THE
HOME FRONT
Margaret
Vandenburg
Copyright © 2015 by Margaret Vandenburg
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
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The Permanent Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vandenburg, Margaret.
The home front / Margaret Vandenburg.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-57962-386-9
eISBN 978-1-57962-413-2
1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3572.A647H66 2015
813’.54—dc23 2014041248
Printed in the United States of America.
for my mother
~ I ~
His cell phone rang the minute he left the trailer. He thought he might get used to it, flying drones one minute, chatting with his wife the next. Navigating the conflicting demands of combat and family life had never been easy. But oceans had always separated one from the other, not a forty-minute commute on US-95. Even he couldn’t shift gears that fast. Then there was the trailer itself, the ultimate insult to what was left of his professional integrity. The fact that the Pentagon hadn’t built an actual ground control station said it all. Everything was on the cheap since the downturn.
“Pick up some soy milk, will you? And a bag of potatoes for Max.”
“Anything else?”
“Hurry home. The natives are restless.”
Todd started the pickup and flicked on the lights. One thing he couldn’t stand was daylight savings time. Millions of nine-to-fivers had to suffer for the four farmers left in the state of Nevada. Rose forced him to get tested for seasonal affective disorder, but it wasn’t that. You didn’t have to be sick to want to see a ray of sunshine after being glued to a computer console, especially since the day shift was really the night shift. When it was high noon at Creech Air Force Base it was just shy of midnight at Kandahar Airfield, the biggest hive of drones south of Kabul. He chased bad guys around dark deserts—hour after hour after hour—then drove home through a dark desert. If it weren’t for weekends, he’d never see the light of day. Still, there was no use complaining. He tried to convince himself that virtual war beat freezing your hiney off in Afghanistan. Or worse yet, Pakistan. He was getting too old for heroics anyway.
Price Chopper was hopping. They were running a sale on hamburger packaged in red, white, and blue Styrofoam containers. Big beefy guys were stocking up, mostly bachelor types with plenty of pasty white buns in their carts. You are what you eat. Too bad Rose was on a health kick. Todd couldn’t remember the last time she’d served a recognizable dinner, let alone one he could really sink his teeth into. Eating organically was like sucking meals through a straw, and his jaws ached for something more substantial than tofu and quinoa. At this rate his family would starve to death.
No use torturing himself wandering past the butcher. He made a beeline for the produce section. A dozen varieties of potatoes were heaped up in massive bins, none of which resembled the ones he ate growing up. The Idaho spuds were twice the normal size. They were beautiful, provided you liked the look of clones on steroids. Several new kinds of new potatoes were available in an astonishing spectrum of colors. Todd was tempted to try the bright purple ones, to see what color they were inside, but his son would blow a gasket. Max would only eat tan foods, the rounder the better, which put the kibosh on Rose’s natural food fetish. Organic potatoes had unpredictable protrusions and unblinking eyes that completely disqualified them, even when mashed and reshaped into lumpy little balls. Rose had lots of tricks up her sleeve, but Max was no fool. The great virtue of genetically engineered vegetables was that they all shared a uniform shape and size. They were Max’s version of comfort food.
Todd grabbed a bag of potatoes and headed for the checkout line. On the way he saw Dirk Brown cruising the beer aisle. His cart was filled with chips and salsa, enough to last a week. The sight of him made Todd feel nostalgic for the good old days when overseas deployments transformed beer-swilling cadets into fighter pilots. Ever since 9/11, the US Air Force funneled bozos like Brown into the domestic drone program. The sum of his qualifications was the capacity to wield joysticks like a third thumb, the ultimate bionic weapon. He was the video game equivalent of a pinball wizard. Todd knew full well the comparison dated him. In his day, pilots understood not only how to kill but also the gravity of killing. Brown was a hardcore gamer who thought drone warfare was a trip and a half. His exact words. He conducted himself more like a kid at a PlayStation than a warrior at the ready. Acne and all. It didn’t help that virtual cockpits were designed to resemble game consoles to accommodate the likes of Dirk Brown. But a Star Wars aficionado does not a pilot make.
Todd ducked down the soda aisle. He frankly didn’t know which was worse, commanding a squad of punks or running into them at the supermarket. Either way, professionalism was bound to erode. Not that Brown was to blame. Martial ethics relied on the imminent danger of getting your butt blown off. Flying drones from the air-conditioned comfort of a double-wide didn’t exactly inspire valor and honor. For that matter, neither did running errands for your wife on the way home from what felt more like a desk job than active duty. His cell rang again.
“Where are you?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“Don’t forget the milk.”
She must have mounted a surveillance camera in his head. Either that or they’d been married long enough to read each other’s minds. Even when he was stationed in Iraq, she always sensed when he was scheduled to fly particularly perilous missions. She’d call, pretending there was a medical emergency, so they could have phone sex. Marital telepathy. He missed those days. Living in the suburbs of Las Vegas certainly wasn’t the life he’d envisioned at the Air Force Academy. Drones were a game changer, that’s for sure, let alone autism. Maybe things would eventually calm down at home so he and Rose could pick up where they left off when Max was diagnosed. Their love was still there somewhere, underneath all the bullshit. Not that he blamed Max, poor kid. No one was to blame, which made it that much harder to swallow.
