by Amy Hempel
They’d grown up down the street from each other. He could not remember a time before they were friends, but she’d had enough time to get married and divorced and produce a little girl before he thought to kiss her for the first time, only a few months before he’d gotten his orders. In fairness, she was not exactly beautiful; it had taken some time for him to see past that. Her face was pleasant but plain, her features so simple that if she were a cartoon she’d seem deliberately underdrawn. She was not big, exactly, but pillowy, like if you pressed your hand into her it would keep sinking and sinking because there was nothing solid to her. It bothered him to think of Kenny putting his hand on her that way, Kenny who’d once assigned numbers to all the waitresses at Ruby Tuesday based on the quality of their asses, Kenny who’d probably never be gentle enough to notice what her body did while it was his.
It wasn’t Lanae who met him at the airport when he landed back where he’d started. It was his mother, looking small in the crowd of people waiting for arrivals. Some of them were bored, leaning up against the wall like they were in line for a restaurant table, others peered around the gate like paparazzi waiting for the right shot to happen. His mother was up in front, squinting at him like she wasn’t sure he was real. She was in her nurse’s uniform, and it made her look a little ominous. When he came through security she ran up to hug him so he couldn’t breathe. “Baby,” she said, then asked how the connecting flight had been, and then talked about everything but what mattered. Perhaps after all of his letters home she was used to unanswered questions, because she didn’t ask any, not about the war, not about his health, not about the conditions of his honorable discharge or what he intended to do upon his return to civilian society.
She was all weather and light gossip through the parking lot. “The cherry blossoms are beautiful this year,” she was saying as they rode down the Dulles Toll Road, and if it had been Lanae saying something like that he would have said Cherry blossoms? Are you fucking kidding me? but because it was his mother things kept up like that all the way around 395 and back to Alexandria. It was still too early in the morning for real rush-hour traffic, and they made it in twenty minutes. The house was as he’d remembered it, old, the bright robin’s egg blue of the paint cheerful in a painfully false way, like a woman wearing red lipstick and layers of foundation caked over wrinkles. Inside, the surfaces were all coated with a thin layer of dust, and it made him feel guilty his mother had to do all of this housework herself, even though when he was home he almost never cleaned anything.
He’d barely put his bags down when she was off to work, still not able to take the whole day off. She left with promises of dinner later. In her absence it struck him that it had been a long time since he’d heard silence. In the desert there was always noise. When it was not the radio, or people talking, or shouting, or shouting at him, it was the dull purr of machinery providing a constant background soundtrack, or the rhythmic pulse of sniper fire. Now it was a weekday in the suburbs and the lack of human presence made him anxious. He turned the TV on and off four times, flipping through talk shows and soap operas and thinking this was something like what had happened to him: someone had changed the channel on his life. The abruptness of the transition overrode the need for social protocol, so without calling first he got into the old Buick and drove to Lanae’s, the feel of the leather steering wheel strange beneath his hands. The brakes screeched every time he stepped on them, and he realized he should have asked his mother how the car was running before taking it anywhere, but the problem seemed appropriate—he had started this motion, and the best thing to do was not to stop it.
Kenny’s car outside of Lanae’s duplex did not surprise him, nor did it deter him. He parked in one of the visitor spaces and walked up to ring the bell.
“Son of a bitch! What’s good?” Kenny asked when he answered the door, as if Georgie had been gone for a year on a beer run.
“I’m back,” he said, unnecessarily. “How you been, man?”
Kenny looked like he’d been Kenny. He’d always been a big guy, but he was getting soft around the middle. His hair was freshly cut in a fade, and he was already in uniform, wearing a shiny gold name tag that said Kenneth, and beneath that, Manager, which had not been true when Georgie left. Georgie could smell the apartment through the door, Lanae’s perfume and floral air freshener not masking that something had been cooked with grease that morning.
“Not bad,” he said. “I’ve been holding it down over here while you been holding it down over there. Glad you came back in one piece.”
Kenny gave him a one-armed hug, and for a minute Georgie felt like an asshole for wanting to say Holding it down? You’ve been serving people KFC.
“Look man, I was on my way to work, but we’ll catch up later, alright?” Kenny said, moving out of the doorway to reveal Lanae standing there, still in the T-shirt she’d slept in. Her hair was pulled back in a head scarf, and it made her eyes look huge. Kenny was out the door with a nod and a shoulder clasp, not so much as a backward glance at Lanae standing there. The casual way he left them alone together bothered Georgie. He wasn’t sure if Kenny didn’t consider him a threat or simply didn’t care what Lanae did; either way he was annoyed.
“Hey,” said Lanae, her voice soft, and he realized he hadn’t thought this visit through any further than that.
“Hi,” he said, and looked at the clock on the wall, which was an hour behind schedule. He thought to mention this, then thought against it.
“Georgie!” Esther yelled through the silence, running out of the kitchen, her face sticky with pancake syrup. He was relieved she remembered his name. Her hair was done in pigtails with little pink barrettes on them; they matched her socks and skirt. Lanae could win a prize for coordinating things.
