The Hole We're In

by Gabrielle Zevin

  Golf.

  “When will I know the outcome of this investigation?” she asked.

  Hotel.

  “We’ll call you,” said the man on the line.

  Indigo.

  She hung up the telephone.

  Juliet.

  Then she picked it up again.

  Kilo.

  Then, she walked out back and threw the phone into the hole in the yard.

  Then she returned inside.

  But she needed to make a call.

  So she went back outside, where she lowered herself into the hole to retrieve the phone.

  It was harder coming out than going in, but she was strong and managed.

  Then she went back inside, plugged in the phone, and called the church.

  “Buckstop Church of Sabbath Day Adventists. Minister Roger Pomeroy’s office,” was how her father’s secretary answered the phone.

  “Is the pastor in? I mean, could I speak to him?”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  It was an obvious enough question, but it baffled her. She didn’t want to say who it was. She didn’t want to have to ask, “Do you reckon the pastor has a moment for his estranged daughter?” And if he wasn’t in anyway, she didn’t want to leave a message and have the whole church speculating on what Pastor Dad’s bad daughter wanted now. And she didn’t want to wait for him to call her back. So instead, she asked what time his afternoon office hours were.

  The secretary was out when Patsy arrived, and her father’s office was empty. Patsy went in anyway and sat down. She looked at the pictures on her father’s desk. An old photograph of her mother from when she was young and skinny and frame-worthy. The three kids from when they were little and pure-hearted. Patsy looked at the girl she had been and wanted to black her face out. Or, at the very least, draw a mustache and devil horns on her.

  When her father arrived, he didn’t acknowledge her right away. It was a sort of game with him, one she’d seen him play many times. He’d talk to a person when he was ready to talk to the person and not a moment before.

  He took off his jacket and loosened his tie. Then he checked his e-mail. Then he watered a snake plant on his windowsill that had dust on it like it hadn’t been touched in months. Luckily, it was the kind of plant that required minimal attention.

  Finally, he sat down. He positioned himself right at the center of the desk, then rolled his chair back about a foot. He pushed up the sleeves of his white dress shirt as if he were saying, I’m ready to get my hands dirty now.

  “Well,” he said, a little laugh in his voice, like that well was some kind of great in-joke between them. “Well,” he repeated, though she hadn’t found it all that clever the first time around. “Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting to see you at church.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I only went to see Minnie’s play. She was good.”

  “She’s a good girl,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I mean she was good in the play. A good actor, don’t you think?”

  “Good enough for church,” he said.

  The bastard just couldn’t concede the point, she thought.

  Her father nodded as if to indicate that the pleasantries portion of the conversation was over. “How can I help you?”

  My whole life, she thought, this man has never raised a finger to help me. “I want the money Grandma left me to use for school.”

  “Will you be attending an Adventist college?” he asked.

  She told him she wouldn’t, that nothing had changed on that front, that she’d be finishing her studies at Chattanooga.

  “We been through this before, darlin’. Your grandma wanted you to use that money to go to an Adventist school.”

  “No, she didn’t. She only said it was for my Christian education, and seems to me I could still be getting that at a regular college.”

  He smiled but said nothing.

  “Honestly, I don’t want to have to do this... I don’t want to have to make any trouble, but I’ll sue for it if I have to,” she said. “Grandma wrote that will when she was screw-loosed and senile, and she only added the Christian part in at the end... What she meant and the circumstances, they’re...” She searched for the word.

  “Contestable?” He shook his head in a fatherly and ministerly expression of extreme disappointment. “You do what you have to do, Patricia.” He looked her in the eye, and she felt transparent and weak. He knew she wouldn’t sue. “Thought Uncle Sam would be taking care of you anyhow,” he said.

  “The GI bill doesn’t pay for everything, Dad!” She had considered lying, but she thought maybe he’d take pity on her and just give her the money if she admitted there were some problems with her bonus and the military in general. Her father liked to think he was saving people. So she told him how things stood. He seemed to listen. In any case, he nodded a lot, which gave her hope. At the end of her woeful story, she added, “And if you really think Grandma wouldn’t want me to have that money for secular college... well, I’d even be sure to pay you back once my bonus comes through, all right, Dad?”

