When She Came Home
Page 6
Rick said, “Go with your mother, Glory.”
“You come, Daddy.” She tugged on his hand.
Harry came around the table. He was so accustomed to his prosthetics that his gait looked no more awkward than if he had a mild charley horse. “You’re with me, kid.”
Glory didn’t object. She was crazy about her uncle Harry.
In the moments of silence after Harry and Glory left the table, the murmur of the television talking to itself in the den reached the dining room.
“I thought I’d shut that damn thing off,” Maryanne said and excused herself to do so.
Conversation turned to the Belasco hearings. Bunny had a few dozen opinions. As he talked he ate and gestured with his fork, stabbing the air as if he were inflicting wounds on the senator.
Rick said, “What I don’t understand is why we need these special security outfits in the first place. How’d the military get along without them before?”
“Iraq’s a whole new kind of war.”
“I’m aware of that, Bunny. And you don’t have to tell me that most of the contractors do routine stuff like food service and construction, sanitation.” Rick sounded irritable. “But some of those guys are just mercenaries.”
Frankie had met a couple of G4S employees back in the spring when they came through FOB Redline for a few days. Several of them shared an apartment not far from the Green Zone where they made their own beer. The idea of making beer in Baghdad had amused everyone. One man, a Brit with special service experience, had told her he was making more money than he’d ever seen in his life, but he wanted to make clear that the paycheck came at a cost. Whereas Marines never left anyone behind even if it meant returning to the scene of a battle days, weeks, or even years later, the Brit knew that if he were kidnapped or wounded, he was on his own.
“Mercenary is a word I don’t like.” Bunny put his fork on the edge of his plate, lining it up precisely parallel with the knife. “You say the word—mercenary—and you think about killers for hire, assassins, or something, right?” He raised his fork again. “But the guys who work for G4S, they just want to get the job done, same as Marines.”
“Whatever they do, they make a whole lot of money,” Harry said, resuming his seat at the table. “Some of those guys are pulling down two-fifty K a year.”
“There’s nothing wrong with making money when you fight the enemies of democracy,” Bunny said. “It’s either we hire contractors or we bring back the draft. That’s what it comes down to. Manpower. This country can’t fight a war with a volunteer army.”
“Would that be so bad? The draft, I mean? Why not national service for everyone over the age of eighteen, male and female? Even a gimp like me can do paperwork.”
“Never going to happen, Harry. Nation hasn’t got the stomach for it.”
“This G4S thing.” The General spoke up for the first time. “Americans should be grateful for the help they’re giving us over there instead of wasting a truckload of taxpayers’ money to investigate them. They risk their lives same as any fighting man.”
“Amen, brother.”
“Mind you”—the General raised his glass for emphasis, sloshing the wine dangerously close to the rim—“if G4S has broken any laws they have to be called on it. But the Senate should keep its nose out of it. That Belasco woman’s been against the war from the start, and now all she wants to do is make trouble.”
“And she’s going to get a lot of people up to testify and half of them won’t know what they’re talking about. She sure as hell doesn’t. The woman’s stone-cold ignorant about what it takes to win a war and she’ll sit up there lording herself over a lot of good men who, if the truth is told, are doing more for this country’s interests than she is.” Bunny looked at Frankie. “What do you think? About G4S?”
The blood rushed to her cheeks. “I don’t have an opinion.”
“Of course you have an opinion,” her father said. “Good God, Francine, you were over there for almost a year. How can you not have an opinion? What did you do? Stay in your rack the whole time? ‘Wake me when it’s over’?”
Frankie’s mother laid a hand on his wrist.
Harry said, “Leave her alone, Dad.”
“I can’t ask my daughter a question? It’s my goddamned birthday! Bunny go ahead and have that last slice of meat, you know you want it. Francine, give me your glass.” He raised the wine bottle and when she shook her head, he refilled his own.
“That’s enough wine, Harlan.” Frankie’s mother swiped up his glass and shoved her chair back. “Bunny, I don’t know what your cholesterol numbers are, but I’m sure you don’t need any more prime rib. You all just stay here and try to be civil to one another while I see about dessert.”
Frankie could not sit still, and her palms prickled with anxiety, as if she’d grabbed hold of a thistle. She knew that family occasions didn’t have to be fraught. Rick and his brothers didn’t always get along, and his sister nursed a permanent grievance, claiming no one paid attention to her opinions. Sometimes his father drank too much or his mother got her feelings hurt because no one asked for a second helping. But the affection they all felt for each other was there at the table, no matter what. No one was judged too harshly; they teased but they didn’t insult. When Rick’s family got together, no one was bullied.
The General’s birthday cake was a many-layered splendor of raspberries, chocolate, and cream.
Frankie went upstairs to get Glory. In the empty guest room the television was on, a Pixar movie about cars boinging from laugh to laugh. She checked the bathroom and then walked down the hall, glancing into the rooms that had once been hers and Harry’s but had long been given over to an office for the General and a little room that her mother called her bolt-hole. She found Glory in the General’s office, standing in front of his towering gun cabinet.
“Cake time.”