“Look at you, little ma,” he said, scooping her up and kissing her cheek. “Look how big you got.”
“Look how bad she got, you mean,” Lanae said. “Tell Georgie how you got kicked out of day care.”
“I got kicked out of day care,” Esther said matter-of-factly. Georgie tried not to laugh. Lanae rolled her eyes.
“She hides too much,” she said. “Every time they take the kids somewhere, this one hides, and they gotta hold everyone up looking for her. Last time they found her, she scratched the teacher who tried to get her back on the bus. She can’t pull this kind of stuff when she starts kindergarten.”
Lanae sighed, and reached up to put her fingers in her hair, but all it did was push the scarf back. Take it off, he wanted to say. Take it off, and put clothes on. He wanted it to feel like real life again, like their life again, and with him dressed and wearing cologne for the first time in months, and her standing there in a scarf and T-shirt, all shiny Vaselined thighs and gold toenails, they looked mismatched.
“Look, have some breakfast if you want it,” she said. “I’ll be out in a second. I need to take a shower, and then I gotta work on finding this one a babysitter before my shift starts.”
“When does it start?”
“Two.”
“I can watch her. I’m free.”
Lanae gave him an appraising look. “What are you doing these days?”
“Today, nothing.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“I talked to your mom a little while ago,” Lanae said, which was her way of telling him she knew. Of course she knew. How could Lanae not know, gossipy mother or no gossipy mother?
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll take good care of her.”
“If Dee doesn’t get back to me, you might have to,” said Lanae. She walked off and Georgie made himself at home in her kitchen, grabbing a plate from the dish rack and taking the last of the eggs and bacon from the pans on the stove. Esther sat beside him and colored as he poured syrup over his breakfast.
“So what do you keep hiding from?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Esther shrugged. “I just like the trip places better. Day care smells funny and the k
ids are dumb.”
“What did I tell you about stupid people?” Georgie asked.
“I forget.” Esther squinted. “You were gone a long time.”
“Well, I’m back now, and you’re not going to let stupid people bother you anymore,” Georgie said, even though neither of these promises was his to make.
Honestly, watching Esther was good for him. His mother was perplexed, Kenny was amused, Lanae was skeptical. But Esther could not go back to her old day care, and Dee, the woman down the street who ran an unlicensed day care in her living room, plopped the kids in front of the downstairs television all afternoon and could only be torn away from her soaps upstairs if one of them hit someone or broke something. It wasn’t hard for Georgie to be the best alternative. He became adequate as a caretaker. He took Esther on trips. They read and reread her favorite books. He learned to cut the crusts off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over and above her protests that the old sitter had let the kids stay up to watch Comic View, he made sure she was washed and in bed and wearing matching pajamas by the time Lanae and Kenny got home from their evening shifts.
“Are you sure it doesn’t remind you . . .” his mother started once, after gently suggesting he look for a real job, but she let the thought trail off unfinished.
“I wasn’t babysitting over there, ma.”
“I know,” she said, but she didn’t.
The truth was Esther was the opposite of a reminder. In his old life, his job had been to knock on stranger’s doors in the middle of the night, hold them at gunpoint, and convince them to trust him. That was the easiest part of it. They went at night because during daytime the snipers had a clear shot at them, and anyone who opened the door, but even in the dark, a bullet or an IED could take you out like that. Sometimes when they got to a house there were already bodies. Other times there was nothing—a thin film of dust over whatever was left—things too heavy for the family to carry and too worthless for anyone to steal.
The sisters were sitting in the dark, huddled on the floor with their parents, when Georgie’s unit pushed through the door. Pretty girls, big black eyes and sleepy baby-doll faces. The little one had cried when they first came through the door, and the older one, maybe nine, had clamped her hand tightly over the younger girl’s mouth, like they’d been ordered not to make any noise. The father had been soft-spoken—angry, but reasonable. Usually, Georgie stood back and kept an eye out for trouble, let the lieutenant do the talking, but this time he went over to the girls himself, reached out his hand and shook their tiny ones, moist with heat and fear. He handed them each a piece of the candy they were supposed to give to children in cooperative families, and stepped back awkwardly.
The older one smiled back at him, her missing two front teeth somehow reminding him of home.
They were not, in the grand scheme of things, anyone special. There were kids dying all over the place. Still, when they went back the next day, to see if the father would answer some more questions about his neighbors, and the girls were lying there, throats slit, bullets to the head, blood everywhere but parents nowhere to be found, he stepped outside of the house to vomit.
When Georgie was twelve, a station wagon had skidded on the ice and swerved into his father’s Tercel, crushing the car and half of his father, who had bled into an irreversible coma before Georgie and his mother got to the hospital to see him. Because his mother had to be sedated at the news, he’d stood at his father’s bedside alone, staring at the body, the way the part beneath the sheet was unnaturally crumpled, the way his face began to look like melted wax, the way his lips remained slightly parted.
