Broken

Broken-2

Mel stood, looked at the blood on her arm from a long scrap from elbow to wrist.

“I hear you, Daddy,” she mumbled.

The run home was slower, hampered by a limp, but she ran. After all, she was a Morris, and they don’t give up.

Daymares

he coffee was even stronger than the sludge commonly found in a ship’s galley, and Mel loved it. Periodically, her duties at Navy Central Command brought her to Bagdad, a city she’d grown to love. She mourned deeply the damage to both the city and its people by the long presence of war. She always managed to sneak in a visit to this coffee house, near a market from which she could hear the bustle and drone of barter and business, much as it had been practiced in this city for millennia. The sounds gave her hope that Bagdad would survive, just as it had so many wars before.

Her official business had been brief, simply checking on the status of a supply depot which serviced many of the U.S. and allied military commands stationed in Iraq. She and her aide, Lieutenant Harold Canton, had made short work of the inspection and material review. It didn’t take long to know that the Marine major and his crew knew what they were doing. She and Canton had stopped as they crossed through the edge of the city, heading for the airfield where a plane waited to take them back to Bahrain. Canton left her alone at the table, his cup growing cold, as he went in search of the head, something that could be a challenge with the language barriers. He may be gone for a while.

Open before her on the table was Mel’s ever-present notebook, and she scribbled reminders about what she wished to include in her report to Central Command. She took no notes about her other meeting, the secret meeting. Zadab, her lover of fifteen years, had a beloved cousin, Sherine, who now headed an organization that sought to protect Iraqi women, especially those targeted for honor killings. Any time Mel came to Baghdad, they would meet, and Mel would do what she could, even if it was only to pass along a knick-knack or family news from Zadab. They would meet in the same place, the backroom of a small shop. Sherine could not afford to be seen in the company of a U.S. Navy captain, not with the animosity felt by so many Iraqis because of the American “occupation.” Mel’s commander knew and approved of the contact, and she was careful to officially, if secretly, report on her meetings, a path which the admiral hoped would help, in time, to improve relations with the women of Iraq.

Mel paused, feeling the heft of the pen in her hand. Her thoughts drifted back to that birthday when she and Zadab had actually both been home, sharing daily life in their Virginia suburb. Her birthday consisted of dinner at her favorite restaurant, a movie, and the company of the woman who was her companion and best friend. Zadab presented the pen to Mel over dinner, and that moment remained in Mel’s mind as a precious memory. As lovers, their relationship had always been lukewarm, but that hadn’t mattered much. Both were more married to their work than each other. In an odd way, it made their relationship deeper, if somewhat difficult to define. Mel always carried the pen, an expensive writing instrument. The feel of it in her hand reminded her that she had a home, a place where she could truly rest and know she was safe.

Stretching tired muscles, Mel laid the pen on the table as she reached far over her head, striving to ease the tension in her neck. She hadn’t noticed that the table was not level, and the pen rolled, falling from the edge, evading Mel’s efforts to capture it. She sighed as she watched it roll to the base of a concrete pillar that supported the roof which shaded the open-air café. She rose from her chair, took a stride, stretching to retrieve the pen, her left foot extended beyond the edge of the pillar. She grasped the precious pen in her hand, relieved to see it was undamaged.

Then the world ended.

Reality rushed past Mel at the speed of light, leaving her momentarily deaf and blind, and barely aware of excruciating pain that overwhelmed her senses. In the time it took to take half a breath, the café transformed from a pleasant oasis in a war-torn land, to the epicenter of destruction itself. Despite the protection of the concrete pillar, the concussion of the explosion alone sucked the very air from Mel’s lungs, and left her ears hopelessly plugged from the abrupt change in air pressure from normal air to intensely dense to normal air again as the flash of the explosion passed. Clutched in her right hand was the pen, the wayward pen that had saved her life. She lay in the rubble, confused and disoriented, her eyes focused on a wall across the way, and she watched as the earthen bricks, formerly covered by stucco, teetered and finally fell in a domino effect that took her back to a teenaged memory. Her brother, Hoyt, had failed to balance a stack of fresh hay, and it had toppled in a slow-motion taunting of her brother’s efforts. Insanely, she fought laughter, recalling how she and her father had teased a frustrated Hoyt.

