Blue Stars (47 page)

“But it’s no trouble!” Ellen protested. “You can have Wesley’s room, and it won’t be hard to make any changes to the bathroom up there— We’ll all pitch in to get you settled…”

Mike looked down at his lap. He’d gained back most of the weight, and his hair was longer, a soft bristle like a black paintbrush.

“I don’t mind at all, is what I’m saying,” she continued, though the three of them were silent. Had obviously talked it through, between them. “Just until you get on your…”
Feet again,
she was able to bite back.

“Mom,” Jane said. And her voice was gentle. “It’s good this way. He needs his own place.”

“But…”

“Mom. It’s okay.”

And in this way, Ellen understood that things had changed. She swallowed her objections and tried to form an enthusiastic smile. An awkward silence settled as Ellen gazed over the brown and brittle grass in the yard; she could feel the three others exchanging looks.
Stay here,
she told herself sternly.

“It’s not like I won’t be around,” Mike mumbled, and bit off half his hot dog. “To hang out, or whatever.” And his flash of a smile to her, mouth full and eyes exhausted, did the work it always had.

*   *   *

Mike’s C-leg was now leaning against the other side of the couch from where he sat, his stump propped up on a checkerboard-pattern needlepoint pillow Ellen’s mother had once made. Jane nudged the prosthetic away from her. “At least
that
sneaker doesn’t smell,” she said. The two of them were bent over Mike’s laptop, laughing at something on Facebook.

Ellen lingered in the doorway, watching them. It was impossible to parse the language of their bodies, utterly comfortable with each other. Jane smacked the back of Mike’s head, and then laid hers on his shoulder. He said something that made her wince, then something low and soft, into her ear, that made her smile. This was recent, though, a wary amity. Before, there had been weeks of slammed doors, bitten-off conversations, phones ringing at 2:00 a.m. Ellen stayed focused on Jane, on her recovery. How had they settled things between them, after his injury, after the adoption? It wasn’t for her to know, at least now.

“I’m going up to the study,” she said. “Jane, you’ll lock up?”

“What about the movie?” Mike protested. He held up the DVD case. “You were the one who picked it.”
The Mummy III: Rise of the Dragon Emperor.
He ignored Jane’s laughter. “She did, she insisted!
I
wanted
Pride and Prejudice.
”

“All right, you two.” She dropped a kiss on the tops of both heads. “Keep it down so I can hear myself think.”

“Wait, weren’t you going to show us something?” Jane said, twisting around to catch her mother’s wrist. “Like on the news, that you taped?”

“Oh. No, it’s not important. And I have papers to grade.”

“You have papers to grade? Mike, she has papers to grade!”

“
Papers that need a grading,
” he mock-announced. “Many, many papers. On which there shall be grades. Many, many grades.”

“Papers to grade, papers to grade,” Jane twittered, in a parrot voice.

Ellen rolled her eyes and went upstairs. What was funny about that? She
did
have papers to grade. As always. Even more so, now that she had taken on three courses this spring, continued voluntary penance in the department.

But she wasn’t planning to grade, not now. First she went to her desk, where the proofs of her most recent article—“Wharton and War: A Writer on the (Home) Front”—needed correction, and several e-mails about upcoming conferences awaited her response. Ellen cleared this work to the side and opened a file she’d named, simply, “New Book.” Here she quickly typed a few thoughts that had occurred during dinner prep, mere notes and sketches that she could flesh out more later, when she wasn’t so tired. Because the new edition of
A Son at the Front,
with an introduction by Ellen Silverman, was doing well. Serena had urged her to write the proposal and get a contract first, but Ellen was going to take her time with this book. She had new things to say, and she wanted to build them up slowly, to consider multiple approaches into the material of how reading mattered to women in Wharton’s era, during the Great War. Ellen believed she had a different audience now, to be responsible to—and whether that was true or not, it made this work seem vital, and she knew enough not to argue with that.

