Riders (3 page)

“What happened after the fall?”

“I woke up in the hospital. Walter Reed Medical Center. I’d been in ICU for a few days when I came around. My mom flew out to be with me but I only have a vague memory of that. Of anything from those days, actually, because I was either unconscious or drugged. Kinda like right now. By the way, Nat, Natalie … Cordero. I have a supersensitive stomach and it’s not liking whatever you gave me. Puking’s a personal specialty. I hope you’re quick.”

“Your files from Walter Reed are interesting,” she says, without missing a beat. “You were released within a week of being admitted.” She looks up, her eyes going a little wide. “That’s awfully fast.”

“Awfully so.”

“Where did you go afterward?”

“I was transferred home. I’d stabilized much sooner than the doctors expected. They couldn’t seem to get a good grasp on what needed to be fixed. The status of my injuries … they described it as ‘dynamic.’ The docs did what they could, set the major bones—the femur and tibia—then decided to give the swelling a chance to subside before bringing me back for further assessment.”

“Your injury status was
dynamic
?”

“Constantly changing.”

“Thank you, I know what it means. Where’s home?”

“Half Moon Bay, California.”

“And what happened there?”

“Things got weird.”

Cordero sits back in her chair. She threads her fingers together. “Tell me about the weird,” she says.

So I do.

C
HAPTER
5

Okay. Home.

I was only there for about a day, but a lot happened in that time. It was when I first started noticing that things with me weren’t right.

From the second I woke up, I was so disoriented that I didn’t recognize my own room. I remember thinking the desk and the surfboard hanging over the window looked familiar before I realized they were actually mine. And my body felt strange. Not how I expected for being so busted up. I had air casts on my left leg and arm—I’d fallen on that side—but I didn’t feel any pain. My muscles only felt swollen, like they’d been stuffed with cotton balls. I chalked that up to all the pain meds I’d been taking.

Another strange thing about that morning was being alone. For days I’d been under the constant care of doctors and nurses at Walter Reed, then during my transfer home. Before that I’d been surrounded by guys all the time, in a nonstop flow of activity. You could call RASP a very
dynamic
environment. But that day in my room all I heard was the far-off hum of Highway 1. I was hyperaware of not having anywhere to be for the first time in months, so I just stayed there for a while, staring at the stripes of sunshine on my window blinds, absorbing my new situation.

Mom hadn’t moved anything in my room since I’d left home. My desk was still crowded with baseball trophies. My camping gear and backpacks were still piled in the corner. My graduation cap and gown were still thrown over the back of my chair. Everything looked too flimsy and bright. Like toys compared to the gear I’d been using in the Army.

After a minute or two, I rallied the courage to take a look at myself. My injuries could have definitely been worse but they were no cakewalk, either. Beneath the air casts and my clothes, I knew I was black-and-blue. Stitched up like a quilt. A real mess. Once the swelling went down, it was possible I’d need surgeries in my arm, wrist, and leg, followed by months of rehab before I could even think about getting back to Fort Benning. I’d been told at Walter Reed that could all take up to a year, but I’d refused to consider what that really meant in front of my mom and the doctors. Now I did, and it just about killed me.

I don’t expect you to understand this but enlisting in the Army, it was … um. It was a really good thing for me. I’d been in hell since my dad died. But RASP had turned things around for me. It was something positive when I’d needed it, and lying on my bed that morning, I couldn’t accept the setback I’d just been dealt. That I was going to miss
a year
while I healed. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t go back to how I’d been before.

As that sank in, anger moved through me like nothing I’d ever felt before. A feeling way bigger than frustration or disappointment. It was
rage.
Rage that felt like heat inside me, a fever to the millionth degree. So much it seemed measurable, like if you had the right lens, the right equipment, you’d see thermal waves in the air around me.

I was on strict orders not to move unless absolutely necessary. Parts of my femur had shattered and had only just been set. Right then, I couldn’t have cared less. With that anger sizzling inside me, I couldn’t lay there any longer.