“Did Grandpa kill people when he went to war?”
“Everyone’s waiting downstairs. We’re ready to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
“Did he? Kill people?”
“We can talk about this, Glory, but now isn’t the time.”
There would never be a right time to talk about killing and threatening people with guns, but if ever there was a teachable moment, this might be it. Still Frankie could not begin. She wanted more than anything to be the mother Glory needed and deserved, but at that moment the task was beyond her mothering skills. She felt a leaden certainty that no matter what she said, she’d get it wrong.
“Grandpa won’t cut his cake without you. You should see how gorgeous it is.”
“I don’t care about cake. How come I ask you stuff and you don’t answer?”
“Another time, Glory. It’s been a long night.”
“Well, did he?”
“Your grandfather was a hero in Vietnam. You know that. He saved the lives of his Marines.”
“So that means he did kill people. What about you? Did you shoot anyone?”
“No.”
Not exactly.
“But you had a gun, right? Why didn’t you shoot it?”
“I wasn’t that kind of Marine.”
Glory’s blue-green eyes seemed to turn a darker, harder shade when she was thinking.
“Did you see anyone get shot?”
She couldn’t talk about this to an eight-year-old, she couldn’t talk about it to anyone. She had built a wall in her mind so she wouldn’t even have to think about it.
“We’re going to sing and eat some dessert and then we’re going home. We’re not going to talk about guns and shooting.”
Glory crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her pillowy lower lip. “I know about free speech, Mom.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Tiger, but there’s no free speech for eight-year-olds.”
“I can ask any question I want and you can’t stop me. It says so in the Constitution.”
Downstairs the doorbell rang. Frankie heard voices from the entry.
Melanie extricated herself, laughed, and shook back her long sheet of blond hair, almost the same shade as Glory’s. “I feel so bad busting in on you all like this.” She had a sweet high voice to match her schoolgirl hair. “Richard told me he wanted these papers signed and in the mail tonight.”
“Can she have some cake, Grandmommy? Can she?”
Richard.
Frankie’s mother, standing just behind Melanie with her hand on the doorknob, looked up at the stairs and caught Frankie’s eye. Her head tilted slightly in a way that asked a question Frankie could not answer.
Chapter 9
Melanie had declined the invitation to join the family for dessert. After her departure and a plate of cake and ice cream, Glory collapsed in whiny exhaustion and only Rick could comfort her, saying to Harry as he held her on his lap that some days an eight-year-old was just a taller version of a four-year-old. For a minute Frankie felt like a stranger in the family. In the time she had been deployed Rick had learned how to be a single parent and required no help from her.
At home he carried Glory upstairs, and she did not stir except to tighten her arms about his neck. Following behind them Frankie reached for the banister to steady herself, staggered by a wave of soul-sapping weariness. Jared Westcott, the conference at Arcadia, and her father’s baiting: it was more than she knew how to handle. And the worst of it had been those moments upstairs, confronted by the fierce little girl she and Rick had made. She had failed to do the right thing, to be the mother she wanted to be.
She sank to the stairs and sat with her head in her hands, her fingers pressed hard against her closed eyes.
At Three Fountain Square she had failed to be the Marine she wanted to be. So little had been asked of her. All she had to do was force open the door of the Humvee and step out. But she had done nothing.
Lions and bears and two or three different floppy-eared dogs, a pony the color of Pepto-Bismol, Zee-Zee the chartreuse cobra, and more creatures whose names Frankie did not know were arranged in a protective wall around Glory. Frankie’s impulse was to clear the bed and give her room to uncurl like a blossom from a tight bud. She had once tried to do this but the results were unhappy. Glory had awakened in the darkness without her protectors, screaming for Daddy, her eyes alight with a nightmare she could not remember.
Frankie didn’t think she had ever screamed for her daddy in that way. But then she hadn’t ever had a “daddy.” Her father had been either “the General” or “Sir” for as far back as she could remember, a formidable and sometimes frightening figure. Even so her memories of childhood were mostly happy. Eight had been a year of wonders, of falling into bed exhausted at the end of every day and being asleep before her head touched the pillow. It was a time of bikes and Rollerblades and Boogie-boarding, sleepovers and learning to sail and horseback ride, of finding that she was strong and naturally adept at a lot of things, that when she made a suggestion, the other girls agreed and went along with her. Somewhere around age eight she had begun to sense that she was a leader.
She could not remember ever being afraid at Glory’s age.
And then, without warning, an experience leapt out of memory to contradict her. The General had gone on a Canadian fishing trip and been away ten days. At eight she had only a map-gazing knowledge of where Canada was, even less of British Columbia and a lake called Ruination. She looked the word up and the meaning raised the hair on her arms when she realized that the General had gone to a place named for destruction and death. He might never come back from Ruination. In this way she had first understood that her demanding, powerful, and awe-inspiring father could die. And, therefore, so could she.
Children died all the time.
Glory shifted under her patchwork comforter. “Hi, Mommy.” In half sleep, her voice was whispery and moist. “Sing the blackbird song, okay?”
“I can’t, honey.”
“Please?”
“It hurts my throat.”
