Purple Hearts Page 15

  And if you didn’t know, you shut the fuck up and listened until you did.

  The person in the chair shifted, sighing through his nose.

  Apologies didn’t happen, either. You broke something, you didn’t weep and say sorry, you fixed it or figured out how to replace it. If you couldn’t replace it, like I couldn’t replace the goddess figurine he’d brought home for my mother from Vietnam after I’d knocked it over practicing karate, you fucked off for a while.

  Forgiveness came in the form of “Rangers are playing,” or an impromptu lesson in how to take out an intruder with a crowbar if he wasn’t home: You run into a room and wait next to the door, and when the intruder opens it, you smack him in the balls. He let Jake and me practice on him with pillows. Probably one of the five times in my life I’d seen him laugh.

  He never laid a hand on Jake or me. He signed our permission slips. He went to our football games, our parent-teacher conferences, dropped us off at birthday parties.

  Maybe it was time.

  Maybe I could tell him that I had fixed it, that I was sober now, that I had opted out of the stronger drugs for tramadol, even when the doctors said I could risk my spine “winding up” from too many pain signals.

  Maybe him sitting here was the equivalent of him forgiving me after a few days, opening a Lone Star, turning on the TV, telling me to turn up the volume so he could hear the announcers.

  Dad, I’d say, keeping it simple. Taking it slow. How ya been?

  I opened my eyes and choked on a gasp, wishing I’d kept them closed.

  Johnno turned, snapping his chin. A tobacco-stained smile grew. “Morrow! Morning, dude.”

  Fuck.

  He stood, his windbreaker swishing, the smell of secondhand smoke washing over me. My heartbeat rose to my ears. “Welcome home, soldier. Happy New Year. They did an article about you in the Buda Times. I wiped my ass with it.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked, my tongue still slurring with sleep.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Why do you think? To get paid.”

  I wished I had enough spit in my mouth to gather and hurl at him. After the initial shock, I had no more fear left. “I paid you. I had my bank pay you.”

  “You paid me half.”

  “We said the other half in nine months.”

  “We said the other half when you get back.”

  “I won’t have it until I get severance. That will be months from now.”

  “Fuck that.”

  I pointed to my leg. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You got money, I know you do. You figured it out before. I don’t know what you did, but do it again.”

  I reached for him, just barely missing his jacket. He stepped back, laughing.

  Then Johnno looked behind him at the open door, strode to it, and calmly pushed it shut.

  “If you fucking try anything, I swear to God—” I started, my teeth clenched.

  But my reflexes were slow. With one hand, he moved the call button out of reach, and with the other, he pressed on my leg. Softly at first, then harder, until the stabbing pain blotted out every other sensation. I tried to reach for him again, but he had moved to the end of the bed, hands moving up my shin.

  “You’re going to pay me half of the rest in a month, and half the month after.”

  “Agh!” I cried out, feeling tears come to my eyes.

  Johnno let up for a second, looking behind him. The door didn’t budge. He pressed again, harder. Slicing, burning, not sure if my eyes were open anymore, red, white, red, white.

  He let go. Water rushed over my nerves. Eyesight returned. Johnno had pulled the newspaper out of his jacket, squinting at it, still standing over me like Death.

  “ ‘Wounded fighting at the Pakistan border with the Thirty-fourth Red Horse Infantry Division,’ ” he read aloud. “ ‘Morrow will be awarded the Purple Heart for his sacrifice to the United States Armed Forces.’ ” He stopped, breaking into a cheesy, yellow smile. “Congratulations, Private Morrow!”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I said, still reeling from pain.

  “You know what else this article said, though? Said you got a wife. Little Boricua situation? Thinking I might need to look her up.”

  I didn’t have the energy to respond. I just closed my eyes, hoping he’d go away, like a bad dream. When I opened them again, he was gone, but metal spikes were still grinding into my leg, relentless. The ache and the stabbing combined.

