Part Five: The Room with the Blue Curtain
She was in a small bed with a drip in her arm and she was wearing a hospital gown that was too big for her and she had Mr. Button — he had put him in her hands before they went in, which had been the right instinct — held against her side. The monitor above her beeped with a steadiness that was, after the first few minutes, reassuring.
He sat in the chair beside the bed.
She was not asleep, though her eyes were heavy.
“Does it hurt?” he said, nodding at the drip.
“A little bit. Not much.” She looked at it. “It’s cold.”
“That’s the fluid going in. It’ll warm up.”
She looked at him. Her face in the hospital light was paler than it should have been, the shadows more visible, but she was there, she was present and looking at him with Emma’s specific quality of attention — direct, slightly assessing, the look of a child who took things seriously.
“I knew you’d come,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Aunt Sarah told me, when you left,” she said. “She said that Dad always came home. She said you were the kind of person that always came home.”
He thought about Sarah, who had said this to a six-year-old while he was in the air, and who would be receiving a phone call from him in approximately two hours and who would, he knew, pick up on the first ring.
“Aunt Sarah’s right,” he said.
Emma nodded. It was a satisfied nod, the nod of someone whose hypothesis had been confirmed.
“I’m going to sleep now,” she said, as if announcing a decision.
“Okay.”
“Will you stay?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She closed her eyes.
Within minutes, her breathing changed — the slower, deeper rhythm of actual sleep, not the light managed rest of someone keeping watch. He sat in the plastic chair and looked at his daughter’s sleeping face and felt, all at once, everything he had not allowed himself to feel in the corridor or the examination room or the car.
It moved through him in stages. The relief, first — enormous, almost physical, the specific relief of she is safe, she is here, I can see her breathing. Then the grief of what had been done to her, the image of the crate in the garden, the way she’d flinched when she heard him coming, the too-cooperative calm of a child who had learned to manage her own fear. Then something else, underneath, which was not grief and not relief but something colder — the particular cold of a man who had protected strangers in foreign places for fourteen months and had come home to find that the person he would most readily have died for had been in a cage in a garden four hundred miles away.
He sat with it.
He was not a man who expressed things easily, which was partly training and partly temperament and partly what happened to people who had seen the things he’d seen and needed somewhere to put them. But he was also not a man who pretended things weren’t there, which was how you stayed functional — you acknowledged the weight, you made room for it, you didn’t let it knock you over by pretending it wasn’t there.
Emma slept.
He sat.
After a while he took out his phone and called Sarah.
