Blue Stars (29 page)

Goddamn it, Lolo.

Under the fluorescent lights, snow glittered and vanished. Barely even November, and there’s snow? It was going to be hell walking him back in this. Building 18 was on the other side of the campus and the damn shuttle never showed up on time.

“So what’s it say,” Lacey asked, in a low voice.

“I shouldn’t actually—”

“
What
.”

“I can’t—you know, I’m not supposed to…” The young woman’s voice came closer to the phone, whispering. “But they won’t give you any more paid leave. It’s all vacation days after this week.”

“Yeah. Uh-huh.”

Lacey hung up. When she finally turned away from the snow, one of the PT staffers was waving at her to come. Eddie, at a table full of blocks and cups and dials, was twisting in his seat. His bandaged head tipped back and as she crossed the cavernous room Lacey could hear his yodel call.

“I’m here, I’m here,” she murmured, squeezing his arm. Eddie’s head-waggling slowed to a stop. The therapist guided his hands to the objects on the table and he began to sort through them, fitting piece into piece. Standing at his side, Lacey looked at his tanned neck, his shoulders under the gray T-shirt, his straight back. That was Eddie in there, in a wordless disguise. Swamped with emotion, Lacey felt as cut off from him as she ever had.

“Can I—I’m just going to—” Screw it. Lacey pulled off her shoes and dropped her jacket onto a mat table. She reached the pull-up bar with one light jump up, and yeah, she had to rock her hips hard to get those first ones in but then the right muscles were firing. Three, four, fiiiiiiive. A few PT guys whistled. Then she hung from the bar and closed her eyes. Untucked shirt, belly exposed. Brought her knees up to her chest, and down. Up, and down. One more pull-up, barely. The burn wiped her mind clean.

*   *   *

“I don’t
want
any, okay? Just leave me alone.” Mike swatted at Ellen’s arm as she once again tried to bring the straw to his mouth.

“But this is the berry flavor. Completely different from that chocolate you hated—just try a few sips.” Mike had healed enough to be moved back to Ward 57. Nausea from his meds kept him from eating or drinking much of anything, and last night a nurse had given them a stern speech about his needing to take in more nutrients on his own. So here was Ellen with a thick pink shake full of TPN, coaxing as best she could. Her theory, half remembered from when the kids were babies, was to tap the straw at his lips and move it away. He needed to make the effort himself if they were to get anywhere.

“One sip. Or I’ll turn on the Bach and Beethoven.” Mike, loath to complain about anything at their home in Madison, was known to subtly shut off the classical music channel Ellen left on in various rooms. She would switch it on, and an hour later he’d walk by and just happen to switch it off. “All those … violins,” he’d say, face squinched, if confronted. Oh, what she would give to see his guilty-as-charged smile right now.

“Mom, give it a rest already! He said he doesn’t want it.” Jane paced around the hospital bed, agitated. She was wearing a loose flannel shirt and baggy jeans that almost hid her growing middle.

Mike groaned, a stifled cry, and pushed his head back into the pillow, eyes closed. Jane froze. “Are you okay?” she asked at the same moment that Ellen said, “Does it hurt?”

His eyes opened to the ceiling and he huffed out two breaths and then laughed, or tried to. “Yeah, it hurts! It fucking kills!” Mike arched his back, straining up, and then collapsed back down. He looked from Ellen to Jane and back again. “I can’t even believe it, being here.” His voice was high, on the verge of tears. Ellen felt the pulse thumping in her throat.

She couldn’t look at his eyes. She couldn’t look at the tightly wrapped stump of his shortened thigh, so she stared at his hands. Mike’s hands. One gripping the metal rail of the bed, the other tapping restlessly against the mattress. Strong fingers with pronounced knuckles, and a few dark hairs. Fingernails short and blunt. These hands had no desert tan, showed no sign of having carried a weapon, of having been in Iraq a month ago. They were a healthy young man’s hands, lying against faded green checked hospital linens. Ellen let go of the shake and put her hand over his, the one holding tight to the railing.

“Dr. Grant said the nerve pain in your—in your leg would be worst today and tomorrow, but then should—”

“Where’s the thing, I gotta push the—” Mike shook off her hand to fumble in the bedsheets at his side.

“Here, here.” Jane handed him the Dilaudid pump with its clicker button.

“It’s too early,” Ellen said quietly. “Another twenty minutes.”

