We laughed, both of us.
Jacob had the night off. I badly needed a friend’s company. We stayed in that place until midnight, eating ribs and catfish and sweet potato—the kind of food I remembered from Georgia—and drinking shots of what tasted like moonshine. Home brew, the waitress called it. Finally we both got some sense and went home.
Apartment 2B was empty when I got there. No Sara. No piano. At some point I’d texted her to say I would be late. She never replied.
But I saw the gift the moment I switched on the light in my bedroom.
A book, set in the exact center of my bed. I picked it up carefully. The cover was thin, supple leather, dyed to the darkest blue, with the spine and corners reinforced by polished silver. Inside, the pages were a thick cream-colored parchment, blank and lovely with promise.
A journal. She bought me a journal.
Inside the front cover, Sara had pasted a bright green sticky note that said: In recognition of a difficult day. —S.
Oh. This was a gift I could not bear to return.
I’m writing all this as though it’s easy. It’s not, this being six a.m. and me with way too much hangover and nowhere near enough sleep. Not to mention keeping my promise to Jacob. Should I tell Faith Bellaume about Sara and the journal? I think no. Not yet. Today we talk about Georgia.
But I’m not done with my real entry.
So there I was. Drunk. Exhausted. A headache pinching my skull. And this inexplicable gift from Sara. I didn’t even bother to ask how she knew about my day. She just did.
That’s when I saw the other gift. A fountain pen of stainless steel, with a plain square nib. I touched the nib and it was as though the pen bled for me—blue-black blood that stained my fingertip. Everything ready, I thought, except the words themselves.
And then it came to me. A proper first entry.
And so I wrote what I repeat now:
I WILL HAVE MY VICTORY. I WILL HAVE MY LIFE BACK. I SWEAR IT.
8
The next day I kept my promise to Jacob.
It was, after all, a necessary step for the promise I made to myself.
If Faith Bellaume wondered at my bloodshot eyes, she said nothing. We talked for the requisite fifty minutes. About Georgia. About the arguments I had overheard between my father and my grandmother. About the differences between a dirt farm in Georgia and the one-room apartment where we first lived in Suitland. I didn’t have any grand epiphany, but neither did I expect one. At least I didn’t punch her this time.
The third visit was more difficult. The fourth nearly impossible.
But I kept at it.
The younger technicians, the ones who had not served in Oklahoma or any of the Russian Conflicts, whispered when I arrived—disheveled, often tear-stained—from my therapy sessions. The older men and women, most of them veterans, offered me a practical kind of sympathy. Sometimes they handed me a cup of strong coffee to gulp down before my first patient. Or they restocked my supply cabinets. The days when I failed to arrive at eight forty-five—those days when I could not, absolutely could not, spring fully formed like Athena from the skull of therapy—the techs or Roberta Thompson did a sweep and made everything ready.
Between us all, we managed, and for that I was grateful.
* * *
Eventually, Faith Bellaume told me, you must learn to make the hard decisions. You never have, not really. You’ve pretended. In school. With your family. With Angela. A very good pretense, I admit, but you kept running away. You will never reclaim your life unless you confront what truly frightens you. That is the truth.
Laboring at this almost unthinking job was not enough.
Nor this daily scouring of my soul.
When I argued, she was pleased I could fight back with words and not a formless rage. Still she insisted. I would have to choose a goal, lay out the steps, then follow them. Only then could I reclaim my life, in all senses of the word.
* * *
It was the middle of October—not quite two months since I rode that crowded Amtrak from Pittsburgh to Union Station. President Sanches’s speeches, when I had the spoons to notice, had taken on a didactic quality, as though she would lecture the nation and the rebel states into obedience. Jeb Foley called her a failure, and the conservative news feeds used the word against her like a blunt relentless weapon.
Except she had not failed. Not as I saw it.
From that very first day, when she announced her plans for federal oversight of the police, when she launched her campaign for gun control, Alida Sanches had achieved all kinds of victories my parents once called impossible. She had argued and negotiated, along with her third-party allies, until we had universal health care and equal rights for gay and transgender people. And when the rebels had taken to bombing hospitals and airports and federal buildings, she had not backed down.
But still soldiers died. Still the New Confederacy fought against what they called the tyranny of the left. And still there were rumors that Texas and Arizona poured money and arms into the civil war. Aided, some said, by certain foreign governments, though the names of those governments changed from week to week. Russia, our enemy. China, our ally except when our goals differed. Unless Sanches could end this war, and end it without dismantling every gain she’d made, I knew how history would write these past eight years.
Two weeks after my first visit with Faith Bellaume, I presented my photo ID to the receptionist at the VA headquarters and told her I had a ten a.m. appointment with my caseworker, Terrence Alexander Smith.
Making the appointment had taken five days of wrangling by phone and email. The VA could not accommodate me earlier than ten a.m., they said, nor later than two p.m., unless I wished to defer my appointment until December. I did not wish to. Momentum, I told myself. Keep moving. Do whatever it takes. In the end, I worked out a plan with Roberta Thompson to make up the lost hours during the evening shift.
