Totally Fucked Over

I woke up in a white room. The ceiling was white, the walls were white, hell, for all I knew the floor was white. For the next five or ten minutes I tried to figure out where I was and what was going on. For some reason I couldn't sit up, and I couldn't figure that out either. Finally, I started to figure out that I was in a bed, I had all kinds of tubes and wires hooked up to me, and I had something down my throat.

I heard a noise like a door opening, and a young nurse appeared in my vision.

"You finally woke up. You have had us worried for a while there. Let me get a doctor, and we'll see what we can do to make you a little more comfortable."

The nurse disappeared, and I lay there trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Finally a man appeared, and told me that he was Doctor Schmidt, and that he wanted to examine me.

I wanted to scream. The only thing I could remember was what apparently was a huge fireball, and then this room. I couldn't talk, I really couldn't move, I didn't know where I was, and then it hit me. I DIDN'T KNOW WHO I WAS. It was like I had been born when the fireball happened – whatever that was.

Over the next couple of days, I was poked, prodded, examined and generally made miserable by all the attention I was getting. The feeding tube was out of my throat, and I was able to eat a bit, although the pap that I was getting certainly wasn't my idea of something good to eat. What made it even worse was that I had no idea of what the hell I liked to eat.

I had been told that I had been in Iraq, and in a Hummer, when a roadside bomb went off, which more or less explained the fireball. My left leg had been blown off just below the knee, and my left hand had had my ring finger and my little finger taken off as well. I had apparently had my face smashed into something because almost every bone in my face had been broken, along with a couple of skull fractures.

I had been in a coma for almost two months, not quite, but close.

I was going to need extensive surgery on my leg, some relatively minor surgery on my hand, and my face was going to have to be reconstructed. All things are relative, the surgery on my hand was going to require a specialist, but they thought they could restore almost normal function.

I was informed that I was Lt. Ted Wisnowski, and I had been returning from Iraq because my aunt, my only next of kin, had died, and I was being sent back for her funeral.

I had absolutely no memory of an Aunt Susan, or for that matter of anyone by the name of Wisnowski.

The only thing I did have was a watch, really a rather expensive looking watch, with an engraving on the back that simply had a date and the words "With all my love, Amy."

They had me scheduled for several surgeries, now that I was awake, and I spent a lot of time under the knife. When I was out of surgery the doctors were working with me to try to help me recover my memory of who the hell I was. Except that nothing they were talking about made the slightest bit of sense to me. Schools that I had gone too were just names. People listed in my records meant nothing to me.

I would go into complete funks periodically, primarily because I had no identity. I didn't exist except for the damn records. But eventually they got me to the point that I was willing to accept that even if I had no memories before the fireball, I was me – not some alien that had invaded my body, but just me.

It was three months after my leg was blown off. That's how I thought about it, the day that started my new life – I lost my leg, and I was born from a fireball. A new doctor, one I hadn't seen before came in with my records in his hands, and sat down beside my bed.

"I'm Doctor McInnes. I have been asked by the Army to try and rebuild your face as best I can. I think I am pretty good, but I will tell you from the start, I don't have a whole lot of information to go on. Normally I would have recent photographs of you from various angles to get a good idea of what you looked like. In your case, I just have two photographs the Army took, for your identification cards, and they aren't as good as I would like them to be. I will do the best job I can, but we are going to have to work together to help me understand what you want."

"In the process of the reconstructive surgery, I can, if you would like, do a bit of plastic surgery to change things that you would like changed. I'm not really supposed to do this, but I think that it is just my contribution to the guys that have been changed forever anyway."

This was the first doctor I had warmed up to. The rest, although they were concerned, and wanted to help me, they hadn't appeared to me as people that saw me as a person, rather than just as another patient. As people that actually cared about me as a person.

We talked for another hour or so, then the doctor got up and left, telling me that he was going to study my charts, and that he would be back in another couple of days to discuss what he could, and couldn't do.

Three days later, the Doctor McInnes came back into my room with a bevy of other people.

