I forced my eyelids open, but they closed again almost immediately. I tried again, catching glimpses of my surroundings. A woman was talking on a wall phone. Judging by the scrubs and what she was saying, she was a nurse. She watched me from the corner of her eye, then looked over me and checked the beeping monitors. My eyes closed, and she hung up the phone. I forced my eyelids up again, seeing her grab a chart.
“Don't try to talk,” she said as my eyes closed again. “Just nod if you can hear me.”
I nodded as I opened my eyes. It came as a surprise that I had a tube in my mouth.
What the hell happened?
“Let's get that taken care of.” A man's voice spoke from just outside my peripheral vision.
The doctor appeared a moment later, and the scraping pull from my throat made me gag. The nurse gave me a few drops of water from a long straw and settled my head back on the pillows. Everything was fuzzy, but I was still shocked at how weak I felt.
“You should feel more aware in a moment,” the doctor said. “Then we can talk. Well, I'll talk and you'll probably just want to listen. Those ventilator tubes can be uncomfortable.”
I swallowed around the swollen fire in my throat and pried my eyes open again. This time I felt strong enough to keep them that way. I turned my head slightly, my stomach lurching at the dizziness that roiled over me.
After a moment, the doctor came into focus as he sat down next to my bed. He was somewhere in his middle forties with a severely receded hairline. What was left of his black hair sat far back on his head, but showed no signs of gray. He pushed round wire-rimmed glasses up his nose and gave me a tight-lipped smile.
“Sergeant Welch,” he said. “I'm Dr. Bouton, the chief of Neurology. First, I'd like to thank you for your service.”
I nodded, then asked the first question I needed answered. “How long?” The fire in my throat made my eyes water.
“Two weeks.”
I shook my head and the doctor peered over his glasses at me.
“You mean how long until you can get back out there.” It was a statement, not a question. He must've worked with soldiers before.
The nurse lowered the chart for a moment, and I felt her dark eyes brush across my face. My stomach suddenly clenched. All my limbs were intact, I could see that. I wiggled my fingers and toes. There was nothing I could see that should've caused her reaction.
Dr. Bouton's face was frighteningly blank. “I think we'd better go over a few things before you ask any more questions.”
I shifted impatiently and another wave of dizziness made me feel sick. The nurse carefully adjusted my pillows, and then gave me a few more drops of water from the straw.
“Do you remember how you got injured?” Dr. Bouton asked. “Let's keep this simple. Go ahead and blink once for 'yes,' twice for 'no.'”
I blinked once. I remembered a bit more now. The soldiers who'd walked into the middle of our assignment. The one I hadn't been able to save. And the one with the green eyes. For a moment, I could feel his blood soaking into my uniform. I wondered if he'd made it. He'd been alive when everything had gone black.
“By a mix of miracle and your peak physical condition, you were able to get far enough from the blast radius to only have minor injuries. Some scrapes and bruises, a couple of pieces of shrapnel we had to dig out of your back and legs, but those are all surface injuries that are mostly healed,” Dr. Bouton said. His mouth tightened for a moment before he continued, “Unfortunately, the shock wave from the blast caused a brain injury, and that's what put you into a coma for the past two weeks.”
“Dizzy?” I asked.
“I was afraid of that. The blast damaged your inner ear. That's the cause of the dizziness you're feeling.”
My chest tightened and suddenly, I couldn't breathe.
His voice softened. “The vertigo may go away, or it may be something that effects you for the rest of your life. As for your hearing...we don't know anything for certain, but from what I've seen, the damage is irreversible.”
I blinked my eyes twice and then twice again. No. He couldn't be right.
Dr. Bouton took the chart from the nurse and reviewed it carefully. “Why don't we concentrate on today? How is your pain? Think about it overall and show me a number: one is barely noticeable and five is unbearable.”
I held up one finger. I was uncomfortable, but I'd felt worse after other missions.
“Hungry?”
