Blue Stars (15 page)

“Despicable,” Ellen whispered. She forced herself to face the shaming that would come.

“They’re so young,” Serena went on. “So deluded. And what we’ve done … first we ask the unbearable and now we scorn them for submitting. And then we make them live with both.” Ellen realized that Serena was talking about the Marines. With sympathy, with real sorrow. She reached over to hold her friend’s hand.

They stayed like that for several minutes, a soft steady rain against the window screen, a car swishing by on wet pavement.

“Two of my grad students are building an online archive of citizens’ responses to the war.” Serena tucked back her loose strand of hair. “Half interactive art site, half journalism project. It has a lot of potential. Would you speak to them? They’re doing interviews, and I know it would mean everything for them to have your perspective—a family member’s, that is. They haven’t found any yet, from what I understand.”

“I don’t think so, Serena.”

“You can be as conflicted as you want. You wouldn’t have to do anything other than give your honest expression of what this is like.”

If only it were that easy,
Ellen thought. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t. But…” And here she did allow herself to think about Jane (not about her
situation,
which was a matter to be solved soon), Jane the passionate activist, with a heart as big and angry as Serena could ever want. “I think I know someone perfect.”

10

“So when they bring the check, I pull out this coupon and hand it to the server. Two minutes later he’s back with the host, and they tell us we can’t use it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, he says, the deal is for a
romantic
dinner for two, and I was with a girlfriend. See, he keeps saying, pointing to the printout, it clearly states, ‘You and your sweetheart will enjoy a three-course meal,’ blah blah blah.”

“So how’d he know you weren’t lesbos?”

“Don’t say that.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, what’s it matter? Two dinners is two dinners.”

“Right, that’s what we kept arguing. But he’s like, if we offered this deal to any two people, it wouldn’t be worth it to us, and the special was meant to be for couples—”

“And that’s when you played the husband-at-war card.”

Silence.

“What!” “Why not?” “You’re crazy!”

“I don’t know … everyone was already staring at us, and I cry at the drop of a hat these days. I didn’t even want to go there. I was already feeling like an idiot, all dressed up and out for date night with my best friend.”

“So you just paid the full damn price? Both of you?”

“Plus the sitter, don’t forget.”

“Well … they did comp one of our desserts…”

Groans.

“Okay, but my girlfriend? She went home and wrote a nasty review on Yelp, then she went to town on them on her own blog—now it’s getting picked up by all these mil-wife blogs…”

Cheers.

Lacey smiled, but she was looking for a way to steer the group’s conversation—well, to where? She wasn’t exactly sure but felt vaguely that they should be talking about something else. As usual, though, the women wanted to talk about money. She tipped back in her folding chair to get a view of Otis through the door’s plastic pane, on the floor in the hall, playing his Nintendo DS.

Problem was, if she led them to talk about their feelings that would mean, maybe, cracking open the door on some of her own.

On the stairs back at Jim’s place, that first night. Because they couldn’t make it up to the bedroom in time; her back against the wall, his feet on two different levels, pieces of their clothes tossed over the railing where they drifted down a half flight. His face buried in her neck, his fist pounding the wall.

Lacey drew interlocking circles on the legal pad she’d bought for these meetings. She never actually ended up taking any notes.
Jim
she wrote.
JimJimJimJim
. Under that, she wrote
SLUT
in block letters, shaded them in, and then scribbled over all of it.

Two days later, he came over in the morning as soon as Otis left for camp, and she didn’t have to be at the gym until noon. She didn’t want to do it in their house, didn’t want to deal with a motel, didn’t want to waste time driving back through traffic to his place. So they did it in his car, in the neighbors’ garage, which Lacey had a key to, since they let Otis stick his bike in there over the winter. The whole time she prayed that garage door wouldn’t suddenly rise, if the people next door happened to forget something and came back for it.

If only that fear—that any second, she could have been caught—had been enough to shame her into stopping. But fear made it all the hotter, screwing Jim in his car. Lacey told herself that stopping now wouldn’t make any difference to her already degraded state, but if she spent any time thinking about it, she’d know that wasn’t the truth. She was crazy about him, but it was a willful craziness. Lacey knew herself, knew she could—she
would!
—pull out as soon as the right time came.

