“Ican’tbe late, Mom. Janet already wants to take me off the Wednesday shift and give it to her niece!”
Grace pulled off her dishwashing gloves. “I’m very sorry this happened to your bike, but putting the word ‘please’ in front of your request would really go a long way.”
Katie’s eyes rolled. “Fine, Mom.Please…”
Grace shook her head in disgust. Every day her daughter grew more insolent. She had refused to even come over to say hello to B?o and Anh the other day when Grace brought them to the club. Katie’s focus seemed only to be on making enough pocket money to be ableto go out with her friends or to save up for a pair of designer jeans that insulted Grace with their ridiculous price tag.
What was next? Katie asking her for a new bike? Grace had already firmly made up her mind that she was going to tell Katie that they expected her to put some of the money she’d earned toward a newer model if she didn’t want to keep having to repair the old one. The girl needed to realize how lucky she was to have the life she enjoyed. The last time Grace went to the motherhouse and brought some homemade muffins, despite their very limited grasp of English, every one of the Vietnamese refugees already knew the wordspleaseandthank you. Was it so much to ask that her daughter to do the same?
Grace pulled a dishcloth off the hook and began drying the frying pan. She could feel Katie’s impatience rising off her skin like steam.
She waited for a beat. Then another.
“Mom!”
“If you wait a second and change your tone, young lady, I’ll throw on some clothes and drive you.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, please!”
There were more than enough clocks in the Golden household for Grace to realize she needed to move quickly so Katie wouldn’t be late.
CHAPTER 47
THERE ARE FRACTURES INJACK’S MEMORY, TINY FAULT LINESthat absorb moments he can’t remember clearly. His mind’s a constellation of jumbled images and words that he isn’t sure actually happened or he imagined under a cloud of morphine. He has spent years trying to decipher whether the recurring dream he experiences nearly every night actually happened—or whether he has dreamt the scenario so often that he now believes it to be fact. But whether it is a memory he has conjured or something he had lived through, it continues to haunt him. In the dream, he’s on the evac chopper, minutes after Doc has put out the fire on his head. Chief is loading Gomez’s stretcher on board. Jack hears a voice saying,He’s not going to make it, but there is a third nameless marine who is crouched next to him. He reaches for Jack’s hand and squeezes it feeling the faintest bit of life still in his fingers. “He’s alive,” he tells the others, and the helicopter lifts off.
The rest would be a haze to him as he is transported to a field hospital where he is intubated and the Vaseline bandages that Doc had wrapped his face in are removed. The nurses have coated him in a thick paste of Silvadene and wrapped his face with gauze.
“If he makes it through the night, we have to get him on the next plane to Japan,” someone says. “We can’t do anything for him here.”
Within twenty-four hours, Jack is on a hospital plane to Okinawa, where he remains heavily sedated until they can get him to the best military burn unit in the States, Brooke Army Medical Hospital in San Antonio, Texas.
He does not hear the doctors and nurses questioning whether they are reading his file correctly, his Record of Emergency Data form only has a single name listed: his mother, Eleanor Grady. Within the hour, they will learn she is deceased.
“Are you saying this marine has no living relative? Not a single other person listed on his form?” The doctor’s voice is incredulous.
“Yes,” the nurse answers. Her voice is steeped in sadness as she looks over to Jack, still under sedation in the hospital bed, his face is wrapped in layers of white gauze bandages that make him look like a mummy.
“He whimpers at night,” she adds. “It’s terrible to hear.”
“There’s nothing more painful than a burn … and this—Jesus Christ … the white phosphorous burned half his face down to nearly the bone.” The surgeon sucks in his breath. “It’s really a miracle that this man is still alive.”
Over the next few days, Jack’s face and scalp is debrided of any remaining dead tissue and he receives his first skin graft. The surgical team takes skin from his buttocks and thighs, and then reattach it piece by piece to where he’s been wounded. They cannot restore his vision in his left eye, but they do their best to create a flap to create the allusion of an eyelid.
When he awakens from the long and intensive surgery, Jack can be heard swearing and screaming. In his delirium, he believes his face is still on fire. He repeatedly begs the nurses and doctors to let him die.
He floats in and out of consciousness and is only vaguely aware that a handful of nurses, after learning he has no remaining family now, come sit by his bedside and hold his hand. One of them plays music from a small transistor radio that she puts on the bedside table, next to the pitcher of water, a box of tissues, and a stack of plastic cups.
“What’s your name?” he manages to ask her as the words struggle to emerge from his dry lips. Although he is still wrapped like a mummy, he can just about make out her face from one his one good eye.
“Barbara,” she replies softly. “Barbara Starr.”
She leans over toward the radio and adjusts the antenna until the sound shifts from static to song.
Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” filled the room and the music, so quietly sung, roused something inside him. Emotions that had been numbed by the enormity of his trauma and by the pain medicine bubbled forth.
Jack’s eyes moistened with tears.
Barbara pulled some tissues from the bedside and dabbed both his eyes. Beneath the white coverlet, Jack’s chest lifted and deflated with each deep breath.
