Blue Stars (27 page)

She’d tried, at the beginning of the visit, to get them talking. Why was it taking so long to win over the Iraqi people? When they’d seen how much safer they were now? She even referenced a building project boondoggle, some Jalibah plumbing project the locals had totally effed up, that she’d read about weeks ago on
Power Line
. But both soldiers had politely rebuffed her. It was like she’d made an ugly mistake by even bringing it up, the war. They told Eddie about the Ravens game instead.

Why, she wondered now, pacing outside this stranger’s room. Because her intel was so out-of-date? Out of their concern for Eddie, who was kicked out of it irrevocably now—his guys, that shithole, the work he’d loved? Or maybe because—this thought chilled Lacey—it didn’t matter here, of all places. The stuff she’d fixated on, all those blogs, all that data. It shrunk down to nothingness. On the ward, it was all beside the point.

Suddenly the door opened, and conversation spilled into the hallway. Uniforms, hand-shaking, nurses and doctors and photos and hugs for the wife. Lacey waited and when the cluster of men headed for the elevators, she made her move.

“Excuse me? General? Can I talk to you for a sec?”

The bristly white-haired man gave her only a sideways smile, and didn’t slow his pace. He was handed a phone and began talking on it immediately.

“It’s about my husband, Major Edgardo Diaz? If you could just take a quick look at his file?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll need to make an appointment to—”

“We’re in room five-eight-four-oh, which is right around the—”

“Ma’am. All queries related to the review process need to be channeled—”

“All
right
. Jesus.” She swiped away the business card this underling was waving in her face. Elevator doors closed on the brigadier general and his party, and Lacey was left alone in the foyer.

Or so she thought. One last young guy in uniform, bringing up the rear. He held a cardboard box and gave Lacey a once-over before flicking his gaze away.

“Hey,” she said, drawing it out. In the way she knew exactly how to. “Do you have a sec? Just a quick question about the Purple Heart process. I know, I know, you can’t tell me anything official. Promise I won’t beg.” When he hesitated, she pointed toward the Healing Garden. And gave him a tilted head smile,
please?

While Staff Sergeant Jerry Miller scanned through Eddie’s injury file next to her on a stone bench, Lacey jiggled her foot and swatted away a tiny spider dangling from its long invisible thread. Healing Garden, what a load. It was stuffy in here, even at night, like a greenhouse with wilting and possibly fake plants. Across the reflecting pool was a woman with two kids who were using their bench as a desk, writing with pencils in workbooks. Every so often she would point at a place on their pages and they’d erase furiously. The rest of the time she was scrolling her phone.

“That’s all you got for the injury report?”

“Yeah. Why, should there be more?”

“It’s just that they’ve classified it as VINA—see?” Sergeant Miller pointed to a blurry acronym stamped on Eddie’s papers. “What was it, a rollover?”

“All I know was, he was driving back to base and had to swerve, then went into a ditch, and yeah—it flipped. He’s blind in one eye, you saw that, right? And, well, there’s significant concussion damage.”
Don’t make me describe the laughter.

But the sergeant was shaking his head. “Vehicle Incident: Non Applicable. That means, well. That it was an accident. Not enemy combat.”

“An
accident
? Only in the sense that he
accidentally
swerved off the road to avoid the
accident
of getting blown sky-high by an IED. Put on the road by some Hajji. By accident. Fuck.” The mom across the pool gave her a sour look:
Language.

“Doesn’t say anything about IED. You got documentation on that?”

Lacey blew out her breath. “Look. Obviously he wouldn’t have rolled his Humvee on purpose, so … There had to have been a reason he swerved! He saw something, or … You know, there had been two other explosions in that quadrant in that past month! One of his buddies told me on IM. Wait—wait, where are you going?”

“I’m sorry,” the sergeant said, handing her back the file. He must have been all of twenty-three years old; sweet and chubby, dark black skin. “Doesn’t qualify. It’s not a file they’re going to consider for award.”

“But—so—that’s it?”

“What a lot of people do is”—he dropped his tone, as if sliding her a secret—“write their representative.”

Lacey couldn’t speak.

