Blue Stars (38 page)

“Mom, really? ‘Urine, volume and color’?” Wesley had hooted. “What do you do, take a good look after he goes?”

“Ask her what she did one time after I took an especially good shit,” she heard Michael say, laughing.

“Oh, God.” Wes groaned. “What’s been going on over here, you guys?”

“Tell him, Ellen!”

“Well, I…” There was no escaping it. “I put a smiley face next to the date, in the chart.” Couldn’t they let her collapse back in bed? “Now listen, if you see Dr. Rombardy, remind him about the swelling on his—”

But Wesley was laughing too loudly. “Mikey, you got an A! In pooping! Is that your first A ever?”

She hung up on them.

As she almost did now, with Wesley. But instead she forced herself to be cogent for the rest of the update about Michael in the Gait Lab, although she did hold the phone away from her ear when he described the hoagies they’d ordered for dinner with a couple of other guys on the ward. No, she didn’t need anything. Yes, she would call if she did. Fine, he could stop by tomorrow on his way to the ward. Drive carefully, etc. etc. Wait! Make sure the night shift had his cell number as well as hers.

In a few minutes Ellen felt herself tugged back down into the clenched state of dozing; not asleep and not awake, her body tightened with flu and her mind raced with images and memories.

Like the bitterly cold Saturday afternoon they’d sat in the frozen metal stands to watch one of Michael’s football games his senior year. To Ellen, everything about this giant public school seemed unfriendly—the ugly one-story buildings, the ragged fields, the rowdy teens in the stands, and even the few people her age, unsmiling parents who spat disparagement at the referees. But for Wes’s and Jane’s sake, she put a good face on it. She shushed their scornful privileged comments—about the cheerleaders’ sprayed and teased hair, or the way the announcer kept mispronouncing
Realtor
(for one of the team’s sponsors)—and tried to figure out which player was their Mike. None of them knew his number, and the boys all looked the same in their dingy white jerseys and white helmets. This was supposed to be the one area of his success, the one arena where Mike hadn’t screwed up or burned bridges. And yet as each quarter inexorably ticked down there was no action that distinguished one player over another, as far as Ellen could see. The cold wind took away the coaches’ screams before they reached the sparse crowd. All they could hear over the squealing PA system were the rattling metal stands and the satisfying
click-crunch
of helmets and pads crashing into one another, again and again.

Jane fled to wait in the car. Wes elbowed Ellen: “Aren’t you glad I never wanted to play?” he shouted, scarf over his mouth. And what had she said, cold and frustrated with this useless outing, what had she said without thinking? “Luckily, you never would have made it past tryouts,” maybe. Whatever it had been, her words made him turn away, visibly stung.

Meanwhile, all around them a chant rose up from the home stands:
YOUUUU SUCK! YOUUUUU SUCK! YOUUUUU SUCK!
Ellen was amazed by the hearty vehemence full-grown adults brought to it, hurling the words down vaguely toward the other team, or simply out into the gray windy day.

After the game, trying to salvage some part of this, she’d hurried down the unsteady riser to try to catch Michael as the players jogged off the muddy field toward the gym.

“Mike! Mike!” Ellen had called as the sweaty boys ran past, her voice high and desperate with need. None of the helmeted horde noticed or recognized or acknowledged her there, leaning over a railing. Did he hear her? Did he ignore her?
Great game,
she would have said. And claimed due credit for being there—wasn’t that what this was all about, after all?

“Exit on the other side,” a beefy security guard told her. All the players were gone.

Ellen coughed and coughed again. She squinted back up in the stands, mostly empty now. There he was, Wesley. Crutches propped alongside. Waiting for her, furious and ashamed, his half leg jutting out.
How can he wear those shorts in this cold?
A coughing fit winded her; she could never make it back up all those steps; she was stranded down here, far away from him. Wes held his shiny-pink stump in both hands and shook it at her—
See this? See?
—and he was laughing in a terrible way, laughing and shaking that misshapen chunk of bare thigh …

No! No, no. Ellen fought her way awake in her darkened Mologne House room. Coughing helped; she had to push herself upright to make it stop. At least the nausea had abated, for now. Sweaty, she wiped her mouth with a cloth. What a miserable nightmare. Not Wesley. It didn’t happen to Wesley.

