Blue Stars (21 page)

The first classroom she tried was wrong; a startled instructor looked up from passing out photocopies. Ellen went up one floor—yes, this must be it. Without knocking she pulled open the door into a darkened lecture room.

Serena was midlecture, clicking through images on a digital screen. When she caught sight of Ellen she cut across the stage, still speaking to the class, flooded by the blinding projector light.

“What’s wrong?” Serena said, covering the microphone clipped to her lapel.

“I think … I think Michael must be hurt.” She said it in a rush, full of wonder.

Serena uncovered her mike. “Class dismissed. Check your e-mail later tonight.”

*   *   *

Now they were in Serena’s office, a narrow, high-ceilinged space with tall windows, staring at the phone on a table between them. Six replays of the message had convinced Serena that the man said “sixteen hundred” U.S. Central Standard Time, that is, 4:00 p.m. It was a few minutes after four, and Ellen was alternately numb and crazed.

A burst of adrenaline shot through her. “This is good, right? He was speaking to me. He’s— This is good, right? They’ll send him home. He’ll come back to me, it’ll be like nothing happened.”

Serena tipped her head,
maybe
. Earlier, at her desk she had googled “military time,” “sixteen hundred,” “phone calls from Iraq” while Ellen huddled on a chair, and now they could only wait.

“I should call Wes and Jane. Or—”

“Let’s get all the information first.”

“He said, ‘One’s all right, one’s…’” Ellen gripped the hem of her sweater. “What does it mean? One of them? One of his … friends? ‘We took a hit.’”

“I don’t know.”

“It can’t be that bad, if he called me himself! How could he possibly call me if…?”

“Ellen.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t pick up. He was right there. He was right on the phone and I let it ring. And now he could be dead.”

“Stop.”

“At least they’re with him. Someone’s with him, they’re taking care of him.”

“Yes. Now be calm. When they call, you need to—”

The phone rang. Area code 910. Ellen’s breath drained away and she answered, staring straight ahead.

“Yes?”

“Is this Mrs. Ellen Silverman of Madison, Wisconsin?”

“Yes it is.”

“Please verify your date of birth and address, ma’am?” She did. Serena slid over a pen and pad of paper.

“Mrs. Silverman, this is Rear Detachment Colonel Balton. I am calling about Lance Corporal Mic—”

“Is he alive?” Ellen shouted. “Is he all right? He just called, though I didn’t get to talk to him. But he was talking! What happened? Can you put him on the phone?”

“Ma’am. Yes, he is alive. I’m calling from Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. The information I have states that Lance Corporal Cacciarelli sustained injuries yesterday morning in the field and has been medevaced to Baghdad for evaluation and treatment. He—”

“Can I talk to someone there? In Iraq, I mean? I’m sorry, I know you have things set up this way but he literally just called here, and I—”

“Mrs. Silverman. I am your contact for all communications. The area medics have determined that once stable Lance Corporal Cacciarelli will be transported to Walter Reed via Ramstein base in Germany. As soon as I have the timeline I will call with his arrival date and your transportation options.”

Ellen looked at Serena, lost and frightened. “You said, ‘once stable.’ What is his exact condition now?” Serena nodded,
good.

Short pause on the other end. “‘Your Marine has primary injuries in the following systems: skeletal, skin/muscle, cardio, vestibular, and neurological. The full extent of the injuries is not known at this time. Lance Corporal Cacciarelli is responding to treatment and will be transported as soon as stable.’”

Serena saw what this did to Ellen and scooted her chair as close as it would go. She touched her head to Ellen’s, the phone between them, and wrote rapidly, copying down the information, sketching out questions.

“Is he going to live?” It was all she could do to manage this question. The man’s careful response evaporated Ellen’s strength.

“Ma’am, I can promise he is getting the absolute best care possible. Now I have some information and forms to send you about traveling to Walter Reed. Is there an e-mail address you have access to right now?”

Ellen sank back from the table. Serena took over the call, identifying herself and giving the needed address. She went on to ask several clarifying questions, ones Ellen herself should have thought to ask. Calm and taking notes, Serena pressed the man:
When will we know more? Who can we call after this, to follow up? How soon until she travels to Washington? How do we make arrangements to…?

