by Bart Hopkins
“Is Jason okay?” she interrupted. As she said it, all their days on active duty flashed through her mind: living on the installation; the front-door parking spaces outside of the M-C-X (the base department store) for general officers only; and, the reverence with which Jason would announce the presence of the C-O anywhere where they both happened to be…
“Susan, that’s our commanding officer…”
She tried to regain her composure: “Please, sir … just tell me he’s okay.”
“I understand what you’re going through, Mrs. Donahue,” he started. Cleared his throat. Continued: “Staff Sergeant Donahue … your husband … is in critical condition. He was medically evacuated from Afghanistan on a C-130 yesterday. Arrived at Ramstein Air Base in Germany late in the morning. From there they got him on a chopper to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center—”
“Oh my God…” she whispered.
“—where he’s undergone two surgeries,” the general continued. “He’s recovering. Time is our ally right now, and what you need to do is stay positive. You have a son, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir. Daniel. His name is Daniel.”
“Daniel needs you right now. Stay strong for him.” He cleared his throat again and added, “If I may … just speak candidly to you for a moment?
“Of course.”
“Mrs. Donahue, my son is a Marine. On his second tour in Afghanistan three years ago, an improvised explosive device, what we call an I-E-D, went off under his hummer. He was the lucky one in his vehicle—he lived.
“Things were touch and go for a few weeks, and then there were surgeries for the next year. He made it. Our best doctors are treating your husband. He is being looked after day and night.” After a pause he said, “Be strong.”
She digested the information and thought about Danny. She’d nearly failed him during her initial panic attack, or whatever that had been. General Shapland was right.
“Was it an I-E-D that got Jason?”
“Yes. There were four people in the vehicle; your husband and another Marine are now at Landstuhl.”
Years of being a nurse had conditioned her to respond unemotionally in situations similar to this. Instead of breaking down, she allowed her professional instincts to prevail; Nurse Donahue was able to push Distraught Wife out of the way for a moment.
“What details do you have about his injuries, General?”
“Hmm. The initial reports I’ve been given say that the explosion occurred as the front passenger tire passed over a pressure sensitive I-E-D. As truck commander, your husband was in the front passenger seat. So he received the brunt of it. There are numerous areas where shrapnel and debris from the engine compartment struck him. His body armor protected most of his torso, but…”
“Please go on,” she prompted him. “I need to know.”
“There was damage to much of the right side of his body. His right leg may have permanent nerve damage. The vision in his right eye is unknown. Even though he was seat belted into the truck, the frame was squeezed, and his arm collided with the door, fracturing it in multiple places. The functionality of the arm and leg are unknown, but offline the doctors told me they think a near-full recovery is likely.
“He also suffered trauma to the head, and brain; he’s been unconscious since the accident.”
“A coma,” she said, a statement not a question.
“A coma, but the doctors believe he’s due to regain consciousness at any moment. And they don’t think there will be lasting damage as brain function seems fine; however, there is always that chance he will suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.”
Jason had always been a fan of military history. Susan recalled him telling her about how tough Spartan wives were, way before movies like 300 had popularized it. He had explained how the mothers promulgated the warrior culture. They sent their sons off to training early and refused to accept cowardice.
“So you’re saying they’re tough bitches,” she had said to him.
“Yeah. Seriously tough bitches,” he’d agreed with a laugh.
“General Shapland … thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Save it for the guys that got him out of there.”
“Of course,” she said. Nurse Donahue and Distraught Susan wrestled for control of Susan Donahue’s emotions. In the end neither won, and a third personality emerged from the fray: Strong Susan.
“Ma’am, believe me when I tell you that we’ll have Staff Sergeant Donahue on his way to Wilford Hall in the next few days. That’s the largest military treatment center in the U.S., and it’s right next door to you, in San Antonio.
“Okay.”
“That’s where my boy went … believe me, they do really good things there. Miracles. They’ll figure everything out. Probably a little physical therapy. All the medical stuff.”