"Lt. Wisnowski, I have some good news, and some bad news."

"Okay. Might as well give me the bad news now."

"Well, first off, I was comparing your x-rays with your photographs, and suddenly realized that the bone structure just didn't match. Not because of your injuries, but because your facial structure could never have been matched to your current face, even with all of your injuries. The differences are relatively minor, but significant enough that I am certain that you are not Lt. Wisnowski."

"We are going to have to start over from scratch, but first we are going to have to figure out who you are."

It turned out that the bevy of people accompanying the good doctor, were going to take fingerprints, dental impressions, the whole nine yards.

Two weeks later I had the answers. I was Captain James E. Peters, often called Jamie. I was married to an Amy Peters, and I had a child, although the child had been born after I was "killed." I was a helicopter pilot. I had been called home because my parents had been killed in a car wreck, and had been going home on emergency leave along with Lt. Wisnowski. The roadside bomb had blown the hummer we were riding in apart. Lt. Wisnowski had been killed, and apparently our dog tags had been taken off, or blown off. Lt. Wisnowski had been decapitated, so it was reasonable to assume that his dog tags had been blown off also. They weren't really sure what had happened to mine, but apparently they had been switched somehow.

There had been a closed casket funeral, so nobody had questioned the looks of the body.

"So where is my wife?"

"We really don't know. As she was living in base housing, she was given 30 days after notification of your death, to find another place to live. She moved to an apartment near the base, and lived there for about a month, then packed up everything and went somewhere. We simply don't know where."

I wanted to cut the bastards throats. I go to Iraq, I get blown up, and they can't be bothered to find my wife and tell her I am alive. They can't even tell me where she is – or where my child is.

Over the next couple of months, now that the doctors have figured out who the hell I am, they get it right this time.

I look at the watch that Amy gave me, and get a vision of a pretty young woman, with light brown hair. But that is all, just a vision.

We work for weeks, and finally it all starts to come back. Oh there are still holes, but I remember dating Amy, I remember her parents getting very upset that she was going to marry a "war-monger". I remember that when we did get married, her parents disowned her, and how upset she was, but still determined that she was going to go into this marriage with all the love and passion that she could.

I remember my childhood, and the loving parents I had. No siblings, but all the love and care that any child could ever want.

I even remember snatches of our honeymoon. A trip to Baja, Mexico, to a little fishing village, where we swam, snorkeled, and made love. The worst part of that is that I cannot remember making love to Amy. I knew we must have, but I simply couldn't remember it.

The damned Army couldn't be bothered to find Amy. I had her last known address, but nothing else. The frigging Army wouldn't look for her. I found a few souls in the Pentagon that tried to help, but no luck.

I had a fair amount of back pay, so I hired a private investigator to try to track her down. For all the money I spent, I might as well have hired a psychic. Nothing. Not a single clue. When they contacted Amy's parents they were simply told that they had disowned her, and hadn't heard from her since.

I was close to getting released from the hospital. I had actually lost track of the number of surgeries I had had, but my physical rehabilitation was going well, and I was now comfortable with my leg. There wasn't a whole lot they could do with my hand; after all, I still had two fingers and a thumb.

I spent my time on the Internet, looking for Amy. No luck. I didn't even know of a city to start in.

I got discharged from the hospital, eighteen months after my re-birth, with a prosthesis for a left leg, and one in a case for when I wanted to run. I will say that the Army did the best they could to put me back together, but I sure wasn't happy with how they dealt with my personal life.

I called everyone I could think of, until finally a sergeant I had vaguely known a couple of years earlier, suggested that I call the VA. I hadn't even thought of it. It still took me a couple of days to get someone who would listen to my story. After several phone calls, and a call from my commanding officer, I got an address, and a direct deposit bank number, just in case the address didn't work, that told me that Amy was now in California.

My commanding officer basically gave me what is called "basket leave." For you who don't know, that is leave that isn't charged to your account, you just get to go on leave, and to hell with the regs.