What she had taped to show Mike and Jane had aired on C-SPAN earlier in the week. One had to fast-forward through many, many minutes of procedural complications, and pockets of dead air, and long-winded speeches received with grim-faced hauteur by the committee members of the House commission. The unmoving grainy long shots were technically similar to footage from a convenience store security camera. It would be impossible to miss Lacey, though. She stood out, not only because of the long, blond, wavy hair, but because of the way her paper trembled as she gripped it and read out her statement in her strong, outer-borough accent.

Ellen had been riveted. Lacey, testifying to Congress! At first she barely listened to what Lacey had to say, those details about her substandard living conditions, shoddy treatment, the different ways Walter Reed failed people once the soldiers became outpatients. She just marveled at the tiny representation of her friend, making known what the army had tried to cover up. Were those reading glasses new? How was Eddie doing? It had been so long since they had talked on the phone, and their e-mails had slowed to a stop.

When the scandal broke, Ellen saw that her own part in the actual newspaper series was small. She recognized things she had said to Shelby, but they were truncated and attributed to “another resident.” Lacey’s story was a focus, though, as was a photo of her sitting next to Eddie, his face tilted up toward the stained ceiling, a half smile on his lips. Lacey eyed the camera dead-on.

“What bothers me is that he can’t see it,” Mrs. Diaz said, referring to Major Diaz’s head and eye injuries. She gestured to the mold and the broken bathroom fixtures. “I do the best I can, but Eddie was always the one for cleaning. He’d be up and down this whole hall, bleaching and fixing everyone’s rooms, if he could.”

There were also several column inches devoted to a mother furious about her son’s hopelessly mixed-up medication, and an army staff sergeant who, although injured himself, had taken on the role of social worker, morale booster, janitor, and handyman for his fellow soldiers who couldn’t help themselves. The original articles snowballed into further investigations, predictable outrage (both automatic and real), some firings, and now this congressional committee.

“Professor Silverman, when you were there did you know about all this???” a student had e-mailed, sending a link.

“Huh,” Jane said, when Ellen showed her the paper. “Can I take your car tomorrow?”

“Brilliant, brave,” read the note on the bouquet Serena sent to her office.

But Lacey, Lacey had done it. Suddenly Ellen had a powerful longing to be back there, at the Mologne House bar. Getting teased by Lacey and laughing with her and trying to give her some good advice. She’d thought back then those hours were merely a respite; she’d taken them for granted.
Strange,
Ellen thought, pushing away from her desk. To know now that that friendship was real.

She could phone Lacey, tomorrow. She could tell her how proud she was, watching her testimony, how impressed.
How I miss her.

Her reading chair, a light wool blanket. Rumbled explosions from the movie downstairs; the memory of Lacey’s hoarse laugh. Ellen switched on the lamp, and opened her book.

NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 2007

Apparently this block on Carroll Street was the only one on City Island where it was every-man-for-himself in terms of garbage cans. More likely, Lolo’s natural haughtiness and tendency toward daily 311 calls to report minor snow shoveling violations or noise complaints hadn’t won her many friends. Whatever it was, no one else’s garbage and recycling cans were still out at dinnertime on this evening near the end of winter. Lacey got back out of her car, left the motor running, and hauled the first of Lolo’s three heavy cans from the curb around to the side of the house.

“Now she’s gonna stand there, get all concerned, what’s that noise,” Lacey muttered under the window where Lolo was frowning, talking. “It’s fine, Mom. Just bringing in the cans.” She ignored Lolo’s complicated gestures—
What are you doing? I’ll do that later.
Not, of course:
Thank you.

Then she dragged the blue recycle can, cursing when her heel caught on a crust of blackened snow. Wheeling in the last, sticky-handled garbage can, Lacey could feel it starting, the hot throat, the bad feelings. She ducked down out of sight under the windows and wiped at her face furiously. Lacey sat on her heels and pinched her upper arms until they stung, sobbing, while Lolo knocked on the glass above her:
Where are you? What’s going on?

But by now she knew to expect it, each time she came out here to visit Eddie, each time she left him. Jim said it was proof of her caring heart. People from her AA meeting said it was years of built-up toxins finally leaching out of her system and she shouldn’t expect it to stop anytime soon. All Lacey knew was she’d be wrung out and mascara-stained, numb, as payback for this weekly afternoon on City Island.

