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by Kristen Tsetsi

  ________

  She stares out the window and smokes. “Green-suiters,” she says. “That’s what they call them. Did you know that?”

  I tell her I didn’t.

  “Captain James Collins. That was his name, the one who talked.” Her ash falls on the floor. “It’s funny—I think he looked at me after a few words like I was going to stop him. But I wanted to hear the whole thing.”

  ________

  “The Secretary of the Army expressed his regret,” she says. She laughs and wipes her eyes. “I don’t even know who the secretary of the Army is, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know me. Or William. So what’s he have to be so fucking regretful about?”

  ________

  “James—Captain James Collins—asked if I was Denise White. I almost said no. I could have been you, if I’d wanted. Could have sent him away. Anyone could have left your address on my door. I can’t believe he actually came, you know? I didn’t think they’d actually come.” She slides her glass around on the table. “But then he asked if I was the wife of Chief Warrant Officer William H. White.” She picks at her finger until a line of blood spreads around the base of her nail.

  ________

  “I can’t leave,” she says. “I just can’t. I don’t know where I’ll go. Or do I? What if I know exactly where I’ll go?”

  “You can stay,” I tell her. I bring out a pillow.

  ________

  “I didn’t want it to happen, Mia. Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you.”

  ________

  “He wasn’t shot down,” she says. “Somehow, that’s worse, isn’t it? Or is it better? I don’t know.”

  I ask her what happened.

  “That was the only thing I asked them. How did it happen?” She brings her empty glass to the kitchen and says, “Wires. They said he hit some wires.” She comes back out. “He always said he was such a good pilot. Do you think maybe they made a mistake? Maybe it wasn’t even him.”

  I shouldn’t say it, but I do. I say, “Maybe.”

  ________

  “He was so sweet,” she says, and grimaces on ‘sweet.’ “It’s a dumb word, but you know what I mean. He didn’t deserve it.” She crushes her fifteenth cigarette in the ashtray. “I didn’t deserve him.” She brushes her hair off her face, gently at first, absently, but then with harsh yanks.

  I say, “I’m sure you were a wonderful wife.”

  She looks at me while lighting another cigarette. She’s smoked them so constantly that imagining the taste of yet another pull on a filter almost makes me gag.

  “I mean, as far as he knows. And that’s what’s important.”

  “Shut up, Mia. Okay?”

  ________

  “William was good to me. He was a good husband. A good—a great—friend.”

  “He knew you loved him,” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says. “But what if he didn’t?”

  ________

  Denise cries. She says, “It happened at midnight, his time. Do you know what I was doing at three o’clock yesterday?”

  I don’t ask.

  She doesn’t say.

  I sit beside her with my hand on top of hers.

  “I’m going to hell,” she says.

  ________

  Strands of hair cling to her cheek. I pull the blanket to her shoulders even though it’s not cold, and I start to pick up Chancey from behind her legs. She makes a noise, then mumbles without opening her eyes, “Leave him,” and tucks her fingers under his chin.

  I watch her from the chair, watch the moon’s shadows roll over her face.

  MAY 6, TUESDAY

  “I’ll be leaving soon,” Denise says, “but when I come back we’ll do something, okay?”

  I turn up the volume on the phone. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” she says. “You know.” She pauses and takes a breath. A moment passes. I watch a cat outside tug at a low-hanging pair of pants on the clothesline. She says, “I just wanted you to know I’d be gone so you wouldn’t worry if you called and didn’t get an answer.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I say. “I just thought you’d have so much going on, you know. And I didn’t want to—I didn’t know what to say, and I thought—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Take care of yourself,” I say. “And tell his mom—tell her that Jake is sorry. Or something.”

  “I will.”

  I didn’t know William very well, and so I don’t know what to say. He was Jake’s friend. “He liked the chicken joke,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The chicken joke. Remember? He told it twice that night, after the ball. He thought no one appreciated the humor, and the second time he told it, we all thought about it. And we all laughed. Remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He was funny. Or—Denise, I’m sorry.”

  “Listen—um—I gave Brian your address because I left my lighter at your house, the silver one with the—”

  “I found it.” With the initials engraved on the back. W.W.

  “So, he’ll stop by sometime in the next few days and get it so I can take it with me. I would do it myself, but he lives just a few blocks from you—did you know?—and…anyway. If you have to go somewhere and he hasn’t come by, yet, maybe you can just put it in an envelope with his name on it and tape it to your door. His name is spelled with an ‘i’. ‘B-R-I—”

  “I know how to spell Brian.”

  “Right. I know.” She pauses. Takes a breath.

  “I’m sorry. That was unnecess—”

  “It’s over,” she says. “So you know.”

  I say nothing.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you. It’s none of my—”

  “Whatever, Mia. Okay? I’m telling you. It’s over. I just wanted you to know.”

  ________

  May 6

  Jake,

  I’m sorry. About William. Were you there? Did you see it?

