Coach Sheen smiled through his tears, and he and Ambrose shared a moment with the whole town looking on.
“He also told me Bailey wanted me to speak at his funeral.” Ambrose grimaced and the audience laughed at his expression. He waited for them to grow quiet before he continued. “You know I love wrestling. Wrestling taught me how to work hard, to take counsel, to take my lumps like a man and win like one too. Wrestling made me a better soldier. But like Coach Sheen, I've learned there are things more important than wrestling. Being a hero on the mat isn't nearly as important as being a hero off the mat, and Bailey Sheen was a hero to many. He was a hero to me, and he was a hero to everybody on the wrestling team.
“Shakespeare said, ‘the robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.’” Ambrose's eyes shot to Fern's and he smiled softly at the girl that had him quoting Shakespeare once again. “Bailey is proof of this. He was always smiling, and in so many ways he had life beat, not the other way around. We can't always control what happens to us. Whether it's a crippled body or a scarred face. Whether it's the loss of people we love and don't want to live without,” Ambrose choked out.
“We were robbed. We were robbed of Bailey's light, Paulie's sweetness, Grant's integrity, Jesse's passion and Bean's love of life. We were robbed. But I've decided to smile, like Bailey did, and steal something from the thief.” Ambrose looked out across the mourners, most whom he had known his whole life, and cried openly. But his voice was clear as he closed his remarks.
“I'm proud of my service in Iraq, but I'm not proud of the way I left or the way I came home. In a lot of ways, I let my friends down . . . and I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself completely for their loss. I owe them something, and I owe you something. So I'll do my best to represent you and them well wrestling for Penn State.”
Gasps ricocheted around the room, but Ambrose continued over the excited response. “Bailey believed I could do it, and I'm going to damn well do my best to prove him right.”
1995
“How many stitches did you get?” Fern wished Bailey would pull off the gauze taped to his chin so she could see for herself. She'd run straight over when she’d heard the news.
“Twenty. It was pretty deep. I saw my jaw bone.” Bailey seemed excited about the seriousness of his wound, but his face fell almost immediately. He had a book on his lap, as usual, but he wasn't reading. He was propped up in his bed, his wheelchair pushed to the side, temporarily abandoned. Bailey's parents had purchased the bed from a medical supply store a few months before. It had bars along the side and buttons that would raise your upper body so you could read or your feet so you could pretend you were in a rocket ship shooting into space. Fern had Bailey had ridden on it a few times until Angie had firmly told them it wasn't a toy and she never wanted to catch them playing spaceship on it, ever again.
“Does it hurt?” Fern asked. Maybe that was why Bailey was so glum.
“Nah. It's still numb from the shot.” Bailey poked at it to show her.
“So what's wrong, buddy?” Fern hopped up onto the bed, wiggling her little body next to his and pushing the book aside to make more space.
“I'm not going to walk again, Fern,” Bailey said, his chin wobbling, making the gauze pad shimmy up and down.
“You can still walk a little though, right?”
“No. I can't. I tried today and I fell down. Smacked my chin really hard on the ground.” The bandage on Bailey's chin wobbled again, evidence to his claim.
For a while, Bailey had only used his wheelchair when he got home from school, saving his strength so he could leave it at home during the day. Then the school day got to be too much, so Angie and Mike changed tactics, sending him to school in his chair and letting him up in the evenings when his strength would allow. But slowly, incrementally, his evening freedom became more and more limited and his time in the chair increased. Apparently now, he wasn't walking at all.
“Do you remember your last step?” Fern asked softly, not savvy enough at eleven to avoid direct questions that might be painful to answer.
“No. I don't. I would write it in my journal if I did. But I don't know.”
“I bet your mom wishes she could put it in your baby book. She wrote down your first step, didn't she? She probably wishes she could write down your last.”
“She probably thought there would be more.” Bailey gulped and Fern could tell he was trying not to cry. “I thought there would be more. But I guess I used them all up.”
“I would give you some of my steps if I could,” Fern offered, her chin starting to wobble too. They cried together for a minute, two forlorn little figures on a hospital bed, surrounded by blue walls and Bailey's things.