“Thank you, sir. I really do, I … just want to say thanks.”
“Well, you were—persistent—in getting information.”
“Right, well … sorry about that.”
“No need to say anything. My wife would have done the same thing. Tough ladies.”
Tough bitches, she thought, and smiled weakly.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to leave you my phone number. My office is going to give you an update at least twice a day. If they fail to do that, you call me and let me know. Understood?”
“Understood. Thanks again, General.”
Chapter 25
Greg and Candy
“Chuck, do you remember that time you passed out in your front yard?” Rob asked. “Holy shit, that was the funniest thing ever.” Chuck shook his head, but he was smirking, and his glassy eyes perked up behind the vodka sour he was nursing.
“What happened?” Mandy squealed. She was single and hitting the sauce pretty hard. Greg had already pegged her and Rob Handsome for drunk reunion sex at some point that night. Probably wouldn’t be the first time they bumped uglies.
“Dude! Me, Mark … and that guy!” he pointed at Greg. “We were all out after one of the games. I think we beat the crap out of Deer Park that night. I threw so many yards—”
Several people started clearing their throats, cutting him off, and the group laughed.
“Okay, all right,” he smiled. “I’ll cut down on the football talk. Anyway, someone rented Fireman’s Hall over on Heards Lane and they had a couple o’ kegs. And shots. And freakin’ Chuck Norris took down, I don’t even know, like fourteen shots—”
“Sixteen,” Chuck said.
“Sixteen! I stand corrected. And it’s no wonder. Because he passed out and slid right off the barstool to the floor. We slapped him around and poured water on his face, but ol’ boy was out. I’ve never seen anyone that completely and utterly toasted. I mean wrecked—”
“They get the picture,” Chuck said.
“Right. So we took Chuck, here, to his house, deposited him in the grass by his front door, rang the doorbell, and hauled ass out of there. We went back to Fireman’s Hall and kept drinking.”
Everyone started laughing. Chuck bowed to the table.
“Except, an hour later, Gregory over there has a change of heart. Or maybe his labia started hurting, I don’t know, because he starts worrying about Chuck. I mean, he wouldn’t shut the hell up about it—he wants to go back and make sure his boyfriend was okay.”
A few people laughed, and Candy put a hand on Greg’s thigh and gave it a squeeze. Instead of pulling it back, she left her hand there, resting on his leg. Greg stole a glance at her hand and thought about how a slight shift to the right, just two or three inches, and she’d be feeling something else. He looked up and she was watching him—smiled—winked at him.
“So we drive back to Chuck’s house. And … okay, Greg was right. Chuck was still outside. At some point in his drunken stupor, he’d crawled across the yard, rolled onto his back, and thrown up all over himself,” he said. A couple of the girls gagged and protested. “And it was dried and hard all
over his face.”
“That’s what she said,” Chuck chimed in.
“Ha! Not that night, buddy. So we rang the doorbell again and waited. Chuck’s dad came out and told us, ‘I’ve got him, boys. Go on home.’ While we walked back to the car, Chuck’s dad took the garden hose and sprayed all that dried-up vomit off his face. Hosed him down.”
“Well, thanks for that story, Handsome. Can I interest anyone in a Chevy? Side airbags standard,” Chuck said, and several crumpled napkins flew his way. “Hey, don’t hate.”
“What? OhmyGod! You’reallhere!” The petite brunette’s words ran together in shrill glee. Greg noticed that she was stacked—what a group with more class might call top heavy. Lord only knew what Rob or Chuck might call it—her assets had their rapt attention—but there was a good idea they’d all find out. “Rob Handsome! Chuck Hill!”
“Stacy Peters,” Chuck blurted out.
“Stacy Peters?” Greg repeated. He remembered a small, energetic girl from the cheerleading squad—a real fireball, with a smaller bosom—not the stacked brunette in front of him. He recalled thinking that she was sort of hot back in the day, but that she had a mouth like a sailor.
