The Space Between Battlefield and Home

In addition, "he was very emotionally damaged," his mother said during an interview in the Mologne House dining room last week. "He'd come down here for formation, go to the hospital, do his therapy, come straight back here around lunchtime and you wouldn't see him the rest of the day. He'd lock himself in that room.

"So I didn't feel like I could leave him at that time," she said.

Weeks passed, then months. Out the window of 454, mother and son watched fall and winter come and go. Spring arrived, then summer again. "We have officially been through leaf changes, blizzards and heat waves and some pretty hellacious thunderstorms," he said.

In November, his father went back to his job at a Nissan plant in Tennessee. Trish lost her job and started taking college accounting courses online, doing homework with a laptop computer on her bed, beneath a framed drawing of the Lincoln Memorial. Ryan turned 20 in December.

As time went by, Room 454 got messy. The two argued over the TV. He loved the safety of the Cartoon Network, where there was little to trigger bad memories. "I didn't want to watch that 24 hours a day," she said.

"Thank God we get along," she said. He was "the baby" of her three children. "She and I have always been close," he said. He was glad to have her near.

"I basically needed her here," he said. "I wanted to be by myself, so I could learn to live by myself. But at the same time, I would get really lonely. . . . Also, in the beginning, having to deal with a lot of the emotional aspects of what happened to me, it was a big help having her here because I had a shoulder to cry on and somebody to talk to."

And the hotel was a godsend, with the Marine Corps paying the bills, she said. "If I had to worry about where I was going to be in relation to him, I don't think I could handle that."

In the spring, he got his first artificial arm: He ordered one done up in Marine Corps camouflage with a Purple Heart badge attached. "They can pretty much do whatever you want," he said.

He learned to tie his shoes with his right hand and his left hook. And he adopted the grim Mologne House humor. "You lost a limb," he said. "What are you going to do? It ain't going to grow back."

He and his fellow amputees would joke and have T-shirts made with outrageous slogans about their injuries. "If you can find humor in your own tragedy, then you're definitely a lot better off," he said.

As he came out of his shell, he and his mother began visiting newer hotel guests to reassure them that everything would be all right.

"You sit there and cry with them," Trish Autery said. She would tell others: 'It'll be okay. He's going to come through it. You'll come through it and probably be in a better place when you get to the other side.' "

Ready to Move On

The Auterys have almost reached the other side. "I'm perfectly fine," Ryan Autery said, "with the exception of carrying around a big hook. . . . I can run, swim, jump, play, whatever, I can still do it." He joked: "I swim in circles, though."

And it is time to go. He hopes to leave a week or so after his mother. He will return to his parents' home and has thought about going back to school to become a history teacher. Mainly, he said, he needs to get home and be back around civilians.

As for the past year, he said he would do it all again, except for one thing. "Knowing what I know now. . . . I would just change what happened Aug. 19."

One day last week, he flopped on his bed in Room 454 beneath a drawing of the Capitol framed on the wall. The floor was cluttered with jeans, comic books, boxes and his spare, battery-powered artificial arm. His mother sat on her bed, beside a white teddy bear, a laptop and an open accounting book and prepared him a ready-to-eat tuna fish snack. He reminded her to include the relish.

"I like this place," he said, yawning as he lay on his back with his arms outspread. "It's a nice place. It's beautiful. But I will not be upset at all about leaving. . . . I know when I check out of this room my next stop is my actual room at home."

His mother agreed. She will definitely miss the people of Mologne House, she said. "But not the place."