Blue Stars (22 page)

Lacey wasn’t dumb. She knew none of that mattered, balanced against the bad. She’d be honest with herself, if not with anyone else. She didn’t make any promises to Jim, and he didn’t ask for any.
But just say the word, Lace, and we’ll make this right. You’ll do right by him, when the time comes. We can make a good life out of this.

What she could use most of all was someone to talk to. And yeah, Martine was probably never going to be that person—Lacey bit down on the rush of sadness—but now she’d made sure of that, hadn’t she?

A beat of silence stretched out uncomfortably, there in her living room. Martine wouldn’t have, would she? No way. Lacey tried to find something to say, any topic, while she spun crazy circles of fear inside. She’d known, of course, that Mart would never tell Eddie—through her husband or any other connection. She would never risk distracting him, over there. It was a code they had never discussed, but Lacey felt it as strongly as if they’d signed a contract in blood. That didn’t mean, though, that Martine wouldn’t tell Anne.

Who now stood, smoothing her dark pants down slim legs, stepped uneasily around the pile of laundry to a side table where she picked up the digital photo frame Lacey had given Eddie for Christmas last year. Over the woman’s shoulder, Lacey saw the images flick by in a tilted slide show: Otis at Orchard Beach, Eddie and Lacey swanked out for a night on the town, Lolo stiff on the front steps in City Island.

“I like this,” Anne murmured. Her voice was subdued. Lacey felt a flash of terror.

“It’s too bad, but we’ve got to get going.”

Anne set down the frame and studied Lacey. She showed no sign of taking the hint.

“Otis has a game,” Lacey said weakly. She prayed he wouldn’t contradict her. “But it was really good to see you…” Why wasn’t she leaving? Would she confront Lacey here, in her own home, in front of her son? Spit on her, curse her out?

From back in the kitchen, her cell rang. Lacey ignored it. “Maybe we can get together sometime, like for a drink—I mean, coffee or something?” She urged Anne toward the door with every inner impulse.

“Why don’t you get that. I’ll wait.”

“That’s okay. It’s probably my mother-in-law. She’s, you know.” Lacey made a face. Her armpits pricked.

“Answer the phone, Lacey,” Anne said quietly. Otis looked up from his catalog. Lacey went in a daze around the corner to where her phone was lilting on the counter under a pile of mail. Now she knew. Why Anne had come. In her hands, the phone had quieted but almost immediately began to ring again.

She walked slowly back to the living room, where Anne still stood, her face now broken open by fear. “How bad?” Lacey said.

Anne shook her head, she didn’t know.

Lacey nodded. He wasn’t dead; that would have been casualty officers at the door. “Hello,” she said into the phone. And pointed to Otis, then the back bedroom. Anne bent quickly to the boy and led him out of the room.

In the next few minutes, Lacey learned that Major Diaz had suffered injuries to face, chest, and limbs in a Humvee accident in Baghdad, was receiving treatment at base, expected to be medevaced by Huey within the hour. Routed through Landstuhl, transferred to Walter Reed within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Current status of Major Diaz: stable, though unconscious.

Lacey stayed calm; she drew on all the times she’d heard wives go through this and knew enough not to press the RDO rep for details, answers, that weren’t available yet. She didn’t write anything down, but she made sure to confirm her eligibility for Travel and Transportation Orders—reimbursement for three people in terms of gas for the car, lodging and food expenses while at the hospital. Once that was cleared, there was nothing else to do except put down the phone and call Otis to her.

She held her baby, she kissed his head and told him Eddie got hurt but he would be okay. Everything was going to be okay. Otis began to cry. Anne knelt in front of the two of them, promising help, crying also. Only Lacey stayed cold and strong. A long list of immediate actions formed in her mind. The first, and hardest, would be to tell Lolo. And she’d need to borrow money from Anne for the trip to D.C.; she could pay her back as soon as the T&TO funds cleared. But for now she rocked Otis and let Anne go on about how she found out only an hour ago and came rushing over as soon as she heard, that Lacey would have every bit of support from the entire FRG, and that she’d get through this, she would, she had them all in her corner.

Inside, though, Lacey listened to a voice calmly explain why this had happened.
You did this to him
, it said.
You made it happen.

