With something niggling in the back of her mind, she said, “No, that’s okay. I think I’d rather go over and bang on it myself. Which barracks do you live in?”
There was a sudden stillness on Justin’s end. “Uh, I should probably…you know, he’s probably not home. Just let me go see and, uh, I can tell him to, uh, call you or something if he is there.”
The niggling got worse, and something cold seeped down her spine. “Justin, what’s the building number?”
“You know, Carly, I can’t just—”
“Justin.”
Reluctantly he gave her the building number, the name and Dane’s room number. She picked up a pen, poised to write it down, but there was no need. She recognized both number and name. She passed it every Tuesday on her way to the transition unit with the kids. Except for a few lucky ones with family in Tallgrass, every patient she knew at the WTU lived in the barracks just down the street.
Dane lived in the wounded warrior barracks.
“Don’t you go over there and warn him,” she said quietly.
“Carly— Man, he’ll kill me if I don’t— Just wait. Let me go see—”
She hung up on him.
He’d told her he’d torn up his leg in Afghanistan. It didn’t take a life-changing injury to bar a paratrooper from any further jumps. Those guys suffered back and knee injuries all the time and went on living a relatively normal life, no different from any hard-charging athlete. Injuries were part of the job.
But it pretty much did take a life-changing injury to end up in the wounded warrior program. He didn’t show any signs of a traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder. Was his leg injury worse than he’d admitted?
But he didn’t use crutches. He limped only on occasion. He’d hiked into the falls at Turner Falls and climbed to Wagon Wheel Cave. His only limitations seemed to involve kneeling and climbing ladders, and he’d done plenty of kneeling helping her plant yesterday.
She realized with a start she was standing at the front door, her purse strap over one shoulder, her keys in her hand. By the time she’d reached Main Street, she’d managed to tamp down her curiosity and hurt into a sort of wait-and-see numbness.
She followed the familiar route onto post, pulling into the barracks parking lot and, first thing, noticing Dane’s truck off in a distant corner. After parking, she sat for a moment studying the buildings. They were modeled after Tranquility Hall at National Military Medical Center in Bethesda: small apartments that allowed the recovering soldiers to adapt to regular life. Some had extra bedrooms so family could stay, give emotional support and help when needed and practice the responsibilities they would face at home.
Her aching fingers made her realize she was gripping the steering wheel. She was delaying.
Slowly she forced her fingers loose, then opened the door. It took only moments to cross the parking lot to the building, to locate Unit 6. Her hand clenched, and instead of knocking, she banged on the door, just as she’d told Justin she would.
There was a moment’s silence, then Dane’s voice filtered out. “For God’s sake, Justin. Can’t a guy take a bath without you calling and pounding—” The lock clicked, and the door swung in, and he stood there, leaning on crutches. He wore a T-shirt and sweatpants, the left leg swaying gently from midthigh down. His right foot was bare. The left…
Wasn’t there.
The expression on his face was stark, color draining, eyes widening. His hands clenched the crutches, the muscles in his arms bunching and rippling, then his face turned a mottled red and he took an awkward step back, as if to shield himself behind the door. He wanted to hide. From her.
Carly wanted to do a dozen things. Hold him and hug him until everything was all right. Demand to know everything. Ask why he hadn’t told her. Plead to know why he hadn’t trusted her. Beat him with one of the crutches for being so…so…
Striving for a cool, even tone, she politely asked, “May I come in?”
His hesitation was so long that she thought he was actually going to tell her no. Finally, though, he stepped aside and nudged the door open wider. She walked into the apartment, her gaze taking in the institutional feel of the furnishings, the lack of personal items…and the lifelike prosthetic leg sitting on the couch. She couldn’t help but stare at it before turning her gaze back to Dane.
“This is what you call ‘tearing up’ your leg?” She gestured toward the prosthesis without taking her attention from his face, from the embarrassment that still bronzed his skin, from the mortification still in his eyes.
