A Virgin River Christmas (6 page)

Then she remembered—that was an outhouse out there, wasn’t it? Wow, how hilarious to think she’d be glad to see an outhouse! Life had gotten real interesting.

Drew and
especially
Erin would absolutely die if they found out she’d been sleeping in the bug. She shook her head.
I’m as nuts as he is, for sure.
And then she noticed snow flurries against the window of the bug. Very pretty, light, fluffy snowflakes in the waning light with a narrow streak of sunlight in the west through the clouds—the flakes glittered as they fell. The view over the ridge was amazing—there was a rainbow shining through the snow drifting down onto the tall pines—it was magnificent. She just couldn’t be upset in this place. Not with Ian, in any case. Maybe he had forgotten they were friends.

He probably wanted her to think he was crazy, roaring like that, but she wanted to believe that, underneath the bluster, he would still be all the things Bobby said he was, all the things he’d been in their early letters, before Ian got out of the Marines—strong, compassionate, gentle, loyal. Brave. He’d been so courageous to do what he had done.

With the snow lightly falling, and the sun causing the rainbow to fade into dusk, she relaxed and closed her eyes for just a second. To think.

Three

I
an tried to keep himself from looking out the window; he’d be damned if he’d open the door. The silence in the mountains was such that if she’d turned the ignition to start the car, he could have heard the click. So he refreshed the fire in the woodstove, fired up the propane cookstove and heated large pans of water for a bath.

He’d made it a year in this cabin without a tub, shower or electricity, but he had made a few adjustments; he bought a generator and wired up a couple of lights inside. He found an old clawfoot tub in a salvage yard that he’d repaired and patched, enabling him to wash out of something larger than the kitchen sink.

It was always a shallow bath—a couple of pans of cold water hand pumped into a pot in the sink from the spring-fed well under the house, and a couple of large pans of boiling water didn’t make for a nice long soak. In the winter, he got in, got clean and got out real quick. He would probably never have plumbing other than the pump; he worried about money and he wasn’t skilled enough to do the plumbing himself. He hadn’t had a real honest-to-God shower in years. But he was a guy—he didn’t exactly primp. This was all he really needed. It got him good and clean.

After a quick scrub and some clean clothes, he warmed some stew on the stove, leaving it right in the can with the paper ripped off the outside. He wanted to see where she was, what she was doing, but he wouldn’t let himself. He’d ignore her, refuse to talk to her, and she’d go away. Soon, he hoped.

After all this time, Ian had managed not to dwell on everything that came before the mountains, but one look at that fiery red mane and her flashing green eyes brought everything rushing back. The first time he’d seen that beautiful little face had been in a photo that Bobby carried with him.

That kid was something else. Ian had been twenty-eight and Bobby twenty with a couple of years in the Marines when they first met. Bobby already had himself some stripes. Ian was just getting a new command and he took to the kid immediately—he was funny and fearless. Big, like Ian—about six feet of hard body—and no attitude. At first, Ian just worked him to death, but found himself responding right away to Bobby’s incredible endurance and commitment. It didn’t take long before Ian was mentoring him; teaching him and building him into one of the best of the best. Also, he was having a beer with him now and then and talking about home, about things that were not military—sports, music, cars and hunting. And then they went to Iraq together.

They got out pictures of their girls and read the letters they got to each other, sometimes leaving out the more personal parts, sometimes not. Bobby had married his girl, but Ian had been engaged less than a year when they went to Iraq in the same unit.

Ian had Shelly back then. While he was gone, she was planning a wedding that would take place when he got back. Bobby and Marcie were hoping to start a family. Their women were beautiful—Marcie was small and fragile-looking with that great mass of curly red hair and a completely impish smile. Shelly was a tall, thin, sophisticated-looking blonde with long straight hair. Ian remembered that Marcie had sent Bobby a pair of her panties that he proudly showed to the guys, but
no
one was allowed to touch. Shelly sent Ian a lock of hair, but he’d have rather had panties. Marcie sent Bobby a picture of herself in her underwear on Bobby’s motorcycle; Shelly sent a picture of herself posed in front of a Christmas tree, wearing slacks and a turtleneck sweater. Their girls also sent them cookies, books, cards, socks and tapes, anything they could think of. When the flak jackets ran low and soldiers started buying their own, Marcie and Shelly sent their men armor as well.

