“Hello,” the dark-skinned girl began, “I’m Helen Clifton.” Lacy watched her through the narrow crack. “A junior? Sorry to interrupt. My fiancé’s stationed in Da Nang, north of Saigon, and in his last letter he mentioned a soldier in his company who has no one to write home to. A white gentleman. And I thought if you had the time—”
“He wants a pen pal?” Lacy asked. “Any old stranger for a pen pal?”
The girl stared at Lacy and handed her a slip of paper. “His name is Aaron Warner, from Midland. That’s the address, if you want to do something for our troops in-country.”
Lacy shut the door and threw out the paper. For the rest of the day, as she lay reading in her underwear, she thought back to the intrusion. She didn’t want to be reminded of what was going on over there. Nobody wanted to see it on the news—piles of bodies, or monks in flames, forests stripped by chemical plague down to ashen netherworlds. Then twilight came. Lacy imagined the night ahead. Trudging to the hall kitchenette for her TV dinner, with the foods in their separate squares. Eating at her desk, not talking to a soul, reading Asimov or Bradbury until she tired her eyes out enough to sleep. Loneliness gathered into a cold spot in her chest. She found her hand reaching into the trash. Slowly, almost indifferently, she took her best fountain pen and a sheet of the monogrammed stationery her mother insisted was a hallmark of proper ladies—even lost causes like Lacy—and composed a letter.
September 1, 1969
Dear Mr. Warner—
My name is Lacy Adams. I received your name from the fiancée of a gentleman in your company, who thought you might like a pen pal. She suggested your family were not the best correspondents. I’m no stranger to those sorts of things. I was raised on a farm where we fattened our anger and resentment right beside the cattle. I am pursuing a PhD in chemistry at UT Austin. I know nothing of yours, but I am of a serious disposition.
As an organism, there are two ways your tour could end—1. You could come home, or 2. if not, your valuable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur will be returned to the earth to create new life. (That’s a joke.) In seriousness, I appreciate your sacrifice. Whatever anyone thinks of this war, your service is something our country never asked of me, or any woman, and for that you have my gratitude. If you ever need a friend on a long night, my address is below.
Very truly yours,
L.A.
In the morning, as the mailbox swallowed the letter, the thought crossed her mind of whether Aaron would respond and what she might have gotten herself into. Lacy shook it off. She’d had twenty-three years of being herself, and all the good that did her, and she figured she could scare off a guy halfway around the world as fast as she did here at home. In stockings and cashmere twinset, she marched to the chemistry building, popping a stick of Juicy Fruit to calm her nerves.
It was the moment Lacy had worried about all summer: would she finally get placed in a lab with faculty, like the rest of her cohort, and launch her career? She entered the office with jaw clenched on her gum and took the envelope from her mail cubby. By letter from Department Chair Wallace, she learned instead that for the third straight semester she would grade undergrad problem sets if she wanted to keep her fellowship. Tears swelled, threatening to blow her meticulously serene exterior.
“Miss Adams.” A hand patted her shoulder as Wallace hurried through the office. He turned at the door and smiled blandly. “Always a lovely sight.”
They watched each other. In his face Lacy could recall every expression she had cataloged since her freshman year—his bemused smile when she declared her major, the wrinkled amazement when she said she applied to the PhD program. The man who controlled her fate, who gave her money to live so she’d never have to ask her mother for anything again. Gone, out the door. She sank into a chair, pressed a Kleenex to her eyes, and told herself for the millionth time that there was no problem, she wasn’t a problem, and science wasn’t for the fainthearted. She checked her watch; she was late for biochem. And without a better idea of what to do, she rose and soldiered on to class.
* * *
One Monday evening, while Lacy sat grading in her room, she heard the labored steps of the housemother distributing the mail. For the first time in more than a year her feet paused at Lacy’s door. Under it whisked a letter with Private Warner’s name and hers printed on a dirty envelope. She tore it open. Dear Lacy was scrawled in a wild hand, followed by words and dark boxes all over—phrases blacked out with a marker, whole lines at a time. She squinted, looking for a full sentence, as random bits dashed into view: dying clock ticking … people in the trees … losing my mines … and near the bottom a repeated stream of look ma no hands!!!
