a sleeping pill...”
“Maybe,” she said, although she had no plans of taking one. She had watched others in pain become reliant on pills. That would not happen to her. She knew her recuperating time would be long and painful. It was too easy to become addicted to pain meds.
“I’ll get you a glass of water, okay?” her mother persisted.
Jenny nodded. She could do that on her own, but the small chore would satisfy her mother.
After her mother brought the water, Jenny went to her bathroom and took a hot, and then cold, shower to shake off the nightmare.
She knew she couldn’t go back to sleep. Not yet. The horror of those moments was still too real. She went to the corner of her room, where she kept the physical therapy equipment. She selected a rod, turned on the portable TV to an all-news station and sat down in front of it. Her injury didn’t seem to hurt so much when she was occupied with news.
She started moving the rod from side to side as she watched. An upset election in Europe, Congress fighting again, riots in a Middle Eastern country. She ached to be in the middle of it. She didn’t belong in a luxurious bedroom, in a gated community.
She held the rod across her body like a vaudevillian dancing with a cane. She moved it to the left and then to the right. It was one of the excruciatingly painful exercises to expand the mobility of her right shoulder. She smothered a cry as she impatiently shoved the rod too far.
The news turned back again to the Middle East, reporting on the refugees fleeing from wars in Iraq and Syria. She wanted to cry. Scream. Do something. She kept seeing that bombing and the children and adults running for cover where there was none. Did the volunteer medical workers make it to safety? If so, what about the next day? And the one after that?
The scenes haunted her.
Yet despite her injury, she wanted to go back. She needed to record what was happening. She wanted the world to know. To care, dammit.
She didn’t know now whether she could ever return, with her shattered rotator cuff and damaged tendons and muscles. The wrong movement sent rivers of pain through her. She also experienced flashbacks and nightmares. Though less frequent now, she couldn’t take the chance of endangering others during one of her episodes.
Where was Rick now? She hadn’t heard from him in a month. He had stayed with her that day and somehow managed to get her across the border to a hospital. He’d called from a cell phone, somewhere in the field, three weeks later. She’d been barely coherent after her surgery, but she told him she would be back.
She missed him. He was fearless and always had a joke on his lips. He was probably the only person who’d ever understood her need to write stories that needed to be told. That was her source of adrenaline, just as photography was his...
Stop thinking about the past.
She dropped the rod and went to the window. She stared out at the manicured lawn and towering trees in the backyard. The vivid reds and oranges stood in stark contrast to the colorless rocks and sand of much of the Middle East. So why couldn’t she appreciate it? The house and grounds felt like a prison.
It had been nearly four months since that bloody afternoon in Syria. She was lucky not to have bled to death. The red-hot metal had cauterized the wound, and Rick had cradled her body to keep the metal from moving until they found a doctor among the refugees. She’d been patched up enough to get to Turkey, where she received further medical treatment, and was sent home to Colorado.
Following two operations on her shoulder, she’d needed weeks of intense therapy. Her mother begged her to move into the family home, which was close to the rehab center.
She’d resisted at first. With the exception of several brief visits with her mother, she’d not been home since college. She’d been overseas for the last eight years, five of them in the Middle East. Moving back at thirty-two was humiliating.
But staying there for a few weeks was the logical decision. She couldn’t even dress herself without going into elaborate contortions.
Recuperating in a happy home would have been difficult enough, but this house was not happy. Her father was rarely there, and when he was, he usually went straight to his study. Her mother drank too much wine when she wasn’t at charity functions, and probably when she was, too. Her smile was a little too bright. Jenny’s journalistic eye saw the pain she tried to hide.
On the rare weekends her father returned from San Francisco, where his company kept an apartment for him, he couldn’t stop reminding her that he had warned her not to go. The Middle East was no place for a woman. Why couldn’t she be like her two sisters?
According to her father, journalism was no profession for his daughter. No opportunity to marry an up-and-coming husband, as her sisters had, and have children.
But then Jenny knew she’d always been a disappointment to him.
From the time she was old enough to walk, she’d run after fire engines or any other kind of excitement. At ten, she’d saved her allowance to buy a battered set of encyclopedias at a used book sale, and by twelve she’d read through them, along with finishing the reading list for the fifth, sixth and seventh grades. In lieu of dancing lessons, she headed for the library. The librarian was her best friend.
Her parents hadn’t been concerned when she announced at age eleven that she wanted to wander the world, rather than get married, assuming her declaration was just a child’s wild fancy. They became more concerned when, at sixteen, she announced she was going to be a journalist and, at seventeen, attended a lecture by a renowned journalist at the University of Colorado, instead of going to the junior prom.
More than anything else, she’d wanted to be on her own, free to fly like a bird...
And she had.
Would she ever fly again?
* * *
THREE MORNINGS LATER, Jenny woke to pounding at the door. Her brain was foggy. Daylight poured through the window. She glanced at the clock and jerked upright. It was ten in the morning, but then she hadn’t gone to sleep until 4:00 a.m. She’d been caught up in an idea for a story.
More impatient knocking, and then the door burst open. Her sister Lenore walked in.
Jenny stared at her. “I thought you were in San Francisco.”
“Charlie and I flew in this morning,” she said.
“Charlie?”
“Charlotte, your niece. She announced last year she wants to be called Charlie.”
“How did our parents take the announcement?”
“They ignored Charlie’s edict, of course, and warned me that she might, of all horrors, take after you.”
Jenny chuckled. This was a different side of Lenore. But then, except for a brief visit at the hospital a few months ago, she hadn’t seen her sister in more than five years. “Mother didn’t say you were coming,” she said.
“She didn’t know,” Lenore said. “Charlie’s downstairs with her now.” She scrutinized Jenny. “You look a lot better than you did a few months ago. But you really have to
