Blue Stars (25 page)

And what about me?
Ellen thought. Why did my voice do nothing to calm him? His bulging eyes, his whole body shaking. She felt as if he might bite her, or put his hands around her neck. Curled up under the covers, unwashed and hungry, Ellen trembled. Why should he be calmed? What was she to him? Their connection was so precarious, so short-lived. Compared to the trauma of war and injury, wasn’t it likely that everything about them had been obliterated? And did that mean she was even more useless here than she felt? Ellen pictured Lacey calmly and competently handling her husband’s awakening—how reassured he’d be to find her there, to hear her familiar voice, their years of marriage stabilizing him even in the confusion. A thousand previous memories rushing in to align him with reality. With life.

But she could do this. Mike needed her; she’d saved him before, hadn’t she? No, her letters hadn’t worked—she shook her head in bed, disgusted—all those pages, all that reading: worthless. All right, but she could do better. It might be a technicality that brought her to Walter Reed, mere guardian in a world of real moms, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t bring him back, couldn’t find their connection again. She’d find a way.

To get herself to sleep, Ellen clung to a memory: the two of them, on the couch in the basement. The TV on mute, a late-night talk show. Mike had two weeks to make up a dozen incomplete assignments—including a ten-page research essay—in order for him to graduate high school. Ellen, in her bathrobe, knew a dire situation when she saw one, and sorted quickly through a pile of half-written reports and mediocre paperbacks—dog-eared and underlined for decades.
Death
=
theme. Green light
=
symbolism!! Danny R sux cox.
“This first,” she said. “No, this one. If you read two chapters I’ll tell you about the rest. No, Wikipedia doesn’t count for a source. Because I say it doesn’t. Now look, for the research essay you’ll want to set it up like—” She took his pen and swiftly sketched out an outline, muttering about remedial teachers who couldn’t bother to write up clear directions or a rubric, when she felt his gaze on her. “What?”

“Nothing,” Mike had said. Sheepish, grateful.

Ellen went back to writing. “Don’t know what I would have done,” he said then, quietly, almost to himself.

*   *   *

Eddie Diaz came up smoothly and without incident. Lacey gripped the rosary in one hand and his in another, but no bad dreams shook him, no terror swept through his placid body. In fact, it was so easy that the attending congratulated herself, in pointed response to Lacey’s insistence that the procedure be done in SICU.

Eddie slowly swung his head back and forth against the raised back of the bed. Lacey spoke to him, but he didn’t seem interested in what she was saying. Instead, he pursed his mouth and flickered his tongue in and out, searching. She held the straw to his lips, ignoring the doctor’s
not too much at first
—and felt him pull deep, until the ice rattled at the bottom of the Styrofoam cup. The doctor began to say something, but was cut short by what happened next.

Eddie laughed. He set his head lightly back on the bed and laughed a long, fluty trill. Lacey dropped his cup and ice slid around on the floor. “Ed, Ed,” she murmured. “It’s okay.”

But her husband let out a long moaning sigh that turned into another laugh. A laugh she’d never heard from him before. Light and breathy, carefree.

One of the aides in the room chuckled until Lacey shut him up with a look.

“It’s just the Versed,” the doctor said. She flipped back a few pages on his chart. “It’ll sometimes cause—”

“I know what Versed does,” Lacey hissed. “And he’s not on it.”

“He’s not? Oh, right. Well, there’s bound to be some emotional disinhib—”

“Hi,” Eddie said softly. “Hi, hi.”

“Hi, hon,” Lacey said, leaning across him on the bed. “You’re in Walter Reed. You can’t see because there was an accident, in the Humvee. But you’re okay, and all the guys who were in there with you are okay—” His men, she knew, would be his top concern.

“Hi, hi, hiiiiiii…” Eddie giggled. He reached up to gently pat the contours of the covered eye.

“Captain Diaz,” the doctor said loudly. “I’m Dr. Renard. We are protecting your eye with a shield. Can you tell me where you are? Do you know why you’re here?”

“Of course he can’t,” Lacey snapped. “He’s been out for a week. Ask him—”

“Here, I’m here,” Eddie began, in nearly a whisper. With a tiny smile flickering. “Ha. Aha ha.” He turned his blind face her way, sweetly. Lacey edged back, throat full of nausea. The aide went
awww.
Eddie made a smoochie face and she almost bolted. But he just wanted water again, so she filled another cup and put the straw to his lips. After he drank, he swooned backward: asleep again?

