Home Front (23 page)

He kissed her forehead, sighing.

“It’s about Mommy,” she said, then burst into tears. “She got losted or hurted, right?”

He tightened his hold on Lulu. “No, baby. Mommy’s fine.”

“I miss my mommy.”

He rocked her back and forth, soothing her until her tears dried. When she was calm again, he put her down on the sofa and started
The Little Mermaid
DVD. That would keep Lulu busy for a while. She should be in bed, of course. It was late. But all he could think about was Jo, and what could have happened.

He didn’t really make a decision; rather, he found himself moving toward his office. He went inside and shut the door. His hands were shaking; ice rattled in his glass.

It could have been.

He slumped onto the sofa and bowed his head. Betsy was worried that she was forgetting her mother. But Michael had forgotten Jolene long before, hadn’t he? He’d lived with her, slept with her, and still somehow had forgotten the woman he’d married. He glanced to his left and saw a framed picture of him and Jolene; it had been taken years ago, at the arboretum in Seattle. They had been young then, and so in love.
Look at the family of ducks, Michael, that will be us one day, waddling along with our babies in tow …
In that one image, in Jolene’s bright smile, he remembered her.

He was a little unsteady as he got to his feet. At the bookcase, he withdrew a leather-bound photo album and an old VHS tape. Tucking them under his arm, he went into the family room, asked Lulu to follow him, and went upstairs.

He knocked on Betsy’s door. “Can we come in?”

“Okay.”

He picked up Lulu, carried her into the room, and sat down on the bed beside Betsy. Settling a girl on each side of him, he opened the album.

Centered in the first page, covered by a shiny piece of see-through plastic, was one of the few pictures he’d ever seen of his wife as a young girl. She stood on a rocky outcropping, wearing faded jeans and a cheap V-neck sweater. She was turned slightly away from the camera, looking into some invisible distance, with messy strands of long blond hair pulled across her face by the wind. Off to the left was a man walking away; all you could see was a ragged jeans hemline and a scuffed black boot.

Jolene had often said she’d chosen this photo to begin her life’s trail because it was so representative: her mother was missing and her dad was leaving. He’d seen this picture lots of times, but now he really looked at it, saw how sharp she looked, how thin. Her hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb in weeks, and the loss in her eyes was wrenching. She was watching the man walk away. Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

“She’s about fifteen here. Not much older than you, Bets.”

“She looks sad,” Betsy said.

“That’s cuz we aren’t borned yet,” Lulu said, repeating what Jolene always said about this photograph.

Michael turned the pages slowly, taking his girls on a journey down the road of Jolene’s life. There were pictures of Jolene in her army uniform, seated in a chopper, out playing Frisbee. In each successive photograph, she looked taller, stronger, but it wasn’t until their wedding picture that he saw
her,
the woman with whom he’d fallen in love. She’d smiled and cried through the ceremony, and told him it was the happiest day of her life.

Our lives,
he’d said, kissing her.
We will always be in love like this, Jo
.

Of course we will,
she’d said, laughing, and they’d believed it for years and years, until … they hadn’t. No, until
he
hadn’t.

“She looks pretty,” Lulu said.

He knew all that Jolene had lost in her life, and the things she’d never had and the things she’d overcome, and yet in all of these pictures, she looked incredibly happy. He’d made her happy; that was something he’d always known. What he’d forgotten was how happy she’d made him.

“When is she coming home?” Lulu asked. “Tomorrow?”

“November,” Betsy said with a sigh. “For just two weeks.”

“Oh.” Lulu made a small, squeaking sound. “Will I be five by then?”

“Yep,” Betsy said. “But she won’t be here for your birthday.”

Before Lulu could start crying, Michael got up and put a tape in the TV. Since Jolene’s deployment, the girls had obsessively watched the “good-bye reels,” as he liked to call them—the tapes she’d made for each of the girls. But they hadn’t seen this one in years.

He hit Play and the movie started. The first scene was Jolene, bleary-eyed, holding a baby girl who was no bigger than a half gallon of milk. “Say hi to your fans, little Elizabeth. Or will you be Betsy? Michael? Does she look like a Betsy to you…”

Now Betsy was walking for the first time, wobbling forward, laughing as she plopped over … Jolene was clapping and crying, saying, “Look, Michael, don’t miss this…”

Twelve years of his life, passing in forty-two minutes of tape.

