The Year That Follows (7 page)

“You’ve been to war,” Sam says. “Afghanistan.” The kid rests his arms back on the railing, and soon he and Sam are again looking at the ocean, a bright
glare on the scalloped water. “Yes, sir. How did you know?”

“I’ve been to war.”

The kid nods. “Which one?”

“The Second World War.”

“Were you army?”

“Navy. Three years on this very ocean.”

They stare at the water, and Sam assumes that’s all that will be said. To say you’ve been there—it’s all that’s needed. But then the kid speaks.

“You must be very proud,” he says.

“Very,” Sam says. It may be, Sam thinks, what I’m most proud of. When Truman sent him that letter, thanking him for his service, he framed it, and it’s still on his wall, the only award he’s ever displayed. He knows that everyone got one of those letters, even soldiers who never left the States, but that isn’t the point. That letter has meaning. There is no way to adequately thank someone who has been in combat. “You’re wearing your dog tags,” he says.

“Yes, sir. A reminder of the guys who are over there. Around here it would be easy, you know, to forget there’s a war on.”

Sam remembers getting his dog tags, two pieces of notched tin with his name and the letter
H. H
for
Hebrew
. Every government has its system of branding. He puts his hand in his pants pocket, fingers the tags. They got him through the war, and he goes nowhere without them, though he doesn’t wear them around his neck. He’d be self-conscious about that.

“Your family in Santa Barbara?” Sam asks.

“Carpenteria.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I like it here,” the marine says. “Where there’s money.”

“I know there’s a war on,” Sam tells him.

“I appreciate that,” the marine says. He’s thin, not the burly Hollywood version of a soldier but a slender kid, the skin drawn tight across his cheeks, veins and tendons visible in his neck when he turns his head. “I go back in five days. Do you know that Afghanistan is exactly on the other side of the globe?”

“I used to think that about the South Pacific.”

“Did you see action?” the marine asks.

“Yes. Broke my back, in fact. Off Okinawa.”

The kid turns to him. “Did anyone understand, when you got home?”

“How could they?”

“My best friend was killed by a mine. A Russian mine. It was probably older than he was. What was the point of that?”

“My son was killed on September eleventh. I thought what I did in the war should mean that my children would get more than forty-one years.”

“He was killed in the attacks?”

“Yes,” Sam says.

“You’re the first person I’ve met who lost someone that day,” the marine says.

Sam nods.

“We’ll get those bastards.”

“I hope so,” Sam says.

Standing next to this kid, Sam feels the urge to put his arm around the boy. He remembers when he first heard the news of the
9
/
11
attacks, early on that Tuesday morning. He knew then, as he knows now, that there would be war. He knew it because he knew his country. For all its technological and economic prowess, for all its art and culture and great universities, for all its odes to the best qualities of the Western enlightenment, America is at heart a warrior nation, much more Sparta than Athens. There will be hell to pay, and skinny kids like this one next to him will be sent to collect.

Sam looks down and sees a pair of dark eyes staring up at him. A seal. He reaches into his pocket and takes out his dog tags. He feels he’s being watched as he removes one of the tags from the chain, and hands it to the kid.

“Here, take this,” Sam says. “I want you to have it.”

“Why?”

“Because I went to war with this tag, and I came home. It got me through, and it’ll get you through. When it’s all over, you bring it back to me.”

“How do I find you?”

“I’m in the phone book,” Sam says.

S
unday afternoon, after a trip to the local park, they return to Cat’s building. It’s square and squat, a bulldog of a structure on the border between Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, built in the early eighties when money was dear and developers were not inclined to waste exorbitant interest on aesthetic niceties like brick patterns or landscaping. Still, it has central air, and this provides a welcome refuge for Connor and Cat, who sprawl on the living-room carpet. Connor likes to wrestle and he is a boy, and so Cat obliges him, learning as she goes, about boys and herself and maybe something about men, the desire they have to prove themselves, something like the impulse in rams and elk and the other large animals that bang their heads together.