What was worse than the dream (the half dream, for the football game had been real, and never seeing Mike, and her mean comment to Wes) was her waking relief, this unforgivable and utter elation that swelled within her every cell, as she realized anew—
say it
—that at least it wasn’t her
real son,
amputated, broken inside, trapped in this new lifelong hell, up there in Heaton.

Ellen put the side of her head to the wall and cried. The force of the shame and the relief. No, she’d never had to worry about gentle, brainy Wesley coming to this. At once it all seemed false and guilt-filled, every minute she’d spent at Mike’s side—every baby food jar, therapy session, PT trip. Was that why he was so prickly, so apt to pop off? Could he sense it too, that she was here on a technicality?

But that wasn’t right. She tried to think clearly, huddled in pain, sensing a new awareness pounding at the door of her illness. What about all that agony while he was gone? What about those months of wrenching anxiety, the unsent, unhinged letters? Had that been optional? A kind of made-up existential crisis she forced on herself in lieu of a real mother’s fear, a real mother’s pain?

All right, then. Reframe this. Consider the context. (Things she’d scribbled, a thousand times, in student paper margins.)

They’d faced the judge, across his enormous desk, that morning Ellen became Michael’s legal guardian. It was October, less than a year until he turned eighteen. The forms were reviewed and stamped; the two of them signed where they were told. Then a clerk was summoned, to be a second witness as Ellen read the oath out loud. It was a moment of surprising solemnity, amid the bureaucracy, compared to the nervous joking she and Mike had done in the car on the way over.
After this I’m gonna call you Ma. Don’t you dare.

“I, Ellen Silverman, will faithfully and completely fill my duties as Guardian. I promise to, at all times, protect my ward’s interests and to make all decisions based on the best interest of my ward.”

Did that awkward repetition, my ward’s interests, best interest of my ward, bother her then? Had she broken the mood with a slight frown, always needing to assert her readerly superiority, if only to herself? Ellen pressed the damp washcloth to her mouth, tried to see herself back through the years in that judge’s office.

What had she known then about protecting Michael? That Ellen, in the courthouse, the one in the pressed skirt and good shoes. What did she even know about the phrase “transfemoral amputation”?

“But what if,” she said aloud into her room at Mologne. A sting of acid down her throat. What if the oath had said more? “Furthermore, I, Ellen Silverman, promise to tacitly support the war in Iraq and all U.S. military intervention thereof, including my ward’s voluntary participation in activities designed to maim, kill, and otherwise perform duties as per the orders of Commander in Chief George W. Bush. I promise to accept fear and terror for an unknown duration of time related to the following: the possibility my ward will be killed during war; the possibility he will kill during war; the possibility he will be kidnapped, tortured, and executed; the possibility that he will suffer. I promise to bear the fact that he will lose a limb. I promise to leave my job, home, family, and friends, to stay with him for an unknown duration of time while he heals. I promise to accept, if not understand, that my very presence will not ease and may even trigger my ward’s anger, frustration, and other symptoms. I promise…”

She fell back to sleep.

Sometime later, Ellen lurched out of bed, instantly dizzy. She felt her way to the bathroom, resigned to another bout of vomiting. But two thoughts blazed through her nauseated fog and she held them tight, understanding what had been shown to her. Now all the struggle to understand her place here fell away, all those questions about Michael and what if and if only … Guardianship, motherhood, these distinctions fell away because it was love, just love, its own reward. How could she not have seen? In the face of it, this simple love for Mike, she felt wordless, lightened.

And also wretched, weak. But there was Jane. Think about Jane. A bad mistake, her leaving.
Ellen’s
mistake. But she would fix things as soon as she survived this flu, or even survived these next few minutes. They would go to him together, and tell him. They would rise up and make the best of it. Because what you chose and what you were given made up a life.

And, oh, she needed her daughter. Jane, Jane. Come back.

27

It was Wild Turkey doubles, and she’d had four or five, lost track. Lacey was alone at the bar in the Mologne lobby with that burn-it-all-to-the-ground feeling, and she didn’t care. Not caring was part of the feeling: dangerous, on-the-edge. For the past few hours, she’d been trading jokes and buy-backs with a nearby table full of guys, but things were devolving, she could tell. Flirting had taken on a bad tinge, as if they were daring her to go further. She knew they were talking about her. Fuck ’em.

