Eleven Days

by Lea Carpenter

  “And did they stay?”

  “I asked them to, but no, they didn’t stay. They’d arranged all the gifts in a darling little basket; I think they made the basket, too. And left it with—with a Thermos of eggnog.”

  “Eggnog?”

  “Yes, but when I opened it, it was only half full. I think it was theirs and they left it by accident. They sprinkle cinnamon on the eggnog. I’d forgotten that.”

  “Cinnamon.”

  “You know people don’t know what to say.”

  “About what?”

  “About me. About you. People don’t know what to say to a mother whose son’s not home for Christmas.”

  “How about ‘Merry Christmas, ma’am.’ ”

  “That’s exactly what they should have said. I should have helped them.”

  “Are you sure everything’s all right?” He knows, but he wants to hear her say it anyhow.

  “Everything’s swell. I’m attending two parties tonight alone.”

  “Where?”

  “Blair House and the Naval Observatory, where else?” And in their lies by lies they flattered be, she thinks.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Don’t drink and drive. Or—don’t drink and handle any sophisticated weaponry.”

  “What’s weaponry?”

  He hung up the phone and smiled. She hung up the phone and wept.

  HEAVEN

  WASHINGTON, D.C., NIGHT,

  MAY 11, 2011

  In the backseat of the Town Car, driving to D.C.’s Dulles International Airport, Sara closes her eyes and opens them. She is nowhere near sleep. It is almost eight o’clock at night. The godfather has a FIJI water bottle filled with martinis; she can tell because she sees—and smells—the olives. Like David, he takes three. Unlike David, he takes his drinks without rocks.

  She thinks about the Marines on the train. She thinks about her conversation with Jason just after Christmas, and his chastising her for referring to his Teammates as “boys” rather than men. She couldn’t help it. She still thought of most of the men she knew as boys, too. What is the definition of a man, anyhow? That he can vote? That he’s been in love? She stares out the window. It’s raining. Would the flights be delayed?

  Sara tells the godfather that she only just learned, in the car tonight on the way to the train station with Sam, that Jason has been in love—is in love.

  “Did you know that?”

  “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully assert my right to remain silent.”

  “Come on.”

  “He’s not ten years old, Sara.”

  “But who is she? Did he use the word ‘love’?”

  “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully—”

  “Forget it. I’ll find out.”

  They drive. It’s raining hard now. And Sara says, “You know, Sam said he was very good at what he did. Jason.”

  “Of course he was. Is.”

  “Is. Yes. At what he does. Sam said he is very good at what he does. Let’s talk like that, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “How long—”

  “Long. I have Ambien. You should sleep.”

  They drive in silence for a while.

  And then the godfather says, “He’s twenty-seven, Sara.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re mad if you think a twenty-seven-year-old’s never been in love. Especially your Romeo.”

  “Romeo?”

  “He’s a flirt.”

  “He’s not.”

  “He is. Unavoidable, given the gene pool.”

  “Well, he’s never talked to me about any one girl in particular.”

  “You know how hard it is for a Team guy to find a girl who will worship him?”

  “No.”

  “About as hard as it is to find a lobbyist on K Street.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “They call them warriors, for chrissake, Sara. The girls pursue them like paparazzi.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  It’s raining harder now.

  “Will the flight be delayed?”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me. And we’re not flying out of Dulles. We’re flying out of Andrews.”

  “Andrews?”

  “Sara, just—don’t stress the flight plan, okay? I’ll explain.”

  “Can you explain the allure of falling in love with someone who regularly places his life on the line?”

  “Um, I think I’d have to say that question falls into the category of If You Don’t Understand It Immediately It Cannot Be Explained.”

  “Well, I guess that makes me an idiot.”

  “It makes you a hypocrite.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sara, David?”

  “David didn’t place his life on the line.”

  “He did.”

  “You romanticize him. David sat at a desk.”

  “David placed his life on the line for this country.”

  “Behind a desk.”

  “I’m not sure you understand the full extent of what he did.”

  “If I don’t, the fault is not mine.”

  “He—”

  “Let’s not revisit that, all right? I’ve made my peace. Please don’t compare what David did to what Jason does now. That’s ancient history, anyhow. Let’s not have history lessons.”

  They are passing the Washington Monument. At night, lit, it’s breathtaking. She always forgets the sheer beauty of this city, how wide the sky seems with its low architectural lines, how pristine the pieces of the Mall’s iconography are. She would take it over Paris.

  “Anyhow,” the godfather says, “Jason doesn’t let it get to his head. Most don’t. These guys don’t spend too much time worrying about the reasons people obsess over them. Or protest their participation. They do their jobs. They move on. They spend about as much time on fan blogs as they do on The New York Times op-ed page.”

  “My son reads The New York Times.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t take his cues from their views.”

  “No, he doesn’t take cues from anyone. That’s what David gave him: a clinical inability to take cues from anyone other than his conscience.”