He hit Stop.

There she was, his Jo. Her beautiful face was distorted, pixellated by the stop-motion, but even through the grainy, muted colors, he saw the power of her smile.

He saw the whole of his life in her eyes, all his dreams and hopes and fears.

I don’t love you anymore
.

How could he have said that to her? How could he have been so cavalier with their life, with the commitment they’d made?

He wanted to tell her he was sorry, but time and distance separated them now. Whatever he had to say, it would have to wait until November. Would she even want to listen?

“Let’s go shopping tomorrow and send her a care package,” Betsy said.

“Yay!” Lulu said, clapping her hands.

Michael nodded, saying nothing, hoping they didn’t see the tears in his eyes.

*   *   *

Strapped in place and weighed down by the thirty pounds of Kevlar plating in her vest, Jolene piloted the Black Hawk toward Baghdad. Sweat collected under her helmet, dampened her hair, ran down the back of her neck. Her skin was flushed; she had a little trouble breathing. Inside the gloves, her hands were slick and damp. Even with the helicopter’s doors open, it was a damn oven in here. The water in her bottle was at least 122 degrees—hardly refreshing. Tami was in the right seat.

They flew a combat spread formation, three helicopters strong, hurtling through the darkening sky. Below, the confusing sprawl of Baghdad fanned out on all sides.

“Blue rain … blue rain…” came the other pilot’s voice through the radio.

It meant that the zone into which they were flying was hot, inhospitable. It could be anything—mortar fire, a missile, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), a gunfight of some kind.

Jolene said on comm, “Raptor eight-nine veering east. ETA to Green Zone, four minutes.”

She moved the cyclic; the helicopter responded instantly to her touch, dropping its nose, picking up speed, hurtling forward.

Ra-ta-ta-tat
. Bullets hit the helicopter in a spray. The sound was so loud that even wearing a helmet and earbuds, Jolene flinched.

“We’re taking fire,” Tami said sharply.

“Hang on,” Jolene said, banking a hard left turn.

She heard the
tink-tink-tink
of machine gun fire hitting her aircraft. One first, then a splatter of hits, close together, sounding like a hard rain on tin. Smoke filled the helicopter.

“There,” Tami said. “Three o’clock.”

A group of insurgents was on a rooftop below, firing. A machine gun set on a tripod spit yellow fire.

Jolene banked left again. As she made the turn, the helicopter to her right exploded. Bits of burning metal hit the side of Jolene’s aircraft. Heat billowed inside, and the aftermath rocked them from side to side.

“Knife oh-four, do you copy?” Tami said into the radio. “This is Raptor eight-nine.”

The helicopter next to them spiraled to the ground. On impact, a cloud of black smoke billowed up. For a split second, Jolene couldn’t look away.

Tami radioed the crash coordinates into the base. “Knife oh-four, do you copy?”

Jolene made a series of fast turns, evading, varying her airspeed, changing her altitude. Up, down, side to side.

When they were out of range, she turned to look in the back bay. “Is everyone okay?” she said to her crew, hearing back from all of them.

Jolene followed the other Black Hawk into Washington Heliport, landing behind it. She was shaking as she unhooked her MCU vest and seat belt.

She climbed out of the seat and stepped down onto the tarmac. The sky was gunmetal gray, but even in the gloom she could see the thick black smoke still rising up from the crash site. She closed her eyes and said a prayer for the fallen airmen, even though in her heart she knew that no one had survived that explosion. Seconds later, the roar of jet engines filled the night sky; bombs exploded in bursts of red fire. As soon as possible, she knew that a medevac helicopter would go to the site and try to locate survivors and victims.

She couldn’t help thinking that if you
were
alive and hurt in enemy territory with your bird on fire, it would be the longest wait of your life.

Could she have done something differently? Would a different choice on her part have changed the outcome? They flew in formation to protect one another, but Jolene hadn’t protected her partner aircraft; soon, somewhere across the world, a casualty assistance team would gather to give a family the worst possible news.