One time there’d been six of them jammed into a Volkswagen Fox, drinking, and rolling around the island when she suddenly said: “Pull over as soon as you can.”
“Why?” someone asked nervously. Words like pull over as soon as you can were synonymous with getting sick, and nobody wanted to hear that when you were crammed six-deep in a Fox.
“I have to shit,” she had replied. Not quietly, either. The other two guys in the car had laughed. Maybe they thought she was funny. Or maybe there was that whole thing going on where guys become attracted to girls who act like one of the guys, the girls that smoke and burp and curse.
Or shit.
And there it was. Greg wasn’t like the others; he never thought of her as hot after that single, solitary moment in time. She’d ruined it. Sometimes he almost found himself considering her, or thinking she was good looking, but then he’d remember that night. He would forever think of her as having to shit.
“Yes! So you recognize me?” she said. “Greg Thomas. Oh my God—Candy Simon! Girl, you look fantastic! That’s so great that you and Greg are still together!”
“Hey, you look great, too!” Candy leaned forward and told Stacy. As she did so, her hand slid a little further up Greg’s pants. Another inch and she’d be shaking hands with the sheriff.
Greg noticed that Candy didn’t correct Stacy, but nobody else seemed to notice. Drinks and laughter were on tap tonight, and everyone ordered round after round.
“Notice anything new about me?” Stacy asked.
“Um, can you touch your elbows behind your back? Please?” Rob laughed at his own joke, but he wasn’t the only one thinking something along those lines. His ridiculously good looks and humor earned him a little slap on the arm from Stacy. He noticed that Mandy edged a little closer to Rob and brushed up against him. Looked like she and Stacy might be competing for him that night. Point, Mandy.
“That’s right … I gotta boob job! Aren’t they awesome?” Stacy squeezed her arms together and everything in between moved forward. Greg laughed to himself. She was equally as straightforward as she’d been two decades before. Also: point, Stacy.
And the night was only half over.
<<>>
“Who’s up for IHOP?”
“IHOP? Come on, man, let’s do Waffle House.”
“Bro! There wasn’t any Waffle House in Galveston when we were in high school.”
“There wasn’t an IHOP either.”
“Yeah, but there was a Denny’s, and Denny’s is pretty much the same thing as IHOP.”
“What? What the hell kind of logic is that? That doesn’t even make sense.”
Greg listened to Chuck and Rob argue about where they should eat. They were floating around the streets in the Strand district of Galveston, drinking too much, and waxing group nostalgic over their high school and early college years. In those days, they’d all lived in Galveston or visited regularly—Christmas home from college, summer jobs at Moody Gardens or Gaidos—and they still got together.
Most had moved on long ago, and the visits were rare. The occasional Facebook update revealed some random island adventure. It usually involved kids, thirty extra pounds, and thinning hair.
What surprised Greg most about the old crew was how many of them were single. Of the six of them out tonight, four were divorced, and one was never married. He alone carried the matrimonial torch … remained with the person with whom he’d shared vows. Stacy was the one who had never had a ring put on it.
“Brother-man, I have four words for you: hash browns all the way.”
“That’s five words,” Rob replied.
“What?” Chuck counted them off on his fingers. “Four words.”
“Hash browns is two words, Chuck.”
“No it isn’t. Why would it be two words? It’s just one thing.”
“Google it, Bro.”
“It’s one word—” Chuck started to protest.
“Google it,” Handsome cut him off.
Chuck got out his phone with his right hand and started tapping on the screen one-handed. His left hand was occupied, being around Stacy’s waist. In a surprising move, as the drinking and tomfoolery had continued, Chuck had maneuvered in on Stacy and, apparently, won her away from Rob Handsome. Perhaps Stacy wasn’t into sharing, and Mandy’s talons were already squarely embedded in Rob.
Whatever the case, old Chucky would get lucky.
