5
W ill opened his eyes, and the white sun was gleaming down into them, blinding him, so he closed them again. He tried to sit up.
“Easy, easy now, pal. Don’t move too much all at once.”
The voice was young, and male, and…and American?
He tried opening his eyes again, just a little. As his vision cleared, he realized the blazing white light overhead was coming from a fluorescent bulb, not the desert sun. And the sand underneath him was a mattress, covered with white sheets that smelled of disinfectant. And the robes he wore were only a hospital gown and bedcovers.
The young man was standing beside the bed. He had dirty-blond hair twisted into dreadlocks, and an eyebrow ring. But he wore the scrubs of a hospital staffer, and the tag pinned to his chest read Danny Miller, R.N.
Will tried to talk but only rasped, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “Where am I?”
“Dude, look around. You’re in a hospital.” The kid pushed a button that raised Will’s upper body, then he picked up a plastic cup with a straw through the top and held the straw to Will’s lips.
Will drank. The ice water felt good going down his parched throat. He noted the IV bags dangling from a pole beside the bed, noticed the tubes leading to his wrists, glanced down at his foot, but it was covered by blankets. Hell, how bad was it? He couldn’t feel much in any of his limbs just yet.
“What hospital?” he asked at length, trying to move the foot but feeling no response.
“Bethesda.”
Will closed his eyes, so intensely relieved it was almost painful. He was home. He was in the States.
“The doctor will be in any second now. Look, I’m supposed to let some other guys know when you wake up. You up to talking to some people after the doc gives you the okay?”
“Depends on who it is. Although I’m afraid I can guess.”
“Military. Lots of hardware on their chests.”
Will nodded. They’d want to debrief him. It was S.O.P. “Yeah, whatever. First, though, I’d like to know about my foot.”
The kid reached down to pull the covers away, revealing the well-bandaged foot. “You’ve still got it. That’s good news, right?”
“That depends. Do I get to keep it?”
“Looks like. The doc will be able to tell you more.”
“The doc” did tell him more. He told him the foot would never be one hundred percent, that he was going to have to bear up to some intense physical therapy, and that he would have a limp for the rest of his life. He would walk, but never run. He would need to use a cane.
He did not accept that prognosis.
He spent the next month in the hospital. The PT was painful, but it was a far cry from the other tortures he’d endured. During that time he was debriefed by the military and declared an American hero by the press. He received a huge cash settlement for the damage done to his foot, and that was in addition to his pension. He was showered in accolades, awarded the medal of honor and a purple heart, and retired with honors, all before he ever got out of the hospital.
He didn’t want to retire. He didn’t want the damn money or the medals or the press. But with the foot the way it was, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. So he took the cards he was dealt, and he endured the PT, and he got his ass out of the wheelchair and walked through the hospital corridors at night with the help of a cane, because he couldn’t fucking sleep anyway.
Especially that last night-his final night in the hospital. He’d been there a month, and they would be sending him home the next morning. “Home” was a word that meant nothing to Will. He’d been a soldier for so long, he didn’t have a home. He had nowhere to go. Nothing to do, really. Money? He had plenty of that, the one thing that had never mattered to him.
He felt as if his life had been gutted. And when he tallied the things he had lost, there was one, foolish, ridiculous item that always topped the list. He’d lost his fantasy. That Gypsy camp in some faraway time and place where he used to escape the pain, and the beautiful woman who had inhabited it. He often found himself wondering about her, just as if she were real. “What ever became of Sarafina?” he would ask himself, before his common sense would kick in to remind him that she was a figment of his imagination, a tool created by his mind to enable him to cope with the torture and imprisonment.
He’d tried like hell to conjure her image to mind during the physical therapy sessions, but apparently they hadn’t been painful enough to invoke her. He couldn’t find that place in his mind anymore, the one where he used to retreat to be with her. And though he knew she wasn’t real, he worried about her, what had happened to her, how she had adjusted to the change.
Hell, when he thought about it, maybe there was a reason his mind had conjured the beautiful Gypsy girl and her tragic tale for him. Maybe he’d known, somehow, deep down, how drastically his own life was about to change, and maybe he’d created her so it wouldn’t seem quite as bad in comparison. Sure, he’d lost a lot. Full use of the foot, his career in Special Forces, his entire life’s work. But she’d lost more. She’d lost her lover, her family, her tribe-and then her humanity when she’d been transformed into something else. He wondered how she had dealt with that, if becoming a dark creature had changed who she was inside. Had she become evil just because it was expected of her, or was the change purely physical, like the change in him was?
He thought of these things as he limped along the quiet hospital corridors at 3:00 a.m. There were only a handful of nurses on duty at that hour, and they tended to cluster in the break room around the TV, sipping coffee and chatting. At the prescribed intervals they would emerge to check on patients and administer meds. One nurse would emerge every half hour or so to prowl the wing, ensuring that all the patients were all right, and of course they came out if the phone rang, or a patient buzzed, or a monitor sounded an alarm.
He liked the nights. They were the only time he could be alone to walk unassisted and unhindered. The nurses knew how painful it was for him to step on the foot, even now that it was healing. So they tended to cheer for him with every inch he gained, as if he were a toddler taking his first steps. He hated it, though he knew they were only trying to encourage him. He far preferred privacy during torture, he decided.
The walking cane was hospital issue: stainless steel, with a rubber-coated crook at the top and a tripod with brown rubber tips at the bottom. He would definitely find something better when he got out of here.
That last night, he was traversing an empty stretch of hallway, where no one was at work. The hospital lab was in this section, but it was all but abandoned at this hour. A few people came and went, but none from his wing and none who questioned him. It was his favorite place for night walking.
Wearing an expression that said he knew exactly what he was doing was all it took to keep everyone off his back. No patients roomed in this section, so nurses weren’t milling around. His own wouldn’t be in to check on him for an hour yet, and if they did happen to peek through the door in the meantime, they would see the blanket-covered shape of a man lying sound asleep with his back to them. Because that was what Will wanted them to see.
God, his skills were going to be utterly
