Danielle Steel - Full circle

“Yes, ma'm.” He saluted her, and a few minutes later, a nurse came in and gave him a shot for the pain, and Tana watched him drift off to sleep, holding his hand, as the tears coursed down her face and she cried silently whispering her prayers and her thanks. She watched him for hours, just holding his hand, and at last she kissed his cheek, and his eyes, and she left the hospital. It was after midnight by then, and all she could think of as she took a bus back to Berkeley that night was “Thank God.” Thank God he was alive. Thank God he hadn't died in that godforsaken jungle, wherever the hell it was. Vietnam had a new meaning to her now. It was a place where people went to be killed. It wasn't just someplace one read about, something to talk about between classes, with professors or friends. It was real to her now. She knew exactly what it meant. It meant Harry Wins-low would never walk again. And as she stepped off the bus in Berkeley that night, the tears still running down her cheeks, she jammed her hands in her pockets, and walked back to her rented room, knowing that neither of them would ever be the same again.

Tana sat at his side for the next two days, and never moved, except to go home and get a few hour' sleep, bathe, change her clothes and come back again, to hold his hand, talk to him when he was awake, about the years when he was at Harvard and she was at BU, the tandem bicycle they had, the vacations on Cape Cod. They kept him pretty doped up most of the time, but there were times when he was so lucid it hurt to look at him, and to realize the thoughts going through his mind. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life paralyzed. He wanted to die, he told Tana again and again. And she screamed at him and called him a son of a bitch. But she was also afraid to leave him at night, for fear he would do something about it himself. She warned the nurses about how he felt, but they were used to it and it didn't impress them much. They kept a close eye on him, and there were others who were worse off, like the boy down the hall who had lost both arms and his entire face when a six-year-old boy had handed a hand grenade to him.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, her mother called just before she left for the hospital. It was ten o'clock in New York, and she had gone into the office for a few hours, and she thought she'd call Tana to see how she was. She had hoped right up until the last minute that Tana would change her mind and come home to spend Christmas with her, but Tana had insisted for months that there was no chance of that. She had stacks and stacks of work to do. And she said there wasn't even any point in Jean coming out. But it seemed a depressing way to spend the Christmas holidays, almost as depressing as the way she was spending them herself. Arthur was having a family Christmas in Palm Beach with Ann and Billy and his son-in-law, and the baby, and he hadn't included Jean. She understood of course that it would have been awkward for him.

“So what are you up to, sweetheart?” Jean hadn't called her in two weeks. She was too depressed to call, and she didn't want Tana to hear it on the phone. At least when Arthur was in New York over the holidays, there was some hope that he might stop by for a few hours, but this year she didn't even have that hope held out to her, and Tana was gone.… “Studying as hard as you thought?”

“Yes … I … no…” She was still half asleep. She had stayed with Harry until four o'clock. His fever had suddenly shot up the night before and she was afraid to leave him again, but at four in the morning, the nurses had insisted she go home and get some sleep. It was going to be a long, hard climb for him, and if she burned herself out now, she wouldn't do him any good later on, when he needed her most. “I haven't been. At least not for the past three days.” She almost groaned with fatigue, as she sat down in the straight-backed chair they left near the phone. “Harry got back from Vietnam.” Her eyes glazed as she thought of it. This would be the first time she had told anyone, and the thought of what there was to say made her sick.

“You've been seeing him?” Jean sounded instantly annoyed. “I thought you had studying to do. If I'd thought you could take time off to play, Tana, I wouldn't be sitting here spending the Christmas holidays by myself … if you have time to play around with him, the least you could have—”

“Stop it!” Tana suddenly shrieked in the empty hall. “Stop it! He's in Letterman. No one's playing around, for God's sake.” There was silence at Jean's end. She had never heard Tana sound like that. There was a kind of hysterical desperation in her voice, and a frightening despair.

“What's Letterman?” She imagined it was a hotel, but something instantly told her she was wrong.

“The military hospital here. He was shot in the spine.…” She began to take in great gulps of air so she wouldn't cry, but it didn't work. Nothing worked. She cried all the time when she wasn't with him. She couldn't believe what had happened to him. And she nearly collapsed now on the chair, like a little child. “He's a paraplegic now, Mom … he may not even live … he got this terrible fever last night…” She just sat there, crying, shaking from head to foot and unable to stop, but she had to let it out, as Jean stared at her office wall in shock, thinking about the boy she had seen so many times. He was so confident, almost debonair, if one could say that about a boy his age, he laughed all the time, he was funny and bright and irreverent and he had annoyed her most of the time, and now she thanked God Tana hadn't married him … imagine the life that would have been for her.

“Oh sweetheart … I'm so sorry.…”

“So am I.” She sounded exactly as she had as a child when her puppy died, and it broke Jean's heart to listen to her. “And there's nothing I can do, except sit there and watch.”

“You shouldn't be there. It puts too much strain on you.”

“I have to be there. Don't you understand?” Her voice was harsh. “I'm all he has.”

“What about his family?”

“His father hasn't shown up yet, and he probably never will, the son of a bitch, and Harry's just lying there, barely hanging on.”

“Well, there's nothing you can do. And I don't think you should see something like that, Tan.”

“Oh, no?” She was belligerent now. “What should I see, Mom? Dinner parties on the East Side, evenings in Greenwich with the Durning clan? That's the worst crock of crap I've ever heard. My best friend has just had his ass shot off in Vietnam, and you don't think I should do something like that. Just what do you think should happen to him, Mom? Should I cross him off my list because he can't dance anymore?”

“Don't be so cynical, Tana.” Jean Roberts sounded firm.

“Why the hell not? What kind of world do we live in anyway? What's wrong with everyone? Why don't they see what we're getting into in Vietnam?” Not to mention Sharon and Richard Blake and John Kennedy and everything else that was wrong with the world.

“That's not in your hands or mine.”

“Why doesn't anyone care what we think … ? what I think … what Harry thinks.… Why didn't anybody ask him before he went?” She was sobbing again and she couldn't go on.

“Get hold of yourself.” Jean waited for a moment, and then said, “I think you should come home for the holidays, Tan, especially if you're going to spend them around the hospital with that boy.”

“I can't come home now.” Her voice was sharp and suddenly there were tears in Jean's eyes.