Lacy stuffed the letter in her desk drawer and locked it. But after one look, Aaron’s words had already begun mutating in her head into a voice she could not quiet. For days she barely slept and stumbled through her classes, imagining the man who wrote them. And then, on Friday evening, the housemother paused again and four more letters shot under her door. He’s writing me every day, Lacy thought with a shiver as she locked them away, unopened, that week, and the next. Yet with each letter her fear was gradually inflected with mystery. Why did he keep writing? What lay behind the redactions? What if Aaron was trying to tell her something and she’d done nothing to decipher them after promising friendship?
She held out until late on a Saturday night. The girls down the hall cranked their Motown and sang along, turning gray skies blue, their voices echoing off the walls of the empty dorm. At the stroke of midnight Lacy took Private Warner’s ten letters from the drawer. She laid them out on her yellow silk duvet, cautiously, reverently, like tarots, and opened the second one.
Aaron began with an apology. His last letter was crazy talk, but when he got hers it was like a ray of light blew up a dam and he couldn’t help but gush, and just knowing she’s out there reading this means the world, it’s life and death so please keep reading. Lacy continued. She sensed a hint of crazy in this letter, too, despite the square, manly handwriting—some nonsense about how he was really supposed to be in med school and not over there. But then he told her he laughed out loud when he read about the cattle on her farm growing up, the anger and the cows, and how her family must be like his. Suddenly it seemed as if Aaron was in the room beside her, whispering hot words in her ear. He had to sign off, but he’d talk to her tomorrow.
Her pulse skipped as she tore open the remaining letters. Are you the disfavored one?—the next letter began without a greeting—Lacy, are you the black sheep in your family too? She read these words and instantly knew him. Not from data or thoughts in her mind but through her very being, the way Legolas and the Elvish knew rocks or the souls of trees.
Aaron wrote his life story on letterhead scrounged from the Red Cross. He told her about his brother with the stutter, and the parents falling over themselves to praise the average one. And to Aaron, who got straight As and a full ride to UT, did his dad say congrats? Still he put his head down and strived, because that’s the American Dream. But how does it work anymore? Twenty-three years you believe things matter, school, jobs, to end up in the jungle? To see it slip through your fingers halfway around the world, in a hell so deep you start wishing for death. You dream of it and wake up cursing your eyes for opening. So, thank you, Lacy—he closed his last letter—if you’re there. There wasn’t much left of Aaron Warner to write home about, but when he thought of her reading, it’s like God said let there be light and it shined on these chicken scratches of what he used to be. He heard it took five days for mail to go from A to B, and maybe in five days he’d be dead but could she send him a sign?
The last words were smudged where her tear had mingled with the blue ink. Lacy wiped her eyes and breathlessly paced the room, rereading each letter. The Tower bells chimed twice, vibrating through the now silent hall. A night curled in on itself and gone to sleep, she thought, while she had been with Aaron.
She sat at her desk and, hours from dawn, wrote with a focus as sharp as hunger. Sh
e didn’t believe in God, she told him, so she wouldn’t pray for him, but she’d send a letter every day, so that he’d know someone at home was willing him not to die. To keep writing back. She could hear him in his letters, she said, a man of substance in dire straits. Hold on, Aaron, every day until the next one.
In the morning Lacy rose with purpose. She didn’t linger over her doughnut at the diner, picking at the Formica counter and fretting over school like usual. She returned to her desk and wrote another letter. Aaron wasn’t alone in his loneliness, she assured him. Her two best and only friends from UT were engaged before graduation, married after, and launched on their husbands’ vectors to Tulsa and Corpus Christi. And if Aaron wanted to talk family, well, she hadn’t spoken to hers in thirteen months, so, yes, she was a black sheep too. She wasn’t the girl her mother wanted. How she looked, or talked to men, or had a brain full of more than beauty secrets—no detail was too small to escape her mom’s eye. And one day, after Lacy beat her head against that wall enough times, she realized it could kill her. And stopped trying.