There was a hot burble inside her, a nauseated melting. Ellen stood in a panic, groped around. There was no way she could make it to the restroom, even if she knew where it was in this building. She couldn’t even talk. In the corner of the office, behind Serena’s desk, she pulled down her pants and squatted over the plastic-lined garbage can, sweating and shaking as a toxic mess poured out of her.

Serena, still on the phone, found a box of tissues and pushed it near Ellen. Then she locked her office door and continued with her crisp, precise questions to the man on the other end. Ellen hung on to the side of the desk, half naked but without shame. There was only a basic primal relief. And, in the last moment before facing what she had to, gratitude for the luck of Serena, elegant and unflustered and bearing this moment with her: the terror, the shit, the unknown.

14

“Mom! Someone’s at the door!”

Lacey stuck her head out of the shower. “What?” Couldn’t Otis get off his butt and come tell her whatever he was yelling about from the living room? And why did anything need her attention now, during the ten minutes before the hot water inevitably conked out?

She wrapped herself in a towel and came out, giving Otis the stink-eye as the doorbell rang again. “You couldn’t get off the couch and answer it?”

“I’m
reading
.”

“Uh-huh.” A computer game catalog.

Cold October air leaked under the front door to swirl around Lacey’s wet legs. “Yes?”

“Lacey?”

She checked the peephole. Shit.
Anne Mackay,
right there on the doorstep. “Hi! Oh, hi, Anne. You know, I just got out of the shower. Give me one—” No, she couldn’t leave her out there in the cold. Lacey opened the door, cursing herself for not owning a robe. “Come on in.”

“I am
so
sorry,” Anne said. “I would have called but I was actually running errands in the neighborhood—”

“No, it’s fine,” Lacey insisted. “Just let me throw something on.” She led Anne into the living room, swatted Otis’s feet so that he would sit up and make room on the couch. Then she ran into the bedroom as Anne greeted Otis and began to ask cheerful questions to which he responded mostly in half phrases or single words. Lacey pulled on jeans and dug around for a clean top. She combed out her wet hair and tried to picture how messy her place looked through Anne’s eyes. Not much she could do about it now; did she even have any decent snacks to offer?

Back in the living room, Otis was unwillingly showing his catalog to an enthusiastic Anne, whose trim slacks and crisp white blouse made Lacey want to rewind the entire morning. What was she doing here on a Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m.? What was she doing here at all?

“I was just going to make some coffee, I don’t know if you—”

“That would be perfect!”

“Right. Okay. Otis, maybe you can help me in the kitchen for a sec?”

“Help you make coffee?” But he shuffled in after her.

Lacey pushed a brown paper bag at him. “Look,” she whispered. “We need to clean up the place some. But without her noticing. So just go around and pick up stuff, all right?”

“What stuff?”

“Clothes, toys, anything lying around. But don’t do it so it
looks
like you’re cleaning up. Oh, crap. Is there still a pile of laundry on the chair out there?”

Otis shrugged. “Why are you freaking out? You never care about cleaning.”

“She’s like my boss, all right, so cut the ’tude and help your mom. Don’t tell me we’re out of milk.” Luckily she did have a new can of Chock full o’Nuts, so Lacey was able to bring out two decent mugs with sugar and powdered creamer on the side.

Once they were settled, Anne launched into a long funny story that Lacey could only partially follow; it had to do with Anne having
thought
she signed her daughter Isabella up for basic ballet lessons but somehow mixed up the class descriptions and got her nine-year-old into an advanced toe-shoes and barre class, which the teacher seemed to think was perfectly okay even though Isabella was in way above her head, and started
arguing
with Anne when she tried to switch the girl into an easier lesson.

“So she’s, you know, this classic hair-scraped-back ballet teacher, not an ounce of fat on her, and she just goes off on me in this ridiculous French accent! With all these little bun-heads standing around and snickering! I mean, I don’t even think the woman
is
French. It’s the role she feels she has to play. Anyway, she goes—” Here Anne put her nose up and let out a trill of Frenchy-sounding words interspersed with English.

“So I’m a little ticked, right? Bella is practically in tears and this woman is insisting she has to stay in this class if she wants to be in their program. Well, maybe it wasn’t nice of me but I pull out
my
college French—I spent two semesters in Paris—and I go,
Eh bien, excusez-moi, mais je pense que je connais ma fille mieux que vous
!”

