“Fuck that.”
I pointed to my leg. “What do you want me to do?”
“You got money, I know you do. You figured it out before. I don’t know what you did, but do it again.”
I reached for him, just barely missing his jacket. He stepped back, laughing.
Then Johnno looked behind him at the open door, strode to it, and calmly pushed it shut.
“If you fucking try anything, I swear to God—” I started, my teeth clenched.
But my reflexes were slow. With one hand, he moved the call button out of reach, and with the other, he pressed on my leg. Softly at first, then harder, until the stabbing pain blotted out every other sensation. I tried to reach for him again, but he had moved to the end of the bed, hands moving up my shin.
“You’re going to pay me half of the rest in a month, and half the month after.”
“Agh!” I cried out, feeling tears come to my eyes.
Johnno let up for a second, looking behind him. The door didn’t budge. He pressed again, harder. Slicing, burning, not sure if my eyes were open anymore, red, white, red, white.
He let go. Water rushed over my nerves. Eyesight returned. Johnno had pulled the newspaper out of his jacket, squinting at it, still standing over me like Death.
“？‘Wounded fighting at the Pakistan border with the Thirty-fourth Red Horse Infantry Division,’？” he read aloud. “？‘Morrow will be awarded the Purple Heart for his sacrifice to the United States Armed Forces.’？” He stopped, breaking into a cheesy, yellow smile. “Congratulations, Private Morrow!”
“Get the fuck out of here,” I said, still reeling from pain.
“You know what else this article said, though? Said you got a wife. Little Boricua situation? Thinking I might need to look her up.”
I didn’t have the energy to respond. I just closed my eyes, hoping he’d go away, like a bad dream. When I opened them again, he was gone, but metal spikes were still grinding into my leg, relentless. The ache and the stabbing combined.
He was right, I guessed. I would get a Purple Heart. To be forever reminded of that moment at the jeep, of pulling Frankie’s body toward mine, leaving a trail of blood in the road. The third pain, always there, always hooking me back.
Tara arrived in bright pink scrubs, her bangs freshly permed, strapping on her latex gloves and starting a story about the officer down the hall.
“Hey, Tara?” I asked, swallowing, trying to block out the semicircle of faces I’d seen at my last Narcotics Anonymous meeting at Austin Universalist, smiling at me with bright eyes. Telling me to stay strong.
“What is it, hon?” she said, bending my good leg.
“Tramadol isn’t working. I’d like to up my medication.”
Cassie
George and Louise Cucciolo held Frankie’s memorial service under the hundred-foot-tall arches of St. Mary’s Cathedral, dwarfing the fifty or so of us who were invited. Luke could stand with the help of a few nurses, but he could barely put any weight on the leg, and the cathedral’s only wheelchair-accessible entrance was through a back door, up a noisy wooden ramp. I’d picked him up in San Antonio this morning, and we drove here in silence. It was like neither one of us knew what to say now. I hadn’t really imagined what it would be like when he came home. I certainly hadn’t imagined it like this.
As we rattled through the door, we realized that the ramp led not to the back of the church, where everyone was entering, but to the area behind the pulpit. We had wheeled right into the middle of an operatic rendition of “Ave Maria.” We had to steer around the casket and a blown-up photo of Frankie as the tear-stained eyes of the attendees followed us in confusion. He would have found the whole thing hilarious, probably.
? ? ?
Once we were back in the van, Luke took off the leg brace he had to wear for certain time intervals throughout the day and asked me to hand him the bottle of painkillers. His second dose, at least since I’d been with him.
“Are you sure you should take two this close together?”
“It says ‘as needed,’ doesn’t it?” Luke replied.
“I guess.” I checked the bottle.
“Well, there you go.”
“Trying to numb the pain?” I joked weakly.
“Of my leg, yeah,” Luke said, his eyes out the window.
“K,” I said. We’d joked in other serious moments. It was kind of one of the only ways we could communicate. But he’d ignored it.
“But seriously,” I started. “Are you okay?”