  Dumb question. How could you have, unless you were there?

  Was there a lot of blood, and was it fast? I shouldn’t ask these things, I know, but they’re what I’m thinking. I hope it was fast.

  Poor William.

  How could he have been alive last week and be dead this week?

  I’m back to watching the news, now. I stopped for a while. Did I tell you? It’s never good, so I stopped. But now, maybe it’s useful. For something. I have it on, never turn it off. Never again, because what if I miss you?

  Please be alive next week. Please be alive, stay alive, do whatever it takes because I can’t stand to think of Denise at William’s funeral and I wouldn’t know what to do with your clothes and your aftershave. But that’s not what I mean at all.

  Denise was here when they came. Were you not flying with him? Were you with him, but you survived? What happens to a helicopter when it flies into wires? Is it an electrical fire, or is there tangling? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t wonder. It doesn’t matter what happens except what happens.

  I was there when you called, but I missed you. Again, I missed you. But I heard your voice and thank you, thank you for calling. They came when you called. Denise left a note on her door, and they came to our place looking for her. I never thought they would come to our place and they did.

  Did you get my letter? The one after the one about your mom and your sister? I’m sorry. For all of it. For what I said about all that.

  Don’t die. Don’t die.

  Too much unresolved. Don’t die. Denise didn’t even see it coming. There was something on the news and she was fine and she said she knew you two were okay. But she was wrong. Do you see? She was wrong, even though she was so sure she was right.

  I’m not sure of anything, anymore. I can’t be, can I? Not that I ever was. But, sometimes, I would think that if I just knew you’d be okay, you would be. But it’s not true.

  What do I do now?

  No. Don’t
worry. These are just my thoughts today.

  Everything will be fine tomorrow.

  I love you I love you I love you. I do.

  Mia

  Stifling top-floor humidity cools, thins, on the way down the stairs. A thick and steady wind comes through the hallway window high on the wall, and for a moment I stand there, letting the breeze—though warm—chill the sweat and lift the heat from my skin before I move on, down to the ground floor.

  My mailbox is empty, but the white corner of an envelope sticks out from behind the brass door of number one’s box, the one beside mine. It’s been such a long time since there’s been a letter for me that there could—there must—be a mistake. The mailman might have accidentally left my letter in the wrong box, for example. Or he might have had a substitute, someone new who didn’t care about the route or about the people waiting for important mail and who just wanted to get the day over with.

  Unlike the corner of a business envelope, this one, I notice as I tug at it, has none of the black bar code lines near the bottom edge, and nothing on it crinkles the way an address window would crinkle. The paper tears a little with the yanking, snags on some sharp imperfection in the thin brass, but it’s out almost far enough for me to see the address and the handwriting. Black is all I’m getting, now, just the bottom curve of an ‘s’ in the town name and the points making up the bottom of ‘TN.’ I push it back inside the box, bit by bit, holding the smallest wedge of corner so I can slide it up higher, maybe bypass that—

  The door opens and I let go, step back and examine my own envelope to make sure the address is correct, the stamp right-side up.

  Brian, windblown and sweating, smiles with white, square teeth.

  “Good timing,” he says.

  His loose clothes, khaki pants and white shirt, cling to his sweaty skin. But I don’t notice. His attractiveness is obvious. Uninteresting.

  I tell him I was just checking the mail.

  “Ah. As you were.”

  I reach up to put my letter in the bin, which is not a bin at all, but a thin, plastic bookend, its flat bracing ledge tucked between the wall and the tops of the mailboxes.

  The landing is small, and when I turn, Brian’s body blocks the stairway. “Excuse me.”

  He steps aside. “Denise wants me to pick up her lighter.”

  “It’s upstairs. You can come with me, if you want. Or you can stay down here.”

  He waits in the kitchen while I lift cushions and rug corners. At the desk, I sit down and move stacks of paper and slide the lamp to the side. It leaves a clean path in the dust.

  He bends around the corner. “Find it?”

  “Not yet.” I spin to face him and cross my legs.

  He steps into the room and leans against the door frame and puts his hands in his pockets. “Do you think you might keep looking for it?”

  “I will. I’m thinking. I could swear I just saw it, and I’m trying to remember where.”

  He waits, looks at the muted commercial on the television, and then behind me. “Is that your Christmas tree?”

  “So,” I say, “do you think it’ll be over soon, then?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he says, “but Christmas has been over for a couple of months, now.”

  “I mean the war.”

  “The war?”

  “It’s almost over, don’t you think? News has been good. Considering.”

  “I don’t know.” His fingers move in his pockets and there is clicking, clinking.

  “You must know something. You’re one of them, aren’t you? In a way, anyway.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to change a country, no matter how pretty the pictures they give us. We see what they want us to see.”

  “But, we’re in control, now. We have the control. Maybe it’ll be over in a month.”