I nodded and was struck with a wave of nausea. Shit. I screwed my eyes shut and willed it to pass. This couldn't be happening. When it did, I looked at the doctor and blinked once.
“We're going to have to start you with the soft stuff,” Dr. Bouton said. “You've been on a feeding tube for a while. I'm not sure how well you'd do with solid food right now. Just think of it as a smoothie. I'm sure you've had worse rations.”
I blinked once again.
“Your throat should be fine soon, and if the food settles, I see no reason you can't be eating solid food come morning,” Dr. Bouton said. “Then we'll run some tests and see where we're at. Try not to think too much about it.”
The doctor popped his pen back in his pocket and gave me a tight smile before leaving. The nurse followed and I knew she'd be back soon with my smoothie. As hungry as I was, I had something I had to do first.
I ripped back the covers and realized the doctor was right. A few abrasions were already scabbed over and nearly healed. The only problem was that every time I tipped my head to the right the room spun.
Shit.
“First things first. I'm going to open the curtains,” Dr. Bouton said the next morning. He cautiously peeled back the curtains and watched me, but I was too busy trying to figure out the skyline to comment.
“No sensitivity to light?” he asked.
“Los Angeles?” I asked, sure I had to be dreaming. What the hell was I doing in LA? I hadn't even thought to ask before.
“Cedar-Sinai,” Dr. Bouton said.
Why was I at Cedar-Sinai? Okay, yeah, coma, but still. If they'd wanted to transfer me to a non-military hospital, wouldn't it have made more sense to have one nearer to my home base, or my actual home? LA was neither of those things. In fact, the only time I'd been to the city had been with a buddy, a little over three and a half years ago. A buddy who'd dragged me to a party and then ditched me for some woman whose name he hadn't remembered the next day. I, on the other hand, hadn't been able to forget the woman I'd slept with that night.
Now, the memory of her hit me so hard that I almost missed that Dr. Bouton was talking again.
“I'm going to be honest. This next part might not go well.”
“Sitting up?” I asked.
I didn’t care. I needed to do something, anything, to get her out of my mind. I needed to focus on getting better so I could get back to my unit.
Without waiting for an answer, I pulled back the covers and started to shift my weight. The two orderlies standing by the door immediately rushed to my side, moving to take my arms like I was some sort of invalid. I bit back a snarl. They were just doing their job.
“To the left,” Dr. Bouton said.
They leaned me toward the left so I could push off that way. I put my feet on the floor and forced myself to be steady. Dr. Bouton came up close with a penlight and peered into my eyes and then into my ears. Whatever it took for him to get these two to let me go so I could show him that I was fine.
“I'm sure you can take a few steps, but before you do that, I'd like you to tip your head to the right, slowly.”
The orderlies tensed and I snorted before tipping my head to the right. About twenty degrees later, a wave of dizziness nearly dropped me to the floor. The orderlies lifted me back onto the bed and pressed me against the pillows. The feeling passed, and I shook them off, careful not to move my head as my face flamed.
My heart was pounding, and I was just glad they'd let me take off that fucking monitor before I'd tried to sit up. I didn't need anyone knowing how
that had affected me. The whole room had fucking tipped, and I'd been helpless to stop it.
“BPPV,” Dr. Bouton said grimly.
Before I could demand an explanation, I got one from an unexpected source.
“Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.” A gruff voice came from the doorway. “Your stupid cousin got it from those two years he spent as a roadie for that metal band.”
My father filled the doorway of the hospital room. He stood ramrod straight, his pants and shirt so perfectly pressed that one would've thought he'd come straight from a dry cleaners rather than having been on a plane for hours.
“We took the earlier flight,” he said as he came into the room. “Your mother will be here in a moment. She seems to think you need flowers.” His mouth twitched but he didn't smile.
Captain Kenneth Welch wasn't a hard or cruel man, but he rarely smiled. He crossed the room and shook my hand before clapping me on the shoulder. His heavy hand stayed there and squeezed. The gesture was both as familiar and comforting as my father's deep green eyes and military-cut silver hair. He was only fifty-seven, but he'd been solid silver since his late thirties.
