Chapter 10

Valerie cried when it was time for her to take her rental car back to the airport and leave. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was hug her. Us big strong Army types got used to tamping down the emotions at leave-taking, and for the first few months of a deployment. You couldn’t dwell on how much you missed the people back home or it would distract you. Distractions get you killed in a combat zone.

I told her I’d Skype more often and that seemed to help a little. Finally she wiped her eyes and got in the car. I went back into the barracks and tried to read, but that didn’t work. I went to the day room and shot some pool, which helped.

My running legs were supposed to get used at least three times a week. There was one other guy there with a bilateral BTK amputation, and he went out on the basketball court in his running legs. Somebody had glued pads to the bottom so they didn’t slip on the concrete. But he was about ready to go home, and he was a lot better at using them than I was. It was all I could manage to just stand up, moving with little steps, bouncing around. It really was like having stilts with springs on the bottoms. I didn’t have to be tethered to the ceiling anymore, though, and Vlad said I was getting better.

I had only had three days with Val, but we’d spent every waking (and sleeping) hour together. We hadn’t spent it all in bed. I had taken her around San Antonio, showing her the places Eve had showed me. We discovered a few more on our own. Walking didn’t make my stumps sore now, as long as I didn’t do it for hours at a time, so we went to some museums. We watched a movie and ate out a lot. Val was raking in the dough on her job. She’d already paid off half of her student loans. She’d found a university student to live with, which meant she split the rent. She was rarely there except during the hours of darkness, so she didn’t interfere with her roommate’s social life. She might be unhappy that she’d gained a few pounds, but it wasn’t because she was eating more. Her job kept her at a desk a lot of the time and she wasn’t getting as much exercise as she used to.

So when she left, I felt like each day was forty hours long, and I was more bored than ever. That’s why I ended up going out and actually running on my blades.

Wow. That’s all I can say. I had always thought of myself as a fair runner. I’d done okay in basic and then officer’s basic and then on unit runs, once I was commissioned. I wasn’t a speed demon, and I didn’t run circles around the formation, which the hard core guys actually did. For real. They’d grab the guidon and take off, circle the entire company formation and show back up at the front, grinning and breathing hard. Five minutes later they’d do it again. It was a big morale booster ... for them. The rest of us hated them, at least in basic, because the drill instructors said anybody who didn’t do that was a pansy.

Anyway, it took me maybe five hundred yards to get the feel of it, loping along, springing from one blade to the other. Then I paid attention to what was around me and realized this didn’t take nearly as much energy as pushing flesh and muscle forward, leaping off of one organic foot to land on the heel of the other. It was more like floating, and the first thing I thought of was watching old films of the guys who went to the moon. I felt like I looked like them. I didn’t, of course, but that’s what it felt like.

The only difficult part was that, in the past, I had jogged, rather than running. To run in blades, you were rolling your hips and throwing your thigh forward, and it was actually harder to do that slowly than it was to speed up. As ironic as it sounds, my mile run time improved by a full minute. They had a track with a rubber surface, and running on it was so easy I wanted to laugh.

So I ran a lot after that, so much so that I overdid it on my stumps and they got sore. I didn’t think anybody noticed, because I didn’t report it. I just stayed off of them for a few days. I was only going to physical therapy once a week, now.

It turns out that people who see a vet sit down, take off his blades and massage his stumps, and then put his blades back on (because he didn’t bring any other legs with him) and limp off, report that to other people.

Like my mother-in-law, who practically everybody now knew was my wife’s mother.

They didn’t spy for her. They just tattled to her.

So Vlad knew all about it when I went to PT later that week. Nurse O’Malley was there, too, with a doctor in tow.

The doctor took a look at me and then reported to the nurse, instead of the patient.

“He’ll be fine,” he said. “It probably only cost him a week.”

“Cost who a week?” I asked.

Nurse O’Malley deigned to look at me, a mild sneer on her face. It was the sneer she used on patients who had disappointed her.

“They were going to do a fitting for your next to last legs today,” she said. “Now they have to wait until the damage you caused repairs itself.”

“Nobody told me today was that day,” I yelped.

“Nobody should have to tell you,” she said. “You play by the rules and the rules work for you, Lieutenant.”

“All I did was go running. I’m supposed to go running!” I argued.

“Not five miles on blades you’ve only had for three weeks,” she said.

“I didn’t run five miles,” I snorted. Actually, I had no idea how long I’d run that day. I was in the zone, thinking about what I was going to do after the Army. I kept coming up with ideas for careers, and then deciding that artificial legs might make that harder than I wanted a career to be. I moved on to something else, and so on. It was only the pain in my stumps that made me stop, rather than deciding I’d run enough times around the track to make it a workout.

“You did according to Sergeant Timmons,” I said.

Marcie Timmons was a dog handler in Afghanistan. Her dog sniffed out a command detonated bomb and the bomber set it off. She lost her dog and one leg four inches below her money-maker. Her words, not mine. She got to BAMC after me and part of my rehab was to help her with her rehab. She didn’t move off the ward until a month after I did, and she was in a different dorm, so we didn’t see each other all that much. Apparently she was out walking and saw me on my blades and stopped to watch. She knew Eve was my mother-in-law, too. When it became obvious I was in pain, she felt like there was nothing much she could do for me except make sure somebody knew the “dumb officer” was abusing his body.

