She heard Tami’s voice, her throaty laugh … or was that the wind through the cedar boughs?
Seth welcomed them into the house; he looked as dazed and shaky as Jolene felt. She saw the envelope sticking out of his pocket. It was a reminder of her own last letter from Tami, which lay hidden in a drawer in her nightstand, still unopened. He wore his mother’s dog tags around his neck.
“Stay with your mom,” Michael said to Betsy. He and Mila worked their way through the crowd, taking the food to the table.
“Lucky me,” Betsy muttered under her breath.
Jolene barely heard. She remained by the door. She heard talking, even laughing, but it made no sense to her. Tami should be here. It was her house …
The narrow manufactured home was too full of people; food covered every surface in the kitchen and dining room. Most of their Guard unit was here. Oh, God, there were Smitty’s parents, their faces different now, lined by the kind of grief that constricted blood flow and tightened skin. What would she say to them? What would they say to her?
An easel in the center of the room held a poster-sized picture of Tami in her ACUs, smiling brightly for the camera, waving to the folks back home. Jolene had taken that picture only a few weeks before the crash … Give me your real smile, Tam, come on …
She closed her eyes, trying not to remember. Count to ten. Breathe. She needed to go talk to Smitty’s parents, to tell them how sorry she was for their loss and how brave their son had been. He didn’t suffer. Was that what they would want to hear? Or that he’d been courageous or funny or thoughtful?
Behind her, a door slammed shut. Bam! Jolene screamed. In an instant, she was in Balad again, and the base was under attack, and a rocket whizzed by her head. She reached for Tami, told her to take cover, and threw herself to the ground.
She hit so hard it knocked the breath from her lungs, made her dizzy.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a pale white patch of linoleum and a sea of feet. Not boots … not sand. Nothing smelled like smoke or mortar fire.
Feeling sick with shame, Jolene realized that she was on the floor of Tami’s house.
Her family and friends—and the soldiers from her unit—stood around her, beers in their hands, smiles faded, peering down at her with concern. They were talking. Was it to her or themselves? She couldn’t tell; their voices were a chain-saw buzz of sound. Michael was in the kitchen, standing beside Carl. A song—“Crazy for You”—blared through old speakers in a distant room.
“Oh, my GOD,” Betsy yelled, distancing herself from Jolene. “What’s WRONG with you?”
Jolene saw how mortified her daughter was. “I’m sorry, Betsy,” she whispered, crawling slowly to a stand. She was shaking now; she couldn’t breathe. She hated the pity she saw in the eyes around her.
She knew she should say something, make some pathetic excuse, but what was there? She could see by the way her friends were looking at her that they knew, all of them; they knew she was damaged now, broken. Crazy.
She limped for the front door, pushing through it, going out into the night.
“Jolene, wait,” she heard Michael yell from inside the house.
She slammed the door shut behind her and kept going, limping down the gravel driveway and across the grass field that separated their properties.
She was almost home when Michael caught up with her. He took her by the arm, tried to stop her.
She pushed him away. “Leave me alone. ”
“Jolene—”
“Don’t say anything,” she hissed. She was losing herself as she stood here, falling apart by degree. “Leave me alone. ”
“Jolene,” he said. “Let me help you. ”
She pushed past him and went into the house, then limped into her bedroom. She turned to slam the door shut and stepped wrong, came down hard on her blisters, and a rage exploded inside of her, made her shake it was so powerful. Suddenly she wanted the prosthesis off—off—she couldn’t stand looking at it. She leaned against the dresser and took it off, screaming as she threw it across the room. The ugly plastic leg hit a vase Mila had given them last Christmas, and the pretty blue and white Chinese porcelain cracked into pieces.
She started to laugh even though it wasn’t funny, was the opposite of funny, but she kept laughing. Look, Tam—no leg!
She wanted to sink to her knees, but she couldn’t do it. One of the many things she couldn’t do anymore. It took everything she had just to stand here, storklike, swaying.
She laughed harder at that. Then she realized she had to go to the bathroom and she’d thrown her leg and the wheelchair wasn’t here and her crutches were in the mudroom.
Cursing, she hopped awkwardly forward, balancing on the furniture. In the bathroom, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and looked away. Her hands were shaking as she unbuttoned her jeans and shoved them down to her ankles. She realized too late that she wasn’t close enough to the toilet.
“Damn it. ”