Page 91 of The Girls of Pearl Harbor
Her tears kept spilling, but she didn’t try to hide them this time. ‘Me too,’ she whispered back. ‘Me too.’
Art’s hand fell away then, and she finished shaving him, not brave enough to try to talk again. But when she finished and set the razor down, giving his face one final wipe down with the towel, she finally cleared her throat.
‘You ready to try out that wheelchair yet? Because I need to get out of here, and I’d rather be with you than on my own.’
Art pushed himself up properly and wiped at his own eyes, his smile warming her in a way she hadn’t warmed in a very long time.
‘I thought you were never going to ask.’
‘Take me back,’ he barked less than an hour later, his voice croaky as he gripped the sides of the chair with both hands and pressed back into the seat. ‘Eva, take me back now!’
She took a deep breath, hearing the familiar angry tone in Arthur’s voice.
‘Art, listen to me,’ she said, trying to keep her voice as low and soft as she could. ‘You’re going to be fine. Just trust me.’
‘Trusting you got me into this mess!’
He spun around in the seat, and her heart almost broke when she saw the terror in his gaze.
‘I thought I could do this, but I can’t,’ he said. ‘Take me back.’
Eva gritted her teeth and pushed hard on the wheelchair, propelling it forward with a grunt, his weight heavier than she’d anticipated. ‘Sit still and just breathe,’ she ordered.
He started to complain again, but she refused to listen, pushing him through the last part of the ward and nodding her thanks when one of the corpsmen opened and held the door for her.
‘It’s going to feel a little bumpy here until we get onto the grass,’ she said, huffing as she kept the wheelchair moving.
‘Eva,please,’ he begged, reminding her of a little boy trying to convince his mother to listen to him. ‘I can’t do this—I can’t balance. I just can’t.’
‘You can,’ she said, exhaling when the chair finally became easier to move, ‘and you are.’
She pushed a bit farther, stopping only when they were far enough away from the hospital that he wouldn’t ask to be pushed straight back.
‘How does that feel?’ she asked, leaning against the chair and watching as he lifted his face, eyes shut, basking like a cat in the sun.
He didn’t answer right away, but when he finally opened his mouth, a slow smile spread across his lips. ‘It feels good.’
She sat on the ground in front of him, looking at the stump above where his knee would have been, since he had his eyes closed. It was different seeing it outside, because in the hospital he was always beneath a sheet or blanket, and when she was checking it, she was so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t actually take the time to think about it. But here, out in the open, in the real world, she could see what had been taken from him. His remaining leg was almost fully healed now, and it was a big leg, hairy and strong, as masculine as could be as it protruded from the blanket, but with scars slicing across it where before she imagined there were no marks. But the space on the other side, where his other leg should have been, told her that nothing about his life could ever be the same again.
‘Don’t go feeling sorry for me.’
Eva looked up, embarrassed that she’d been caught looking at him so openly. ‘I’m sorry; I was just ...’ She swallowed. ‘I haven’t really seen you like this. Up until now, you’ve just been my patient lying in a bed.’
‘And now you’ve realized I’m a useless cripple?’
She shook her head. ‘No, Art, that’s not what I was thinking.’
‘What was it, then?’
Eva met his gaze, not wanting him to think she wasn’t telling the truth. ‘I was thinking how your life will change, that there are things you won’t be able to do anymore.’ She swallowed as her voice cracked. ‘But as hard as things are going to be in the beginning, I know that one day you’ll be happy that you lived, one leg or not. That’s what I wanted to tell you, right from the beginning; it’s why I waited beside your bed until you woke up.’
He opened his palms as if to soak up the sun, his head angled upward still. ‘I’ll never fly again,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll never sit behind the controls of a plane; I’ll never have that feeling of soaring through the sky again.’
She listened. There was nothing she could say, because he was right.
‘I’ll never hold a woman in my arms and dance again.’ He laughed. ‘I was crap at dancing anyway, but I’d literally be all left feet now.’
She smiled, liking that he was joking about it, but his face became somber almost instantly.