It sounds like she didn’t care, but that’s not true at all. The military is all about tough love.

I got an angry call from my wife that night. Sergeant Timmons had ratted me out to Nurse O’Malley, and Nurse O’Malley ratted me out to her daughter.

“You delayed things a whole week?“ wailed my wife. “I’m dying up here, so lonely I want to scream, and you cost us another week apart?”

“It might not be a whole week,” I said. “The doctor said I’d be fine and that it might only put things back a week.”

“That’s not what my mother told me,” she said.

I was not used to Valerie being upset with me. She’d been very level-headed about everything in our lives thus far. She understood that the Army was our ticket to a better future. She didn’t like it, but she understood the need. And she knew that the injury I suffered wasn’t my fault. You pays your nickel and you takes your chances. Sure, she’d yelled at me before, about this or that, but not like she was yelling at me this time.

“I’ll work extra hard to heal,” I offered. It sounded better in my head than it did out there in actual spoken words.

“Then why haven’t you already worked extra hard to heal?“ she shouted.

“I’m sorry!” I yelled back. “I was running, and thinking about us, and I lost track of what I was doing. I won’t do it again!”

Now that was only partly true. I was running, and I did think about Val during part of that run, but I didn’t lose myself in reflections on my lovely wife, like it sort of sounded, when I said it. And the “I won’t do it again,” part could be construed to mean I didn’t plan on thinking about her to distraction anymore. Of course that’s not what I meant at all. All I was trying to do was get her off my back.

There was this long silence, and then a click.

Valerie had never hung up on me before.

I admit, I panicked a little bit.

I called her back, and it went to voice mail. Twenty minutes later there was a knock at my door. For just a fraction of a second I imagined Val was there, still angry, and wanting to face me about it. Of course that was ridiculous. Depending on how you look at it ... it was worse.

It was her mother.

As soon as I opened the door she held up both hands to stop me from talking and said, “I didn’t mean to get you in that much trouble. I’m sorry.”

“She hung up on me!” I yelped.

“I know. She told me. She feels awful about that.”

“Then why didn’t she answer when I called her back?”

“She has her pride,” said Eve, as if that made any sense at all.

“So she called you instead.”

“Yes. She asked me to come talk to you.”

“That seems way more complicated than just answering the phone,” I said.

“She asked me for a favor. I thought you and I should talk about it first, before I agreed.”

“What favor?”

“She asked if I’d arrange for you to move out of the dorm, and in with me, until you get your final legs.”

Eve had delivered the news as if it were no more than an update on my condition, but I knew she was perturbed. I knew this because she went to my fridge, opened it, saw my illicit and forbidden bottle of whisky in it, and merely opened it, taking a slug. Then she put it back and slumped down in the only chair in the room. She looked dejected.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” I asked, like an idiot.

“Of course not,” she said. “Are you an idiot?”

“So ... what did you tell her?”

Finally she looked at me.

“I told her I’d do it, of course. She’s my daughter.”

“Does she know what’s going to happen if we ... um ... live together?”

“Of course she does. Would you stop asking stupid questions?”

“I don’t get it. All I did was overstress my stumps a little bit. I know she’s mad at me, but making me move in with you ... I just don’t understand why she’d want that.”

Eve glared at me.

“Apparently, you were a wonderful lover when she was here, last.”

“Yes. I tried. I wanted to show her I still loved her, and that what you and I did didn’t mean anything.”

“Lieutenant,” she said, her voice frosty in the extreme. “You are a fucking moron.”

“What?” I yelled. “Why?”

“Because it did mean something! It meant something to me! And I told Valerie about that, hoping she’d understand how idiotic it was of her to push us together.”

I could see the pain in her eyes. I had said it meant nothing. I was just one more man who didn’t respect her ... who had used her ... who didn’t care about her.

I happened to have my legs on, so I got up and went to her. I wanted to kneel, but I hadn’t worked on doing that, and it’s really hard to put one knee on the ground when the other leg isn’t bending.

So I sat on her lap.

I know. It’s goofy. It might have been laughable if she hadn’t been on the verge of crying. She tried to push me off, but I had an arm around her neck and wouldn’t let her.

“I’m sorry!” I said, trying not to yell.

I leaned to kiss the side of her head, up high. She tried to dodge it and her hands pushed at my body.

“Get off me, you oaf!” she yelped.

“No. Not until you let me apologize.”

“You already did. Now get off.”

“Eve,” I said. “Look at me.”

“No.”

“Please.”

It must have seemed like the most ridiculous scenario she’d ever been in, but eventually she glanced up at me.

“I didn’t want to say it meant something to me, too. I couldn’t tell her that. I don’t care how much she thinks this is good for us, I couldn’t tell her that it made me feel like a real man again. I had already been with her, and it went okay, but not great. I couldn’t tell her I loved being in bed with her mother.”

“Why did you say that to me?” she asked. She was no longer pushing at me. One of her hands was lying on my hip, in fact, just draped there.

“I didn’t mean to say that you meant nothing to me. Why do you think I keep resisting her getting us together? I like it too much. I like you too much. You’re not supposed to fall in love with more than one woman. It’s just a rule.”

“You’re not in love with me,” she said.