Blue Stars (28 page)

“If you already know, then why are you even asking me?” Jane mumbled. While Ellen had been pacing the small room, she had shrunk into a sullen ball on the sagging couch, picking at the ends of her hair.

“I saw you in there! Jane, I saw—”

“Oh, are you the only one who can love Michael, Mom? You’re in charge of how everyone feels and relates to each other, right, I forgot.”

“But how long have you two … I mean, why didn’t you even tell me?”

Jane snorted, a sound programmed to light up every one of the frustration clusters in Ellen’s brain.

“Was it … serious? Did you have plans…?”

“Mom. Be real. Plans for what? Dumbass Mike losing his leg and me getting knocked up? That’d be like the worst reality show ever.”

“So it is his.”

“
God.
Would you just give it a rest? But yeah, so back at home we were…”

“What?”

“It’s not like it had a
name
or anything. It was just … You know…” Jane flipped her hands vaguely around and Ellen had to restrain herself from shaking her. She felt so stupid, imagining Mike and Jane sneaking off to various rooms in the house—in her house!—and laughing at her, how little she knew. Clueless Ellen, such a do-gooder. She wished she could have it out with Mike too.

“A fling?”

Jane glared at her. And then retreated into a private showy smirk. “Sure, okay. Yep, call it a
fling
. Whatever label works for you.”

“I’m just trying to understand. There are more factors at work here than you’re thinking about. First of all, you’re not even a legal adult yet. And I’m the one supporting you. So—”

“So you deserve to know all my business, is that it? You pay, I tell?”

“Would you please focus on something other than yourself for once?”

“This is about me!”

“What about Mike? What is he supposed to do about it? How much can he be involved? Do you have any idea what his life is going to be like, once he recovers from this? How are you even going to tell him? When?” Jane was crying now, but Ellen couldn’t stop herself. “How can he possibly handle all of what he’s been through, and learn he’s a father on top of that?”

“I didn’t even say it
was
him!”

“You need to—”

“Shut up, Mom! Just shut up, okay
?”

They were so loud and livid that neither heard Lacey knock on the door, if she even did knock. But there she was, astonished, and calling them both out.

“Hey. Hey! What’s going on?”

Ellen, instantly ashamed, grew quiet and tried to calm her red face, her thumping pulse. Jane was on her feet, still shouting.

Lacey came in and quickly shut the door. “Wait a minute. Don’t you shout at your mother like that!”

“It’s all right, Lacey. We’re just—”

“Take a breath. Take a full breath.” Lacey was at Jane’s side, Jane who was gasping with tears and fury. “That kind of screaming makes you hyperventilate, and it’s not good for mom, and it’s not good for baby. Plenty of time to hash it out later.”

“But she—”

“I know, I know. Long breath out. Like that, yeah.”

“I feel dizzy.”

“Honey—”

“Let’s get her some water. You drinking enough water, sweetie? No, you’re not.” Ellen rushed back with a glass from the bathroom tap, contrite. Jane did look woozy, and she hung on to Lacey’s arm as she was guided back down to the couch. She drank the entire cup without protest.

“When’s the last time she ate?”

“Oh my God, I don’t even know—we went right to SICU after I picked her up and—”

“I had cereal this morning before the plane,” Jane mumbled. She laid her head back on the couch. “Who are you?”

“Nothing since this morning?” Ellen exclaimed. “Why on earth didn’t you say something? We could have—”

“So let’s figure out where you’re ordering from,” Lacey said, cutting her off. “Chinese or pizza, Chinese’s faster.”

“Pizza,” Ellen and Jane said, at the same time. Jane smiled at her mother, and held out her empty glass for more.

*   *   *

Sometime later, the box of pizza was empty except for discarded crusts. Lacey was finishing her fourth beer, Ellen still on her first, and Lacey was just light enough to feel she could legitimately help herself to the last one in the six-pack. After all, Ellen just had one to be sociable, clearly. Did she ever dress down? Even at 10:00 p.m., after a knock-down-drag-out with her teen—now that girl had issues—the woman looked ready to pour tea at church. Gray wool slacks, soft sweater, small gold hoop earrings … and stocking feet. Yes, Ellen had slipped off her nice leather flats, but she was wearing stockings or knee-highs underneath.