  He was right, I guessed. I would get a Purple Heart. To be forever reminded of that moment at the jeep, of pulling Frankie’s body toward mine, leaving a trail of blood in the road. The third pain, always there, always hooking me back.

  Tara arrived in bright pink scrubs, her bangs freshly permed, strapping on her latex gloves and starting a story about the officer down the hall.

  “Hey, Tara?” I asked, swallowing, trying to block out the semicircle of faces I’d seen at my last Narcotics Anonymous meeting at Austin Universalist, smiling at me with bright eyes. Telling me to stay strong.

  “What is it, hon?” she said, bending my good leg.

  “Tramadol isn’t working. I’d like to up my medication.”

  Cassie

  George and Louise Cucciolo held Frankie’s memorial service under the hundred-foot-tall arches of St. Mary’s Cathedral, dwarfing the fifty or so of us who were invited. Luke could stand with the help of a few nurses, but he could barely put any weight on the leg, and the cathedral’s only wheelchair-accessible entrance was through a back door, up a noisy wooden ramp. I’d picked him up in San Antonio this morning, and we drove here in silence. It was like neither one of us knew what to say now. I hadn’t really imagined what it would be like when he came home. I certainly hadn’t imagined it like this.

  As we rattled through the door, we realized that the ramp led not to the back of the church, where everyone was entering, but to the area behind the pulpit. We had wheeled right into the middle of an operatic rendition of “Ave Maria.” We had to steer around the casket and a blown-up photo of Frankie as the tear-stained eyes of the attendees followed us in confusion. He would have found the whole thing hilarious, probably.

  • • •

  Once we were back in the van, Luke took off the leg brace he had to wear for certain time intervals throughout the day and asked me to hand him the bottle of painkillers. His second dose, at least since I’d been with him.

  “Are you sure you should take two this close together?”

  “It says ‘as needed,’ doesn’t it?” Luke replied.

  “I guess.” I checked the bottle.

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Trying to numb the pain?” I joked weakly.

  “Of my leg, yeah,” Luke said, his eyes out the window.

  “K,” I said. We’d joked in other serious moments. It was kind of one of the only ways we could communicate. But he’d ignored it.

  “But seriously,” I started. “Are you okay?”

  Part of why I asked was to make sense of my own feelings.

  Frankie was the one who brought us together, after all. I wanted to talk to the only other person who knew how it felt to lose him in the same way I did. I wanted to know that there was still a common goal, even if our link was gone.

  I looked at Luke. He was resting his chin on his hand, eyes drifting.

  “Luke?” I said.

  “Hm?” He blinked a few times. “Oh. It was sad.”

  It was sad? “Is that it?” I asked.

  Luke’s face transformed in an instant to anger. Angrier than I’d ever seen him. “What, you want me to cry? I can’t just turn it on and off. That’s not how grief works.”

  “I know. But Frankie was my friend, too. I mean—I can relate. Believe me.”

  He looked back out the window. “No, you can’t. You weren’t there.”

  That one got me in the gut. Of course I wasn’t there. But I had been there in spirit, listening to him, writing to him. Bearing witness. If no
t being a true wife, then something like a friend.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but stopped. This was bigger than this moment. I understood. He could stew. He could hurt. He could be angry at me now, even though I was trying to help. But not forever.

  After the procession wove through Austin, Frankie was buried in Texas State Cemetery under a dull January sun. Beside me, Luke had remained hard-jawed in his dress blues. When the officers fired ceremonial shots, he twitched in his wheelchair.

  Elena had tossed a turquoise necklace into the grave, one Frankie had given her before he left. Louise, a license plate that spelled FRNKIE and three white roses. George had dropped in a stack of Marvel comics. The three of them held one another and wept.

  Christmas had been last week. I thought about standing up to speak with a few of his other friends, telling one of the many stories we’d shared as kids, but none of them was self-contained—if I was going to tell the story of the Barbie car, then I had to start with the Christmas of 1995 to give context, and if I told about Christmas of 1995, I’d have to compare it to the previous Christmas, the one where my mom caught us dressing in his parents’ clothes.

