Travelers Rest by Ann Tatlock

never have my hands back.”
    “So you want to give up?”
    “Yes.”
    She slapped the chair’s armrests with both hands. “How can you do this to me?”
    “Jane, I—”
    “You’re only thinking of yourself! What about your parents? What would it do to them if you . . . if you gave up?”
    He shut his eyes, opened them, said quietly, “You will all go on. I know you will. You’ll be all right.”
    Jane cried out in frustration. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you’re talking like this. You’ve never been a quitter before. Now look at you. You’re not the only person who’s ever had a spinal cord injury, you know. Other people are injured and then go on to live perfectly happy lives—”
    “Stop it, Jane. Just stop. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t have a clue what it’s like. You’re not the one in this chair, unable to move, unable to do anything . . .” He didn’t finish. He turned his face to the wall.
    She stood abruptly, crossed her arms, and moved to the window. For a long while she leaned a shoulder against the glass and looked out at the drizzling rain. “You were always the one who believed in a loving God,” she said. “I was always the one who didn’t know for sure. What about your loving God now, Seth? Has He stopped being loving because you were wounded? Or have you decided He was never really there after all?”
    Minutes passed. Dirty drops of rain slithered wormlike down the glass. Voices drifted in from the hall, and a medicine cart clanked across the linoleum. Somewhere, a nurse’s bell rang and rang again. When Seth finally spoke, Jane turned away from the window to look at him.
    “When we got off the plane in Germany,” he said, “we were put in buses and taken to Landstuhl, the military hospital. It was raining, like today, only it was cold. The rain was like ice. Everything was gray.”
    Seth moved his gaze to Jane, as though to see if she was listening. She nodded for him to go on. He looked away, up toward the ceiling, and started again. “I didn’t know the other guys on the bus, but everyone was wounded to one extent or another. A couple of guys had had limbs amputated back in Iraq. One guy was blind, I think. At least he had bandages over his eyes. The person next to me had been burned pretty bad. And of course a few of us had been shot. Most of the guys tried to joke about it, saying things like our injuries were our ticket out, our pass to go home, blah blah blah, you know, like something good had happened to us. We were the lucky ones because we were getting out. Still, a couple of the guys were crying. They tried to be quiet about it, but I could hear them. I couldn’t talk at all because of the tube in my throat. I could only listen. What I really wanted to do was put my hands over my ears, but of course there was no way I was going to do that. It was like I was trapped in concrete. I was still inside my body, but I couldn’t make it move anymore. So I just had to lie there and listen to the jokes and the men crying and the rain beating against the windows.”
    He swallowed hard. Jane watched as a crimson streak snuck up the side of his neck and fanned out across his cheek. Whether red was the color of anger or sadness, or both, she didn’t know. She waited. He blinked a few times while moistening his lips with his tongue.
    “When we finally got to the hospital,” he went on, “the bus pulled up to the emergency room entrance, and a whole crowd of people came out to meet us. They opened the rear door of the bus and started taking guys out. I was just lying there waiting and watching them work. They worked with this kind of quiet efficiency that I found both comforting and frightening. I mean, I knew I was in good hands, but I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be part of this incoming paddy wagon of wounded soldiers, you know? I just kept thinking, Can somebody get me out of this picture? I’m not supposed to be here. I