The Marine's Return. Rula Sinara
qualifications. Six-and-a-half months since the blast and still suffering.
He turned and stood in front of the intricately carved wood mirror that hung over his dresser. Twisted, dark-pink burn scars wrapped around half of his back and up the right side of his neck. Quarter-inch scars mottled his right cheek where surgeons had removed embedded debris. It was a miracle he still had his eyes. Though sometimes he wondered if that was its own form of torture.
Here he was at twenty-four, supposedly the prime of his life, and he was this. He was—had been—right-handed. He’d lost his dominance in more ways than one. But he still had his sight, just so that he could wake up every morning and be met with the monster that was left of him. Just so that he could see the looks of pity on the faces of others. Sometimes he wished he’d never woken up from the medically induced coma he’d been kept in for weeks. Everyone kept saying he was lucky that he’d recovered, for the most part, from the traumatic brain injury he’d also suffered in the blast.
“Chad?” His mother rapped at the door. He hurried to the bed and lay on top of the traditionally woven bedspread, then picked up the magazine he’d abandoned earlier because putting it down every time he had to turn a page had worn on his patience. His mother eased the door open and peered inside.
“Chad.” She came in and closed the door behind her.
“Hey, what’s up?” He hoped he sounded as calm and cool as possible. He didn’t want his mom worrying about him anymore. As a doctor, Hope worried enough about everyone under her care, and she, along with his dad, had spent most of the past year by his side in the States. He’d given them both gray hairs and creases around their eyes these last few months. He’d taken them away from his younger brothers—even if Ryan and Philip were off in college—and their first grandchild.
His older sister, Maddie, and her husband, Haki, had a fifteen-month-old baby. They lived in Kenya’s Serengeti where Haki ran a rural veterinary clinic that catered to the livestock needs of the tribal herdsmen. With a toddler, they definitely could have used Hope’s help, but instead Chad’s mother had been caring for him. He was burdening them all.
His dad, too. As an ex-marine, his dad was good at masking what was going through his head, but Chad could see past the firm “Suck it up, Marine” attitude. Still, he seemed to be emphasizing his own efforts to carry on despite the cast he was sporting. At least that was temporary. Chad’s amputation wasn’t.
Chad knew this wasn’t how either of his parents had envisioned his future.
“Don’t pretend. I heard you. If the pain is that bad, take something,” Hope said.
“I’m not taking any more drugs,” he said, sitting upright and swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
You still have everything from the waist down, man. Count your blessings.
“We can switch medic—”
“No.” Painkillers only stole what was left of him.
“Then what? Let me do something. Let me help.”
“I’m fine. Honestly, Mom. It was just a sudden shooting pain. It went away. I’m all good now. Hungry, actually.”
He wasn’t.
He tossed the magazine aside and stood. He motioned to the doorway.
“After you.”
“You can’t fool a mother, Chad. I know you think feeding you will distract me. I’ll do it because, yes, it’ll make me feel a little better, but you can’t sit up here like this for hours on end.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Then let’s head down and eat,” he said, limping slightly ahead of her before she could say more. The deep shrapnel scars in his right hip and thigh tugged with each step. He could hear her following. “Am I smelling chapati and nyama? I thought Jamal and Dalila were with their grandkids today.”
Jamal and Dalila were like grandparents. They’d worked as driver, cook and nannies for Hope’s parents, also doctors in Nairobi, since she’d been born. They’d stayed on with the family—really as part of the family—and continued to help when Hope married Ben and adopted his three children and then when the couple had their own baby, Philip.
None of them cared who was blood related and who wasn’t. They’d always been a family in the tightest sense of the word.
The aroma of beef, onion, curried spices, vegetables and warm flatbread wafted up the stairwell. Chad’s stomach grumbled loudly. Maybe he was hungry. Funny that hunger was the one pain he rarely felt.
“Yes. Dalila cooked her famous stew early this morning before leaving. For ‘her Chad,’ as she put it. I just warmed it all up for lunch.”
Lunch? Had he really been in his room that long?
“She’s a kitchen goddess,” he said, quirking the corner of his mouth up. He reached for the banister and clenched his jaw when he realized he’d tried reaching with his right arm. How many more months or years was it going to take for his brain to adjust?
He made his way down the curved staircase, placing his hand against the left wall for balance when he felt a twinge in his right hip.
“I have an ironsmith coming in a few days to make a matching banister for the left side,” Hope said.
“Cancel the appointment. You don’t have to change anything on my account. I’ll manage.”
“I know we don’t have to. Your father and I want to. It’s not a big deal. He said he’ll be back in time for lunch. He got a ride to the office. He needed to sign off on some new recruit applications. I told him someone could bring the paperwork to the house, but he was desperate to get out.”
Ben’s work with KWS and the Kenyan armed forces to combat ruthless poachers was just another example of how evil existed even at home. There was no escaping it...a fact that made Chad’s blood curdle, especially now that there was nothing he could do about it.
His father had always been his role model...someone whose expectations he’d always tried to live up to. After Chad’s biological mother was killed by a reckless drunk driver when Chad was only four, and his dad had retreated into a shell, Chad had quickly caught on to the fact that the only way for his father to notice him was to try to be just like him. He probably already was on some level, behavioral genetics and all.
But as soon as he was old enough to really understand how needlessly his mother had lost her life and how rampant violence and war were in the news, Chad had understood what had really driven his father to serve. And it had become Chad’s mission, too.
Roosevelt, the family dog, came bounding up just as Chad cleared the last step. But rather than colliding into Chad or jumping up on him, the four-year-old mix padded around him, wagging his tail and sniffing.
“He’s finally outgrowing some of that puppy energy,” Hope said.
Chad’s eyes stung as he reached down and scratched Roosevelt behind the ear. Losing Aries in action still gouged him in the heart.
Roosevelt licked his hand. The dog knew. His behavior had nothing to do with outgrowing puppyhood, if that even happened for dogs with any Golden or Lab in the mix. Nope. Chad had no doubt Roosevelt sensed something was wrong. Dogs could smell disease and injury. They mourned loss. And Chad had lost more than his arm. When the doctors had brought him out of his induced coma, he’d discovered that Aries had died in the blast and his best friend, Tony, had been killed only a week after the blast that injured Chad.
Chad walked across the living room with the dog at his heels and opened the glass patio doors that led to their garden. He could hear his mom tinkering in the kitchen. He sat on the top step leading out onto the grass, grabbed a rubber ball and tossed it. It took a curved path into the base of a flowering bougainvillea—far from the tree he’d been