Page 35 of Hold on Tight

Jake turned, startled. They’d been talking a few minutes earlier about how Jake was running a ten-minute mile. Surely he couldn’t be asking that question seriously.

“I assume you’re on the Temporary Disability Retirement List at the moment?”

“Yeah.” Jake was drawing disability pay now, but he had to be reevaluated soon and deemed either permanently retired or fit to return to active duty.

“Lotta guys are going back fast now. Did you read that book?Back in the Fight? The one about the Ranger?”

“Nah,” Jake said. Everyone wanted him to read some inspirational book or other. One of his buddies had brought him a book calledAmped, about a soldier who’d lost a leg in Iraq and gone on to be a Paralympian. Jake had tossed the book into the garbage—though he was pretty sure a nurse had fished it out and recycled it through some other guys who were more willing to be inspired.

“That guy went back fast. Book starts with him in the middle of battle.”

“He was BK.”Below the knee.

“Things are changing,” Harwood said. “AK guys are going back fast too. Motivated guys. You could pull it off. You could be back in a combat role in a few months, if you wanted to. With your determination, and your strength. And my socket,” he added.

Jake felt a prickle of anger. What the hell did this guy know about his strength or his determination? What the hell did he know about what it felt like to lose a leg, lose a friend, lose direction? Or what it felt like to be the one who lived? “Stick to leg-building and leave the headshrinking to the trained professionals, okay?”

Harwood shrugged. “Have it your way.”

He cleared out of there before Harwood could give him any more life advice. But the guy’s words rang in Jake’s head as he headed out for his run that day. He ran harder and faster than he’d thought he could, and he pondered it. Going back. He thought about what he missed. Order. Hierarchy. The simplicity. How it was always clear what needed to happen next, or at least whose decision it should be. Not that things never degenerated into chaos—of course they did. But he’d had a clarity in those moments of chaos, a sense of certainty about what mattered, and about what he was meant to be doing, that he couldn’t recapture now.

He missed working on a team. Leading a team. Knowing those guys so well, he could half the time predict what they were going to say before they said it, almost always predict what they were going to do before they did it. Knowing their strengths and their weaknesses …

Knowing Mike’s strengths and weaknesses hadn’t helped anyone.

He hadn’t gone to Mike’s funeral. Hadn’t made the phone call to Mike’s wife. Because he’d been struggling to live, then drowning in rage and regret.

Pain shot through his residual leg and he nearly fell. There was so much sweat between the silicone sheath and his own flesh that it was a miracle the prosthesis was still on.

He’d been fueled, fighting all those years, by conviction. What would it be like to fight without that certainty? What would keep you slogging up mountains, through snow, across wasted desert land?

There was this army cliché that you fought the war for the guy next to you. He’d always thought his fight was bigger than that. But now he wasn’t so sure. Mike had been the guy next to him. And now he wasn’t—because of what Jake had done, ornotdone—and when Jake looked in his heart for reasons to fight, he couldn’t find the old ones.

Sometimes he thought they’d never existed. He’d needed a reason to run away from his dad’s emptiness and rage, his mother’s self-loathing, his siblings’ self-destruction. 9/11 had dovetailed with his needs. He’d needed to think he was fighting instead of running, and war had given him that.

The explosion had blown the whole construct to hell, and all that was left were the things he’d tried to run away from.

Maybe going back to the war would be better than this. At least it would besomething. Soldiers lost faith all the time—he knew that. That was why that cliché existed. Sometimes the act of putting one foot in front of the other, the work of saving the life at your right shoulder, could be enough.

Would it be enough for him?

It had to be better than this. At least he wouldn’t be his father.

He wassomeone’sfather, though. Whether he liked it or not. What would it mean to Sam if he went back in? What would it mean to Mira?

Whatever Mira wanted from him—if she wanted anything at all, and he was decidedly not convinced she did—it shouldn’t keep him from doing what he was supposed to be doing. It shouldn’t keep him from finishing what he’d started. If he could go back in, he’d visit Sam on leave, do his best to be a father in the time he had with his son.

He would let a month or two go by. He’d let the urgency die out of his own feelings, and he’d let her cool off. Then he’d ask her if he could take Sam to a baseball game or something. He’d try to arrange outings where there wouldn’t be a lot of opportunity for him and Mira to be alone, and over time—he was sure—they’d figure out how to ignore any lingering chemistry. They’d focus on Sam’s needs. They’d get into a rhythm that would work for all of them, regardless of whether he retired or went back to serving.

It was a good plan.

If his brain kept trying to write Mira back into it, he could ignore that.

Chapter 10

Running with the new prosthesis was a whole new ball game. It had been hard to catch the rhythm—new socket, new knee, and best of all, new foot. The first time the running foot—which looked more like a curved hook than an actual foot—had bounced him off the ground at the track where he and Harwood had been playing around with it, he’d almost fallen flat on his face, but he was getting it now, and it was such a high. He was doing five miles now, no problem, and even though he didn’t think he’d ever be a parathlete, he could understand the draw. Why you might come out of an accident broken, put yourself back together with spare parts, and throw yourself wholeheartedly into a new fight.

He took another lap of the Discovery Park path he liked to run on, slower now, cooling off. Not even minding the slight chafe of the socket against his thigh. Having Harwood in his court made all the difference. The guy was a perfectionist, totally obsessed. If he asked Jake, “How’s it feel?” and Jake answered with anything other than “Like my own leg,” he’d be in there with measurements and tools and adjustments, tweaking socks and sheaths, as if it were his own stump they were trying to baby.

---