She’d studied the pictures she could find, including one of him on the Pateros football team as a junior in 2003 and one printed in the Quad City Star Tribune when he’d completed basic training. Ten years ago, he’d been a skinny boy in an oversized army hat, but the arms and shoulders of this man were too muscled to be labeled boyish. Her stomach lurched over the contrast of his upper body filling the space between the bed rails and the empty mattress at the foot of the bed.
When the nurse looked over her shoulder and connected with Grace, she jerked her head at the bed, as if she’d been waiting for Grace to enter. Maybe some visitors fled without stepping inside, but taking the easy route wouldn’t give her answers about the engagement photo. To get her life back, she’d have to come all the way in.
Despite the monitors arrayed around the top of the tilted bed, the room was quieter than she’d expected. No repetitive beeps, just the generic white noise of electronics and humming ventilation.
“Hello.” She swallowed and tried again, but the new greeting sounded too loud.
The man in the bed fluttered his eyelids and turned his head, and then his mouth fell open and his skin flushed to his hairline. She might have no earthly idea why he’d fabricated an engagement, but even with the robe and hairnet, he recognized her.
“Surprise, Sergeant.” The nurse stood. “Your fiancée’s here!”
The whole world believed the lie.
Standing at the head of the bed, if she focused on his face, she could keep the bundled stubs out of her peripheral vision. “Hello, Reynaldo.”
The nurse gathered a tray of dishes. “Buzz if you need me.”
After the other woman left, the silence absorbed the energy Grace’s nerves had supplied on the way to the room. She could almost graph how the longer she stood five feet from the bed, the smaller she became. Eventually, if neither of them spoke, maybe she would disappear.
On a paper taped to the wall, someone had written SSG Reynaldo Cruz, Pateros, WA and a string of numbers and letters that must have meaning to army people.
Enough time passed with her studying the room and him staring wordlessly that any change felt awkward, but she tried again. “I’m Grace Kim. But you know that, don’t you?”
The disposable paper cap created a desperate urge to scratch her scalp, a feeling almost as sharp as the one that overcame her when her cubicle-mate talked about his kids’ headlice, but she kept her hands at her sides and waited for the man in the bed to reply.
He nodded, and his lips flexed like a ling cod until he managed to say, “Rey Cruz.”
“This is awkward, isn’t it?”
“No.” This time his voice was deeper and stronger than she’d expected, and he nodded, which confused her.
“You don’t think so?”
He closed his eyes and blew out a huff of air while he made a twisting gesture with his hand, as if screwing in a light bulb or flipping things.
“You meant yes?”
He nodded again.
She pulled a chair beside the bed and looked over the rail at his head and shoulders. The edges of a tattoo peeked below the sleeve of his blue hospital gown. “I had two flights full of babies, so let’s cut to the chase. Why’d you claim we’re engaged?”
“Long.” His lips moved, and eventually a word emerged. “Stor-stor-story.”
“I have a week off that I didn’t want. Go ahead and tell me.”
He rolled his eyes and lifted empty hands, palms up. “No.”
Idiotic laughter, as sudden as the tears she’d almost released downstairs, bubbled close to the edges of her control. Of course he must have some sort of brain damage. “So how are we going to clear up this mess if you can’t even tell me how it started?”
“Need. Pick.” His chin thrust forward and his eyes squinted at the ceiling as he struggled for words. “Pick. Her. Pick-her.”
“You need picture? Oh, you needed a picture.” His nod meant she must have guessed correctly. “Why mine?”
He tapped his temple, then pointed at her, and the flash hurtled her a decade into the past.
“That’s it? All the women in the world, but you chose my picture for something, I don’t know what, because you think I’m smart?” The adolescent awareness of being brainy in a small town washed over her, the out-of-place feeling that had driven her to Seattle a dozen years before. She hadn’t endured that mix of self-aware humiliation and pride for a long time, and she didn’t like roiling in it now. “You don’t even know me. Why pretend to be engaged?”
“Fit.” The word bounced in the pause between his wordless mouth movements. “You fit.” He shrugged as if apologizing.
The effort that lowered his dark eyebrows as he struggled to speak convinced her he hadn’t been playing a prank with her as the punchline, even if he couldn’t explain.
“Cruz, hey, amigo.” The deep voice behind Grace made her jump in her seat. “Should’ve guessed that even flat on your back at Walter Reed you’d scout a beautiful woman.”
Rey’s face lit when he saw the blond man and dark-haired woman in the doorway. The newcomers sported the same paper gowns over their civilian clothes, and their smiles seemed as tense as she suspected herself of looking. Grace slipped toward the empty end of the bed, allowing them access to their friend.
“Wu-wu-wu,” Rey struggled to speak as he grabbed the man’s hand, but to the woman he said “Doc” quite clearly.
“Reynaldo? How come I never knew your first name?” She had his chart in her hand as she smiled at Grace. “I’m Theresa. This is my husband Wulf, and we’re old friends of Rey-nal-do’s.” She exaggerated the syllables until the man in the bed blushed.
