(10 of 10)
There was silence in the room for a few seconds. Jessi was much thinner than they remembered, and her head had been shaved so doctors could better treat her head wound. Dee stood transfixed by the sight of so many machines, so many tubes and wires, by the bag of blood that hung near her daughter's bed. "Oh my God," she said, inside her head. Greg could not talk either, nor did her sister Brandi. Jessi looked at them and smiled. Brother Greg Jr. took a step into the room.
"Poomba," she said.
The family moved carefully around the bed. "We just wanted to touch her," Dee said. She looked right into her daughter's face and lied. "You look good," she said.
Dee asked her to open her mouth. "I just wanted to make sure she still had all her teeth," Dee said. "They were fine."
They talked, gently, about what had happened to her. Dee said Jessi talked about the battle at Nasiriyah and about the civilian hospital, but did not talk to her at all about Lori or about what had happened between the ambush and her awakening later in the military hospital.
A few days after the family arrived in Germany, Jessi's psychologist, Army Lieut. Colonel Sally Harvey, met with Greg and Dee in Jessi's room to tell them what she could about what had happened in those lost hours.
"She wanted us to be there when she told Jessi," Dee said. Dee stood beside Jessi's bed and held her good hand, and Greg stood on the other side of the bed, his hand resting on her. Harvey told them that Jessi had been assaulted and of the injuries resulting from that savagery.
Jessi's face did not change.
"She just lay there, and her face was blank," said Dee. She thought Jessi might at least grip her hand harder, something, but her hand was limp.
Jessi acted as if it were something that had happened to someone else, someone she didn't know.
"I don't remember," she said, turning her face up to look at her mother. "I don't know."
Dee kept waiting for her to just break down.
She is still waiting.
For Jessi, it was simple. She wanted back what she had before. She did not want to dance ballet or play concert piano. She wanted to walk to the movies through a mall, wanted to press a gas pedal and steer herself to the Taco Bell drive-through. She wanted to go to college and be a kindergarten teacher and hold babies. She also had another picture in her mind. She would walk down an aisle and get married, though Ruben had not worked up the nerve to tell her father that they had talked about marriage and that he had given Jessi a promise ring. In her mind Jessi could see the wedding. "I really wanted to be able to walk at that," Jessi said.