“It was pretty damn well torn up before the doctors cut it off.” His tone was flat, edged with dark emotion. Anger. Bitterness.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“When would have been a good time for that?”
“The first time we met. The second. The third. Or the first time we kissed, or the second or the third, or, hell, last night when we were on the couch with my blouse half undone.” Tears welling, she swallowed hard and tightened every muscle in her body to stave them off. “That day in the cave, when you told me you were stationed at Fort Murphy, it would have been so easy to add ‘at the Warrior Transition Unit.’ That second time, in the gym, when you pretended you’d just stopped by to visit Justin, you could have been honest instead.”
He closed the door, then leaned against it. “Like that wouldn’t have changed things?”
“Changed things how?” Slowly his meaning dawned, and the desire to give him a whack with his own crutch returned. “You think it would have mattered to me? That I wouldn’t have been interested? You think I’m so shallow that I wouldn’t get involved with a man missing a leg?”
The bitterness that had been in his voice earlier returned. “You do have this thing about perfection.”
Her own eyes doubled in size. “It’s a word I use, for God’s sake! The weather is perfect, my flower beds are perfect, the colors in my living room are perfect. You’re perfect, too, Dane. You’re a perfect ass. You didn’t even trust me.” Finally a tear slipped free. “How can you care about someone you don’t even trust?”
“Carly—” He dragged his hand through his hair, not as easy to do when he was using crutches to hold him upright. “I meant to tell you. Really. It’s just…I was…The doctors say I have body-image issues. I’m not adapting well to my new reality.” He snorted. “I hated losing my leg. I hate the prosthesis and the sleeve and the stump and the crutches and the pain and everything else, so I don’t tell anyone. I figure if I don’t have to see it or talk about it, and no one else does, either, then I can pretend it didn’t happen.”
Her chest tightened, making air difficult to take in. “You should have told me. You should have given me a chance, Dane. I wouldn’t have let you down.”
Heat flared in his voice. “My own mother let me down. She only came to see me once in all those months in the hospital. She calls me crippled and says no woman would want me like this.”
Carly tried to imagine Mia or her own mother ever saying such things to their sons, and the image wouldn’t form. No loving mother could ever be so insensitive and cruel. “Then your mother’s a fool, Dane, because I wanted you!” Want you, will always want you, was what she meant, but she used the past tense in a petty effort to transfer a little of her hurt to him.
He noticed. His mouth thinned, the muscles in his clean-shaven jaw working. “Do you want to know now?”
She had to swallow a couple times to get the answer out, steeling her nerves, steeling her heart, because she knew his story wasn’t going to be easy to tell, easy to hear. “Yes.”
He walked smoothly, as if he’d used the crutches long enough for them to become a part of him, and moved the prosthetic from the sofa to the chair. Though he looked as if he wanted to throw it, he set it down with restraint, then went to sit at the other end of the sofa. She eased onto the cushion farthest from him, turning to face him.
When he began, his voice was blank, an emotionless recitatio
n of what must have been the worst day of his life. “It was my fourth tour in the desert. We were stationed in Kunar Province. Routine day, routine patrol, until it got blasted all to hell. IED. One minute, we were driving along, arguing about the best place to find pizza back in Vicenza, and the next, I was lying facedown twenty-five feet away. I guess I blacked out for a moment. When I opened my eyes, I saw my boot about twelve feet away. I knew it was mine because it had this oil stain that I couldn’t get rid of. There was dust settling all around, people yelling and running, and that damn boot was just standing there.
“And then I realized my foot was still in it.”
Carly’s throat swelled, and she clamped her jaws together, pushing her tongue hard against the roof of her mouth. Thanks to the media embedded with American troops, she could too easily imagine the scene: the chaos, the urgency, the fear. Injured buddies, probably one or more dead, feeling exposed as if the enemy might pick them off one at a time while they tried to save their friends’ lives.
