Blue Stars (45 page)

Kids wore shorts and sneakers; they had shrugged off jackets in the warm sunshine. A number of them wore red-white-and-blue construction-paper hats—at least until they were crumpled or blown across the grass—evidence of an earlier crafts project run by social services. Not many fathers of patients were present. There were a few older vets, locals probably, who had been invited out of respect or nostalgia, who wore pinned-on medals or caps bearing their regiment or memorabilia flags in their lapels.

Women, all ages, made up most of the crowd. Here at Walter Reed they were known only by association: mother, wife, sister, girlfriend. They wore sunglasses—mirrored, flip kind, drugstore brand, department store brand, dark lenses, colored lenses, attached to a chain around a neck. Murmuring to each other, they stood in groups of three or four, occasionally bursting out in a big wave to someone across the grass, or leaning over to check in with their soldier. They carried no purses, having long ago given those up as unnecessary, here. Instead, they carried canvas tote bags—you were always getting freebie tote bags—stamped with pharmaceutical brands or the names of companies who wanted the charity publicity:
FORD TOUGH. LIKE AMERICA’S HEROES.
Inside the bags: bottled water, sunscreen wipes, cell phone, and a camera she’d forgotten to find batteries for. Meds he needed in the next hour, PowerBar because the meds made him nauseated,
Us Weekly
she borrowed from the PT waiting room in case there might exist in this afternoon a slight chance—
yeah, right
—for half an hour of lying down in the peaceful shade of a tree somewhere on the grounds. By herself.

As the gospel singers finished and filed off the dais, Lacey craned her neck to see around the people in front of her. She and Eddie were on the southeast side of the circle, shuffled in with a bunch of others from Building 18 who had walked over together. Figures. Sure, put the blind guy—half blind, she reminded herself with a smile—about as far from the action as possible. “What’s he saying?” “When they starting?” No one in their area could hear a damn word from the announcers, and Lacey didn’t care anyway. She scanned the crowd, leaning forward until someone elbowed her, annoyed. “Oh, relax,” Lacey hissed back. She’d be here, wouldn’t she? She knew they were leaving tomorrow, so she’d come to this, right?

Since Ellen had come back a week ago—and thank God Mike made it through that insane infection—she and Lacey had tried without success to get together. Phone calls, texts, and quick hugs were all they had found time for. Lacey knew how overwhelmed Ellen was after what Mike had been through—she’d barely left 57 after he was transferred back there, she and Jane together again spending every waking moment with Mike … maybe out of happiness. It was a reunion, Lacey got it, so she stayed out of the way even when they said stick around, they just ordered a pizza.
No, it’s okay, you guys do your thing.
She gave Mike a kiss and told him he better get his ass in shape soon or else.
Else you’ll come kick it for me, I know, I know,
he joked. So good to see that kid easy and joking.
No way in hell,
Lacey said.
I’m never setting foot in this place again.

If only her crap phone hadn’t died last night! She’d had to call Lolo and Otis using a calling card and the smelly pay phone in the basement of Building 18. But she and Ellen would find time, wouldn’t they? It had to be today; bags were packed, and she and Eddie were getting driven to the airport before dawn tomorrow. For coffee or something, just a few minutes together. Where was she?

Eddie shifted side to side; the crowds made him nervous, and he didn’t understand why they were here. “Shit, I don’t know why either,” she said, squeezing his hand. Oh, Ed. “Hey. Hey, Eddie.”

He turned his head toward her and it focused, his eye, it focused on her. “Want to grow your mustache back?” Lacey reached up to touch his upper lip. His hand followed hers, feeling for something not there anymore. “Let’s do that. When we’re back in New York.”

“Back home,” Eddie agreed, patting his lip. “Mom?”

“Yes. Mom’s at home. See her tomorrow, okay?”

A purple balloon, set free on purpose or not, wafted up in the air. A ripple of excitement in the crowd—people pointed, faces followed the drift—until most realized it wasn’t related to the event. Soon the purple spot was a soap bubble high in the air, bobbing gently in the direction of the Gait Lab.

On the other side of the circle, wedged between the tent and the announcer’s platform, Ellen kept a hand on Michael’s wheelchair, unhappy that he was jostled by latecomers squeezing their way to the front of the crowd.

