The Widow of Conard County

by Rachel Lee

  “You’ve told me,” she said finally, “that you have trouble remembering things, figuring out how to do things. Is there anything else I need to know about?”

  His brow knit. “How so?”

  “I want us to work well together, so I need as good a picture as you can give me of your current condition.”

  “Oh.” He sighed. “I think I told you I don’t stay on task so well anymore.”

  “You stayed on task long enough to get here.”

  “That was simple. One step. All I had to do was figure out which way to go and then keep going. I can still read a map, and the map was my list.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I have a temper. It’s explosive now. I get frustrated easily. I work on controlling it, but don’t be surprised if you hear me cussing a blue streak. I know I’m not supposed to do that, but sometimes I do it, anyway.”

  “I can handle that. Chet cussed a lot, too.”

  “I guess we all did.”

  “You seem to be pretty concerned about that doorjamb.”

  “I busted it.” He paused. “Okay, I have trouble staying on task but sometimes I get pretty fixated on things. Like the door. A little of this, a little of that.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know it all yet. I’m still finding out.”

  “I guess we’ll find out together, then.” Her heart twinged as he sighed.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “I suppose we will.” His light green eyes grew distant. She let him be, waiting for whatever might occur to him next. As with some of her students, the only way to learn was often just to wait, listen and watch. She figured she had the easy part of this, by far. She couldn’t imagine the pain if she had been sitting here talking to Chet in this condition. As it was, it was troubling enough.

  “I saw sheep on the way in,” he said. “I didn’t know you had sheep.”

  “They belong to my neighbor. I lease grazing to him.”

  “Good idea. Chet wanted goats. Why goats?”

  “He thought they were more fun. I don’t personally know, since I never had any.”

  “That was going to be hard on you.” His eyes fixed on her, telling her he was fully back from his wandering.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t know anything about goats. How could you take care of them?”

  A soft laugh, only half sad, escaped her. “Honestly, I think that was one of the many things he and I were going to worry about later.”

  “Yeah, after the castle was built in the air.” A grin stretched his face.

  She was surprised that he’d made that leap after the way he’d been criticizing his own capacities. “You only need the drawbridge after the castle is done.”

  He nodded. “That was Chet, all right. The most practical guy on Earth when it counted. But you know, I liked his dreams. Big dreams. Good ones.”

  “So did I.” The shadow of sorrow passed over her once more, but she shook it away.

  “Peaceful dreams,” he added, looking down. “He was learning, too.”

  “Learning?”

  “Yeah. He used to talk to the local farmers and goatherds when he could. Ask them to teach him. They really liked that.”

  Again, her heart squeezed. “He never told me that.”

  “Probably didn’t want you getting frightened or something. I don’t know. We were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. That’s what they called it. But nobody did it like Chet. Or me,” he added almost as an afterthought. “I don’t know how many times he dragged me into helping some guy dig an irrigation ditch, or chase down some goats. All kinds of stuff. It was fun. And he kept saying he was learning.”

  All of a sudden he jumped up. “Sorry, I’m making you sad again. I need to learn not to ramble.” Then he walked over to examine the door. “I need a long piece of wood like this, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you have out in that barn?”

  She doubted she had any half round or even quarter round out there, but she could see no reason to stop him if he needed to look. “I don’t know. I just go looking for stuff when I need it.”

  “I’ll go look.” He stared at the splintered wood again as if memorizing it, then walked out toward the barn. There was plenty of light left, and he’d surely find the switches just inside the barn door if he wanted more.

  She watched him go, then wiped away a few of the tears she’d been holding in. Okay, he was determined to fix that door for her. Heading to the back of the house and her tiny office, she decided to look for drawings online. Something she could print out that he might be able to follow. Or at least that she could guide him through.

  * * *

  Liam verged on exploding again, and getting out of the house seemed like a damn good idea. Thinking about Chet made him angrier than a wet hornet, mainly because he always felt it would have been better if he’d taken that round himself. Chet had a real life. He should have lived to enjoy it.

  Liam didn’t have any life out of the army, really. None. The army was everything. He used to listen to Chet’s stories like a kid staring at a toy he couldn’t have. He could remember that much, at least. It wasn’t that he wanted Chet’s life or Chet’s wife, or anything, but he often got to wishing for a life, period. Something outside the big, green machine where he’d lived sixteen years since he turned eighteen.

  Chet always made it seem like Liam was going to be part of that ranch he was dreaming up, but Liam figured he’d be no good at that, a city kid from Dallas. Still, it was fun listening and egging Chet on. Now look at him. Here he was, next to useless to anybody, and he figured the least he could do was try to help Chet’s wife in some way.

  As if he could. Damn, he felt like he ought to know how to fix that door. That was the most frustrating thing of all, looking at something he felt he ought to know and finding himself faced with some kind of jumble he couldn’t seem to sort out. Like being dropped in a foreign land without a bit of knowledge of the language or customs.

  And that was a feeling he knew for real. But never had it clouded damn near everything.