  At Andrews, they turn in to the hangar reserved for private planes. She asks—meekly—why they aren’t flying commercial and who is paying for this. He tells her there were no direct flights. She asks where they are going. “Jeddah,” he tells her. And the first thing she thinks of is “Christmas,” because “Christmas” and “Jeddah” have always been synonymous in her mind. She has never seen the inside of a private plane. It is so clean. “Jeddah, by way of Sigonella. We have to stop to refuel, change crews. You should sleep.”

  “Sigonella—”

  “Italy.”

  “What is this plane?” she asks, mildly alarmed, looking up at it.

  “Boeing Business Jet. It’s like a converted 737.”

  “Right. How much does it cost?”

  “Fifty million. New.”

  “Jesus.”

  The plane was like a piece of art. And that’s perhaps why it costs as much as a Picasso, she thinks. He tells her a bit about the person who owns it, a defense contractor who runs training camps for international paramilitary groups. “Former Special Operations Forces guy, actually. Former Team guy.”

  *

  The inside of the plane reminds her of a painting by Andrew Wyeth, one that hangs in a small museum only a few miles from her home. It’s the one place she took Jason each year at various holidays—Thanksgiving, Easter. It’s dedicated to nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, and Sara loved the romance and the realism of those periods. Her son loved it because many of the paintings in one of its galleries were of pirates, and pigs.

  The painting on her mind now is one of a woman looking out the window of a private jet. She is alone on the plane, and she is wearing a white coat. Her head is turned aw
ay, so you cannot tell how old she is; in fact, she might be a girl, not a woman, but would a girl travel alone on a private jet? Would anyone? She is looking out her window and through the clouds, almost as if she were looking down from heaven. And for the first time Sara thinks: Yeah, because in heaven everyone gets to ride on jets like this. But in the painting what the woman sees through the window isn’t angels; it’s a house, a little farmhouse. The painting at first appears to be a realistic portrait: a woman on a plane looks out the window. But if you looked more closely you could see the more fantastic, almost disturbing elements in it: the plane’s windows are sized like those of a vast ship, not like the traditionally and necessarily tiny rounds of an aircraft. And the chairs are enormous, as is the table between them. The painting owes as much to Alice in Wonderland as it does to Christina’s World.

  And Sara loved it for that mix: the harsh, cold American realism and the sly joy of a fantasy whose meaning was left to the imagination of the beholder. Sara had always looked at it as tragic, that this horrible thing was transporting the woman away from the place that she loved. Her view has not changed. Yes, the girl in the painting has her plane, but she is alone. And so she dreams about the house she sees below.

  Sara is embarrassed to be in such luxury but also slightly numb and slightly giddy from stress. There is a private bathroom at the back with monogrammed blue linen towels, and tiny soaps wrapped in pleated blue tissue paper. It’s all robin’s-egg blue, a color she loves. When she lifts up one of the soaps to use it, she notices that the china dish underneath has a Trident painted on it in gold.

  There is a girl dressed in blue who brings Sara a menu that includes filet mignon, smoked salmon, and cheeseburgers. The girl offers her a cocktail. The godfather falls asleep and encourages her to do the same. She has a drink, quickly, and starts on a second one. She cannot sleep—yet. This is her first trip abroad since not long after her son was born. David had insisted they get away, and leaving her little one with a friend, they’d taken off just the two of them for a quick Grand Tour: Rome, Paris, Vienna, Salzburg, London, Munich. And Normandy, so she could see the beaches. David had wanted her to understand what had occurred there. The climate at the time—it was summer—was welcoming. They stayed in an enormous château owned by another Yale classmate of David’s, where the owner kept his collection of hot air balloons running and staked to the lawn, ready to rise, his horses tacked up in the barn—just in case. She’d been afraid to go up in a balloon for a ride, and David had teased her for being so hesitant. He’d finally convinced her, and then they’d taken it together, with a guide. They flew close to the beaches and, at David’s insistence, right over the American cemetery. “They buried the brothers next to each other,” he’d said. “Thirty-eight sets.” He’d brought binoculars and stood behind her, holding them up to her eyes. As they’d looked down over the nine thousand plus headstones, he’d said in poor French, to the guide, “The Pacific Theater got no respect.” He was trying to make a joke.

  It was one of her more magical memories of being with him. Those weeks he had been generous and affectionate, and she even thought that he might propose marriage. He was on his home turf: travel and grandeur; good meals broken up only by learning or interesting introductions. He couldn’t trade those addictions for more mundane tasks, like negotiating the logistics of parenting or being nice to dull neighbors. He never did propose. His gift to her was a small set of memories. And a son. He was not capable of giving more than that.

  She had thought she’d have a life where she traveled more, at least more than along the northeastern train line. But there was never time. When she was younger, her parents dragged her everywhere. They lived lives unallied with any regimen or convention, and often they’d just decide, “It’s Tuesday, it’s Istanbul.” Travel to her in those years was the essence of stress and dislocation, an experience of missed flights and lost tickets and old arguments. And she hated it. Only later, spending the summer in London before the summer when she met David, would she see the lure of being in a foreign place, and the luxury of learning new things coupled with the luxury of anonymity and rootlessness.

