The Soldier's Homecoming

Travis looked around the room. Danny was still here, supporting the others.

“You said there’s a ranch?”

“Yeah.”

“Any jobs available there for a young amputee?”

“We could find something. You have a prospect?”

“A corporal. Lost his right leg. He’s a foster kid. No family. No place to go. But he’s a damn hard worker and has encouraged everyone around here.”

“Sounds like someone we can use,” Manning said. “We’ll figure something out.”

“You sound...” Travis couldn’t find the right word.

“Content? I am. I have a wife, a kid, five or six dogs—it changes by the day—two horses and a crazy cat. I’m even an innkeeper,” Manning said with a humor that was definitely new.

“This I have to see,” Travis replied, signaling his acceptance. They discussed the logistics for a moment more, and then he hung up.

Stunned, Travis stood there for a moment. His thoughts raced ahead as he looked at too many warriors struggling to get their lives back.

For the first time in two years, he felt a sense of excitement. He had a challenge, another battle, even if the campaign might be brief. He’d seen so many fellow patients sink into hopelessness. He’d felt it himself. Maybe, just maybe, he could do something worthwhile, both for himself and others fighting for a new life.

He whistled as he limped down the hall. It was the first time he had whistled since his injury.

CHAPTER TWO (#u3f120706-64dc-59f2-88d9-8304b88e84b8)

Denver

A LITTLE GIRL RUNNING. Blood everywhere. Spreading like a river. Edging nearer and nearer...

Panicked, Jenny woke, soaked in her own sweat. The jerk of her body as she woke renewed intense pain in her shoulder. Disoriented, she looked around, trying to control the trembling. The night-light, now necessary for sleep, was just strong enough to reveal the shadowed bedroom, rather than the rubble of a once prosperous city.

Had she screamed again? God, she hoped not.

Her brief prayer was not answered. She heard a tentative knock on the door, and her mother inched the door open and entered the room. Her hair was in rare disarray, her robe partly open, her face slathered with some kind of cream.

“Jennifer?” Her mother’s voice was loud, and Jenny smelled alcohol on her breath as she leaned over. “Another nightmare?”

Jenny struggled to sit upright. Even after four months, the pain in her shoulder could stop her cold.

“It’s okay, Mother. It’s gone.”

She’d never told her mother the truth of the nightmares, that they always revolved around the child standing bewildered in a blood-soaked street. Had the little girl survived? The question wouldn’t leave her. “I’m okay now. Really. Just a bad dream. Remember, I used to have them as a child.” Jenny looked at the clock. A little after 4:00 a.m. “You go back to bed. I know you have that luncheon today. I’ll read for a while, then go back to sleep.”

“If you’re sure...”

“I am. It’s gone now.”

“Maybe a sleeping pill...”

“Maybe,” she said, although she had no plans of taking one. She had watched others in pain become reliant on pills. That would not happen to her. She knew her recuperating time would be long and painful. It was too easy to become addicted to pain meds.

“I’ll get you a glass of water, okay?” her mother persisted.

Jenny nodded. She could do that on her own, but the small chore would satisfy her mother.

After her mother brought the water, Jenny went to her bathroom and took a hot, and then cold, shower to shake off the nightmare.

She knew she couldn’t go back to sleep. Not yet. The horror of those moments was still too real. She went to the corner of her room, where she kept the physical therapy equipment. She selected a rod, turned on the portable TV to an all-news station and sat down in front of it. Her injury didn’t seem to hurt so much when she was occupied with news.

She started moving the rod from side to side as she watched. An upset election in Europe, Congress fighting again, riots in a Middle Eastern country. She ached to be in the middle of it. She didn’t belong in a luxurious bedroom, in a gated community.

She held the rod across her body like a vaudevillian dancing with a cane. She moved it to the left and then to the right. It was one of the excruciatingly painful exercises to expand the mobility of her right shoulder. She smothered a cry as she impatiently shoved the rod too far.

The news turned back again to the Middle East, reporting on the refugees fleeing from wars in Iraq and Syria. She wanted to cry. Scream. Do something. She kept seeing that bombing and the children and adults running for cover where there was none. Did the volunteer medical workers make it to safety? If so, what about the next day? And the one after that?

The scenes haunted her.

Yet despite her injury, she wanted to go back. She needed to record what was happening. She wanted the world to know. To care, dammit.

She didn’t know now whether she could ever return, with her shattered rotator cuff and damaged tendons and muscles. The wrong movement sent rivers of pain through her. She also experienced flashbacks and nightmares. Though less frequent now, she couldn’t take the chance of endangering others during one of her episodes.

Where was Rick now? She hadn’t heard from him in a month. He had stayed with her that day and somehow managed to get her across the border to a hospital. He’d called from a cell phone, somewhere in the field, three weeks later. She’d been barely coherent after her surgery, but she told him she would be back.

She missed him. He was fearless and always had a joke on his lips. He was probably the only person who’d ever understood her need to write stories that needed to be told. That was her source of adrenaline, just as photography was his...

Stop thinking about the past.

She dropped the rod and went to the window. She stared out at the manicured lawn and towering trees in the backyard. The vivid reds and oranges stood in stark contrast to the colorless rocks and sand of much of the Middle East. So why couldn’t she appreciate it? The house and grounds felt like a prison.

It had been nearly four months since that bloody afternoon in Syria. She was lucky not to have bled to death. The red-hot metal had cauterized the wound, and Rick had cradled her body to keep the metal from moving until they found a doctor among the refugees. She’d been patched up enough to get to Turkey, where she received further medical treatment, and was sent home to Colorado.

Following two operations on her shoulder, she’d needed weeks of intense therapy. Her mother begged her to move into the family home, which was close to the rehab center.

She’d resisted at first. With the exception of several brief visits with her mother, she’d not been home since college. She’d been overseas for the last eight years, five of them in the Middle East. Moving back at thirty-two was humiliating.

But staying there for a few weeks was the logical decision. She couldn’t even dress herself without going into elaborate contortions.

Recuperating in a happy home would have been difficult enough, but this house was not happy. Her father was rarely there, and when he was, he usually went straight to his study. Her mother drank too much wine when she wasn’t at charity functions, and probably when she was, too. Her smile was a little too bright. Jenny’s journalistic eye saw the pain she tried to hide.

On the rare weekends her father returned from San Francisco, where his company kept an apartment for him, he couldn’t stop reminding her that he had warned her not to go. The Middle East was no place for a woman. Why couldn’t she be like her two sisters?

According to her father, journalism was no profession for his daughter. No opportunity to marry an up-and-coming husband, as her sisters had, and have children.

But then Jenny knew she’d always been a disappointment to him.

From the time she was old enough to walk, she’d run after fire engines or any other kind of excitement. At ten, she’d saved her allowance to buy a battered set of encyclopedias at a used book sale, and by twelve she’d read through them, along with finishing the reading list for the fifth, sixth and seventh grades. In lieu of dancing lessons, she headed for the library. The librarian was her best friend.