Gifts of Honor: Starting from ScratchHero's Homecoming

by Gail, Stacy

  Chris sighed, leaning back in his seat. “I should’ve given you more of an explanation. I admit that, and I apologize. But there’s not much else to say, Beth. I couldn’t see things working between us, and I thought I would give you the chance to move on with your life sooner rather than later.”

  She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Not much else to say,” she repeated. “We spend four of the most incredible days of my life together, you spend four months sending emails that seem to be written under the assumption that you were planning to pick up where we left off as soon as you could, then it all stops. After a few weeks you send me a couple of sentences to say it’s over, and now you’re sitting in my car, and you’re blind. Really, Chris? Not much else to say?”

  He wasn’t looking at her, but he tilted his head toward the sound of her voice, and his lip curled in amusement. “Four of the most incredible days of your life?”

  She pursed her lips, resisting the urge to give him another slap.

  “I dropped everything to race to the airport and pick you up,” she told him tightly. “I think it’s time you explain yourself.”

  For several seconds Chris was silent, thoughtfully running his thumb back and forth across the brim of his hat.

  “It was a suicide bomber,” he said finally. “Dressed as an Afghani police officer. He killed the sentry at the gate to the camp, approached him like a police officer would, then stuck a nine-millimeter under his body armor and fired at close range. He ran into the camp and was intercepted by a couple of guys from my company, so someone yelled to get the captain. I was asleep—this was the middle of the night—so when I came out to see what was going on I wasn’t wearing any protective gear, just ACU trousers and a T-shirt. Long story short, he pressed a button, the whole place lit up and when I woke up in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany three days later, I couldn’t see a goddamn thing.”

  Beth drew a steadying breath as she steered the car farther into the center of Manhattan. Chris delivered the story of these life-altering events with such devastating precision and neutrality, she wasn’t sure how he expected her to react—or if he even cared what she thought.

  She recalled that last morning at her house—the warm, reliable solidity of his chest against her back as they lay in bed, his arm draped over her waist, his other hand trailing idle paths through her hair. She tried to imagine that sweet, tender man being shaken awake, running out into the middle of a moonlit desert compound, his expression alert and intent as he took in the last scene he would ever see.

  The car’s heater was running full blast, but she shivered.

  “Is it permanent? The blindness?” she asked tentatively, as if trying out the last word for the first time.

  “Possibly,” he said flatly. “The burns are still healing, and they’re not sure how much of my sight will return. I can see shadows now, which is an improvement, but it’ll be months before I know for certain whether I’ll get some or any vision back.” He flashed a bitter smile in her direction. “Sorry to disappoint, in case you were hoping for a Christmas miracle.”

  “Of course not,” she said softly. She bit her lip as she attempted to take everything in, from Chris’s altered state to the simple fact of his presence beside her. They were nearing the hotel—she had to decide what she really wanted from him, if anything, and quickly.

  “And the last email, where you said it was impossible—that we were impossible—can I ask, was that before the explosion or after?”

  Chris trained his sightless eyes on her so directly that for a moment, Beth almost believed he could see her after all.

  “Does it matter?”

  Beth pulled into a parking space. “I guess not,” she replied, praying that the sarcasm effectively hid the hurt that lanced through her so deeply she thought she might split in two. Sighted or blind, he didn’t want her—and why should he? She was incredulous at his attention in the first place, so to some extent this pain was her just reward for not being more guarded. She’d accepted long ago that she was too introverted and timid to be attractive to most men—it was foolish to think this time would be any different.

  Beth cut the engine and yanked her keys from the ignition. “We’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “The Holiday Inn across from the campus. Is that okay?”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “It’s fine. If you give me a hand to the front door, I can take it from there.”

  Wordlessly they made their way across the lobby to the reception desk, where tinny speakers played “Little Drummer Boy.” The college-age girl behind the desk watched Chris approach with wide, attentive eyes, and Beth considered what a striking figure he cut, this tall, handsome officer in his dress uniform, being led around by a short, dishwater blonde in an oversized coat and thick-framed glasses with rapidly fogging lenses.

  He was right. They just weren’t meant to be together.

  When they reached the desk, she placed his hand on its burnished surface.

  “Do you want me to stick around, to make sure they have a room available?”

  “We definitely have availability,” the hotel staffer chirped, smiling broadly. “And we’d be very happy to offer you our military discount, sir.”

  Chris inclined his head toward Beth. “I’ll let you get on with your evening. Thanks for the ride, I appreciate it.”

  “Do you have my cell phone number? Just give me a ring if you need anything, or if you get stuck longer than you expect and you want to have dinner, or you need someone to run you to the supermarket or whatever.” Beth trailed off as she realized she was stalling. This was not turning out to be the dignified, head-held-high, better-off-without-you exit she’d planned.

  Chris’s smile sat somewhere between endeared and patronizing, but there was no mistaking the cold finality in his tone. “It was nice to see you again, Beth. Have a good Christmas.”

  He extended his hand, and she thought she might know how that slap had felt.

