by E. L. Carter
THE RUNNING WAR
E. L. CARTER
Copyright © 2017 by E. L. Carter
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, E. L., author.
The running war / E. L. Carter.
First edition. Sag Harbor, NY : Permanent Press, [2017]
eISBN 978-1-57962-510-8
1. Psychic trauma—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. 4. Mystery fiction. 5. War stories.
PS3603.A776985 R86 2017
813'.6—dc23
2017014297
Printed in the United States of America
For my mother, who showed me love can accomplish anything
BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005
At first I can see nothing but the desert, patterned with drainages. Brown land, rock, and wind: the etched lines must tell its fortune, and maybe mine. I only wish I were a palmist, not a stupid American hurtling through the air above a map full of symbols I can’t translate. I’m grateful for the roar of the engine outside my window, which prevents conversation. The man next to me has an Arabic newspaper strewn across the lap of his dark suit. I wish I had something distracting in my lap, something more than a child’s toy. But that’s what I have, a plastic butterfly with some kind of synthetic fabric for wings, the beads held on with glue-gunned drops that smeared before they dried. It was an afterthought, and it didn’t occur to me until I was packing that the thing would disintegrate in my luggage. The only option was to hold it like a baby the whole way.
I brought it because of Kris. I want something that connects me with Kris.
I turn it over in my hands, then hold it up against the plastic window and press it toward the desert below. I don’t really want to be here, but if I can keep my hands busy, let the butterfly do the flying, I think I might be able to stay in my seat and keep my seat belt fastened all the way into Baghdad.
Out of the desert emerge almost-careful rectangles of farmland. They grow wider as we descend, and then vanish in the face of the city: not suburban sprawl like an American city, just a sudden demarcation between fields and cemented blocks. Through the center runs a wild scribble of river, nothing about it relenting to right angles or measured blocks. The river won’t let Baghdad square off. It thrusts itself through the imposition of order, the creator still.
Just as I glimpse the airport, the plane begins to plummet so fast that my neighbor’s newspapers float up in the air like a cloud of crumpled butterflies. We circle around. One minute I see sky, and the next, the patchwork of fields and the airport road. The pilot seems to think we need to drill ourselves down into the earth. Someone told me something about this being the part where you might get shot out of the sky, but I didn’t pay attention, and right now I’m glad to not know. The hijab I’m supposed to wear has fallen back around my neck, and it’s a stupid situation really, because when I wear it people speak to me in Arabic, of which I know less than ten words, and I should have checked out one of those learn-a-language courses from the library—but it happened so fast, the whole thing—and now I’m descending into a foreign city, a city at war, with nothing but a few names scribbled in a notebook, a visa, and the knowledge, half-forgotten somewhere changing planes in London or Dubai, that I have to do this, I’ve been flying at 500 miles per hour toward my destiny, toward the only action I can think to take that originates in my heart.
NEW JERSEY—MARCH 2005
Kris and I used to chase butterflies down to this train station, gliding swallowtails or quick-flitting whites. We’d tromp right through people’s yards, into and out of woods, over the river, and along fences all the way to the wildflowers by the tracks, brown-eyed Susans and asters, or to the clusters of phlox between the parking lot and the station. Of course being led by butterflies was only the beginning, because what kid with a penchant for running wouldn’t want to get all the way to New York?
I was always leaving, always seeing the station from the perspective of a train headed east, my head turned for one last glance. Tonight when I climb down the three steel steps and past the yellow line, I face a closed-up station and the automatic ticket machines out back. I can still see the frame of the window where I bought my passage when I was a kid. The trees have grown up like me, each in its place around the perimeter of the station, like me barren and brittle with a spark inside.
When they were saplings with gnarled feet and too many hands to count, Kris and I hid among them. We were too young then to travel, and though we ran away this far, some instinct for survival kept us undercover while commuters climbed on and off the train. We would sit there for what seemed like hours, watching the businessmen, trying to stay invisible, and waiting for our chance to run. Kris would whisper too loud, some giveaway like “I’m hungry.” I would elbow him. Didn’t he know trees only sigh?
Mom was always so mad when she found us at the station. I think I understand better now how fear manifests itself as anger. She would swat at me through the tree branches, grunting “Madeline—come—here—now,” while they tried to protect me with little scratches. With her free hand, she would pull Kris out, right through all those arms and into hers.
Tonight I have only myself to wrestle. I will follow the route of our childhood adventures, in reverse this time. I will turn toward home. I walk out of the parking lot, onto the dark street, and turn left up the hill. In town the houses sit close to the road, some of them with porch lights on, some dark, some lit from one window. As I move on, the side of the road changes. A thin strip of grass pressed against cement becomes dirt, ditches, tangles of dormant plant matter that stretch away out of sight. Some of the driveways have gateposts, but most just trail off, a grey stripe disappearing into the woods, a swath through the trees and into the flat face of the dark.
I go up the hill, panting a little bit but keeping up the pace. At the place where the hill begins to crest, I turn my head and listen.
