Blue Stars (13 page)

She and Jim were the only ones left at the bar. He’d cleaned up, closed up, and was sitting on the cooler with a beer. “They were right,” he said. “People usually are.”

“Well, I sure as hell think so now. If he ever thought to show his face around me or Otis these days…”

“Like to see him try. So your husband can teach him how Marines take care of things.”

“Army,” Lacey said, mostly to herself. She was disconcerted by the mention of Eddie, but too drunk to let herself worry about it much. Though, was he bringing it up as a test, to see how she’d respond? “I should get going.”

“Let me take you somewhere.” Jim put her glass and his bottle in the sink. As he came around the bar, jacket in hand, Lacey felt afraid.

“I shouldn’t have kept you late—I’m a mess, I know, but I hate to act like some kind of tease—”

“Hey. Hey.” Jim came to stand in front of her in the darkened bar, streetlights catching his face. “That’s not my game. I like you. I like you, Lacey Reed.”

“And that’s it. You liking me.”

He ran both hands through his hair. “What I want to do right now? Yeah. No. But I can keep that to myself. If I have to.” Jim gave her a half smile that hit Lacey low, deep in her belly. They hung there inside the long moment where she was supposed to slide off her chair, put her hand on his wrist, make him drop his jacket on the floor. Instead, he held the door open for her. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

He drove them farther out on the island, down the only avenue until it ended in a clutch of seafood restaurants and chain-link fences, pilings and broken rocks sticking up out of the black water. Lacey rested her head on the back of his car seat and wondered aloud whether her mother-in-law ever went to any of these places.

“No one on the island does,” Jim said, peering out the side window. “All the seafood places, they’re overpriced, they get business from tourists and that’s it. But here, this is it.” He swerved down a side street, cut the lights, and parked with the passenger side wheels up on the curb. “Shh,” he told her as she stumbled out of the tilted-up truck. “There’s a guard sometimes.”

“For what?” A chain-link fence blocked off entrance to the water, on which was raised a high metal ramp like a kind of boat launch. “A ferry?”

“It goes to Hart Island.” When this didn’t prompt any response from Lacey, Jim went on. “Potter’s field, you know what that is? Mass burials for anyone in the city who doesn’t get IDed, all the babies who die in the hospital—”

“Stop.”

“I know, it’s—yeah, it’ll break your heart. And it’s right here, but no one knows about it. Biggest public cemetery in the world. They send prison labor out there every day, you see the gray corrections bus riding down the avenue just like the Bx29.”

Lacey strained to see the island off the coast but got nothing. Then the very thought of what was on there, within sight and possibly smell of her own woozy self, clanged through her: thousands and thousands of decomposed bodies, of people stacked on top of each other, of the kids …

She ran back to Jim’s car. Fucking fuck, it was locked. He was right behind her, with apologies, with the keys, and she tried to yell at him—
why on God’s earth would he
—when all of it converged: the dead Iraqi sprawled on the toilet, Aimee’s husband, the city’s nameless bodies stacked in trenches, and her own bad sick flirtatious soul—and Lacey bent over to retch violently onto the curb, hanging on first to the car handle and then Jim. Grateful, angry, and finally exhausted, she let him lead her into the front seat. She let him bring her napkins and a warm beer he’d fished out of the trunk. She rinsed, spat, and then took a long shaky drink.

Jim stood in front of her, leaning down on the other side of the open car door. “I didn’t think it’s possible, but I am, in fact, even dumber than I look.”

“I’ll say.”

“Jesus. I want to kick my own ass so bad.” He scrubbed his face with a hand. “It’s been so long since I’ve been around a woman like you and now—”

Lacey put her hand on his thick wrist. He helped her stand, eyes wide. She kissed him once, a trial, and then again, for real. The car door was between them. Jim pushed her hair away and held the sides of her face.

She was bad, she was bad. It was wrong and desperate and a relief, such a sad relief.

9

Dear Michael, When you say tuna packs, what do you mean? Not actual cans of tuna? I found beef jerky and the protein bars. I told Wes how worried I am that they’re not giving you enough to eat but he said you
never
got enough to eat, so there’s that.