  “Goodbye, Chris,” she said as icily as she could manage, ignoring his proffered hand. She turned on her heel and stomped out to her car. As soon as she was safely ensconced in the driver’s seat, she dissolved into racking, heartbroken tears.

  “Stupid soldier.” She pounded her fist on the steering wheel, sniffing hard as she rode the wave of disappointment, regret and sheer anger. “Stupid man, and stupid me.”

  She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand as she put the car into gear. She was a fool to fall so deeply, so quickly, but it wasn’t an error she would make again. Let him try his charms on the pretty receptionist or some lonely woman in the hotel bar—it didn’t matter to her. Chris may have broken her heart, but it was on the mend, and it would be a long, long time before she let anyone get near it again.

  Chapter Two

  Chris lay on his back on the hotel bed, not hearing the evening news report that blared on the TV. Instead he stared upward, focusing intently on what he could and couldn’t see and trying to determine, as he did several times every day, whether anything had improved.

  When he’d first woken up in the hospital, his eyes had been bandaged. It was only when the doctors removed the bandages, he opened his eyes and discovered that his view was the same that he’d realized the extent of his injuries. He saw something worse than blackness, or darkness—he saw nothing.

  As the weeks progressed, the visual void eventually gave way to the slightest perception of light and its changes. Soon he could tell the difference between having his bedside lamp on or off, or when one of the nurses opened the curtains to flood the room with bright sunlight. He started to see vague, shadowy objects, and could just make out a person moving across his central field of vision or if a large piece of furniture stood in his way.

  While these developments certainly represented progress, Chris knew that functi
onally he was still as good as completely blind. The medical professionals perpetually danced around his prognosis, citing the unpredictability of ocular burns. He might recover enough ability to see color and depth that he could read books and drive in the daytime, they hypothesized, or he might have already reached his restorative peak and would need exhaustive occupational training in order to live independently. They encouraged him to focus on the present rather than the future, to take things one day at a time and to do the best he could with what limited vision he had.

  Unfortunately, his best was still pretty terrible. Exasperated, he stood up from the bed and began to pace aimlessly around the room.

  Knocking around a sterile hotel room was already high on Chris’s list of his least favorite ways to spend an evening, but not being able to read or properly watch TV or even look out the window made his feeling of confinement much worse. Although he would have to return to the hospital for another two weeks of rehab after Christmas, he’d been so excited to leave the medical compound for the first time since his admission in late October that for the past week he’d barely slept, unable to stop compiling his mental inventory of everything he wanted to do once he got home. Now he was finally here, back in Kansas, only he wasn’t out in his parents’ barn stroking the horses’ soft muzzles, or stretching out in front of the hearth and listening to the fire crackle, or sitting on the porch in the freezing air, enjoying the perfect silence of nighttime in the country. Instead he was in a claustrophobic hotel room with a scratchy duvet and a lingering smell of bathroom cleaning products.

  He thought of Beth, as he had done every few minutes since they parted in the lobby. His expectation that their brief reunion might ease some of his marrow-deep longing for her couldn’t have been more wrong. It turned out she was every bit the woman he remembered and more, and there was no more assuring himself that he’d embellished their connection in his memory.

  He pivoted on his heel, exhaling in disgust. Enough moping—he couldn’t spend all night brooding and feeling sorry for himself. He could go to the restaurant downstairs—wait, did the hotel have a restaurant? It must have a bar, surely—he could go there. Or to one of the bars down the road. The only upside to his military haircut was it meant he could usually count on a free drink—although coupled with being on his own and carrying a white cane, it might also invite some decidedly unwelcome, drunken attention by the kind of grizzled old alcoholics who were always delighted to find someone worse off than themselves. Maybe he’d stick to the hotel after all.

  Chris was running his hand over what he hoped was the room service menu, wondering whether it might be easier just to starve, when the transformer on the street outside exploded with a crackle and a resonant boom.

  Instinctively he dropped to his stomach on the floor, shielding his head with his hands. The television and the central heating audibly clicked off, plunging the room into silence.

  “It’s just an electrical thing,” he said aloud, forcing himself up into a sitting position with his back against the bed. “It’s from the blizzard. Everything is absolutely fine. There’s no danger.”

  But his heart pounded faster and faster, his skin had gone clammy and cold, and as he felt the dreaded, stomach-turning tug deep within his head, he knew what was coming—and that he couldn’t stop it.

