Away from the SICU, there was limited space for privacy. The fifth floor was ringed with wards around the building, two to each side. Inside that were the nurses’ stations and waiting rooms; behind that layer, in the innermost part of the floor, were closed-door offices Ellen was never invited into. Supply closets, equipment rooms, and janitor services were tucked into each hallway’s corner. Luckily Ward 57, the amputee ward, where Michael had been moved yesterday into one half of a double room, was next to an interior courtyard called the Healing Garden. Ellen had only noticed it in passing, in the business of Michael getting settled into this new space, and she was surprised when Dr. Grant suggested they go in there to talk over what he needed to explain to her.
“Pretend we’re actually outside,” he said, in apology. The young doctor, Ellen’s favorite so far on Michael’s team, dragged a metal chair over with an echoing scrape and held the back while she sat. Milky light from the ceiling’s plastic skylight panes fell down over the two of them, tucked in a corner of the stone-paved garden between two giant potted ferns. He held a folder on one knee—the business at hand—but didn’t open it yet.
“I’m sure you have questions. I’ll answer everything I can about the process for his leg, and then we’ll make sure Neuro gets back to you on anything related to the TBI.”
Ellen straightened and opened her own notebook. She might be new, but she understood how rare this one-on-one moment was with the head of a surgical team. “One of the other doctors was telling me Michael needs another cleaning-out surgery?”
“Debridement, we call it. Yes. There are bits of foreign matter, dirt, and shrapnel still in Michael’s tissues and we go in to clean it out, essentially. It’s how we stay on top of any infection that might arise, but then again we don’t want to cut too much or damage the remaining tissue any more than we have to at one time, so we go in periodically, not all at once. He’s had three of these, and will need maybe, I’m thinking, two more, unless … Well, that’s what we can discuss.” Dr. Grant tapped his folder. He was in his middle thirties, Ellen guessed, with a boyish flip of hair that reminded her of Wes.
“An infection that starts in the, in the stump”—that word—“is dangerous because…”
“Even if infection originates there, it could spread rapidly—inflammation, fever, pus—up the rest of his leg, threatening major arteries in the thigh. And of course then there is the fear of other body systems becoming compromised, when they’re already overstressed from the trauma. Neural, muscular, or cardio.”
“But he’s on antibiotics, just in case.” Since the fury and trauma of his coming out of the coma, Michael had been in a twilight state for the past day and a half. He would flutter his eyes open, and could take sips of fluid. He made gestures and guttural sounds, but no words. Mostly, he slept, flushed and quivering.
“Yes. And debriding the wound site does let us get inside the damaged area to be extra sure nothing has started to devolve.”
“But you don’t think that’s enough. In the long term.”
Dr. Grant smiled at her. “No, I don’t. My opinion at this point is that we need to amputate farther up his leg. I’m sorry. I know that’s not easy to hear.”
Ellen was struggling under the kindness of his gaze; she almost couldn’t work through the meaning of the words because of how self-conscious she was about her horror. “But—cut off more of his leg? Isn’t that—isn’t that the opposite of what we want?” Stupid, irrelevant, but exactly what came to mind.
“I know. But there are—”
“You said his injury was a good one! Because it was so far down, and that having his knee still would mean he’d have—”
“I don’t believe I ever—”
“Well, someone did.” Ellen tried to rein in her voice, bouncing off the cold stones of the Healing Garden.
Dr. Grant took a deep breath. “I wanted to save his knee, yes.” Past tense. “Transtibial prostheses give a much more normal movement than an above-the-knee amputation. But here’s what I wanted to show you.” He took a sheet of paper out and put it on top of the folder. A diagram of a leg in profile, unmarked. Dr. Grant moved his chair closer to Ellen’s so she could see; with his blue-inked pen, he drew a line across the diagram, a few inches up from the ankle. “This is where Michael is now. But because of the way his injury occurred, the impact from the explosion went upward, like this—” Sharp lines pushed up, the pen making a scritch noise against the paper. “And the force drove against the front of his knee, which caused it to degrade.”
“This prefix,” Ellen said, studying the sheet, “is starting to wear on me. Debride, devolve, degrade…”
“So while Michael technically retained his knee, the MRIs show bad damage to its structural integrity.”
“Won’t it heal? Eventually?”