My escort appeared within moments and brought me up the same flight of stairs and through the same maze of corridors to Smith’s cubicle. Little had changed since my last visit, including Smith himself. I sat down and waited while he shuffled through a stack of papers, then consulted his computer display. He glanced toward me, with my new haircut and my freshly pressed suit, the one I had bought during that mad week after meeting Sara Holmes.
Clothes are like armor, Faith Bellaume had murmured when I told her about my plans. They can protect you. They can also act like a challenge to the enemy.
I smiled at him. He stared at a point over my shoulder.
“You have a job?” he asked.
“Medical technician at the VA Medical Center.”
He sniffed. “Permanent or temporary?”
“That information should be in my records.”
His glance met mine briefly, then flicked away. “Yes. I see. It is.”
Smith scrolled through the rest of my file. At one point, he paused the display and his eyes narrowed while he studied the screen, now carefully angled away from me. I wondered if he had noticed my new address, which certainly did not match a technician’s salary.
“When you applied for this interview, you said you wanted a reevaluation of your case,” he said at last.
“Not exactly. I’m not contesting my pension or my benefits. No, I want . . .” And here I had to remind myself of the script I had rehearsed these past three days. “I want a reliable device. A replacement for the one installed under emergency conditions on the front.”
Smith blinked. I felt a trembling inside my gut and its electronic echo through my left arm.
Say nothing. Wait for him to speak first.
He leaned back in his chair, tapping one hand against the other, as though he were reviewing his supply of government-issue replies. Finally he offered me a sanctimonious smile. “I understand your concerns, Captain Watson. However, as you know, the military action in the central states has not been kind to our economy. The VA does not have the funds to outfit all our veterans
with the newest prosthetic limbs—”
“I don’t require a new one. But as my medical record shows, this particular device took excessive damage when its previous owner died in combat. The operating surgeon installed it as a temporary measure, but he recommended a replacement, as did the physical therapists in Decatur. And there is a market of used and refurbished limbs.”
He was about to object—I could see that—so I hurried into my next argument. “There is also the matter of my return to service.”
That caught his attention. “You wish to reenlist.”
Stop now, you idiot. Do not promise them anything.
But one lesson I had learned in my morning sessions was to heed my instincts. I would not sacrifice my soul for our civil war, not even for a new left arm, and not even if I believed that victory served a higher purpose than a Progressive Party win this November. But I did believe in honor. And in using my hard-won skills to heal the wounded, to make them whole.
“I want to serve my country,” I said. “But I’m a surgeon. I need two good hands to do my work.”
Smith stared at me with his watery eyes, as though amazed by my speech. No, not amazed. Disturbed. Abruptly, the old bored expression fell over his face again and he returned to studying the computer screen. For several long moments, the cubicle was silent except for the hum of the ventilation fans and the tap, tap, tap of his fingers over the keys.
“You applied for counseling, I see.”
Oh. Oh, damn him for using the VA’s own services against me.
I drew a deep breath and pinned my thoughts upon my goals. Even so, it took me a moment before I could trust myself to speak in an ordinary tone. “The VA recommends counseling for all returning veterans.”
He gave a little wave of his hand. “It’s standard for combat veterans, not medical personnel.”
I was in combat. You know that. You choose to forget.
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying,” I said cautiously.
“Just a concern,” he said. “Nothing more. How many weeks did the clinic recommend for your case?”
Another question he had no right to ask me. But if I lost my temper or refused to answer his questions, he could label me uncooperative, unstable, and therefore a risk, just as a hospital might deny an organ transplant to an alcoholic.
I pretended to smooth out the sleeve covering my device. My fingers were trembling. Rage. Frustration. None of them useful emotions. I shut them away in a mental box for later, and met Smith’s gaze with as pleasant and bland an expression as I could muster. “The clinic did not specify, but you could ask them for access to my private records.”
Which they would not grant, but neither could he claim I had refused him.
Smith examined his fingernails with a frown. “I can’t promise anything.”
“I know,” I replied. “Until next month, then.”
He glanced up, startled.
I smiled, sure of myself for once. “Regulations grant me regular reviews. No?”
The frown turned into a scowl. “Correct. Until next month, Captain Watson.”
* * *
We smiled, shook hands, and silently wished each other to eternal hell. At least I did. Smith did not strike me as the imaginative sort. Most likely he simply wished for an early lunch break. He handed me over to my escort with little more than a shudder and disappeared into his cubicle. By now I knew my way, but I dutifully followed the young woman through the maze of cubicles, back to the public regions of VA headquarters.
Outside, the air felt damp and cool, and ugly gray clouds hovered low above the city. The skin over my forehead felt too tight and my prosthetic arm buzzed with suppressed emotion. I checked my watch. Ten thirty-five. Thompson did not expect me until eleven forty-five. I briefly considered taking a cab back to 2809 Q Street, but that would be a mistake. I had work to do, patients to interview, a paycheck to earn.
I set off on foot for the VA Medical Center, with second thoughts trailing close behind.
Fail, fail, fail. I had failed completely. Smith would never recommend me for a new device. Bellaume was right. I had challenged a man who did not like being challenged. All through the ten blocks from the VA headquarters to the medical center, I replayed every exchange, every moment where I could have chosen more diplomatic words, a more conciliatory manner.