  “Breathe through it,” he coached himself, just as the psychologist had told him to, but his voice sounded far away and disembodied, and a sense of ominous, terrifying doom came over him like a dark cloud. He pulled his legs up and wrapped his arms around them, pressing his forehead into his knees in a futile attempt to brace himself against the violent trembling that overtook him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and then he was back in the desert—the heavy, stinking smell of charred flesh and singed metal and blood and smoke and dust filling his throat and choking him. His ears were ringing but he could make out strangled cries, infuriated but distant shouts, and very close by, the sound of hopeless weeping. He tried to gasp for air but the frantic expansion of his lungs sent searing, agonizing pain ripping through his side, like a trail of flame burning across his ribs, up his neck and scorching his face. He tried to open his eyes but it felt like his lids were glued shut—or, wait, were his eyes already open? He flailed in the darkness that wasn’t really dark, but a light so impossibly, glaringly, painfully bright that he couldn’t see anything. His hands touched the hard, cool ground, his fingers clawed at the dirt, coming away with a sticky substance covering his palms. He hauled himself onto his stomach, reached up to touch his face, felt something wet, warm, and then there was a rushing in his ears like a freight train, like the tornado he’d weathered in the basement as a young boy—

  “Chris? Are you all right?”

  Chris pulled his head from his knees, blinking uselessly. Where the hell was he? Who was calling him? There was coarse carpet beneath his bare feet, a metal bed frame digging into his spine, no sound except someone knocking on a door.

  “Chris, it’s Beth. I’m coming in, okay?”

  Beth. Soft, beautiful, sweet, lovely Beth, with skin like a ripe plum, whose hair smelled like tangerines. He was in the hotel in Kansas—Beth had driven him here. She’d answered his call despite everything he’d done. It was almost Christmas. He was safe. He was going to survive.

  Chris covered his face with his hands and let out a single, grateful sob.

  * * *

  From the moment she heard the radio bulletin that a transformer explosion had caused a power cut in most of the area near the university, Beth had fought warring impulses to check on Chris and to ignore him completely. The latter won for about five minutes. The former compelled her to first phone the cell number from which he’d called her in the airport, then to try the hotel’s front desk when there was no answer and finally to get in her car and drive through the pummeling snow of a blizzard in full swing to the pitch-black downtown area, the argument that she should have stayed put in her cozy house and left him to his own devices hadn’t quite been defeated.

  The area outside the hotel was cordoned off so she parked down the street and picked her way across the snowpacked sidewalks. The sun had been down for over an hour and its absence was keenly felt in the temperature, which had plummeted on its departure. Icy flakes stung her face as Beth hurried to the door of the hotel with the hood of her sweatshirt pulled down over her forehead.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered into the howling wind. Not only was Chris undeserving of her effort, it was likely he wouldn’t even appreciate it. Yet despite all he’d done to her, she couldn’t shake the concern that compelled her through the storm, and she knew she wouldn’t sleep at all that night if she couldn’t reassure herself that he was okay.

  Emergency lighting cast an eerie glow in the reception area, where the same young woman from earlier was manning the desk amidst a mixed crowd of irritated patrons, police, safety personnel and hard-hatted workers from the energy company.

  “I couldn’t get through on the phone so I wanted to check on someone who’s staying here, Captain Chris Walker?” Beth explained as she shouldered her way to the desk.

  The girl’s face was blank—she clearly didn’t remember Beth’s earlier appearance in the lobby.

  “He’s an army officer,” she expanded impatiently. “He’s blind, he was recently wounded in combat. Has no one been upstairs to let him know what’s going on?”

  The girl’s expression twisted with guilt, and with a roll of her eyes Beth asked for his room number and then charged toward the stairs.

  Now, as she used the key card she’d coaxed out of the receptionist and pushed open the door having had no response to her knocking, she wondered for the millionth time whether this was the right thing to do. Maybe Chris had found his own way out and to another hotel. And he hadn’t answered his phone when she called—could he make it any clearer that he didn’t want t
o be with her again?

  Not that coming to his hotel meant she wanted to be with him either, she told herself defensively. She was just being a good citizen.

  The emergency lighting in the hallway cast a widening sliver of illumination through the center of Chris’s room and reflected off the metal badge on the front of his hat, which was stowed in the open-faced closet just inside the entrance. His duffel bag was on the floor beside the television, with the zipper open, but otherwise the room looked as pristine and untouched as she imagined it had when he first walked in.

  “Chris?” she called hesitantly, her shadow blocking out the light from the corridor.

  “In here,” came a hoarse voice from the far side of the room. She heard him clear his throat. “By the bed.”

  Beth hesitated in the doorway, waiting to see if he moved or gave any indication as to whether he wanted her there or not. When nothing happened, she propped the door open to let light in from the hall and carefully eased into the pitch-black room.

  She found him in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, in jeans and a flannel shirt, with his knees pulled up to his chest. She reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, but he flinched so violently at her touch that she snatched it back. That’s when she realized he was shaking.

  Beth slid down to join him on the floor, careful not to touch him. “I heard about the blackout on TV. You didn’t answer your phone, so I thought I’d come by and make sure you weren’t stuck here with a dead battery and no way to contact your parents,” she lied, assuming from his stiff, defensive posture that he wasn’t overjoyed at her presence.

  “Blackout,” he echoed, and Beth thought he sounded relieved. “Is it just the hotel? Or the whole street?”

  “Most of the area, actually. A transformer exploded outside, from the blizzard.”

  He nodded, exhaling heavily. “I heard it a few minutes ago. You got here quickly.”