“Maybe, over a long period of time, with rehab, and luck. But what might happen, what I think is more likely, is the combined pressure of supporting his body weight on a prosthesis, on a damaged knee, would hamper his walking and standing to a point where … well, where he might have trouble walking much at all.”
Ellen looked away. In the middle of the Healing Garden was a rectangular pond. A young woman with a baby strapped to her chest squatted low to the pool, pointing into it. The baby kicked its feet against her body and sucked on the fabric sling.
“If we do a transfemoral amputation, we’ll know what we’re dealing with. We won’t have to worry about remaining shrapnel causing infection, or how bad his knee might be. He’ll be fitted for a C-leg as soon as he’s recovered.”
“How much?” The baby let out a shout of delight; there must be fish in the pool. “How much would you have to take off?”
“About nine inches. Up to here.” The blue pen—swish—made a swift and inexorable mark across the diagram.
“But that’s—” She couldn’t say it out loud: Michael wasn’t supposed to lose his leg! Just his foot. That’s what had happened over there. And you’d barely notice if someone was missing a foot. But this—that firm blue line sliced above the joint of the knee, forsaking every bit of leg below it, the way it made even the anonymous diagram look wrong and off balance—this was something else! Another person’s body, not Michael’s.
“Maybe a little less, depending on what we find when we go in. I have several fact sheets prepared for you—here—so that when we meet tomorrow, post-op, I’ll need your decision.”
Ellen was startled by Dr. Grant’s handing her the file, his beginning to rise. “But we need to talk it over with him! We have to wait until he understands, until he’s awake enough—”
Dr. Grant was shaking his head. “I’ve consulted with Neuro; he won’t be clearheaded by the time we’d have to move on this. Legally, it’s your call. But as you’ll see in there, I don’t think the decision should be a hard one. This is the right thing for Michael.”
The young mother walked her baby around the pool, singing softly. Ellen stared at the pavement stones underneath Dr. Grant’s empty chair. It’s your call. Because of a twenty-minute appointment in County Court four years ago. Because she signed a document promising to make good decisions on his behalf. “But that was supposed to be for school,” she said, not realizing until the words echoed that she had spoken aloud. Dr. Grant’s diagram of the bisected leg quivered in her hand. She didn’t sign up for this.
* * *
“I’d do it,” Lacey said, eating another French fry from Ellen’s plate. “If the choice is between having a knee and a lifetime of pain versus no knee and no pain—”
“It’s not exactly that simple,” Ellen said. She picked up another section of turkey club and stared at it.
Lacey shrugged. “If it’s just the idea of adding another surgery—I mean, you know he’ll be having dozens, right? Not to mention what he’s already had. Colostomy, skin grafts…”
“What I want to know is why they can’t go in to put pins in the knee—stabilize it somehow, rather than just—” Ellen put down the sandwich, although she knew she had to eat something. Rather than just cutting it off.
They were on the ground floor of her new home for now, Mologne House, where Lacey had helped to bring up her bags and then offered to show her around.
It was the strangest hotel in existence. In the lobby was a bar, decorated in dark woods with a red-and-green Oriental print on floors and furniture. The walls were cream, paneled, filled with muted paintings of fruit and birds. A bit shabby, a bit old-fashioned; if you glanced quickly you might mistake it for a business traveler’s midrange staple. But on the love seat nearby, on his phone, was a man with his jeans leg pinned up over a thigh stump; his pretty girlfriend held his crutches between her legs and listened in to the call. Portable oxygen tanks took up room under a table. Men with metal prosthetic arms, bandaged heads, colostomy bags tucked discreetly under sweatshirts, milled around the bar area, waiting for family members, talking with friends. Orange crepe-paper pumpkins and black pipe-cleaner spiders spun slowly, hung from fishing line. Older men in uniforms strode through with purpose, and women in dark pantsuits adorned with badges spoke clearly, helping, managing. A pleasant-faced Asian woman sat behind a grand piano and played “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
These women, Ellen thought. The wives, the mothers. She took a bite of turkey club and scanned the room. How were they so at ease here? Waving, calling out with delight when they spotted someone familiar. At the table behind Lacey, there was a woman with a beautiful chignon wearing an oversize gray hooded sweatshirt with raised puffy letters that read: AMERICA’S HEROES CANDLE WALK 2004. Red, white, and blue, of course. She was speaking rapidly, heatedly, about something—Ellen couldn’t catch the words—to another woman at the table; occasionally they would break out into matching peals of laughter. Every so often the woman in chignon and sweatshirt would reach over to break off a small piece of pizza for her son, immobilized from neck to waist in a plastic corset, tipped back in his full-body wheelchair. It had to be a show, how stagy and loud and comfortable she was. A show put on just for me, Ellen couldn’t help thinking. She shuddered; she would never become that. For a moment, she felt a pang for the Marriott, which had been an escape from Walter Reed, she saw now.
