Unremarried Widow (12 page)

A doctor friend once spoke about a diagnostic technique used during his medical school days in the 1960s. A resident would walk past a patient's open door and try to make a diagnosis from those brief moments of passage—the time it took to step from one doorjamb to the next. The doctor said the residents were often successful at diagnosing an ailment in those few seconds. They could even tell you the likelihood of survival.

“It's true,” the doctor had told me. “You'd be surprised at how quickly you can assess a situation.”

I swept my eyes across the room: my mother in a dining chair in the middle of the living room, nowhere near where it should be; the living room lights turned off; two soldiers in dress uniform filling the space. I felt a drawing in at my navel, a great coming together of all the esoteric parts of me that are neither flesh nor blood nor skin. A silver cord slipped free, pulling from that central place, the part that keeps me whole. I imagined my soul draining out of me like liquid mercury, disappearing into the ether of my suddenly intangible existence. I hesitated on the top step and thought about turning and walking back down to the garage. If I stayed on the far side of the door, the soldiers could not tell me what they had come there to say. If they didn't say it, it wouldn't be true. But I am too rational, too predictable. I am a rule follower. I opened the door wider. I stepped in.

In the living room I went first to where my mother sat and bent stiffly down to put my arms around her.

“Everything will be okay,” I said.

I straightened and the soldiers were beside me. One, a chaplain. The non-chaplain said, “On behalf of the President of the United States, I regret to inform you that your husband, Miles Henderson, has been killed in Iraq.”

I looked at him numbly. This was not the way it was supposed to happen. Every military wife imagines this scenario, and in my visions the soldiers always came during the day. I would be in the kitchen and
I could see them through the sliding glass doors. The sky would be deep summer blue, the Gulf green at their backs. I would be wearing my house clothes and I would duck down on the opposite side of the breakfast bar, embarrassed that they might see me that way. I would hide until they left. But this was an ambush. I never imagined the soldiers there after dark, already in the house, where I could not hide, could not turn them away.

I asked the non-chaplain if he knew what had happened.

“We don't have many details,” he said.

“Did he crash?”

“Yes, ma'am. That's what we're hearing.”

“Was he shot down?”

“We heard maybe weather.”

“Weather?”

“A sandstorm may have brought them down.”

I crossed my arms over my chest as if to shield myself from this information, already understanding that there were some details I would not want to know.

“Who was the second pilot?” I said.

“The second pilot?”

“In the helicopter. Who else was killed?”

“We're not at liberty to say.”

“Do you know?”

“No, ma'am.”

I faced the soldiers for a long moment. No one spoke.

“Would you like us to stay?” the chaplain said.

“No. Thank you.”

When the door shut behind them, I turned to the dark living room. Neighbors, a husband and wife, stepped in off the porch. I realized they must have seen the soldiers when they first arrived and they had been sitting with my mother all that time, waiting.

“Do you want to sit down?” the wife asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Outside.”

Waves folded against the sand and the salted humidity of the sea pushed against my skin as we sat on the deck. I turned my eyes upward to the night sky, where clouds scudded across the knit darkness, and then dropped my face into my hands. A wail worked its way up from my belly and pushed past my lips, sweeping back in waves across my chest and down my legs. The tender parts of me that are soft and unprotected like the flesh of a crab met the night air. I was all hurt.

“What do I do?” I said to the wife. “Do I take down his photos? Do I give his stuff away?”

She patted my hand. “You don't have to think about that right now.”

I turned to my mother, who has a road map for this grief, who might have shown me the way, but she looked at her lap and said nothing. Much later my mother would say about this time, “You were so angry. At me. At the world.” She was right. I was suddenly furious at everyone. The soldiers in Miles's unit, the ones who had survived; the government, whose political decision makers ordered men overseas but would never send their own sons to die; the American public whose S
UPPORT
O
UR
T
ROOPS
bumper stickers faded and peeled while everyone turned their faces from the war and forgot. Saddam Hussein; Osama bin Laden; George W. Bush, who years later would hold my fingers between his soft damp hands and when my escort told him of Miles's death would say, “That's disappointing,” who wouldn't even have the gumption to say, “I'm sorry.” I was angry at all of them. But more than anyone I was angry at my mother. My mother, who knew exactly how I was feeling. Who had also lost a husband. Who I rarely saw cry after my father's death and who had done such an effective job of erasing him from our lives, from the reality that he had been lost to me. My mother, who never remarried. Who was permanently, unpardonably alone. Who I had tried my entire life not to become and whose fate, despite my best efforts, I now shared.