I know,
she thought, and braced for what was to come.

PART TWO

AWAY

15

WALTER REED ARMY MEDICAL CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.
OCTOBER 2005

By the middle of the fourth day Michael had been in surgical intensive care at Walter Reed, it had been determined that he would probably survive. Probably. Ellen didn’t fully understand who had decided this, or by what measurement, since he was still in a coma—light coma, medically induced—and she couldn’t see any change in the terrifying condition of his body, but the force of her gratitude kept her from asking too many questions. It was hard to form thoughts or questions here. Yellow curtains pressed closely around Michael and the other four men in their beds. Gowned personnel barreled in to work on him—Ellen roughly ushered aside—in new emergencies she couldn’t detect. Digital shrieks came from monitors and equipment attached to unconscious Michael and the men behind the other curtains. The doctors didn’t speak much to her, aside from brief updates that left her more confused than before. She got the sense they were hedging their bets.

Yet it wasn’t the doctors or the nurses that infuriated Ellen—or the many ranks of half-medical, half-military staff with their jargon and hurry and protocol—it was herself. Why couldn’t she find a way to make herself heard, here? Who was this woman, stammering and feeble, passively agreeing to procedures she wasn’t clear on? Why did she let that one surgeon cut her off on the question of pain in a coma? She, who could lecture to the back of a two-hundred-seat auditorium without a microphone, who could summarize salient points and counterarguments at the drop of a hat, who was no stranger to the blazing self-importance of young men with highly advanced degrees?

(“We can get back to saving the liver and spleen,
or
I can stand here discussing it with you.” That’s what the impatient surgeon had said when she fumbled around asking about pain levels. In response, what could anyone do but shut up and step aside?)

Mom,
they constantly called her here. Too busy with life-or-death to learn names. “Step outside now, Mom.” “Okay, Mom, we’re gonna need you to…” “Your signature here, Mom, and here…” Each time, the word burned her.
But I’m not,
she cried inwardly, afraid she was a fake or fraud, afraid this biological lack would doom his chances somehow. But she moved, she signed, she did what she was told.

*   *   *

It didn’t matter what she said or thought, anyway. Michael would survive, or he wouldn’t. Whole cadres of people worked around the clock to stabilize him, using every effort and technique at hand. There wasn’t a lot of critical abstraction involved. Maybe this was the time that people who could, prayed.

If it hadn’t been for the wife of the man in the bed two down from Michael, Ellen might have continued in this confounding meek state. But the woman she overheard yesterday afternoon—they all did, no one could escape that New York accent—was anything but meek.

“You gotta be kidding me! No. No way. Still on dialysis, still with the balloon pump, and … you see this? Look at that color. I showed you people that yesterday,
Jesus.
That’s plasma leaking from the vent, so don’t—”

Ellen had stayed rock-still, shocked and a little thrilled to hear this torrent unleash. From where she was huddled on a plastic chair, in the back corner of the SICU—Michael was having another round of lab draws—she couldn’t see the owner of that indignant voice. It was coming from somewhere inside the warren of yellow-curtained rooms.

“No. He’s not ready. No way in hell. Just ’cause you need the space doesn’t mean I’m gonna roll over—”

A murmuring voice, or two, in response, trying to calm her.

“Maybe you think I don’t know the rate of death for patients moved out of Intensive before fully stable. Or the risks of cranial swelling. They go crazy, they pull their own tubes out! I’ve read about it, you’ve seen it—”

At this, Ellen’s attention sharpened. Michael was scheduled to be moved to one of the wards, later today or tonight. But … that was a good thing. She’d been told he was better, he was ready … wasn’t he?

As the woman’s voice rose higher, stubbornly refuting every doctor’s murmur, Ellen suddenly realized there wasn’t just insistence in her words, there was also logic. And informed experience. And the distinct sense that there were more perspectives to consider aside from the hospital’s authority.

Ellen bent forward on her chair and pressed her torso close to her thighs. She craned her head farther down and peered under the curtains. At first she could see nothing but the rolling wheels of crash carts and the movable levers of the hospital beds. Nurse and staff clogs, moving steadily around the beds and the equipment. Chair legs where other visitors sat by the beds, perhaps also listening in silence. And then Ellen found what she was looking for; she knew.