Georgie hadn’t known, at first, that the sisters would stick with him like that.
“What’s fucked-up,” Georgie said to Jones two days after, “is that I wished for a minute it was our guys who did it, some psycho who lost it. The way that kid looked at me. Like she really thought I came to save her. I don’t want to think about them coming for her family because we made them talk. I don’t want to be the reason they did her like that.”
“What’s the difference between you and some other asshole?” Jones said. “Either nobody’s responsible for nothing, or every last motherfucker on this planet is going to hell someday.”
After that, he’d turn around in the shower, the girls would be there. He’d be sleeping, and he’d open his eyes to see the little one hiding in the corner of his room. He was jumpy and too spooked to sleep. He told Ramirez about it, and Ramirez said you didn’t get to pick your ghosts, your ghosts picked you.
“Still,” he said. “Lieutenant sends you to talk to someone, don’t say that shit. White people don’t believe in ghosts.”
But he told the doctors everything, and then some. He didn’t care anymore what his file said, as long as it got him the fuck out of that place. And the truth is right before the army let him go, sent him packing with a prescription and a once-a-month check-in with the shrink at the VA hospital, it had gotten really bad. One night he was sure the older girl had come to him in a dream and told him Peterson had come back and killed her, skinny Peterson who didn’t even like to kill the beetles that slipped into their blankets every night, but nonetheless he’d held Peterson at gunpoint until Ramirez came in and snapped him out of it. Another time, he got convinced Jones really was going to kill him one day, and ran up to him outside of mess hall, grabbing for his pistol; three or four guys had to pull him off. Once, in the daytime, he thought he saw one of the dead girls, bold as brass, standing outside on the street they were patrolling. He went to shake her by the shoulders, ask her what she’d been playing at, pretending to be dead all this time, but he’d only just grabbed her when Ramirez pulled him off of her, shaking his head, and when he looked back at the girl’s tear-streaked face before she ran for it like there was no tomorrow, he realized she was someone else entirely. Ramirez put an arm around him and started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He looked down the road at the place that girl had just been, and shook his head.
“The fuck you think she’s running to so fast anyway? Someone ought to tell her there’s nowhere to go.”
Sometimes Esther called him Daddy. When it started out, it seemed harmless enough. They were always going places that encouraged fantasy. Chuck E. Cheese’s, where the giant rat sang and served pizza. The movies, where princesses lived happily ever after. The zoo, where animals who could have killed you in their natural state looked bored and docile behind high fences. Glitter Girl, Esther’s favorite store in the mall, where girls three and up could get manicures, and any girl of any age could buy a crown or a pink T-shirt that said ROCK STAR. What was a pretend family relationship, compared to all that? Besides, it made people less nervous. When she’d introduced him to strangers as her babysitter, all six feet and two hundred and five pounds of him, they’d raised their eyebrows and looked at him as though he might be some kind of predator. Now people thought it was sweet when they went places together.
“This is my daddy,” Esther told the manicurist at Glitter Girl, where Georgie had just let Esther get her nails painted fuchsia. She smiled at him conspiratorially. He had reminded her, gently, that Mommy might not understand about their make-believe family, and they should keep it to themselves for now.
“Day off, huh?” said the manicurist. She looked like a college kid, a cute redhead with dangly pom-pom earrings. Judging by the pocketbook she’d draped over the chair beside her, she was working there for kicks—if the logo on the bag was real, it was worth three of Georgie’s old army paychecks.
“I’m on leave,” he said. “Army. I was in Iraq for a year. Just trying to spend as much time with her as I can before I head back.” He sat up straighter, afraid somehow she’d see through the lie and refuse to believe he’d been a soldier at all. When they’d walked in, she’d looked at him with polite skepticism, as if in one glance she could tell that Esther’s coordinated clothes came from Target, that he was out of real work and his gold watch was a knockoff
that sometimes turned his wrist green, like perhaps the pity in her smile would show them they were in the wrong store, without the humiliation of price tags.
“Wow,” she murmured now, almost deferentially. She looked up and swept an arc of red hair away from her face so she could look at him directly. “A year in Iraq. I can’t imagine. Of course you’ll spend all the time you can with her. They grow up so fast.” She shook her head with a sincerity he found oddly charming in a woman who worked in a store that sold halter tops for girls with no breasts.
“Tell you what, sweetheart,” she said to Esther. “Since your daddy’s such a brave man, and you’re such a good girl for letting him go off and protect us, I’m going to do a little something extra for you. Do you want some nail gems?”
Esther nodded, and Georgie turned his head away so the manicurist wouldn’t see him smirk. Nail gems. Cherry blossoms. The things people offered him by way of consolation.
When Esther’s nails were drying, tiny heart-shaped rhinestones in the center of each one, and the salesgirl had gone to wait on the next customer, a miniature blonde with a functional Razr phone but no parent in sight, Esther turned to him accusingly.