  He laughed. “Well, Patsy, you raise some... points,” he said. “I’m gonna have to pray on it.”

  She nodded. “Do you mean right now? ’Cause I’m just wondering how long praying on it will take.”

  He said he didn’t know how long it would take—God was on his own schedule after all—but based on experience, God’s schedule usually took no more than a week.

  Her father’s secretary knocked on the door. “Roger, do you have a moment?”

  “For you, Megan, I’ve got all the time in the world,” Roger said, his voice slick and bright. He didn’t bother talking to Patsy that way. She had been immune to his charms for some time and was frankly amazed they worked on anyone.

  The secretary stuck her head inside the office. Patsy had never seen her before. She was younger than Patsy, barely out of high school, and clearly had no idea who Patsy was. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had company,” the secretary said a bit jealously.

  “We’re all finished here.” He waved his hand to dismiss his daughter, and Patsy let herself be dismissed.

  On the walk back, she let herself best-case it. Maybe Roger would pray on it, and God would tell him to give her the money. And maybe everything would work out with Uncle Sam. And maybe even Magnum’s cupcake contest would be a success. And maybe the unborn inside her would somehow work itself out, too... She didn’t know how yet.

  When she got home, the phone was ringing. She picked up the receiver, hoping to hear from either God (via Roger) or Uncle Sam.

  “Patricia French?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Who wants to know?”

  She said she was the fiancée of that buddy of Patsy’s whose face had been blown off. Buddy was in the VA hospital in Memphis, having some surgery on what was left of his visage. The fiancée thought it’d be “a real morale boost” to have some of his old friends visit. Not surprisingly, Buddy was pretty depressed about things.

  “What kind of surgery?”

  “Oh, nothing that major!” she said. Her punctuation mark of choice was the exclamation point, which made her sound like a cheerleader. Patsy was sure Buddy had shown her a picture of his fiancée, but she couldn’t remember what the woman looked like. “They’re taking some bone out of his hip and trying to graft it to his face so they can make him a new nose.”

  “Sounds kind of major,” Patsy said.

  “Not compared to what he’s been through,” Buddy’s fiancée said. The woman had lost a bit of the cheer in her voice, but then it was back. “Anyhow, he heard you were in Tennessee, and he perked right up at the thought!”

  “I’m real sorry,” Patsy said. “I just don’t know if I’ll be able to make it this week. I’d come if I could, but a lot of things have sort of gone to hell on me here, and—”

  “Please, Patsy. Do you mind if I call you Patsy? Please. He’s been so low... I think
it would help. I really think it would.”

  At that moment, Patsy didn’t feel like feeling sorry for anyone but herself. Which was to say, she didn’t exactly feel like driving all the way to Memphis and spending a million dollars she didn’t have on gas just so she could see what was left of Buddy. But she agreed to go the next day. He had been her first real friend in the service, and she knew he would do the same for her. He’s one of us, she thought.

  She dropped her husband at work and then drove the three hundred miles to Memphis. She thought about other drives she had taken, which was something she always tended to do when driving long distances. It was strange, in a way, because she never felt like she was on the drive she was on. She was always on some other road, some road in her head.

  The fiancée met her in the lobby of the hospital. “Patsy,” she said. “I’m so glad you made it. How are you?” She did look like a cheerleader. She was curvy and compact and blonde-haired and ponytailed. She looked like she was built to be on the top of gymnastic pyramids and in football players’ arms. She looks like me, Patsy thought. What I used to look like.

  A doctor stopped the fiancée just as they were about to enter Buddy’s room. Patsy stopped to wait for her, but she waved Patsy ahead. “He’s waiting for you.”

  There were two patients in Buddy’s room, and they were both, Patsy thought, pretty FUBAR. The one near the window had his head entirely wrapped in bandages, and he seemed to be watching television, though she couldn’t entirely tell—he may have just been pointed in that direction. The guy near the door didn’t have any bandages, but he didn’t really have a face either. Guy number two was sleeping. He didn’t have ears or a nose. He did however have a balloon on the top of his neck, probably to generate extra skin for an unimaginably ecruciating future procedure. He had the kind of injuries that made Patsy want to get down on her knees and thank the Lord it wasn’t her.

