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Seventy-one-year old Kerry Montgomery moved like a spritely teen from the breakroom. She burst down the hallway, her flats clacking across the linoleum. Far behind her, her youngest son, Andrew, limped forward and winced with every step.
Outside his father’s room, the doctor spoke to Kelli, Steven, Claire, Charlotte, Gail, and Abby with soft tones, his forehead shoved forward and his eyebrows lowered. Kerry didn’t hesitate to speak with the doctor. She rushed directly through the door, which remained flung open as Andrew neared it. With the door still open, first Steven, then Kelli, then Claire ambled in as well. Their voices rang out like a chorus.
“Dad! You’re awake!”
The nurse who remained in the room hissed at them. “I told you guys. Your father can’t handle all this at once. It’s too much stimulation—”
Kerry hustled to the other side of the bed and leaned down to gently lay a hand over his father’s still-broad shoulder as she whispered, “Darling, we’re all here for you. Take as much time as you need. We’ll postpone Christmas if we need to.”
Andrew remained several steps outside the door. He hadn’t yet seen his father’s face. Just the idea of the old man, there lying immobile in a hospital bed, was enough to chill him to the bone. He was reminded of being a little kid, of thinking his father was the strongest man in the universe. Now, they were both crippled, struck-down by the events of their lives.
And Andrew certainly didn’t have the strength to enter that room. He hadn’t prepared himself and nobody had alluded that the old man would choose his first day to open his eyes.
“Thank you for heeding the nurse’s warnings,” the doctor said to him, Gail and Abby, who remained even further back in the hall with wide worried eyes, like those of frightened deer. He also grumbled, “I don’t know how anyone expects us to run a tight ship around here when they don’t pay attention to the rules...” as he marched back within the white room to tell everyone to stand back. “There can be only one visitor in the room at a time! We will let you know when he’s strong enough to increase the count.”
A shaky voice rang out to the left of Andrew.
“Andy? Is that really you?”
Andrew forced his eyes from the bottom half of his father’s hospital bed and turned to find a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties. Her eyes were tender, soft, and her raven hair cascaded like a waterfall down her shoulders and toward her chest. She wore blue nurse’s scrubs and scuffed tennis shoes, and she looked at him as though he was some kind of gift.
It had been a long time since anyone had looked at Andrew like that.
It only took a split-second for Andrew to realize it was Beth Leopold, Kurt’s sister now standing in front of him. And in the moment of that realization, his heart burst into a million pieces.
“Beth,” he breathed.
The corners of her mouth turned upward; her eyes shone with humor and light. “I was worried you wouldn’t recognize me. It’s been so long. Seventeen years?”
He nodded. There was something about the swoop of her nose, the furrow of her eyebrows. She and Kurt had been only a year apart, Irish twins, and there were certainly similarities, so much so that Andrew could draw out a mental map of what Kurt might have looked like at age thirty-five if he had lived.
If only he had lived.
That moment, his siblings piled out of the hospital room. They were angry that they’d been kicked out of their father’s hospital room, yet thrilled to pieces that he’d awoken, especially when the prognosis had been so terrible only a few hours before.
“Nothing can beat that man,” Claire said excitedly as tears rolled down her cheeks. “He can take out a tree and wake up the next day like nothing happened.”
Steven smacked his chest with a hand that seemed oiled from his long day at the auto shop. His cheeks were blotched red, but his grin was infectious. He stepped closer to Gail and Abby and said, “He made a joke the second he saw me. He said, ‘So, Stevie, what’s for dinner?’ Can you believe that?”
Gail laughed nervously. Andrew’s eyes flashed from Kelli to Steven, then back to Beth. Neither he nor Beth knew what to say. Since his siblings had cleared away from his father, he caught full sight of the old man: the thick bandages around his face and head, and his broken arm.
At the hospital in Baghdad, that was all I ever saw. Broken people. People who would never walk again. People who’d given everything for their country. And for what?
“You all right, Andy?” Charlotte said as she stepped toward him. She wrapped an arm around his shoulder, but he’d already begun to shake.
Nothing could stop it: the PTSD attack.