Lacey debated whether a third rum and Coke was going to freak Ellen out. When it was what, 3:00 p.m.? She shouldn’t have had this second one. Stopping after one drink was a thousand times easier than reining it in after two. Two meant the gates were open, and she was less satisfied than before she’d had the first sip.
“Everyone else seems to think it’s the right thing to do—my friend Serena, my son, even my, well, Paul—my friend,” Ellen said. “I called them all, and it’s unanimous.” Only she hadn’t called everyone. Because how could Jane see outside her own entanglements with Mike, whatever they might be, to be helpful in this? Impossible.
“Anyway, I just wish it didn’t have to be me, making this decision. Alone, I mean. I wish he—”
“Because you’re his guardian, you mean? Not the mom?” Uh-oh. Ellen’s quick freeze was tiny, but real. Lacey remembered now how carefully the woman had explained this, a distinction she herself didn’t find so important, but … “I mean—not that it would be easier that way. But I get why you’re having doubts. Except you shouldn’t be! Not because of that, I mean.” Shit. Couldn’t she shut up for one second? “Excuse me?” She held up the empty glass so that the waiter could see.
Ellen smiled to herself. Not the mom. In a way, it helped to hear it spoken out loud like that, so flat and blunt.
“The thing is,” Lacey went on, determined to get this right. “Saying yes to someone else’s transfemoral amputation is not ever going to feel right, or easy or whatever. It is a big deal. And you’re right: It sucks. It sucks that you have to be the one.”
“Thank you,” Ellen said, and bit her sandwich to cover the surge of grateful tears. Lacey hadn’t said it but the implication was clear: no matter if you’re the real mother or not. “Who are you looking for?” Because Lacey’s gaze was roaming the room now.
“These guys from Eddie’s unit. They’re gonna visit him.”
“That’s nice. How did you get in touch? Michael’s commander has sent me a few e-mails, but I haven’t written back yet.”
Lacey frowned. How did she get in touch? What kind of question was that? Apart from constant back-and-forth e-mails ever since the news about Eddie’s injury, Skype-ing from the computer room at Heaton, and updates she wrote each day to the rear commander? These were the guys who’d been with Eddie out there; they were his lifeline. “Uh, you should probably write him back.”
“How is Eddie’s … how’s his demeanor?”
“The maniacal laughing? Yeah, still there.” Lacey drank once, twice, and one more time to get toward the bottom of the glass. Jesus, these were short pours. “But he went around the room twice using just a cane, and used the bathroom on his own, so…”
“That’s good. That’s wonderful.”
“But the surgeon is giving me the runaround about his optic nerve surgery. All they want to talk about is his physical therapy.” Speaking of which, her gym had called twice in the past two days, not that she’d answered. Lacey guessed the honeymoon period was wearing off—the flowers they’d sent, the card signed by everyone, the How are you? texts from Gwen. Now it was When are you coming back?
“I should run, because—”
“If you want, I can get a list of some audiobooks. For Eddie. If you let me know what his tastes are, maybe…”
“His tastes?” Lacey was trying to remember if she had any cash in her wallet. Just then, she glimpsed the bright blue braid of a shoulder cord on a dark green Army Reserve uniform. The man crossing the lobby had clipped gray hair, and two or three underlings hurrying behind him. That had to be who she wanted. “I better run. Meeting those guys from Eddie’s unit…”
“In reading, I mean.”
“What?” Lacey’s purse had slipped off the back of her chair, and now all her shit was rolling around, lipstick, coins. Come on, come on—if she could just grab a minute with the brigadier general. Because that’s who it had to be. “Oh. Eddie’s not exactly a big reader or anything. Maybe if he needs something to help him fall asleep. Ha. Okay, gotta run, I’ll text you later.” Her drinks were on Ellen’s tab, right? Lacey kept her head down as she left the bar, hot with shame but still hoping no one would flag her down to pay.
