Michael squeezed her hand, reminding her with his touch that she was here, standing; the worst was behind them. She took off her heavy woolen coat and handed it to her husband.
For a moment, as she stood there in her dress uniform, decorated with the medals she’d earned and the patches that had defined so many years of her life, she felt tall again, steady. It didn’t matter that the skirt revealed what she’d lost; the uniform revealed who she had been for more than twenty years. She wore it with pride.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked.
She smiled. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll wait for you?”
“Okay.” She let go of his hand and went to the desk, where the nurse on duty gave her the information she needed.
“Are you family?” the nurse asked.
“No.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“No. My visit is a surprise. But I’ve cleared it with the hospital.”
The nurse studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Room 326. You’re lucky. She’s leaving in two days.”
Thanking her, Jolene headed down to room 326, in the orthotics wing.
The door was open.
Jolene moved through the buzz of medical staff with the ease of someone who had learned the routine of a place like this.
She paused at the open door and knocked.
Inside the room, a woman lay in a hospital bed, angled up. Jolene recognized the look in the woman’s eyes: a combination of fear, anger, and loneliness. There were few lonelier places in the world than a hospital room. Even with loved ones beside you, there was no escaping the frightening, isolating truth that neither love alone nor family could make you whole.
She went to the end of the bed and stood there. “Sarah Merrin?”
“What’s left of me is.”
Jolene’s heart ached for this woman—this girl, almost; she couldn’t be more than twenty years old. She saw the empty blanket where Sarah’s legs had been. “You’re still Sarah, even though it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you left her somewhere, over there, right?”
Sarah looked up.
God, she was so young.
“Do I know you?”
Jolene moved slowly away from the end of the bed. As she walked, with only the slightest hitch in her gait, she felt herself gliding back in time, and for a second she was the woman in the hospital bed again, and a young marine named Leah Sykes was coming up to her bed, smiling, offering hope in the fact of her stance. Jolene hadn’t appreciated it enough then—she’d been so broken—but she had learned, over time, how much that support had meant.
She moved to the side of Sarah’s bed.
Sarah looked down at Jolene’s prosthesis, then up at her face.
“I’m Jolene Zarkades. You wrote me a letter. Two, actually. I’m sorry it took me so long to get here. I was … depressed and pissed off for a while.”
“Chief?”
“It’s just Jolene these days. Hi, Sarah,” she said gently.
Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.
“I’m a runner,” Jolene said softly. “It took a while, but I’ll be a runner again. I ordered a tricked-out new metal prosthesis. It’s called a blade. Supposedly, I’ll be able to run like the wind.”
“Yeah, I hear a lot of shit like that. People actually say, ‘Oh, it’s just your legs, thank God it wasn’t worse.’ They wouldn’t say that if they had a stump. Or two.”
“You’ll lose things, I won’t lie. But you’ll find things, too.”
Sarah lay back in her pillows, sighing. “Teddy’s coming back today. He’s just finishing his tour, and I’m what’s waiting for him. Lucky guy. I don’t know what to say to him. Last time … well, he had trouble looking at me, if you know what I mean.”
Jolene knew better than to hand out some shiny bit of optimism. She understood now that some things had to be fought for to mean anything. There were journeys in life no one could take for you. She couldn’t tell this girl, this soldier, how to handle her life or her injury or her marriage. All she could do was be here, standing as tall as she knew how, and hope that down the road, this would be remembered, as she remembered the woman who had stood by her bedside in Germany, all those months ago. “I’m just going to stand here, okay?” she said to Sarah. “Be here with you.”
“I’ve been alone,” Sarah said, sounding young, almost childlike.
“You’re not alone now.” Jolene stood a few inches away from the wall, listening as Sarah talked about her childhood in West Virginia and the man she’d loved since ninth grade and the fear that she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.