The Way Home

Chapter 10

HE AWOKE GASPING, HIS HEART hammering so hard his chest felt as if it would explode from the pressure. Visions of fire and blood and bullets flew through his mind like a cyclone, all mayhem and madness and speed. Too fast for him to decipher. Too horrifying for him to want to.

Then soft hands covered his, held tight in a night that was warm and dark but for a pale light burning nearby in the cave.

“You are safe, askar,” a woman whispered in Pashto.

You are safe, soldier.

“You are safe,” she repeated, her voice soothing and sleepy, as though she had recently awakened.

Rabia.

His heartbeat slowed fractionally, then started to settle when he realized it was her. She’d come to him again in the cave. No. Wait. He opened his eyes. Not the cave. The ceiling above him was whitewashed plaster, not dingy, dripping rock.

Slowly, so as not to wake the vertigo, he looked around. Walls. Structural walls, not made of rock. A window was covered with fabric. A soft light burned from a small wooden table. An intricately patterned rug hung on the wall.

He remembered now. She had moved him out of the cave. She’d brought him to her father’s home in the village.

“How long?” he asked through a scratchy throat as his breathing stabilized.

“One hour. No more.” She offered him water. He drank gratefully as she held his head, then carefully resettled him on the pallet.

“No. Not how long was I asleep. How long have I been here?”

“Four days only.”

Painstakingly slow, he turned his head so he could look at her. And felt his heartbeat quicken again.

The burqa was gone. She didn’t wear it in the house. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her face, but each time he did, it was a fascinating revelation. One that held him in thrall and incapable of looking away, even though he saw that his scrutiny made her uncomfortable.

“I will leave you now.” She moved to go.

“No.” He reached for her hand. Held on with as much strength as he could muster. “Please… please stay. Just a little while.”

With reluctance, she stopped resisting as he continued to stare unapologetically at the woman who represented the sum total of his life.

She was incredibly beautiful. Night-black hair, long and loose and falling over slim shoulders. Most Afghan women were easy on the eyes—God only knew how he knew that—and she was no exception. Clear olive complexion, delicately arched brows over dark, intelligent eyes that had once been angry and cold but now offered compassion. Her reaction to him made her uncomfortable, though. Clearly, she struggled with what she felt.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to stare. It’s… it’s just that I wondered what you looked like for so long. It’s still new to me every time I see you.”

She looked away, then rose to her knees, her soft white gown falling over her bare feet. “I must go back to my bed now.”

She looked tired, so he let her go. She needed sleep, even if he wasn’t going to get any. After one of his nightmares, he never slept. He was afraid to.

“Why do you do this, Rabia?” he whispered, aware of her father sleeping across the small room. “Why do you take care of me?”

She looked from the hands she’d clasped at her lap to his face, then back to her hands again. A heartbeat passed while she decided what to say. “Because you invoked Pashtunwali.”

“Yeah, so you told me.” She’d explained how she’d found him and he’d asked for refuge. He didn’t remember. Had no idea why he even knew that word. Another mystery. Like the mystery of why both English and Pashto words mixed together in his head. So much muddled together that when they spoke now, it was in an odd blend of English and Pashto that somehow worked.

The bigger mystery was that he didn’t think it was only Pashtunwali that compelled her to help him. There was more to it now. When she had first come to him, she’d been hostile. Hell, she’d hated him. Barely tolerated him and clearly felt burdened by his presence.

That had changed over time. What he sensed from her now felt very much like concern and caring—and God, he needed to believe that, because without it, he was completely alone.

He needed it so much that he didn’t trust the feeling completely. Maybe there were ulterior motives. Did she and her father plan to ransom him? If so, to whom? The U.S. government? Hell, if someone from the military knew he was alive, they would have already moved heaven and earth to find him. No man left behind. It was the Special Forces credo.

The thought hit him like a tank.

Was he Special Forces? If not, why would that particular spec-ops credo step front and center? Why not Navy SEAL or Marine Force Recon or Army Ranger or Delta?

Special Forces. Army. It felt right that he’d worn a green beret.

Or maybe it was wishful thinking because he’d like to believe he’d been so much more than the weak, useless excuse for a man that he’d become.

A familiar pain knifed through his head, reminding him that isolation was not a small house made of mud bricks and straw plaster in the middle of a war-torn country. Isolation was crippling vertigo, fading eyesight, and not knowing your own damn name. Not knowing if you had a family, if you had a life worth going back to, or if you even had a dog.

He forced a deep breath. Then another. He couldn’t go there. He had to deal with now. Only now was as unknown as his past.

“I must go,” she whispered again, and this time, he stopped her with a request.

“Tea. Please?”

While they never spoken of it, he knew she mixed opiates in a concoction of tea and honey that did little to disguise the bitter taste of the poppy.

She glanced toward the cooking room, then back to him. “Do you need it?”