The pain found its way past the initial shock, and she raised her left leg to determine how badly she was injured. Her foot and ankle were gone with the top three inches of her combat boot still hanging tenaciously to the stump. Blood flowed from the opening, and Mel’s intelligence and training stepped in to overpower the euphoria of shock. She undid her belt buckle and pulled the belt free, hampered by the pen in her hand. Despite the threat, she took a moment to carefully stow the pen, her lifeline, into a pocket of her BDU blouse. She wrapped the belt just above the bleeding stump and twisted, grasping a shard of wood from the rubble, to place at the top of the twist. When tight enough to slow the flow of blood, she tucked the sliver of wood underneath the band around her leg before dipping her finger in her own blood and painting a “T” on her forehead. Her training held, even in trauma. That “T” would let the corpsmen know a tourniquet was hiding under the blanket they may use to save her precious body warmth. She lay back, wondering if unconsciousness would come soon, masking the intensity of her pain.

Canton! Where’s Canton? She thought, praying that the young lieutenant had been safe from the explosion. That was when her hearing returned. A sound, incongruous in the devastation of war, left her feeling even more disoriented.

A toddler’s cries wailed, louder than the moans she heard from others injured. She rotated her head, striving to triangulate the sound with her still limited hearing. It was then she remembered the Iraqi couple, a small boy in the mother’s lap, all sitting at a table near her own. She turned her head and fought the urge to be sick at what she saw. Half the father was simply gone; the dirt and charred black from the explosion marred the white of the clothing, covering what remained of the body. Amazingly, there was no blood on the clothing, only the tell-tale red where his upper half had been severed from the bottom. There was no sign of the rest of the man. The woman’s body was ravaged as well, although she had been partially protected by the same concrete pillar which saved Mel. One solid, open wound replaced what had once been her back and the back of her head. She lay tightly balled, some obstruction obviously beneath her. The sounds of a wailing child came from beneath her mangled body.

Mel pulled herself inch by inch toward the woman and the child still protected beneath the mother, pausing now and again to push aside a piece of rubble that blocked her path. When she reached them, Mel struggled to push the body away and retrieve the crying child. Shocked, she felt movement, as the mangled mother sought to help her, raising slightly on one arm. Mel pulled the child—miraculously with no apparent wounds—toward her as she looked into the fading eyes of a dying woman.

Mel opened her mouth to speak.

Soaked in sweat, Mel awoke. She lay atop her bed, still in much the same position she had assumed when first reclining for an afternoon nap. Tears joined the salt of the sweat on her face.

The same damn place, Mel thought. The dream always ends in the same damn place. Why can’t I remember?

Mel sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the prosthesis where it hung on the bedpost. She placed it in her lap then froze and closed her eyes. A stew of emotions bubbled in her heart and mind, and she sat perfectly still, letting the hodge-podge of feelings swish around in her mind, like holding a mouthful of casserole on the tongue, striving to identify the subtle spice, giving it a unique flavor. Pain, fear, and anger were all there, dominant flavors, but there was something else, something that felt like it might be the source of the wall that kept her dreams and her memories from moving forward, completing the horrific story of the worst day of her life. When the nature of that elusive emotion floated to the top, puzzlement joined it.

Guilt, Mel thought. Why guilt?

She threw the prosthesis on the bed and hopped, one-legged, into the bathroom, turning the cold water on full blast at the sink. She threw handfuls of piercingly cold well water on her face, even the back of her neck. It helped. The breathtaking cold reminded her she was alive.

The woman staring back at her in the mirror seemed strange. She was thin with dark circles under her eyes. Mel could barely recognize the confident and determined Naval officer whom she knew so well and admired.

“What did you do?” she mumbled to the image. “Why guilt?”

She looked away from the mirror toward her hands, clutching desperately to the porcelain of the sink. The grip on such solidity was the only thing that kept them from shaking uncontrollably.

What did I do?

Looking at the surface of the coffee in her cup, Mel frowned at the ripples she saw there. Her hand was shaking, and she hated that. The fresh, spring air comforted her as she sat on the open front porch of the family ranch home, but the dream—the pervasive dream—still haunted her. The physical disability that all could see barely troubled her anymore. It was the incomplete memory—that f*****g dream—that drove her to the solitude of the ranch and left her feeling as unfit company for any other human being.

The cell phone vibrated on the patio table beside the chair where she rested.

I actually have good cell signal today, Mel thought as she picked up the phone. The music she’d chosen for the ring tone gave her comfort, even before she answered.

“Hey,” Mel said.

“We don’t talk for a week and you answer the phone ‘hey’?” Zadab answered.

“Sorry Hon…” Mel started, then caught herself, “Zadab. Still feeling my way around our new situation.”

There was a pause before Zadab responded. “I will always love you,” she said.

“But not in love with me.”

“No,” Zadab said. “Were we ever ‘in love’?”

Mel tried to choke back a bitter laugh, with little success. “No, we weren’t, but I will always love you too.”

“Are you taking care of yourself?” Zadab asked.

“Of course,” Mel responded. She took a deep breath. “How’s Lelia?”