Blue Stars (39 page)

*   *   *

Three days ago Lacey went out for a run. A jog, to be more precise. Half walk, let’s be real. Working out those guys in 57 made it all too clear how far she’d let things slip in that department, though she’d lost about ten pounds, probably all muscle. She was wearing somebody’s cast-off trainers (from a lost-and-found box) and a pair of Eddie’s gray sweatpants that were too heavy for the day—melting pockets of dirty snow, puffs of cold spring air. Lacey was puffing too, cursing the many months of nothing that had led to this sorry state of affairs. She had always prided herself on staying in shape even during a partying phase. At Rudy’s Gym they were used to her bathroom-dash for a quick hangover vomit and then back out there to keep lifting. Boot and rally! But this, this was pathetic.

She made it about a mile into Rock Creek Park and had to rest, winded, on a bench. But then a few tri-dip sets later, she was back at it, dragging herself out toward Walter Reed.

Jogging in place at the corner of Sixteenth and Alaska, waiting to cross, Lacey idly noticed the white Pontiac G8 on the other side, with its flashers on.
Just like mine,
she thought.

Wait a minute.

Because now the woman was getting out of the driver’s seat and waving to Lacey. Was it—?

“Is that my car?” Traffic separated them and the black-haired woman didn’t hear her, only waved again. “That’s my car, dammit. Hey!”

Horns blared as Lacey charged across the street. She ignored whatever the grinning reporter was saying and went around to check the license plate: XLJ 314.

“How’d you get this? Why are you driving my car?”

“You set some kind of record at the pound, apparently. They thought it was an abandoned vehicle.”

“Yeah, well.” Lacey tightened her ponytail, acutely aware of the other woman’s skinny jeans and cool tunic-type sweater thing. “It’s probably worth more in parts, anyway.”

The reporter laughed. “I stopped by for you at Building Eighteen, but someone told me you’d be out here. It wasn’t locked by the way. Front entrance. I just went right in.”

“Yeah. The buzzer’s broken again. First floor’s pissed. There’s been two break-ins, and one woman had her … never mind.”

Behind them, a tall wrought iron fence barred off the south side of Walter Reed, the nicer part. Rolling lawns and dense trees; through them you could only partially glimpse the older buildings, red brick with white cupolas and curlicue trim on the eaves. Lacey sometimes hid out back near here when she drank during the day. Like a servant creeping around the mansion and its grounds. The reporter tossed her the keys in a long silvery arc. “Want to give me a ride home?”

Lacey studied them. The key ring with its plastic tab advertising Sip N Bowl out on White Plains Road, one of Otis’s favorites. House keys to their place, which she hadn’t touched in months, hadn’t even thought about. She traced one of the nicked metal squares, still warm from the other woman’s hands.

Lacey was no fool: this was a quid pro quo. She’d paid off her car in exchange for … what? Some dirt on this place. Some truths. Well, maybe it was time.

“I’m not a squealer,” she said, looking up. “That’s not who I am.”

The reporter held up both hands. “Just a ride,” she said. “We’ll talk, and you decide. Promise.”

“All right.” The door handle clunking up, the squeak of the driver’s seat, curved to the shape of her ass, the touch of the steering wheel worn shiny at four and eight … sense memories so strong it felt like Lacey had climbed back into her old life. She’d had to blink her eyes a lot, sweat and tears mingling, as she leaned over to call to this reporter lady still standing outside. “So get in.”

*   *   *

Now in the bathroom in Mologne’s lobby Lacey lost her balance while squatting to pee and fell forward against the stall’s door.

“Whoa,” someone out at the sinks said, with a half laugh.

“Shut up.” Both hands on the door, she braced herself to try again. Also, she could rest her forehead there for a moment. C’mon, Lace.
O can’t see me like this. Or Lolo. Lolo and O, O Lo. O no o no …

She flicked water on her face and then on the mirror to break up her image in the reflection. Drops zigzagged down, mesmerizing.

Back at the bar, she called for the check, which had been set in front of her place already. Her glass was gone, even though it’d had at least one last melted-ice sip. Bitch. Her jacket was on the ground. Fine, now where the fuck was her purse?

Laughter behind her. Intentional laughter, meant to be heard. Lacey whirled and saw her bag on the soldiers’ table, contents dumped out and spread around.

“You shits. Give me my stuff.”

