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3 | Weird croissants and laughter




Leonardo


They say no man could be completely broken unless when forced to rely on someone else for their daily needs. It was that sheer dependency that broke every strand of their willpower, eventually turning them into nothing but a crumpled piece of body and soul.

A couple of months had passed since my accident but the memories remained fresh. Every night, that horrific scene of the blast replayed in my mind. It drummed up the reminder - I was a failure. A commander who failed in his duty to protect his men.

My days passed with intense physical and psychological therapy but nothing seemed to revive my will to walk. To live.

I was under constant vigilance like a prisoner. From the food I'd consume to my medicine intake and every other thing I did, I needed someone's help. Someone to monitor me in case I fell unconscious again.

The worst among them was the part about personal hygiene. There was something soul-crushing about a person being bathed by someone, being attended to for every one of nature's calls.

If you could survive that, I bow to you.

I wasn't strong enough to bear through it.

My self-confidence took a nosedive faster than a crashing plane, falling into the sea of frustration and despair. I knew I needed to be brave for those dependent on me but it was easier said than done.

More so, when I didn't even want to try.

"Please, just one more time." Amara stood at the far end of the parallel bar, tempting me to take another step towards her. "One more. Then I promise, we are done for the day."

"You said that an hour ago."

I clenched my teeth and took another step. The artificial grip of the prosthetic limp dug around my stump, trying to stumble me over. The pain, a dull sensation thumped over my left thigh, ending where my leg ended and the titanium limb began.

Since my amputation, this became the norm - walking. Or trying to walk. More exercise and stronger medicines. The support staff monitored me like some wounded, caged animal who was being experimented on to see how it reacted.

"How about this..." Amara said as she took a step closer.

If she reduced our distance by moving closer, I'd have to walk all over again.

"Stay where you are," I growled. "I'm trying."

"We can take a break for a while-"

"Dammit. I said I'm trying. So shut the hell up."

"Excuse me."

I looked up to the sight of her, arms crossed over her chest.

Her brown eyes darkened as I took another laborious step, ignoring my progress. "You promised, you'd not be rude to me."

"Sorry," I said, gripping the cold steel on both sides and moving ahead. "I'll try to work on it."

Though my right leg held much of my weight, I still had to learn how to use my artificial limb and walk like a normal person.

Normal was such a funny word for me. What was normal for everyone wasn't the same for me.

My body, seared both in skin and soul wouldn't be normal again. My leg would never regain its lost strength or regrow the lost part. No matter how much I trained to walk like a normal person, some things would never be normal for me.

What sucked the most about this ordeal was even after two months of being in the hospital and training to walk every day with my artificial leg, I still needed help. I needed someone to strap on my limb and hold me if I stumbled.

If someone said something about a light at the end of a freaking tunnel, I would have punched their fucking face.

I took a painful, trembling step forward, breathing through the gaps between my teeth. My vision saw black dots as I gripped the parallel bars, harder than before.

Get it over with.

"You're doing great," Amara said, her joyous tone sliding off my ears. "Loosen your grip from the metal and try. Come on, one last step."

As I took another step as instructed, I recalled the time Amara informed me about tendering her resignation from her posting. I was curious to know the reason but I knew better than to ask.

Amara Safi knew how to get someone to take the bait, and play the personal, sympathy card. For any question that I planned on asking, she would bombard me with tens of hers.

Since I decided to shut the doors to my past and bury them deep within, I didn't want her or anyone else to go digging for the dead.

"Anndddd..." Amara's intonated words nudged me to take the last step.

To move once more before I earned the comfort of sitting in my wheelchair.

As always, I took the last step with caution, unwilling to fall like all other times.

Exhaustion took hold of my body. My left leg began trembling. The pain from the prosthetic digging around my stump, blistering the healing wound and abrading a newer, fresher part of the skin, soured my mouth.

Yet, I moved.

I marched.

"You pushed harder than all other days." Amara moved my wheelchair closer. "I'm so proud of you, Leo. You didn't stop like those other times."

"Well, I have to push harder if I need to get away from you," I said, looking up at her as I unclasped the brakes on my wheelchair. "It's either trying to walk and going away from here or suffering through your company."

Amara gingerly pushed my chair towards the bed, cackling behind me. She knew I meant none of it.

What I truly meant was being thankful for her company. For her care. She stayed when it wasn't required of her. She helped even when it wasn't a part of her job.