"Get the hell out of here and find your wife. All we are doing is processing your retirement papers. Go put your life back together."

I found the address that the VA had, only to find that Amy and the baby had moved out about four months before. No forwarding address.

My hopes were dashed, and I was apparently back where I started. That night I took solace from a bottle of scotch, then started up the next morning.

Two days later, after a few phone calls to the woman at the VA I had talked to I had the bank that the checks were being deposited at.

I carefully dressed in my dress uniform, made sure all my medals were on display, and caught a cab down to the bank, and entered the inner sanctum of banking. The manager wasn't having a bit of it.

"It's a violation of the privacy laws. You can't have this information. Blah, blah, blah.

I wanted to punch the sanctimonious bastard out, but realized that a one-legged, irate husband wasn't going to go anywhere.

As I left, the clerk that had ushered me into him pressed a piece of paper into my hand.

"I think you are honest, and I overheard part of your story, you have had a hard go of it. Here is the address you want. God Bless you, and I hope you find your wife."

I thanked her profusely, and then thought where I should go from here. It was 3:00pm, so she was probably working. I walked back to hotel, waited around doing nothing but being completely paranoid, until finally it was 5:30pm.

My cab dropped me off at the address the bank teller had given me, a lovely little ranch style home, probably three bedrooms, with a nice yard. I could tell that the fence around the yard was new; the wood hadn't had time to weather.

I rang the doorbell a couple of times, and waited. After a few moments, the door opened and the brown-haired, pretty woman I had envisioned to be connected to my watch appeared. She looked at me for a moment, saying:

"Can I help you?"

Then she saw past the plastic surgery and the scars, and whispered;

"Oh God, Jamie, is that you?"

Amy sagged against the door, her face as white as snow – I know that is has been written about many times, but it was. She sagged against the doorway, and seemed as though she couldn't stand up.

I gathered Amy into my arms and kissed her, the hunger I had felt for this brown-haired woman suddenly coming to the fore.

"I'm here, I'm alive, and I have been looking for you for close to two years now."

Amy recovered her composure.

"Oh God, come in. Where have you been?"

"In a hospital. Trying to find you. Trying to fix a horrible mix-up."

Sounds of a not so small baby came from within.

"Come on, I need to feed the baby, and we can talk while I do it."

I walked into the kitchen area, and found a child, about a year old, trying to feed itself from a jar that Amy had left on the table. He (as I found out) couldn't quite reach what he wanted, so was being a little upset.

"Jamie, meet James E. Parker, Jr. He doesn't' have many manners yet, but he is working on them. This is your son."

I cried, I couldn't help it, I just cried. After the horror I had experienced in Iraq, I couldn't do anything else, but just cry.

As Amy fed the baby, I told her my story, how I had just missed her four months ago, the whole bit. I could see Amy's hand shaking as she fed the baby, and tears running down her cheeks, but didn't really understand why. This should have been a time for happy, not for tears.

Finally Amy put down the spoon she was feeding James with and looked at me. Tears were running down her face, actually they were pouring down her face.

"Jamie, I thought you were dead. I got VA benefits and everything. The Army told me that I had to move out of base housing within thirty days, and I didn't have a clue where to go. I called my parents, and they refused to have anything to do with me."

"I had married the war-monger, and now I could live with the consequences."

I wanted to go beat her sanctimonious parents into a pulp, but didn't say anything.

I couldn't get an apartment because the death benefits weren't enough to cover living expenses and the rent. I finally, at the last minute, put everything into storage, and got one of those motel rooms that rent by the week or month."

"I couldn't spend my life like that, and I knew it, but I had no place to go. Certainly no place that I wanted to go."

"I had talked with the base chaplain, on several occasions, and finally one of his assistants told me that his cousin was looking for an office manager. It was in Atlanta, so of course I would have to move there, but that didn't seem to matter."

"I had a phone interview with him that lasted about an hour. When we were done, he told me he would call me back in a day or two and let me know where we stood."