The shaking pushed Andrew back toward the far wall. He placed his hands over his cheeks and blinked several times. He tried to will himself back to the world. Dad’s awake in there. He wants to see you. It’s been seventeen years. Seventeen years and enough time to forgive and forget. Pull it together. He doesn’t want to see his son all messed up from PTSD. He wants a confident, able son. Don’t limp. Don’t limp.
He lost track of everything. He couldn’t hear his siblings, couldn’t make sense of the white walls or the white linoleum floors. At some points, his mind told him he’d entered some kind of blisteringly light world, a kind of heaven, while at other times, the screeching in his ears told him he’d entered a kind of hell. Sweat pooled along his brow and at the base of his neck.
Maybe it would be better if I wasn’t here at all.
**
ANDREW CAME-TO IN AN unfamiliar vehicle. He blinked into the soft grey light of a beautiful Martha’s Vineyard winters late afternoon as snow fluttered down and landed little polka-dots across the windshield. In his hand, he held a water bottle that he didn’t recognize. His knees knocked together as he continued to shake.
“That’s right, Andy. Just keep breathing.” The voice was angelic, like a song.
“Where—where am I?”
“You’re in my car,” the voice told him. “Just outside the hospital.”
“Oh.”
Shame fell over him for a moment as he remembered his PTSD attack just outside his father’s hospital room.
“I probably freaked out my brother and sisters,” he whispered.
“Just a little. They’re worried about you. I got you out of there pretty fast,” the voice said.
Andrew took a long, cool drink of water and forced himself to turn his head. Somehow, his head felt like the heaviest rock in the world.
Beth Leopold smiled at him from the driver’s seat of a little beat-up car. She wore only her scrubs still, despite the chill, and her cheeks brightened to a shade of crimson that made her impossibly beautiful.
“You got me out of there,” Andrew said. His voice remained groggy. “Thank you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Beth replied.
“It all got a little overwhelming in there,” Andrew said. “I guess it’s been a pretty chaotic twenty-four hours.”
Beth clicked on the radio to an old station from the nineties and early two-thousands, a time period that sizzled with memories of their high school days.
“You have every right to be freaked out,” she told him. “Hospitals are emotional places. And I have a hunch you’ve seen your fair share. They must be a trigger for you.”
“I’ve had my share of hospitals, although I think it’s the fact it’s been seventeen years since I’ve been back,” Andrew whispered. “I don’t know why I thought this would be okay.”
Beth nodded. She reached for her purse slowly and searched through it until she found a package of Oreos, which she handed to him with a firm nod. “You should eat something. Family members of people in the hospital never remember to eat.”
“You keep a lot of spare snacks on you?” Andrew asked, trying to lighten the mood as he took the package.
“I have an eight-year-old,” Beth affirmed. “Eight-year-olds are constantly hungry.”
Andrew tore open the silver and blue packaging and placed a cookie between his teeth. As he bit down, Beth said, “I see you’ve become a monster.”
Andrew’s heart sank. First, she’d had this whole other life where she’d had a kid; next, she saw him for what he truly was these days? His eyes were hooded as he searched for what to say.
“I mean, I’ve never seen you eat an Oreo without taking it apart first,” she said. “You just bit down without rhyme or reason. You used to have a perfect technique.”
Andrew’s heart returned to its normal beating. He laughed, maybe a bit too loudly. “Should I be arrested?”
“I’m calling the police right now,” Beth said.
“Harsh but fair.”
Beth gave Andrew a brighter smile. “Do you mind if I drive around for a little while? I always find that helps me.”
“Helps with what?”
Beth pondered this for a long time. Her eyes grew distant.
“When Kurt died, I dealt with panic attacks for many years. My parents were distant; they couldn’t handle the sorrow. I just got in my car and drove and drove. On this island, there isn’t far to go, so I just did circles, fell into nooks and crannies. It’s like I tried to run away, but I always came back to the same place. Maybe that’s the definition of insanity.
“In any case, your family is worried about you, but they trust me to know what to do. The nurse’s scrubs give me some level of authority, I guess,” she continued. “I told them I would have you back when you were ready to come back. No sooner than that. Is that okay with you?”
Andrew’s eyes welled with tears. On the stereo, a Goo Goo Dolls song reminded him of long-ago summer nights, when all he had wanted to do was just sit with Beth Leopold in a car and drive till morning.