One Breath at a Time
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER, GERMANY
APRIL 2004
She woke up in pieces.
Not all at once—not the sudden, gasping return to consciousness that happened in movies—but in layers, one sense at a time, the way light came back after you’d been in the dark long enough that your eyes had forgotten what to do with it. Sound first: the low hum of machinery, a monitor’s steady rhythm, voices somewhere down a corridor speaking in the measured tones of people who had learned to be quiet around sleeping patients. Then smell: antiseptic, clean linen, the particular absence of dust and cordite and blood that told her, before anything else did, that she wasn’t in Fallujah anymore.
Then pain, which arrived not all at once but in a sequence—thigh, calf, forearm, shoulder, and then the hip, which wasn’t like the others, which was its own separate country of hurt that the others had been preparing her for without quite managing to.
She opened her eyes.
White ceiling. Fluorescent light, dimmed. An IV line running into her right arm. A monitor beside the bed tracking her pulse in green peaks that moved with a steadiness she found, after a moment, genuinely comforting—not because she’d doubted she had a pulse, exactly, but because seeing it confirmed felt like evidence of something.
She turned her head, slowly, and found her mother.
Lina Stoica was asleep in the chair beside the bed, still in what looked like traveling clothes—dark trousers, a gray blouse, her good coat folded across her lap—her head tipped against the wall at an angle that was going to hurt her neck when she woke up. She looked smaller than Gabriella remembered, or maybe the chair was large, or maybe it was just that Gabriella had never seen her mother asleep before in quite this way—unguarded, exhausted, the careful composure she maintained like a second skin completely absent, leaving only a sixty-one-year-old woman who had gotten on a plane to Germany the moment someone told her to.
Gabriella looked at her for a long time without saying anything.
She thought about waking her. Decided against it. Her mother had clearly needed the sleep, and there was nothing that couldn’t wait another hour, and Gabriella wasn’t sure yet what she would say—wasn’t sure her voice worked, wasn’t sure her mind was organized enough yet to navigate whatever conversation was coming, because whatever conversation was coming with Lina Stoica was going to be significant, and she wanted to be more awake for it than she currently was.
She looked at the ceiling instead, and took stock.
Both legs present—she could feel them, which was more than she’d been certain of during the hip shots, when the grinding structural wrongness had suggested possibilities she hadn’t let herself dwell on. Left arm present, splinted from elbow to wrist, immobile. Left hip—she didn’t try to move it, because the pain that had greeted her on waking had made the parameters of that very clear. Right hand working, which was the thing that mattered most, the thing she found herself flexing almost reflexively, the way you checked a tool you’d been depending on.
Broderick.
She didn’t know. That was the first coherent thought that assembled itself into something actionable—she didn’t know if Broderick had made it, didn’t know what the medevac had found when they got him onto the bird, didn’t know what the head wound had been hiding underneath all that blood that she’d been managing rather than diagnosing for sixteen hours.
She was still thinking about that when the door opened and a nurse came in—American, Army uniform, clipboard, the practiced efficiency of someone doing morning rounds.
“You’re awake.” Not a question, just an observation, delivered with a brief professional smile. “How’s the pain?”
“Manageable.” It wasn’t entirely true, but it was true enough. “The officer who came in with me. Lieutenant Broderick. Do you know his status?”
The nurse checked her clipboard. “He’s out of surgery. They took him up to the ICU yesterday—he’s been stable since this morning.”
“Brain injury?”
“I don’t have the details of his case. His attending can speak to that.” She was already checking the IV line, checking the monitor, the brisk movements of someone with fourteen other patients. “Your surgeon will be in around 0800. You’ve got a lot of hardware holding your hip together now—he’ll want to walk you through the repair.”
“What time is it?”
“Just past six.”
Two hours, then. Gabriella nodded, and the nurse made her notations and left, and the room went quiet again except for the monitor and her mother’s slow, even breathing.
She looked at Lina.
Her mother had come. Of course she had. She would have been on the first available flight the moment the notification came through—Gabriella knew that without question, knew it the way she knew her mother’s voice and her mother’s cooking and the particular set of her mother’s jaw when she had decided something and was not going to be argued out of it. Lina Stoica had buried a husband to this life. She was not going to bury a daughter to it as well without being present for every possible moment of the alternative.
That was love, Gabriella had come to understand. Not the absence of fear but the willingness to get on a plane anyway.
“Gabi.”
Her mother’s voice—soft, still half-asleep, Romanian vowels broader than usual the way they always were when Lina was tired or emotional or both. Gabriella turned her head and found her mother awake, upright, the good coat sliding off her lap unnoticed, her eyes fixed on Gabriella’s face with an expression that Gabriella had no word for in either language.
“Mama.”
Lina was out of the chair and beside the bed in a single motion, her hand finding Gabriella’s right hand, her other hand going to Gabriella’s face—not quite touching, hovering, the gesture of someone who wanted to hold on and was afraid of what she might disturb if she did.
“I’m okay,” Gabriella said.
“Don’t.” Lina’s voice was very quiet. “Don’t tell me you’re okay. I can see what you are.”
Gabriella didn’t say anything to that, because her mother wasn’t wrong, and because Lina Stoica had not raised a daughter who lied to her, not about things that mattered.
“The officer,” Lina said, after a moment. “The one you—they told me. What you did.” Her English was precise, careful, the English of someone who had learned it as an adult and never stopped treating it with respect. “He is alive?”
“He’s in the ICU. Stable, they said.”
Lina nodded, slowly, and her hand tightened around Gabriella’s. “Good. That’s good.” A pause. “And you? What did they tell you?”
“Surgery on the hip. Hardware. I haven’t talked to the surgeon yet.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.