* * *
Max’s diagnosis brought out the best in Rose. She rose to the occasion with all the passion of aroused motherhood. It brought out the worst of the worst in Todd. He felt helpless. Cheated. Angry. He took it out on the doctor, which was obnoxious but not unwarranted. Dr. Dillard never should have been allowed to practice medicine. He had the bedside manner of an accountant. Max started screaming the minute he laid eyes on him, a predictable enough response. He’d been screaming pretty much nonstop since roughly his third birthday. But he really let loose around Dr. Dillard. Neurological disorder notwithstanding, Max was a damned good judge of character.
Their regular pediatrician diagnosed one thing after another before admitting he was out of his league. Actually he probably just wanted to avoid being the bearer of bad news. They had to consult a specialist at University Medical Center in downtown Las Vegas. Fancy clinic, fancy doctors. Specialists in bad news. At 10:37 on Wednesday, March 4, Dr. Dillard ushered Rose and Todd into his office. Diagnosis day, or D-Day as Todd always referred to it, constituted the beginning of an interminably long, unthinkably costly siege with infinitesimal odds of prevailing against the enemy.
Dr. Dillard didn’t look either one of them in the eye. He shook Todd’s hand, but not Rose’s, which pissed her off. He didn’t apologize for being thirty-seven minutes late, which pi
ssed Todd off. His desk was obscenely large and there was absolutely nothing on it except a pink folder. Pink. He peered at them over the top of his half glasses. The crown of his head had obviously been polished that morning, an affectation that further undermined his credibility. He opened the folder and delivered the diagnosis with deadpan certainty.
“Your son has autism.”
“Are you sure?” Rose asked.
“His symptoms are unmistakable, Mrs. Barron.”
They waited for him to continue. To clarify. To soften the blow with a favorable prognosis. A grandfather clock tolled the quarter hour. Todd checked his watch. 10:38. Everywhere he went, without thinking, he checked the accuracy of clocks, which were usually a minute or two off. Seven minutes was pathetic. This quack couldn’t keep the proper time, let alone diagnose Max.
“You didn’t even take a blood test,” Todd said. “How can you be sure?”
“I can assure you that I examined him thoroughly.”
“How serious is it?” Rose asked.
Dr. Dillard shuffled through the papers in his file, mostly hand-scribbled notes. All very scientific. “I regret to inform you that your son may never advance beyond the mental age of five or six.” He closed the file.
“What about treatment options?” Rose asked.
“I’m a diagnostician, not a therapist.”
“That’s it?” Todd said. “You drop the bomb and then hightail it out of here?”
“The right diagnosis makes treatment possible.”
“And the wrong diagnosis? What does the wrong diagnosis do?”
“I wouldn’t know, Major Barron.”
“Since you’re so damn sure of yourself, let’s pin down a number, Doctor. Five or six?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Any chance he might make it to seven?”
Dr. Dillard finally looked at him. They locked horns, staring each other down, while Rose tried to turn D-Day into V-Day. By the time they left the doctor’s office at 11:23, she had convinced herself that Max would eventually test off the spectrum, a term she had just learned and already used with a maternal authority that brooked no contradiction. Even Dr. Dillard stopped trying to tell her there was no known cure. The clock was tolling the half hour, seven fucking minutes fast, as Todd slammed the office door behind them. Together, he and Rose embodied the first two stages of grief—anger and denial. Acceptance would be a long time coming.
Rose threw herself into finding treatment options, which were still scarce in Nevada. Either the autism epidemic hadn’t hit their fair state, or there weren’t enough diagnosticians to deliver the bad news. The Internet became her doctor on call. Rose had never been one to surf the web, a completely unnecessary exercise with so many shopping malls nearby. She didn’t even have a Facebook page. Everything changed after the diagnosis. Within a week, she had hundreds of friends, mostly mothers of children with autism and the occasional adult with Asperger syndrome. Official online sources propounded innumerable theories about the cause and treatment of the disorder. But none of them proved as instructive as her new Facebook friends.
The general consensus was that the best treatment program included a combination of Applied Behavior Analysis and Floortime therapies. Critics of ABA’s unabashedly Pavlovian approach swore by Floortime, which was designed to ameliorate robotic behavior by developing emotional affect. Sorting out the pros and cons of each therapeutic approach was just the beginning. Board-certified therapists were hard to come by, not to mention outrageously expensive. Rose purchased instructional manuals online and started training herself. There was no way she could singlehandedly conduct the requisite seven hours of treatment per day. She tracked down local graduate students in psychology eager to work with Max for research credit and a nominal fee. Paying less for student therapists would leave more money to invest in the battery of baseline tests necessary to pinpoint his position on the spectrum. First Rose had to locate qualified specialists to administer the tests. Then she had to convince them that a month was too long to wait for an appointment. One after another seemingly insurmountable obstacle fell by the wayside. Within two weeks of Max’s diagnosis, while Todd was still reeling from the shock, Rose had everything under control.
