Beggar of Love (38 page)

“What’s going on? You look shook-up.” Maybe younger than a teen, she thought. Shannon looked like a little boy, lower lip wobbly, trying to be brave and hold back tears.

“I got a letter from the National Guard. They’re calling me back. I’m scared they’ll send me to Iraq. I can’t go to Iraq. Or Afghanistan. I’ll die from the heat alone, never mind, you know, the bombs and stuff. It gets up to a hundred thirty degrees in Iraq—can people survive in that heat? I don’t know where the heck Afghanistan is.”

“There’s no way out?”

Shannon sounded very adult as she explained. “They’re not letting much of anybody leave the service, whether or not their enlistment terms are up. They could get me over there and keep me for fifteen months, eight years—if I lived that long. I was active-duty in 1998–99, and then I was in the National Guard for three years. The army wrote me a few months ago about transferring from the Individual Ready Reserve to the National Guard or reserve. They made me think I wouldn’t go to Iraq if I did that. I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? I didn’t know if they were twisting my arm to volunteer. I stayed in the IRR because I’d be out in June. None of my old army pals knew which way to turn either.”

“My brain is spinning. I didn’t know there was something besides the guard and the regular reserves.”

“The IRR is, like, different. We don’t do a regular schedule of training. We’re not paid like reservists. But we can get recalled in an emergency because we still have that reserve-duty commitment. I heard at least two thousand IRRs transferred to either the army reserve or the National Guard. I’ll bet you the ones who went for it will go over too.” Shannon sat on the edge of the dock and covered her face with her hands. “I am so scared.”

“Would your back keep you out?”

“What the fuck? There’s nothing wrong with my back.”

Jefferson wasn’t going to argue. She’d seen it often enough: athletes so used to living with their pain that they didn’t even notice it was there. What could she say to Shannon? She’d never been much at coming up with solutions to other people’s problems or comforting them. It wasn’t that she didn’t care—or was it? Was she learning to care more, post-alcohol? Maybe she did care about this kid. Well, like they said in the program, fake it till you make it. She scrubbed at another spot of mildew. “Not everyone goes, do they?”

“Check. Thousands of soldiers killed since 2003.”

“Oh, boy.”

The kid was crying now. “What would you do?”

She thought carefully. What would she do? “Back when I was your age I was drinking a lot. I would have pretended to myself that it was no big deal, gone over there, and stayed drunk as much as I could. Now, though, I can’t imagine being able to pull it off. I’d see if my parents’ old friends could pull any strings. They know a lot of people, including retired army and Washington insiders.”

“My parents don’t know anybody. My dad got early layoff as a machinist at a furnace factory and my mom works in a card shop at the big mall. They didn’t want me to go into the service, but I thought I could meet some gay girls there. Pipsborough isn’t exactly Northampton.”

“So did you?”

Shannon was scrubbing the hull with wide, fast swipes, grinning despite the tears drying on her face. She snuffled. “Sure, loads of them. I was seeing a girl while I was still in boot camp. It got better from there.” She dipped her rag in a bucket and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “I’d have to leave my cat with my folks. He wouldn’t understand why I left him.” She shook her head. “I guess the army wouldn’t care that he’s my dependent.”

“What about telling them you’re gay?”

“That only matters in peacetime, unless they catch you. This gives them a chance to kill us.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” She raked her fingers through her hair.

“Hell, no.” Shannon looked shocked, as if everyone should know the deal with gay soldiers. “Each queer they send over means some straight boy doesn’t have to go. And if I tell them, then I might have a less-than-honorable discharge.”

“So you think there’s more of a chance you’ll go.”

“I know they’re still kicking some of us out, but at the rate the enemy’s blowing up soldiers? I think we’ll all go.”

“Have you thought about Canada?”

“I don’t much want to live up there. But I got my cat’s papers from the vet in case. It was one thing when Vietnam draft dodgers went north. Canada’s not taking in AWOL Americans this time around.”

She wondered what Dawn’s father would say to this dilemma, given his illness, his daughter’s disability, and his marriage to the enemy. “I don’t know what to say, Shannon. It kind of sounds like you signed a contract you can’t renege on.”

