The Soldier's Homecoming. Patricia Potter

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СКАЧАТЬ with a cane. She moved it to the left and then to the right. It was one of the excruciatingly painful exercises to expand the mobility of her right shoulder. She smothered a cry as she impatiently shoved the rod too far.

      The news turned back again to the Middle East, reporting on the refugees fleeing from wars in Iraq and Syria. She wanted to cry. Scream. Do something. She kept seeing that bombing and the children and adults running for cover where there was none. Did the volunteer medical workers make it to safety? If so, what about the next day? And the one after that?

      The scenes haunted her.

      Yet despite her injury, she wanted to go back. She needed to record what was happening. She wanted the world to know. To care, dammit.

      She didn’t know now whether she could ever return, with her shattered rotator cuff and damaged tendons and muscles. The wrong movement sent rivers of pain through her. She also experienced flashbacks and nightmares. Though less frequent now, she couldn’t take the chance of endangering others during one of her episodes.

      Where was Rick now? She hadn’t heard from him in a month. He had stayed with her that day and somehow managed to get her across the border to a hospital. He’d called from a cell phone, somewhere in the field, three weeks later. She’d been barely coherent after her surgery, but she told him she would be back.

      She missed him. He was fearless and always had a joke on his lips. He was probably the only person who’d ever understood her need to write stories that needed to be told. That was her source of adrenaline, just as photography was his...

      Stop thinking about the past.

      She dropped the rod and went to the window. She stared out at the manicured lawn and towering trees in the backyard. The vivid reds and oranges stood in stark contrast to the colorless rocks and sand of much of the Middle East. So why couldn’t she appreciate it? The house and grounds felt like a prison.

      It had been nearly four months since that bloody afternoon in Syria. She was lucky not to have bled to death. The red-hot metal had cauterized the wound, and Rick had cradled her body to keep the metal from moving until they found a doctor among the refugees. She’d been patched up enough to get to Turkey, where she received further medical treatment, and was sent home to Colorado.

      Following two operations on her shoulder, she’d needed weeks of intense therapy. Her mother begged her to move into the family home, which was close to the rehab center.

      She’d resisted at first. With the exception of several brief visits with her mother, she’d not been home since college. She’d been overseas for the last eight years, five of them in the Middle East. Moving back at thirty-two was humiliating.

      But staying there for a few weeks was the logical decision. She couldn’t even dress herself without going into elaborate contortions.

      Recuperating in a happy home would have been difficult enough, but this house was not happy. Her father was rarely there, and when he was, he usually went straight to his study. Her mother drank too much wine when she wasn’t at charity functions, and probably when she was, too. Her smile was a little too bright. Jenny’s journalistic eye saw the pain she tried to hide.

      On the rare weekends her father returned from San Francisco, where his company kept an apartment for him, he couldn’t stop reminding her that he had warned her not to go. The Middle East was no place for a woman. Why couldn’t she be like her two sisters?

      According to her father, journalism was no profession for his daughter. No opportunity to marry an up-and-coming husband, as her sisters had, and have children.

      But then Jenny knew she’d always been a disappointment to him.

      From the time she was old enough to walk, she’d run after fire engines or any other kind of excitement. At ten, she’d saved her allowance to buy a battered set of encyclopedias at a used book sale, and by twelve she’d read through them, along with finishing the reading list for the fifth, sixth and seventh grades. In lieu of dancing lessons, she headed for the library. The librarian was her best friend.

      Her parents hadn’t been concerned when she announced at age eleven that she wanted to wander the world, rather than get married, assuming her declaration was just a child’s wild fancy. They became more concerned when, at sixteen, she announced she was going to be a journalist and, at seventeen, attended a lecture by a renowned journalist at the University of Colorado, instead of going to the junior prom.

      More than anything else, she’d wanted to be on her own, free to fly like a bird...

      And she had.

      Would she ever fly again?

      * * *

      THREE MORNINGS LATER, Jenny woke to pounding at the door. Her brain was foggy. Daylight poured through the window. She glanced at the clock and jerked upright. It was ten in the morning, but then she hadn’t gone to sleep until 4:00 a.m. She’d been caught up in an idea for a story.

      More impatient knocking, and then the door burst open. Her sister Lenore walked in.

      Jenny stared at her. “I thought you were in San Francisco.”

      “Charlie and I flew in this morning,” she said.

      “Charlie?”

      “Charlotte, your niece. She announced last year she wants to be called Charlie.”

      “How did our parents take the announcement?”

      “They ignored Charlie’s edict, of course, and warned me that she might, of all horrors, take after you.”

      Jenny chuckled. This was a different side of Lenore. But then, except for a brief visit at the hospital a few months ago, she hadn’t seen her sister in more than five years. “Mother didn’t say you were coming,” she said.

      “She didn’t know,” Lenore said. “Charlie’s downstairs with her now.” She scrutinized Jenny. “You look a lot better than you did a few months ago. But you really have to do something with that hair.”

      “Gee, thanks. I missed you, too,” Jenny replied. Her hair probably was a mess after sleeping on it. It was uncontrollably curly and a real pain to brush with her left hand.

      “You never did like lies. Even little ones,” Lenore said as she eyed Jenny critically. “You know, your hair would look really cute if you cut it shorter.”

      “I would look like Little Orphan Annie,” Jenny retorted, not admitting that she needed a new hairstyle, one that she could manage with her injury.

      Lenore laughed, but it sounded hollow. “No, you wouldn’t. It would look great on you. I couldn’t get away with it, but you could.” She paused, and then she added awkwardly, “How are you feeling? Really?”

      “Good,” Jenny lied. “I’m hoping to leave soon. I want to get back to work.”

      “Is your shoulder healed enough?”

      “I can manage most activities now. The problem is driving. A sudden movement can nearly paralyze my arm, but I’m working on it.”

      “You’re not planning to go back to the Middle East?”

      “I’m СКАЧАТЬ