  She concluded that Buddy must be the bandaged guy since the fiancée had mentioned him getting the bone grafted to his face, so she went over to the bed by the window.

  “Hey, Buddy, how you doing?” Patsy asked.

  Buddy didn’t really reply. He just kind of grunted and nodded with what Patsy took to be enthusiasm.

  It was depressing that her pal couldn’t really talk. She tried to remind herself of the guy under all those bandages who’d been a damned good friend to her, and of other similarly unhelpful clichés.

  “I’m sure you’ll be talking again soon,” she said.

  The guy shook his head vigorously.

  She had heard that when you met someone who’d had a stroke or some other head trauma, you should just keep talking naturally. She tried to do that, though she didn’t find it to be particularly natural to engage in such a one-sided conversation. “S’pose you heard about me leaving the military,” she said.

  Buddy shook his head.

  “Yeah, it was kind of abrupt, to tell the truth. I—I can’t really explain it. I guess I just got fed up with being Over There.”

  Buddy cocked his head at her.

  “Come on, Buddy, don’t look at me that way.”

  Buddy cocked his head the other way.

  “Aw man, you know me too well. I could never lie to you.” She looked around the room and lowered her voice. “OK, here’s the thing. You might have known I was sleeping with Smartie. Just like one or two times, that’s it.”

  Buddy looked at her.

  “Yeah, I know he was engaged! I’m married, you know. I’m not proud of what I done, but a girl gets lonely every now and again.”

  Buddy turned his head toward the window.

  “So, I got pregnant.”

  Buddy shook his head.

  “Yeah, I really don’t know what I’m going to do about that either, but thanks for judging. And they were gonna put me on administrative detail. They were gonna transfer me to Bragg or I don’t know where. And I got super depressed just thinking about it. Like, I’d served all this time, and you know me...”

  Buddy shook his head again.

  “Come on, you know me. I’m eff’n fierce. I wasn’t some shit-bag private dickless who was always crying and whining and sleeping with people. OK, except with Smartie, but that was just like two or three times. I wasn’t, like, Queen for a Year. I wasn’t an eff’n Desert Fox. I was tough. I hated the thought of everyone thinking I was some knocked-up loser at Bragg, having a kid that clearly weren’t my husband’s. So, I got my rifle. And I sat down on my bed in the barracks. And I raised the gun. Now, I just have to mention that, at this point, I wasn’t really thinking straight. Like, you’d just gotten shipped home, and I’d been Over There for like eleven months, and I was knocked up to boot, so hormones might have come into play, I’m no expert. But for the record, my plan had never been to kill my—”

  Enter Buddy’s fiancée. “Hey, Johnny boy,” she said, “how you doing today?”

  Who the fuck is Johnny boy?

  “Patsy,” the fiancée said gently, “this is Buddy’s roommate, PFC Jonathan Garcia. Buddy’s over there.” She pointed to the man by the door, the sleeping guy with the balloon animal in his neck. “Johnny boy can’t talk just yet, but we’re hoping he’s gonna come around real soon.”

  For a second, Patsy worried that she had just told her entire life story to man she didn’t even know. She comforted herself with the fact that he was mute and, thus, unlikely to tell tales.

  The fiancée walked over to Buddy’s bed, and she shook him awake. “Buddy, you got a visitor.” In retrospect, it should have been obvious that this man, and not the bandaged man by the window, was Buddy. This man’s hands were black; the other man’s were white.

  “By the way,” Buddy’s fiancée whispered to Patsy, “he can’t really see you right on. He’s kind of gotta look at you peripherally, but don’t let that bother you.”

  Patsy sat down sidewise, so that Buddy wouldn’t have to turn his head. “Hey, Buddy!” she said. Her voice sounded fake and tinny, like she was leaving a message for someone.