  That summer she’d pretended to take classes but spent most afternoons at the National Portrait Gallery, and in the War Rooms. In the Portrait Gallery she liked to sit on the bench by the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, the one where the Virgin Queen stands astride the globe, the one onto which, in tiny script at the bottom, the artist had written the following phrases:

  She gives and does not expect

  In giving back, she increases

  She can, but does not, take revenge

  Yes, she would think. That’s the kind of girl I’m going to grow up to be. Within a year she’d be pregnant and in love with a man who could never commit and who, moreover, was in no position to support her.

  She liked the War Rooms not because she liked war but because she liked stories, and she was always so struck by how an entire government had just, as it were, gone to ground in that time of crisis, arranging dinner parties and strategy sessions several levels below English streets. She loved seeing Churchill’s bedside ashtrays overflowing with his fat cigar ash. Those speeches, so central to a nation’s psyche, were composed largely by a prime minister while in his bed.

  She had always planned to take Jason on trips, but then she never felt she could spend the money or take the time. Later, he never wanted her to spend the money, and he never had the time. She hated herself in some ways for the provincial path she had chosen for him. She had believed it would be more honest, but perhaps if she’d raised him somewhere else, they’d be in London right now, touring the Tate, talking about his work in the City, at a bank, with a desk, pushing important papers and assessing vast estate investments, or the price of engagement rings.

  Rather, now she is speeding toward a place where she does not speak the language, and while she knows the names of its various political parties and a bit of its history, she possesses no desire to know more. She wishes the place they were heading toward could be Athens, with Jason waiting in jeans and a map of the Acropolis. Why is her son in Jeddah? What was he doing? What did they do to him, and who are they? She is not thinking clearly. She is thinking about her grown man as a little boy and praying as any mother would, in a moment like this, that he is all right. She is remembering the story she used to read to him to help him fall asleep at night—because he struggled with sleep—the one he practically begged for night after night, all the way up until he was in junior high and too proud to beg: Jason and the Argonauts. Who was Jason, and what was the Golden Fleece? Whatever happened to Jason’s select team of highly trained seafaring heroes?

  Thinking on it now, the story seems to her more than anything a metaphor for the futility of sending sons out into the world to achieve. Wasn’t Jason sent after the fleece straight into sure slaughter? Yes: Jason was sent to recover the fleece by the king, his uncle, the king who had been told that Jason would overthrow his reign and overtake his kingdom. So the king sent the boy on a mission from which he was certain Jason would never return—an Odyssean voyage in reverse, where each chapter brought new trials in the shapes of women or beasts or angry gods and goddesses. Even in the presence of a team of “heroes,” Jason’s chances were slim. But he embraced them. He was clear that his right to the throne was secure. He had good men. And nothing, not even falling in love or the eventual destruction of that love, would keep him from fulfilling his mission. God, she thinks, it doesn’t sound like a bedtime story.

  Sara thinks about the boy, Sam, back at her house, now watching over things. What was it about Sam that had seduced her to trust him so completely and so quickly? She was usually slow to trust, critical of new people—reserved, even in the face of goodness. But with Sam she had felt immediately at ease, and it might have had less to do with his knowledge of her son than it did with what she knew he had been through. It was the eye. It was his casual happiness in spite of the truth of his history: this is what made h
im so appealing. It will be good to cook with Sam and Jason, she thinks. She will tease her son about the all the loves he has not shared with her. She thinks about his wedding, what she might say that night and what she might wear.

  “We’re taking off,” the godfather says. As he slips his cell phone into his breast pocket, she sees he has his shirts monogrammed now.

  “I can’t do my seatbelt,” she says, tearing up a bit.

  “Jesus, Sara, you don’t have to put on your seatbelt,” he says.

  “Help me,” she says. And he knows she’s not talking about the belt. He’ll hold her hand as the plane rises, sharply and abruptly, through the rain.

  *

  When she was almost five months pregnant, she had visited—for the first time—Arlington National Cemetery. She was back at Georgetown, if halfheartedly, and one of her teachers had given the class the assignment of visiting the Washington monument they were “least interested in,” with the aim of revising their view. An essay was required. The southerners in the class all chose Lincoln, cheekily; the northerners then piled on with plans for Jefferson. And the foreign students split up the remaining mall icons. Sara was alone in selecting Arlington. Typical. What kind of good American girl wouldn’t possess an interest in the war dead?

  The day she went, it was snowing. The climb uphill to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (formerly Robert E. Lee’s plantation, a fact she’d guessed most of the southern schools had skipped in their history books) wasn’t easy, and especially not easy in the snow four months pregnant. But the air wasn’t too cold, and in the late afternoon everything was quiet and still. Pin-dropping still. When she stopped to ask the guide at the information center the best approach to walking the grounds, the guard had said, “If you walk quickly, you’ll make the changing of the guard.” So she had skipped the eternal flame and gone straight to the top of the hill, to the vast marble domed structure with its Corinthian columns and its amphitheater. She had sat, breathless, only to be told to stand for the changing of the guard. The ceremony was introduced. On the tomb it says, Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God. The whole thing was as close as Sara had ever come to experiencing a formal religious service. But here, God (the object of worship) was never named. Taps was played.