Bye, bye, Blackbird.
Frankie and Rick lay in the dark, neither of them ready to sleep. Through the window the fog reflected and dispersed the city’s light, illuminating the room with an ashy glow.
“It’s not really dark in here,” she said. “Maybe we should get blackout curtains.”
“I like being able to see you.”
“In the desert, if there’s cloud cover, the darkness is so thick sometimes you can be looking right down at your feet and not see them. You just put one foot in front of the other and hope you’re going in the right direction.”
“Hard to believe.”
Rick rolled onto his side, his face a few inches from hers. She wondered what would happen if she leaned in and kissed him. Would she regret it like the last time and the time before, like every time they had been intimate—and there were not that many—since she came back from Iraq? If she kissed him now would he think she wanted him to make love to her when it was the last thing she desired? She tried to believe her therapist’s promise that someday she would want him to touch her again.
“In the Middle East most of the heavy construction is done at night because of the heat. They use those big white-bright lights. I knew this Marine from OT. She was stuck in Bahrain and lived in a condo twenty stories up, brand-new and mostly empty. Right next door they were building another high-rise. At night it was so bright in her apartment, she bought rugs in the souk and hung them over the windows.”
“I don’t think you need to go that far.”
“An Indian family lived in the apartment next to hers. She could hear him beating the wife, but she wasn’t allowed to do anything. She told her CO and he said she should get a headset. Listen to music or something.”
“Frankie, honey—”
Smothering under the comforter’s feather weight, she kicked it away and sat up, slumped on the edge of the bed, digging her toes into the thick carpet. “It’s bizarre, how you can be surrounded by people and still be lonely. At FOB Redline sometimes, I felt like I lived at the bottom of a big hole. I’d get up and do my job and that was good, a lot of the work was good. But at the end of the day I went back in my hole. If it weren’t for Fatima—”
“You never mentioned her before.”
Frankie shrugged. “My interpreter.” My friend.
“Tell me about her,” he said, stroking her back through the T-shirt she slept in.
But Fatima meant talking about Three Fountain Square. She shivered and shifted away from his hand.
“Please, talk to me.”
“I’m too wired.”
“How can you be wired? You never sleep. You should be falling-down exhausted.”
“Let me be the way I am, Rick. Just try to understand.”
“I’m trying, baby, I really am. But you’ve got to see how hard you make it. You know, Frankie, we were lonely too. Do you ever think about that? Glory and I were a family while you were gone, but not the family either of us wanted. I know, I know, we’re military and deployment comes with the package. Okay, I’ve got that. But does that mean we can’t miss you and want you back? Frankie, you’re home now. How come it feels like you’re still gone?”
“I’m a Marine, Rick.”
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Have you got any idea how sick I am of hearing those words? I’m a Marine. Like it’s some kind of sacred calling? You’re my wife, Frankie. You’re Glory’s mother. Swear to God, I think nothing means as much to you as the almighty Marine Corps.”
“I love you both more than anything.”
“Then why don’t we feel it?”
She didn’t know how to answer. She wanted to get in the car and drive away, stop somewhere, and begin her life all over again where no one expected anything of her.
“Just tell me one thing. Do you want to go back?”
She closed her eyes. “No.”
“Then what is it you do want?”
To forget Iraq and what she’d seen there, to forget the sand and heat and parched air. The mistakes, all the fucking mistakes that were made every day. The missteps and oversights and, despite everyone’s best efforts, the failures again and again. She wanted to love Rick and for Glory to laugh and tell moron jokes as she once had. She wanted to sing her daughter to sleep again.
Her voice broke like kindling. “I don’t know.”
She waited for his breathing to become deep and regular, the sign that he had gone wherever he went in sleep, the faraway place that kept him until morning, scarcely moving while she tossed beside him. This night he stayed awake and they lay so far apart she felt the wind howl between them.
“Glory’s having trouble in school.” She spoke into the darkness, giving him an abbreviated account of the school conference.
“She threatened that girl? She admitted it? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“They’re making a big deal out of nothing.” She punched her pillow into a backrest. “She’s got spirit. What do you expect? She’s the General’s granddaughter.”
“Frankie, she’s my daughter. If she’s having trouble in school I want to know about it. She and I were on our own for almost a year. I know this little girl. She doesn’t go around threatening people for no reason.”
His comment felt like an attack, she had to retaliate. “What about Melanie? Does she know her too? Glory’s crazy about Melanie.”
“Frankie, I needed a babysitter when you were gone. Mel’s young and maternal—”
“And I’m not.”
“I didn’t say that. But Glory needed someone and they bonded. I don’t know why you aren’t happy about that.”
“Use your imagination, Richard.”
“She took care of Glory.”
“What about you? Did she take care of you too?”
Chapter 10
Much later she ran a bath, steamy and deep. Against her skin, the water was silk, the stuff of dreams in Iraq. Half asleep, she laid her head back against the tiles. Through the bathroom window, open above the back garden, the last of the mock orange smelled sickeningly sweet. The fragrance brought back a memory of another sweet-smelling flower, this one growing along a mud brick wall.