“Push it anyway,” Jane advised. “Maybe you’ll get a little something.”

Mike clicked and clicked the button and then flung it away with a cry.

“I’ll go get the nurse.”

“Wait, let’s wait. You can do this.” Ellen daubed sweat from Mike’s forehead and cheeks. She held up the straw and this time he drank. “Let’s talk about something. It’ll pass the time. And maybe there’s only fifteen or so—”

“Small talk, Mom? Seriously? ‘Oh hey, Mike, how you been? What’s new?’”

He gritted a short laugh between his teeth.

“Jane, why don’t you tell him about…” Ellen went blank. Jane stared at her. A warning. “That concert you went to,” she finished lamely. “What’s that band?”

Instead, Jane spoke to Mike. “Do you remember anything—about getting hit, I mean?”

“Jane! Don’t make him think about that. He needs to focus on recovering.”

“Don’t make him think about it, or don’t make
you
? It already happened, Mom. It’s not like talking about it will—”

“There’s a time and a place. Let him be the one to—”

“Well, he probably blacked it all out, right?” Mike watched Jane stalk back and forth in the small space, knocking down a row of cards Ellen had propped on the radiator—mostly from friends of hers, or the parents of Wes’s and Jane’s friends, though there was one from Michael’s football coach, one signed “best wishes” from the principal of his high school (a short article had run last week on his injury), and one from someone (shakily addressed from FL, an elderly relative?) named Mrs. George Horodner. Wesley, who was splitting his time between Chicago and Madison, had mailed a packet of cards to Mologne House as well as Ellen’s own bills and correspondence, which she’d barely glanced through.

“And I say,
good,
” Jane exclaimed, warming to her subject. “I mean, you were only there for a few months! It’ll seem like a bad dream, all of it. Except for—” She stopped. They all avoided looking at his stump. This time it was Ellen’s turn to signal Jane a warning.

“These kids were throwing rocks,” Mike said, staring up at the ceiling. His tone was almost conversational. “Pop out from around the corner, toss them to us on the ground, for fun. Cottle said it was sandbox soccer, so we kicked them back.”

“Who’s Cottle?”

“They throw, we kick. Throw, kick. They’re laughing. Then they…” His gaze scraped the room. “They, um.”

“It’s all right,” Ellen murmured. She held up the pink shake, a question, which he ignored. Her own hand was unsteady.

“They all run away. We don’t know why. We don’t care.”

Jane’s face, tightened in horror, must reflect Ellen’s own. Mike’s voice grew flat, disconnected. He didn’t look at either of them.

“It’s hot, it’s quiet in the street. Then it comes, over the wall. Someone threw it. I go to kick—and—and—”

They were silent for a long time. Jane rubbed small light circles on Michael’s shoulder. It was as if he’d slipped away, into a dark sullen place all alone. He seemed not to know they were there, seemed to be thinking furiously, gaze averted, stuck on a problem only he knew how to figure.

Ellen reached out with the pink shake and at the instant the straw touched his mouth, Mike exploded. Bursting forward, he backhanded the cup of liquid against Jane, knocking her off the bed. Splattered and shocked, she scrambled quickly out of his range. “Move back
,
” Ellen called, afraid for Jane and for the baby. “Move away!” Hands on his shoulder, Ellen tried to pull him back but he was vibrating from the force of his anger, and his shouting—she now realized he was shouting, at the room, at Jane, who shrunk back, soaked with pink slime.

“Mike. Michael, stop it! You’ll hurt yourself! Jane, go get an aide. Get someone!” Jane fled.

In the moments before the aides came rushing in, Ellen tried to wrestle him down, helpless against his garbled vehemence. He was unintelligible, but veins stood out on the side of his reddened throat. As he twisted to get away from her, he slid sideways on the bed and his stump raised into the air, the most she’d ever seen it. Ellen gripped Michael on his shoulders, his back. His wrapped half leg was out in the open and there was his catheter bag and the sour smell of new sweat layered over old. Ellen tucked her head down, away from his fists, and held on.

In the depths of her consciousness, there was a voice calmly noting throughout tumult.
There was something she’d read once, about pain creating reality. Who was it? Yes—Elaine Scarry. This is what she meant: for the person in pain, there is no other moment. It makes and remakes his world.

Injuring is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being. It is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else, but is the relentless object of all military activity.