Eddie’s last e-mail was upbeat, even more so than usual. He’d forgotten to ask about Otis’s nosebleeds, what the doctor had said (allergies, new medicine), and for once he didn’t bug Lacey about whether they ran the AC units all day, or how the credit cards were holding up.
These guys might actually be getting the hang of it
,
believe it or not
. He meant the hapless Iraqi soldiers, the ones his unit was trying to shape into a disciplined fighting force.
No big screwups going on a week now. Freaking miracle. Also the police had a dinner for us, some holiday thing, and it turned out to be pretty fun, as long as you didn’t eat much of the food.
Eddie went on to describe the new school being built, the safer roads, even a shocker rainstorm that cooled them for a day or so. He didn’t say it in so many words, but you didn’t need to be a mind reader. The man loved his job.

Super! That’s great for you!
Lacey, fighting tears, and for once not thinking at all about Jim.
Maybe you should get your ass back here and see about your wife, though.

“Lacey?”

What? The whole group was staring at her, waiting for a response. “Oh, um—say that again?”

It was Bailey, the youngest one. Now Lacey noticed the girl’s reddened nose, her smeared eyeliner. “We got in a fight. Me and Greg. And it ended real bad. I don’t know what to do.”

“On the phone? IM?”

“Skype. He works KP, you know, so they get to use the computers more … Anyway, he—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. One of the heavier black women nudged her—
go on
. “He saw what I’d written back to his ex on Facebook. She’s like, a real nightmare. She’s all, I’m thinking about you all the time—she pretends it’s about his being over there, but it’s not, that’s just her sad-ass excuse. So I said back off and get your own husband, and I, you know called her some things … Then Greg saw it and he was pissed, he didn’t want his family and everyone to see me like that. He says she’s just being nice, which is a crock. But I couldn’t believe he was, like, standing up for
her
and not me, and—”

“You went off on him.” Lacey knew where this was going.

“Yeah.” Bailey looked miserable. “He kept telling me to shut up, ’cause the other guys could hear, but I was so … you know.”

“Yeah.” The group nodded. They knew.

“I held my hand up in front of the camera and took off my ring,” Bailey said. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean it. Greg—he just—he just looked at me, total shock, and then he walked away from the computer—”

She was sobbing now, in big
a-huh a-huh
noises. Otis peeked in through the window. One or two of the women reached over to pat Bailey, but the rest fidgeted, or shook their heads.

“How long ago was this?” Lacey waved to Otis,
it’s okay.

“Three
days
. And he won’t write me back now, or nothing! I’m freaking out, Lacey. Lacey, what if he gets pulled for a mission and gets hit—”

Instant angry murmurs from the group:
Tshh—why you even—don’t say it. Shut up.

“—And it’ll be all my fault! All my fault! Because he’s not gonna be focused and shit, and I can’t, I can’t even…”

Lacey left her chair and went over to Bailey. She squatted in front of the girl. Everyone else watched; she could feel the tension and even hostility, the way they had inched away from this pain, this mess.
Finally, the tissue box she’d been bringing each week!
Lacey handed it to Bailey, waited while she blew and wiped, blew and wiped. Then Lacey took up the girl’s purse, pulled out her cosmetic bag. “Here. Fix your face. Go on, I’ll tell you what to do. You get fixed up, first.” The girl’s eyes met hers, wild and scared, and then to herself in the compact mirror. Lacey watched as she dabbed on some cover-up, and a little mascara.

“When you get home, here’s what you do. You are going to send him one e-mail—
one.
Short and sweet, and this is what it’ll say.”

“He’s not checking his e-mail! I’ve sent a million!”

“Oh, he’s checking. Here’s what you write.” Lacey motioned, and one of the other women got up to bring over her pen and pad. She paused, glanced around the chair circle. “What should she write?”

“‘Being away from you made me go a little psycho. I’m normal now.’”

“‘I know you need your space but I am sorry and down for you stronger and truer than before.’”

“‘That Facebook bitch got nothing on—’ Okay, okay. ‘Nobody can get in between us.’”