  The nurse who had driven us to the funeral waited in the van, hooking and unhooking Luke in and out like a kid to a car seat, popping handfuls of Corn Nuts. I thought I saw him crack a smile as I struggled to push Luke’s chair through the grass of the cemetery.

  “Bastard,” I’d muttered.

  Luke either hadn’t heard or pretended not to hear.

  Two hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Yarvis greeted us at the entrance to Brooke Army Medical Center, giving a cold nod to the nurse as he lowered Luke’s platform to the ground. “That guy’s a bastard,” Yarvis said as soon as we were rolling back to Luke’s room, out of earshot.

  I decided I liked him.

  “So,” Yarvis said, wheezing a bit as he settled across from us. “How long have you been married?”

  “Four months,” I said.

  “Five months,” Luke said at the same time.

  “We got married in the middle of August,” I said, grabbing Luke’s hand, burying my nails into it. That seemed to wake Luke up. That’s better, you jerk. I’m sad, too, but we have a job to do. He cleared his throat.

  Yarvis looked from me to Luke, back to me. “Well, I can’t imagine the separation was easy. I know my wife and I couldn’t stand to be apart in our first year, and it’s clear that Cassie being able to visit you has helped a lot.”

  “I come when I can,” I said, hoping he’d change the subject soon. The truth was I’d been there only a handful of times. An hour and forty-five minutes was a long drive, and when I did visit, we sat in silence while Luke watched the Dallas Mavericks on TV and I worked on mixing songs on GarageBand.

  Luke and I tried to smile at each other. It looked more like we had gotten headaches at the same time.

  Yarvis stared at his clipboard. “You’ve made significant progress, Private Morrow, and the doctors say you’re ready to go home.”

  We were quiet.

  Home. Okay. It took a while for what exactly that meant to set in. Luke didn’t have a place, so “home” meant my home. What else could it mean? We were married. That was why people got married. Not to deceive the U.S. government into giving them money. Most people got married because they liked each other enough to share a home.

  The silence stretched on until Luke cleared his throat. “Wow, we’re obviously speechless, here.”

  “Yay!” I followed, lifting our clasped hands in a pathetic cheer.

  “I’ll be checking in on you every week or so,” Yarvis said, “and of course you should be doing your physical therapy, but for now, you get to make like a tree.”

  “Great!” Luke offered.

  “It’ll still take a couple of days before we discharge you,” he said. “We’ll discuss your situation first, give you a chance to transition.”

  “Got it,” Luke said, though his eyes looked glazed.

  “I’ll leave ya to it and let the doctor know.”

  When Yarvis had shut the door, Luke let go of my hand, putting his own to his forehead. “Shit,” he said.

  My stomach was churning. “Yeah.”

  “I could stay at my brother’s,” he suggested, but I shook my head. Both of us knew that would look too weird, unless I were to stay with him, and of course I couldn’t. I had to work in Austin.

  “Plus not a good idea to live near your dad, considering he’s a former army police officer. When were you going to tell me that?”

  I had overheard his father and Yarvis talking about Vietnam one day. Yarvis had asked what his dad’s role was. The CID were the very people who busted illegal activity within the military. Rights violations, protocol violations, you know, stuff like fake fucking marriages.

  “I honestly forgot,” he said, shrugging.

  I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “What are we going to do?”

  Luke put a fist to his palm. “We wait for my leg to heal, then I get an honorable discharge, then we make a plan to go our separate ways. We can get through this.”

  For a minute, he felt more present. It felt like we were on the same planet. The same hostile, hurtling-through-space-toward-a-black-hole planet.

  Then I remembered Toby. Sweet Toby, who spent hours in my apartment, taking baths, cooking bland spaghetti, and going through a serious early-nineties hip-hop phase.

  “What?” Luke said, studying my face.

  “So, while you were gone, I kind of started seeing someone.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “You have a boyfriend?”

