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“You’re not interrupting. I was walking in my front door. I figured I ought to check on you. You’re obviously confused if you think I can’t beat your Pretty Boy ass.”
I chuckle. “Got a minute?”
“Sure. Need me to swing by?”
“No, nothing like that,” I say hastily. “I wanted to ask about your injuries. Do you feel up to that tonight? Or at all, even. If it’s too painful to talk about –”
“Please,” he dismisses me. “That shit doesn’t bother me. What do you want to know?”
I’m floored by his nonchalance. “Oh. Uh – well, what happened?”
“Summer in the Sandbox, six years ago. Four of us were on patrol. Our sweepers missed a roadside bomb. We got hit. I was the lucky one.”
Stubbs believes he’s lucky because he was the one who survived, but to me, no matter how you slice it, it’s a tragedy. “What kind of injuries did you have?”
I hear clinking, followed by the creak of a chair and the hiss of a twist-off cap. “I’d offer to swing by and share a beer, but they don’t mix with pain meds. Let’s see. Well, obviously I lost my legs. Multiple surgeries for those. Got a rod in my spine, a matching pair of titanium hips that the ladies adore, pins and screws in my right arm, skin grafts to my left thigh… What else? A bunch of broken ribs, blast lung, a skull fracture, bleeding in my brain, a broken jaw. That one was a bitch,” he recalls.
“Jesus,” I mutter. “How the hell did you survive?”
He laughs. “Cause I’m a badass motherfucker. Oorah! Marines, baby!” he roars, forcing me to hold the phone away from my ear.
“Your head injury. How bad was it?”
“Skull fracture. Bleeding. Burr holes. A craniotomy to open up a section of my skull.”
“Shit, man.”
“It’s a good thing,” he says confidently. “Swelling shoves your brain against your skull. That shit hurts because your skull’s not soft like your belly. There’s nowhere for the brain to go, and pain meds can’t touch it. If they don’t open your skull to relieve the pressure, you die.”
His casual discussion of his near-fatal experience confounds me. “Were you always like this about your injuries?”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s no big deal.”
“No. It was hard for a while, but I’ve had a few years to gain perspective.”
I shake my head in amazement, regrouping. “So after the head injury, did you have problems with mood swings or rage or depression?”
“All the above. I was a goddamn powder keg. It’s a good thing I was as injured as I was, because at full strength with my attitude, I’d have killed someone.”
“Seriously?”
He laughs. “What? You think a guy on peg legs can’t kick ass?”
I chuckle. “You just seem so Zen now. I can’t picture it.”
“I’m gonna give you some advice. First of all, take the damn psych meds. Everybody fights them, but your body needs every ounce of strength to heal your injuries. Don’t waste half its energy fighting the shit in your head. The second thing? Talk to the damn shrinks. I don’t mean sit there pretending to listen and then blowing off what they tell you. They don’t do that job for the money. They could make four times as much listening to housewives whine about their husbands not noticing them. We trust surgeons to repair our bodies. We trust PT guys to build our strength and OTs to teach us to manage in the real world. Trust the people that can help you manage the shit inside your head.”
When the sun comes up, I’m still ruminating on the wisdom of his words.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHARLIE
I’m exhausted, physically and emotionally. I take my third shower of the day, hoping to rinse away my emotions. I make a peanut butter sandwich in my beige hotel kitchenette and open my laptop. There’s an email from Lila about the changes to my house to accommodate Mark. Was it really just this morning that I emailed her? It seems like an eternity ago.
Her reply leaves me speechless. She’s not hiring a contractor. Most of the changes needed are things Tucker, Tom, and Lila can do, and she and Tucker insist on paying for them. The only update requiring a contractor is the shower, and Tom’s friend Tyson works with a charity for disabled service members. He renovates homes to make them disability-friendly. He’s redoing Mark’s shower next week, and the charity is covering the cost of the shower renovation.
