The Soldier's Homecoming

They had become friends during the ten years they had worked together, both moving up the military ladder. When they first met, Sergeant Manning was a squad leader, and Travis was a lieutenant. Travis made sure Manning stayed with him. He’d been his go-to guy in the most difficult and dangerous missions. He not only thought strategically, but his fellow soldiers would follow him to hell and back.

Travis realized he’d been silent for more than a few seconds. “How?” he asked dubiously.

“I remember you telling me you were a college athlete and studied sports management in Indiana. That included business, didn’t it?”

“Some,” Travis admitted.

“A friend of mine, a former navy SEAL—yeah, I know, strange friend for a Ranger—just bought a small ranch where I live. He’s thinking about starting a horse therapy program for vets. He’s knee deep in getting it started and needs help with the business aspects, particularly possible grants, regulations, staffing...”

“Why me?”

“Because I know how you cared about your men. The job needs someone who would be committed as well as having some knowledge of athletics and business.”

It definitely sounded interesting, particularly Manning’s participation, but he wasn’t qualified. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t know anything about grants.”

“But you know about physical therapy and organization. I also remember how you used to work the system to get what you needed. You never took no for an answer. That’s what we need now.”

“We?”

“It’s kinda a joint effort. You have to see it for yourself to believe it,” Manning said. “It would just be temporary, and we can’t afford to pay much.”

“In other words, you want someone cheap.”

“More like free, except for the use of a really nice cabin, as long as you stay.”

“You really know how to sell a job,” Travis replied. Could it be that Manning had somehow discovered that Travis had no family, no plans?

Being a desk jockey held little appeal for him. “Where?” he asked.

“A little town in Colorado. It’s...unusual.”

“You living there now?”

“About eighteen months. After I recovered, I found Amos. He’s with me now.”

“That’s great.” Travis remembered the military dog, how the animal mourned when his handler, Manning’s best friend, died. The dog was eventually sent back stateside.

“Call it a working vacation,” Josh said. “I have a cabin that will be all yours. It’s on a lake, next to a mountain. The town is vet-friendly.”

“How long?”

“A few months. We have volunteers, enthusiasm, horses. Just no expertise.”

Travis looked around the room. Danny was still here, supporting the others.

“You said there’s a ranch?”

“Yeah.”

“Any jobs available there for a young amputee?”

“We could find something. You have a prospect?”

“A corporal. Lost his right leg. He’s a foster kid. No family. No place to go. But he’s a damn hard worker and has encouraged everyone around here.”

“Sounds like someone we can use,” Manning said. “We’ll figure something out.”

“You sound...” Travis couldn’t find the right word.

“Content? I am. I have a wife, a kid, five or six dogs—it changes by the day—two horses and a crazy cat. I’m even an innkeeper,” Manning said with a humor that was definitely new.

“This I have to see,” Travis replied, signaling his acceptance. They discussed the logistics for a moment more, and then he hung up.

Stunned, Travis stood there for a moment. His thoughts raced ahead as he looked at too many warriors struggling to get their lives back.

For the first time in two years, he felt a sense of excitement. He had a challenge, another battle, even if the campaign might be brief. He’d seen so many fellow patients sink into hopelessness. He’d felt it himself. Maybe, just maybe, he could do something worthwhile, both for himself and others fighting for a new life.

He whistled as he limped down the hall. It was the first time he had whistled since his injury.

CHAPTER TWO

Denver

A LITTLE GIRL RUNNING. Blood everywhere. Spreading like a river. Edging nearer and nearer...

Panicked, Jenny woke, soaked in her own sweat. The jerk of her body as she woke renewed intense pain in her shoulder. Disoriented, she looked around, trying to control the trembling. The night-light, now necessary for sleep, was just strong enough to reveal the shadowed bedroom, rather than the rubble of a once prosperous city.

Had she screamed again? God, she hoped not.

Her brief prayer was not answered. She heard a tentative knock on the door, and her mother inched the door open and entered the room. Her hair was in rare disarray, her robe partly open, her face slathered with some kind of cream.

“Jennifer?” Her mother’s voice was loud, and Jenny smelled alcohol on her breath as she leaned over. “Another nightmare?”

Jenny struggled to sit upright. Even after four months, the pain in her shoulder could stop her cold.

“It’s okay, Mother. It’s gone.”

She’d never told her mother the truth of the nightmares, that they always revolved around the child standing bewildered in a blood-soaked street. Had the little girl survived? The question wouldn’t leave her. “I’m okay now. Really. Just a bad dream. Remember, I used to have them as a child.” Jenny looked at the clock. A little after 4:00 a.m. “You go back to bed. I know you have that luncheon today. I’ll read for a while, then go back to sleep.”

“If you’re sure...”

“I am. It’s gone now.”

“Maybe a sleeping pill...”

“Maybe,” she said, although she had no plans of taking one. She had watched others in pain become reliant on pills. That would not happen to her. She knew her recuperating time would be long and painful. It was too easy to become addicted to pain meds.