  “What are you, jealous?” I asked, instinctively. But for a second our last night together flashed in front of me. I felt my cheeks burn.

  He didn’t respond, so I tried to make light of it, pushing him on the arm. The muscles there were rock hard.

  He looked at the spot where my hand had been, and rolled his eyes. “No, I’m not jealous, but people see you have a boyfriend, then they see you have a husband, they start asking questions.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I swallowed. “But it’s not like you and I are going to be out in the same places I’m out with Toby.”

  “Toby?” Luke asked. “That sounds like a dog’s name.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  He cleared his throat, sitting back. “So you guys are pretty serious.”

  Yeah! I was about to say, but it sounded off. Like I was forcing it.

  I went with, “Serious enough that I don’t want to break up with him because I’ve got a fake husband in my bed.”

  Luke held up his hands. “Uh, I’ll sleep on the couch, thanks.”

  I blushed. “No, I meant you can take the bed. With your leg and all.”

  “We’ll flip for it.”

  We flipped. Luke lost. I felt bad for a minute, then I remembered him comparing Toby to a dog. We sat, saying nothing, probably thinking about the same thing. Sharing a bathroom. Sharing a life. It would be different. This was real. This was sharing oxygen, and resources, and time I usually spent on my band, on my real boyfriend. And whatever it was that Luke would do all day. I didn’t know if I could handle it. If Luke kept acting like he did today, like he was someone I’d never even met, I definitely couldn’t.

  Luke broke the quiet. “Are you going to tell him?”

  Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Maybe when the time is right. We’ll just have to avoid my apartment for a while.”

  “Damn, Cassie,” Luke said, reaching for his pills, his lips lifting into a half-smile. “What the hell are you going to say?”

  Luke

  The morning of my release, I sat with Cassie in the fluorescent cafeteria behind weak cups of coffee. We held each other’s sweaty hands, gazing at a quietly wheezing Yarvis, my surgeon, Dr. Rosen, and Fern, a young woman from the Quality of Life Foundation with glasses and black dreadlocks wrapped into a bun.

  I had taken OxyContin this morning, and was resisting taking another one
, though my leg was sore down to the bone from physical therapy and the doctor palpating it to check my progress. I wanted to be able to listen, to be present. The surgeon’s jargon was making that hard, words like distal third tibia and fibula and fractured patella washing over me in a dull blur.

  “Since we were able to fuse the patella, we’ll just be looking to avoid nerve damage, atrophy in the quad muscle, and possibly cartilage fusing your knee in a straight position. But you’ve been progressing pretty well with flexibility, it looks like, so that doesn’t seem to be too much of a risk.”

  That last part I understood. Yarvis muttered, “Atta kid.”

  “Now that your patella has begun to heal, we’ll move on from the static quadriceps exercises you’ve been doing to knee flexion. The idea is to get you partially weight bearing with support, then gradually weight bearing once we see little periosteal callus on the twelve-week serial X-ray.”

  “Per— callus?” I asked, wishing I had paid better attention when they showed me the X-rays the first time.

  “A mass of tissue that forms at a fracture site to establish continuity between the bone ends. So, basically, the mushy glue holding your bones together. We want it to start disappearing as your bones heal.”

  “So when that disappears, I get out of the wheelchair?”

  “It depends.” Everything depended. “We want you to be up now, but not fully weight bearing. We’ll do a slower incremental increase in weight, bearing twenty-five percent, fifty percent, seventy-five percent, one hundred percent with a cane, then complete free bearing.”

  A cane? Like an old man. At least I could move around on my own then. “So how long is that total?”

  “We’re thinking twelve weeks initially, especially considering it’s not just the tibia and fibula but kneecap as well, and you came in right after Thanksgiving? Now we’re in week, what, six? Probably another eight for physio, just to be safe. Keep in mind if you are diabetic or if you smoke, you may be slower to heal, but . . .” He glanced at my chart. “It doesn’t look like that will be a factor, right?”