“We're proud of you, son,” he said. He didn't give praise lightly, but he always meant it when he did.
“So it's basically vertigo?” I asked, needing to hear the doctor say it. I didn't remember it affecting my cousin Robbie's life very much, but then again, he hadn't been a soldier. “But it'll fade and I'll be cleared for active duty. In what, a few weeks?”
“Duty?” Dr. Bouton asked. He glanced at my father and then slid his eyes over to the doorway where my mother was now standing.
Dad frowned and squeezed my shoulder again. My mother had her always-present smile hovering just above an enormous bunch of flowers. A 'get well' balloon bumped on the ceiling behind her. I saw her chocolate-brown eyes dart from me to my father and then to the doctor. Her smile lost some of its light and she hurried to my side, dropping the flowers and balloon on the nearby chair.
“Sergeant Welch, BBPV can, technically, be cured, but I don't know if I'd ever be able to sign off on you going back to Special Forces.”
My fingers twitched against the sheets, but I didn't let myself show any emotion. I'd worked my ass off to get into Special Forces. My dad's fingers tightened on my shoulder, but I didn't take my eyes off of Dr. Bouton.
“But it's not even the BBPV that's the main problem,” he continued. “Since we last spoke, I went over your x-rays with a specialist. While we'll need to run some tests for final confirmation, I can tell you that your left eardrum was partially perforated.”
I could feel the tension radiating off of both my parents now.
“Spit it out, Doc.” The words came out quiet, but harsh. “Don't sugar-coat it.”
“No matter how your hearing tests come back, Sergeant, I'm afraid your days of active duty are over.”
6
Haze
I gripped the edge of the sink and waited for the room to stop spinning. Dr. Bouton told me it helped to look at something steady, like how sailors watch the horizon and fight off seasickness. As it faded, I slowly raised my head and looked out the window at the nearly unending fields of wheat. The dizziness had passed, but the grim thoughts took longer, especially since I had nothing else to do.
I reached up without looking and found the coffee mug. I was six three, but even I couldn't look at the top shelf without tipping my head back, and that was one of the positions that I couldn't manage without losing my balance. Four months had passed since I'd woken up in the hospital and learned that my world would never be the same.
The nausea had faded, but the dizzy spells still caught me by surprise. Dr. Bouton had assured me that I'd learn what actions and positions caused the vertigo. If it had only been the BBPV, I might've had a chance of avoiding vertigo altogether, but my eardrum hadn't healed properly, ensuring me a lifetime of dizziness if I turned my head the wrong way.
And it had also earned me a one hundred percent chance of never getting my old life back.
Kansas had never bothered me before. I wasn't like a lot of kids from small towns who'd signed up for the service to see the world. I'd signed up because it was what the men in my family did. And we served proudly. All of us.
Plus, having been raised a military brat, I'd already seen plenty of the world. We'd settled here just after I'd finished my sophomore year of high school, and since my family had stayed, this was more home than any other place I'd lived. One thing someone like me learned at a young age, the building and location weren't what made it a home. It was the people.
“Knock, knock,” my mother called from the front door. “Have you had breakfast yet?”
“It's unlocked,” I called back. I probably should've gotten up and gotten the door for her, but I knew she wouldn't be mad. She'd just chalk it up to me not wanting to get dizzy, instead of what it really was: me being a depressed asshole.
“Oh, I do love it here. Colin did such a nice job,” she said as she came in with a woven basket full from the farmer's market.
She was right. The renovated barn was an amazing space. The front door opened directly into a two-story living room. To the right was a wall of bookshelves my oldest brother had made from reclaimed wood. A large chandelier created from old glass bottles strung from a long beam over the rectangular farm table illuminating the kitchen slash dining room. In the back section of the main floor, the doors from the old horse stalls remained to wall off an office and full bathroom. A steep open staircase, meant to look like an oversized ladder, ran up between the kitchen and office to two sizable bedrooms carved out of the old hayloft.