At first all that comes is the thud of my sneakers, but then it starts to emerge out of the void before me—the little frogs croaking in harmony, a slow, slow rhythm that could be overlaid with a million different counter-rhythms by a busy mind. Their time signature never changes. The song of the frogs signals my turn, the sound I have followed to the left, onto the next road, for as long as I can remember. In the five days since Kris died, the world has felt like looking down into their pond in midsummer. I can’t see my own reflection and below the scum layer who knows what’s breeding, what’s eating what, a fierce biology that masks itself in green slime. It means something to believe in simplicity. To walk in 4/4 time.
Once I was driving at night somewhere in the west, running as usual, lighting a lover on fire like a flare to guide my way. It was one of those places with a big sky and dry land that buckles and furrows in places, revealing millions of years of changes, ancient oceans and rivers, the formation of mountains, the action of the wind and the rain. I could see through time so well because the moon was full that night, and it painted the scene with its muted silver.
The moon’s version of the world suits me. A landscape of shadows, silhouettes, and shapes in the corner of your eye. A hidden world or an unsure eye leaves just enough room for the truth—which is what we don’t know, can’t know—to emerge. That was what I saw. The moon’s order, the moon’s story of evolution. And then, because reality is always changing, the silver sky began to tur
n blue, and the silver rocks, the silver grasses, the silver layers of earth, all began to change not just in color but in shape as well, until I couldn’t tell the story I’d just learned at all. Right at the farthest reach of my vision the sun made its grand entrance, flooding the scene with familiarity, and at exactly the same time the moon began to disappear in my rearview mirror. I pulled the car over and got out, the cold of the morning washing over me like water, dry red stones splayed under my feet.
The earth stood perfectly still exactly at this moment of great change. I was not running away or toward. And then the sun rose, its rays licked my face like an eager dog, and the moon was gone over the other hills.
I’m trying to remember what it felt like to acknowledge an order in the universe that even I had no power to destroy, an order that not even death could cut away. Tonight on the road the moon is new, gone already. I know it will come back again but I don’t know when—right now I think it could take a very long time. I’m at the corner where the frogs are, invisible in the dark but their song clear and precise: quarter note, rest, quarter note, rest. Maybe they can’t steady me, but I follow the turn anyway.
A BOMB went off. The story on record is that it was somewhere on the west side of Baghdad, but in truth it happened here, on a dead-end street in western New Jersey. It was just like Kris described. You see the dust blowing across the road, picking up litter as it goes. You see a berm, and then like flipping a light switch, nothing is the same. The long descending whistle never comes. Fear was there, just like always, comfortable fear. Now the fear is real, the ground is shaking, the familiar ground has opened like a pair of jaws.
This kind of bomb is designed to know no boundaries. Its makers don’t differentiate friend from enemy, soldier from civilian, Asia from North America. You can’t know what it will blast apart.
The blast has shattered everything and reorganized itself into this point, simple frog song, this walk. I’m coming home. Kris was here for the six months since a bomb went off in Baghdad. I was not. And now he is dead. And he has left me a note. I’m in the driveway, and it’s so dark I’m going by feel. You can’t walk one step ahead or behind or to the side when you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You have to listen to your footsteps, to the crunch of gravel and the rustle that means the edge, last year’s fallen leaves.
When I enter the kitchen, the storm door swings shut behind me with a definite thwack. Light harsh on my eyes, but in reality a soft yellow comes from the hanging glass lamp, soft on the pockmarked wooden table, on the stone hearth and the pine floor and the cabinets that line one side of the wall.
Dad fiddles with a napkin ring. Mom stands at the sink, doing dishes by hand. Grief has run the color out of them like tired laundry—bleeding in shades of grey. I had never thought of them as old. How did I miss the way the red hair stamped like a trademark on Dad’s head has been bleached? His skin hangs around his jowls in loose folds and his nose, as if making up for the attrition of color in other places, has darkened toward vermillion. He looks up at me with the unsurprised recognition that only drunk people can manage when they are surprised.
Mom, dressed like she expected company, has her grey-brown hair pulled back in a sharp-edged swirl, both sad and graceful at the same time. She turns, and for a moment I think she’ll cry, but she brushes her hands back against her hair instead, smooths out her trousers, and shows me her teeth.
“Hello,” I say.
“Have you eaten?”
Does she mean today, this week, since Kris died? “No.”
“Oh, Maddy,” she says, and hugs me then. She turns to the fridge and pulls out a casserole, noodles with a thick white sauce, already cut into a serving size and tucked in a microwave container. She zaps it and places it on the table with a linen napkin and a fork. When I sit, Dad reaches out his hand, lays it on mine and says, “I’m glad you made it.”
I nod and begin to measure my way through the bites. The cheesy sauce stings my throat, its sharpness almost painful. Mom rinses the last utensil and then pulls up a chair across the table, her face slightly eager but also smoothed flat like her pants, and studies me.
“Good casserole,” Dad says, pouring scotch into a little glass.
“Where have you been?” Mom crosses her legs in her chair.
“Florida. East side.” We always recite these lines when I show up on the doorstep like a stray. Each time I name a different place and they don’t ask more. Maybe they don’t want to know. I came when they called this time. I say, “Are you okay?”
