Exley (2 page)

“I'm in the bathroom,” Mother would say.

“What are you doing in there?” I would ask.

“Miller
, I am
in
the
bathroom,
” Mother would say.

“I
know,
” I would say. “But what are you
doing
in there?”

But this time was different. It was different because Mother had been crying and I wanted to know why, and my dad was back from the war and I wanted to know where he was. I knocked on the door, and Mother stopped crying immediately.

“I'm in the bathroom,” she said.

“Why were you crying?” I asked. And then, before she could answer, I asked, “Where's my dad?” Which started her crying again.

I took a step back from the door and thought about what I knew. I absolutely knew my dad was back from Iraq. Except he wasn't in our house, which he would have been if he'd been able to be in our house. Mother was crying, which she'd never done, as far as I knew, except for that once. All of this was going on in Watertown, New York. Fort Drum is in Watertown. It's an army fort. I go to school with dozens of kids whose dads and mothers are based at Fort Drum before and after going to Iraq. I knew from them that when their parents left Iraq for Watertown, they went to one of three places. My dad wasn't in the house — my eyes told me that. My dad wasn't in the base morgue, either — my bones told me that, just as surely as they'd told me my dad was back from Iraq in the first place. That left only one place where he could be: the VA hospital.

I went upstairs, got dressed, brushed my teeth, walked back downstairs, got Exley's book from my dad's study, put it in my backpack, shouldered the backpack, then took a few steps toward the bathroom. The door to the bathroom was still closed, and I could hear Mother still crying behind it, quieter now, but steady, like an all-day rain.
Please don't cry
, I wanted to say to her.
I'm going to go get my dad and bring him home and everything will be all right. So please don't cry
. But I didn't think I could say anything like that and not feel ridiculous afterward. I thought of my dad, of what he might say to Mother under these kinds of circumstances. Probably something not exactly comforting, probably something beginning with the phrase “For Christ's sake.” I didn't think I could, or should, say that, either. So instead of saying either of those two things, I said, “I'm going to ride my bike,” although possibly not loud enough to be heard over her crying. In any case, Mother kept crying. And so I walked into the garage, where I kept my Huffy, climbed on, and pedaled to the VA hospital.

 

 

M
y second session with M. My area of expertise, of course, is the juvenile mind, but perhaps a physical description is in order nonetheless. M. has light blue eyes and red cheeks that suggest either robustness or shame and hair that one might call dirty blond. In M.'s case, the description pertains both to the color of his hair and to its cleanliness. M.'s hair is not
long
but
high
and looks as though it has been slept on: it is flat in sections, unruly in others. I can see comb marks and surmise that someone has tried and failed to tame it. I assume that someone to be his mother. Oh, his mother! I somehow restrain myself from asking if she is well, if she's waiting for him outside in the car, if she has spoken of me since our first session. I can see her in my mind's eye: her shiny black hair, her eyes so deeply blue that they, too, look black, her angular white face, the total effect being coal placed on a taut pillow. She is as beautiful in memory as she was in my office four days ago. Despite his hair, and despite his tiny teeth (M. can be mature in most ways except for his dentition, which remains entirely infantile), M. is himself what one would call a good-looking kid, although he looks nothing like his lovely mother. I assume he takes after his father.

On that subject: I begin by asking M. to tell me the circumstances behind his father's going to Iraq. I make this request as though holding the assumption that the father truly is in Iraq, although I do not, in fact, actually assume that.

“My dad,” M. says immediately, as though waiting for me to ask the question, “went to Iraq on Friday, the twentieth of March, 200–.” This is how Miller speaks the date: “Two thousand blank.” Odd — odd and, indeed,
quite strange
— although I don't say so. Instead, I ask M. how he can be so certain about the date.

“Because it was the last day of school before spring vacation,” he says. I am about to ask him how he can be so certain it was the last day of school, but he anticipates the question. “I remember it was the last day of school because I didn't have to bring any books or folders or notebooks home. Just an empty backpack. I was swinging my empty backpack around by one of its loops as I walked home. It made a whistling sound as I swung it, and then it made a crying sound. I stopped swinging the backpack and listened. The crying sound was still there. I walked toward it, toward my house, which was less than a block away. When I got to the house next to ours, I could see through the neighbors' hedge that Mother was standing in our driveway, crying.”