“We were gonna pay your tab but”—laughter—“nobody’s got that much money, so—”

“Uh-oh, tampon.” It was pinched between the metal fingers of a prosthetic hook. “Is this a bad time of the month?”

“Lemme see the lipstick again.” Burp.

“Is this really your phone? Oh man, now I feel better.”

A fury rose up inside her. She scrabbled to corral all her embarrassing crap back into her bag, but they kept snatching things back. And nothing replaced that drunken fury, no shame or self-preservation, when finally one of them unfolded and smoothed out the picture of Jim. It was actually a computer printout from Facebook, the only photograph she could find without obviously stalking him. Jim, baseball cap on backward, cup in hand, midlaugh. Outside on someone’s patio, a barbecue she hadn’t gone to with him, a button-up shirt she’d never seen and probably never would.

“Who the fuck is this,” one of the vets said, flatly.

“It’s not her man, that I know. I seen him, blind guy, Mexican. Right?”

“Give it back to her.” This was Jensen, not looking at Lacey. Not smiling.

“No, I wanna know who this fat fuck is and why
he’s
in here.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Lacey hissed, and made a swipe for the photo, which was neatly whipped out of her reach.

“Maybe it’s her brother, all right?”

“Is it your brother?” the soldier holding the photo said to her. Taunting, a test.

“Sure. Sure, it’s my brother. We’re BFF, so I carry a fucking photo around. Of my brother.”

Cold stares from all of them, with their patchy-shaved heads and missing limbs; their busted insides and messed-up brains. These sullen young faces. Resentful like Bailey’s, or Martine’s, just like anyone who’d been disappointed by Lacey. How could anyone mistake
her
for someone to admire? What had she done, letting herself be a part of this military world with its belief in things like honor and duty and courage? She was a sham and she couldn’t bear it one more instant, these broken boys looking up at her for reassurance.

“You think we sit home the whole time waiting for you to get back?” she cried. “Your perfect virgin angels, right? Sewing flags and staring at your photos. You don’t know. You don’t know anything about people like me.”

She gripped the handle of a nearby wheelchair as the floor tilted. The poison of her bad self and the drinks rushed upward.

“Yeah, I cheated on him. There. I’ll fucking announce it right here in the Mologne House for American Heroes and their Saintly Wives. Okay? Is that what you want to hear? That I’m a slut and so is your girlfriend and yours and yours—”

“Shut up, bitch.”

“This girl’s crazy.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? This slut is the one who takes him to every appointment, PT, MBI … Okay? For a man who I don’t even think I ever loved! Lost my job, never see my kid, live in a fucking hovel with mold that gives me nosebleeds but that’s not enough, right?”

There was shouting now. From the guys, from the bartender, from others in the lobby who had drifted over to see what the commotion was. A roar of disgust turned on her like a firehose. But Lacey couldn’t stop.

“Because I’m supposed to offer up my
soul
too! It’s not enough that this whore actually showed up and stayed here and is in the shit with him every day, every month … no! Because we’ve gotta
love
it too!”

Someone was pulling on her arm. Lacey ripped it away. People were pointing, yelling, demanding she leave.

“I’m a drunk but not a hypocrite! Say what you want about me, but I know the deal. All right? I know the deal. People usually do, when the— What? Get
off
me!”

Ellen. In a soft wool robe. “Let’s go. Lacey. Come with me.”

Now the growing mob included Ellen in their vitriol, but she stayed calm and quiet, murmuring to Lacey, guiding her back and away. She swept up Lacey’s things, she spoke to the bartender, she put distance between Lacey and the soldiers at the table. Little by little, Ellen drew the two of them toward the elevators, waving off people who stared. Lacey was weeping hysterically now:
I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it
. But fuck those guys.
Go away, Ellen, just leave me alone … I’m so, I’m so …

*   *   *

An hour later she wasn’t sober yet, but she was quiet. Ellen made her take a hot shower and drink a cold glass of water. Literally. She stood in front of Lacey and wouldn’t let her stop until she finished glugging it. Each time Lacey tried to collapse into a sobbing pile, Ellen put on her stern-professor face and gave her another task, like, open this bottle of Advil and blow your nose. Tough love. Right now she was supposed to be pulling Ellen’s comb through her own wet and tangled hair, but the world kept collapsing in on her—what she’d become, how much she missed Jim, and what Ellen must think of her now …

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Stop that.” Ellen tugged her back up from flopping sideways on the bed. “Give me the comb.”