Shannon hung her head like one of Jefferson’s kids in trouble for daydreaming in the outfield. “Not while I’m alive.”

“Hey, you could meet the love of your life over there.”

Shannon’s face was solemn, but her eyes looked as if she was savoring that imagined meeting, and soon her deep dimples began to show like little shadows on her cheeks. “With my luck she’d be Iraqi and her fundamentalist brother would catch us in bed.”

“Or you’d be with her when your company is attacked.”

“I can’t believe we’re over there at all. I wouldn’t hesitate to go if they were landing at Hampton Beach.”

What did this youngster want from her? Maybe nothing. What could she give her? Maybe nothing.

Shannon stood, rag dipping. “Listen,” she said with her brawny New Hampshire accent. “If I disappear, to wherever, would you do me a favor?”

Here it came.

Shannon Wiley had a desperate look. “Would you look after my cat? And Dawn?”

Jefferson thought she could see the conflict flashing like a danger signal in her eyes. Would Jefferson steal Dawn? Of course not, Jefferson thought. She and Dawn Northway talked as she and Ginger never had, even in the beginning. The words, like storms of memory, that she’d never shared with anyone, poured out of her: the women, her grandparents, drinking, her bare-bones career…

She drew them all for Dawn with words. She never knew she had such a need to talk to someone. Not even with Lily Ann had she opened up this much. Something about Dawn, the feeling of Dawn, some gladness of spirit, relaxed Jefferson. Was it because they weren’t lovers? She wanted Dawn to know everything about her, bad and good, before—before what? Becoming lovers? Before losing her to someone else? Before she lost her because of her terrible confessions? Before she lost the impulse to lay herself bare? Yes and no. It was because she had that same gladness of spirit. Dawn knew how to be happy. She liked being happy. Nothing had crushed that spirit.

She never felt ashamed when she shared stuff with Dawn, nor did Dawn ever blanch. Dawn responded with stories of her own, mild in comparison though they were. She might even, Jefferson suspected by the flush of Dawn’s face and the quick cascade of her words, be turned on by Jefferson’s lustiest escapades.

And then there were the other stories. Jefferson’s and Dawn’s: Jefferson’s sports failures and triumphs; how Dawn’s father rescued her mother’s family, risking everything himself. How her mother and father fell in love at first sight, she cowering in her hooch, shielding her younger siblings with her body, he appalled by orders to shoot everyone and following the family down the tunnel in the floor of their home. Dawn said she expected the same for herself. It was as if her parents recognized each other from some forever time ago when they were locked together in some way. One day Dawn confessed that she’d had the same feeling the night Jefferson walked into that church basement, and she followed it with a quick joke about having a gene for underground love.

Dawn said she hoped that confiding in Jefferson wouldn’t chase her off. She told Jefferson how much she valued their friendship and companionship above all else in her life. She asked for nothing more, would accept nothing more. Jefferson admitted that sometimes she’d gone with women because she didn’t know how to say no. Dawn was looking for love, not kindness; a soul mate, not sex. If it turned out right between them, if Jefferson came to feel as she did, they’d know because they would combust in passion, there would be no mistaking it. Meanwhile, Jefferson, for once in her life, was content to wait. Talking was proving to be as gratifying as physical seduction.

“Shannon,” she began to caution, then remembered that when she was Shannon’s age, everything felt this important. Shannon wanted her to keep anyone from horning in on Dawn. She could see how she had fooled herself into thinking she could control anything now that she watched Shannon make the same thinking error. “Does Dawn need looking after?”

“Everybody needs looking after.”

It wasn’t her place to open Shannon’s eyes to her ulterior motive. She wanted her to know she had no designs on Dawn. Who knew what life would bring while Shannon was away? It was very possible she wouldn’t come back, or would come back missing limbs, crazed by heat and violence and fear, needing care herself. Did lesbians have a way to help their own veterans? She’d never thought of this before. Wasn’t Shannon really asking Jefferson to take care of, to save PFC Shannon Wiley? She shook her head. Most of her adult life had been about taking care of women. Right now Jefferson, finally sleeping through some nights and eating better, was numero uno for Jefferson.