“Crying?” I ask.

“Really
crying,” M. says. “You could see the tears running down her face, into her mouth. I'd never seen or heard her cry. It scared me. It made me not want to get too close to her, so I stayed on our neighbors' side of the hedge.”

“Your mother was crying?” I ask again, unable to get past the image. I can feel my eyes water at the thought of hers watering. But M. appears not to hear me. His eyes are closed. It strikes me that this story is something he has memorized — memorized and, indeed,
committed to memory
.

“My dad was in his Lumina, which was running and pointed down the driveway, toward the street. The driver's-side window was down and he leaned out of it and said, ‘Maybe I should go to Iraq, too.'”

“How did he say those words?” I ask.

M. opens his eyes and looks at me quizzically. “With his mouth,” M. says.

“No, no,” I say. “In what tone? In what manner? Did he emphasize the word ‘should'? The word ‘I'? Did the sentence sound like a threat? A promise?”

“It sounded sad,” M. says, closing his eyes again.

“Sad,” I repeat. “And what did your mother say in response?”

“‘T.,'” M. says. T., I know, is the boy's father's name. M. says the name in his own voice, but I assume he's repeating what his mother said. M. gulps once, twice, as though trying to catch his breath, and I wonder if the gulping is his or his mother's. Perhaps it is both. “
‘Please.
'”

I do not ask how she said the word “please,” because I can hear her voice in his, can see her lovely wet eyes telling M.'s father to stay. I wonder how anyone could
go
when those eyes said,
Stay
. But evidently M.'s father went anyway. “Then my dad rolled up his window, pulled out of the driveway, and then drove away.”

“Did he see you standing there?” I ask.

“No,” M. says. “But Mother did. She'd walked to the end of the driveway to look at my dad driving away from her. And then she turned to go back into the house and saw me behind the bush. Then she stopped crying, smiled, and asked, ‘How was your last day of school?'”

“That was most considerate of her,” I say. “Most considerate and, indeed, most
thoughtful
.”

M. opens his eyes and gives me the look that all my patients give me when they tire of saying “Whatever” with their mouths and instead say it with their eyes. Then he closes them once more and says, “So I asked her why my dad was going to Iraq.”

“And her answer?”

“She said, ‘Lots of people are going to Iraq, M., but your dad isn't one of them.' And then she turned around and went into the house.”

M. opens his eyes and considers me as I consider his story. One aspect of the tale seems clear enough: M.'s mother and father had a fight, and his father left them because of it. Either M. is omitting the reason for the fight, or he doesn't know the reason. But married persons only argue over two things: money and sexual infidelity. Every mental health professional knows this, even those, like me, who do not specialize in the mental health of married persons, and who do not have great piles of money, and who have never been married and who have never been sexually unfaithful and who, frankly, have never had much of an opportunity to be sexually unfaithful. But regardless, that part of the tale seems explicable enough. Other aspects of M.'s story seem inconsistent—M. knows the exact month and date of his father's departure but can't, or won't, specify the year? — but are most likely neither here nor there: I suspect, as with the cause of M.'s parents' fight, we will “get to the bottom of it” soon enough. But the most troublesome aspect of M.'s tale is his belief that his father's saying that “maybe” he “should” go to Iraq constitutes proof
that the father, in fact,
did
go to Iraq. Does M. really believe this, or is he merely pretending to? And if the latter, does he know he's pretending, or does he think he's telling the truth? I decide to press M. on the matter. “So
that's
how you know your father went to Iraq?” I ask him. “Because he said that ‘maybe' he ‘should' go there?”