Amara Safi was a godsent who knew I was indebted to her.

"Your mother has arrived early today," she said. "Should I call her in?"

Helping me move back on the bed, Amara rolled my hospital gown up to my knees and unbuckled the so-called state-of-the-art prosthetic leg that was now a part of my life.

"She knows she's welcomed."

Right on cue, she walked in, crossing the corner of the room where my crutches and the walking bars were kept on display.

Her greyish eyes were a canvas through which I could read all her emotions. Sadness - like the dark, ominous and rumbling skies outside - reflected in her eyes.

"I know you don't like flowers, Leo, so I bought you something else," Mom said, placing a brown paper bag on the white, metal table beside my bed. "I hope you like it."

Her smile simmered. She may not say much but Rachel Brenton was suffering, seeing her son suffer.

It had been two months since Mom saw me - a burnt, bruised and handicapped soldier. I remembered that day when she tried blinking away her tears and put on a weird, elongated smile as I was reeled out of the aircraft.

She didn't know but her brave face acted as a constant reminder of my failure.

"This is the new thing that kids are having nowadays," Mom said, breaking my reverie. "I saw it on Tinder."

"TikTok, Mom. Not Tinder."

She placed the bag in my hand. The warm, buttery scent filled my senses as I unwrapped the bag and dunked my hand inside.

It wasn't just a croissant. Chocolate covered with colorful sprinkles and sugar dust, that piece of confectionery would have any Frenchman wage war against us for destroying their beloved food.

"What the hell is this?" I asked, looking at Amara and Mom. They concentrated on my mother's phone to ignore me. "Hello?"

"Oh, is this what it is?" Amara pointed to the screen, then glanced at the abomination resting in my hand. "It looks so good in the video."

"Here...Take it." I placed the weird, pink-looking croissant back in the bag, offering it to Amara. "You have whatever this is. My eyes are watering just by looking at the glitter and the colors it has."

"Come on, Leo." Mom protested, neatly breaking the abominable dessert into three. "Take a bite. Just one bite."

The symphony of flaky pastry sheets cracking under pressure was dull music in an otherwise machine-whirling room.

With both her hands aloft, waving the broken piece in front of our faces, Amara and I took her offering.

Biting into it, I said a little prayer. After all, I didn't want to make a newspaper headline tomorrow - man dies after eating weird, pink croissant.

While I gagged at the cotton candy flavour that burst in my mouth, Amara closed her eyes and hummed as if it was some Michelin star chef's preparation.

"Good God, woman. Have you no taste buds at all?" I said to Amara. Mom slapped my arm, pursing her lips.

"My taste buds are working fine," Amara said, rolling her eyes. "But yours have been destroyed after-"

She didn't complete her sentence.

Since arriving at Walter Reeds after my amputation, my mother and Amara walked around eggshells. They thoroughly monitored everything they said, right from what words to use to anything that might trigger me.

For anyone else, it would appear as if they suffered a stroke, mid-sentence. In reality, they processed words to cushion their impact.

This time, Amara slipped.

"Leo, what I meant-" she began.

"Enough with you two." I clicked the button that straighten the bed's backrest. "I need to get this over with, once and for all." I turned to address my mother. "Mom, you've been babying me as if I'm pregnant or something."

"Leo, hush," Mom said. "You're overthinking it."

"No, I'm not. I know when you talk freely to me and when you hold your tongue from saying something stupid. Stop. That. Now."

I wasn't done.

"And you," I turned to Amara. "Stop coddling me. I'm not a child."

Something dark flashed in her eyes before vanishing behind those wide, brown orbs. She nodded once more like a kid who was made to understand the reason for being scolded.

"Sorry," she mumbled and tossed the uneaten piece of dessert back into the bag. "This is bad. Yuck."

I pursed my lips to avoid laughing. My rant would lose all its impact if I laughed now.

Amara cringed her face, making gagging sounds. She stuck her tongue out, displaying it for my mother's viewing pleasure, who nodded.

Was she asking if her tongue turned pink?

My chest rumbled and my head leaned lower as I laughed cautiously before breaking all barriers and doing it wholeheartedly.

The corners of my eyes watered and my chest suddenly felt lighter.

How long had it been since I laughed?

We sat and talked about the latest trending movie and TV shows. When Amara received a call, she hopped off the chair. Her brownish skin turned pale.