Dr. Renard turned to one of the nurses. “Do you have the rotation schedule? For pressure wounds?” She went on to discuss raising his heels for bedsore prevention, and gave orders about his drip and TPN feed.

All the while Lacey fought her dismay. And—yes—her disgust. Who
was
this simpering stranger? With the cutesy-pie voice and the tee-hees? Where was Eddie? Twenty minutes later, he was still giggling as if he had a secret, while drifting in and out of consciousness.

She followed Renard into the hall. “What’s that about?” Lacey demanded. “He’s not like that. Why is he
laughing
, for God’s sake?”

“I know it’s disconcerting. But you have to give it time. We don’t know the extent of the closed-head injury, and until—”

“Is it permanent?”

Renard studied Lacey. “If it is, it’s not the worst. Sometimes a personality shift can go the other way. They become angry all the time, flying off the handle at whatever. Or there can be constant crying…”

Lacey gaped at this bitch. Who quickly covered her ass. “But that’s jumping the gun by quite a bit. We’re set to do a CAT scan as soon as Ocular gives the okay. Most likely, it’s a temporary reaction to one of the meds, and will wear off.” Then she hurried away.

For a long time Lacey lingered outside in the hall. Eddie was scheduled to be moved to Ward 58 tomorrow morning; Ellen’s Michael would be in 57 of course—everyone knew about 57, infamous from the sheer numbers of lost limbs from the war. Lacey found herself glad to know that Ellen would be nearby. The professor—she’d been right about that!—had a steeliness that was impressive. She wasn’t some scared bunny, like some of the other moms … or one of those who raised loud and confused complaints to anyone who would listen. Plus, Lacey could use a friend here.

No, she couldn’t call Anne or the other girls back; most of those calls had been trickling away in any case as the days went on. They couldn’t understand. Lacey herself wouldn’t have understood, before this, what it was like here. The FRG women who had meant everything to her—all seemed a long way away now.

She took out her phone and stared at it. Too early to call Otis—he wouldn’t be home from school until five. She’d already spoken to her mother-in-law twice today, anyway, for updates on Eddie and to answer the million questions Lolo had about Lacey’s apartment, where she was staying with Otis:
Was this all the towels Lacey had? Why no DustBuster, that vacuum canister was much too heavy? How to work the TV remote (again)? I don’t like this coffeepot, I put it out for the trashman.

But here was yet another message from Lolo; as Lacey listened, prepared to be annoyed, she grew very still instead. Could she possibly be hearing this right? “—And also, that man just came for the bills. He said you said it’s okay, so I gave him the envelopes and those papers by the phone. Also he left an envelope with the money, he says for the groceries? Must be from the army. So I already put the order to Big Apple but they don’t deliver until tonight. Otis needs a new set of uniforms and you need to call me back right away because of his homeworks, I don’t know this math and he says he don’t have to—”

Lacey strode away from Eddie’s room, hands shaking as she pressed buttons on the phone. Jim answered right away and she didn’t wait. “What are you doing? What. You go to my
house
? You talked to his
mom
? What the
fuck
?”

A long breath exhale. “I didn’t do it to get in your way. You didn’t have to call me or anything. I just wanted to help out. As a friend.”

“Help out by what? Hanging around my mother-in-law?” A man in BDUs turned the corner and gave Lacey a crisp nod; she tried to bring her voice down. “Getting her all confused? And what is this—about papers, something you took?”

“Nothing! A couple utility bills and I took care of them, okay? Also a few other things. Those ones that went to collections, Lace—that’s not good.”

“That’s not your business! I don’t need any help! Just stay out of it, all right?”

“Okay. Okay.”

She held the phone tightly so that she wouldn’t cry. “You gave her money?”

“Just a few bucks. For Otis, for whatever. I won’t do it again. If you say. Lacey. Hey, Lace.”

“What?”

“Don’t hang up. I won’t call you, I won’t do anything more … Just don’t go yet.”