“You sound just like my mother,” M. says. I thrill to hear those words — I sound like M.'s mother! I have something in common with M.'s mother! — but M. doesn't appear to feel similarly. His red cheeks go pale and his blue eyes tear up; he runs a hand through his hair, sending it even further ceilingward. When I ask if he's “all right,” he doesn't answer. This is both the comfort and the terror of the juvenile mind. One knows that if the juvenile mouth is not moving, then the mind is; but one does not necessarily know
what
that mind is moving away from or toward. “What are you thinking?” I ask M., as I ask most of my patients when I want to know their thoughts. Most of my patients will, in fact, tell me, a phenomenon I described two years ago at the North Country Mental Health Professionals' annual meeting in my speech “‘Ask and You Shall Receive': A Commonsensical Approach to the Juvenile Mind.” But not M.; he simply stares at me with his faint blue eyes. Those eyes are most changeable: one moment they seem unbearably sad, and the next full of danger; one moment M. looks like he's heartbroken, the next he looks like the hangman. In short, M. appears to be no ordinary patient, just as M.'s mother appears to be no ordinary patient's mother. As for M.'s father, it is uncertain what he is and what he isn't. Thus far, he is an enigma, in deed and in word. “Other than your father saying he might go to Iraq,” I ask, “why do you think he would?”

“Would what?”

“Go to Iraq.”

“I have no idea,” M. says quickly, too quickly.
Yes, you do
, I think but do not say. Instead, I give M. an assignment. I ask him to write down something important about his father.

“Something important?” he asks.

“Something you remember about him,” I say. “Something you love. Some lesson he's taught you. I'd like you to write this down and then share it with me during our weekly session.”

M. nods like he thinks this is something he can do. “When?” he asks.

“Whenever you feel like it,” I say, and he nods again. This seems like progress, of a sort. But still, something about M.'s story and his father's role in it nags at me.

“Your father told your mother that maybe he should go to Iraq, too,” I say, and then I repeat the final word: “‘Too.' What do you think he meant by ‘too'?”

M. nods, then cocks his head slightly to the right. Only now can I tell what M. is thinking. I can tell he's asked himself the same question. Finally, he says, “Maybe he meant that he was going to Iraq, just like everyone else around here?” And by the way he says this — as a question, not as a statement — I can tell that M. still has not found the answer.

 

 

I
knew where the VA hospital had to be: on Washington Street. Because that's where all the hospitals and social services are in Watertown. That's where Good Samaritan is — the place where I was born and where, I found out later, Exley was born, too — and where the county blood clinic and the county mental hospital and the county welfare office and the county substance-abuse clinic and the county domestic-abuse clinic and the library and the historical society and the YMCA and
Watertown Daily Times
all are, too. It's the most popular street in Watertown: people are always outside, lining the sidewalks. Whenever I was with Mother or my dad as we drove down Washington Street, I felt like I was in a parade and the people on the sidewalks were watching me. This time, I was the parade all by myself — me and my bike. I walked my bike past the same people, again and again, as I looked for the VA hospital. Past the five guys outside the YMCA, smoking their cigarettes: one half of their faces seemed to be in shadow even though it was noon and sunny out, and the other half seemed to be winking at me. Past the two fat women standing at the end of a huge line outside the county welfare office but facing away from the office and toward the street: they were dressed in bright green and pink sweatpants and black bubble jackets and were staring at me with their round white faces and tiny eyes, like I had something they wanted, something they didn't think they'd get from the welfare office. I tried not to stare at them and kept walking, past the soldier wearing his camo and his beret, with his pant legs tucked into his high boots, standing in the middle of the sidewalk and talking on his cell phone. You can't go anywhere in Watertown and not see a soldier talking on a cell phone, just like everyone else who isn't in a uniform. I don't know why this surprised me so much the first time I noticed it, but it did. When my
dad first went to Iraq, I used to stop every soldier I'd see and interrupt his phone conversation and ask him if he knew my dad. One time, when I interrupted one soldier's phone call, he handed me the phone, said, “Here you go.” “Hello?” I said, thinking it'd be my dad. But it wasn't. It was some woman saying, “Reggie? Is that you? Reggie, I'm
talking
to you.” I handed Reggie back his phone and said, “That isn't my dad.” “No,” Reggie said sadly. “But I wish it was.” He put the phone to his ear and said, “I'm here, Sharon,” and then with his free hand he made a gun, put the index finger to the side of his head, pulled the trigger of his thumb, and mouthed the word
Pow!