Lacey sighed. Everything was packed up in her room, except the clothes she had on—these too-short jean cutoffs and a holey
ARMY STRONG
T-shirt of Eddie’s. No bra. And that chipped purple polish on her toes … well it wasn’t like she’d planned to stick around for dinner.

Jane was asleep in the bed across the room, snoring intermittently. She was still in her clothes, but Ellen had pulled the covers up over and smoothed her dreadlocks off her face. So, Ellen’s teenage daughter was a hot pregnant mess! Lacey felt bad, but she couldn’t help liking this new development. It made Professor Ellen just a little more approachable.

“Who’s the dad?” she whispered. “She’s not going to marry him or anything dumb like that, right?”

Ellen shook her head.

“Well, you better get his parents involved. Square away the money stuff right off the bat. They’ll make him contribute, even if he doesn’t have it himself. They’ll be so pissed at him, it’ll help your cause, believe me. They’ll pay up.”

“That’s not really—never mind.”

“Let’s face it, she’ll be better off on her own. I mean, I practically have a degree in this. You don’t want some deadbeat around. That’ll hold her back more than the baby.”

But why was Ellen so silent, so serious? Avoiding a straight look at her? Oh
, wait.

“It’s not…?” Lacey pointed toward the door, in the general direction of Heaton Pavilion. Ellen kept twisting her paper napkin around a finger. “It’s his? Whoa. Holy shit.”

“Holy shit indeed,” Ellen said. “She won’t say one way or the other, which means it probably is.”

“And you knew nothing? That they were…? Huh. Well, that is some crazy incestuous shit there.”

“They’re not related! For God’s sake, Lacey!”

“I know, I know. I said
incestuous
, not incest.”

“Stop! Would you keep it down?”

Lacey went to the minifridge, cracked open the last beer, and brought it to Ellen. Who took it, to her surprise. Over the next hour, she got Ellen to talk about all of it: Jane’s history of drama with school, partying, cops (which Lacey could have guessed anyway). Michael’s shit-box aunt and bad situation. Their family’s taking him in when—not that Ellen said this outright—they should have been paying more attention to Jane. Ellen’s (naive) assumption that there’d be no hanky-panky. And why was it somehow
worse
to know that it had been nothing more than “friends with benefits”—Lacey was impressed Ellen even knew that phrase—rather than some big love affair. Why did it make her feel even more stupid and left out …

Then there was a long last weepy part, which Lacey couldn’t really follow, a lot about good and bad neighborhoods in Madison and no one went to college except Wesley (who’s Wesley?) and reading lots of books against the war and now she didn’t want to read any books at all, but she missed them, but they seemed so pointless now and what was she going to do about Jane? And the baby? What was she going to do about Michael?

Jane slept on, even while the thumping bass from the wall behind the bed increased in volume. Lacey and Ellen peered into the hall and saw a gathering of others, mostly women in bathrobes or sweats, out to investigate. One of them, a tired-looking woman with big hair, pounded on the door in question and unleashed on the occupants as soon as it was opened. She held her ground—
totally unacceptable, gonna call the front desk, turn it off or I’ll—
even when guys in wheelchairs kept rolling out of the room to argue with her. Chair after chair—“how do they all fit?” Ellen murmured—of shaved-head wounded soldiers maneuvered their way outside to protest they’d already turned down Jeezy twice so get over it. They were drunk, laughing, and after a while the woman just gave up and left. One by one, everyone wandered back to their rooms. A few little kids, up too late, danced around the hall in pajamas before being shooed back in.

Inside Ellen’s, Lacey said, “Who knows what we’re in for over in Building Eighteen.”

“When do you move?”

“Tomorrow. That’s why I was stopping by, earlier. See if you wanted my extra space heater. I got maintenance to give me an extra. Which is illegal, I’m sure.”

“And Eddie … how is he?”

Still fucked up.
“He’s good. Really good in PT. They think he’ll go outpatient soon; maybe in the next week. I mean, they’re already talking about having him show up for formation.”

“And then … stay with you? In Building Eighteen?” Ellen’s shock proved it to Lacey; this
was
rushed. Sending a blind man off the ward that soon? But then again, she seemed to have no energy to fight it. The process, a dozen different entities setting Eddie’s course of treatment, was like a huge bulldozer. She could only lie down.