Yeah. He needed it. He needed the haze of nothingness the drug spread through his mind and body. The need made him a weak man. He knew that. He knew he needed to resist.

Would tonight finally be the night? Could he do it?

With remnants of the nightmare hovering just out of his grasp, he knew he should at least try. If his head cleared, maybe he would remember something. Maybe tonight he didn’t want to.

“Yes, please,” he said, ashamed to be so deep into the drug that he craved it more than his strength or the life he’d lost.

Tomorrow, he resolved, as she rose on quiet feet and walked out of the room to make his tea. Tomorrow he would try. Tonight he wanted only relief.

FOUR MORE TOMORROWS passed before he finally found the courage to let go of the opium.

“You are sure, askar?” Rabia asked with concern in her eyes.

“I’m sure.”

She didn’t ask again. She understood. She knew he had to do this.

Once he’d said no more, the tea had become sweeter.

Life had not.

He’d thought he’d known pain. But the withdrawal was beyond anything he could have imagined. Cold sweats, tremors, vomiting, anxiety, and his old friend insomnia. And then there was the pain—muscle, bone, hair, teeth, everything hurt with unconditional torture.

All in a day’s work, if you were a junkie kicking the habit.

Through it all, Rabia stayed by his side.

She bathed him.

She cleaned up after him.

She held him while he shook until his bones ached.

She soothed his brow through the night terrors.

And when he finally slept, the nightmares shot at him like bullets. Fragmented images cut into his mind like daggers, waking him to his own screams as he faced fire and smoke and IED blasts until exhaustion sucked him under again.

“HOW ARE YOU this morning, askar?”

He opened his eyes slowly. Sunlight slanted in beneath the meager drape of fabric covering the small window. “I don’t know. How long has it been?”

“Since the tea became sweet?”

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Immediately, she knelt beside him and tipped a cup of water to his lips.

“Yes,” he croaked after taking a small sip. “Since the tea became sweet.”

“Seven days.”

Seven days of hell. But he was alive. "Let's not do that again real soon.”

“Oh that, we agree.”

Because he heard a soft smile in her voice, he smiled, too, something that he realized he hadn’t done since he’d come to, chained by his ankle in that cave.

Suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for all she had done for him, for all she had been to him, he reached for her hand. “Thank you.”

She wove her fingers through his, squeezed, and inexplicably, the darkness in his heart lifted. He didn’t think about it. He brought their linked hands to his mouth and kissed the back of her knuckles.

The action was spontaneous and achingly intimate.

Just as suddenly, it was over.

She tugged her hand out of his. “I must prepare the morning meal.”

Then she was gone, leaving him wondering what the hell he’d been thinking. Well, that was pretty damn clear. He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought at all. For an instant, neither had she. For once, she’d responded in a way that wasn’t an offer of comfort or aid. She’d touched him out of affection. He’d reacted in kind.

And it had scared the hell out of her.

Hell, it scared him, too. And, unexpectedly, aroused him.

He stared at the ceiling, experiencing what it felt like to be a man responding physically to a woman and instinctively knowing he had not lived his life in a sexual vacuum. There had been women. Possibly one special woman. Was one waiting for him even now? Would he ever remember her if there was? And what would it matter if he never got out of this damn country and reclaimed his life?

Frustrated, fighting defeat, he willed his thoughts away from the softness of Rabia’s body and the fullness of her lips. Thinking of her that way was one-hundred-percent out of line. Thinking of her that way would not happen again.

But the house was small, the walls thin. There was no way to distance himself physically or mentally. For long moments, he listened to her speak softly to her father in the cooking room. For the first time in seven days, the smells coming from her kitchen didn’t nauseate him.

And for the first time since he’d come to in that cave, he decided that it was time to see his own face.

He stared at the wall beside his pallet and the small mirror that hung above the wooden table. Flat-out, unadulterated fear accelerated his heart rate. What if he didn’t recognize his own face?

What if he did?

What if seeing his image triggered his memory and he didn’t like the man he’d been? What if who he’d been was so horrible that his mind had been protecting him with the amnesia?

There was only one way to find out.

He lay there a little longer, gathering his courage, then, moving slowly and carefully, struggled to sit up. Winded and weak, he gripped the table for support and eventually made it to his knees. Several steadying breaths later, when the vertigo hadn’t reared its ugly head, he managed to get one foot under his weight, then the other, while constantly repeating his mantra.

Still, the room started spinning wildly. He gripped the table for several seconds before the world righted itself again.

Heart slamming, knees threatening to buckle, he drew several bracing breaths, then faced his nemesis in the wavy, mottled mirror—and experienced another loss so acute that it trumped all others.

The eyes of a stranger stared back at him from a face half covered by beard and skin stained dark by the henna dye Rabia had applied to help disguise him in the event that he was spotted through a window.