She mailed the letters on her way to class Monday morning. In the evening, as she sat to write again, Aaron’s next letter flew under her door. Thus began their system: writing across continents and each other, their words like ships passing daily. They talked about themselves. They asked questions that went unanswered, or responses lagged for days or weeks, appearing out of nowhere to forgotten queries.
Lacy wrote about the dissertation proposal she submitted early—silicon etching on CMOS wafers—and how cool computers were and maybe someday they’d be more than big calculators and be like our friends, too. Aaron wrote that the cigarettes were awful lately, and he had some fungal thing on his chest. She confided that the last time she went home her mother invited an old classmate of Lacy’s to dinner. Heir to a funeral home chain, recently divorced—her mom whispered during cocktails—very eager to remarry. And when Lacy left the table after the boy shushed her, her mother trailed her to the foyer and asked, “Who do you think’s going to marry you, Lacy? You’re not like other girls, be smart!” Aaron said in his nightmares a vulture kept ripping his eyes out. But a week later he wrote, Never marry? Shushed you? God forbid Lacy Adams patents a computer chip and makes a million dollars—I hear the sky falling already!
Lacy knew then that he was listening. He’d been listening all along.
She shared more. Things she could never say aloud flowed from her pen. The awful memory of being pulled from class in fifth grade, when her dad died, and the red-hot unfairness of her mom’s house, where she had no place. Her feckless brother who could do no wrong, who totaled a Stingray at sixteen and got the whopping punishment of a purse-lipped “boys will be boys” from their mother. Lacy’s words were sharp and controlled; she liked who she was in her letters. Some days she recalled a turn of phrase, a curated intimacy mailed to Aaron, as she sat in class. She started raising her hand more and kept it up until the professor acknowledged her. Her grades, always good, turned excellent.
On Halloween, an undisguised Lacy made her way to the chemistry building through students dressed as Popeyes and Jeannies. She delivered a typed memo to Department Chair Wallace describing how each day of biochem had begun that semester: a compound listed on the chalkboard—PCB or resveratrol—that a male classmate would diagram and always coincidentally looked like a pair of breasts. She noted the professor’s response every time—“hubba-hubba”—and asked if this lived up to the academic standards of the University of Texas. Lacy never heard back. But for weeks Aaron ended his letters with Give ’em hell, Lacy!
And then, around the time Aaron’s vulture stopped visiting his sleep, a nightmare of her own came true. One evening the housemother didn’t stop at her door, and again the next night. For a week no letters came. Lacy couldn’t eat. She bought a pack of Virginia Slims and took up smoking. At night she was plagued by the same sliver of a dream: the housemother paused at her door, but when Lacy opened it a duty officer stood there with a somber face. Each night Lacy awakened, sweating, to the reality that no one would come tell her if Aaron died. To the world outside they were nothing. The word entered her mind as though for the first time: Love? She pushed it away. But harder to subdue was a bittersweet truth of their letters—that the world they created there, together, was better than where either of them was fighting.
A letter arrived on the eve of Thanksgiving. Aaron was sorry for the gap. He tried not to talk war stuff, but he was a minesweeper and his partner tripped a partial dud while they were scouting. Aaron was laid out, exposed and bleeding. He thought of letting death come. A bullet from anywhere any second. But he thought of Lacy, the way she dotted her i’s, and he dragged himself to cover. He had a letter to write. You’re a cherry lifesaver, he said.
Soon their letters bore flashes of open affection, twinkling like the lights going up around the shop windows on the Drag. Lacy wrote that Willie Nelson just played the Armadillo, and of course she didn’t go, but when his song came on the radio she thought of Aaron. He was always on her mind. She hadn’t even asked what he looked like, she wrote, but she saw him in places—in the face of a cook at the diner, or Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Aaron hoped it wasn’t too forward, but could she send him a picture? To put a face to the beautiful words? She didn’t have any of herself, she replied, but she’d get one.
