Page 9 of Hold on Tight

He didn’t want any kid to have him for a father.Ex-soldier. Ex-person. A guy, like his own father, who occupied a chair and sucked the life out of a room, out of the world. And in some ways, he feared even more finding something to fill the hours, to kill the time, something that was a shadow of purpose, a substitute for meaning.

His good leg ached like a mo-fo. Sweat had pooled between the silicone sheath of his prosthesis and his stump—because that’s what it was, not a “residual limb” in the politically correct parlance of all the do-gooder doctors and prosthetists and physical therapists, but a fucking dead, aching, battered stump.

Mira was laughing and brushing the boy’s hair off his forehead as she chatted with the PT. Jake tried not to, but he let himself see the boy’s face.

The ways he felt and didn’t feel surprised him.

There was no wave of recognition. Or even a ping. Sam looked like Mira, but not so much like Mira that Jake would have found him familiar if he’d met him on the street. And he guessed it was hard to see yourself in a child, because he didn’t. Not himself and not his father, mother, sister, or brother. Sam was just a kid. A good-looking kid, with some baby left to his face, and big eyes, whose color, admittedly, was an exact match for his own.

What he did feel was curiosity. The sensation was unexpected, because aside from the numbness and fog and God, the irritability, the sense of needing desperately to escape his own skin, he felt very little these days. Certainly not a tug, an impulse, toward investigation. Certainly not any wish to know more aboutanything, let alone something big and complicated, a whole unexplored and deeply fraught territory.

I wonder if he has trouble falling asleep at night. If he’s afraid of the dark. If he hates nuts and beans.

I wonder if he wishes he had a father.

The physical therapist said something and Sam smiled, and Jake took it like a soccer ball in the groin. That smile. Mira’s smile. If the color of Sam’s eyes was his, the way they crinkled and shone was all Mira. The slight asymmetry to his mouth. The dimple in only one cheek.

He had no right to be affected by her smile, whether it was on her face or someone else’s. No right. He’d given her up, walked away from her. And he sure as hell didn’t deserve her now.

But whether he had the right or not, her smile got under the first layer of the numbness and niggled like a splinter.

He told himself he hadn’t walked away yet because he was waiting for his appointment, because he needed this one hour today when he’d know what he was doing. When he had a sense of purpose, even if it was small, even if it was constrained, even if it was dictated by someone else. But he knew he was still standing here, watching them, because he couldn’t walk away.

“Jake?” Linda, his physical therapist, stood in the doorway to the waiting room. “Thanks for meeting me here. We’ll be back at the VA Tuesday—there was just no way for me to teach Pilates here and get back there in time today.”

“I need one more minute,” he told her.

She nodded. “I’ll be in back.”

Linda was a patient woman. She’d hung in with him through a lot of bad sessions. Sessions where he’d sweated and come close to tears, where “agility” had meant tripping over hula hoops and yoga blocks. He’d sworn and yelled and blamed her for the slowness of his progress. And she’d told him to take his time and not worry, that “agility” would come.

“We’ll have you running.”

“Fat fucking chance.”

“And biking.”

“No way.”

“And swimming.”

“I don’t think the hydraulic knee would appreciate that.”

“They make swim prostheses.”

“What about carrying a fifty-pound pack and forty pounds of weaponry over rough terrain?”

“It’ll come, if that’s what you want.”

Now she said, “Take your time.” Her mantra.

Mira and Sam were coming toward them. Sam’s hair was dark and shaggy. His ankle was wrapped.

Jake’s ghost foot throbbed.

He was still here. Because there was some small, not-yet-dead part of him that wanted to be useful, and that part recognized an opportunity when he saw one.

And maybe, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself, because it felt good, feeling something again. It felt good,wantingher. Letting himself think about what it would be like to crave, to grasp, to bury himself—fingers, tongue, dick—in her. To get himself back and give himself away again, in one swift purge.