Nothing to Lose

“That’s why I don’t wear my wedding band,” Vaughan said. “He wanted to take it with him, on a chain around his neck. The heat melted it and the blast drove it into his lungs.”

She put the film back in the stack.

“He wore it for good luck,” she said.

She butted the paperwork into a neat pile and moved to the foot of the bed. Reacher asked, “What was he?”

“Infantry, assigned to the First Armored Division.”

“And this was IED versus Humvee?”

She nodded. “An improvised explosive device against a tin can. He might as well have been on foot in his bathrobe. I don’t know why they call themimprovised. They seem pretty damn professional to me.”

“When was this?”

“Almost two years ago.”

The respirator hissed on.

Reacher asked, “What was his day job?”

“He was a mechanic. For farm equipment, mostly.”

The clock ticked, relentlessly.

Reacher asked, “What’s the prognosis?”

Vaughan said, “At first it was reasonable, in theory. They thought he would be confused and uncoordinated, you know, and perhaps a little unstable and aggressive, and certainly lacking all his basic life and motor skills.”

“So you moved house,” Reacher said. “You were thinking about a wheelchair. You bought a one-story and took the door off the living room. You put three chairs in the kitchen, not four. To leave a space.”

She nodded. “I wanted to be ready. But he never woke up. The swelling never went away.”

“Why not?”

“Make a fist.”

“A what?”

“Make a fist and hold it up.”

Reacher made a fist and held it up.

Vaughan said, “OK, your forearm is your spinal cord and your fist is a bump on the end called your brain stem. Some places in the animal kingdom, that’s as good as it gets. But humans grew brains. Imagine I scooped out a pumpkin and fitted it over your fist. That’s your brain. Imagine the pumpkin goo was kind of bonded with your skin. This is how it was explained to me. I could hit the pumpkin or you could shake it a little and you’d be OK. But imagine suddenly twisting your wrist, very violently. What’s going to happen?”

“The bond is going to shear,” Reacher said. “The pumpkin goo is going to unstick from my skin.”

Vaughan nodded again. “That’s what happened to David’s head. A shearing injury. The very worst kind. His brain stem is OK but the rest of his brain doesn’t even know it’s there. It doesn’t know there’s a problem.”

“Will the bond re-form?”

“Never. That just doesn’t happen. Brains have spare capacity, but neuron cells can’t regenerate. This is all he will ever be. He’s like a brain-damaged lizard. He’s got the IQ of a goldfish. He can’t move and he can’t see and he can’t hear and he can’t think.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan said, “Battlefield medicine is very good now. He was stable and in Germany within thirteen hours. In Korea or Vietnam he would have died at the scene, no question.”

She moved to the head of the bed and laid her hand on her husband’s cheek, very gently, very tenderly. Said, “We think his spinal cord is severed too, as far as we can tell. But that doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

The respirator hissed and the clock ticked and the IV lines made tiny liquid sounds and Vaughan stood quietly and then she said, “You don’t shave very often, do you?”

“Sometimes,” Reacher said.

“But you know how?”

“I learned at my daddy’s knee.”

“Will you shave David?”

“Don’t the orderlies do that?”

“They should, but they don’t. And I like him to look decent. It seems like the least I can do.” She took a supermarket carrier bag out of the green metal cabinet. It held men’s toiletries. Shaving gel, a half-used pack of disposable razors, soap, a washcloth. Reacher found a bathroom across the hall and stepped back and forth with the wet cloth, soaping the guy’s face, rinsing it, wetting it again. He smoothed blue gel over the guy’s chin and cheeks and lathered it with his fingertips and then set about using the razor. It was difficult. A completely instinctive sequence of actions when applied to himself became awkward on a third party. Especially on a third party who had a breathing tube in his mouth and a large part of his skull missing.

While he worked with the razor, Vaughan cleaned the room. She had a second supermarket bag in the cabinet that held cloths and sprays and a dustpan and brush. She stretched high and bent low and went through the whole twelve-foot cube very thoroughly. Her husband stared on at a point miles beyond the ceiling and the respirator hissed and blew. Reacher finished up and Vaughan stopped a minute later and stood back and looked.

“Good work,” she said.

“You too. Although you shouldn’t have to do that yourself.”

“I know.”

They repacked the supermarket bags and put them away in the cabinet. Reacher asked, “How often do you come?”

“Not very often,” Vaughan said. “It’s a Zen thing, really. If I visit and he doesn’t know I’ve visited, have I really visited at all? It’s self-indulgent to come here just to make myself feel like a good wife. So I prefer to visit him in my memory. He’s much more real there.”

“How long were you married?”

“We’re still married.”