“I just saw them on Saturday. Annabelle’s getting married in March. We went bridesmaid dress shopping.”
“That’s good.”
Teresa was quiet for a long while and I starting raking the cat fur on the counter into a pile.
“But how are you doing?” I said. “I haven’t talked to you in forever. Have you heard from John?”
“I spoke to him last night. That’s why I’m calling.”
I stopped raking the counter.
“Is everything okay?”
“He told me he’s been talking to Miles.”
I started on the pile again, slower this time, pulling grains of sand with long strokes across the Corian.
“Miles said you guys have been having a tough time.”
“Excuse me?”
“He confided in John and I thought I should give you a call.”
I let out an exasperated breath.
“Honey, they are in hell over there,” Teresa said. “They get shot at all the time. John found bullet holes in his aircraft yesterday.”
I traced the clear space that surrounded the pile with the tip of one finger.
“I’m just saying,” Teresa said. “He doesn’t need any extra stress right now, you know? Things are really hard over there and he doesn’t need to be worried about you.”
I picked up a crumb between my thumb and index finger and dropped it on top of the pile.
“Okay? I don’t mean to yell at you. I don’t want you to think I’m mad at you. I wish you were up here at Fort Bragg. We could keep your mind off stuff.”
You could keep me in line, I thought.
“I just want you to do what you can for Miles while our boys are over there,” she said, and paused for me to answer. I held the phone in my hand and stared at the white countertop.
“All right, honey,” she said after a while. “You hang in there. How’s your mom?”
“She’s fine.”
“Tell her I said hello.”
“Okay.”
“Take care, sweetie.”
I hung up the phone and looked up to see my mother coming down the stairs.
“You are not going to believe who I just got off the phone with,” I said.
She stopped walking and put her hands on her hips. “Who?”
“Teresa Priestner.”
My mother’s eyebrows pulled together and the muscles along her jaw tightened.
“Is everything okay?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. She called to yell at me.”
I waved an indignant hand, incensed at the meddling of Army wives, blind to how hard it must have been for Teresa to make that call.
“Yell at you?” my mother said. “About what?”
“About not being a good wife.”
My mother stood quietly and looked away, toward the sliding glass doors and the beach beyond.
“Can you believe that?” I said. “Like I’m not supposed to talk to my husband? Like, since he’s in Iraq I have to be sweet to him all the time?”
“Do you think maybe—”
“It’s bullshit,” I said. “Right?”
“I don’t know,” my mother said.
“But to call me like that? To reprimand me?”
I waved my hands angrily in front of my face.
“She thinks because her husband outranks Miles that she can boss me around. No one but me seems to realize that I am not in the military.”
My mother stayed with her hands on her hips, and when I could tell she wasn’t going to say anything, I turned and stomped to the back room.
“It’s bullshit,” I said again over my shoulder.
That night I sat down to write Miles an angry letter, a piece of mail that would sum up how I felt, how I was right, how it was bullshit. But I thought back to something we had said months ago when we were both new to Army life: the military is hell on marriage. I realized how hard the other wives worked to keep their relationships going. Teresa—who had already seen John through two deployments—knew exactly what to do. So instead of my angry letter, I wrote a love letter in its place. I put down all the things I loved about Miles. The freckles across his shoulders, the way his skin smelled after a shower, the calluses on his hands, how we talked before falling asleep at night, his breath in my face in the mornings. I stopped bringing up the house. Teresa was right. He was in hell.
Miles wrote back:
I find myself dreaming about your hair. How I love to touch it and run my fingers through it. How, when you sit beside me in bed and bend your head down to kiss me and your hair falls around me to where the only thing I can see is your face. Your hair acts as curtains blocking out the world so that all I can see is you, and all you can see is me. I wish that we could wrap your hair around both of us and block out all of this.
Afterward there was a long silence from him and then:
The internet has been down for a few days. It sounds like you know why. His name was Spc. Timothy Adam Fulkerson. He was hit by a landmine while providing security for the rest of us in the entire base. I didn’t know him personally. Just knew who he was, the guidon bearer for D Co. Most of our enlisted knew him though; some were good friends. It really sucks to see these men hurting, and I can only imagine what Spc. Fulkerson’s family is going through right now. Also keep in your prayers the family of Cpt. Matthew Mattingly. He was the 58 driver that was shot and killed a few weeks ago. Both of these men were among the finest in the Task Force from what I understand and from what their peers say. We had Fulkerson’s memorial service today. I hope it looked nice for his family’s sake. We taped it to send to them. Throughout the service I just kept getting the feeling that this young man has given the absolute sacrifice, and his family deserved so much more, much more. But a stupid ceremony is all we have to offer in place of a promising future and a wonderful son and friend.