I shifted to the edge of the bed, slid my legs off the mattress, and sat up. A head rush hit me hard, my pulse a shrill cry in my ears, and the room carouseled around me, but I knew there’d be more. I braced myself for the pain I knew was coming.

It never did. Aside from dizziness and anger that felt like burning cordite inside me, I felt okay. My left arm and leg felt puffy and a little numb, but that was all.

My mom had left a note on my bedside table beneath a glass of water and my bottles of pain meds—a pharmacy’s worth. She was on a quick run to the grocery store. I was supposed to take my next doses as soon as I woke up because I was already two hours late. She’d also left my crutches leaning against the wall. I passed on the drugs, grabbed a crutch for my healthy arm, and stood.

Still fine.

I kept going.

To walk with only one side of my body, I had to drag my crutch in a half circle ahead of me, then step, then drag, then step, sort of like a human compass. I figured that out as I left my room and made my way into our short hallway, past the pictures of me and my twin sister, Anna, playing naked on the beach as babies, then me with braces and zits in Little League uniforms, then me with braces and zits before junior prom. I attribute most of my mental toughness to growing up walking that hallway day after day.

I gave myself a goal to get to the front door because
setting goals is how I do things and I needed to keep moving. I needed to feel like I could still get around on my own. If I could just get past the front door, it’d be a sign that I was back in control, and already recovering.

As I hobbled into our small living room, I noticed some moving boxes stacked under the window and stopped. Anna’s painting of the ocean had been taken down from its spot above the couch and leaned against the wall. Our bookshelf was empty except for two framed photos. One of my dad kneeling by a swordfish on his best friend’s fishing boat, the other of me as a scrawny-ass kid riding a two-foot wave like I was the king of everything.

The signs were all there. We were selling the house.

I hadn’t expected that, though I should’ve. My mom managed a seafood restaurant by the harbor. She made an okay living but she was paying for Anna’s college. I tried to help. I gave her as much as I could from my Army paychecks, but it wasn’t much. Without my dad’s income, I knew we couldn’t stay in our house—the house my dad had built—and give my sister a college education. Still. I hadn’t realized we were that close to selling. I hated that my mom had to handle this—the sale, a move, her
life
—alone. But I didn’t know how to help. How could I take some pressure off? Especially now that I was busted up?

Hobbling past the moving boxes, I made it to the front door and stepped outside. The concrete walkway felt cool under my right foot; my left was safely encased in the air cast.

Half Moon Bay, where I grew up, is a small town southwest of San Francisco right on the Pacific Ocean. It’s a fishing town and a surfing town and the smell there is a combination of lobster traps and highway exhaust and tourist restaurants. You know the smell of fish and chips? That’s home for me. A hundred percent, it’s home. It’s the best smell in the world. I’d missed it, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about the move. Soon this
wouldn’t
be home. Where would my mom go? And everywhere I looked I saw memories of my dad. The street, where we used to throw the baseball. The driveway, where he used to wash his truck. His workshop, in the garage.

I’d already lost him. Was I going to lose these memories of him, too?

My next-door neighbor, Mrs. Collins, was out tending the roses along her picket fence. Mrs. C had just retired after being a nurse for forty years. Her husband had flown F-4s for the Air Force in Vietnam. Mrs. C had never had kids, so she’d sort of adopted Anna and me as unofficial grandkids. She loved to bake and had this great sense of humor. The day I enlisted, she brought over an olallieberry pie with a note that said,
Dear Gideon, The Army is a fine path too, I suppose.

As much as I liked her, I was in no mood to talk. But I shuffled over to her anyway, because I knew my mom would never hear the end of it if I didn’t say hello.

“Hey, Mrs. C,” I said, trying to settle myself down. The personal anger atmosphere I’d developed was still with me, this searing heat that seeped from my skin. “How you doing today?”

“Gideon?” Her eyes met mine. They seemed foggy, like she wasn’t really focusing on me. And she’d frozen in place, letting the long red rose she’d just clipped fall to the grass.

“Mrs. Collins? You all right?”

She blinked. “Of course I am. I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I didn’t say you did. What is it you want?” she demanded, her cheeks jiggling.