Tami and Jamie came up to stand beside her. They stood in front of their helicopter, which was scarred with bullet holes.

No one spoke. Each of them knew that one bullet in the right place, one RPG hit, and they could have been the aircraft on fire in the desert.

“Who’s hungry?” Jamie said, taking off his helmet.

“I’m always hungry,” Smitty said, coming up beside them, coughing. He gave everyone his trademark grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Tonight, for the first time, Smitty looked old. “I sure could use me a Mountain Dew.”

Jamie, as always, kept up a steady stream of conversation as they walked through the Green Zone. Everything he said was funny, and each of them wanted something to smile about. They ate made-to-order stir-fry and homemade milkshakes while the maintenance crew patched up their helicopter. All the while, they talked about anything except what was on their minds.

By midnight, they were back in the air, flying over Baghdad again. They skirted the most dangerous parts of the city. Now and then gunfire rang out—coming from opportunistic insurgents who could hear the helicopter and shot skyward, hoping to hit what they couldn’t see. They landed back at Balad without incident.

Jolene shut down the engine. The rotors slowed by degrees, the
thwop-thwop-thwop
more drawn out in every rotation.

Jolene finally relaxed in her seat. Through her night-vision goggles, the world looked distorted. Here on the black tarmac, she saw ghostly green images moving in front of her.

Absurdly, she thought of souls, walking away from their bodies; that reminded her of the crew they’d lost.

“My son has chicken pox,” Jamie said from behind her. “Did I tell you that?”

It was what she needed: a reminder of home. “Kids get over that fast. He won’t even remember it in a year. Betsy wanted strawberry Popsicles for every meal.”

“Will he remember that I wasn’t there?”

Jolene had no easy answer for that.

She unhooked the goggles from her helmet and unstrapped from the seat. When she stepped onto the tarmac, a wave of exhaustion overtook her, and it was not an ordinary tiredness; this was bone deep, a kind of standing death.

She wanted to know she’d done everything possible tonight, that she was not in any way at fault, but there was no one to tell her that, no one she could believe, anyway. The thought isolated her, reminded her of how alone she was over here. She wished she could call Michael, tell him about her day and let his voice soothe her ragged nerves. So many soldiers over here had that, a marital lifeline. Like Tami and Carl.

There was little privacy over here, and since Tami and Jolene routinely stood in the phone lines together, they heard each other’s conversations. She heard Tami whispering,
I love you so much, baby, just hearing your voice makes me strong again.

She remembered when she and Michael had been like that, each a half of the whole. Tami came up beside her, bumped her hip to hip. “You okay?”

“No. You?”

“No. Let’s call home. I need to hear my husband’s voice,” Tami said.

They walked across the base to the phones. Amazingly, the line was short. There were only two soldiers in front of them.

Jolene let Tami go first, heard her friend say, “Carl? Baby? I miss you so much…”

Jolene tried not to listen. The truth was she needed Michael right now, needed him to say he loved her and that he was waiting for her, that she wasn’t as alone over here as she felt, that she still had a life at home.

When it was finally Jolene’s turn, she dialed home, hoping someone was there. Back there, it was two fifteen on a Saturday afternoon.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Michael.”

She closed her eyes, imagining his smile. She wanted to tell him more, share her feelings, but how could she? He would never understand. He wasn’t like Carl; he wasn’t proud of what she did over here. He didn’t understand how deeply she cared about the other soldiers with whom she served. At that, she felt even more separate, more distant.

A world away, she heard the creaking of his chair as he sat down, and that simple, ordinary sound reminded her acutely of the people she’d left behind and how they’d gone on with their lives, making memories that didn’t include her.

“How are you, Jo?”

She felt her mouth tremble. His tone of voice was so tender; she had to remind herself that he didn’t really want to know. When had he ever wanted to hear about her service? She couldn’t tell him that her friends had been killed tonight, that maybe it was even her fault, a little. He’d just tell her it was a ridiculous war and the soldiers had died for nothing. She straightened, cleared her throat. “How are my girls? Is Lulu excited about her birthday?”