“I’ll get you a glass of water, okay?” her mother persisted.

Jenny nodded. She could do that on her own, but the small chore would satisfy her mother.

After her mother brought the water, Jenny went to her bathroom and took a hot, and then cold, shower to shake off the nightmare.

She knew she couldn’t go back to sleep. Not yet. The horror of those moments was still too real. She went to the corner of her room, where she kept the physical therapy equipment. She selected a rod, turned on the portable TV to an all-news station and sat down in front of it. Her injury didn’t seem to hurt so much when she was occupied with news.

She started moving the rod from side to side as she watched. An upset election in Europe, Congress fighting again, riots in a Middle Eastern country. She ached to be in the middle of it. She didn’t belong in a luxurious bedroom, in a gated community.

She held the rod across her body like a vaudevillian dancing 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 not that delusional,” Jenny said. “But I haven’t completely been idle. Thanks to the internet, I’ve been researching some stories I can do here in the States.”

“Anything in particular?”

She nodded. “Horse therapy.”

“Horse therapy?” Lenore echoed. “Therapy for horses?”

“No,” Jenny said patiently, unsure whether her sister was kidding. “Equine therapy for veterans. I was looking at various therapy programs and found a number that involved horses. I knew there were equine programs for kids with autism and disabilities. I didn’t know how many are available for veterans. It could make a great story.”

Lenore studied her for a moment. “Does this interest have anything to do with your nightmares?”

“Mom told you?” Jenny asked.

“She’s worried about you.”

“I’m worried about her, or I would have left by now,” Jenny said. “She’s drinking too much. I suppose you know our father rarely comes home these days. He’s living full time in San Francisco.”

“I might be able to help you there. Charlie and I are moving back to Denver. Doug and I are getting a divorce.” It was said in a monotone voice, but Jenny saw the pain in her eyes.

“A divorce?” Jenny couldn’t hold back her surprise. “I thought you and Doug were the perfect couple. What happened?”

Lenore shrugged. “The old, old story. He found someone younger. And thinner. A friend told me he was cheating. I didn’t believe it at first, but I hired a private investigator. He produced a lot of photos. Doug didn’t even try to deny it. I think he was actually relieved. He just didn’t have the guts to ask for a divorce, and he didn’t want to share any money. The photos, though, bought me a nice settlement.”

“I’m sorry, Lenore. I really am.” Jenny didn’t add that she thought Lenore was better off without Doug. She’d never liked him. He was an executive in their father’s company. Too good-looking. Too oblivious to other people, unless they could do something for him. Too much like her father.

“The settlement will give me enough to buy a condo,” Lenore said, “and Charlie and I are moving here to be close to Mother. I’ll have to go to work.” She hesitated. “I got a real estate license in California and made some sales. I was pretty good at it. More important, it’s the kind of job where you control your own hours. I can be there for Charlie and for Mother.”

Jenny nodded. Her sister would be good at real estate. She was attractive and smart. She’d studied business in school until she met Doug and married him before finishing her degree.

“What does Father think about that?”

Lenore shrugged. “He disapproved, of course, but all he really cares about is the company.”

“I wish Mother would leave him.”

“She’s afraid of being alone. He’s convinced her that a woman is worthless without a husband.” Lenore grinned suddenly and added, “That’s why he was always on your case. You disproved the theory. Unfortunately, I was a slow learner.”

“But now I support myself and I’ve got to get back to work, starting with the equine therapy programs. I’m only too familiar with the military and the burdens they carry when they leave. I really want to tell that story.”

“Well, you’ll have a place to hang your hat if you need one,” Lenore said. “You can move in with us. Charlie would love to spend time with you. She reminds me a lot of you when you were a kid, although she’s more withdrawn. She’s curious and reads all the time. She’s read everything she could find about you and written by you on the internet.” Lenore paused, and then said sadly, “Spending time with you would take some of the sting away from the move. Sometimes, no matter how rotten the father, the daughter forgives him.”

Jenny wondered if Lenore was talking about herself, as well as her daughter. It warmed her heart that Charlotte—Charlie—was interested in what she did. Jenny hadn’t seen much of her niece, but she remembered a pretty blonde girl who looked at her shyly and was very polite.

“She’s hurting,” Lenore continued. “But I don’t want her around our father or my ex-husband. I remember how Father tried to make you into something you weren’t. So did I, and I regret all those lessons I forced on you about makeup and dressing to attract the opposite sex. And some of the comments I made about you being a nerd.”

“I was,” Jenny said with a grin. “I still am.”

“I don’t think so,” Lenore said. “I’ve kept up with you. You have a powerful voice. I’m really proud of you.”

Jenny didn’t know what to say. She finally found her voice. “What about Mom.”