But the thought of him there with her, in whatever shabby room she’d been shunted off to, them together and alone and that soft crazy laughing, the two of them in bed together … Lacey wasn’t sure she could bear it.

“So what do I do?” Ellen whispered. She was staring at Jane in the bed.

“You don’t tell him,” Lacey said. Here was one thing, at least, that was clear. “Do what you have to do. But don’t let her put that on him. Not here.”

Ellen nodded. She knew.

19

“If one more person tries to give us a damn dog…” Lacey slapped the
“
PAWS for Patriots” brochure back onto the counter. The staff sergeant in the PT Annex barely reacted as she swept it into the garbage.

“I just hand out what they tell me. Fill out top part of this one, initial six places where I flagged, then fill out last page of this one—”

Lacey stared at the clipboards stacked in front of her. “I did those already.”

“When?”

“Monday!”

“Today’s Wednesday.” The staff sergeant turned away, uninterested in the sheer amount of crazy-making these endless forms brought about. By now, Lacey could rattle off Eddie’s Social Security number, service ID code, treatment code, and TriCare ID number in her sleep. Everywhere she went people made her fill out forms. Often, the forms contradicted one another: She’d be told to sign off on an MRI that Eddie wasn’t scheduled to have—yet. She’d enter home information on one benefit sheet but base info on another, with no idea which was right. Every time she saw a printout of his medicines it was out-of-date, and she stopped carefully correcting it—crossing out and writing in the dozen different drugs—because there was no sign any human was reading these anyway.

“Do they not think we have anything else to do?” she muttered, taking a seat next to a heavyset mom bent over her own set of clipboards. “Half my life with these forms.”

“Pff. Think it’ll keep our minds off of what’s really going on,” the woman replied, pointing with her pen toward the gym. “They’re wrong.” Her soldier must be one of the guys out there on the blue mats, lifting medicine balls or pushing weight machine levers, wearing gray T-shirts and black shorts, using whichever limbs they had left. Or maybe the woman in a back brace and tight bun, an eagle tattoo on her shoulder, doing standing toe raises on a box.

There was a good vibe in here—the familiar get-’er-done aura of men working out—although for Lacey it was weird being off on the sideline. She was so used to being the one calling out reps and correcting form. Some of the guys even looked like they were doing her Rudy’s Gym boot camp routine, only with prosthetics: squats, plank, lunge, plank, scissor abs, repeat. They spun the arm bikes and balanced on a wobble board. It couldn’t be much different, Lacey thought, working from a PT angle.

Eddie was happy too; so far, he loved his OT days. He’d mastered walking with a cane so well that they had him doing spatial drills and PT without much accommodation. If led to the right equipment, he could bench-press, leg-lift, and stretch out with the rest of the guys. After all, many of them had head or eye bandages too. Once in a while, though, Eddie let out a shrill bark, like a seal on a rock. It was his new sound, meant to signal delight, maybe. The therapists didn’t startle. They were used to it by now, even if it drew side-eye from a couple of the other guys. But to Lacey on her plastic molded seat all the way across the gym, the sound pierced the big room and sent a sliver of despair, each time, right through her stomach.

There he went again:
Errrrrrooof!
“Huh,” the heavy woman said, not looking up from her form. Lacey burned.

Her phone buzzed: her own gym. Which was only minimally more appealing than Eddie’s bark, so she actually answered, for the first time in over a week.

“Mrs. Diaz?” An unknown voice, young and hesitant. Lacey left her bag and clipboards on her seat and went to stand in the foyer. This couldn’t be good.

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Oh, good. I’m calling for Regina Morgan, in staffing? She wanted to make sure you—”

“Wait. I’m on leave—my husband’s been injured, he’s…”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Diaz. Well, but Ms. Morgan wanted to make sure you got the letter—”

“Did you talk to Pat Simmons?” Patty would sort it out. True, all the phone messages had been getting more dire, and Lacey had assumed her third extension for leave would be approved, but …

“Patricia Simmons is no longer with the organization. Did you have questions for Ms. Morgan about the letter?”

Lacey stared at the darkening afternoon outside; it was beginning to snow. “What letter? I told you, I’m not home. My husband—”

“You were sent a contract notification by registered mail. I see here that it was signed for by L. Diaz, last Thursday? Um … Ms. Morgan says, um, the thing is we have to have it signed and back here by the end of the week.”