Mom doesn’t show me her perfect teeth now. She carefully runs her fingers through her hair, like she’s searching for a wound. Her fingers are small and slender and her face beneath her hands is oval—all of it like mine. Some people call us beautiful, but I’ve never understood the compliment, this liability—and the resentment or hunger that follows. “We’re doing the best we can,” she says.
Almost a confession. I want to say, “It’s written on you like tattoos,” but I know it would hurt her to be seen like that. So I say, “I don’t know how to talk or not talk or how to slow down my heart. I don’t know what to do.”
Mom blinks. “We haven’t been to his apartment. I can’t—”
I wait for her until I’m sure that’s all she can say. Then rest in the silence between us, three heads slightly bowed like grace before dinner. “I can’t—” our prayer.
Finally, I hear Mom breathe in, and she pushes out the words. “He left you a weird little note, you know.”
“That’s what you said.”
When my dinner is done, not finished but enough to give a scrap to the cat, I wash my plate and put it next to the other two plates and the two forks, two glasses, and the casserole dish, carefully arranged on a towel. Dad hugs me and stumbles off to bed, his wake an uneven thumping on the stairs. I follow Mom to the linen closet, where she pulls out a fresh set of sheets. We make the bed in the spare room together, the crisp cotton snapping under our hands as we work.
Tonight I’m sure the old fantasy about her will erupt: her hair long, wearing an old flannel nightgown, she walks the halls like a ghost, sobbing. No one remembers in the morning. Not her, not Dad snoring next to her, not Kris, tossing and turning. But when I was small I was sure I heard her in my half-sleep, the sobbing gentle and far away through the closed door. Each time, when I came fully awake, there was a creak on the floorboards as she scurried back to her room, and then the quiet of night. I call this to mind now, as I have done for so many years when I can’t understand how she could hide her most precious self like a scar. How could she not come out, having lost Kris, and me as well?
My mother is beautiful even when she’s bleeding to death from grief. She misses hardly a moment, a tiny moment when she might slip through her own disguise. I search for the torn edges of her mask like a blind woman, feeling my way with my fingers for the tiniest imperfection. But she laughs whether or not she thinks a joke was funny, says only what she needs to, maneuvers like a yogini away from politics, or the past, or herself. For how many generations have women trained each other like dogs to befit their station? As if sweat, or feeling, or windblown hair might betray some essential weakness, the fragility that lies in all of us. This one is an aristocrat’s granddaughter. A life sentence: the smooth lie of genetic pride. It pushes against Mom, threatening to topple her. And I—the dark daughter who betrays the lie—have constructed my identity on ignoring her. She might hide away a twenty-four-karat whip, might even use it on the sly, but I hold my brown eyes steady.
She says. “You came because of that note, didn’t you? It’s garbled nonsense.”
“You read it.”
“Of course.” She goes to the dresser and adjusts the little mirror on top, tilting it with both hands until it sits at a satisfactory angle.
“That was for me.”
“Just ignore it, Maddy. He wasn’t making sense.”
I punch the pillow into its case. I say, “Okay. Where is it?�
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She turns abruptly and vanishes out the door. I follow her clicking shoes across the wood floor, across the runner where the clicking stops, then starts up again, and then down the creaky stairs, the familiar old wooden woman who grumbles as I descend. Impossible to sneak around. Mom’s antique rolltop desk has beast feet, an array of different-shaped slots, and drawers with tiny handles, one of which only opens when you push a secret button inlaid in the wood. I used to pop that drawer when I was little, each time hopeful that I would find hidden treasure. Mom pulls an envelope out of a vertical slot and hands it to me.
She looks at me then, one of those rare looks when I can see her eyes through the mask, open and raw, and her grief makes me want to kiss her, right on that wet open place. But I do nothing and she turns, walks up the creaky old-woman stairs with her hand pulling her along the banister—an old woman barely holding up—and disappears around the corner into her bedroom. I stand for a minute watching the place where she’s been, as if something might be left there, some clue, a dropped handkerchief. All I’m left with is a thought: if I were Kris, she would have told me she loved me. A bitter, stupid, too-late thought.
I sink into the couch; it fronts a coffee table with foldable sides and some sea glass arranged in a jar. To my left is the door to the dining room and the old upright piano under the stairs. To my right, on the mantel above the fireplace, and straight ahead, next to the desk on the deep sill, pictures of my ancestors stare me down. I glare at them. I guess to fight back. One wears a stiff collar, the kind that looks like it’s holding your head on. His moustache is freshly brushed. He founded the stockbrokerage where Dad worked. Next to him and partway behind is the doctor in a winter coat, holding an unknown parcel. Above and looking down, a thin face and limpid eyes, my great-great-great-uncle and Dad’s namesake. The woman next to him in a rocker, her hair swooshed up and her collar fit for Queen Victoria, has her children displayed around her. I list them from left to right: Papa, ripe old age, Aunt Eva, polio, Uncle Jack, the war, Uncle Chet, heart attack at fifty-two. They stand so obediently in their little knickers and dress. Would they have obeyed as well if they knew the future? And would Grand-mère have held them to it?