Ellen gave up on the sandwich, allowed a busboy to collect her plate. She folded her arms, tucking hands against her body; at least it wasn’t freezing in here, the way it was on the wards, or had been at the Marriott. What would Jane, arriving day after tomorrow, think of this place? Of the young man hopping easily around the love seat, waiting for his girl to bring around the crutches? Of Michael …
And here the images came so fast and thick—the baby on its way, Jane’s stubborn silence, Michael hurt and howling—that they clogged up her mind and shut down any kind of real response. So for a while she just sat there, in the lobby bar with the war-broken men and their women. The late-afternoon milling around; desultory talk and dark wood; the melancholy piano background music. It was almost like the Rathskeller on a weekday. As if she had a pack of student essays to read and an extra hour before her seminar. As if Serena were on her way for coffee, and the war were nothing more than muted images on the TV in the corner of the taproom.
The waiter brought the check and she paid it, not caring that Lacey had forgotten to give her money. She stood up, hands empty, and slowly walked back to the ward.
* * *
Lacey stalked the hallway outside some guy’s room, a double-leg amputee over in Ward 57. Peered in through the door whenever she could risk it without drawing attention. The soldier in there was receiving a Purple Heart. She’d been right—those guys in the uniforms back at Mologne were the ones awarding it. She could glimpse their solemn faces as they read the citation, the still circle of dark green uniforms crowding the hospital room. This was probably last of a series of rooms they’d hit today.
The only woman in the room—Indian-looking, older, probably the mom—glanced up and caught Lacey peeking in. But then she was distracted by one of the officers and Lacey hurried away.
It was late and she should get back to Eddie. The shift change would be in an hour, and she wouldn’t trust those night nurses with changing a diaper, let alone the dressing on his left eye. No room for error if there was going to be any chance of saving it.
Earlier, two guys from Eddie’s unit—they’d served together last deployment, and were stationed now in D.C.—stopped by. Lacey had been hoping for a miracle, but no luck. Eddie lolled his head, laughed softly, and barely spoke. The guys betrayed nothing, no shock or shakiness at their onetime commanding officer now sightless and witless. They did a better job than she did, to be honest, at actually staying with the conversation. They craned close to hear his giggly whispers, they tried to respond and keep it going, and they saluted on their way out as sharp as you could ask. “You got this, Major. Give ’em hell.” “You’re looking good, sir. You’ll be out of here soon.” But Lacey could only imagine what they were saying now, on the drive back out to base. Shaking their heads: Is that fucked up or what? But to her, nothing but respect, correctness.
She’d tried, at the beginning of the visit, to get them talking. Why was it taking so long to win over the Iraqi people? When they’d seen how much safer they were now? She even referenced a building project boondoggle, some Jalibah plumbing project the locals had totally effed up, that she’d read about weeks ago on Power Line. But both soldiers had politely rebuffed her. It was like she’d made an ugly mistake by even bringing it up, the war. They told Eddie about the Ravens game instead.
Why, she wondered now, pacing outside this stranger’s room. Because her intel was so out-of-date? Out of their concern for Eddie, who was kicked out of it irrevocably now—his guys, that shithole, the work he’d loved? Or maybe because—this thought chilled Lacey—it didn’t matter here, of all places. The stuff she’d fixated on, all those blogs, all that data. It shrunk down to nothingness. On the ward, it was all beside the point.
Suddenly the door opened, and conversation spilled into the hallway. Uniforms, hand-shaking, nurses and doctors and photos and hugs for the wife. Lacey waited and when the cluster of men headed for the elevators, she made her move.
“Excuse me? General? Can I talk to you for a sec?”
The bristly white-haired man gave her only a sideways smile, and didn’t slow his pace. He was handed a phone and began talking on it immediately.
“It’s about my husband, Major Edgardo Diaz? If you could just take a quick look at his file?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll need to make an appointment to—”
“We’re in room five-eight-four-oh, which is right around the—”
“Ma’am. All queries related to the review process need to be channeled—”
“All right. Jesus.” She swiped away the business card this underling was waving in her face. Elevator doors closed on the brigadier general and his party, and Lacey was left alone in the foyer.