Soon they are rolling toy cars and trucks on the carpet, the vehicles a little gift because she loves him, and even with money so tight she wants to remind him. At the start of the car playing, Cat looks at her watch and then she vows not to look again, but after what she is sure has been an hour she sneaks a peek and finds that only twenty-odd minutes have passed. What’s wrong with me? she wonders. This is my son. She knows she loves Connor, knows it if she knows anything, and so shouldn’t playing cars with him be an enjoyable activity,
as enjoyable as would lying on the couch right now, watching some movie from twenty years ago, interesting today for all its anthropological detail—the big collars, the huge feathered hair, the memory of her youth?

She gives it her best shot, mimicking his gurgling engine noises. The cars remind her of the drive home after
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11
. She’d spent a sleepless Tuesday night in Kyle’s apartment, not even bothering with the pretense of going to bed, but dozing now and again while watching CNN. The next day she went to the hospitals, a police station, tried to get to Kyle’s place of work, though she knew it was hopeless. He’d simply disappeared. She called Michael and talked to Connor after he’d gotten home from school—the day before they’d sent the kids home early—and she knew then, hearing her little boy’s voice, that she had to get home. She had to. Yes, she felt she was abandoning her brother, that she’d come all this way, traveled both the miles and time to get back to him, and, perhaps, through him, to herself. But Kyle was gone now, and Connor wasn’t. She needed to get to him.

The airports were closed, but eventually she found a rental car, picked it up Thursday afternoon, and headed west. She made it home in the wee hours of Friday morning. Along the way she passed numerous football fields across western Pennsylvania and Ohio, the lights shining on what must have been Thursday night junior varsity games. She wondered if Connor would play football, as Tommy had, as the boy’s father had, as Kyle hadn’t. She knew most mothers didn’t want their sons
to play, that it was a dangerous game, but she hoped Connor would. It seemed a necessary thing that these games were played, that they were played on that one night, nine-thirteen, the Thursday after
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11
, if only so they could be glimpsed from the highway: glowing pools of normalcy.

On that drive home she was finally able to stop crying. She was cried out. She still hoped Kyle would be found, but she also knew better, and so she wished for what seemed possible, which was to get home, hold Connor in her arms, and never let him out of her sight.

Now she decides she’ll give the car game an hour, and she does. Then she reads to Connor Dr. Seuss’s
Yertle the Turtle
, her favorite. She makes Connor a snack—bits of salami, which he loves, and Triscuits—pours a glass of Merlot, then plops down on the couch, and flips through the channels while Connor eats on his knees at the coffee table. She happens on a preseason football game and thinks again of that drive, and of Tommy. He cared about preseason games. What was at stake, he once explained to her, was not the score but who would make the team. And so now, because of him, she takes a moment to watch. It’s the fourth quarter; the players are from the last rounds of the draft, or undrafted free agents, long shots to make their teams. But still Cat senses the intensity of it, the do-or-die nature of the struggles encased in a meaningless game. She wonders at being the mother of a boy, at how ill prepared she must be to teach Connor what he needs to know to be a man.

O
ne of the interesting things about parenthood is how it can bring your own childhood back to you. Cat makes macaroni and cheese from a box, Kraft, and eats it with Connor. Macaroni and cheese? Till Connor it had been twenty-five years since Cat had eaten mac and cheese. Odd what an effective mnemonic device food is, how she can picture her mother plopping it into Kyle’s bowl and then Cat’s own, that world-weary, tired look on her mother’s face. This was usually on nights when Cat’s father wasn’t home yet; her mother would eat leftovers or nothing at all.

It is Sunday night, the end of the weekend. The phone rings, a rare thing.

“Hey,” says a voice. “It’s Tom—Tommy.”

She feels her breath catch. “You sound unsure.”

“No one calls me Tommy anymore.”

“What is it then, Tom?”

“You can call me Tommy. I like it. It makes me feel younger.”

“Well, then. What are you doing?”

“I’m calling to ask you on a date.”

His idea is tomorrow, but she shoots this down. A Tonya rule, for one thing: don’t be available on his first choice. Also, she’ll never find a sitter in time. They settle on Friday, five days hence. He offers to pick her up, but she says she’ll meet him at the restaurant. She doesn’t want him to see how she lives.