He’d been certain he’d at least recognize his own face, and in truth, he had put off looking for fear that he wouldn’t… and still he wasn’t prepared for the tears that suddenly clouded his vision at yet one more blow fate had seen fit to deal him.

Shock and curiosity finally beat out despair, and he studied this man who was him and whom he didn’t know. The eyes looking back at him were brown, the skin drawn, the cheeks sunken; streaks of gray were threaded through the tangle of dark hair and beard.

Despite the weakness, he had, for some reason, decided he was not an old man. He’d been certain he was in his thirties. Now he wasn’t so sure. The emaciated man staring back looked much older. Maybe it was his eyes. The eyes looked a hundred years old. Eerily empty. Because of his injuries? The opium? The absence of self? Had he lost his soul when he’d lost his memories and been sent into a time continuum where he’d aged by decades? Or was his soul merely as damaged as his body?

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a thought persisted. This was not who he was or had been. He was not all about darkness and despair. As much as he feared he’d be disappointed, he believed deep down that he had not been a bad man. This pitiful, weak man had not been a part of his life before he’d lost himself. He’d been someone. He’d been something. He’d been vital and driven and real.

The man he saw in the mirror was none of those things. This man was a ghost. A shell. A man without a future because he had no past.

The familiar taste of fear, sharp and sour and overwhelming, pooled in his mouth. Would he ever find himself? Would he ever remember? Or was he stuck here in a hellish limbo for the rest of his life? Like he was stuck in this hostile country with no hope of rescue.

Shaken and defeated, he drew several more deep breaths and settled himself down. If he gave in to the fear, the darkness would eat him alive, and he’d be begging Rabia for opium again.

Composed but still unsteady, he turned his attention to the pitcher of water on the small table. A bar of coarse soap and a clean rag sat beside it. He used both to wash his face, a small task that felt monumental.

It felt both strange and good to be on his feet, but he knew he didn’t dare test his strength for too long. He didn’t dare count on the vertigo to leave him alone, either, or for the pain in his leg to allow him to walk without a limp.

Or for the sight to return miraculously in his right eye.

The vision problems had come on gradually. At first, he’d thought it was a side effect of the vertigo and the opium. At least, he’d hoped. He couldn’t hold that hope any longer. Looking in the mirror had confirmed his worst fears. Like his memory, the vision in his right eye was gone.

Rabia had done her best for him. But he knew he needed medical attention. He suspected he’d sustained a traumatic brain injury—a recently healed wound at the base of his skull supported that idea. A TBI could account for the loss of vision and the vertigo. And more. Another sign of TBI was the fact that his amnesia had lasted this long, suggesting that it was extremely severe.

Retrograde amnesia, possibly?

RA commonly results from damage to the region of the brain most closely associated with episodic and declarative memory, including autobiographical information. In extreme cases, individuals completely forget who they are. Memory loss, however, can also be selective or categorical, manifested by a person’s inability to remember events related to a specific incident or topic.

Whoa.

He gripped the table when he felt himself reeling. Where had that textbook analysis come from?

The same place as the short frantic bursts of information that flew at him out of the blue since he’d started weaning himself off the opium. Most of the time, it came at him like bullets—rushing by so fast he couldn’t capture it all. He’d see fire and smell burning rubber, hear blasts, feel pain. The next time, he’d see blue skies, glimmering water, winter snow, summer sun.

This was the first time anything had manifested with such clarity. So much clarity it almost set him on his ass.

He circled back to the medical terminology. Was he a doctor? A doctor who was a soldier? That didn’t feel right. A medic, maybe? Yeah, maybe.

“Congratulations,” he muttered. “You’ve just solved exactly nothing.”

He still didn’t know who he was or how he’d gotten here or, more important, how he was going to get out.

And go where?

Yeah. Go where?

Very carefully, he eased back down onto the pallet. Winded and shaky, he leaned back against the wall and recovered what little strength he had. When he felt steadier, he reached for the stack of clean clothes Rabia had folded neatly on the edge of his pallet.

If anyone visiting accidentally saw him in the house, they would see a man in traditional Pashtun dress, with a loose-fitting shirt that reached his knees, called a qmis, and a vest that covered the shirt and pants, a shalwar. He tied the trousers with a string and then, with the rest of his energy, slipped his bare feet into the chaplay, or thick leather shoes. Then he rested again.

Several minutes later, he’d regained enough strength to deal with the pagray—a turban—and the long strip of cotton cloth that Rabia had taught him to wind around his head and leave one end dangling.

Finally, he reached for a long, wide piece of cloth and draped the chadar over his shoulders. Then he lay back down, angered by his weakness and pumping heart but looking like a proper Pashtun man.

Like a man, he thought grimly, lost between a world he had forgotten and a world where he didn’t belong.

Like a man confused about a woman who was a part of that world.

Then he drifted into another fitful sleep.