Or so she thought. One last young guy in uniform, bringing up the rear. He held a cardboard box and gave Lacey a once-over before flicking his gaze away.
“Hey,” she said, drawing it out. In the way she knew exactly how to. “Do you have a sec? Just a quick question about the Purple Heart process. I know, I know, you can’t tell me anything official. Promise I won’t beg.” When he hesitated, she pointed toward the Healing Garden. And gave him a tilted head smile, please?
While Staff Sergeant Jerry Miller scanned through Eddie’s injury file next to her on a stone bench, Lacey jiggled her foot and swatted away a tiny spider dangling from its long invisible thread. Healing Garden, what a load. It was stuffy in here, even at night, like a greenhouse with wilting and possibly fake plants. Across the reflecting pool was a woman with two kids who were using their bench as a desk, writing with pencils in workbooks. Every so often she would point at a place on their pages and they’d erase furiously. The rest of the time she was scrolling her phone.
“That’s all you got for the injury report?”
“Yeah. Why, should there be more?”
“It’s just that they’ve classified it as VINA—see?” Sergeant Miller pointed to a blurry acronym stamped on Eddie’s papers. “What was it, a rollover?”
“All I know was, he was driving back to base and had to swerve, then went into a ditch, and yeah—it flipped. He’s blind in one eye, you saw that, right? And, well, there’s significant concussion damage.” Don’t make me describe the laughter.
But the sergeant was shaking his head. “Vehicle Incident: Non Applicable. That means, well. That it was an accident. Not enemy combat.”
“An accident? Only in the sense that he accidentally swerved off the road to avoid the accident of getting blown sky-high by an IED. Put on the road by some Hajji. By accident. Fuck.” The mom across the pool gave her a sour look: Language.
“Doesn’t say anything about IED. You got documentation on that?”
Lacey blew out her breath. “Look. Obviously he wouldn’t have rolled his Humvee on purpose, so … There had to have been a reason he swerved! He saw something, or … You know, there had been two other explosions in that quadrant in that past month! One of his buddies told me on IM. Wait—wait, where are you going?”
“I’m sorry,” the sergeant said, handing her back the file. He must have been all of twenty-three years old; sweet and chubby, dark black skin. “Doesn’t qualify. It’s not a file they’re going to consider for award.”
“But—so—that’s it?”
“What a lot of people do is”—he dropped his tone, as if sliding her a secret—“write their representative.”
Lacey couldn’t speak.
“You know, like your congressperson. From your home state. Shoot them an e-mail, get them involved. Sometimes a big name can put on the pressure, and…” Sergeant Miller fluttered his hand up toward the filmy dark skylights. After a moment, when he got nothing back from Lacey—no flirtiness now—he left.
She wanted to rip the leaves off all these plants, these tasteful goddamn healing plants. An accident. Of course, it was only too perfect—a dumbass solo rollover on a sandy road without a shred of cause or glory … that could only be the reason why Eddie had lost his eyes, his mind, his dignity without even knowing it. They were dropping Purple Hearts on the chests of boys almost half his age! For losing a finger or two!
“Do you know what time it is?” Speaking to her. The mom across the pool. “My phone just died.”
“Yeah…” Lacey checked her phone. “Nine-fifteen.”
“Oh boy. Bedtime, guys. Let’s go. Quick kiss for Daddy, don’t wake him up.” No protest from the kids, who stacked up their worksheets. One little boy kicked a pebble into the pool and then followed his mom out.
Lacey wanted Otis, bad. She wanted to be checking his homework and giving him shit about playing his DS past bedtime. She wanted her sense of purpose back, her FRG phone tree, Anne and Felicia and Martine …
She wanted Jim.
If only she could get moving now, to check on Eddie and then hurry back to Mologne where with luck she could get in before last call at the bar. Secret shots behind the cover beer she’d sip slowly. But what was this falling feeling? A slipping, blank-faced freeze. It was, Lacey realized, with more wonder than anything else, fear. She was afraid. She probed at it, turned it over and over, couldn’t find a way out—yes, she was. Not when Eddie deployed or seeing pictures of those sick losers pissing near corpses. Not hearing that he got hit or the first time she saw his missing eye. Not even when Martine caught her with Jim—well, okay, some then.
But here, now, in the Healing Garden. Lacey was afraid.