Homefront Hero. Allie Pleiter
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was it her hands that shuddered? Or had she merely felt a tremble but not seen it? She forced a casualness to her touch as she showed him again how to wrap the yarn around his right index finger—the one with the long scar down the side. “You don’t need to strangle it, Captain, just let this finger do the work.”
“John,” he corrected as he fumbled his way through a stitch—labored but correctly done. “At least off camera.”
“Well, John.” The familiarity felt more daring than she liked, even though she worked to hide it from her voice. “It feels odd to everyone at first, not just war heroes.” John rolled his shoulders and scowled as he produced a second stitch—also correct but less forced. “See? There’s no need to mount a battle here.” She leaned over to adjust his far hand again, catching a whiff of his aftershave. He smelled exotic and sophisticated.
“This must get easier.” She couldn’t tell if it was a question or a demand.
“Yes.” She felt the first smile of the afternoon sneak across her lips. “It does.”
He looked up at her for the first time. Were she knitting at the moment, she would have surely dropped a stitch. He would have enjoyed that. “It must. I’ve seen young boys do this.”
“That is the idea, isn’t it?” And it was. It wasn’t just some general’s folly to decide to convince America’s boys to knit. The clicking needles of American women and girls simply weren’t enough. The Red Cross was so desperate for woolen socks that this “farfetched scheme” to recruit boys was, in fact, important to brave men risking their lives across the ocean.
“And you’ll teach injured soldiers to do this?” he asked. “To pass the time in the hospital as well as meet the need for socks?” What he hadn’t realized was that five tidy stitches had worked their way onto his needle while he spoke. While many might accuse John Gallows of great arrogance, his only knitting sin was the universal fault of trying too hard.
“Yes, that’s the idea. It’s been done successfully in some other hospitals, so I am eager to try it here.”
“Done successfully, you say? Well, then, I simply can’t allow this to elude me, can I? My own grandmother,” he went on, “who can barely see well enough to know which Gallows is who, can do this.” Three more stitches.
“Your grandmother knits?” Keep him talking, Leanne urged herself, realizing that talking was the key to keeping him from overthinking the simple stitches.
“Constantly. I have several holiday sweaters in the most atrocious patterns you can imagine. And a few scarves that could scare away the enemy.” He looked down, a little stunned to realize he’d made it all the way to the end of the double-pointed needle. “Now what?”
She didn’t have to force herself to take his hands and show him how to switch to the next needle. And while she didn’t dare look up at him while she touched those hands, she could feel his smile behind her. “See, just like that. All lined up like soldiers, they are. Well done.”
He said nothing until the silence forced her to look up at him. When she did, Leanne felt it burrow its way under her ribs and steal her breath. “Well taught, Nurse Sample.”
“Leanne,” she heard herself say, but it was as if Ida’s daring nature had inhabited her voice. “Off camera.”
Chapter Seven
“One more inch…just one inch farther…ugh!” John growled in exasperation at the joints that would not bend to his will. It was as if the plaster cast on his leg had never come off—the stubborn limb refused to regain the needed flexibility. He gripped the bench harder and set his teeth against the pain, leaning into another push. It was probably no accident that the “reconstruction clinic,” the gymnasium on base that housed the staff and equipment designed to rehabilitate wounded soldiers, was olive-green rather than hospital white. To John, the gymnasium was no less a battlefield than the front line. It reminded him that he was a soldier—and that a soldier belonged on the front lines, where he intended to return as soon as possible, even if he had to thrash his leg into submission every step of the way.
“Whoa there, stallion. You’re not going to get what you want out of that leg by beating it up.” Dr. Charles Madison pushed John’s leg back down. John hated how easily the small doctor could do it, too. The weakness in his leg made him crazy, and Madison had a gift for showcasing just how much strength John had lost.
“It doesn’t bend a single inch farther this week.” Complaining felt childish, but John’s frustration stole his composure as easily as the dirigible stay lines had shredded his leg. Patience was not a virtue Gallows men either possessed or cherished. John pulled himself upright with something just short of a snarl.
“This isn’t the kind of thing that goes in a straight line.” Dr. Madison, his Bostonian accent sounding entirely too fatherly, sat down on the bench next to John. He set his clipboard down with a weariness that spoke do we have to go over this again? without words. “It’s going to be back-and-forth. And if you push it too far too fast, I promise you it will be more back than forth. Flex your foot.”
John shot him a look but obeyed. The doctor could make “flex your foot” sound like “go sit in the corner.”
“You’ve got more rotation than you did last week. You tore nearly every tendon from your hip down. It’s a wonder you’ve still got use of the leg at all, Gallows. Those tether lines could have ripped the whole thing off.”
“Yes, yes, I’m so fabulously fortunate.” John launched himself up off the bench and hobbled to the bars on the wall nearby. Did Madison think he didn’t know that? And if those lines—those horrid steel lines that felt like they were slicing his leg off from the inside out while he dangled—had severed his leg, where would he have been? Falling thousands of feet out of the sky to drown in the ocean. If he lived through the fall. The mere thought of that terrifying, helpless hanging sensation, those minutes of absolute dread that felt like hours of twisting over what he was certain would be the site of his death, sent that icy sensation through his chest again. He hated this sniper-fire fear of that memory which could attack him without warning. A wrong comment or even the slightest hint of falling—and he slipped all the time these days—would catapult him back to those moments in the sky. Somehow he knew that if he ever had to hang upside down again for any reason—some exercise or calisthenic someone dreamed up to rehabilitate him—he’d stop breathing altogether. Die of remembered fright on the spot. Just the kind of way every war hero ought to behave.
“For a talented spokesman, I wonder sometimes if I ought to punch you for the thoughtless things you say.” Madison cornered him against the wall and pinned him with severe eyes. “Look around you, son. Wake up and see just how fortunate you are. That imperfect leg you so despise is at least still there. You’ve your wits about you and the admiration of many. Take a walk with me over to another hall of the hospital—the one with no visitors—and see some of the ghosts we can barely call men. Complain to them as they sit in chairs mumbling because not only their arm but their mind is gone.”
John was in no mood to be smothered by the silver lining of his own survival. Madison didn’t get like this often, and it bothered John to no end when the doctor lectured him on his advantages. He needed no reminding. “I know I ought to be glad I’m alive,” he mumbled with reluctance. That was, in fact, part of the problem. Part of the thing niggling at the back of his mind, taunting him on the edges of sleep. He was alive. He was fortunate. More than that, he was lauded and admired. He just never felt like he earned it. And that wasn’t the sort of thing one mentioned to anyone. Humility was one thing—and another one of those virtues not especially prized by Gallows men. Feeling like a fraud? That was another. “I let my frustration get the better of my mouth.”
John had been down that particular hospital hallway. He knew soldiers who, once maimed, wanted nothing more than to get back out on the front lines so they could be shot down and end their misery. They wouldn’t put their families through the shame of suicide, yet they couldn’t face