“‘Praying for you. Praying for me. Asking God to help me with my faults, take care of you always.’”

“‘I believe in you.’”

Bailey capped her lip gloss and listened. Lacey wrote it all down. She tore off the sheet and handed it to Bailey, who folded it into triangles. “You okay?” The girl nodded. Women stood and stretched; Otis leaned in the door. “I put my phone number on there, you can call me anytime.” Bailey nodded again, ready to get out of there. Lacey tapped her bare knee and stood up. “We all screw it up sometimes. Just make it right.”

*   *   *

On the way home, she and Otis stopped at the Associated for a rotisserie chicken. Lacey made potato salad and they ate with the back door propped open, swatting at flies who made it through the torn screen, enjoying scraps of car stereo music bumping past. During dinner, Otis read aloud from his weekly book report—this time it was the fourth or fifth of the Percy Jackson series. Lacey couldn’t really keep them straight, but if he liked them fine with her. He’d drawn several colored-pencil portraits of the characters, teens and gods fighting dragons and other monsters. That gave him extra points, which Lacey noted in her little spiral notebook near the phone. Each summer assignment—she varied them, sometimes book reports, sometimes math—got Otis points toward a new Wii game. While he scraped the dishes she put one drawing on the fridge, saved the other to mail to Eddie. Wondered if she could sign Otis up for that art class this fall. Why were these places so damn expensive? And getting into one of the free park district classes was harder than getting tickets to Mariah Carey.

After Otis went to bed, Lacey took a long shower and then sat outside on the stoop in a T-shirt and a pair of Eddie’s boxer briefs. She drank a beer—drinking only beer at home, a self-improvement step—and read an article on a deadly stampede in Iraq, in one of those weekly newsmagazines she regularly took home from the gym. Apparently a thousand people were killed when rumors of a suicide bomber threw a pilgrim crowd into panic, and they surged over a bridge that collapsed into the Tigris River.

“A thousand people,” Lacey said out loud. Almost impossible to comprehend. She tried to visualize a thousand people, a thousand anythings, in her mind. The death toll for U.S. service members was over a thousand now for sure. Maybe heading toward two. How many potential Hajjis had been killed in that stampede?

The phone rang and she jumped. Martine: “What are you doing? Are you outside or something?”

“On the stoop. Little old lady neighbors giving me stink-eye for not wearing a bra.”

“Little old men probably want to give you something else.”

“They wish. What’re you doing?”

“TV. Nothing. Kids are in bed. You waiting for him to call? Think he’s still up?”

Lacey curled the magazine into a tight roll and pressed the sharp edges of the paper against her bare thigh. “Yeah. No. Thought there might be a chance, but probably not until later in the week.”

Martine yawned loudly into the phone. “Twenty-one weeks yesterday. For the first time, I forgot to have them cross it off on the calendar. Is that a good sign? Or not?”

“Good if they didn’t remember. Not sure about you.”

“My girlfriend Sara says they don’t start crossing days out until more than halfway. Also she signed up for some program that’ll text her daughter every day with a countdown, and like an inspirational quote.”

“Mm.” Lacey shifted on the hard stone step. “Listen, could you take Otis some night next week? Maybe Thursday? I can drop him off after my shift.”

“Sure.” Martine yawned again. “Got a date?”

Lacey glared at two homeboy teens scraping a skateboard against the curb. “I got to get together with a girl from my group. Bailey. She’s a real mess.”

“Straighten her out, Lace. They give us a bad name, these girls.”

“I’m on it.” The magazine left a curved red indentation on her thigh.

“Hey, we need to go out sometime. Girls’ night. Long as I’m in bed by … nine.”

Lacey smiled. “’Night, Mart.”

“’Night. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Lacey snapped her phone shut and an echoing pang of self-loathing thwacked within her. Why couldn’t she have that: the ability to fall asleep alone on the couch in front of the TV and be content with it? How did other people cope with the bad secret longings, the itchy need for attention, that beautiful burst of adrenaline when you indulged in what was wrong? What was wrong with her? Had she slept through life class the day they taught you how to be a good person and like it?