Facing two sets of sea green pant leg scrubs were shoes that could only be worn by the owner of that voice. Even in the requisite blue shoe covers that Ellen herself had on, the stacked heels were high on that pair of peeling black leather boots. Pushing herself upright, Ellen glanced down at herself: an oversize gown made of some material that was a cross between paper and cloth, plastic gloves that made her hands sweat and itch. Under that, plain slacks, a simple blouse, a light wool cardigan; and under the shoe covers, a pair of flats. Some variety of the same clothes she’d been wearing since she arrived in Washington, D.C., three days ago. A few more sets of each hung in the closet of her room in the Marriott in downtown Silver Spring. What would it be like to stride these floors with the height of such boots?

The woman’s voice had gone quiet. Some agreement had been reached. But now Ellen was alight with urgency. She had to be back with Michael, but as soon as she could she went out into the bright spaceship-like hallways outside their room. Past the soiled linen containers, more crash carts, the hand sanitizer boxes affixed to each doorway. She caught a glimpse of tight jeans under a visitor gown and—yes, those black boots—disappearing into the women’s restroom by the elevator banks.

“Excuse me,” Ellen said, pushing in after her. “Why shouldn’t he be moved? My—well, my son is scheduled for later today.” Ellen glanced down the row of stalls—empty. “I heard you back in there, and … Please. Do you know something?”

The woman turned from the mirror to face Ellen. She was tall and strong, maybe forty. Her smeared black eye makeup looked like it hadn’t been washed off in days. Ellen tried to smile, tried to regulate her ragged voice, aware that she was far away from a normal social interaction. Suddenly afraid this woman would simply shrug, and dismiss her.

“How long have they had him in the coma? He’s got TBI, right?”

Ellen nearly swooned with relief. “It’s been three days. The last X-ray showed less swelling, but—”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “Propofol, right?”

“Yes.”

“All I know is, better to be in SICU when they bring them out to check function. It can get rough.” The woman twisted her long blond hair up and tied it into a knot. There were faint pockmarks on her cheeks, and her lips were chapped.

Ellen swallowed. “Rough how?”

“Psychosis, delirium. They get wild, in a nightmare you can’t calm them out of. And they can do a lot of damage before they’re sedated again. They can’t talk, they think they’ve been kidnapped and shit, they want to fight you. My girlfriend’s husband vaulted out of bed, and this woman told me—”

“Are you a doctor?”

The woman turned and gave herself a rueful smile in the mirror. “No. So don’t listen to me. Ask his care manager, or whatever they’re called.” She tousled her bangs this way and that, pushing them out of her eyes.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.” She went briskly into a stall. Ellen started to speak, but the rushing stream of urine covered up her words. When the woman came out a moment later, she looked surprised to see Ellen still waiting there.

“I apologize, that came out wrong. I can tell you know a lot about this, and I don’t and … I just don’t know if I’m getting the full picture—in there.” Ellen nodded in the direction of their room, brimming with tears of shame. “I don’t want to make any mistakes,” she whispered. She leaned back against the cool concrete wall and watched the woman push up the elastic sleeves of her gown and wash her hands, slowly and thoroughly.

“What I did was, I got them to agree to Eddie staying one more night and one more day in SICU. Also that they have to bring him up from the coma, at least for the first time, here and not on the ward.” They made eye contact in the mirror, ghosts in matching translucent gowns. “Try that. He’ll get a better shot.”

Thank you
. Ellen breathed. And then she was gone in a rush of new energy, walk-racing as fast as she could down the achy-bright hallway to find Michael’s doctors, already organizing persuasive sentences in her mind.

*   *   *

That was awkward. Lacey skidded getting out of the elevator, nearly went down flat on her ass in the front lobby, had to hop around to get those booties off. She’d been bitchy to that woman, the gray-haired teacher type, but it was just auto-bitch, spillover from having to ream out the doctors. Not to mention the mother-in-law nightmare waiting for her back at Mologne, in the single room she, Lolo, and Otis were crammed into. Or the fact that Eddie had lost an eye, most of his sight, and an unclear but possibly significant amount of brain capacity. Or her negative bank account; the unpaid vacation days she was using up; those ten hours of sleep she’d gotten, in total, over the last three days.