“Grace Kim.” The other woman’s smile prodded her to continue beyond that simple statement. “I, ah, I grew up in Pateros with Rey.” Momentary panic over whether her sister had used the correct nickname jerked her gaze to the man in the bed. His upward tilting lips and relaxed eyebrows reassured her that she hadn’t yet said the wrong thing.
Wulf stage-whispered to Rey, “We saw the photo. How long you been holding out on the team about a hometown girl?”
Rey made a hand gesture for a large distance, but when he intercepted her raised eyebrows, he shrunk the space between his thumb and first finger to an inch.
His friends laughed, and the man continued, “Now I know why you were always big talk and no action.”
When he turned toward her, Grace’s back and shoulders clenched. She’d successfully concealed her disappointment that they couldn’t explain the truth either, but she wouldn’t be able to field any questions about a mythical courtship.
“Cruz is like a brother. If there’s anything you need from my wife or me—” he broke off, squeezing his eyes shut, and Grace suspected he was close to tears.
Not the moment to tell him his best friend was a liar.
Theresa immersed herself in the clipboard’s papers. “This is good.”
Anything that could possibly be called good about the half-empty bed and flailing speech imposed on this man eluded Grace.
The other woman flipped pages and periodically muttered “I see” and “oh.” She must not have realized she had Grace and both men transfixed. “You are one lucky—”
“Gonna share your findings with us?” her husband asked.
She gave him the type of look that flowed between people who didn’t need to use words with each other. “Apparently the explosion was a Soviet anti-personnel mine, not an IED. Either because of water damage or age, they estimate it expended half its rated force. Because Rey-nal-do—I do like saying that name—was in water over his waist, it slowed the blast wave. Debris wasn’t driven as far into his body. The ditch had some fecal coliform—” she shrugged like the only words Grace understood were no big deal, “—but that’s responded to antibiotics and it’s
not the variety of infections caused by particles in a ground-based explosion.” She stopped and blinked. “I hope that’s clear.”
“As the dulcet tones of archaic Icelandic, Madam Wife.”
Rey snorted at his friend’s comment, and Grace realized she wasn’t the only one lost. The way these two obviously cared about the man in the bed made her reluctant to expose Reynaldo’s lies. Because a real fiancée would presumably expect details, she asked, “What’s going to happen next?”
“Best guess, they’ll close the wounds this week and if all goes well, after six or nine months of physical therapy, he’ll go home,” Theresa answered.
The nearest doctor to Pateros was at the county hospital in Brewster. She couldn’t recall if their town had services for the disabled. “No way.”
Theresa’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t you live there?”
“I’m in Seattle.” And she didn’t go home much except holidays, but her schedule was irrelevant. “Besides the...” She waved a hand at the empty space in the bed. “Why can’t he speak?” Wanting an explanation this much felt selfish, but she needed him to be able to talk.
The other woman flipped pages. “TBI—traumatic brain injury—can manifest different symptoms. Rey’s exhibiting expressive aphasia.” More pages. “His tests don’t show apraxia—that’s language processing problems, basically input. Aphasia is disconnect in the output, the link between his brain’s language center and his mouth.”
“Not sure those two were ever connected,” Wulf said.
Rey lifted a middle finger to reply.
“See? You still manage output, compadre.”
Neither woman allowed the men to sidetrack them. “How long until he’s better?” Grace asked.
“I practice internal medicine, not neurology, so I can’t say.” Her eyes narrowed at Grace. “How well do you know Reynaldo?”
Grace had been half-prepared for the interrogation shift since Rey’s friends had arrived. She wrapped her arms around herself and glanced at Rey to see if he wanted her to reveal the truth. His half-closed eyes and shallow breathing made him look exhausted. Part of her wanted to place her hand on his forehead, but touching him with an audience would be too awkward. “We’re from the same town. Everyone knows everyone.”
“How long have you been engaged?” The other woman’s gaze focused where Grace’s ringless left hand protruded from her crossed arms.
The direct question filled her with dread because she’d been a crappy liar her whole life, unable even to blame a dirty floor on the dog when she’d forgotten to remove her shoes inside. “Since the news announced it.”
Instead of throwing accusations, Wulf punched his friend lightly on the shoulder. “Cruz, man, there are easier ways to get a woman to say yes.”
“As if you can give advice.” Theresa’s husky laugh hinted at secrets with her husband. “I don’t remember wine or flowers when you asked me.”
Grace didn’t know where to look when Rey’s friends smiled adoringly at each other, so she glanced at Rey, who was watching her, not his friends.
When he intercepted her gaze, Rey’s eyes rolled up and his tongue stuck halfway out.
At least they had their reactions to the other couple’s affection in common.
Wulf and Theresa caught Rey’s expression and laughed too. “What did you always call that? My kitty eyes?” Wulf rested his hand on Rey’s shoulder. “Join the club, buddy.”
These people loved Rey. She couldn’t imagine telling them the engagement was a lie, one their friend had started, not without a better explanation that wouldn’t leave them as bewildered as she felt. The best she could offer was a smile.
* * *
Cruz didn’t think he’d ever remained this silent except on a mission. He always instigated a debate or posed a hypothetical. If he could get his mouth to work, he’d ask Wulf about the end game in Denmark two months ago, but he was too tired to try.