These fits were getting a little easier to take, though, ever since they flew her down last week to Washington for the trial. Okay, Lacey knew it wasn’t a trial, but you could have fooled her—with the bench seating and dark wood rails, the podium and hushed seriousness in that giant hearing room where she was called to be a witness in front of not one judge, but half a dozen, all staring down at her from a raised platform with their name plates set out in front. She was so scared she’d had to pee the whole time. They’d said she could read whatever she wanted, her statement, but she’d forced Shelby to help her write and rewrite those two pages, e-mailing it back and forth, until it sounded right and all the mistakes were fixed. In D.C. she got driven everywhere in a Town Car and stayed at the Marriott out by Reagan National, and even though Lacey sort of knew she wouldn’t be paying for it she was so nervous about what was and was not included on this trip that she didn’t eat dinner that night, didn’t order a thing from room service, just watched some cable in the bathrobe before her flight back the next morning at seven.

“I pictured it different,” she told Jim then, on the phone, lying sideways across the king bed. “Different how?” he asked. “Tell me.” “Well … I guess I imagined being back there, at Walter Reed. Saying all this there, somehow, what it was like. But I was nowhere near it. Never going to see it again, probably.” “Yeah. What else?” “And nobody was there that I knew. It’s stupid, but…” She tried to figure it out, while Jim waited for her.
Because he wanted to know her thoughts.
That hit her each and every time. “I guess I thought I’d see people. Like, from the wards. I thought I’d see Ellen.” “Was she going to testify too?” “No. I just thought about her, when I was there.”

What she didn’t say was that at every turn she’d been freaked that someone from Building 18, one of the women who hated her now, was going to pop out and scream at her in front of everyone. She’d seen herself called out on mil-wife blogs ever since the articles came out last month, everything from
who does she think she is?
to
whiny brat doesn’t deserve to be called an army wife
to
unpatriotic bitch
to
nice undyed roots, you hot mess.
No, she didn’t tell Jim about the late-night reading of these posts, or about how they could still make her burn with shame. In D.C. she half expected a brigade of righteous wives and moms to face her down during her testimony, and the funny thing was she could predict every single thing they’d say to her. She had been one of them.

But if there was one person she wanted to know all about what she’d done—spoken directly to the House of Representatives!—it was Otis, so she texted him photos of everything until they made her put her phone away, the marble halls and brass plaques and a self-portrait of her big face in front of a flag, and she collected a bag full of souvenirs for him: her ID badge, the program schedule, a White House magnet she bought at the airport, two bars of soap from the hotel. Her days of being able to give him extra assignments on top of school stuff were over—he’d like to see her try—but if she could she’d make him research and memorize whatever structure of authority made up the legislative branches leading down to the Subcommittee on National Security. And then explain it to her, since Lacey still wasn’t sure how that all worked.

She called him now, from the car, phone wedged between cheek and ear while she idled in Lolo’s driveway. In a front window Tego the cat arched his back between the glass and the sheer white curtain. A hand—Eddie’s hand—appeared and stroked the old cat, front to back, again and again. All Lacey could see of Eddie was his shadow behind the curtain, but she watched his hand pet the cat, slowly, steadily. She shut her eyes and mentally sent him … what? The hope that things would be easier someday, good luck with Lolo’s “Texas chili” tonight (she had memories of
that
), and:
I’m sorry
. Always, sorry. Sorry for him and for her and for them.

“C’mon, Otis—pick up, pick up, pick up … Hi, honey! Whatcha doing?”

“Nothing.”

“So what kind of nothing?” Lacey waved to Lolo, still consternated in the window on the other side of the door
. What’s wrong with your car why haven’t you left yet?
Then she floored it up Carroll and hung a left on the main avenue. Otis was telling her about the movie they were watching, about a mummy and a dragon and she tried to keep it straight but she was still trying to shake off the remnants of crying so hard, god she wished she could get that together already.

“Uh-huh. What about homework?”

“What about it?”