All she’d wanted to do was help.
Standing there at Long Binh in her dress uniform, Vietnam nothing more than truck transports and dusty airstrips so far, noise and heavy heat and incredible smells. Anxious, certain. Saluting the assignments officer. Readyfor whatever he gave her. The rest of the United States was swinging onto the antiwar bandwagon, but Claire Maguire had enlisted right out of training to take part in a war.
“They were dying,” she said aloud before she realized it,her memory still caught at that moment when she’d smiled at the news she was getting an evac hospital. She was goingto the real war. “No matter what else was going on, therewere too many boys dying, and I knew I could help.”
She felt Tony’s hand in her hair, his breath against her, hissteady, certain strength. In the darkness, it helped.
Even so, the old tears crowded her throat, the truth noone had wanted from her caught too long in darkness. “AllI wanted to do was help.”
For a moment, Tony simply held her. Simply stroked herhair, as if he were the mother and she the child who hadbeen frightened. Injured. Betrayed.
“Do you know what they called posttraumatic stress inthe Civil War?” Tony asked, his voice impossibly gentle.
“What does that have to do with it?” she retorted in desperation, not wanting to hear more. Not able to give more.
“Just hear me out,” he said. “Then I’ll be finished. InVietnam, we call it PTSD. In Korea it was battle psychosis.In World War II, battle fatigue, and World War I, shellshock. Do you know what they called it in the Civil War,Claire?”
“No,” she snapped. “Tell me.”
He didn’t just tell her. He faced her with it. Lifted her inhis arms until they were eye to eye in the dimness and shewas forced to wash in that mystical water. “In the Civil War,Claire,” he said so gently she wanted to cry, “they called it soldier’s heart.”
Claire couldn’t answer. She couldn’t breathe past thesudden agony in her chest.
“I just wanted you to know,” he said gently, brushing afinger along her cheek. “I think it’s a much better name forit, don’t you?”
Tears stung her eyes and spilled over onto his chest. “Yes,” she admitted on a breath. “Yes.”
Because here in the dark, in the arms of a man she barely knew, Claire could feel her heart tearing apart all over againwhere it had never really been healed. She saw again the mugshe’d held in her hand that day, and how when she’d looked back down at it, a thick droplet of blood had hit the rim andtrailed an obscene path down the white side and across thecaduceus printed there. Over her thumb, her wrist. One dropof blood, and she could never quite clean it from her memory, like Lady Macbeth.
She’d scrubbed for years, and she still saw it.
“I’m here,” Tony whispered, his arms tight around herin the darkness, his mouth against her hair, his heart beating so close she could almost hear it. “I’m here, Claire.”
And for the first time in years, when Claire sobbed,someone held her.