  “Maybe,” he says. He runs his hand over his head, through hair thick with waves. It hides his fingers. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll be fine.”

  “William wasn’t.”

  William wasn’t. Wasn’t.

  That William is dead…William is dead, dead, dead…does not seem real, or likely, or probable. They say, yes, on the news, that people are being killed. Every day, almost, they say someone dies, but surely they’re not actually being killed.

  William is not really dead.

  “True,” he says, “but what are the chances of both of them not making it back?”

  “That doesn’t work.”

  “I guess it doesn’t.”

  He lifts his chin, looks across the room and out the window. “Still,” he says, “you’ll get nowhere assuming the worst every day.”

  I swivel in the chair, side to side, and then spin. “No,” I say, “but it’s safe,” and I spin, pulling my legs to my chest, and spin, using the desk to push me along. I think of Superman, circling the Earth fist forward, around, around, fast enough to reverse the rotation and reverse time and arrive with just moments to save Lois. I close my eyes and try for the second week of February, the day before he came home with the news. We would fill the gas tank and load the cat and drive the scenic routes to Canada or Mexico.

  Brian says, “What are you doing?” but I don’t answer, just spin, the chair knocking at its base under my unbalanced weight, and it is when the spinning starts to feel like sitting stationary—though I knew it before, of course—that it comes. Future as fact rather than as a possibility with options on top of options.

  We would never have made it.

  We’d never have gotten out of the state, because (I stop pushing, open my eyes and watch the floor spiral) Jake would never have left with me.

  The chair slows, then stops, and I am dizzy and sick. I rest my head on the desk and he asks if I’m okay.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little strange,” I say, “that she sent you to pick up something of her dead husband’s?”

  “Proximity. That’s all it is.”

  Sitting straight helps level my head, but he still sways some where he stands. “Why did you say yes?”

  “Pathetically devoted. By the way, I really have to get the lighter to her before she goes tomorrow, so if you—”

  “I’ll find it. I just have to remember where it is.”

  “Did I come at a bad time? You seem…troubled.”

  His hair is too long. Jake has seen hair shorter than that and has bent to whisper in my ear, “That’s not regulation.” (I feel his breath, thinking of it now.)

  “Not a bad time.” William’s lighter presses against the crease of my upper, inner thigh, through my pocket. I adjust it.

  “Well,” he says. “I suppose I can wait a bit.”

  I stand up to look behind the computer monitor, twisting the screen, even. “What did you think? When you heard, I mean.” I sit back down.

  “About William?”

  “What else?”

  He sighs and again runs his fingers though his hair, then pulls a brown box from his shirt pocket. “May I?”

  “You may.”

  “I’m quitting when I’m thirty-five,” he says. He smiles. “And I don’t know why I told you that.” He tilts his head while lighting, then slips the matchbook back into his khakis. “I don’t mean to be impatient,” he says, “but the sooner you find the lighter, the sooner I can go to—I can get it to Denise.” The sun has shifted behind the blinds and shines in his eyes. He squints, shields them. “You know how you women are about our things.” He turns to the TV and it’s dust, dust and sun.

  “Especially once you’re dead.”

  “I would imagine, especially then.”

  I turn up the sound, but there’s nothing new, today, just a replay. A reel from early April. Citizens—miles, towns from Jake—push through the square like a water surge and surround the stories-tall fallen statue. A boy, nine, maybe ten, smacks it with a shoe he’s taken off and grips tightly in his hand, and his rage—it should be impossible in someone so young�
�is mirrored in those around him, their cheers filled with triumph, resentment. The anchors smile. It’s a good day, still, looting aside. We must remember that, they say.

  Brian watches with an eyebrow raised.

  I open a drawer and move pens around, pick up a linked string of paperclips and unhook them one by one. “Denise, for example. All she has left of William is whatever he left behind. Imagine having only that to hold onto.”

  He shrugs. “I—”

  “You can’t imagine, can you?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can’t. You haven’t been over at all, yet, have you? I never thought it was possible for one person to have so much luck.”

  Brian plucks a piece of tobacco from his tongue, looks at it, and takes it into the kitchen. He runs the water, comes back out, and stands where he was before, again shading squinted eyes until he notices the sun has moved. He drops his hand. “You think I’ve somehow, what, manipulated the system to keep myself out of the war?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I’m sure it is, to some degree.”

  The paperclips unstrung and loose, I return them to the drawer and close it. “And have you?”

  He looks at me while see-sawing his cigar between his fingers. “To some degree.”

  “Well,” I say, and it happens so quickly—my getting up, my walking over—that I am surprised by the hot, itching sting of his face on my palm. He yanks my wrist from where it hangs in the air—just beside his cheek, floating—and pushes me away. There should not be tears—this is not a time for tears—but I must have them, because once he seems sure I won’t try to hit him again, he goes into the kitchen and comes back with a paper towel and uses it to wipe my face.