“Are you here by yourself?” she said. The woman, who looked my age, stuck out a hand. “I’m Laura.” She turned to the small group beside her. “We’re all wives. I mean, widows.”
I shook each of their hands—Mindi, Jocelyn, Jaime, Sarah—and we fell into a conversation that surprised me with its instant intimacy.
“How long were you married?” Jaime asked.
“Just four months,” I said. “You?”
“Eight years. I met Dave in high school.”
“What branch was your husband in?” Mindi said.
“Army.”
“I’m Army too. Which unit?”
“The Eighty-Second. Out of Bragg. Yours?”
“The Two-Six Cav out of Hawaii.”
“How did your husbands die?” I asked and was shocked for a moment at my boldness. But they answered without hesitation.
“A Kiowa crash,” Mindi said.
“An IED blast.”
“IED.”
“And yours?” Mindi asked.
“Helicopter crash,” I said.
They nodded, knowing.
“Did you meet before TAPS?” I asked the group.
Laura laughed.
“No, we just met,” she said. “This is our first time here.”
The crowd shuffled slowly into the ballroom and our group of widows claimed a table in the back. Sarah bought a bottle of wine. I bought a second. A keynote speaker talked about honor and sacrifice and a woman sang “Amazing Grace.” Jocelyn, who was only a few weeks in, covered her face with her hands and Sarah wrapped her in her arms. I looked around the table and saw that we were all crying. For the first time in a long time, it felt all right. We ate the baked chicken and asparagus that the waiters served. We drank our cheap hotel wine. At one point Mindi pulled a rose from the arrangement in the middle of the table and soon we each had a flower stuck in the neckline of our dresses.
“Our ‘bereavage,’ ” she called it.
There was no dancing, as it turned out, just a slow end to the evening. I laughed in a way I had not laughed since Miles died. As we headed out of the ballroom and to our separate hotel suites, I wondered why I hadn’t known women like them before. Where had they been when I was trying to make a life alongside the military?
The answer, of course, is that they had been there all along.
On the morning of Memorial Day, TAPS arranged a shuttle from the hotel to Arlington National Cemetery and our small group of widows joined up at Section 60. We followed Mindi to her husband Tuc’s grave, in the row in front of John’s, and we fanned out around her on the grass. We sat for a time without talking and then, in the way of military widows, we talked about the grim details of our husbands’ deaths. This was the new language I had learned to speak, a lexicon of briefings and autopsy reports and partial remains.
“You said Tuc died in a helicopter crash?” Sarah asked.
“Yeah,” Mindi said. “They got shot and went down hard.”
“Did you get to see him after he came back?”
“In the funeral home.”
I sat back on the grass. “You saw him?”
“Just from the waist up. In the coffin.”
“How was he?”
“He looked all right.”
“I saw Sean,” Laura said. “As soon as they got him to the funeral home.”
“What was it like?” I said. “To see him, I mean.”
“Not too bad. I got to hold his hand.”
“How was it?”
“He was cold,” Laura said. “They pack them in ice.”
I imagined Miles’s body gone stiff and cool, and I shivered. Other families had started to fill the cemetery, and a group of young men smoked cigars a few graves down. They had brought folding chairs and a cooler of beer, as if they planned to be there all day.
“I didn’t see Dave,” Jaime said. “The IED blew apart his Humvee. I don’t want—”
She looked at her feet and back at us, and we returned her look without flinching.
“I don’t want to think about how he came home.”
I ran my hand over the grass and felt the day’s heat gathered there. To the east the brown waters of the Potomac churned toward the sea, and I thought of rivers running red with blood. At Arlington the grave markers are white like ivory or teeth or bone. I looked at the young women beside me and considered the terrible knowledge they carry inside them—knowledge I carried too—and I felt a sudden responsibility to tell their stories, our stories. I wanted everyone to know the things we knew.
19
The 1st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division came home from Iraq in October 2007, fifteen months after the unit deployed. I refused to let anyone tell me the exact date the soldiers would fly to Fort Bragg. If I had known that the families were reuniting while I sat alone in my rented house with its ragged backyard and half my things in boxes, it would have felt like a betrayal of the gravest kind. I preferred to think that one day the unit would be in Iraq and one day it would be home, with nothing in between. No dramatic welcome reception with flags and balloons and signs, the reunion sweetness I will never know. There are widows who go to the homecoming. They say being there and not seeing their husbands walk off the plane confirms the truth of what happened. They say it brings them closure. I do not believe in closure. But knowing the unit was home felt like an ending of sorts to one story, and I liked to think it created room for the opening of another.
* * *
When I first thought about quitting my job on the farm to write full-time, I e-mailed an editor friend to ask her opinion.
“Are you nuts?” she wrote back.
I laughed. I was.