Later he wrote to tell me about the death of another soldier:
I hate telling you this kind of stuff, babe. I don’t tell you these things to try to scare you or make sure you know things are rough over here. On the contrary, I really try my best to protect you from all of the cruelty and ugliness that goes on over here. I attempt to make all news sound positive at best and uneventful at worst. I just sometimes can’t hide everything. Some things have to be told, ugly or not. I am here to protect you and all our friends and family from all this crap, and I wish you did not have to see or hear anything about what is going on over here. I honestly do not know if what we are doing over here is helping or hurting, but I know that if I wasn’t here then someone else would have to be. I can’t think about that now though. I just try to focus on the good things, like you, and home, and our bright future that I know is ahead of us.
* * *
At the beginning of November he wrote:
No real news here. Just keeping on keeping on.
And:
I tried the video thing today. I think it worked. I did not burn it to the CD yet in case I make another video before I go to the post office again.
And:
I love you.
It was his last letter home.
Part II
9
Women would tell me later that they knew. Just knew. They knew the minute they woke up. They knew as they cleaned their houses in fits of clairvoyant anticipation. They knew as they dressed and waited on the couch for the soldiers to come.
Did I know?
At Fort Rucker, Miles once took me into the equipment room to try out a pair of night-vision goggles. He turned out the lights and we stood in unbroken darkness.
“Can you see that?” he said.
I felt his fingers brush the air in front of my face.
“Nothing.”
“Put these on.”
He placed the goggles in my hand and showed me the strap with his fingers, guiding me as if I were blind, and I strapped the bulky headset over my face.
“Holy shit,” I said.
I could see everything. The countertop, the sh
elving units, Miles next to me. The room glowed in shades of incandescent green as if someone had flipped the switch on a powerful floodlight. I saw in emerald tones what had been there all along.
Looking back to the notification—and even earlier, to the time of impact—I recognize this knowing that the other women describe. As Miles was making a hard left bank over the sands of northeastern Iraq, I threw my car in reverse and ran straight into the bed of a parked pickup.
“Damn it,” I said.
I gritted my teeth and climbed out to check the bumper. A three-inch puncture cut into the black rubber. The car was brand-new, our first big purchase together, bought the week after the wedding. I ran my finger over the gash.
“Shit,” I said.
I checked the truck for damage—none—and drove home angry. That night I couldn’t sleep, and the next morning arrived fogged over with feelings of guilt and anger and—there it is, in vibrant green—foreboding.
At work I called a docent about coming in early. I scheduled a group tour for the following Thursday. I had promised to make crêpes the week before and I had brought in sugar, flour, and eggs, but the plan seemed more interesting than the execution or I was too busy or I forgot, and at five o’clock I put all the ingredients back into my tote bag and lugged it out to the car. I drove home with the seed of unease stuck like a stone in the back of my throat. The lights in the garage were turned off when I pulled in and the feeling was deeper there, thicker, murky like the waters of a slow-moving river. I made my way up the stairs with my purse in one hand and the heavy tote bag in the other. I set the sack of ingredients on the top step and put my key in the dead bolt, but the door was already unlocked. I pushed it open with my free hand.
A doctor friend once spoke about a diagnostic technique used during his medical school days in the 1960s. A resident would walk past a patient’s open door and try to make a diagnosis from those brief moments of passage—the time it took to step from one doorjamb to the next. The doctor said the residents were often successful at diagnosing an ailment in those few seconds. They could even tell you the likelihood of survival.
“It’s true,” the doctor had told me. “You’d be surprised at how quickly you can assess a situation.”
I swept my eyes across the room: my mother in a dining chair in the middle of the living room, nowhere near where it should be; the living room lights turned off; two soldiers in dress uniform filling the space. I felt a drawing in at my navel, a great coming together of all the esoteric parts of me that are neither flesh nor blood nor skin. A silver cord slipped free, pulling from that central place, the part that keeps me whole. I imagined my soul draining out of me like liquid mercury, disappearing into the ether of my suddenly intangible existence. I hesitated on the top step and thought about turning and walking back down to the garage. If I stayed on the far side of the door, the soldiers could not tell me what they had come there to say. If they didn’t say it, it wouldn’t be true. But I am too rational, too predictable. I am a rule follower. I opened the door wider. I stepped in.
In the living room I went first to where my mother sat and bent stiffly down to put my arms around her.
“Everything will be okay,” I said.
I straightened and the soldiers were beside me. One, a chaplain. The non-chaplain said, “On behalf of the President of the United States, I regret to inform you that your husband, Miles Henderson, has been killed in Iraq.”
I looked at him numbly. This was not the way it was supposed to happen. Every military wife imagines this scenario, and in my visions the soldiers always came during the day. I would be in the kitchen and I could see them through the sliding glass doors. The sky would be deep summer blue, the Gulf green at their backs. I would be wearing my house clothes and I would duck down on the opposite side of the breakfast bar, embarrassed that they might see me that way. I would hide until they left. But this was an ambush. I never imagined the soldiers there after dark, already in the house, where I could not hide, could not turn them away.
I asked the non-chaplain if he knew what had happened.
“We don’t have many details,” he said.