“You know, like your congressperson. From your home state. Shoot them an e-mail, get them involved. Sometimes a big name can put on the pressure, and…” Sergeant Miller fluttered his hand up toward the filmy dark skylights. After a moment, when he got nothing back from Lacey—no flirtiness now—he left.

She wanted to rip the leaves off all these plants, these tasteful goddamn
healing
plants. An accident. Of course, it was only too perfect—a dumbass solo rollover on a sandy road without a shred of cause or glory … that could only be the reason why Eddie had lost his eyes, his mind, his dignity without even knowing it. They were dropping Purple Hearts on the chests of boys almost half his age! For losing a finger or two!

“Do you know what time it is?” Speaking to her. The mom across the pool. “My phone just died.”

“Yeah…” Lacey checked her phone. “Nine-fifteen.”

“Oh boy. Bedtime, guys. Let’s go. Quick kiss for Daddy, don’t wake him up.” No protest from the kids, who stacked up their worksheets. One little boy kicked a pebble into the pool and then followed his mom out.

Lacey wanted Otis, bad. She wanted to be checking his homework and giving him shit about playing his DS past bedtime. She wanted her sense of purpose back, her FRG phone tree, Anne and Felicia and Martine …

She wanted Jim.

If only she could get moving now, to check on Eddie and then hurry back to Mologne where with luck she could get in before last call at the bar. Secret shots behind the cover beer she’d sip slowly. But what was this falling feeling? A slipping, blank-faced freeze. It was, Lacey realized, with more wonder than anything else, fear. She was afraid. She probed at it, turned it over and over, couldn’t find a way out—yes, she was. Not when Eddie deployed or seeing pictures of those sick losers pissing near corpses. Not hearing that he got hit or the first time she saw his missing eye. Not even when Martine caught her with Jim—well, okay, some then.

But here, now, in the Healing Garden. Lacey was afraid.

18

Once when the children were in grade school, Ellen and Don took them along on an early-fall weekend trip to Chicago. Don had a conference, so Ellen made lunch plans with friends and afterward took the children to the Lincoln Park Zoo. It began to drizzle, so they went inside a building in the Children’s Zoo, where the main attraction was a giant play structure made of steel cables and built to look like a spiderweb surrounding a tree.

Or something. Ellen, tired and ready to meet Don back at the hotel, thought the whole thing looked menacing—narrow crawl spaces tunneled around and around, nearly up to the ceiling, filled with children. The noise was shattering. Jane, naturally, kicked off her Keds and dove right in, climbing much higher than Ellen wished a five-year-old would. Wes hesitated, so she followed him around as he peered at curled snakes and little turtles in their glass-front habitats.

Ellen, craning her neck, could barely locate Jane amid the humid scrum of shouting children. So she didn’t pay as much attention as she should have when Wesley quietly said he would give it a try. Sure enough, her sweet unathletic Wes got stuck halfway through; she heard him crying, saw his little hands holding on to the wires. Ellen tried to call up directions, encouragement, but panic kept him in a tight corner high above the ground, not budging. So she dumped her purse and shoes and tried to go after him, scraping her knees on the rubber flooring, neck and back painfully torqued in the tight, wired-in tunnel.

But Ellen too became stuck, having taken a wrong turn—she could see Wesley trapped in a tunnel directly across from her, but was unable to reach him. Backed-up kids were calling at him—
go, already!
—and wrestling their way past Ellen. Parents below shouted that she was going the wrong way. She had a dire moment of breathlessness.

“Wes! Wes! Mommy’s right here!” But he showed no sign of hearing her.

Suddenly Ellen saw Jane, wriggling through the tunnels. She scooted on hands and knees, past much bigger kids, and swung herself up to the platform where Wesley clung to his corner. Ellen saw their heads close together. Jane tugged at Wesley’s pant leg, and again, until he edged away from his corner. Step by step, he followed Jane: around a curving wire tunnel, down a drop hole, across a long skinny platform. It took Ellen much more work to get herself out.

When they were all three on the ground again, she hugged both and then took Jane’s round little face in both hands. “You. You!” Jane had danced away from her, on to the next thing, but with a sly smile—
I am awesome … when I want to be.