Lacey kept a smile on her face, wondering whether she was supposed to pretend she could tell the difference between fake and real French. The caffeine was helping her catch up; there were no errands that could possibly take Anne Mackay around here. So what was it? Maybe it had gotten around that Lacey had been to two different vet agencies for prepaid grocery and gas cards, and a box of freebies she’d been handed and had carried, mortified, to her car and into her house. The roll of toilet paper in the bathroom she prayed Anne wouldn’t ask to use was from that very box. Maybe Anne was here to offer some kind of
we’re-all-in-this-together
moral support or, worse, an actual loan.

Or what if one of the girls from the group had complained about her? Could you get fired from a job you hadn’t even applied for? That someone had
asked
you to do? That didn’t pay?

“We had a nice day with Bailey last weekend,” she said, testing the waters. “Right, O? At the zoo?”

“Bailey…” Anne said, frowning, as if she’d never heard of the person Lacey had e-mailed her about several times, checking that she was saying the right thing to this frustrating girl who was threatening to walk away from all of it.

“When you made us walk around for hours in the cold and all the animals were, like, inside because it was freezing?” Otis said. But he gave her a teasing smile.

“When we took the tram out and back,” Lacey countered, “and you got hot chocolate
and
an ice cream?” She’d worked overtime at the gym that Friday, since Otis was at a sleepover, but had rallied as she could, treating Bailey to lunch and a day at the Bronx Zoo she had planned because Anne’s handbook suggested including wives, especially ones without children, into fun outings if they seemed depressed.

“I think she had a good time,” Lacey said. “But maybe you want to call her? She told me she hasn’t talked to Greg—that’s her guy—in a while. And the thing is, she didn’t seem that upset about it.” Huddled in her jean jacket, Bailey had stared at the ibex and shrugged while Lacey kept on with gentle questions about how she was doing.

“Maybe it’s not for everyone,” she whispered while the long-horned goats shuffled around their feed pen.

“What isn’t?” Lacey said. But Bailey hadn’t answered, merely moved on to join Otis at the Great Bear Wilderness.

Anne clucked, nodding in concern, but in a general way. What Lacey didn’t say was that Bailey most likely had something else going on, someone on the side. The girl was furtive in a new way, smiling to herself, as if Lacey wouldn’t notice, was both more cheerful and more stressed. It wasn’t hard to tell she was keeping a secret.

Takes one to know one. That old-school comeback, one of the first Otis had learned to toss around. Lacey used to think it was funny. Now it pierced her. Who did she think she was, showing off her fake perfect life, la la la I’m taking my son to the zoo on two hours of sleep, to someone who was struggling with the same ugliness and failure that she was? Who was she trying to convince?

“Mm-hmm,” Anne said, eyes wandering around the room.

“How are things for…” Lacey stalled out, forgetting if she’d ever known the name of Anne’s husband.

“What? Oh, Roger’s good. He says he got eight of our letters on one day, after about a month of nothing. I don’t know. Everyone’s using MotoMail now, but I guess I’m old-fashioned.”

“MotoMail?”

“That service? Where you e-mail a letter and it gets printed out at base and then delivered? You should try it.”

“Not very private, though.” Lacey glanced at Otis. “Not for
those
kinds of letters, I guess.” This kind of joke would be a no-brainer with Martine, but Anne just smiled blankly.

Martine. A pain winched through Lacey. Since that night at Chap’s, they’d barely had contact. Next morning, Lacey had called and called, but Martine never picked up. Over the next week, Martine would only text her, not speak directly.
Whatever,
she wrote to Lacey, who was desperate to know if they were in a fight.
I don’t want to be involved.
Also,
You’re apologizing to ME?!
This after Lacey had left a message saying,
I’m sorry
. Finally:
I don’t think so
. Lacey had texted:
Can we get together?

She was sorry, no lie, a sorry excuse for a soldier’s wife. But was she truly sorry for what she’d done with Jim? Sometimes. She thought about calling it off, again. But since they’d resumed, with late-night calls and one feverish lunch hour of kissing in her car, there was calm again in her mind, in her life. She could handle Otis and this crappy new sassing-back of his; she could hold her head up in the checkout line paying for food with charity. She subsisted on coffee and takeout and had cut the drinking down and was as sweet as she’d ever been to Eddie, when they talked.