Chapter 16
Fourteen months ago …
"Hey, Peanut," I said as I answered the phone. That was my nickname for Maria because she was so tiny compared to my six-three height. I liked that about her … how small and vulnerable she seemed. It made me feel more like a man as her protector.
Silence.
Then an awkward clearing of the throat.
"Listen … Christopher … we need to talk," she said tentatively.
And I heard it.
Instantaneously, my skin prickled with hyper awareness. I knew … just knew by the tone of her voice, what was coming. And I wasn't about to make it easy on her. "Well, that's exactly what we're doing … talking. You called me after all."
She laughed nervously, and I could almost envision her chewing on her bottom lip, which was what she did when she was anxious. "About us," she added.
"What us?" I asked, because I needed her to get to the point. I'd had enough long and drawn out pain in my life, and I didn't need any more of that shit. I needed her to admit that in her mind, there wasn't an "us" anymore. I'd heard what she hadn't said clearly through the phone. I'd been suspecting it, but now I heard it for sure.
"I'm seeing someone else," she said in a quavering voice filled with regret.
Now that I wasn't expecting. "What the holy-ever-loving fucking kind of shit is that?" I yelled through the phone.
I thought I'd known what was coming. A breakup. A sob story about how she couldn't deal with my gross stump of a leg and my mangled arm and hand. I figured she was disgusted and didn't want to be burdened with a cripple, but never in my wildest, fearful imagination had I thought she'd cheat on me before she came to that final realization.
I just didn't think she had it in her to do that.
"I'm sorry," she wailed in misery. And then she proceeded to lay it all out. "I was lonely. You've been gone for so long, and Kellan-"
"Fuck me," I roared. "You're seeing Kellan Fucking Meister? He's a fucking jackass who's so stupid he can't string a coherent sentence together. He's got a unibrow for Christ's sake, Maria. I'm pretty sure he's inbred."
"Just stop it," she cried out. "I love him, and he's asked me to marry him."
And all the air was just sucked out of my lungs. A sharp, piercing stab of pain rocketed through my gut, and I massaged my stomach in an attempt to alleviate it.
Maria Alvarez and I had gone to high school together, but we didn't date back then. I was from Cascade, West Virginia, a tiny, unincorporated town near the East Crescent Mine where my father and four older brothers all worked. My sister, Sharon, was married to a miner. Maria, two years younger than me, was also from Cascade. Her father Jorge-a second-generation Mexican immigrant-worked in the same mine. Tansy, Maria's mom, was born and raised in Cascade, where her father and brothers also worked in the mine.
You see the pattern?
Everyone worked in the mines because if you lived in rural West Virginia, that was about the only chance you had to make a decent living. But Maria and I had bigger dreams that didn't involve lungs soaked with coal dust and perpetual grime embedded into the top layer of your skin. My way out was the Marine Corps.
Maria's way out was with me.
After I finished boot camp at Parris Island, I was stationed with Combat Logistics Battalion 6 at Camp Lejeune where I became a support marine in Motor Transport. I eventually became a motor transport operator. While I was qualified to drive seven-ton transporters or fuel and water rigs, I actually drove a HMMWV-pronounced Humvee, or as some juvenile boys would giggle at the name when they were younger, Hummers-during my first deployment to Afghanistan. My vehicle was modified to carry a TOW anti-tank missile system, and I never failed to get a jolt of pure adrenaline rush whenever it was fired. During long convoys, I'd be awake sometimes in forty-to-fifty-hour stretches with nothing but ten-minute cat naps to rest my eyes, always constantly on the lookout for a potential ambush and stressed I might drive over an IED. Exhaustion such as I'd never known, yet when it was time to put the TOW into effect, I'd almost become alive with exhilaration. TOW stood for "tube-launched, optically tracked, wire guided," and it could launch a warhead that would hit a target over two and a half miles away. It was a thing of beauty, and I was proud to be a part of it.