Then it comes, over the wall. Someone threw it.
His stump, his stump.
This is exactly the point, Scarry would say. His broken body. “The relentless object of all military activity.” It’s all led directly to this moment.

Two nurses hurried in, with a burly aide. Ellen relinquished her hold and let them take over. Her damp empty arms slowly cooled, fading patches of warmth left by his thrashing heat. Jane waited on the other side of the door, crying.

*   *   *

In bed with Eddie, Lacey felt most torn. In his silence asleep, he seemed like the Eddie of old—flat on his back, faint rumbled snore-whistle, the same warm smell of his body. But the comfort she’d get from this would ricochet back around as pain, as punishment. And Lacey would tremble next to him, unable to sleep, lie awake and watch the gray light on his eye bandage, the curved plastic shield. She shouldn’t be allowed to be relieved by his closeness in bed, by the chance to touch or hold him if she chose to, which she did not. Because let’s face it, the biggest source of relief was the break sleep gave from his laughter, that soul-scratching soft giggle that came out of nowhere several times a day. Neurologist said it would go away, maybe. The swollen parts of Eddie’s brain made it hard to see what was permanent damage and what would right itself, eventually. But Lacey knew; he could only come back so far from this. It was a secret only she knew, not the doctors. This was a punishment.

When the thoughts came like that, there was no way for her to lie in bed next to her husband. And in this small dirty hole of a room, nowhere else to be. Lacey paced, she drank, she scrolled endlessly through her phone. She didn’t know why, but it bothered her that no-name Building 18 was off the Walter Reed campus, even though it was right across the street on Georgia Avenue, a nondescript ugly place stuffed with cheap kitchenette efficiencies. But it did. She felt more alone here than she would if they were on the other side of the city. Lacey pictured Ellen in the warmth and comfort of the Mologne House bar—which was stupid, Ellen never went to the bar unless she, Lacey, dragged her there—making conversation with vets who might have lost body parts but at least had their wits together.

God, she missed Otis. He and Lolo were arriving tomorrow to spend the weekend, and they would try to do a mini-Thanksgiving somewhere around here, probably turkey in the cafeteria. Lacey hoped the four of them could split up for a while, mother and son each, so that she and O could be together, maybe get out of here for a while and pretend they were on a vacation. Except how? Her car, left to rot in the underground parking space, had finally died, and Lacey had no idea what to do about that. And with what? She’d been free-falling without cash for days and weeks now. Luckily, you could scrape by—there was always a breakfast buffet somewhere, or a dinner sponsored by some church group, or (worst-case scenario) a box of packaged snacks left in a hallway. Eddie didn’t seem to notice what they ate; his drugs kept his appetite down. Her phone bill was paid, thanks to Jim she assumed. She’d been washing out her panties and Eddie’s briefs in the stained plastic sink. And the Services Center came through with small cash loans every once in a while, on top of their pitiful per diem. But Lacey wondered when the bottom would fall through.

Still, while Eddie snored she held on to a stubborn dream: her behind the wheel of a convertible—and why not?—with Otis laughing beside her, the two of them rolling through hills on a sunny day, on their way to a restaurant. Maybe to meet Ellen and her family. So put Lolo and Eddie in the backseat, okay, sure. Maybe his eyesight starts to come back:
There’s light coming through!
he exclaims, no laughing. Lolo grabs hold of his hand and gives Lacey a grateful smile through the rearview mirror. And she’s okay, she hasn’t done anything wrong. There’s warm wind in her hair and lots of cash in her purse and she’s driving all of them with not a bad thought in her head.

*   *   *

After he grew strong enough, Ellen began to take Michael in a wheelchair to his various appointments around Heaton, the ones that didn’t take place in Ward 57. His stump was declared to be healing well, and he started the long process of being fitted for what would be his prosthetic leg. Infectious disease specialists put him on a program of drugs for what they vaguely called “Iraqi bacteria” that soldiers had been found to have floating around in their bodies. He saw a psychiatrist for sessions that left him silent, and angrier than ever. When Ellen caught her in the hall one day the harried woman said, “Post-traumatic,” and produced a photocopied list of symptoms and a green pamphlet entitled “Taking Care of Yourself While Caring for Others.” The woman on the cover of the pamphlet was staring off into space, much like Michael did most of the day. “Obviously. With paranoia, generalized anxiety, depression, and temporary short-term memory loss.” She pointed out the newly prescribed medications and started to turn away.