Wulf stepped away from his wife—funny to think of him married to Doc—sat next to the bed and braced his arms on the bed rail. “Never expected to see you play the strong, silent type.”
“Sss-uck.” He’d meant to say he was shit out of luck, but the meaning was identical.
The wetness in his buddy’s eyes made Cruz want to swivel his head toward the window or cover his face, anything not to see tears, but Wulf was still talking. “If I could trade—”
Cruz slashed his finger through the air over his throat to signal his friend to stop. They both knew life didn’t make bargains. It just dealt hands. You played them as they fell.
Wulf’s gaze travelled to where the top sheet’s military corners lay undisturbed by the three dimensions of a man. “Doc ran a 5-K last month.” He bowed his head, shoulders slumped. “You’ll be up and walking too. That’s for sure.”
Rey’s stumps hurt like hell, but they were his lesser worry. Recovery would be hard work, but he’d picked fruit and he’d survived Q ``Course, so he knew whatever he wanted his body to do, it would. But his brain wasn’t a muscle he could shove at a weight machine until it fired straight.
“We’ll dance at your wedding.” His friend was still discussing legs. “You will too.”
He wanted someone to understand, and the man he’d spent eight years eating dirt with seemed like the obvious choice, so he pointed at the empty mattress. “Dry-on.”
“Dry...on... Drive on?” When Cruz nodded, Wulf whooped.
But when he pointed at his head and tried to say worried, it emerged w-w-wor.
“Work? Word?”
What would he trade for speech? Would he trade both balls? One? Tough call, since he wasn’t confident they worked, despite what urologists promised, but his brain sure as hell wasn’t pulling its weight.
“Enough charades.” Wulf fished a newspaper from the trash, found a pen and shoved them at his face. “Try this.”
The piece of paper offered a path. His hand had scabs, but he could already feed himself and hold his own piss-pot. He could do it.
He tried the pen in his right hand, then his left, but it didn’t feel less awkward, so he switched to his right again. The audible scratch of the pen crossing the paper released the tension that had squeezed him like a compression bandage. With a pad of paper, he would write messages the nurses could read to his mother and sister, and ask for Tabasco with his eggs, and apologize to poor Grace for dragging her into his clusterfuck. This pen would free him.
Through his peripheral vision he noticed Grace lean closer, and he wrote, Thank you. I’ll explain after they leave.
Wulf sank in the chair and raised his hand to cover his eyes and forehead.
Rey froze. Without even the scratch of the moving pen, the silence took on weight.
Grace bit her lower lip and wouldn’t meet his gaze. Theresa looked at him and his notes—she was a doctor, she understood bad handwriting, didn’t she?—but her face was smileless.
Finally looking down at what he thought he’d written, he focused on the reality, not the wish. His sentences weren’t even words. Strings of letters covered the paper, mostly capital E and H and other square shapes, backward and sideways like an eye chart.
The pen snapped in two, then hit the wall across from him.
He wasn’t confused inside. He could read the news ticker on television and sort it from the announcer, so why the fuck couldn’t he communicate? Why couldn’t he control his mouth or his hands?
From his first conscious hour at the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, he’d accepted that he wasn’t returning to the field with special operations, not missing both legs. Some amps stayed in the army at desk jobs, even double amps, and he’d begun a mental list of how to continue his career. No more action, but once he achieved independent movement, he’d anticipated terrorizing fresh meat at Q-``Course or evaluating candidates at Specia
l Forces Assessment School.
All the jobs on his career list had one mission-critical common denominator: speech.
* * *
Like a true fiancée, Grace had nodded and laughed with Rey’s friends so late that the April evening had chilled and the parking lot lights had illuminated. Walking to her rental car, she returned her sister’s calls.
Jenni didn’t pause for hello. “Grace!”
“Are you at Mom and Dad’s?”
“Outside walking Po-Po. They have one fat dog.”
Grace had phoned because if she didn’t, it would be weeks before her family forgot, and her mother might be worried enough to call her boss in the morning. That didn’t mean she actually had anything to say to Jenni.
“On the drive home, I had time to think.” Jenni’s voice slowed until she sounded almost apologetic. “I’m sorry I wasn’t paying better attention to what you said at the airport. Do you or do you not know Rey Cruz?”
“I’ve never spoken to him until today.” As she slid into the car’s cocoon of air-freshener and normalcy, relief that she had one person with whom she could talk openly about her problem filled her. “Not ever.”
“You mean he had a picture of you in his wallet, but you don’t even know him?”
“Yes.”
“Whoa. Creepy.”
“He’s not creepy.” He was frustrated and frustrating, complex and difficult, but she hadn’t received one creep vibe.
“Did he tell you why he had your picture?”
“He has a brain injury and can’t talk.”
“Isn’t that convenient.”
“It’s like a stroke.”
“Are you sure? You’re not a good judge of men.”
“You have so much experience? There’s three hundred men where you live, maybe fifty in the key cohort between the ages of eighteen and forty.” She projected fish populations for a living; counting bachelors in Pateros wasn’t challenging.
His Road Home Page 3