I loved my career with the Marine Corps. I made great friends, saw plenty of action, and definitely didn't have any problems with getting girls. The Corps was an escape for me-a way to get out of a dreadful life that had been planned for me since I was born. I didn't join for any sense of patriotic duty or to avenge those who died on 9/11. I didn't have grandiose ideas that I could actually do something to stop terrorism. No, I joined the military for the sole reason that it would get me far away from West Virginia and would be a decent career for me. Fortunately, the military suited me very well and I made the rank of sergeant about halfway through year four of my six-year enlistment. I was twenty-two years old.
It was also around this time that I made a quick trip home to Cascade as a high school buddy was getting married. At the reception, I reconnected with Maria. She had been waitressing since graduation and was still living with her parents. We got very, very drunk at the reception. One thing led to another in the backseat of my car. To my surprise, at age twenty, she still had her virginity intact. Being drunk and horny, I popped her cherry.
Of course, it was immediate love for both of us. Maria left Cascade and moved to North Carolina to be with me. We got a tiny apartment just off base and played house together. I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world.
I was a marine with a hot girlfriend all my buddies lusted after.
I came home every night to a great meal and even better sex after.
Maria attended beauty school and got her license. I re-upped my enlistment and signed on for another three years. All was good and I was seriously considering popping the question to her. I didn't have a dime to my name because we were young, stupid, and didn't save anything. I would have to finance a tiny engagement ring for probably ten years, but I was convinced it was the right time. She was the one for me-I was sure of it.
But then, orders came in that my unit was being deployed to Afghanistan. It was my second tour, and I was prepared for it. It was my job, nothing more and nothing less.
I hesitated about proposing, unsure if I should hold off until I got back. There were pros and cons to both, but I was a cheap son of a bitch and ultimately decided not to spend the money on a ring at that time. I did, however, commit myself to proposing as soon as I returned.
And, yeah … things didn't go quite as I planned.
During my time back in the States, after the initial round of surgeries to try to piece my leg back together again, things were hazy for a while. I was on such high levels of pain medication, so drugged out of my mind, I probably wouldn't have recognized Maria if she had come to visit those first few weeks.
Not that it mattered because she didn't come to visit me.
At all.
She called … I had a vague recollection of that. Sometimes two or three times a day. I slurred most of my words, and she'd cry sometimes, but she always told me she loved me. I loved her back, but I wasn't sure if I ever told her that.
I didn't start to get fully lucid until they took my leg. My tibia and fibula were shattered and my femur broken in two places, held together by the external fixator, which was nothing more than a huge metal cage around my entire leg with pins attached to the outer edges and drilled down into my bones to hold them together. Portions of my flesh and muscle had been sheared off by jagged steel. My wounds oozed from infection, and a wound VAC constantly ran trying to suck the poison from my body. The pain of just sitting still was horrendous. When physical therapy moved me into my cardiac chair each day, trying to make sense of the mess of tangled wires and tubes coming out of me, I would sometimes scream in agony and jab desperately at my pain button for some measure of relief. Eventually, they had to give me an epidural just to give me the ability to get some rest during those early days.
If anyone had felt just a mere instant of what I was feeling, they would have been begging just like I had for them to cut my leg off.
I didn't have to beg overly hard though, because the doctors knew what I did. There was no saving it. So, the leg came off and with that the pain drastically lessened. When the pain lessened, they cut back on my pain meds. Once my stump was healed, I was immediately fit for a prosthesis. My amputation was above the knee. After several different sockets that had to be continually recast as my swelling decreased, I was finally fit for a C-Leg, which was just about as close to a bionic leg as you could get. Then came months of therapy … physical and occupational.
It was more grueling than anything I had ever been through before. The therapists at Walter Reed were tough sons of bitches. They didn't ever let up on me, constantly driving me to continually improve, get stronger, and succeed on my prosthesis. The C-Leg was some high-speed tech shit with sensors in the foot and ankle area that transmit data about my gait to a hydraulic system in the knee, which then helped to swing my leg forward. I had to learn to walk again-forward, backward, sideways, up steps, across rough terrains, and over curbs. At every therapy session, I was drenched in sweat and my stump would throb from the exertion. It was some amazing shit. I was happy because I wasn't suffering the type of pain I was in before, but I was still an amputee.