“By that time in our deployment, some of us were routinely wearing tourniquets when we went out, loosely cinched on our thighs. I didn’t even think to tighten it. I just kept looking at that boot, the sock, the ragged flesh, and wondering how was that possible. It was my foot. It was supposed to be attached.” A note of wonder, of confusion, came into his voice before the monotone returned. “One of the guys from the vehicle behind us tightened the tourniquet on my leg, and they got us out of there and to the field hospital. I don’t know how it happened, but we all survived.”
It happened by the grace of God, Carly thought, because he was meant to come into her life. Meant to change her life.
God, did it make her ungrateful that she would prefer change without pain?
“I got evacked to Landstuhl, where they did the first amputation, then sent me to Bethesda. But the force of the blast blew debris into my leg, damaged muscles, tissue, and bone, and caused an infection. I’d just gotten relatively ambulatory with my new foot when they said they had to do a below-the-knee amputation. But the infection wouldn’t go away. They treated it aggressively, because having a knee is always better than not having one, but after a few months, they had to go in again.”
He smiled weakly. “And here I am.”
And here he was. Carly didn’t know what to say. She understood in her head that the loss of a limb was traumatic, though she couldn’t begin to know just how traumatic it was to him. But he was alive when so many others had died. He should celebrate that, he should be grateful every day, not embarrassed, not trying to hide what his service had cost him. Jeff would have been so thrilled to come home that he would have danced her through the streets of Tallgrass, prosthetic leg and all.
But Dane wasn’t Jeff, and Jeff had known she loved him.
Jeff had trusted her totally, completely, utterly.
And Dane didn’t.
He stared toward the television, and she followed his look to a photograph standing beside it. It had been taken in the desert, a bunch of guys in khaki T-shirts and DCU pants, all with high-and-tights, some wearing dark glasses, some holding weapons that seemed almost as big as they were. She wondered on which deployment it had been taken, which of the men in it had come back, which hadn’t, how much loss they had suffered.
Realizing her cheeks were wet, she raised one hand to swipe away tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, then spoke louder. “I’m very sorry.”
Then…“Is that why…last night…? It really wasn’t me, it was you.”
He gave her a dry look. “We couldn’t have gone much further without having to take our clothes off. I may be an ass, but even I know that dropping my pants with a surprise like that is going to put one hell of a damper on the mood.”
Yeah. Even with her limited sexual experience, she knew shock wasn’t exactly a great turn-on. She would have been horrified—not by the prosthesis but by everything he’d gone through.
On the other hand, her fourteen extra pounds didn’t seem so worrisome in comparison.
“I’ve been celibate a long time, but I think I remember a lot more to foreplay than what we did last night,” she said, trying to match his dryness.
His response could have been a laugh or a cough. “I’ve been celibate a long time, too. Trust me, I don’t have the self-control to wait much beyond what we did last night.” His glance her way was awkward, self-conscious. “I was going to tell you today. Honestly. I want—I want you. I want to—to be with you. To spend the future with you. I was just cleaning up before going to your house.” He gestured toward the prosthesis. “I was even going to wear the pretty leg.”
She believed him. She just wished it had happened the way he’d planned.
She really just wished he’d told her right up front. Even if he’d been uncomfortable telling the truth the first time they’d met, at some point after that, after he’d gotten to know her, hadn’t he realized she wouldn’t care? Hadn’t he had a little bit of faith in her, just enough to know that she was a person of substance? That she was honest and genuine and would never, ever judge him on his physical limitations?
If he hadn’t learned that much about her, had he learned anything at all?
She didn’t realize how long the silence had gone on until he broke it, his words little more than a whisper. “This makes a difference, doesn’t it?” Grimly, he grasped a handful of his pants leg in the middle of his thigh, bunching the empty fabric.
“It doesn’t. I don’t care that you don’t have a leg.” She swallowed hard, then took a couple deep breaths for strength. “I care that you didn’t trust me, Dane. That you didn’t think enough of me to give me a chance.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy and sad and accusing. She imagined she still heard their faint echoes when she stood. “I need…time.”