* * *
Rose had always been a take-charge kind of woman, the kind Todd’s mother would have called a gal, not without a note of warning in her voice. She was working at a used car lot when they met. In sales. She was the only woman on the floor, needless to say. A woman is no more apt to buy a car from another woman than a man is. It’s like having a female cardiologist, something you’d only do if you landed in an emergency room with no other option. The same is true in combat, for that matter. If you’re relying on your buddies to bail you out of an ambush, the more testosterone the better. It’s how everybody feels deep down, when their lives are on the line.
All the salesmen were busy helping other customers. Todd felt self-conscious when she approached him. He couldn’t help noticing her legs, which was annoying at first. He was looking to buy a pickup, not pick up chicks.
“I need a truck,” he said in self-defense.
“You’re in luck,” she said. “I’ve got a Chevy. A real beauty.”
At first he thought she was joking. She sounded like a shyster in some B-movie about gangsters bootlegging behind used car fronts. Except that there was no cigar hanging out of the side of her mouth. Far from it. She wore bright red lipstick, a shade she only wore at work, it turns out. The job demanded a certain brassiness she performed on command. It was like talking to a ventriloquist. She looked at him sideways, the way salesmen tend to look at you when they’re sizing you up.
“I usually buy Fords.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
She dangled the keys just out of reach. Various parts of his body jumped when he looked at her outstretched hand. Her nail polish was several shades darker than her lipstick. He checked her fourth finger and she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He bought the Chevy.
A year later, they were both wearing wedding rings. They lived in a rented duplex on the base the first four months of their marriage, a blissful period between tours in Iraq. One thing could be said for military life. It could prolong the honeymoon, provided you were lucky enough to have a wife who didn’t punish you for overseas deployments. Todd’s unit was gearing up for their second stint in Anbar Province. They were scheduled to fly out the day after Rose turned thirty. All the more reason to make it a birthday to remember.
There was no doubt in Todd’s mind what Rose wished for every year she blew out the candles. She had a thing for sports cars. She thought it was the guys driving them she liked until she climbed into the driver’s seat of a Jaguar. She may not have been the first person on the planet to get a speeding ticket test-driving a Jag. But you can bet the cop wasn’t expecting to find a woman at the wheel. She never thought she’d actually own a sports car, especially now that she was married to an air force officer. Not exactly a lucrative profession, but a girl can dream. Out loud. A lot.
Todd couldn’t see the appeal, frankly. Guys with four-wheel drive rarely appreciate the finer points of cars that can fit into the beds of their pickups. But he had to admit that the idea of his wife jamming a stick was worth the price of admission. She might have to settle for a used Corvette. Even then he’d practically have to mortgage his mother to come up with the money. Then an impossible deal on a Jaguar turned up. A steal, as Rose would have said in her used car lot days. A fellow officer at the base had to unload it quickly to stave off alimony lawyers. He was older but not too old to relish the idea of Todd’s hot wife sitting in the driver’s seat. His fantasy was simultaneously paternalistic and predatory. He was fond of Todd and wished him better luck than he had with women.
Miraculously, the Jaguar was black, Rose’s favorite car color. Todd arranged to have his friend Bill deliver the present while he and Rose were eating birthday breakfast on the front porch. Bill was almost as
excited as Todd. They fashioned a big red bow out of crepe paper and duct tape. News of the birthday present must have traveled across the base. Virtually all the guys had crushes on Rose. Inordinate numbers were taking strolls past the Barrons’ house when the Jaguar rolled up, sleek and festive with that big bow on its hood.
Rose’s eyes lit up when she caught sight of it, but the rest of her face remained impassive. Todd could see she was trying not to get her hopes up. It was her birthday and there was a Jaguar parked in her driveway. But girls like her didn’t own sports cars. She had been raised with very modest expectations, which made surprising her easy and all the more enjoyable. Sometimes Todd wished he had pursued a more lucrative profession so she’d have that look on her face more often.
Bill jumped out and made a show of polishing the hood of the car with his sleeve. Then he joined the dozens of soldiers watching from the street. Rose kept looking back and forth, from the car to Todd’s face, trying to figure out what was going on. Then all the guys started singing “Happy Birthday.” Rose’s eyes were flashing with excitement, but she still couldn’t believe it.
“What’s going on, Todd?”
“It’s yours, baby. Happy birthday.”
She threw her arms around him and all the guys started clapping and whistling. She was anything but prudish. Neither were they. But there was something so inherently sexual about the whole scene they started to disperse. Rose was blushing the color of the ribbon and she had never looked more beautiful. Todd had the impulse to pick her up and carry her to the car, but the gesture seemed out of place. This present was all about Rose being in the driver’s seat, not him.
“Let’s take her for a spin.”
They ran out to the driveway, holding hands. Rose circled the car several times, dragging Todd along to look at every gleaming inch of her. She made him pet the hood ornament before they climbed in. When her bare legs touched the leather seat, she collapsed deep into its embrace. The car fit her like a glove.
The Home Front Page 1