Home Front (47 page)

“Oh, my GOD,” Betsy yelled, distancing herself from Jolene. “What’s WRONG with you?”

Jolene saw how mortified her daughter was. “I’m sorry, Betsy,” she whispered, crawling slowly to a stand. She was shaking now; she couldn’t breathe. She hated the pity she saw in the eyes around her.

She knew she should say something, make some pathetic excuse, but what was there? She could see by the way her friends were looking at her that they knew, all of them; they knew she was damaged now, broken. Crazy.

She limped for the front door, pushing through it, going out into the night.

“Jolene, wait,” she heard Michael yell from inside the house.

She slammed the door shut behind her and kept going, limping down the gravel driveway and across the grass field that separated their properties.

She was almost home when Michael caught up with her. He took her by the arm, tried to stop her.

She pushed him away. “Leave me alone.”

“Jolene—”

“Don’t say anything,” she hissed. She was losing herself as she stood here, falling apart by degree. “Leave me alone.”

“Jolene,” he said. “Let me help you.”

She pushed past him and went into the house, then limped into her bedroom. She turned to slam the door shut and stepped wrong, came down hard on her blisters, and a rage exploded inside of her, made her shake it was so powerful. Suddenly she wanted the prosthesis off—
off
—she couldn’t stand looking at it. She leaned against the dresser and took it off, screaming as she threw it across the room. The ugly plastic leg hit a vase Mila had given them last Christmas, and the pretty blue and white Chinese porcelain cracked into pieces.

She started to laugh even though it wasn’t funny, was the opposite of funny, but she kept laughing.
Look, Tam—no leg!

She wanted to sink to her knees, but she couldn’t do it. One of the many things she couldn’t do anymore. It took everything she had just to stand here, storklike, swaying.

She laughed harder at that. Then she realized she had to go to the bathroom and she’d thrown her leg and the wheelchair wasn’t here and her crutches were in the mudroom.

Cursing, she hopped awkwardly forward, balancing on the furniture. In the bathroom, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and looked away. Her hands were shaking as she unbuttoned her jeans and shoved them down to her ankles. She realized too late that she wasn’t close enough to the toilet.

“Damn it.”

She hopped closer, stepped down on one pant leg, and lost her balance; her ankle twisted. Falling sideways, she grabbed the towel rack. It ripped out of the wall, and she crashed to the floor, hitting her shoulder on the edge of the sink hard enough to make her cry out.

She lay there for a moment, dazed, her shoulder and ankle throbbing, and suddenly she was screaming in frustration.

The bathroom door banged open. “Jolene?”

“Go away.”

Michael knelt beside her, touched her face. “Baby,” he said softly, in the voice she had once loved—still loved—and it made her feel so lonely and lost she couldn’t stand it.

“Are you okay?”

“Do I
look
okay?”

“Baby,” he said again, and suddenly she was crying.
Sobbing
. She tried to stop, to hold back these useless, useless tears and be strong.

Michael took her in his arms and held her tightly, stroking her hair.

Once she’d started to cry, she couldn’t stop. Great, gulping sobs wracked her body, shook her like a rag doll until her nose was running and she couldn’t breathe. She cried first for Tami, but then it was for everything she’d lost, all the way back to her parents, and even before that, for the family she’d longed for as a child and never had. She cried for Smitty, and her lost career and her missing leg and her best friend and her marriage.

When she finally came back to herself, she felt weak, shaky. She drew back and saw that Michael was crying, too.

He gave her an unsteady smile and she needed it—needed him. Telling herself anything else was a lie. “I take it you need to go to the bathroom.”

It made her laugh. Only she could have the breakdown of her life on the bathroom floor, with her jeans down around her ankles.
Ankle
. “Yeah.”

He got up and picked her up as if she weighed nothing and set her on the toilet, then he reached over and unspooled a wad of toilet paper, handing it to her like a perfect white rose.

She’d peed in front of him a thousand times in their marriage, but now the act felt painfully intimate. She thought about asking him to leave and changed her mind. Whatever was happening now between them, she didn’t want to ruin it.

