Chapter Twenty-five

After Rick was shipped stateside, we spent nearly a year in Washington, D.C., while Rick was in the Walter Reed General Hospital there. Once he was discharged, we decided that we wanted to go back to the Boston area. There was a good VA hospital there for him to continue with his therapies and we both felt like it was home. It was the place we’d met and married and dreamed our big dreams. During those long months at Walter Reed, we focused entirely on getting Rick healed and rehabilitated enough so that I could bring him home. Bringing him home was goal enough; all our other prewar pipe dreams had gone up in smoke.

My cousin Sid—who’d made it back safe and sound and very nearly untouched by a war spent in England—found us a single-family house to rent in Quincy, not far from the shore at Squantum. I think he imagined that I’d be able to wheel Rick along the shore drive to enjoy the view of the Boston Harbor islands and eat takeout from Ray’s Clam Shack like a normal couple. Of course that didn’t happen. Our days were housebound, my only excursions to the grocery store and his to the hospital, where it seemed like he was continually being admitted because I had a hard time keeping up with the bedsores and the wound that just wouldn’t heal where his arm, his pitching arm, had been blown away.

The house came with a one-car garage, conjoined to the main building by a glassed-in breezeway. Passing from the house to the garage always felt like being underwater as the light filtered through the glass blocks. The doorways weren’t wide enough to get Rick and his chair through, so he ended up having to endure all weathers as I loaded him into the car from the front walk. We didn’t have a ramp, either, so my biggest challenge was to ease him down the three steps, as if his wheelchair were a giant baby carriage, then anchor my weight against the forward motion of the chair as it rolled down the slope to the sidewalk. My fear was that someday I’d lose control and he’d go careering into the side of the car or, worse, into the street and oncoming traffic.

When Keller Nicholson brought Pax home to us, we’d been in that rental house a little more than six months. Rick had been hospitalized about five times in that period, and the little house didn’t look appreciably more lived in than it had the day we moved into it. Rick was in what had been the den, and I slept upstairs in the larger of the two bedrooms. The second one, the one that still had nursery wallpaper from the previous tenants, I used to store everything I hadn’t had time to unpack; most of our life together was contained in cardboard boxes with labels that described how life had been: Wedding Presents, Photo Albums, Baseball Equipment.

In another life, I’d have washed that charming babyish wallpaper and planned where to put a crib. I hated that room, a reminder of the end of our first, best goal.

In all that time, Rick had never told me what happened and I believed that he couldn’t remember. It wasn’t unusual, after all. Traumatic amnesia. All I knew was that in the ambush, all of his men were lost, Rick the only survivor.

Rick kept Keller in his room, leaving me to fiddle around in the kitchen, craning to hear their voices, wondering what could be going on. Pax panted and paced the hallway from Rick’s room to where I stood, useless, in the kitchen, too late for lunch, too early for dinner. The dog looked at me with a clear concern and all I could do was pat him and mutter words meant to soothe him. “It’s all right, big guy. It’s good to have you back. Will you be happy here? Did you miss us? Can you go back to being our dog?” My questions left my mouth unattached to any thought. “Will you miss him?” Him, Keller.

Finally, Keller appeared in the archway. He still had that military bearing about him, shoulders back, chin lifted, hands rigidly at his sides, the right one clutching the brim of his hat. I looked at his face for the first time, really looked at him, at the angular planes of his face and the aquiline nose suggesting an old Yankee heritage. What I saw was a man moving into the next stage of his life. His mouth was drawn into a military scowl, but his eyes, a deep muddy brown, glinted with enough hope that I felt my own burn.

Pax immediately went to him and sat at his left knee. I never saw a signal. Keller made no overt sign, but without hesitation the dog planted himself where he belonged. I saw the truth clearly now: This dog had formed an attachment as deep as an attachment between lovers. No part of Keller touched the dog, but the connection was as visible to me as if they’d been chained to each other. I wanted to hate him, and yet I couldn’t. I understood him.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered, as if I thought myself alone in the room.

“Mr. Stanton wants to talk to you.” Keller moved aside, the dog gracefully moving with him. I pushed past them to go to Rick, my hand reaching deep into my apron pocket to find a handkerchief. I was already in tears.

I expected to find Rick hunched down and devastated, and every inch of me pulsed to comfort him; but instead, he was sitting in his chair, straight and confident, his good arm crossed over his bad one. Without preamble, he laid out his idea. Keller Nicholson would stay on as Rick’s aide. Room and board, and a small weekly salary in exchange for lifting and dressing and bathing and all the tasks that made up my day. In exchange for Pax.

“Franny, it’s up to you. It’ll take the physical burden off of you, but I know that having another person in the house means more work for you in other areas. But he’s big, he’s capable, and he’s rootless.”

“And we avoid having to argue about Pax.”

Rick nodded. “Yeah. At least for a while. It’ll give us all a chance to adjust.”

A stranger in my house. We knew nothing about him except that Pax was a big fan. I felt like we were trusting a dog as a reference for an employee, a star boarder, an interloper.

“I haven’t struggled. I haven’t complained. I want to take care of you.”

Rick reached out his hand and grasped mine. “I know you do.”

I pressed the crumpled handkerchief up to my eyes. He hadn’t touched me in a long time, and the feel of the soft skin of his palm against my more work-worn hand was too warm and I worried about a new infection starting. I’d forgotten how warm a kind hand can be.

“We give him a month.” He squeezed my hand and let go.

“All right.”

And so Keller Nicholson came into our lives and nothing was ever the same again.