Page 35 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

My right hand glides down his hip to trace the line of his flank. I move my hand lower to skim across the dense muscle of his upper leg.

Near his inner thigh, my fingertips catch on a raised ridge under his skin.

I stop.

The texture isn't a smooth surgical incision or a shallow shrapnel nick. It's a five-inch corded seam of dense scar tissue running diagonally over his femoral artery—a deep canyon where high-velocity metal tore through tissue before synthetic graft sutures held it together.

My breath locks in my throat.

The quiet room, the cedar scent, and the woodsmoke vanish.

In an instant, my mind plunges back into the past.

Red emergency tactical lights flicker in the belly of a C-17 Globemaster III. Five thousand miles away over the freezing expanse of the North Atlantic. October, five years ago. Nine hours of continuous, air-refueled flight from Bagram to Landstuhl.

The constant roar of four turbofan engines vibrates through the aluminum deck plates and shakes the IV poles and oxygen canisters hanging from the ceiling tracks. Airframe vibration rattles the litters stacked three tiers high. Leaking hydraulic fluid fills the cargo bay with a chemical stench alongside cold drafts whistling through the cargo ramp seals.

On the lower litter tier lies a thirty-one-year-old Ranger. His blood pressure is plummeting through the floor, a severed femoral artery spurting dark blood against the deck with every pulse. The Ranger scroll on his torn uniform is soaked red.

I press my gloved hand flat over his groin, my body weight leaning into his hip to hold a manual vascular clamp in place with bare knuckles while the flight surgeon shouts orders over the engine roar. My boots slip in the pooling blood as the aircraft banks over the ocean, but I refuse to let go. I hold pressure for nine hours because a higher clamp means amputating his leg.

When his thrashing turned frantic in the dark, I leaned down close to his ear and hummed the German lullaby my father taught me. I hummed to keep him anchored, to steady my hands from shaking, and to pray when words failed me. I hummed those notes over and over into the roar of the engines until his pulse stabilized under my palm.

Above his head, the plastic flight manifest clipboard sways from a bulkhead hook. A name in block letters. A rank. A status line in red.

I can't remember the name. Not from five years ago. I flew two hundred and fourteen critical patients, and I wrote every name down so I wouldn't have to carry them.

My lungs freeze. The air turns to ice in my chest.

My hand goes rigid against Jason's thigh.

The sergeant on that litter was a Ranger. Severed femoral artery, high on the inner thigh, a diagonal track. October, five years ago. His face was pale as wax, slick with soot and blood, while he slipped in and out of hemorrhagic shock. The oxygen mask covered half of it. I stared at the other half for nine hours.

I look up at Jason now in the dim amber light of the quiet room.

The tune he hums while working on his leather... the melody he told me was stuck in his head without knowing where he learned it. He gave me one word for it, that night in the runs. Landstuhl.

The same wound in the same place. The same stretch of the war. My father's song in his chest.

My breath catches in my throat as tears burn my eyes. The man lying beneath me—the man who just took me apart with worshipful heat—might be the soldier I held together in a tin can flying over the Atlantic.

Might be.

Or he's one of a thousand wounded men who came through Landstuhl that year, and I'm pressing a stranger's wound onto his body because I want the ending too much.

In aeromedical evacuation, you never learn what happens after the ramp drops. You hand off litters on the tarmac at Landstuhl, sign the flight manifest, and turn around to board the next aircraft back into the dark. You never know if they live or die, if they're sent home to their families or sent back to the field. You just drop them off and go straight to the next wounded soldier, the next disaster, the next desperate fight to keep the dying alive.

If it's him, he isn't a ghost in my notebook anymore. He's lying right here. His skin is warm. His chest expands against my shoulder. The leg resting against mine under this wool blanket might be the one I fought nine hours to save.

Tears gather in the corners of my eyes, hot and silent.

Silence stays between us to keep rank and medical charts away from the room. I reach up, curl my fingers into the cotton of his blanket, and press my face into the crook of his warm neck.

Jason shifts beside me, turning his face toward mine in his sleep. His arm tightens around my waist, pulling me closer to his side.

A quiet sound rises from his chest—the low, three-note melody rising and falling with the steady cadence of his breathing. He carries it in his bones. He told me it's just something in his head.

I close my eyes, press my forehead against his collarbone, and let the tears fall into the dark as his steady heartbeat thuds beneath my hand.