Lacey had been broke for so long that she’d forgotten how to do this, drink with actual money in her wallet. Maybe she’d never known how, come to think of it. Her training sessions were a huge hit over in Ward 57. The doctors were all for it, as long as she cleared the exercises with them first, and she was up to three weekly group boot camps with four or five guys in each. Thing is, what she was having the guys do was pretty much basic strength stuff they should have been working on themselves; she provided the incentive and the discipline, not any new techniques. The moms and wives all paid in cash, $30 per, though Lacey knew she could get more if she wanted to. Last week she’d caught a ride with another Building 18er to a Western Union where she paid off collections for two credit card bills and caught up on utilities. When Lolo arrived with Otis the day before yesterday, Lacey was proud to hand her mother-in-law a hundred bucks, although of course the woman put up a big show of not wanting to take it before she finally did.

“But he’s doing so good now.” Lolo couldn’t take her eyes off her son’s face. She just kept stroking it and admiring the new eighteen-dollar shades Lacey had bought at Sunglass Hut. “Why let them cut things in the brain when they don’t have to?”

“Because light,” Eddie had said firmly, and Lacey had wanted to cheer.

“Mom, I know it’s scary. But if there’s a chance they can get some sight back in his eye, then…”

“What about getting some thinking back in his head?” Otis had muttered, and both women shot him a look to kill.

But what then? What now? With the optic nerve surgery tentatively set for Thursday next week and another week or two of recovery, Eddie was going to be released soon. They would be set free, sent home. For a while, both here and at home, Lacey could keep busy chasing the money with forms. While they waited for MEB to make a final decision on his rating, she could figure out whether he’d be medically discharged or retired: one got you severance pay, one got you nada. Then again, would VA rating money be enough to cover them without any other army income—no ID card, no TriCare, no post privileges? Add to this equation that disability dollars got deducted from retirement pay,
but
they were nontaxable. And the fact that some flunky had let it slip that the rules about concurrent receipt were changing next year anyway. So would they be able to collect both retirement and disability, based on his twenty years of service? Only for a time, it appeared. And those benefits might cancel each other out. Not to mention Social Security disability, which she hadn’t even looked into—apparently it had nothing to do with retirement or disability pay, but might disqualify you from either. Or both.

Fine, so that was enough crazy to keep her distracted for a while. But what would happen when the noise and action died down, and the thirty phone calls and the nine trips to Kinkos and the follow-up appointments and the PT and social services and driving Eddie everywhere he ever had to go, again, ever. What was she going to do then?

Her and Eddie, alone in their place all day. Not talking, not touching, not fucking. No job at the gym, no group to lead, no Martine. Otis grows up, goes off to college, her looks melt away and no one notices. And Eddie’s slow high-pitched dribble of a laugh echoes through the house.

Lacey killed her drink in two eye-watering gulps. “’M ready,” she called to the big-momma-type bartender, squelching a wince.

Bonk.
One of the guys swung his wheelchair against her tall-legged stool. “Can’t be that bad, girl,” he said, looking up at her. Southern accent, maybe nineteen. Had both his legs, but they hung limp on the metal front-rigging. He backed up and rammed her chair again.

“What? Did they dare you?” She nodded at the table he’d come from.

“You should come on over there, we don’t bite. Less you want me to.” This was offered up in a nervously questioning tone,
am I doing this right?
Lacey granted him a smile—a real one. These guys. It could break your heart.

“Hey, Jensen, she wants a guy that brought his dick back from the sandbox.”

“Ignore them,” Lacey said.

“Look, it’s all here. Working order.” The young guy, Jensen, hiccupped. “Unlike some people I could mention!” he shouted back over his shoulder. Hoots and retorts from the table.

“Go on,” Lacey urged him back to his friends. She swiveled around to the bar and a fresh drink. The clock over the bar said 10:20. Two more, maybe three? Have to bear down before closing. Lacey checked her phone; no messages. Earlier, she’d thought about calling Ellen to see if she wanted to join, sip that endless single glass of wine she sometimes liked to have. She really should talk to Ellen. There was something she needed to tell her, even though she wasn’t supposed to. But they’d barely had contact since the horrible night of the dinner party when Lacey had screamed like a crazy person at her only friend. So now she just had to hope Ellen wouldn’t pass through the lobby and see her like this.