He didn’t want to think about this. Couldn’t she understand that? He didn’t want to be haunted by it. He absolutely couldn’t talk about it. He sat at his small table, head in his hands, but the memories assaulted him nonetheless.

There was no such thing as a routine mission in Fallujah. Ian’s squad hadn’t seen much action, but that day they hung tight against buildings while they did their door-to-door search for insurgents. The street was nearly deserted; a couple of women stood in doorways, watching them warily. Then it hit fast and hard. There were a couple of sudden explosions—a car bomb and grenade—and then a breakout of sniper fire. Ian saw one of his marines fly through the air, catapulted by the explosion. The second the noise subsided a little, Ian saw that it was Bobby who was down. He quickly assessed the rest of his squad; they’d taken cover and were returning fire. Bobby, however, got a double whammy—he’d been thrown probably twenty feet by the force of the explosion and by the time Ian got to him, there’d been a couple of gunshot wounds as well—head and torso.

Bobby looked up at him and said in a hoarse whisper, “Take cover, Sarge.”

And Ian had replied, “Fuck off. I’m getting you outta here.” Ian scooped him up, and right that second, he knew how bad it was going to turn out. He knew that fast. Bobby was limp as a hundred and eighty pound bag of sand. Carrying him over his shoulder, Ian got him behind the wall of a decimated building, called for a medic, an EMT who could administer battlefield first-aid. Ian put his hand over Bobby’s head wound in an attempt to stanch the bleeding and waited for help.

The medic who traveled with their squad finally came and opened up Bobby’s BDUs, the desert camouflage battle dress. He rolled him carefully. “It’s through and through,” he said of the torso wound, applying a compress to stop the bleeding. “We won’t know how much damage till we get a closer look. His vitals are hanging in there.”

“He’s gonna make it,” Ian said, though Bobby was out cold.

“We’re not going anywhere fast,” the medic said, getting out his gauze and tape to close up the head wound. “We can’t get a chopper in this close. We’ll have to carry the wounded or use litters.”

“Just keep him going till we get transport,” Ian demanded. But the medic was called to another wounded marine and Ian knew it was down to him to do everything he could to keep Bobby alive, to get him to that helicopter. Bobby was unconscious and barely breathing.

It wasn’t that long, but it seemed a lifetime, before the medic’s radio alerted them to a helicopter a few blocks away in a safe zone. Ian knew in his gut that Bobby wasn’t getting out of this okay, but he refused to think about it. “You’re going to be okay, buddy,” he kept saying. “You stay with me, I’ll get you outta here.”

The minute sniper fire seemed to have abated, Ian hefted Bobby into his arms and began to run down the dusty, bullet-riddled streets of Fallujah toward the chopper and the paramedics who had better equipment than what was available in the field. He took sniper fire in the thigh, but it was muscle not bone, and he ran through the pain. He took another one across the face, but he still couldn’t feel the pain. He felt the fire on his cheek. Then he saw the corner of the building on the other side of which would be medical transport.

He got Bobby to the chopper, where the rescue crew took over. He tried to go back to his squad, when one of the medics snagged his sleeve and said, “Hold up there, Sarge. Let’s have a look.”

Ian looked down. He was covered with blood. He couldn’t tell his from Bobby’s. Right then, his leg throbbed and his face burned; his vision blurred from blood running into his eye.

“Whoa, Sarge—you’re not going anywhere. We gotta look at—”

“Take care of
him,”
Ian said sternly. “I’ll be fine.”

“Everyone’s getting taken care of, Sarge,” the medic said, taking the scissors to his pants, cutting them up to his thigh to expose a bleeding hole.

“Oh,” Ian said. “Damn.” And he swayed a little.

He sat while the medic attended to his face wounds—a cut across his eyebrow and a flesh wound that ran down the length of his check. While this was going on, while they were waiting for a couple more wounded marines, Ian watched as they worked on Bobby.

One of the medics said, “No casualties today.”