  “Hey there, SweeTart.” That’s what they had called her over there because she was always eating SweeTarts. That was the only candy that was plentiful, and as a vegetarian, she could rarely find enough real food. Patsy’s vegetarianism was not political, spiritual, familial, or otherwise. The fact was, having never eaten meat, her stomach had not acquired the knack of digesting it. She had complained about the lack of vegetarian options to her CO, who had responded that she ought to just start eating meat. Out of desperation/near starvation, she tried that tack for several days before being struck by an inevitable, though truly epic, case of diarrhea and deciding that malnutrition from a diet consisting of SweeTarts would be a preferable way to die.

  “How you been, girl?” Buddy asked. Even though he didn’t have much in the way of lips, his voice hadn’t changed noticeably to her ear. And, as opposed to Fake Buddy by the window, at least Real Buddy had retained the power of speech.

  The fiancée said, “You’re just so happy to see Patsy, I can tell. You’re like grinning ear to ear.”

  Patsy didn’t know how the fiancée had determined this. The only expressions she could discern were injured and burned.

  “I’ll just leave you two alone,” the fiancée said.

  Patsy was about to tell her that that wasn’t necessary, but the woman was already out the door.

  “So, how you been?” Patsy asked.

  “Ain’t it obvious?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Crap,” he said with a laugh. Then he launched into a monologue about his health troubles. How he’d been in and out of the hospital for the last year. How he’d had some raging bacterial infection that you get from the dirt over there. How no one could even tell he was black anymore, his skin was so scorched and cankered. How no one would really talk to him or look at him either. How he scared his nieces and nephews. How he wouldn’t have gotten through it if not for his fiancée. She might look like Barbie, but her head was screwed on tight.

/>   And here Patsy thought he might have started to cry, though that was hard for her to tell. His eyes had a strange blue, glassy look anyway, and he might just have been sweating from the exertion of narrative. “The wedding’s in April,” he said. “You got to be one of my groomsmen, Patsy.”

  “Aren’t groomsmen supposed to be men?” she asked.

  “Damn, SweeTart. You’re an honorary man, you know that!”

  She had always been proud of the fact that her best friends from the service were guys, that no one ever said she was some weak, stupid girl. She agreed to be his groomsman. “If that’s what you really want,” she said.

  The fiancée walked Patsy back to her car. “Thanks so much for coming.”

  “Weren’t no bother.”

  “So, we’ll see you at the wedding, right?”

  Patsy nodded. “Say, did you used to be a cheerleader?”

  “Yeah, in high school.”

  “Me, too,” Patsy said. “Till they dropped me on my head.”

  FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, Patsy was in a reflective mood during the three-hundred-mile trip back to Buckstop.

  Her time in the sandbox had sometimes seemed like one long truck ride. She could barely remember anything else except those trucks. She shared the truck with Buddy before he got himself blown up on Airport Road. And when she wasn’t driving with Buddy, she drove with Smartie.

  As a rule, she tried not to think about Smartie—she knew nothing good could come of it—but it was a long drive back to Buckstop, and so she permitted herself this exception.

  He had made fun of her for listening to Britney Spears on her iPod and for having an iPod at all when it would have been a lot smarter to have something that took Duracells. But when he wasn’t making fun of her, they had actually talked about things. He had wanted to know all about her vegetarianism, and he, in turn, had confided to her how the men under him didn’t much like him. They were suspicious of him. He assumed that was because of his background. He’d gone to West Point and his uncle was a representative from Kentucky, but he was no elitist. And one time, he got her these vegetarian MREs because they were hard to come by. And he also taught her how to play chess. He had a little magnetic set in a zippered case. He used to make fun of her because she never liked to see the knight go down even if it meant sacrificing the queen and the king. “That’s no way to play, SweeTart,” he said, but he always got all crinkly around the eyes when he said it. She didn’t really care about winning, she just liked the horse. And, well, that time in the truck with Smartie was sort of the happiest she ever was. Not just in Iraq, either. It was sort of the happiest she had ever been in her entire life. She knew that was a pretty pathetic state of things, but it was the truth. What she had said to Fake Buddy about sleeping with Smartie just because she’d been lonely? That had been a lie.