Candy and Greg were bringing up the rear of the group as they moved down the street. She put a hand on his arm and held him back while the others kept walking, allowing a large gap to form between the four and the two.
“Why don’t we go off on our own now?” she asked him.
Warning bells went off inside his head, and the little angel and devil inside of him waged war against one another. Go off alone? He wasn’t sure what to expect. Resolution? An affair? What kind of game was he playing?
“Okay, man, four or five words, it doesn’t really matter. A rose by any other name, right? The point is having hash, browns, covered, smothered, diced, chopped, and chunked. Oh, that’s funny, gloat about it, you’re so smart.”
The banter continued, but Greg only halfway listened as he held a quick debate with himself over his current dilemma. The little devil inside of him won, and he heard himself answer, “Um, sure.”
<<>>
After substantial verbal abuse for breaking away from the others prematurely, Greg and Candy were on their own, gliding down Seawall Boulevard in Candy’s Mustang. She leaned over and pushed a button on her stereo and Information Society’s What’s On Your Mind came out of the speakers. It was one of those Candy and Greg songs from high school.
They pulled into a parking spot on the water, just down from the new Pleasure Pier. Greg moved into the middle of the sidewalk, put his head back, and took a deep breath.
“There is just something awesome about Galveston, isn’t there?”
“Yeah,” she agreed, moving next to him. “It’s why I came back. No other place has ever made me feel this way.”
“It’s crazy that the Flagship is gone,” he said, waving his hand toward the blur of lights, motion, and sound that jutted out over the water. For years there had been a hotel there, completely over the water. A hurricane had changed all of that, and the Pleasure Pier now stood in its place. It was getting late, but the rides were still moving, and the faint sound of voices, bells, and games floated across the distance to them.
“I like this better. Reminds me of Santa Monica,” Candy said. Her tone was wistful—like a child that’s yearning for summer break to last all year. “Have you ever been there?”
“Umm, yeah,” he said without elaborating. They’d taken a family vacation to California just two years earlier. For two weeks they’d hit all the spots along Highway One. Nancy had loved
the pier in Santa Monica.
They walked slowly away, heading west, away from the pier. Neither said anything aloud, but unspoken words hovered near the surface. The crowds were thinning, fewer and fewer people around. When they reached a set of concrete stairs leading to the beach below, Candy asked him, “Take a walk in the sand?”
“Sure,” he told her looking down at his shoes. “Sort of not dressed for it, though.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun. We can leave our shoes on one of the rocks.”
While he watched, she lifted her left leg and slid the heel off, then followed suit with her right heel. Her dress hiked up a little each time, nearly to mid-thigh, and he tried not to look, but couldn’t help himself. Her legs looked firm and tan, no doubt from hours at the beaches around Galveston—maybe even the very spot they now stood. His eyes traveled the contours of her legs one last time, until Candy cleared her throat, and he looked up, busted, into her smiling face.
Down the concrete stairs they went, leaving behind the pallid glow of the streetlights above, for the cool shadows below. They deposited their shoes and walked out to the no-man’s-land of cold, compact sand. The water moved in periodically with the pulse of the waves and covered their feet. He found it a little hard to think as he rode the fence between tipsy and drunk.
“Nice night,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Reminds me of old times.”
He hesitated a moment, thinking about that, then replied carefully, “Galveston reminds me of old times.”
“Hmm. Were they good or bad, those old times?”
“Mostly good.”
“What about with me?” she asked. “Were they good times with me?”
He looked sideways at her and saw a flirtatious grin. He couldn’t help but smile when he replied. “They were good, Candy.”
“Yep.” She dug her toes into the sand a little bit and he watched her trace a smiley face with her big toe. Then she turned to him, and while he watched, her smile went placid, and her demeanor changed. “You know,” she said, “I stopped being mad about how we ended, Greg. I put it behind me. I didn’t know that for certain until we started talking again, and I realized it was true. I don’t harbor any bad feelings.”