The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (25 page)

She sensed my hesitation. “How was your visit with your daughter?”

“Difficult.”

She nodded. “I know about difficult. Before Jimmy shipped out that last time, we talked about whether to try and have a baby. It wasn’t about whether we wanted one, of course we wanted one, but whether or not the timing would work. It was all logistics, whether he would be home to help between deployments, whether or not his mom could come down from Chicago, whether I could get maternity leave. We even talked about whether it would be better to have a baby in the spring or fall, and we decided on spring, but the timing wasn’t right for that, so—” She pressed her palms together. “No baby.”

I took my deep breath. “Cassie and I had a game we played when she was little, something we did when we went out to eat. Watch the people coming in, I told her. Watch—”

That’s as far as I got with my explanation. Pre-boarding was announced for her flight, and the line formed on our toes.

“You’re flying to Canada?”

She nodded, ruefully nodded, and made a dismissive motion with her hand.

“The other members of the committee think I need a break. They might be right, too. What I’ve learned during our campaign is that most people can only be courageous in brief little flashes, that’s all the vast majority of them can manage. One act of courage, one moment of heroic goodness, then poof—their capacity for doing it is gone forever, either that or they never get another chance.”

“You’ve done lots of good.”

“My little flash? Maybe. But they’re right about my needing a vacation. What I worry about, really worry about, is how I’m going to be standing behind a microphone lecturing people who already agree with me that war is wrong, delivering my standard speech, and then I’m going to remember Jimmy and my anger gets the best of me and I blurt it out right in front of the cameras. ‘I hate America! I hate America!’ I’m going to yell that out and in one moment of weakness all the good work we’ve done comes crashing down in flames.”

They were announcing her flight now, she began gathering up her things.

“Anyway, it’s not a vacation, it’s a reconnaissance. Apartment hunting. I’m thinking of moving there. I want to live in a country that doesn’t bully. If I’m ever lucky enough to have a girl like yours that’s where I want to bring her up.”

“I’m going to call you,” I said.

“My co-chair is a wonderful man named Hank Clarkson. He lost a son in Afghanistan. Here, I’ll write down his number. We badly need new blood.”

I took the card, nodded. “You better hurry.”

“Love it or leave it, right? . . . You’re a good listener. Cassie’s lucky to have you.”

I took the card out on my first day here, taped it to the refrigerator where I would see it every morning. Pam Cord had crossed out her name, written in Hank Clarkson’s, the wonderful man, the man who lost his son in Afghanistan. But it’s her I want to call. I want to volunteer when I finish here, though I need to ask how exactly I can help. Will I actually have the nerve? I think Pam is right, that most people find courage only in sudden flashes. Here at the end I’m remembering Beth’s story, and how her husband Alan, so weak and manipulated, plunged into an icy river to try and save a man he hated. I can picture it so clearly, that brief moment standing on the bank before he made his decision. I will dive in, I picture him thinking. I will dive in. I will.

There’s lots more work left of course. Jeannie’s wallpaper, the rolls she picked out, waits in the parlor for me to hang. I must take my time with this, learn to use these new tools correctly. Brushes, yardsticks, trim knives, straight edges, seam rollers— tools not for ripping and tearing, but smoothing, pasting, prettying up. The paper is peach colored and gently Victorian, with a pattern that should be easy to match. Papering over won’t take nearly as long as stripping off, and then the walls will be far too beautiful not to like. The paper will hang here for fifty, sixty, maybe even a hundred years, so our stories will sleep on the walls for the rest of this century, or at least until Cassie is an old woman and what happened in Iraq is a line in a history book, nothing more.

There’s only a little space left before my words hit the edge of the wall and drop toward the floor. You who have found this will need to stoop to read the rest. But there’s so much left to confess, here in these last few inches where I can still confess anything. I stole paperclips from my teacher’s desk when I was seven and hid them in my closet in a silver horde. I hated saying prayers when I was little and by eleven decided there was no God. I resented Jeannie when she was born, how she stole my mother’s attention. I gave a girl named Judy Popp a quarter to be my friend. The two of us took ribbons from the fabric store and once I stole buttons entirely on my own. I smoked a cigarette behind Munten’s supermarket when I was twelve. I was boy crazy in school, a terrible flirt. I cheated on a history test in seventh grade. I necked with Zack Reese on our living room sofa when I was supposed to be babysitting. I smoked pot when I was a sophomore, hardly ever did homework. I waitressed in summers and never reported tips on my taxes. Dan on our honeymoon made love to me behind the wall in Washington in the middle of the day. For many years I drove without my seatbelt fastened. I always tell Dan I’m voting for one candidate, then go into the booth and vote for the other. As a young mother I was a failure at breast feeding. Five years ago at a convention in Phoenix I danced with a handsome teacher from Pennsylvania and let him tug me back to his room. I don’t read as much as I should. I color my hair to hide the gray. I’m ten pounds overweight. My daughter is a torturer.

That’s what you should know about me when it comes to truth. As for this country, our world, these times that to you will seem ancient. It’s not much different than it’s ever been. For the lucky ones, ease and prosperity. For the rest, war, nothing but war, nothing ever but war, war all the time now, war only war.