Chapter 5 - The Clinic in Portsmouth
The branch medical clinic at Portsmouth Naval Hospital smelled different from the civilian ERs I had spent five years avoiding. It smelled of floor stripper, green soap, and the high-grade isopropyl alcohol they use to swab the skin before they draw five tubes of blood for the deployment panel.
Commander Vance walked two paces ahead of me through the basement corridor. She had a set of service khakis—clean, starch-creased, with the black buttons of a lieutenant commander—draped over her left arm, and a pair of low-quarter leather shoes that had been shined with black paste wax until they looked like wet coal.
“The surgeon is Doctor Miller,” Vance said as she pushed open the door to Examination Room Three. “He was on the Mercy during the Pacific partnership deployment. He knows what five-year-old meshed autografts look like when they’ve been dragged across dry wool.”
The room had two stainless steel tables, a blue vinyl examination chair that could be tilted back with a foot pedal, and an ancient, framed print of the frigate Constitution fighting the Guerriere on the wall beside the sink.
Dr. Miller was forty, with red hair cut so short his white scalp showed through the stubble, and the broad, flat thumbs of an orthopedic hand specialist. He didn't say hello. He looked at the four-star coat hanging from my shoulders, then at the blood-spotted white gauze that was sticking to the nape of my neck, and pointed to the chair.
“Face down,” he said. “Don't lean on the right elbow.”
I took off the Admiral’s coat.
Laying it over the back of the stool was like setting down twenty pounds of iron shot. Without the weight of the broadcloth, the cold air came back into the room, prickling the scarred tissue until the skin felt like tight canvas pulled over a drum frame.
I climbed onto the table, my chin resting on the paper roll, my arms hanging down toward the linoleum.
The sound of his gloves snapping onto his wrists was like two small pistol shots.
“Someone pulled this,” Miller said. His fingers were cold, but they didn't shake. He took the edge of the torn silk where it had adhered to the scab over the fourth thoracic vertebra and touched it with a pair of tissue forceps. “The silk fibers have settled into the granulation bed. It’s not deep, but if we don't debride the threads, you’ll have an abscess under the graft within forty-eight hours.”
“Do it,” I said into the paper.
“It’s going to hurt, Commander,” he said.
“I’ve had forty-two square inches of skin taken off my thigh with an air dermatome, Doctor,” I said. “I know what it feels like.”
He used the saline first. The fluid was cold, running in thin, greasy streams down the curve of my ribs, pooling on the blue vinyl beneath my sternum. Then came the tweezers.
Tink. Tink.
Each pull was a hot, needle-sharp point that traveled along the intercostal nerves, around the side of my chest, and settled in my throat like a swallowed coin. I didn't move my feet. I stared at the chrome wheel on the base of the doctor’s stool and counted the spokes: one, two, three, four, five.
“Your sister has a good grip,” Miller murmured as he worked. “She caught the hem right where the back-tack was double-stitched. She must have put seventy pounds of pull on that seam.”
“She wanted people to see,” I said.
“Well, they saw,” Vance said from the corner of the room. She was sitting on a metal folding chair with her service dress blue jacket over her knees, her eyes fixed on the door. “Every junior officer in that room will be telling the story before the eight-o'clock muster tomorrow morning. By noon, it’ll be on the waterfront in San Diego.”
“The story about the girl who burned?” I asked.
“The story about the four-star who gave her jacket to an engineer who hasn't been on the active list in five years,” Vance said. “There’s a difference, Alden. One is a rumor about a family fight. The other is a direct order from the Chief of Naval Operations about who owns the high ground.”
Miller finished the last thread, laid the forceps down on the metal tray with a small, clean clink, and reached for the silver-sulfadiazine jar.
The cream was cold as glacier ice.
As he spread it with a sterile tongue depressor, the fire in the skin began to back down, the sharp white-hot points turning into a broad, dull ache that felt like an old bruise after a rugby match.
“The graft is remarkably healthy,” Miller said, peeling the backing off a twelve-inch square of Telfa non-adherent dressing. “Whoever did the mesh at Brooke knew their business. They gave you fifteen percent extra slack across the shoulder blade to account for the arm movement.”
“Dr. Chen,” I said. “He was an Air Force colonel. He had been doing IED victims from Helmand for six years.”
“He was an artist,” Miller said, smoothing the paper tape across my back with the flat of his hand. “You can get up now. But don't go reaching for any high shelves until the skin sets.”
I sat up. The room did two slow, greasy circles before settling back onto its corners.
On the small desk beside the sink, the set of service khakis lay folded: the trousers, thirty-two regular; the shirt, with the two gold oak leaves of a lieutenant commander pinned to the collars, the points of the leaves aligned precisely one inch from the front edge of the fabric.
Above the left pocket were three ribbons: the Navy Cross, the Purple Heart, and the Navy Commendation Medal with the gold star.
“Those aren't my ribbons,” I said, looking at the navy cross. The ribbon was dark blue, with a single stripe of white through the center, clean and stiff as cardboard.
“They were delivered by courier from the Pentagon three hours ago,” Vance said. “The Admiral had them made up at the exchange annex before she left Washington. She said you wouldn't have your miniatures with you.”
“I haven't worn khakis since twenty-twenty-one, Commander,” I said.
“The uniform regulations haven't changed since twenty-twenty-one, Alden,” Vance said, rising from her chair and offering me the shirt. “The collar stays are plastic, the belt gig-line goes down the center of the fly, and the shoes are shined until you can see your teeth in the toe caps. Put them on.”
I took the shirt.
The cotton-poly blend was stiffer than the silk I had bought in Mount Vernon, but when I slipped my right arm into the sleeve, the seam didn't drag against the bandage. It had been tailored with an extra half-inch of clearance in the armscye—the small, thoughtful adjustment that only someone who had read my medical board report would have thought to make.
I buttoned the front, tucked the tails into the high-waisted trousers, and buckled the cotton webbing belt with the brass tip aligned with the edge of the buckle.
When I looked into the mirror above the sink, the woman staring back didn't look like an inspector for the Maritime Administration who ate egg salad sandwiches out of Tupperware on the docks in Baltimore.
She looked like the Chief Engineer of the USS Truxtun.
The hair was still too long—an inch below the collar, curling where the humidity had hit it—but the neck was straight, the shoulders were level despite the shortened muscle on the right side, and the blue ribbon with the white center stripe sat on the left breast like an anvil on a workbench.
The door to the corridor opened.
Judith Carrow was standing in the hall. She was wearing her working khakis now, the four silver stars pinned to her collars, her hands tucked into the pockets of her windbreaker.
She looked at me for three seconds.
“The hair needs four pins,” she said.
“Yes, ma'am,” I said.
“Vance has them in her purse,” the Admiral said. “Get them in. We have a three-hour transit back to Washington after the commissioning, and the Secretary of the Navy wants to see the engineering report on the Ruiz before we sit down with the defense appropriations subcommittee.”
She stepped back into the corridor, her oxfords squeaking on the fresh floor wax.
“And Valerie,” she called back without turning her head.
May you like
“Yes, Admiral?”
“Your father is in the chapel down the hall,” she said. “He’s been sitting on the third pew for forty minutes. If you want to leave him there, the side exit goes straight to the car.”