She flushed the toilet when she was done.

He knelt in front of her, helped her pull her panties back up.

She saw him look at her gel-socked stump and felt sick to her stomach. He would look away now …

Instead, he slowly peeled off the gel sock, and there it was—the ugly, rounded stub of her once-beautiful leg. He leaned forward and kissed the bright pink scar.

When he looked up, she saw the love in his eyes—there was no denying it anymore. Impossible as it seemed, he’d fallen in love with her again. She’d known on that day in the courtroom, hadn’t she? Known it and feared it.

“You know, right?”

She nodded.

“No arguments,” he whispered, then he picked her up and carried her out of the bathroom. She expected him to set her down on her bed, but he kept walking, out of her room and up the stairs.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Our bed,” he said, climbing the stairs with her in his arms.

She clung to him. All the way up the stairs she thought of why it was a bad idea for them to make love. The doctors had told her she could “resume sexual activity” when she felt ready, but what would it be like?

She wanted to say
stop, I’m not ready,
but even as she had the thought, pushed up by a lifelong fear, she knew it was a lie. She had been ready to love this man from the moment she first saw him. In all these years, that had never changed. They’d hurt each other, let each other down, and yet, here they were after everything, together. She needed him now, needed him to remind her that she was alive, that she wasn’t alone, that she hadn’t lost everything.

She had to believe in him again; it was their only chance. Her only chance. There was no protection from being hurt except to stop loving all together, and she couldn’t do it. She’d tried. She wanted love—reckless, unpredictable, dangerous. Even with her damaged body and her even more damaged heart. She wanted it. Wanted him.

He shoved the bedroom door open and then kicked it shut behind him. At the bed, he stopped, breathing a little hard from the exertion of carrying her up the stairs. In his eyes, she saw the same intense passion that had jolted her body at his touch, brought her back to life, but she saw fear, too, and worry. They lay down together.

“I love you, Jo,” he said simply, although they both knew there was nothing simple about such a declaration.

“I love you, too, Michael,” she said brokenly. “I always have.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. Her body came alive at his touch, opened to him, and she moaned his name, pressed against him. She drew him close, wanting him more than she ever had.

His hand slid under her shirt, unhooked her bra.

She took a deep breath, trying to gather her courage. She wanted him, wanted this to happen, but it frightened her, too. What would love be like with this new body of hers? Would he really still want her?

Moonlight came through the window, illuminating her pale legs. Her thighs were the same size—the swelling had gone down—one tapered to a knee and a shapely calf and a foot. The other …

She so rarely let herself really look at it. Now she did, and she knew Michael was looking, too, at the amputated leg, with its rounded end and Frankenstein stitches, still an angry pink. Lulu had been right: it kind of looked like a football.

“We might have to be … innovative,” she said.

“I love innovative,” he whispered, letting his hand move across her jutting hip bone and along her thigh. His touch electrified her. She pulled off her blouse and undressed him and lay against him, every part of her needing to be touched by him. She ran her bare hand along his chest, feeling him, remembering. Their kiss turned desperate. Her fingers slipped beneath the waistband of his boxers.

Had she ever felt this sharp, aching need before? She couldn’t remember, but it was in her now, fueling her, straining to be released.

He knew her body as well as he knew his own, knew when to touch her and where, knew how to bring her to this edge that was both pleasure and pain. It didn’t matter at all that they had to do things a little differently than before, that she sometimes needed to position herself with pillows. Lying on her side, she clung to him, her breath coming fast and hard, feeling him inside her again, filling her; she arched up, kissed him, and their cheeks were wet with each other’s tears. Her release was so powerful she cried out; it felt as if her entire body were being lifted up, carried on some dark wind, and then floated back to the softness of the bed she’d shared with this man for so much of her life. In the aftermath, she curled against him, her body sweaty, spent, and as he stroked her arm, she lay there, her cheek against his chest, remembering the feel of his tears on her face, the salty taste of his kiss.

*   *   *

“Can I ask you a question?” he said afterward, as they lay together, still breathing heavily.

“Of course.”

