“Sounds nice,” he said. “I’m just not sure I believe that.”
“Don’t have to,” she said. “You’ll find out soon enough, just by watching the others around here.”
“Only if I fall in love,” he said, his lips twitching.
“Is that so hard to believe?” she asked, eyeing him with an odd look. “Do you really not expect to ever fall in love again?”
“I guess I just don’t expect anybody to love me again,” he said. “I don’t consider myself much of a catch.”
“That goes back to that hanging-around-with-the-girls thing again,” she said. “For real women, it’s all about the inside. Remember?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I still think it’s all about who’ll be capable of protecting you and being there when the chips are down.”
“Protecting and looking after are two different things,” she said, her hands on her hips as she studied him. “And you’re the one who’s down right now,” she said. “Helping you is a whole different story. Getting you back on your feet so that you’re a vibrant contributing member of society,” she said, “is what we’re all about here. How you deal with the physical is the rehab, but how you deal with the emotional and the mental side of you is a whole different story. We see progress happen on one level, but then it stalls because it has to happen in all three areas.”
“Does that make me a triangle or something?” he asked with a half laugh.
But she could see that he didn’t really believe her. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’ll see.”
“What will I see?” he asked, as she walked toward the doorway.
“You’ll see that your progress is important to move ahead on all levels,” she said.
“I hope so,” he said. “I’d like to think that the physical was the furthest behind.”
She gave him a brilliant smile. “I hope so,” she said. “I’m really looking forward to getting to know who you are on the inside.” And, with that, she was gone.
That was a very strange nurse. At least in his experience, they rarely got personal. They asked questions about how you were doing, but they didn’t really want to hear the answer. Yet Jessica appeared to be unique. But then, over his first few days at Hathaway, he had already realized the truth of Iain’s statement about how different this place was. In fact, Iain wasn’t even around anymore. He’d moved on, or rather he’d moved up and moved out. Maybe that was a better way of looking at it. Lance still hoped to see Jaden, and that hadn’t happened yet either. Just then Lance heard the sound of crutches coming toward his door. When he looked up, there was Jaden himself. But it was a Jaden whom Lance didn’t even recognize.
“Wow,” Lance said, feeling older, frailer, and more broken than ever. “Aren’t you looking vibrant and healthy?”
Jaden gave him a half smile and took several more steps inside Lance’s room on his crutches. “Well, I am better,” he said. “I still don’t get to leave for a couple months yet though.”
“You look amazing,” Lance said, in shock. “I would have thought you were ready to be discharged.”
“Not according to them,” he said. Leaning over, he grabbed the visitor’s chair, pulled it to him, and slowly, using the chair for support, sat down. “As you can see, I’m still moving pretty slowly.”
“But you’re moving,” Lance said, “and that’s nothing like what you were doing back at the old place.”
“I know, and that’s why, when I came here, I didn’t believe Iain either. But now that I’m here, you realize that I’m halfway there—or, no, I’m probably 65 percent of the way there or maybe even 70, if I’m lucky. But Iain’s like, good Lord. He looks like he’s a bodybuilder or something.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Lance said. “When I first got his email, I didn’t believe him. I figured the joker would make a joke out of me, and I didn’t want to be anybody’s laughingstock anymore.”
“Understood,” Jaden said. “I have to admit that I was a little concerned about that too. We all knew what Iain was like, but I don’t think we understood that the Iain back then wasn’t the same as the Iain right now.”
“Is he really different?”
“Chalk and cheese,” he said. “As in seriously different chalk and cheese. Before he was a joker, always making light of everything. Now he’s seriously built, and he’s got plans of setting up a center to help other vets like us get a new start in life,” he said. “He’s here with his partner, Robin, who works downstairs in the vet clinic. Robin’s brother is even here,” he said. “That’s Keith, and he arrived about a month ago. Iain has helped him get on his feet a lot faster than I would have expected Keith to.”
“Sounds like Iain has made a complete change in his life,” Lance said. “That doesn’t mean it’s the same change that’s available to us all.”
Jaden looked at him, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “And I think that’s one of the realities we have to come to. We come with hope, but we don’t really expect anything better. We can see that other people have done better, but we always expect that our recovery will be the one case that can’t be improved upon.”
Lance winced at that. “I have to admit that I’ve thought that a time or two.”
“Of course you have,” he said. “And things will improve. You’ll be challenged physically. Your mind-set will be challenged, and your emotional balance will go off-kilter. Your physical balance will go off-kilter before it gets better probably,” he said, “and there’ll be this moment, before dawn, where you think it’s not worth it, that you should never have come, and that it’s all a terrible waste. Then you’ll make this decision that you have to live with what you’ve got