Lacey held still, shivering in a towel on the edge of the bed. Ellen combed her hair a handful at a time, from the ends up, the way she’d probably learned from dealing with Jane’s over the years. Oh, Jane … Lacey needed to tell Ellen about Jane.

“Listen, Ellen?” But something caught her eye before she could finish. Shrugging off the comb she went to the dresser and picked up a thick leather folding envelope. Lacey struggled to swallow. “Is this…?”

Yes. It was the actual emblem she’d imagined, she’d tried to conjure, for Eddie from almost the minute she’d heard he’d been hit. In her hands, right now. She had even thought of how they’d display it at home, somewhere subtle but noticeable. Classy. Where people’s eyes might fall on it and they’d know what he had gone through, what she had. It would be the tangible proof, signed and dated, of how much they both had lost. And it would have been what carried Lacey through, alone in the apartment with Eddie-but-not-Eddie.

“I don’t believe you. Were you going to tell me?”

“About what? Oh, that? I don’t—”

“‘Oh, that?’ Jesus. Does getting a Purple Heart happen to you every week or something? So it just slipped your mind?”

“It’s not
my
Purple Heart. Now come over here, let me finish.”

But Lacey couldn’t stop staring at the medal, smaller than she thought it’d be, mounted in a plastic box-type thing, and the fancy script on the citation:
To Michael B. Cacciarelli, Lance Corporal … For Wounds Received in Action on October 11, 2005, in Iraq, Given Under My Hand
. Signed by the secretary of the navy and the adjutant general.

She hugged Mike’s award to her chest, reeling with the unfairness of it all. To compose herself, Lacey gazed around the dresser Ellen had apparently repurposed as a workstation. What were all these notes and lists, covered over with the same miniature forceful script?

“Is it killing you not to have a desk, or what?”

Ellen went
hmph.

“I bet this is the longest you’ve ever gone without a desk in your life. Since you were a kid. What is all this, teaching stuff?” Lacey fingered one of the many scraps of paper taped to the wall above the dresser. But she was wrong: these were names of people, women, that she half recognized from the hospital, or from Mologne or Building 18. Lists of women and their soldiers, with notes jotted next to each about where they were from, what they were like, whether they might be willing to talk to the reporter. Copies of articles titled “Minimum Safety Requirements in VA Hospitals: The Engineering Perspective.” Sketched-out ideas for meetings, dates, facts.

“You think it’s all a crock, don’t you.” Lacey set the award carefully back down on the neat dresser. “The military. You hate it.” She sat down and felt Ellen’s careful hands on her head again.

“I don’t know,” Ellen admitted. “I never had to think much about it, before.”

Lacey struggled with all the sharp things to say, the retorts that came automatically to mind anytime she encountered a head-in-the-sand liberal who probably didn’t know the difference between Kirkuk and Mosul and worse: didn’t care. She and Martine and Felicia and the others … they used to store up and trade put-downs for people just like Ellen, the ones who didn’t get it, didn’t know or respect or appreciate all the work that was being done to keep us safe here in America. But now Lacey was silent on all of that.

“What was it like?” she finally asked. Ellen was rubbing her head with the towel, squeezing excess water out of her hair. She never wanted it to stop. “When they gave it to him.”

“It happened early on, while he was still under. In and out. I don’t think he really knew what was happening.”

“What was it like for you, I mean?”

“Oh.” The towel stopped. “Confusing. I was … proud. I’d never seen him get an award. The formality, the deference, the ceremony. I’m susceptible to all that, I guess. Later on, I scrutinized how meekly I accepted it all—them sweeping in to give him this
thing,
the way we were all so hushed and deferential about a piece of metal, but nobody even mentioned him losing his leg. I can only imagine what Jane would have done, if she’d been there.”

Lacey snorted. She had an idea.

“But no, I didn’t feel as disgusted as I would have thought. Before.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Let’s go to bed. Should you call your room to let them know?”

“Nah, I don’t want to wake them. I sent Otis a text, and I’ll be back over there early.”
Tell her, Lacey
, she cried inwardly. But she couldn’t; it felt too good to be here, coming down from the hysterical shit show she’d put on downstairs, like this was a cozy haven, away from Eddie, away from the little piles of mice shit in the corners of their room, away from all of it. It even smelled fresh in here, like a goddamn Mologne cologne. It felt too good to be with Ellen again.