After her last exam of the semester, Lacy was skipping down the steps of the chemistry building on her way to the Sears photo booth when Professor Wallace called out to her. He led her to his office and shut the door. “Is this about my dissertation proposal?” she asked. “Or the biochem memo? I’m in town the whole break if you—”
“It’s about everything.” Wallace rubbed his eyes behind his horn-rims. He told her how proud he was of her, how much he enjoyed the experience of having her in the program, and how he thought it best if she finished out the year with her master’s and left. Lacy’s mouth went dry. She asked if her performance was substandard. No, he said, flicking his hand at the question, she was near the top of her cohort, but science isn’t strictly about results. Lacy objected that science is precisely about results, to which Wallace replied irritably that scientists worked with others, in labs and companies in the real world, and Lacy had proven a distraction. Her fellowship was a resource better allocated to a student with a real future, surely she could understand? But with a master’s why not teach high school chemistry? Wallace knew a number of elite private schools that would be happy to have her.
It happened fast. Lacy couldn’t remember if she said goodbye or if she thanked Wallace as she was leaving, out of habit. Instead of Sears she found herself a few minutes later at the diner. She ordered a Coke and a Frito pie in the bag. “Make it two pies,” Lacy called out, too shell-shocked to care about her hips. She devoured the first one and was turning to the second when the waitress leaned over the counter. “When’s your friend coming?” she asked. Lacy stared. The waitress pointed to the second pie.
“Oh.” Lacy’s eyes watered. “Soon, I hope.”
But he didn’t. No letter came from Aaron that night, or the rest of the year.
* * *
The dorm cleared out for the holidays. Inside her room, Lacy heard the thumping of suitcases down steps, and silence. She was alone again, but the ache of it was different now. She had tasted something she learned too late was love, she had made shelter with Aaron, and now nothing could protect her from the emptiness. Time was too big, and her imagination terrible. She filled the void with Tolkien, studying every passage about Aragorn, a humble man risking his life to fight against evil. One night she was tracing Aragorn’s path on a map of Middle Earth when a passage from one of Aaron’s letters came to mind. A dream he shared before he went silent. He was a diplomat traveling the world—like the beginning of Casablanca, he wrote, that map of Africa?—ending wars, on missions of peace, with a strong woman at his side. And not some trophy wife. A lady who brought science and progress along with peace.
<
br /> No letter.
Another night Lacy smoked at the window as a storm rippled nearby. Carols played on the radio, fading on the hour so the DJ could wish everyone out there a very merry Christmas. Nat King Cole came on, imploring her to hear the angels’ voices. Lacy pressed her cheek to the windowpane and tried to hear like the Elvish, like Arwen for her human king. She listened for any sound. The patter of rain, or the Tower bells. A car on Guadalupe. But no sign of whether in a faraway jungle Aaron had turned into valuable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur.
* * *
“Private Warner, can you hear me?” Aaron opened his eyes and saw her. His angel, Lacy. “Merry Christmas, Santa’s here!” She fiddled with his arm. “High as a kite now, huh? And I’ve got another present.” She leaned down to his ear. “The doctor says we’re gonna get you good as new. Almost.” Then she was gone. She would stop by to fix his pillows or give him sips of water. Every time she said his name so sweet. One time she asked if he remembered what happened to him, and that’s when he heard it for sure—an accent, like how the New York mobsters talk in the movies.
“You’re not Lacy,” he mumbled.
“Nope, I’m Nurse Maureen. Is she your sweetheart?”
“I have to write a letter,” Aaron croaked. “I need a pen and paper.”
“Stay still.” She pressed his shoulders down. “You’re broken all over. I don’t suppose you’re left-handed?” He shook his head. “Well, the good news is you got four working limbs. First we lower the morphine, and then you can dictate your letter to me.”
“It’s private.”
“Easy.” She dabbed his face with a towel. “Relax.”
Aaron drifted in and out of sleep. With each awakening, time and place slowly reemerged, carving at the soft oblivion with questions he couldn’t answer. How long had he been here? Where was here? Not a field station, judging by the ceiling fan, but a real hospital. It was OK. He lifted his head and saw a mummy body, a cast from ribs to feet and another on his right arm. That was OK too. He repeated the nurse’s question in his head, What happened? until he could uncoil the memory of that day.
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