“I can be her friend,” she told Shannon. “And yours.” She thrust with her putty knife to emphasize what she was saying. “But I’m nobody’s mother and I have fewer answers every day.”

Shannon gave her a wide-eyed look, like she knew Jefferson did have the answers and was withholding them. “If anything happened to Dawn,” Shannon explained, “I might as well go over there and let them do me in so I don’t end up doing it all myself.”

When Jefferson was alone again, thinking about young Shannon, she felt like she’d learned nothing in her whole life and all of a sudden she was expected to be this expert on everything. Didn’t it show that she was all hollow? Shouldn’t she be able to at least come up with a way to think things through? Why? She’d never thought anything through in her life. Her decision to leave the city itself had been nothing more than a reaction to Ginger’s illness, maybe a belated reaction to 9/11. She was always running from pain. How smart was that? Pain hadn’t beaten her yet. Her spirit was as strong as Dawn’s and always would be.

“Don’t try to escape the pain, Shannon,” was all she’d been able to advise, gesturing to the lake with the knife. “It’s like trying to drain the lake dry.”

On Jefferson’s forty-ninth birthday in August when she had no prospective buyers or new listings, and to celebrate her first house sale, she went with Dawn to see her parents’ farm. As she drove, Dawn pointed out her personal landmarks and told funny stories about each. They skirted Lake Winnipesaukee south, then headed west for another twenty minutes, climbing and descending the twisting roads, bouncing over frost heaves, coming suddenly on wide-open views of meadows and the mountains beyond. Dawn exclaimed at the purplish red clover and the light blue yarrow flowers. Occasionally they came to an intersection that boasted a predictably white church and an out-of-business gas station with the original red pumps or an open general store/postoffice/video-rental shop, also white, often peeling. Large grayed houses offered living rooms and front porches converted to antique shops or junk heaps. Between intersections the houses were rare and usually white, sometimes red or cedar shingled.

Dawn drove without haste. Jefferson, fighting to stay awake after another night of insomnia, asked questions. It occurred to her that she seldom got to know women in this way. Pillow talk had always been her style. She missed the touching and dipping in and out of a woman, interrupting life stories with lovemaking.

Women loved to tell their stories and Dawn Northway was no different. That was one of her appeals: despite everything that attracted Jefferson to Dawn—her sunny energy, her prized Asian heritage, the way she would give a sudden shout and leap to a tree limb, then climb and grin back down at her friends, her passion for women’s basketball—the woman was a regular femme. She shopped at the malls and primped before going out; she could whip up a tasty stir-fry and folded her laundry in thirds, patting it even.

Jefferson’s phys ed background made her sensitive to the way people moved. It hadn’t taken her long to notice that Dawn’s left leg was less flexible than her right. Dawn didn’t so much limp as have a slight hitch to her step. This seemed like a good time to ask whether she had been injured.

“No,” Dawn answered. “Agent Orange touched all of us in one way or another. One of my sisters had spina bifida. She died seven years ago because her urinary tract was malformed and there was not much they could do surgically. My brother is slightly mentally retarded, but he can do farm work. Mom had three miscarriages. The chemical can make babies more prone to infection, and that’s what I had, a bone infection. They had to remove some of the bone. My left leg is shorter than the right and the leg didn’t develop like it should. They said I almost died. Carrying this leg around helps me remember how lucky I am to be alive, despite Agent Orange. Both Mom and Dad were exposed to it. Mom has scars on her hands and back, and Dad has leukemia.”

She whistled and touched Dawn’s cheek lightly with her knuckles. “Yet you’re always laughing. Couldn’t have been much fun for a little girl. Or a big girl.”

“Years of exercise regimes right into my teens. But I showed them. I downhill ski, I water-ski, and two years ago I learned to snowboard. Some day I’ll get a wetsuit and drive over to the shore to surf. Read my blog. It’s the first place I’ve been able talk about it.”