35
jo
Our house became something between a clinic and a funeral parlor after my dad came home from his hospital stay in Germany. The mood had changed significantly, and it was hard to remember what life was like before there were ten doctors’ appointments a week and people in and out of our house like someone died. Even Denise Hunchberg brought some sort of casserole over pretty much every day since the moment John Brooke helped Meg wheel Dad through the door. We had everything from bar food from Aunt Hannah’s late shifts at Spirits, to Denise’s Cheez-It casserole, to vibrant bouquets of flowers sent by Mrs. King herself.
Meg must have been getting better at sucking up to the woman, I thought.
The house became overcrowded and started to smell like an office-party potluck. I had finally gotten my license, so I could help take my dad to his appointments and take myself to work when I could. I thought I might have to quit my job at Pages if my dad’s doctors kept adding specialists for him to see. Unlike Meg, I liked driving on the post with my dad; we had started our own secret get-out-of-the-house club.
My dad stared up at the clock on the wall in the waiting room. “They always make me wait so long,”
“Yeah, they do. I bet this will still be faster than Dr. Alaban,” I said.
The pages of the People magazine I was scrolling through were stuck together, and I wiggled them apart. Apparently Jennifer Aniston was pregnant with twins! For the tenth time in the last year. And it was determined that they would most likely have her genetically superior locks of brown hair.
I would never understand people’s obsession with her becoming a mother. So what if she didn’t want to have children?
“No way. Dr. Alaban is just thorough, Jo.”
I looked up from the faux news story on the page. “Thorough? Dad, he takes an hour to even get to the room and has to listen to your heart like ten times before he gets it.”
My dad rolled his eyes. “Your generation is so impatient.”
I rolled my eyes right back at him and leaned forward, tucking my leg under my body in the typical cushioned waiting-room chair. “We just don’t like to waste time. Unlike yours.”
He laughed at that. “Oh, you’re not wasting time on the internet?”
“Learning, yes.”
“Learning what? How to bully people or create hashtags for catastrophic events?”
“Touché.”
The woman behind the desk smiled at me when I looked at her. She was on the phone and seemed to be happy at her job. She remembered my dad’s name each time we came to the neurologist. She was pretty, probably in her twenties. She looked like Angela from Boy Meets World.
“But your generation raised my generation to not like to sit around and wait for stuff.”
“You also don’t know what hard work is. You expect stuff to come to you. Not you.” He waved his hand at me and smiled a little. I was getting used to the chip in the corner of his front tooth. Meg bothered him about fixing it, but he didn’t want to.
“We expect things like free health care and some Social Security,” I teased. It was true, but it wasn’t either of our faults.
“Touché.” He raised his fist and playfully tapped mine in a fist-bump. He drew it back and made a weird little whishhh sound, and I tried not to laugh.
“Dad.” I bit down on my lip and shook my head. “No. Just no.”
He shrugged. He told me I was no fun, and the office phone rang again. My dad ran his fingers over the healing skin on his neck. I felt like every day it got easier to look at his wounds. The first time Meredith gave him a bath, we heard her vomiting down the hall afterward. To drown out the noise, Beth started playing the piano Laurie’s grandpa had given her, but Amy had already heard. I saw it in her cotton-flower-blue eyes when she stared down the hallway, then picked up her phone and went back to her cyberland. Sometimes I wanted to check her search history, but I couldn’t go against my essential beliefs of privacy. No matter how badly I wanted to.
Amy was acting out; we knew it had to do with my dad’s being home and everything changing so fast. Amy had to start helping Beth around the house, which, of course, Amy didn’t want to do. But Meredith was busy, and so were Meg and I. Within the six weeks since our dad had come back, Amy’s teacher had already emailed Meredith about Amy’s behavior. Dad said she was seeking attention, and I thought maybe she was, but of course she was. She was twelve and her dad not only looked different now, but he was a little different inside, too.
But of course he was; four deployments and rolling a Humvee over a roadside bomb on a residential street and barely surviving will do that to a person.
I could still see more of my original dad than my sisters could, but they barely spent time with him.
His jawline was so sharp, like Beth’s and like Meg’s. I thought I looked more like him than my sisters since I got his height. Our hair was the same dried-mud, milk-chocolate brown color.
His leg was still plastered, and the skin on his cheek had started to heal into a waxy coat. The skin they used to replace the skin he lost was so red. The week before, I showed my family a video about a group of doctors in Brazil who were testing tilapia skin on humans with burn damage. Basically a skin graft. Only my dad thought it was interesting and amusing. Meredith left the table.
I got my phone out of my pocket and had a text from Laurie. He asked what time I would be done and said he wanted me to come over when I got back from running around with my dad.
“Who you talking to that has you smiling that way?” my dad asked.
“Smiling? No one.” I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips. I wasn’t smiling.
“Uh-huh.”
My phone pinged and Laurie’s name popped up on the screen.
“It’s just Laurie,” I told my dad when his eyes questioned me.
He jutted his chin out. “Just Laurie. Hmph. So, this Laurie kid is your boyfriend?”
I laughed. “No, Dad. He’s not.”
The clock on the wall loudly ticked the seconds by. It was louder than a second ago.
“I don’t think he knows that. He sure seems like your boyfriend. You wouldn’t hide that from me, would you?” My dad’s mouth was a little crooked, and he said it would be like that from then on, that even two surgeries couldn’t get his jaw quite back where it was before the blast.