  He was used to being clear on a lot. On his orders, on how to follow them, on what to do in most situations. He was used to being able to figure out things when he didn’t know. Put pieces together.

  Now everything was scattered like a million-piece puzzle, and he didn’t know exactly where to start.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He was putting more and more things together, however slowly. And understanding that he needed to walk out before the eruption hit was a big step.

  The barn was shadowy and nearly dark inside despite windows. He felt for switches and flipped them on. Then he spied some bales of hay near the door. Walking over, he punched them like a punching bag, working out the rage that plagued him too often.

  As soon as the anger drained, fatigue hit him and he sat on one of the bales, studying his scuffed knuckles, trying yet again to come to terms with the man he had become. It wasn’t easy. He could still remember that he hadn’t been this angry in the past, at least not without good reason. Now it just rose in him like a tsunami, nearly coming out of nowhere.

  In fact, he sometimes wondered if it was the only real, strong feeling he had left.

  He flexed his hands, feeling their soreness, and sought for something firm and safe on which to fix himself. In rehab they’d taught him the technique, although he knew they had meant for him to use it before the rage took over. Unfortunately, sometimes he didn’t get a whole lot of choice. It was a good technique, though, and helped him out often when the world seemed too jumbled.

  Door frame. He’d busted her door frame. Find a piece of wood like the one he’d broken. He could do that, if there was a piece in here. Rising, he busied himself looking through piles of accumulated stuff, some of which he couldn
’t even remember the names for, if he’d ever known. This barn seemed to have been used for storage for a long time.

  Figuring that much out made him feel good. Okay, it was a huge storage locker and like the puzzle in his brain, it was all jumbled up. He tried to make some order out of what he was seeing, but it took a long time.

  He kept at it, though, and gradually the mess started to take shape. Hand tools hung above a long bench. Wood along one side. Power tools nearby. Packages of shingles. Odds and ends it would take him more time to figure out. Larger pieces of machinery he couldn’t identify yet.

  Focus on the wood. There was quite a bit of it, and it seemed to be in pretty good shape. He wondered what Chet had been planning to do with it. Fence posts? He decided they must be, because he couldn’t imagine any other use. He was relieved to recognize two-by-fours, two-by-twos and other pieces of lumber.

  It wasn’t all gone. No, it definitely wasn’t all gone. The problem was imagining a plan for this stuff. Figuring out how to use it. Like looking at the door, knowing he could fix it, but being unable to remember how.

  By the time he was done, he felt like his brain was smoking from overwork, but he was feeling pretty damn good, too. He’d sorted things out. He knew most of what he was looking at.

  And at the very back, he found a piece of wood that looked like the piece he’d shattered in the doorjamb. Standing it upright, he measured it against himself and decided it was long enough.

  He just hoped it wasn’t intended for something else.

  Then it hit him: Chet was gone. Whatever he had intended to do with this wood was gone with him.

  Holding that slender piece of wood, he sat slowly on the bales again and closed his eyes. Damn, Chet, I wish you were here. She needs you, not me.

  But he was all Sharon was going to get. A very poor substitute.

  All of a sudden, he realized he was muttering under his breath. “Fix the door.” Of course. He’d come out here for a reason. The reminder brought him to his feet and started him on the path to the house with wood in hand.

  Fix the door. Such a simple thing, but such a big deal.

  * * *

  Sharon was relieved when she saw Liam coming back from the barn with a strip of wood in his hand. She had begun to wonder if she should go look for him, and hesitated only because she didn’t want to make him feel any worse than he already did.

  As short a time as she had known him, she’d gathered enough to know he’d suffered more than a TBI. His sense of self-worth had taken a major hit as well, and she could only imagine how this had to be affecting him emotionally and psychologically, apart from the physical injury. And, she reminded herself, he was grieving, too: for a best friend, and for himself.

  He would never again be the man he had once been. That much she knew for sure. No one who suffered a TBI remained totally unchanged, and the worse the damage, the bigger the change.

  Sadly, she realized she would never know the man Chet had called his best buddy. No, she would only get to know this new version of him. But maybe that was best for Liam. She would be making no comparisons, although she suspected he always would be making his own.

  What a hell to live in!

  When she heard the front door open and slam shut, she left her office, carrying the papers she had printed out. He stood inside the door with the strip of quarter round, holding it up beside the one he had splintered when he ripped the hook out. “It’ll work,” he said, as if to himself.

  “Yes, it will,” she agreed. “Was it hard to find?”

  He turned to her. “Depends on what you mean by hard. I wandered around some, getting an idea of the place. There’s a lot in there.”

  “Yeah. We were like squirrels storing up nuts, getting ready for...” She trailed off. Those plans were never going to come to fruition now. “We were planning ahead,” she finished lamely.

  “Good idea. That’s something I need to learn again.”

  “We’ll work on it,” she said firmly, then realized what a commitment she was making. He didn’t seem to notice, though, which relieved her. Neither of them knew how this was going to work or for how long.