I didn’t really register her question right away. It seemed too harsh, and her gaze had gone from foggy to granite. “I was just walking to the beach.”

Actually I’d been hoping she’d heard about my accident and would offer to bake me a get-well pie, but not anymore. She was starting to freak me out.

“Liar.”
She pointed the clippers at me. “You’re not going to the beach, young man. All you’re doing is standing there wasting my time!”

“Uh,
what
?” I didn’t understand. This was the little old lady who asked me to catch and release house spiders. Who smiled when she was sitting on her porch—alone. I mean …
wasting her time
? She lived for visits from me and Anna.

“Get on your way!” she yelled. She pulled off a gardening glove and tossed it at me. I dodged, but not very well with the cast and the crutches, and it smacked me on the back. “Scat!”

That sounded like a good idea to me. I dragged myself down the street, confused and shaken up. I made a mental note to talk to my mom. Mrs. C was getting up there in age. Maybe it was time someone checked her out.

I hobbled past the Marshburns’ and the Harringtons’ down to the end of our court. I knew better than to head into the sand with my injuries, so I stopped at the trailhead. Beyond the dunes and beneath the fog, the ocean was there, big and dependable. You could always count on the ocean to be the ocean.

As I stood there, I realized I still felt no pain in my leg or my arm. My doctors had been way off on their estimates for my recovery. A
year,
they’d told me. No way. Six months was my new target for getting back to Benning. Why not? Physically, I was feeling way better than I expected. Mentally, I had a full tank of frustration and anger to fuel me. And my pre-Army life offered nothing I wanted. My buddies and my sister were away at college. And with the house selling, I wouldn’t even have that anymore. I had to get out of there.

Down the beach, I spotted the Harringtons’ dog loping across the shallow waves. Jackson was more grizzly bear than Labrador. He’d been my running partner before I left home. I called him, and smiled as he came bounding over.

Ten feet shy of me, he dug his paws into the sand and stood tall, ears on high alert like he didn’t recognize me.

“Easy, boy. It’s me.” I’d known him since he was only a couple of weeks old.

His lips curled and he bared his teeth, letting out a low, rumbling growl.

“Jackson, it’s me.”

He charged before I got the words out, his hackles lifting, his mouth snapping.

I swung my crutch forward. “Jackson,
back
!”

But he kept snarling and lunging at me no matter what I yelled, pushing me back toward sand where I knew I’d lose my footing. I thought ahead. If I fell, I’d use my arm with the cast to shield me from his bites.

I’d just stepped off the asphalt when Jackson stopped. His ears pricked up. Then he took off, responding to the voice I could now hear calling him up the street.

I watched him disappear around the side of the Harringtons’ house, my heart banging against my chest.

What
was
that?

I’d had enough fresh air for the day. I hustled home, relieved that Mrs. C had gone inside, too. Shooting through my front door, I came face-to-face with my mom.

“Whoa! Mom! I was—”

I was what? Freaked out by a little old lady and a dog? But the sight of my mom put that all out of my mind, and it was good. Just real good to see her without being in the haze of painkillers.

I hadn’t had an actual conversation with her in weeks, since before I started RASP, and there were a dozen questions I wanted to ask her. If she was doing okay with the house thing. If she was lonely without Anna and me around. If she’d considered dating again—just a yes or no answer would do on that one. I knew she’d move on eventually. She was tough, my mom. And she was young. She’d had Anna and me when she was only twenty and she took care of herself and all that. A lot of times people thought she was Anna’s older sister, since they looked so much alike. Way more than Anna and me.

A second or two passed before I realized we were still standing there. Mom hadn’t said a word and neither had I. For all that I’d wanted to ask her, I couldn’t execute an emotional pivot. I still had this pissed-off furnace cranking inside me. When I finally spoke, what came out of my mouth was, “Were you ever planning to tell me about the house?”

She started in surprise. “We are
not
talking about the house right now, Gideon. We are talking about
you
. Were you trying to scare the life out of me? I leave for half an hour and you disappear? You’re not even supposed to be out of bed!”