“How come you never answered my letter?”

“What letter?”

“The one I sent you in Iraq, a few days before your crash.”

She frowned. “I never got a letter from you over there. We were crazy that last week, missions constantly, and the Internet was always going down. I opened my e-mail once after I got home; there were hundreds of condolence messages about my leg. I couldn’t stand reading them. I haven’t gone to the computer in forever. What did it say?”

“That I wanted another chance.”

She tried to imagine what that would have meant to her then, when she was so far from home. Would she have believed him? “How did it happen, you falling in love with me while I was away?” she asked, her body tucked up against his, her chin resting on his shoulder.

He slid his arm beneath her, pulled her closer. “After Dad’s death, I was depressed, and you were always so damn cheerful. You gave me the kind of advice I couldn’t follow—like think ‘good thoughts, remember his smile.’ Honestly, I hated that shit.” He looked at her. “I was unhappy, and it was easy to blame you.”

“I thought you could will grief away. That’s what I did with my parents. At least that’s what I thought I did. The truth is, I knew loss. I didn’t know grief. Now, I do.” She tilted her chin to look up at him. “I let you down.”

He kissed her forehead slowly, lovingly. “And I let you down.”

“We need to talk more this time,” Jolene said. “Really talk.”

He nodded. “I want to know about Iraq. Can you do that?”

Her instinct was to say
no, you don’t want to know
and protect him. “I’ll tell you what I can do. You can read my journal,” she said. “And I need to talk to that doctor of yours, too. I need help with this, I think.”

“You’ll make it through, Jo. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

“What about Betsy? How will I convince her to forgive me?”

He smiled. “You flew helicopters in combat. You can handle one angry twelve-year-old girl.”

“I’ll take combat anytime.”

They were laughing when someone knocked on their door. Pounded, actually.

Michael got out of bed, snagged his pants and stepped into them. He was buttoning the fly as he opened the door. “Ma,” he said, grinning.

“It’s Betsy,” Mila said. She was holding Lulu, whose head rested on her shoulder. “She’s gone. We can’t find her anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” Michael said, picking a tee shirt up from the floor, pulling it over his head. “I’m sure she’s in the backyard or somewhere close.”

“Gone?” Jolene sat up, clutching the sheet to her bare breasts. She didn’t know how Michael could sound so calm.

Mila glanced sympathetically at Jolene. “After the … incident at Tami’s, there was a lot of talk. People are worried about you, Jo. Anyway, I was soothing Lulu, who kept wanting to know why you’d thrown yourself to the ground, and when I got her settled, I looked for Betsy. It took a long time to work the room. The point is, she and Seth are gone. We’ve looked everywhere. Carl is frantic.”

“I’ll check the house,” Michael said.

He rushed out of the room. Jolene got out of bed and went to her dresser. Finding jeans and a white sweater, she dressed as quickly as she could. Michael returned with her prosthesis, and they went down the stairs. Hold-limp-step. Hold-limp-step. Never had the unwieldiness of her fake leg bothered her more.

Carl was waiting for them in the family room, looking harried. Mila was beside him, holding Lulu in her arms.

“They ran away,” Carl said to Jo. “I heard them talking, and I thought, ‘Good, they’re friends again,’ and I went for another beer. I don’t know how long it was before I went looking for him again. It wasn’t until people started to leave that we noticed. I should have noticed.”

“The Harrisons’ tree,” Michael said. “Remember the last time Betsy ran away? Seth found her at the tree by the Harrisons’ dock.”

Jolene stared at her husband. “The last time she ran away?”

Michael barely responded. Carl nodded and the two men set off. Jolene followed them as far as the porch.

Out there, it was cold and black. No stars shone through. She stood at the railing, trying to will herself to see through the darkness. Mila came up beside her, carrying Lulu. “We’ll find her, Jolene,” she said. “Teenagers do this sort of thing.”

This sort of thing
; running away in the dark, where God only knew what waited. If Jolene had been a better mother in the past weeks, they wouldn’t be here, staring out at the cold night, praying. She heard Lulu’s small sob, and she turned.