“Excuse me!” she exclaimed to one particularly shove-happy couple, startled to notice then that it was the woman in uniform, with a roll bandage taped around her neck. Her husband, in a Dodgers cap, was the one who’d pushed Ellen.

“You’re fine,” he said over his shoulder as they budged in front.

Mike laughed. “Fight, fight, fight,” he whisper-chanted, nudging her.

“Are you sure we can’t go in there?” she said, with a longing look at the spacious area under the tent the aide had suggested they move to.

“No can do, boss. I’ma stick with my boys in coach.” A nearby friend from 57 reached down with a fist bump when he overheard this—he was a fellow AK standing on the same C-leg Mike had received. And then there came the usual smack-talk about grunts over officers, only wimps need special attention, those pansies in the shade, etc., etc.—which broadened into the never-ending Marines vs. Army thing, with occasional potshots at the Navy but not the Air Force because why bother. Ellen let it go. It was disappointing enough for Mike to be back in the chair, especially today out in public—even if that was only temporary, until he got his full strength back after the infection. And for his leg to be refitted, based on the weight he’d lost.

“Didn’t Lacey say she’d be coming to this?” she asked him, going up on tiptoe to see over people’s heads. Ellen was surprised she hadn’t called.

“Dunno.” Mike shrugged. “Hey—those must be the landing targets.” Out on the grass, men in uniform were fastening down black and yellow plastic strips, in the form of an
X
. There were four of them, each in a quadrant of the circle. This did keep the crowd’s attention, and now people were taking pictures and speculating about how much longer they’d have to wait.

The announcer: “Headquartered at Fort Knox, the team is garrisoned at … Two teams from the finest aerial … Utilizing a Fokker C-#1A Troopship specially commissioned for…”

“Pretty sweet gig, considering,” Mike said. “Except for the circus vibe.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Ellen said, still searching for Lacey.

“Why?” he said. “You could get in on it too, and we’d be a traveling skydive freak show. You could get us a gig at UW! For graduation or something!”

“I’d like you to be busy at graduation,” she said. “Graduating.”

But Mike was still having fun with the image. “My robo-leg could have its own little parachute.” He made a zooming noise, pretending to coast down to one of the
X
’s on the lawn.

His anger and paranoia were gone. Even though Ellen knew it didn’t work this way, she couldn’t help believing that when Michael’s fever broke, those black moods—the ones that held such a tight grip on him for months—did too. Or that the PTSD had withered under the force of this other, deadlier, invasion of his body and brain. “Cooked it, you mean,” is how Jane cheerfully put it—right in front of Mike! “Six days of a hundred and four zapped all that being a dick right out of him.” When Ellen told her to shush, she’d just laughed. Jane and Mike both had. She even joined in because it was so good to have him back, although she tried not to think of it that way. Jane didn’t really know, after all, how bad it had been. Maybe Michael didn’t know, either.

Just then four jets pulled parallel contrails across the sky and the crowd let out a huge cheer. The announcer was completely drowned out, even as the planes streaked away from Heaton to bank on the far west side of the horizon. People shaded their eyes, held up phones and cameras even after the jets were gone, positioning their viewfinders up to the blank sky. Goofing-off kids were nudged, told to pay attention. No one knew where to look. One older woman held her hands over her head, an automatic flinch even as she laughed about it.
How they gonna control where they land?

Ellen had followed the jets’ progress west across campus until her gaze caught on the white pillars and gold cupped top of the rose brick old hospital building that dated back to 1909. The first soldiers housed there were the rare surviving injured men of the Great War. Did Edith Wharton ever travel here? she wondered. Probably not—during that time the writer was in full swing of her war efforts in Paris. Still, Ellen could picture it easily: merciless Edith striding these grounds, issuing orders to any poor underling who crossed her path. Cheering the boys in pain on cots … and urging them back to the field to fight for freedom.

How could she? Ellen wondered. There was so much she wanted to understand. The makeshift desk in her room at Mologne—bedside table plus armchair—was neatly set up with books, files, and laptop. Each night after dinner on the ward she worked for about an hour before bed. Michael now shifted in his chair to get more comfortable, lifting his stump briefly, with both hands, an unselfconscious heave.

“Here they come! Here they come!”