Amidst all this anger, I clung to a single idea—that another wife
was suffering the same way I was. I needed to know the name of the second pilot. From the back room I called Amy McNish, the company FRG leader.

“What do you know, Amy?” I said when she answered the phone.

“We don't know much. What have you heard?”

I realized that she did not yet have the names of the pilots, that she did not know Miles was one of them. The Army waits until the next of kin has been notified before releasing the names of those killed. The other wives in the unit had heard about the crash on the news, they knew an Apache had gone down, but they did not know who had been lost.

“They came to my door today,” I said.

Amy was silent as she sat down hard, the phone still in her hand.

“I need to know the name of the second pilot.”

“I'll find out,” Amy said. “I'll call you back as soon as I know.”

The next day people poured
into my mother's house. My half brother from D.C. My uncle from Virginia. Heather. Annabelle. Stacy. If my mother stepped close to speak a kind word or touch my hand, I turned away. The only private moments I had were in the bathroom, where I would sit on the toilet with my eyes closed, bow my head, and speak to Miles.

“I miss you,” I said. “I miss you so much.”

They seemed like the only words that mattered.

Outside, the sky hung low and gray. Florida had entered the dry season, a period of blue skies and flat water, but a rare autumn storm had moved in overnight. The Gulf churned in the wind as I sat on the deck with Heather and Annabelle. Stray gusts lifted our hair and we were mostly quiet as we watched the waves. The collapse of the offshore rig Deepwater Horizon was still four years away, but I see now what an
apt image that is for those first hours after the notification. I remember watching the news as the underwater well pumped oil into the Gulf and how it seemed arterial, as if the earth itself should collapse from the loss. But the well continued to gush with no sign of stopping. In the same way hurt pumped out of me, slick and black as oil. I imagine it covering the deck, dripping down the pilings, pouring onto the beach as the tide rolled in. I hurt and I hurt and I hurt and still there was more, a limitless tonnage. I knew I could bleed hurt forever.

In the early afternoon another soldier arrived, my casualty assistance officer.

“Your CAO,” he said.

Already we were talking in military shorthand.

I offered him a seat at the dining room table and he placed a stack of papers between us. He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses out of his shirt pocket and placed them on his nose.

“My wife says these make me look more intelligent,” he said.

I smiled, amazed at my politeness.

“I'll be helping you with the administrative details.”

He handed me a heavy black binder stuffed with notebook paper.

“In case you want to take notes.”

I didn't. I left the unopened binder on the table in front of me.

“Of course, you know you'll be receiving the death gratuity,” he said. The payout from the military if a soldier is killed overseas. Miles had mentioned it once in passing.

“Don't let them try to give you the twelve thousand,” he said. “If I die over there, make sure they give you the full hundred thousand.”

To the casualty assistance officer I said, “Don't let them give me the twelve thousand.”

He laughed.

“No,” he said. “You'll get the full one hundred thousand.”

I learned that I'd have health insurance for another three years. Dental too. I'd also receive half of the Servicemembers Group Life
Insurance policy every soldier buys into. Miles had called it winning the SGLI lottery. His parents and sister would receive the other half. Later I discovered that many widows call the SGLI payout “blood money.” They tuck the cash into low-yield savings accounts and pride themselves on never tapping into it.

“I haven't touched that money,” these widows will tell me.

They smile as they say this and their cheeks flush, their meaning clear: they will not be bought off. But I felt none of their resentment. I saw the survivor's benefits as continued marks of Miles's generosity. I was strangely grateful to the military and I saw what people meant when they said the Army takes care of its own.

The casualty assistance officer slid a sheet of paper across the dining table. He removed his glasses and polished them with a cloth he pulled from his pocket.