*   *   *

Ellen should have been thinking of that moment, the tucked-in smile on her daughter’s face, as Jane approached Michael in his hospital bed, two days postamputation. Each sight of his heart-shreddingly now-shorter leg, wrapped in white bandages, still made her gasp internally. But this was the first time Jane had seen him, so Ellen didn’t know how she would react. In fact, she was tensed for … what? Crying, screaming, some form of Jane’s emotional outbursts. She wouldn’t be so uncharitable, Ellen told herself, if she weren’t so scraped out from lack of sleep. Michael had been sunk down deep again into anesthetized sleep ever since the operation, in order for his body to process this new trauma. Ellen had spent most of the past two nights in the chair next to him, just in case. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to soothe someone else right now.

But Jane went quietly into the room with none of the hesitation Ellen felt. She slipped off her shoes and dropped her coat on the floor. For a moment she stood still at the foot of his bed, the hem of her long paisley dress quivering. Ellen held herself back, in the doorway.

“Can he hear us?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. They tell me to talk to him, but … I just don’t know.”

Jane nodded, slowly. And then she went to him and put her hands on his arm. She fit them gently, so gently, under the PICC lines, and walked them, one by one, up his body. She fluttered over his stomach and chest, over the faded green-print gown. She touched his jaw and cheek, she touched the top of his head and his still-strong shoulders.

Ellen opened her mouth—
be careful
—but said nothing. Jane’s face was wet, but calm. Her sock feet stepped silently, the loose dress that covered her swelling belly moved with her soft motions. She murmured things Ellen could only half hear:
Oh. Oh, no. Oh, Mike. Mike.
She didn’t stop touching him.

And then in a swift easy motion, she climbed into bed next to him. Held her body close to his, on the other side from his damaged leg, put her arms around him and her face close to his neck. Ellen backed outside and let the door close quietly.

In the hallway, she leaned against the wall and cried. A nurse passing by touched her shoulder briefly but didn’t stop. How had she missed this? That rich, flowing intimacy in her youngest child’s touch. It was almost too much to bear. And how Jane went right for what he needed, what she must have known he needed these past weeks, more than anything—that kind of loving touch, body to body.

But how could they not have told her! What they were to each other—how could she not have known? Ellen’s tears slowed to a stop. She found a tissue in a pocket and blew her nose. She should go back in. Jane really shouldn’t be in bed with him and if a nurse saw …

But for now she left them alone, together. Apart from her.

*   *   *

The peace didn’t last. Back in Mologne, Jane surveyed the room in distaste.

“What, we both sleep in the same bed? It’s a double, not even a queen!”

“Unless you want the couch, honey. It’s not exactly easy to get any room here.”

“Hey, question. It’s like a regular hospital there too, right? I mean, it’s not just for the soldiers.” Jane was pulling clumps of clothing out of her backpack.

“I’m not sure, why?”

“Well, I saw online they have an ob-gyn department, so I was going to see if I could, like, make an appointment.”

“Why?” Ellen sat down on the edge of the bed. “Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

“No, I’m totally fine, it’s nothing. But do you have a directory around here? Oh, and I guess there’s the insurance issue. Do you know if they’ll take yours?”

“Jane,
what
?”

“Don’t freak out. It’s just that … I realized I’m missing my ultrasound tomorrow and—”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Whatever, they have those machines everywhere, and it’s not like I need to know the gender right now, the way everyone gets all hung up on that—”

“Stop. Just stop. I cannot believe how irresponsible you are! How do you expect to take care of a baby if you can’t even—”

And they were off—zero to sixty. Back and forth on the subject of ultrasounds and whether or not they were important, whether they needed to be administered on or near the dates they were scheduled. Then there were the tangents on questions of whether Jane was taking her prenatal vitamins and folic acid pills, the ones Ellen had bought her (“I would, but they make me
nauseated
”) and whether she’d called any of the pediatricians on the list, researched car seats, or signed up for the day care waiting list at UW. No, no, and no, with increasingly incredulous reprimands from Ellen and stonewalling shutdowns from Jane in equal, opposite force.

Then Ellen, knowing it was the worst time to bring it up, brought it up. “This is Michael’s baby. Isn’t it? Let’s be honest about it so we can figure out what to do. Wes says—”