Dear Michael, If you have any time at all to read, I think you might like
Slaughterhouse Five.
There’s a scene where—

Dear Michael, It’s hard to know what to say at a time like this, when the news here is—

For the past day or two Ellen had abandoned each attempt at a letter to Michael, feeling that she had better keep her mouth shut. And if everyone else would too, she might find a way to recover from yesterday’s news. But it was everywhere, on every computer, every radio:
Investigators have determined the identities of at least four Marines said to have been part of the desecration of several corpses of Iraqi insurgents … Names have not been released, although all Marines are said to have enlisted … General Casey orders a top-down review of the incident … Insurgent violence continues to be on the rise in Anbar Province, where the incident took place …

There was no avoiding the horror. Dressing for a colleague’s baby shower, it took Ellen three tries to button her blouse the right way. On the drive across the city, she thought about the most recent letter from Michael. No inkling of the atrocities that everyone was talking about; it was almost as if he was describing an entirely different war in an entirely different place. Or, Ellen thought, though she knew it had been written before that shameful incident (or had it?), as if Mike wanted to deliberately withhold the worst from her.

Dear Ellen, I’ll try to describe what I’m doing right now. I am sitting outside trying to stay in the holes of shade a cammy net provides above me. It is a break from standing watch in the bunker. I am in my cammy pants and a T-shirt it is noon and already about 115 degrees. I can look out and see the Euphrates river 200m to my east with the small lane of Palm Trees on both sides. People might say this is a beautiful place but all I see is on the outskirts of this “city” is a place no humans should have to live. So there’s my little snapshot. Thanks for the letters and stuff. Tell Wes no more candy ’cause I’m trying not to get fat! Hi again—I am now finishing this letter a week later. Love, Mike

In the car, Ellen put on WORT for classical—but stayed alert, for on breaks the announcer still read out the headlines, melding his honeyed bass around words like
toilet, corpses,
and
retaliation
. When that happened, she had to lunge to turn down the dial. She left the windows down; it was thick and muggy, with the threat of rain. On the one hand, it was touching the way Mike’s last letter painstakingly tried to paint a verbal picture of his surroundings, something he must have guessed she would appreciate. On the other, it was a detail-filled document that conspicuously avoided the main subject. All windup and no pitch. Then those ominous casual references to standing watch in bunkers and a place no humans should live! Ellen took University west, the traffic so much less bothersome in the summer. She had scoured the letter so many times it wasn’t hard to reconstruct it in her mind’s eye, even if it wasn’t tucked into the purse now riding on the passenger seat next to a badly wrapped baby present.

“Finishing this a week later,” she said aloud. “Why? And why say it?” And what had happened to break off his descriptive letter writing that suffocating day, in the paltry shade of a cammy net, whatever that was. “‘Hi again’?” What had he done between that day and a week later? If they read it in Intro to Literary Theory she would have led the students to a discussion of caesura, that fracture in a sentence or text where breakage provokes emotion, a jarring. Or she would have nudged them toward Derrida, where absence points up and undermines our traditional expectation of presence.

Did she expect him to tell her about what he was really doing there in western Iraq? About whatever those “missions” involved? About the split-second decisions and acts of self-defense and perpetrations of a plan made so far away from his own day-to-day reality, his own single human agency? Did she want to know whether a man pissing next to the corpse of another man was now something Michael could understand?

Ellen turned onto Shorewood, wound her way toward Lake Mendota. There was another absence in that letter, she realized. Jane. Michael hadn’t mentioned Jane, at all.

Here in one of Madison’s upscale suburbs, the trees were older, leafier. There were fewer sidewalks and more double garages. The homes were graceful, large but not ostentatious. Ellen checked the address and dutifully parked last in the string of cars lining the street. She gathered purse and present but wobbled briefly, closing the car door. She hadn’t eaten yet today, or had she? Recently she’d been keeping odd hours, snacking at random, kept at her desk until late at night.