Impossible.
The word came to me in Sara Holmes’s voice. I felt a brief bubble of laughter in my chest. Of course she would view any compromise as a mistake. Had she ever once conceded anything in her life? I doubted it.
Five blocks along, my rage died down to embers and sparks, helped along by a rain shower. Perhaps I had not lost completely and forever. I had laid out my wishes without excuses. I had offered the gift of my continued service in exchange for an arm and hand that would allow me to perform that continued service. I only needed to call up the stubbornness I’d once possessed, which I knew to be my inheritance from my father and mother, and the grandmother who still lived in Georgia.
The rain died off. The clouds scattered long enough for the sun to break through. It glinted off the cars in the street and the dirty puddles on the sidewalk. A few electronic billboards advertised movies and cars alongside the men and women campaigning for whatever political office. I marched on, my duffel bag thumping against my back.
I arrived at the medical center drenched in sweat and chilled by the early autumn air. Eleven o’clock. My shift started in forty-five minutes. I used that interval to down a cup of strong coffee and a double dose of Advil, then take a hot shower, before changing into my scrubs. I arrived at my station in time to run through my checklist and hand over the signed inventory to Roberta Thompson.
“Good news?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Ah.” She left without saying anything more.
Just as well. Pity might undo me.
For once the unending routine of the day helped. Sixteen veterans presented themselves in turn, each one with different symptoms, each with a disease you could trace back to the war. The young man who had turned drug addict in the face of blood and terror on the front lines. The pilot shot down in enemy territory, rescued after torture. The others with no visible injuries, who had served their tour of duty and returned home, only to find the war had not left them behind. They complained of toothaches, or migraines, or ulcers. An endless litany of small, ordinary illnesses, all much easier to categorize and treat than the invisible wounds the war had inflicted.
At 3:58 p.m., the last patient exited my interview room. I leaned against the counter next to my console and massaged my forehead. Half an hour to review and update records. The evening shift started at five thirty. That left me an hour for dinner in the hospital cafeteria.
I swallowed two Advil, then scrolled through the day’s records. Sixteen patients interviewed. Three repeats. One transfer from a different district. Of the twelve new patients, seven were medical discharges. The war was not going well, but when could you ever say that any war was? I double-checked the two records where I had entered observations. Patel had clicked the box marked “read” for both but made no comments of his own. Had he actually bothered to look at them? Or did the system automatically check that box for him?
My headache eased. I drank another cup of water and brought up the list of patients scheduled for that evening.
First on the list was Belinda Díaz. My heart skipped to a faster beat. Again? And so soon? Then I saw the entry was grayed out, which meant she had canceled. But the entry also said she had confirmed the appointment the day before. I tapped the icon to find out why she had canceled.
Deceased. DOD October 15.
The breath caught in my throat.
She died this morning.
I fumbled twice with my electronic pen before I could tap the right icon to bring up the screen with more details. The screen flickered once, then hesitated, as though it didn’t want to divulge that information. I tapped again, harder
.
Medical reports can be so cold, I thought as I read the short summary. I had written a few of those myself, and that had taught me to read between the lines of the dry accounts to uncover the grief that so often lay behind them.
According to the EMT on duty, Belinda Díaz had collapsed at seven a.m. Her cousin had immediately called 911, and the ambulance crew had transported the patient to the hospital without delay. Further questioning of the cousin revealed that Díaz had not slept well the previous week, and had complained she felt tired and overheated.
The records after that were sparse and blunt. Patient admitted to the VA hospital at 7:40, breathing but otherwise unresponsive. Oxygen and intra-arterial tPA administered. Patient declared dead at eight thirty. Diagnosis: blood clot leading to heart failure.
Impossible, was my first thought. She was too stubborn, too strong, to die that easily.
Except I had witnessed any number of deaths where the young and strong had died.
Medical contraindications. The VA doctors had prescribed all kinds of drugs for Díaz to combat her PTSD and her blood pressure. It was just possible . . .
I scanned through the records of Belinda Díaz’s last four months. It was all painfully bare, painfully average. Her records, copied into the VA system on her discharge, detailed her combat injuries. Her four visits to the VA Medical Center, including Anderson’s diagnosis of PTSD and his prescription of LP#2024016, my own observations about Díaz’s blood pressure, and the ever-increasing dosages of sedatives and hypertension medication that Turner had prescribed.
But nothing about the blood and urine tests I had requested. I scrolled back to see if I had missed the relevant entry, but no. No results, not even a mention of my original request. Thompson had promised to authorize those tests. Had she lied to me? I almost laughed at the thought. Thompson never lied. She told you to your face if she thought your ideas were stupid. It was one of her charms.
I logged in to the laboratory portal, in case the data had failed to make the hop from one system into the other. Not likely. Capitol Diagnostics had won their contract with the VA by guaranteeing reliable service, with penalties for every failure, no matter how small. Rumor said the CEO subtracted those penalties from the salaries of those at fault.
A Study in Honor Page 10