She touched a corner of the framed poster on the wall:
Family. Community. Country. Together we can save lives! Wounded Warriors
ARE
America.
This was bad. Every second she stayed on this call her resolve buckled. How to fight it, the spreading belief that this was a good man? And that this love mattered, somehow, even amid it all?

“He’s not right, Jim,” she whispered. “I could tell right off the bat. He’s awake but … I think something’s broken in there, even if they can’t see it. More than the eyes, I mean.”

“Oh, Christ. That’s messed up. And it’s gotta be so hard on you.”

“Yeah. Well. Like it should be.”

Long sigh,
shhhhh.
“It doesn’t work like that. Even if we hadn’t been … what we were, this still would’ve happened.”

So if she tried to be a good wife now, it didn’t count? It wouldn’t make Eddie better? His eye, though … there was still a chance.
Just a little light,
Lacey thought.
Let him have that. Give me that much.

“Tell me something about your girls,” she said. “Are they liking school? Did Jenny get braces on?”

“Ah, she cut a deal with her mom. Braces can wait until after cheering season, if she keeps a B average. Not how I would’ve done it, but who am I? Just the guy who pays for braces.”

“What about the other ones?” Lacey glanced down the hall. No one came in or out of Eddie’s room, but she knew she’d have to go back there soon. A memory of Eddie’s soft, wandering laughter pierced her, and she recoiled. Give her anything else: blood spurting, vomit, protruding bone. But that laugh …

So she held back for a few more minutes. She traced the letters on
Wounded Warriors
and listened to Jim tell her about his daughters, his voice bright with love for them. She didn’t thank him for the money, or for paying her bills. They didn’t mention it again. His stories about home, about the restaurant and what she was missing in New York, let her hang there a little longer, suspended between two worlds, until it was time to go back down the SICU hall.

17

Away from the SICU, there was limited space for privacy. The fifth floor was ringed with wards around the building, two to each side. Inside that were the nurses’ stations and waiting rooms; behind that layer, in the innermost part of the floor, were closed-door offices Ellen was never invited into. Supply closets, equipment rooms, and janitor services were tucked into each hallway’s corner. Luckily Ward 57, the amputee ward, where Michael had been moved yesterday into one half of a double room, was next to an interior courtyard called the Healing Garden. Ellen had only noticed it in passing, in the business of Michael getting settled into this new space, and she was surprised when Dr. Grant suggested they go in there to talk over what he needed to explain to her.

“Pretend we’re actually outside,” he said, in apology. The young doctor, Ellen’s favorite so far on Michael’s team, dragged a metal chair over with an echoing scrape and held the back while she sat. Milky light from the ceiling’s plastic skylight panes fell down over the two of them, tucked in a corner of the stone-paved garden between two giant potted ferns. He held a folder on one knee—the business at hand—but didn’t open it yet.

“I’m sure you have questions. I’ll answer everything I can about the process for his leg, and then we’ll make sure Neuro gets back to you on anything related to the TBI.”

Ellen straightened and opened her own notebook. She might be new, but she understood how rare this one-on-one moment was with the head of a surgical team. “One of the other doctors was telling me Michael needs another cleaning-out surgery?”

“Debridement, we call it. Yes. There are bits of foreign matter, dirt, and shrapnel still in Michael’s tissues and we go in to clean it out, essentially. It’s how we stay on top of any infection that might arise, but then again we don’t want to cut too much or damage the remaining tissue any more than we have to at one time, so we go in periodically, not all at once. He’s had three of these, and will need maybe, I’m thinking, two more, unless … Well, that’s what we can discuss.” Dr. Grant tapped his folder. He was in his middle thirties, Ellen guessed, with a boyish flip of hair that reminded her of Wes.

“An infection that starts in the, in the stump”—that word—“is dangerous because…”

“Even if infection originates there, it could spread rapidly—inflammation, fever, pus—up the rest of his leg, threatening major arteries in the thigh. And of course then there is the fear of other body systems becoming compromised, when they’re already overstressed from the trauma. Neural, muscular, or cardio.”

“But he’s on antibiotics, just in case.” Since the fury and trauma of his coming out of the coma, Michael had been in a twilight state for the past day and a half. He would flutter his eyes open, and could take sips of fluid. He made gestures and guttural sounds, but no words. Mostly, he slept, flushed and quivering.