Little did they know…

The chopper finally lifted off and headed for the nearest camp hospital. There was a full surgical setup in tents and hastily erected buildings. That’s where Ian was separated from Bobby. Ian was taken into a treatment area while Bobby went straight to surgery. Some young doctor had shaved off Ian’s eyebrow to get a nice, clean stitch on the laceration; the nurse informed him it might never grow back. By the time Ian had a bandage and some crutches, Bobby had been stabilized and airlifted to Germany.

Ian stayed in Iraq. His injuries left some ugly scars but his recovery was relatively short. While Ian was behind the action for two months, he wrote letters to Bobby’s wife, letters telling her he was sure Bobby would be fine. Marcie went immediately to Germany and wrote back to Ian. Then she followed Bobby to Washington D.C.—to the Walter Reed Medical Center, and they wrote some more.

While Ian went back into action, Bobby went from Germany to Walter Reed to a VA hospital in Texas, then home to his wife. Ian kept up the correspondence—he heard from Marcie all the time and answered her every letter. She said things like, “He’s still pretty much unresponsive, but they’re working with him in physical therapy,” and “He’s not on a respirator or anything,” and, “I swear, Ian, he smiled at me today.” She said there was some paralysis and they feared brain damage, not from the bullet wound but from brain swelling. “Feared,” she had written. And “some paralysis.”

It was a few months later when she wrote to Ian again, “We have to face it—he’s not going to recover. He’s paralyzed from the neck down and he’s conscious but unresponsive.” The news hit Ian in the gut like a torpedo. He reread the previous letters; there wasn’t a hint of doom, yet the facts were there. A combination of his denial and her hope had kept the inevitable bad news at bay.

And then Marcie wrote, “I’m so relieved to have him home.”

Ian was given medals for saving Bobby’s life. Every day he asked himself why he should get medals for that, for saving a man to live in a dead body.

Since Ian had the basic information about his friend, he thought he was prepared for the visit he would pay when he was next stateside on leave. Marcie was so excited to see him, to throw her arms around him and
thank
him. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but it sure as hell hadn’t been what he’d seen. Just from earlier photos, he could tell Marcie had become thinner and more pale, even more fragile-looking. She was so tiny, so frail.

And Bobby? The man he’d seen did not resemble his friend. This man was a wasted, emaciated version of Bobby—his musculature gone, staring off at nothing, being fed through a tube, not responding to his young wife or his best friend. Bobby was gone, completely gone, yet his heart pumped and his lungs spontaneously filled with air. It was a travesty. And Ian had accepted medals for that?

Ian opened his eyes and they felt gritty. Sandy. He’d been literally transported to the past, a thing he’d been running from for years. He’d never been entirely sure if what happened next was due to the whole Iraq experience, or to the events that changed Bobby’s life so irrevocably. Whatever it was, it came to an ugly end when he got back from Iraq, a mess, his head all screwed up. He’d visited Bobby for probably less than fifteen minutes and it devastated him to see what he’d done—saving Bobby to live a life like that. He called off his wedding, tearing Shelly to shreds. He reported back for duty, not the same stalwart man, but a wreck who was impossibly short tempered. There was a phone call from Marcie’s sister saying it would be nice if Ian could at least be in touch with her—she was up against so much with Bobby, which added guilt to his growing list of demons.

Ian suddenly couldn’t stay out of trouble. Rather than being an example, he was a problem. He ended up spending a couple of nights in jail for stupid, random fights, and his father told him he was never so goddamned ashamed of him in his life. Ian’s response to that was to screw up enough so the Corps suggested it was time for him to exit and see if he’d be better as a civilian. He couldn’t face any of it. He had let Bobby down, disgraced his father, shattered and abandoned his woman. And he hadn’t been there for Marcie, who deserved better from him. He just wandered off, trying to figure out his head, but the task proved to be impossible.

He didn’t want to see Marcie now. He didn’t want to relive all that. There was no way he could apologize enough, no way to undo what he’d done. She should go away, let him figure out how to coexist alone with his monsters, someplace where he wouldn’t do any harm. He’d found some contentment here; there was nothing to be gained by going over the details again. God knew, he’d been over the details too many times, often without meaning to.