“Did he crash?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what we’re hearing.”
“Was he shot down?”
“We heard maybe weather.”
“Weather?”
“A sandstorm may have brought them down.”
I crossed my arms over my chest as if to shield myself from this information, already understanding that there were some details I would not want to know.
“Who was the second pilot?” I said.
“The second pilot?”
“In the helicopter. Who else was killed?”
“We’re not at liberty to say.”
“Do you know?”
“No, ma’am.”
I faced the soldiers for a long moment. No one spoke.
“Would you like us to stay?” the chaplain said.
“No. Thank you.”
When the door shut behind them, I turned to the dark living room. Neighbors, a husband and wife, stepped in off the porch. I realized they must have seen the soldiers when they first arrived and they had been sitting with my mother all that time, waiting.
“Do you want to sit down?” the wife asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Outside.”
Waves folded against the sand and the salted humidity of the sea pushed against my skin as we sat on the deck. I turned my eyes upward to the night sky, where clouds scudded across the knit darkness, and then dropped my face into my hands. A wail worked its way up from my belly and pushed past my lips, sweeping back in waves across my chest and down my legs. The tender parts of me that are soft and unprotected like the flesh of a crab met the night air. I was all hurt.
“What do I do?” I said to the wife. “Do I take down his photos? Do I give his stuff away?”
She patted my hand. “You don’t have to think about that right now.”
I turned to my mother, who has a road map for this grief, who might have shown me the way, but she looked at her lap and said nothing. Much later my mother would say about this time, “You were so angry. At me. At the world.” She was right. I was suddenly furious at everyone. The soldiers in Miles’s unit, the ones who had survived; the government, whose political decision makers ordered men overseas but would never send their own sons to die; the American public whose SUPPORT OUR TROOPS bumper stickers faded and peeled while everyone turned their faces from the war and forgot. Saddam Hussein; Osama bin Laden; George W. Bush, who years later would hold my fingers between his soft damp hands and when my escort told him of Miles’s death would say, “That’s disappointing,” who wouldn’t even have the gumption to say, “I’m sorry.” I was angry at all of them. But more than anyone I was angry at my mother. My mother, who knew exactly how I was feeling. Who had also lost a husband. Who I rarely saw cry after my father’s death and who had done such an effective job of erasing him from our lives, from the reality that he had been lost to me. My mother, who never remarried. Who was permanently, unpardonably alone. Who I had tried my entire life not to become and whose fate, despite my best efforts, I now shared.
Amidst all this anger, I clung to a single idea—that another wife was suffering the same way I was. I needed to know the name of the second pilot. From the back room I called Amy McNish, the company FRG leader.
“What do you know, Amy?” I said when she answered the phone.
“We don’t know much. What have you heard?”
I realized that she did not yet have the names of the pilots, that she did not know Miles was one of them. The Army waits until the next of kin has been notified before releasing the names of those killed. The other wives in the unit had heard about the crash on the news, they knew an Apache had gone down, but they did not know who had been lost.
“They came to my door today,” I said.
Amy was silent as she sat down hard, the phone still in her hand.
“
I need to know the name of the second pilot.”
“I’ll find out,” Amy said. “I’ll call you back as soon as I know.”
The next day people poured into my mother’s house. My half brother from D.C. My uncle from Virginia. Heather. Annabelle. Stacy. If my mother stepped close to speak a kind word or touch my hand, I turned away. The only private moments I had were in the bathroom, where I would sit on the toilet with my eyes closed, bow my head, and speak to Miles.
“I miss you,” I said. “I miss you so much.”
They seemed like the only words that mattered.
Outside, the sky hung low and gray. Florida had entered the dry season, a period of blue skies and flat water, but a rare autumn storm had moved in overnight. The Gulf churned in the wind as I sat on the deck with Heather and Annabelle. Stray gusts lifted our hair and we were mostly quiet as we watched the waves. The collapse of the offshore rig Deepwater Horizon was still four years away, but I see now what an apt image that is for those first hours after the notification. I remember watching the news as the underwater well pumped oil into the Gulf and how it seemed arterial, as if the earth itself should collapse from the loss. But the well continued to gush with no sign of stopping. In the same way hurt pumped out of me, slick and black as oil. I imagine it covering the deck, dripping down the pilings, pouring onto the beach as the tide rolled in. I hurt and I hurt and I hurt and still there was more, a limitless tonnage. I knew I could bleed hurt forever.
In the early afternoon another soldier arrived, my casualty assistance officer.
“Your CAO,” he said.
Already we were talking in military shorthand.
I offered him a seat at the dining room table and he placed a stack of papers between us. He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses out of his shirt pocket and placed them on his nose.
“My wife says these make me look more intelligent,” he said.
I smiled, amazed at my politeness.
“I’ll be helping you with the administrative details.”
He handed me a heavy black binder stuffed with notebook paper.
“In case you want to take notes.”
Unremarried Widow Page 9