orange shirt? I told you orange was a horrible color on you and what happened? People always mistook you for a traffic cone.” He attempted a grin again, and I squeezed his hand. “But this time you’re going to listen to me. I’m giving you eight weeks to get home, Sergeant Daniels!” He closed his eyes, and I knew he was in there somewhere with fragmented pieces of the kids and me and of an orange shirt that could stop traffic.

*   *   *

“Max!” I jumped in my chair beside Kyle’s bed and looked at him. It was the middle of the night and his eyes were closed. “Max! Maxey!” Max was our first dog, a big, lovable Lab mix. It was two days after he came out of the coma and the first words he spoke plain as day. I laughed out loud and told him we’d have a chat later about him saying a dog’s name before mine.

I never went back to sleep but watched him throughout the morning, praying he’d wake up talking and wanting to take charge. I was staring at him when his eyes opened. “Bug,” he said.

I bent over laughing. First a dog and now a bug! The word sounded thick, medicated and slurred, but I understood him.

“Apple,” he said.

I couldn’t stop laughing as I called the doctor.

“General.”

Kyle always called me “General” when he was at home, indicating that I outranked him. “Now you’re talking,” I said, lying down next to him and kissing his face.

When he was able to string together clumps of three or more words over the next several days, Kyle began to ask about our life together. It took him ten minutes to remember Emma’s name and he never remembered Ethan’s; actually, he didn’t remember Ethan at all. He could say Emma, but Ethan caused him trouble; he couldn’t say the
th
without struggling. I spent much of the day pointing to things and saying the names of them so he could repeat after me: cup, water, ice, lamp, blanket, pillow, socks, underwear, nose, arm, hair, coffee, eggs. We went over the same words again and again because so many of them weren’t understandable. He scrambled the letters the first few times he said the alphabet, but after several tries he made it from
A
to
Z
in less than ten minutes.