"I'll let you two talk," she said, moving towards the door. "Let me know if I'm needed. I'm right outside."

"Please take your time. I'm not going anywhere," I said for which she peered at me till I surrendered my arms up.

A part of my rehabilitation also involved avoiding negative thoughts, which both Mom and Amara agreed, I was brimming with.

Alone in the room, my mother turned to me, showing me her favorite cat and pastry chef videos on her phone.

"These chefs are mostly men," she said. "And they don't even wear any shirts now when they cook."

"It's called thirst trap."

"They trap you and don't give you water?" She kept her phone on my bedside. "What kind of a person does that?"

Since Amara met my mother, she had been nothing but a bad influence on her. From getting her hooked on new gadgets and creating her profiles on various social media platforms as a means to distract her from my recovery issues, Amara pretty much turned my mother into a Gen Z.

A Gen Z who didn't understand half the social media lingos.

"Thirst trap doesn't mean that. It means...they're trying to entice you."

"By foundling an orange."

"Whatever works for you."

"I wasn't sure what I was watching." Her wide eyes and agape mouth confirmed. She wasn't interested in the videos but curious. "I thought that boy lost his clothes and liked his orange a lot."

I looked away because looking at my mother's innocent face, while she tried navigating through the world of thirst traps and daddy videos made me feel bad for her.

Someone should have been there with her to help her understand how it all worked. Someone, who wasn't in my life anymore.

I was a patient, a burden from whom these videos gave her a much needed respite.

"Oh, before I forget. I've talked to the doctor about your discharge." Mom began, her eyes glistening with hope. "With your physiotherapy going well he believes that you can be discharged sooner. Maybe in a week or so."

"I'm not going back to the mansion, Mom."

There were a lot of issues I had to face. From going back into the world to facing friends and family who'd hound me with questions about my mission. About what happened to me.

The worst of them was seeing my father and brother.

"Who said about going back to the mansion? I'm taking you to your apartment."

A simple sentence like that shouldn't have bothered me but it did.

Mom was taking me.

Mom was helping me.

I was a dependent. A burden.

"You don't have to." I leaned into my bed, adjusting it back to its usual position. Maybe, if I pretended to be tired, she would leave me alone. "I'll have some arrangements done and be out of your hair soon. I'm thinking of staying in New York. Uncle Frank still has that apartment there. I can-"

"No." With one commanding word, her face reddened. "I don't care what arrangements you have. For now, you are coming with me. I don't want to listen to how it might make you feel. I don't care. I'm your mother and I need this. I need to see you getting well before you decide to leave me...again."

Mom never played the sympathy card. Even when she witnessed me the first time - almost unrecognizable - she slapped on a smile and managed everything from Miami before temporarily moving to Maryland.

"Fine. I'll come with you." I tipped her chin up, trying hard to wipe those low, hanging tears at her waterline. "We also need a nurse because I still need help and I'm not okay with you helping me do my daily chores."

"Amara can come," mom beamed. "She already does everything for you."

She dialed someone on the phone and in came rushing the devil of our conversation.

"We have an offer for you, Amara." Mom palmed her chest, smiling.

Amara grinned as if she already knew.

How long was I asleep for them to have hatched this plan?

And why was a stranger agreeing to help me?

"See..." Mom turned to me, brimming with unrefined happiness. "She's ready."

"You tricked me." The heaviness of my exercise and the medicines burdened my eyelids and my speech. "Anyways, good for me. I can't afford to pay for a nurse."

"Oh, you are paying me, mister." Amara taunted. "I'm not doing this for charity."

"Then do it as part of your training before your next assignment."

Something told me Amara didn't resign for me. The issue was something else. An issue, I was too sleepy to probe into.

Mom and Amara sat by my bedside, whispering like teenagers.

My eyes fluttered shut, sleep lulled me into its hold. My hearing senses remained active.

"Zemira is calling me every day asking about him." Mom's voice softened. "I don't know what to say. I can't force him to talk to her either."

"Then don't, Rachel. Let him recover first. As I tell all my patients, one step at a time."

The rest was blurry voices like someone was talking underwater.

Only a name remained clear.

~

There we have it, a broken man hiding from his past...

Do you think Leo would ever be able to meet with Zemira and resolve whatever issues he seems to have?

And why do you think he is avoiding her?

Let me know your thoughts.

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