“They coming around!”

It wasn’t the jets though. Now approaching from the south was a yellow-and-white turboprop that, frankly, was underwhelming after the adrenalined roar of the synced planes. Still, the crowd cheered and shouted,
they’re jumping!
Asked one another,
are they jumping?
I can’t see. What’s that? You see anything? Shoot, better them than me; I don’t even like a little turbulence.

The plane seemed to throttle back, to dig into the air above Georgia Avenue. And then it changed shape, grew minuscule black forms on its side that quickly dropped away and became dots in separate space, one, two, three, four of them. The plane moved on, forgotten. The ring of dots hovered, as if in conference. Slowly they drifted toward the crowd on Heaton’s lawn.

“I do not believe it. Do not
believe it
.”

“Mom, they gonna fall right on us or what?”

An instant tiny bloom: black and yellow. Then another. Like popcorn in the sky, parachutes burst open and now the crowd could see what was happening: four figures strung to silk curves that cupped air.

“Army’s Golden Knights team performs at … Most successful sports team in D.O.D. history … intensive program of paratrooping skills second to none in…”

Tacking on a diagonal, the four parachutes fell toward earth. A couple teenagers pretended to wave them in, air traffic controller style. Now the jumpers were in a vertical chain, a thousand meters from the ground, swinging left and right, left and right, as they circled down.

“Oh!” Gasps as purple streams shot out from one of the jumpers’ feet. It was colored gas, set off in puffing funnels from a kind of device strapped to his boots. The smoke faded to violet and obscured the parachutist behind him. Kids made the obligatory fart jokes.

Now they were getting close enough for the crowd to see details: helmets, goggles, and all-black flight suits. Parachutes toggled back and forth, wending their way down. Everyone took a photo, paused to look, took another photo. Cheering rose in intensity as the first jumper entered the area just above the green.
ARMY
, read the underside of his chute, in black letters against the taxi yellow silk. Feet first, he sunk to the
X
on the farthest side of the grass, the one in front of the tent. People flinched, but he stepped down lightly onto the plastic, running a few meters to avoid the parachute, which collapsed against the ground behind him in bubbled heaps, dragged flat by dozens of cables connected to his harness.

The other jumpers were landing, to wild applause and more incomprehensible announcer’s comments, but Lacey couldn’t stop looking at the flattened silk on the grass. Ignored, lifeless. The jumper was unclipped from his harness and jogged around the field to accept the cheers, but the puddle of black and yellow lay splayed like a jellyfish washed up on shore. She felt a sharp stab of gladness that the
ARMY
logo was all crumpled up.
Fuck you
.
Ed should have gotten that medal.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she heard a woman’s voice say, right behind her. “This area is for traitors.” Lacey turned to face two women staring at her with undisguised hostility. One was the fiancée of a specialist who’d lost both an arm and a leg, who Lacey had trained up until recently, when a nasty voice mail message cut it off. She opened her mouth but both women wheeled away before she could say a word. Others nearby looked on, curious at the snub. Lacey’s face was burning. She put on her sunglasses.

It better be worth it, what she’d done for Shelby. Who had moved on from Lacey and Eddie anyway! To others she could follow, tape-record, write about.
She hasn’t even written anything yet,
Lacey felt like calling after those women, two of who knew how many who thought she was a turncoat bitch.
And it’s not like I got paid for it!
Everyone knew that, right? Even though the article wouldn’t come out until later, or so Shelby said, rumors were flying. On big group e-mails Lacey shouldn’t have been cc’ed on, women were writing:
I heard they took a mold sample. Did anyone tell about the elevator, broken three times this week? I need to get my brows done if they’re gonna take a picture of me, anyone know a salon?
Lacey couldn’t always hold on to why she’d participated—and occasionally would pretend she didn’t know anything when a chance conversation in the cafeteria turned to the undercover spy among them—but fuck it, she had and that was that. They were out of here anyway. Still, she edged closer to oblivious Eddie, not jonesing for another encounter.

The purple gas still streaming out of the jumper’s boot was making people cough on the side of the circle where he landed. Another musical group—up-tempo Motown, this time—was at the microphone, and the jumpers went to four different directions on the grass. Each seemed to select a person in the crowd to give something to—a small token from the vest he wore.