  She approached him with the papers. “Do these diagrams make sense to you?”

  He took the papers, his brow furrowing. “It’s all in pieces.”

  She wondered just what he meant by that. It was an “exploded” diagram showing the parts and how they were meant to fit together. Unnecessarily complex because the directions would have built a whole door frame. “Well, we’ll work on it. I don’t exactly get it, either.” Then, after a hesitation, she decided to ask. “Liam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you still read?”

  The saddest thing for her was that he appeared embarrassed. “Not much,” he admitted. “Mostly simple stuff.”

  “So you lost that, too. God.” She didn’t bother hiding her distress. “What’s left, Liam? I’m amazed at how well you’re dealing with this.”

  He seemed to pull back a little, then his stiffness eased. “I’m still walking and talking. Too much talking sometimes. But I don’t know, Sharon. There’s a lot I don’t know yet, and I don’t know how much I’ll get back. Are you sure you want me to hang around? I’ll probably be more trouble than help.”

  The answer rose in her instantaneously, with no doubts. “I wouldn’t want you hanging anywhere else.”

  “But I don’t remember how to do a lot of things.”

  “And I don’t have the muscles to do a lot of things.” She reached out and playfully poked his arm. “Looks like you have plenty of power and a strong back. I’ll use you mercilessly.”

  He surprised her by laughing. A genuine, easy laugh. “Use away. At least something still works right.”

  She fed them an easy meal, insisting the door could wait for morning. “It’s been a stressful day for us both,” she reminded him.

  It certainly had been. The shock of meeting Liam, the bigger shock of the letter from Chet, the sorrow for both men, the return of her anguish...yeah, it had been stressful for her. And she was sure, given his problems and the fact that he had to be grieving, too, for Chet and for his own lost life, as well as facing his deficits again and again, that he might well be reaching his limits, too.

  It was time for some rest. Some relaxation. Some iced tea on the front porch as the last of the long twilight faded away to reveal a diamond-studded night sky.

  “Did you settle in okay?”

  “I guess.”

  Something about that made her head upstairs as soon as the table was cleared. Looking at the guest room, she saw he hadn’t settled in at all. His full backpack lay on the floor. The sheets and blankets she kept folded on the mattress hadn’t been touched. He had neither unpacked nor made up his bed.

  She heard him climb the steps and come to stand behind her. She didn’t ask this time; she simply stepped in.

  “Let’s get this bed made,” she said brightly. “I’ll bet you didn’t see a single fitted sheet the entire time you were in service.”

  He helped open the bottom sheet, and as soon as she fit the pocket around one corner, he grasped the sheet and took care of the rest. He didn’t want to unpack, though. As soon as she suggested it, he simply shook his head. She wondered if he was expecting to be sent on his way soon. That caused her another pang.

  Okay, she thought. He could learn swiftly. That was good news. She imagined there were a lot of things he hadn’t needed to do since his injury, that his rehab had focused on giving him just enough skills to put him out the door. All too often, she had heard, vets were getting far less care than they needed.

  Later, after a quiet few hours on the porch and then in front of a TV movie she hardly saw but that seemed to appeal to him, she stretched out in bed and stared up at the ceiling.

 
How many deficits did he have? How qualified was she to help him with them? Research was going to be necessary, but surely she could help him through that damn diagram tomorrow and they’d both learn something. She’d be the first to admit there were a whole lot of things she didn’t know how to do or couldn’t do herself.

  He was in the same position, but at a different end of the scale. With his reading, for example. She was qualified to teach reading. From there...well, hadn’t he said something about needing lists? She could make simple lists for him. Evidently, he could read some, but probably wasn’t ready to take on an entire book. Maybe he never would be, but some reading was necessary to getting by, although she had known a guy once who couldn’t read at all. He had managed by dint of a quick intelligence.

  But this was a bigger deal than not being able to read. Her mind spun with all she had gathered today, and with ideas about what they might be able to do about at least some of it.

  One thing for sure, she wasn’t going to leave him to the mercies of the empty road and a world that wouldn’t understand.

  She owed it to Chet. Hell, she owed it to Liam. And she owed it to herself.

  * * *

  In his own bed, Liam couldn’t sleep. Sleep often eluded him because it gave him too much empty time. The docs hadn’t been sure whether the insomnia had been caused by his injury, or by his anxiety about his injury.

  In fact, one thing he’d learned in rehab was that this whole TBI business was a bit of a mystery, even to the people trying to treat it. There was a cluster of symptoms that seemed to affect most patients, but the doctors weren’t sure all of them had a physical basis. There was emotional fallout, too, but again, they couldn’t say how much was brain damage and how much arose from the stress and frustration of dealing with that damage.

  He’d have liked to know. He honestly wished he knew how much was permanent, how much would improve and how much simply arose from the situation. Knowing that would have helped him deal with it.

  But nobody had certain answers. Apparently, from what one doc had said, having an estimated quarter million vets with TBI was taxing their limited knowledge. People were now surviving injuries that once would have killed them.