I shook my head. “Dad.”
It wasn’t even that I was weirded out talking about boys with my dad; it was that I didn’t have much to say about Laurie and me.
“Josephine. It’s not like I’m going to lock you in the house or keep you from seeing him. I just want to know what’s going on in your life.”
I sighed. “Just because we hang out a lot doesn’t mean he’s my boyfriend.”
“That boy is sprawled out on the floor of my living room every day. When he’s not, you’re over at his house. Seems like you’re dating to me. When I was dating your mom, she kept trying to tell me we were just friends. Friends don’t do the stuff—”
“Dad! Seriously!” I yelped in horror.
Not actual horror, of course; I knew that my parents were . . . romantic together, but I would be fine to never ever hear it come from my dad’s mouth.
“What?” He smiled.
I rolled my eyes and started laughing. His chin tilted upward, and I could see the jagged crimson scar from the curve of his chin down to his collarbone. I was already getting used to seeing the new additions to my dad’s body. Sometimes I noticed Meredith or my sisters staring at them mindlessly, like my dad couldn’t see them doing it. I knew they didn’t mean to, so I let them grieve and get used to the way it would be in this new version of our lives, after he came home.
I thought when he returned, it would be like before. We would go to Disneyland in Los Angeles for our vacation this fall. Meredith kept saying it wasn’t nearly as magical as the one in Florida and was a third of the size, but Meg and Amy were dying to see the Hollywood sign and have a possible run-in with Robert Pattinson at the famous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. Family vacations weren’t exactly my favorite thing, but Meredith always told me that one day I would be glad that we had taken them.
“What’s up with Meg and Brooke?” my dad asked.
I looked at him for one second and then at the scuff on my Keds. Meredith had told me not to get white shoes, but I didn’t listen.
“Are you writing a gossip blog about your daughters’ dating lives? What’s with all the questions?”
“No, I just want to know what’s happening. Hunchberg said Meg’s trying to get married to Brooke. I laughed it off, but I actually don’t know if that’s true. And you know more than she would ever tell me.”
“I mean, they’re dating still. I think.” I thought about how Brooke was coming over less, and Meg was spending more time at Mrs. King’s and that Shia was in town.
“Not getting married, though? They’re too young.”
“John’s what . . . twentysomething? And Meg is twenty.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“You and mom got married right after high school.”
“Times were different then.”
That was an understatement. Times were better now, for the most part. We were in another war, but weren’t we always? I felt like people still got married young, around Army bases at least. The restaurants surrounding the post were filled with young wives of soldiers working as servers and bartenders. A few girls from Meg’s graduating class were already married to soldiers stationed at Fort Cyprus. Women are more accepted into colleges and work places than when my parents got married, but the tough life of the Army made it hard for both.
“How was it so different?” I asked.
“Well, girls your guys’ age don’t have the same role as when your mom was marrying me. Especially in the military. It’s a rough job, being gone and fighting for your life every other year. And then you add children in there, there was no time for the woman to work. In some cases yeah, but mostly this was the way it was. But with the way the economy is, it’s nearly impossible to feed a family of four on the average soldier’s salary.”
I scoffed at the truth of that. “Which is complete bullshit.”
“Jo!” My dad raised his voice a little and narrowed his eyes.
“Sorry. Anyway, it’s crazy how soldiers can barely feed their families most of the time, but the politicians are spending billions on jets and dinners and whatever they put on their expense accounts. It’s so fuc—” I stopped myself from cussing in front of my dad again.
The door clicked open and a nurse in Hello Kitty scrubs came out into the waiting room.
“Lieutenant Spring,” she said, clipboard in hand.
“Do you want me to go back with you?” I asked my dad. Sometimes he did, and sometimes he didn’t.
“Uh, yeah. Come on with me.”
I pushed my dad’s wheelchair down the hall and almost ran into the wall. I would need to get better at steering, I knew, especially since no one could tell us if or when my dad would walk on his own again. The nurse had such a sweet face that my dad didn’t even complain to her about waiting so long. She told us her name was Sirine, and the tag on her ACU said ORLEN. She had her hair drawn back in tight strings, pulling at her scalp, and gelled or sprayed down. Not a single frizzy hair. I wondered if hair frizzies were against Army regulations.
The room was stark white and smelled like latex and some kind of cleaning product. I sat in a chair next to the desk, and my dad’s chair was in front of me, next to the exam table. It was covered in thick white paper that always crunched when you sat on it.
“Are you in any pain right now?” Sirine asked my dad.
He widened his eyes at her. “You’re joking, right?”
She smiled and faced the computer in front of her. “On a scale from one to ten, what level of pain are you feeling?” She pulled her military ID card out and pushed it into a slot in the keyboard of the computer. Her unpainted nails tapped away at the keys.
“I would say a good . . . two thousand.”
“Two thousand, got it.” She laughed. “So, Dr. Jenner will be in shortly. Let me just get your vitals the best I can.”
When I checked my phone, I had a text from Hayton, the espresso-infused coworker who I worked the most shifts with, asking if I would cover her shift. No matter how long the doctor was going to take to come to the room, I wouldn’t be back in time to take her shift.
My dad spent an hour getting lectured on different types of impact trauma and how he would continue to be monitored. My dad kept telling me that there was nothing to worry about, but as the doctor kept going and going, she made my bad feeling worse.
I wasn’t sure if I trusted my dad the same way after that appointment.