At twenty-nine, Colin had been the first of us to enlist. Now, he was a CBRN Officer. Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear. And he did carpentry and home renovation as a way to deal with the stress. He was stationed in Texas, but even though he'd never lived here, he came home as often as he could.
“You look pale, Cormac, darling. Are you okay?”
It was strange, I thought, that she still called me by my first name when everyone else, even my father, called me by my nickname. My middle name was Hayes, after my mother's middle name, and I'd tried getting people to call me that when I was younger. My little brother, Teague, had turned it from Hayes into Haze. And it had stuck. With everyone but Mom.
“I'm fine.” I didn't look at her.
“Are you sure?” She reached out and stroked my hair like she had when I'd gotten the chicken pox as a kid.
I wanted to pull my head away from her gentle hand, but I was afraid the motion would cause the world to spin. She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead as if checking my temperature, and then plunked the heavy basket down on the kitchen island.
“I brought you plenty of fresh berries. I know how you like them in cream,” she said.
“Mom, I am capable of feeding myself,” I said with a sigh.
She lifted an overflowing container of strawberries from the basket and whisked it to the sink to rinse them. “You're not going to deny me the chance to do my duty, young man. You're a recovering hero, and I'll fuss over you if I want. That's my duty.”
“I'm not a hero,” I said, back in my chair and sipping my coffee.
“Tell that to the men you saved,” she said, giving me the no-nonsense mom look that had kept all six of us kids in line better than any drill sergeant we'd ever had.
I stopped myself from shaking my head. Mom must've caught my grimace in her periphery and dropped the strawberries.
“Another episode?” she asked, taking my hands.
“They're not episodes,” I said firmly. “And I'm fine. Honestly, Mom, a little dizziness here and there doesn't stop me from being a functional human being.”
My tone was terse, but it had been a long four months. While I loved my mother, I wished she'd turn her babying back to my little sister, Brenna, the true baby in the family at eighteen.
Still, there was at least some truth to Mom's concer
n. For nearly two months, the waves of nausea and dizziness had been enough to drop me to the floor. But it had been the overwhelming feeling of helplessness as the world spun around me that had been almost too much to take. I'd spent the first week in bed, refusing to move, telling myself the entire time that it had only been because I hated feeling like I had to throw up.
My parents had let it go for that week, but as soon as it became clear that nothing was changing on my end, the shit had hit the fan.
While I'd still been in the hospital, I'd been assigned a psychiatrist and a support group. My father had yelled and my mother had pleaded for me to take the anti-depression medications I'd been prescribed. The oversized orderlies had tried moving me to an armchair and leaving. If I wanted to go back to bed, I'd have to walk there. I'd slept in the chair.
Dr. Bouton had been the most devious of all. He'd removed my catheter knowing full well I'd have to fight the BPPV to make it to the bathroom in time. He wanted to prove that my life wasn't over, that I hadn't lost everything. That I'd be able to work past it. The thing was, I wanted to work. I wanted to get back to doing the only job I'd ever wanted, the only job that had ever made me feel complete.
But I knew that wasn’t possible. Dr. Bouton wasn’t a military doctor, but he'd laid out things clearly enough that when he'd brought one in, the results hadn't surprised me. The BBPV would eventually clear up, but my dizziness would continue to be a problem thanks to my perforated eardrum.
I was done.
I'd been numb, barely going through the motions for days after the official word had come down. Dad had already gone home, unable to be away from work any longer. Mom, however, had stayed until the day Dr. Bouton told me to go home. I'd protested, but he'd told me that I would need my family to help me continue to recover.
I'd known he hadn't only meant physically.
I adjusted the bracelets on my wrists and avoided my mother's probing look. Dr. Bouton had given them to me before I left. They each held a magnet against a pressure point on each of my wrists. Surprisingly, they helped relieve any lingering nausea.