"He called back the next day, and told me that he would hire me on a trial basis, for ninety days, and the end of the probationary period, if he was satisfied with my work, he would put me on at an annual salary that would let me live relatively comfortably, along with the pension I was getting from the VA. He also told me that he had arranged for his sister to take care of James while I was working at no charge."

"I was desperate at this point, and took the job. I had to pay my own way to Atlanta, and pay the movers, but I had been very careful with the life insurance, and took just a bit out of it to pay for the move."

"The job was wonderful, and Paul was a good teacher. After about six weeks, he told me that I was now on full time, as a permanent employee, and I was getting a 30% raise."

"Over the months we had to work together a lot, making sure that everything was being taken care of, so we had lunch several times a week. That changed after awhile, to being dinner, and before I knew it, Paul was asking me to marry him."

"I thought about it long and hard. I knew that you had only been dead for a little over a year, but it felt right, and so I agreed."

"Four months ago I married Paul. That's why the address you had didn't work. This morning I went to the doctor, and she told me that I was pregnant – about two months pregnant."

"And now I have no idea what to do."

Amy dissolved into tears, and without thinking about it I took her in my arms and held her.

I didn't' know what to say. I felt like I had been kicked in the belly by a mule, but I really didn't know what to do. So I just held her.

"Hi, honey – what the hell is going on here?"

I turned to see a man about my height, very muscular, with a receding hairline. He was holding a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne.

Before I could say anything, Amy turned, and blurted out;

"Paul, this is Jamie. He's not dead. And I don't' know what to do."

Paul blanched, and carefully put the flowers down in the sink.

We all sat at the kitchen table while Amy and I told our stories. Amy told most of the story, while I sort of played with James. My attention was distracted a whole lot, but it was the first time I had seen my son, so perhaps that can be forgiven.

After all was said and done, Paul looked around the table, then offered his hand.

"We haven't been formally introduced, but I am Paul Palmer, and I am not at all sure of my relationship to Amy. I suspect that you are still her husband, and I am just an outsider. That one we will have to sort out of the next couple of days, but for now, welcome to my home."

We shook hands, although I was a bit unsure of how I was supposed to react to the man that my wife had married after I "died".

Amy was still crying, and neither Paul nor I, as best as I could tell, was comfortable with trying to comfort her.

Finally Paul said;

"As far as I can figure out, this is really Amy's decision. That makes it really rough on her, but with either one of us here that is going to make it even rougher."

"I'll call my attorney tomorrow morning, and I can bet that we can get in to see him tomorrow afternoon, after all that is what I pay her all those exorbitant fees for. She'll give us some kind of an answer."

"In the meantime, I'm going to move out. Not because I think Amy has done anything wrong, but because I don't want to put any undue pressure on Amy. She is going to need all the support she can get."

I don't think Amy stopped crying the entire rest of the time I was there. Paul packed a suitcase with enough clothes to take him through the next week or so.

"Come on Jamie, I'll give you a ride to your hotel."

I told him where I was staying, and he immediately said that it was a good place, and that he would stay there also.

We both kissed Amy goodbye, and then climbed into Paul's SUV.

Paul and I walked into the hotel, and Paul immediately booked a room, then asked me if I would join him for dinner. I accepted, and about twenty minutes later we were having dinner in a rather nice hotel restaurant.

We talked about a number of things, what I was going to do, what he was planning with his company, just general stuff. Then he said;

"There is something that I want you to know. Amy and I had never had sex before we were married – I don't approve of sex outside of a marriage. But when we were having sex for the very first time, on our wedding night, she cried out your name. I have never told her about that, because it wasn't important to me at the time."

"It's not important to me now. But I think you needed to know that."

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. The meal ended fairly quickly, and we went to our respective rooms.

The next day, just as Paul said, we had an appointment with his attorney. She listened to our story, and basically informed us that Paul and Amy were not married. It didn't' matter that everybody had tried to do the right thing. Amy and I were still married.