After the cranioplasty, when the doctors fixed a prosthetic piece to his skull, Yunely persuaded them to release Rudy to a rehab center in Pittsburgh. Dan followed, living out of a dumpy motel on the south side, all thoughts of returning to school abandoned. The rehab center had little success. The bullet had destroyed whatever part of the brain sends signals to the rest of the body. He couldn’t move a finger. Noises would bubble up from his throat, but it was hard to tell what these articulated, if anything. Since he couldn’t keep his trunk erect, he had to be strapped into his wheelchair, head held in place with the same type of setup as quadriplegics. After three months, though, the therapists did make one advance they considered significant. When Rudy arrived he still couldn’t swallow. The therapists used electric nodes to zap his throat. To trigger muscle memory, they explained. After months of patient work, they taught him how to use his cheeks and tongue to drink through a straw and swallow. Dan picked up Yunely in Titusville every Thursday on her day off. This was the arrangement they’d worked out so she could keep her job and spend her spare time at Rudy’s side. That Thursday afternoon, when the therapists held up the flex-straw of his plastic mug and Rudy took it with his lips, his cheeks going concave as he drew the water, Yunely shrieked. Like Rudy had thrown a touchdown at the Super Bowl instead of sipping liquid. Her voice flowed in a dense, indomitable waterfall as she gripped her son and kissed his ruined face. Then she went around the room hugging the therapists, weeping onto their sleeves, and the women looked so unembarrassed for her, so genuinely happy to have been the cause of this display. Finally, Yunely held Dan, her head barely reaching his chest. Dios enviaron a su amigo. Su hermano. God sent you to be his friend. His brother.
Rudy went home, and Dan found a job in Titusville. The gas boom had begun. Companies were cracking into the Marcellus and Utica Shales like an enforcer bringing a baseball bat across a car’s windshield, spiderwebbing the rock to release the prize. He moved into an apartment down the road from Yunely and Rudy, and they worked out a schedule. Rudy still needed twenty-four-hour care, and the endless list of tasks included dressing him, changing his diaper, managing the feeding tube, and checking and treating problem sores. Dan would arrive after he got off work and stay until Yunely came home at midnight. During the day, the VA paid for a nurse. Carly, sullen and quietly truculent was first, but then came Annette, a vivacious old Jamaican, who called both Rudy and Dan “Boy-man.” Between Dan, Yunely, and Annette, they managed. There were still moments of real fear. When Yunely worked a late shift, he usually spent the night at the house and would hear Rudy making these desperate, keening moans in his sleep. They had the power to put a dream in Dan’s head the moment before they woke him. He asked Yunely how often Rudy had nightmares. He thought she said once or twice a week, but she may have meant those were the rare nights he didn’t dream.
Rudy had come a long way from when the doctors considered him a corpse in suspended animation, but it was relative. He could move his head, lift a hand every now and then, look at Dan’s one eye with his one eye, but that was his range. His progress seemed to promise so much more, and yet after those first months of rehabilitation he’d hit a wall. Yunely still thought he would be the same again, someday, but it was hard to see how.
Meanwhile, Dan learned how to have a conversation with a friend who had no voice. They watched a lot of movies—he never expressed interest in picking them so it was a lot of Dan’s Netflix queue, a lot of historical documentaries with a Hot Tub Time Machine thrown in now and then. They watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War all the way through twice. He bought graphic novels, held them before Rudy, and read to him.
A few weeks ago, Dan had been reading to him from the Frank Miller classic The Dark Knight Returns. He came to a panel where Harvey Dent was flashing back to his eponymous facial injuries. He felt Rudy stir, and Dan looked up. With great effort, Rudy lifted his arm—the one where the burns had just missed the knight and Sí Se Puede—and his hand hovered over the illustration, index finger attempting a gnarled effort to point. His eye met Dan’s. The left corner of his lip, which managed all of his ability to express, curled up. A movement Dan knew to be his grin.
“Uhn,” he said.
Dan burst out laughing, and Rudy stayed like that, smiling, for the rest of The Dark Knight Returns.
“Do you ever see Kaylyn?” he asked.
They waited on the check, and Dan picked at the cold chits of fries from Hailey’s plate.
She wiped her fingers on a crumpled napkin. “Not really.”
“She’s around, though.”
“Sure. She never went anywhere. We don’t see each other that much. She was still a barfly up until she got pregnant.” A grim smile.
“Pregnant?”
“Yeah. So there’s that.” She closed her mouth, looking oddly troubled.
“Bill told me something tonight.” Maybe it was in poor taste to gossip, but bringing this up didn’t seem any worse than watching Hailey’s face go limp as he related the story of Rudy. He told her what Bill had said about him and Kay. Hailey barely looked surprised.
“You knew?”
She flicked at the napkin and watched it spin and tumble on the plate. “Yeah, I knew.” She closed her mouth. Her teeth clicked together. “Kaylyn called him her ‘pity fuck.’ Bill had been after her for so long that she thought… Well, I don’t know why she ever did anything she did, but I’ve got theories.”
“Such as?”
“It was all like a game to her. It was her way of being able to get to Lisa if she ever needed to.”
This sat poorly in his stomach. His most persistent memory of Kaylyn was when she’d lost her inhaler in the eighth grade (Dan in seventh), and he’d seen her in the hallway heaving breaths during an asthma attack, a teacher rubbing her back and telling her to breathe while Kaylyn’s face brimmed with panic. “That’s twisted.”
She chuffed a humorless laugh. “Hardly the most twisted thing Kay has ever done. She hangs around real fucked-up people now. She hasn’t had a job since she quit waitressing, so she makes money any way she can…” She trailed off.
“How ’bout Lisa?”
She gave another humorless laugh. “No.”
“She’s gotta come back someday.” He felt a surge of longing for his long-gone friend and fellow bookworm. He missed her dearly wherever she was.
“Maybe,” said Hailey. He could feel the night going blank. Hailey preparing to return to her other life. The waitress brought the check. He took it before she could offer to pay. They sat there for a while waiting on the change, looking like a still life painting to anyone passing by the window.
He could never explain it to Hailey or Mom or Heather or Betty. Not even Dad. Why he wanted to go back. Why even after he was healed and discharged, he couldn’t leave Rudy.
It was tour #2 in Iraq, September 22, 2007, thirty-five days before they would go home. They were doing a dismounted patrol just south of a mosque where they usually took small arms fire. When muzzle flashes and tracer fire erupted, they were ready (“Got some MacDougals on the rooftop and in the alley,” Coyle had warned). Cleary laid down fire with the .50 from the gunner’s hole, Della Terza with the SAW, and it didn’t really feel like much. They’d encountered way worse. And then Dan saw a boxy white car coming their way, the kind you saw all over the roads of Baghdad. All he remembered was the driver’s beard peeled back in the smarmy grin of the about-to-be-martyred. Della Terza went cyclic and the VBIED detonated well before it reached the convoy. But they were building those things with a lot of frag: ball bearings, nails, feces, ceramic shards. The post-blast buzz filled his ears until the world he knew returned: the smell of hot, ripe shit, and the rubble plinking and thunking off his helmet. When he saw someone down, he didn’t think it could be Coyle. He thought Coyle had been standing to his right, on the other side of the blast, but for some reason he must have gone to the lead Humvee. Dan could see the explosion had blown both front tires, shattered the windshield. He ran, splashing through engine oil.