Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 21
The outprocessing took four days at Da Nang, then two more at a replacement depot in Okinawa, paperwork and medical checks and the strange limbo of a person who has technically left a war without yet having fully arrived anywhere else. Marisol filled the waiting with small, practical tasks — writing Betsy Whorton a letter she’d promised months earlier and kept postponing, cleaning the Winchester one final time before it was collected by a quiet man in civilian clothes who never gave her a receipt and never needed to, folding her uniforms with the same unhurried care she’d once given hospital linens in a Cedars-Sinai basement a lifetime ago.
Nobody at the depot asked her anything beyond the ordinary questions asked of any nurse rotating home. She answered all of them honestly, within the narrow bounds of what honesty was still allowed to include, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that the practice of it had become so thoroughly hers over the past year that she no longer felt the old flicker of guilt at the omissions. It was simply how her life worked now. It would, she suspected, keep working that way for the rest of it.
The flight home took the better part of two days, a series of connections that deposited her, finally, gray-eyed and stiff from sitting, onto American soil at a base outside San Francisco in the last week of May, 1968.
~ ☆ ~
Los Angeles greeted her the way it had greeted her seven years earlier, though this time the noise didn’t undo her the way it once had — the bus engines, the radios bleeding through open windows, the flat unbroken traffic hum that had once made her flinch like incoming fire. She noticed the sounds. She catalogued them, out of old habit, safe or not worth answering. None of them asked anything more of her than that.
Efraín was waiting at the depot when her bus pulled in, standing exactly where he’d stood the morning she left for Fort Sam Houston nearly two years earlier, though something in his posture had shifted in the time between — older, she thought, in a way that had nothing to do with his face and everything to do with the stillness of a man who had spent two years learning to live with not knowing.
He didn’t say anything when she stepped off the bus. He simply opened his arms, and she walked into them the way she had as a child after a long day on watch, and for a long moment neither of them spoke at all, the noise of the depot swirling around them while the two of them stood still inside it.
“You’re thinner,” he said finally, holding her back at arm’s length to look at her properly, the same assessing look he’d once given a stretch of wind before deciding what it would do to a shot.
“I ate. Mostly.”
“Mostly.” He studied her face a moment longer, and she understood, watching him, that he was reading her the way he’d once read the mountain — searching for what had changed in the terrain, what new weather had moved through since he’d last had eyes on it. Whatever he found, he didn’t say aloud. He only nodded once, the same nod he’d given her after a corrected wind call, an acknowledgment that something had shifted and would need time to be understood rather than explained all at once.
He picked up her duffel before she could stop him, the same instinct from the day she’d left, and this time she let him carry it without argument.
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