“I'll need you to sign this for me,” he said.

I looked at the form without touching the paper. “What is it?”

“It asks if you'd like to receive partial remains.”

“Partial remains?”

“If they find anything after the funeral.”

He put his glasses back on.

“Body parts. That sort of thing.”

I imagined a tooth, a sliver of bone, bits of Miles trickling in over time. I wondered if it would be worse to lose him that way, in pieces.

I declined.

The casualty assistance officer filed the form in his binder, stood, and shook my hand.

“I'll be in touch,” he said.

More people arrived the next
day. The mother of a soldier in the unit who lived in Tampa. A soldier from the unit's rear detachment. Friends.
Neighbors. I thought often of the second pilot. Who had been with Miles at the end? When Amy McNish finally called, I crept away to the back room.

“I have the name of the other pilot,” she said.

“Is he alive?”

Amy was quiet. “No.”

I thought of all the soldiers in the unit. I wondered who would hurt the most.

“Are you ready?” she said.

“Tell me.”

“It's John Priestner.”

I was standing when she called but then I was on my knees. The rough fibers of the carpet rubbed my skin raw and a wail escaped from me. How was this possible? John was one of the most experienced pilots in the unit. He had fifteen hundred flight hours and two deployments behind him. John should have kept Miles safe.

“Do you want me to tell Teresa?” Amy said.

“Yes,” I said. “Please tell her. Tell her to call me.”

Teresa called the night we
drove to the airport to pick up another close friend.

“How are you doing?” Teresa said when I answered.

“I'm okay.” I didn't know what else to say.

“Did you hear anything about the crash?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I heard maybe weather.”

“Did you hear they were trapped inside?”

I shook my head but could not speak.
Please stop talking,
I thought.
Please stop telling me this.

“The helicopter caught on fire,” Teresa said. “They were burned. Our boys were burned.”

It shouldn't have mattered, shouldn't have made a difference, but it did. It was unimaginable. So I didn't imagine it. I tried to let it go, let the information pour through me, no filtration, nothing to stop it. I was a sieve, wide-wired. If I could prevent myself from knowing, from letting that knowledge lodge in my brain, then I could keep myself sane. But if I listened to Teresa, if I took in what she was saying, then the magnitude of what had happened would destroy me.

At the airport my friend folded his tall frame into the backseat while Teresa talked on the phone about what came next. I wasn't listening. Or I was listening but it was flowing through me so that I held on to none of it. Nothing but the image of Miles burned to dust.

The week after the notification
I flew to Washington, D.C., for John's funeral at Arlington.

“You don't have to come,” Teresa said on the phone.

I stopped her before she could finish.

“Of course I'm coming.”

I drove straight to the wake from the airport and stopped on the steps of the funeral home when a girl looked up at me with John's face.

“Megan,” I said.

She smiled. “My mom's inside.”

I pushed open the glass doors to a dark entryway that was mostly empty and waded through the pools of light cast by lamps until I reached the chapel where everyone had gathered. I stepped in and the low murmur stopped. A man whispered to the woman next to him.

“That's the other pilot's wife,” he said.

The silence stretched out while I tried to settle my eyes on someone I knew and then there came a sudden rush. Soldiers stepped
forward, pushed past one another, and scooped me into their arms. These were men from the unit, men who had known Miles. I pressed my face against the green cloth of their uniforms and everything about them reminded me of him—the shape of their frames, the low pitch of their voices. It was impossible to be next to those men and not think of Miles. Impossible that they should be there and he should be dead. The soldiers passed me from embrace to embrace until Teresa had her arms around me and there was nothing to do but stand together in our great sadness. When we stepped apart I saw the coffin at the front of the room. Closed. Of course. Teresa took me by the hand and led me to it. She knelt in front of the casket and I knelt beside her. When she raised her hand to lay her palm against the flag draped over the coffin, I held my hand at my side as long as I could. I hated to touch the metal, hated to imagine what lay inside. When I managed to reach out and touch the coffin with the tips of my fingers, I shook with the horror of it. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath and when I raised my head, Teresa looked at me.