With arrangements made, there is a long silence. She almost thanks him for calling, for not leaving her to
wonder if he would call, for the kindness of taking away that horrible uncertainty. But she stops herself.

“Is that a football game I hear?” he asks.

“It is,” she admits.

“You’re a fan now?”

“I have a son. I thought I should learn.”

“I’m really looking forward to seeing you, Cat.”

“It’ll be great,” she says, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Friday, then,” he says.

She hangs up the phone and has a feeling that is part memory and yet very much present: she again has Tommy to look forward to.

I
t is now after eight, the dishes and the pot are cleaned and put away, and she has to rouse Connor from the couch.

“C’mon, Bucko,” she says. “Time to go get ready for bed.”

Connor says nothing, but Cat can see that he’s tired and not in the mood to move. Together, Cat and Connor collect his prized possessions—a Hot Wheels car, a blue jay feather found outside the apartment, a small rock with a skein of quartz traversing it, the giraffe key chain bought at the zoo, and Brownie, his bear—and head for his room. His favorite thing is to fall asleep in front of the television, now that he’s too big for Cat to pick up and carry to bed. It makes him feel older, he says, to wake up on the couch. Something he no doubt learned from his father.

She has him brush his teeth while she brushes his
hair, and then they lie in bed together while she reads a story about a boy with a magic crayon, one of Connor’s old favorites. She reads and wonders what Tommy reads to his son, what lessons his little boy gets. In the middle of her reading she knows Connor is asleep, hears it in his breathing, and so she kisses him on his hot forehead and goes to call the boy’s father.

Michael answers on the second ring, the telltale sounds of a football game in the background. She tells him she wants to take Connor to California over the several days he would normally have the boy.

A whistle blows in the background. She says nothing, something she learned from Sherri. You want to sell something, you’ve got to know when to shut up. Ask for the order, then don’t talk. People will buy just to break the silence.

“Okay,” Michael says. “But he needs some shoes.”

Of course, she says, she will buy him shoes. She’s been meaning to do it anyway. Lord knows Michael never buys the kid anything to wear, save that one Aerosmith T-shirt she suspected he found on sale, the very shirt Connor wants to wear every day, unaware who Aerosmith is, unaware even of his longing to have his father close. Not even Michael can see this, only Cat, who sees it and feels it, and knows there is nothing to be done.

How did she end up with Michael? It is the mystery of her life, the men in it. She always liked boys, and then men, the company of them, the relative simplicity of their interactions that can pass for honesty, and sometimes
is. She met Michael in a sports bar (of course) up on Square Lake Road, where she went with two girlfriends on a Monday night precisely because it was a football night. One of the girlfriends, Rhonda, insisted it was the perfect night to meet guys, who would be there to watch the game and not to meet women. “There’s nothing worse than a guy trying too hard,” Rhonda said. “Plus, the odds will be good.” Sure enough, there were only a handful of women in the place, and at halftime there was a subtle shift in attention, Cat could feel it, and then suddenly she was playing pool with Michael.

Pool. Of all the ridiculous things. But she was weak then, susceptible as any woman to broad shoulders and a strong jaw and what started that night carried on for almost a year, when she decided that she could not spend the rest of her life with him, that the whole idea was ludicrous—he was a carpenter, had two years of college and little ambition—but before she could tell him she found she was pregnant. She was at work at the insurance agency, and she threw up in the plastic trash can that was under her desk. It was the third time that week, some stomach flu, she lied to herself. As long as no one saw her she could be willfully and effectively delusional, but on this morning Rhonda witnessed it, and said, “What are you, pregnant?”

There was briefly a moment of limb-loosening, gut-clenching, sweaty panic, but then she caught her breath, looked at Rhonda, and understood something like the truth. It was as if her whole life were aiming to this
point, when it would happen just like this, repeating what had come before. It felt preordained, ever since that afternoon almost twenty years before when her mother sat her down and told her what was what.