Her colleague Debbie Masterson was a second-year assistant professor they were all trying to rally around. She’d been on a streak of bad luck: her husband, a scientist at UW, had lost his funding and then his job; she’d been on bed rest since May; they’d had to give up their apartment and move in here with her mother. Not to mention she’d be going up for tenure next year, with infant twins and a job-hunting husband. Ellen breathed deeply and paused for a moment on the paved entrance path, trying to clear her head.
You’re not the only one in pain
, she told herself.
Snap out of it.

“You look wonderful,” she told Debbie, who was laid out regally on a living room couch, surrounded by friends and plates of food. A quick glance let her know that most of those attending were young women she didn’t know, probably friends of Debbie’s from grad school. One or two familiar faces from UW looked up and waved.

“I feel like a pasha greeting her minions. A pasha in nude compression stockings.”

“Here, let me take that for you.” Debbie’s mother relieved her of the present and gave her a cup of punch. Ellen tried not to notice that the woman was only a few years older than she herself was. That would only lead her to think about …

“Just the person I was looking for.” Mark Carroll, department chair.
Damn.
Wasn’t a baby shower supposed to be for women only? “You’ve been hard to get ahold of this summer, Professor. Is your e-mail on the fritz?”

“Really? I don’t think—”

“College Committee on Retention?” Mark leaned back against a sofa armrest. “Dean Welter says she hasn’t seen you at either of the meetings so far.”

Ellen took a big drink of sugary punch. “It’s very difficult to align people’s schedules over the summer. And some research has recently taken up a lot of my time.”

“Hmm.” Mark considered the excuse, tilting his head up to the ceiling. He was such an officious prick. In a department that was 90 percent women, they’d been stuck with this micromanager as chair for the past four years. (Not, Ellen shuddered, that she would want the job.)

“When you agreed to serve on the committee, I was under the impression—”

“I’ll be at the next one for sure, Mark.” The man had once published a book on 1980s sitcoms, Ellen consoled herself.

“That would be great. So what’s this new project? Another Edith exposé? I have to say, I really admire you for sticking to your guns—refusing to branch out to any other subject, you know. It’s so deliciously old-fashioned.”

“Let’s not talk shop at Debbie’s party,” Ellen said, smiling tightly. “I’ll catch you around the office and fill you in.”

“Yes! Actually, Jim and I are off to Beaver Island next week—irony noted—but you could just e-mail me your notes and any updates from that next Retention meeting. And someday I’d love to hear how things are with good old Edith.”

Ellen threaded her way to a chair off to the side. Debbie began opening presents that were carried to her, one by one.
It’s just Mark
, she told herself, sliding a Danish onto a paper plate.
He’s annoyed; he’s being petty.

Meanwhile, women of all ages were advising Debbie on baby care. Don’t let them sleep in your bed, you’ll never get them out. Join a multiples group. Steal all the free stuff they’ll let you take in the hospital. Then, when it was clear the few men in attendance had drifted off to the dining room, hushed and triumphant, the real war stories began.

“Twenty hours in, and they’ve been measuring me at seven centimeters. Then this one resident barges in, snaps on a glove, and sticks his hand up me. No kidding. He says, and I quote, ‘You’re only at six centimeters, and if you don’t progress I’ll need to section you in the next hour.’ I’m like, what are you talking about,
six.
I’m at seven, everyone else says so! He gets all, ‘measuring the cervix is obviously subjective,’ and I shout EXACTLY SO WHAT MAKES YOUR FAT FINGERS THE ONES THAT ARE GOING TO DETERMINE A C-SECTION OR NOT
.”

“
Apparently when they’re inverted you’re supposed to draw them out. Yeah. So they give you these ‘shields,’ and there I am, getting stitched up after a thirty-hour labor, holding the baby and frankly just trying not to pass out, and the nurse is like, I’m just going to put these pieces of plastic on your breasts because your nipples are the wrong shape.”

“She screamed from six to twelve, every single night. Up every two hours for nine months. Literally nine months. The first week I was on the phone with the pediatrician, I’m sobbing of course, and I’m holding this screaming baby, and they start giving me that routine about colic and I’m like, well no shit but would you
listen to this
?”

Could she tape this and replay it for Jane? Ellen caught a pained expression from Debbie’s mother, upright in a side chair. Even Debbie looked unsettled, behind her mock-dismay.