I took time off and visited Vietnam and Cambodia. The News-Press commissioned a travel piece and the editors published my article on the front page of the Sunday travel section, my favorite section, the section I read every morning growing up, where the stories that first inspired my dreams of writing had appeared. I took more time off and visited India; I sold an article on the desert cities of Rajasthan. I pitched a local lifestyles magazine and the editor there gave me an assignment. One of my essays appeared in a literary magazine. On a cool afternoon on the farm, I gathered my nerve, walked into my boss’s office, and told him I was quitting. He looked completely unsurprised.
The Sunshine Café had two recommending qualities: it served breakfast and cocktails all day. The early-bird special was invented for places like that, and by the time our group of hospice widows rolled in after the Tuesday night meeting, most of the diners were finishing their banana pudding. We took our usual table by the window and ordered drinks.
“I got to tell you,” Bea said as she took a sip of her Bloody Mary, “I am tired of being alone.”
“I hear you,” more than one of us said.
She set her glass on the table. “What I wouldn’t give for a man to hold my hand.”
“Or to take me out to dinner,” Linda said. “I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Or just to have someone to talk to,” Lan-fah said.
The table was quiet as each of us mulled this over, and when Jeanie spoke we all turned to listen.
“Well, I have some news,” she said in a low voice. “I’m not sure what you girls are going to think.”
The other tables sent up the combined noise of silverware against plates, glasses clinking, napkins shuffling. We waited for Jeanie to finish.
“I’m seeing someone,” she said.
There was a beat of silence at the table as we took in the news, and then we were cheering and our questions spilled over one another.
“Who is it?”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“What’s he like?”
Jeanie laughed. “If I had known you were going to have this reaction—”
“This is great news,” I said.
“Do you like him?” Lan-fah asked.
“I do,” Jeanie said. “I really like him. He’s a good
guy.”
Linda lifted her wine glass in a toast.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said.
Lan-fah raised her glass and I touched mine to both of theirs. Bea added hers last.
“Me?” she said. “I’m jealous as hell.”
We laughed then, all of us, because we were jealous too.
Thirteen months after the unit returned home and two years after Miles’s death, Captain Scott Delancey came to see me in Florida. Some of the soldiers did that—stopped by or called to pay their respects. In my driveway Scott looked taller than I remembered him, broader through the chest and back, and he had grown older in the time since we had last seen each other. I suppose I had grown older too. When he bent down to hug me, the feeling of being so close to someone I associated with Miles was nearly overwhelming. I pressed my face to the crook of his neck and breathed him in.
“How’ve you been?” he asked when we pulled apart.
“Good,” I said. “Happy to see you.”
On a dare we drove to an arcade north of town where there were batting cages and go-cart tracks and we were the oldest people by a decade. We played rounds of air hockey and Scott beat me every time, but he had the courtesy to let me win on the go-cart track. It felt good to be with someone who had known Miles, and I liked that Scott was generous—he gave me tokens by the handful—and funny. I liked, too, the way other women watched him.
On the drive home from the arcade, Scott reached across the car and took my hand.
“Do you know how to drive a stick shift?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He placed my hand on the gearshift and kept his fingers over mine.
“Now’s a good time to learn.”
We drove like that for a while, my hand cupped in his as he shifted gears, my face flushing each time his skin pressed against mine. When we were nearly home, Scott pulled off the road and into an empty parking lot.
“Your turn now,” he said.
“No way. I’ll destroy your transmission.”
“You’ll be fine. I’ll be right here to help.”
We switched seats and I took the car on a halting tour around the parking lot. The gears ground and the engine stalled but Scott just laughed.
“Keep going,” he said. “You’ll get it.”
I was nervous—from the driving, from him—and my body temperature climbed. I sweated and the windows fogged over, and after a time I called the lesson done. Scott drove the rest of the way while I sat in the passenger seat and wondered what was building between us—if anything. At home, Scott walked me to my front door and said good night. Before he turned to leave he placed a kiss at the corner of my mouth, that small stretch of skin that is for neither friendship nor love but some nameless place in between.
* * *
The Florida Weekly office had grown in the time I’d been writing for the paper. Framed copies of prizewinning editions decorated the walls, and the space buzzed with a low hum of activity. Phones rang in the sales office and I could hear a reporter speaking to an editor in the back room. Somewhere a coffeepot percolated and the smell gave the space an industrious feel. Jeff came to fetch me in the reception area wearing new square-framed glasses that made him look hip.
“You guys are busy,” I said on our way to his office.
“We’re putting out the paper in four counties now,” he said. “Our circulation’s up to a hundred thousand.”
“Not bad.”
Jeff laughed. “Not bad at all.”
In the office, I sat across from Jeff’s desk and admired the framed newsprint that hung on every available space. The paper had reported a story on local casualties of war, and Miles’s photo—the cropped picture from our courthouse wedding—looked down from a copy of the article. Life is funny that way.