The bleakness in his eyes when he nodded just about broke her heart. Instead of walking to the door, she wanted to go to him, wrap her arms around him, convince him that her feelings for him didn’t have anything to do with the number of body parts he had or lacked, that it was the man he was inside that she loved.
But the man he was inside was ashamed of himself and unsure of her.
She stopped at the door, but didn’t look back. “I—I’ll call you.” She opened the door, stepped out into the warm afternoon air, then closed it quietly behind her.
As she crossed the parking lot to her car, she thought about how good she’d become at keeping herself under control. Army widows were expected to show restraint in public. They rarely sobbed through their husbands’ funerals. They didn’t collapse with grief at the grave sites. They maintained control, then fell apart in private.
That was what she did on the drive home: maintained. Her jaw was clenched, her fingers taut, her muscles stressed to the max to keep her erect and composed. She would cry when she got home, with the door securely shutting out the world, letting her grieve and get as sloppy sad as she wanted.
But when she got home, she didn’t throw herself on the couch and sob. She didn’t seek the shadowy sanctuary of her bedroom. She stood in the hallway for a very long time, lost and confused and heart-sore but, to her surprise, still hopeful.
“Every journey starts with one step,” Jeff used to tell her. She and Dane had taken a hell of a lot of steps on this journey. Was she going to throw it all away because of one misstep early on? Was she going to stop loving him, wanting him, needing to be with him because of something he hadn’t said when he should have?
Of course not. She just needed time to get over the hurt that he hadn’t confided in her, that he hadn’t trusted her with information that was such a part of him.
Twisting the band on her fourth finger, she realized that she also needed time to say good-bye. Jeff would be in her heart forever, but it was time to move on from parts of her past and to open herself fully to the possibilities of the future.
With one last twist, she removed her wedding band, then stared at her hand. Every moment, wak
ing or sleeping, she’d worn that ring, ever since Jeff had placed it on her finger at the minister’s behest. It left a groove at the base of her finger, pale, shiny skin so rarely exposed.
Her hand felt naked.
Her heart felt lighter.
She slid the ring onto her right hand, then clenched her fingers. “I love you, Jeff,” she whispered. But she loved Dane, too.
Jeff was all right with that. She knew it deep down in her heart.
Sighing out a bit of heaviness and stress, slowly she went down the hall to the guest room, where she opened the closet and took out an armful of Jeff’s uniforms. Gently, reverently, she began packing them away.
Chapter Sixteen
The first day of spring break should have meant sleeping in late, lounging around in pajamas with a cup of coffee and something truly decadent for breakfast, like sticky, cinammony, nut-laden monkey bread, but instead Therese had gotten up at her usual seven a.m. She showered, dressed, and put on makeup, adding extra concealer under her eyes to cover the shadows there. Before heading downstairs for coffee and yogurt, she knocked sharply on the kids’ doors, getting a grunt from Jacob, nothing from Abby.
Granted, she and Abby hadn’t exchanged five words since the incident Saturday.
The reason Abby hadn’t answered was apparent when Therese reached the kitchen: The girl was sitting at the island, dressed and ready to go, her luggage next to the doorway. She’d gotten a bottle of pop and a yogurt from the refrigerator, but didn’t seem to be making headway on either one, instead running her hands restlessly over her hair, her clothes, her cell phone.
Therese stopped in the hallway before Abby saw her and just studied her. She was so pretty, so delicate. There was much of her mother in her, but Therese could recognize a lot of Paul, too. Baby girl, he’d called her, and Scooter pie. She’d loved the first and rolled her eyes at the second—the reason he’d done it, of course.
Where would she go if Therese insisted on giving her up? Catherine and both sets of grandparents had already made clear they didn’t want custody of her, but that was when they’d known she had a home with Therese. If they knew her only option was entering the foster system, surely—maybe—they’d change their minds.
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