“The condo I’m buying is just a few blocks away. We can see her often and avoid the house when Father’s around. In the meantime I’m going to try to convince Mother to ask Father for a divorce, or at least leave him and move in with us. She’s so unhappy although she doesn’t want to admit it.”

“How’s our sister, Stacy? I haven’t seen her since I went overseas?”

Lenore just shrugged. “She says everything is fine. Stacy started a home decoration business which is why she couldn’t get away to see you. Mac supports her and the kids are doing well.” She hesitated, then added, “I don’t want to push you, but I’d really love for you to move in with us after closing on the condo. You wouldn’t have to worry about looking after Charlie. At ten, almost eleven, she’s quite responsible.”

Touched by the unexpected offer, Jenny nodded. “Thanks. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next but it might well be a godsend.” She changed the subject. “Have you mentioned your move here to Mother and Father?”

“I told Father before coming here. My ex didn’t have the guts to tell him about the divorce so I gave him the unhappy news. He disapproved. Of the divorce of course, not the behavior that prompted it. I’m telling Mother tonight.”

“She’ll be happy to have you here and disappointed by the divorce,” Jenny predicted. Like Father, their mother would rather be miserable—which she was—than admit a failed marriage.

“I’ll stay out of the way unless you need support. How does Stacy feel about it?”

“Stacy echoes Father. As always. It’s my fault and I wasn’t a good enough wife.” She paused, then added, “It’s ridiculous to still feel like a child asking permission to go to a movie.”

“Well, I certainly never expected to be here when I hit thirty-two,” Jenny said.

“Just think about moving in with us,” Lenore pled and left the room.

Perhaps now was the time to explore some possibilities. If she moved in with Lenore, their mother would still have them both nearby for company. It was time to start thinking about subjects she could sell to various publications. In addition to the horse therapy idea, another came to mind: rehab and family challenges. For the first time since the injury, she felt excited. Stimulated. It wouldn’t be what she had been doing, but it would be writing. Travel pieces, human interest stuff. A lot of papers used stringers or freelancers. She knew how to find stories, to look under a headline and find something no one else had.

Her thoughts turned back to Lenore. Maybe the move would be good for both of them. Maybe she would get to know her sister and niece better in the bargain.

CHAPTER THREE

TWO WEEKS AFTER his last rehab appointment, Travis limped through the Denver airport, using a cane, but no brace or crutches.

He hated the looks tossed his way. Pity. Curiosity.

The cane wasn’t necessary for short walks, but on the longer ones, he sometimes needed assistance.

There was one advantage, though. The agent at the check-in desk in Dulles International Airport took one glance at his military identification and then his cane, and upgraded him to first class. He’d dreaded the long flight from Washington to Denver with his bad leg scrunched up.

He didn’t have any baggage other than his carry-on with an extra pair of jeans, shirt, skivvies and a toilet kit. He didn’t think he’d stay more than two or three days. He just wanted to meet the participants, listen to their plans and then make up his mind as to whether he wanted to return for a longer stay.

In the meantime, he’d looked up other vet programs around the country. They’d ranged from small mom-and-pop programs with weekend stays for the veteran and family to months-long stints aimed at teaching skills that could turn into civilian jobs.

He hadn’t mentioned anything to Danny, who had not yet been released from the hospital. He didn’t want to get the kid’s hopes up. Except he knew Josh Manning well. Manning wouldn’t have contacted him, certainly wouldn’t have paid for his airfare, if he was not deadly serious.

Once aboard the plane, Travis gratefully slid into the window seat and placed his cane underneath. He leaned back and sighed in relief as he stretched his legs out in front of him. The right one ached from the long walk. It was galling to remember the ease with which he used to make a ten-mile trek.

The spacious room meant he could sleep. He had taken a cab to the airport at 5:00 a.m. for the 8:00 a.m. flight and then the flight was delayed.

Once in the air, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He wanted to be fully awake when he arrived. He’d looked up Covenant Falls on the internet and knew it was located on the plateau, in the shadow of the San Juan Mountains. Manning said he would pick him up at the Denver airport and drive him to Covenant Falls.

Not for the first time, he doubted the wisdom of the trip. Was it simply a do-good ploy on his ex-sergeant’s part? And what qualifications did Travis really have aside from a seventeen-year-old college degree? His confidence had melted away over the past two years. Still, the invitation got him out of his nondescript furnished apartment, and he looked forward to seeing Manning. Most important: this program might give him a real goal.

He still hung onto a thread of hope that maybe his career wasn’t over. Maybe—just maybe—a desk job could lead back to the battlefield. He didn’t like war, but he respected the men under his command, and he felt he should be out there with them. A loss of one was like a loss in his own family. Hell, they were his family.

He slept until lunch. The small steak that arrived was tough, and he cut the meat awkwardly with his left hand. The loss of two fingers on his right hand made it unsteady despite all the rehab. He was still learning, still retraining what remained of his hand. He was grateful the woman seated next to him didn’t ask if he wanted help, but he was all too aware of her curious gaze.