Jeff leaned back in his chair, cocked his elbows, and put his hands behind his head.
“So I hear you need a recommendation letter.”
“For journalism school,” I said. “At Columbia.”
Jeff whistled. “That’s serious. You ever lived in New York?”
I shook my head. “I heard it’s a crazy city.”
Jeff lowered his arms and leaned forward. “So, why journalism school? You’ve already got a gig here.”
“I need to figure out how to do it right,” I said. “How to tell the big stories.”
I promised to send him information on the recommendation letter, and when I stood to leave he walked me to the front office.
“Thanks again,” I said, my hand on the door.
“Keep me posted,” Jeff said. “And good luck.”
* * *
My time with the Tuesday night grief group was nearing its end. I’d watched the women who were there before me graduate themselves out of the group. Some remarried, some moved away, most simply learned to balance the realities of this new life. On one of my last nights, the usuals gathered, plus the newcomers just testing the place, deciding if the group would work for them. There were the usual flimsy tissue boxes, and we told the usual stories in familiar rhythms. When there was a lull, we sat in companionable silence for nearly a minute before Richard, whom we gossiped about at dinner, who had a beautiful wife—Linda saw them at the grocery store—and whose young son had died many years before, told us this story.
“My grandmother used to say—”
We clutched our rough tissues and looked at him with our swollen eyes.
“She used to say that if you took all the sorrows of all the people in the world and hung them from a tree like fruit and then you let people choose which one they wanted, we would still pick our own.”
I thought back to the phone call with Psychic Suzanna months before and to the first time I met her in the hotel bar. What if she had told me then what was to come? Not just meeting Miles, not just his death, but afterward. That Miles would be the catalyst for this blossoming life, that my time with him would lay the foundation for some braver, more fearless me. That through knowing him and loving him I would become someone with the wherewithal to seize my dreams. I searched across the circle and saw that the other women had turned inward, as I had turned inward, and I imagined us meeting in that orchard of sorrow. Perhaps my mother would be there. Would she still choose this life with its sadness and memories and hopes?
I looked up to see the other women nodding and I found myself nodding too. Of course, we seemed to say, all of us. Of course we would pick our own.
2009
20
At Fort Bragg the memorials to fallen soldiers are scattered throughout the base, often tucked behind unit headquarters and forgotten by nearly everyone except the families of those who have served and died. MILES HENDERSON is carved into the memorial for the 82nd, and I like to imagine the strangers who might someday run their hands over the stone. Will they trace the letters with careful fingers? Will they say his name out loud? Perhaps they will ask themselves if the war was worth even this one life.
On the third Memorial Day after Miles’s death, Teresa parked her Buick on the paved road that runs alongside Section 60 at Arlington. An old oak stood at the edge of the cemetery, its branches reaching inward toward the graves, as blistering heat blanketed the city. I imagined scorched earth as we walked across the grass, the bones beneath our feet blackened and burned, the world set on end. In grief parlance they call this upended life the “new reality.” They don’t tell you it doesn’t feel like any sort of reality at all.
Teresa stopped in front of John’s plot and I stopped beside her. She first sat back on her heels and then stretched her legs in front of her while I stepped out of my sandals and lowered myself to the ground. I kept to the space between John and his neighbor but Teresa sat directly over his grave.
“I wish I could sleep here,” she said. She smoothed the ground the way a person might smooth a bedsheet. “I miss him so much. Both of our boys. Miles too. You know, I never think about John without thinking about Miles.”
I nodded.
I missed them too. I missed the days on the lake in John’s boat, crystal-clear afternoons of heat and cool water. I missed Miles beside me. I missed the way Teresa had been when John was alive, sure of this world and her place in it.
“You and me,” Teresa said. “Who would have thought?”
I would have been the last to think it. But there we were. She scooted forward so she sat next to the headstone, and I watched her from the corners of my eyes. She traced John’s name with one finger and ran her thumb over the line that said BRONZE STAR. She touched the places where John’s birth date and the letters of his rank had been carved into the stone. She did not turn her eyes to the left and right, to the graves beside John, the ones that said PURPLE HEART beneath the names. She had trained herself to stop looking.
But I had not stopped. I looked at all of them, the markers stretching out in a sea of white. When we buried John his grave had been the last in the line. Now the plots snaked in front of his, grave upon grave, reaching to the edges of the field. I tipped my head back to the hot sun and took the brunt of the glare full in the face. I did not turn away from any of it—the sky, the sun, the graves, Teresa and her worries. If I were another kind of woman, I would have put my arms around her and told her how thankful I was that we were in this together. I would have said how proud John would be of her and how much I admire her. But I am not that kind of woman. Instead I offered the only things I know how: my silence and my presence.
“This is so hard,” Teresa said. “You know?”
I watched her sit back in the grass and run a hand over her damp brow.
Unremarried Widow Page 17