Unremarried Widow (18 page)

“You'll still have a daughter,” she said. “And a son.”

I listened without speaking, one arm wrapped tight across my chest.

“Something you write will be published.”

“A book?” I said. “Or, like, an article?”

“Honey, I can't tell. I just see your name in print.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have any other questions for me?”

I started to voice the reason I had called—
Did you know?—
but I must have bungled it somehow, must have tripped over my words or
stumbled over my meaning, or she didn't want to answer, because what she said was “Oh, honey. You are in hell right now.”

I looked at the clock on my nightstand. We had ten minutes left but it was clear there was nothing to say. Just as I began to get off the phone, Suzanna stopped me.

“One more thing,” she said.

I gripped the receiver.
Tell me something I need to hear.

“I see that you've been angry with your mother. Is that right?”

I nodded dumbly into the phone.

“Well, when we hang up, I want you to go give your mom a hug.”

I almost laughed. My mother and I hadn't hugged in a long time.

“You give her a hug, and you say you're sorry. You tell her you're sorry for being so nasty.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Will you do that for me?”

“I will.”

After I hung up the phone, I sat on the bed for a few minutes, debating. I could hear my mother downstairs in the kitchen, putting away the pots from dinner. I thought about letting the moment pass. But then I remembered something Annabelle had said about the first week after the notification when we were all crowded into the house. In a moment when she and my mother were alone together, my mother had said to her, “It's just me and A.J. now. We're all we've got.”

With all my courage, I climbed off the bed and walked downstairs.

“Hey, honey,” my mother said when I stepped into the kitchen. She poured detergent into the dishwasher. “I thought you had gone to bed.”

I stood there unable to speak until she turned to look at me.

“What's up?” she said. “Everything Okay?”

My face collapsed on itself the way it does when I cry: my chin drew in, my lips arced down, my eyes squeezed shut.

“I'm sorry, Mommy,” I said. “I'm sorry I've been so awful.”

I stared at the brown tile of the kitchen floor and held myself stiff.
My mother came to me then and put her arms around my shoulders and I let myself be held. I could smell the VO5 conditioner she uses, the Arrid deodorant she wears, the Tide on her clothes. She held me for a long time and I think she cried, too, and when it was done some of my anger had leached away.

I once sat in a
crowded room of military survivors and watched a clip from a documentary film about military widows. It was immediately clear why the producers had selected the women they chose to profile. They were pretty and articulate and their husbands had a handsome fresh-scrubbed look. When one of the widows in the film spoke about her husband, his photo appeared on the screen and the room full of people literally gasped—he was that good-looking. But then his pretty wife explained how he had died. He was napping in his bunk in Iraq when a worker mistakenly dumped a truckload of sand on his shelter. A foolish accident. I felt more than heard the second reaction from the crowd. Disappointment. We wanted a hero's death for the young husband with the movie star's face. We wanted, if not a happy ending to his story, then at least a heroic one. His death made all that we were trying to make sense of hopelessly senseless.

Teresa was the one who told me Miles and John would not receive
the Purple Heart. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't. I had assumed a soldier killed in combat automatically earned the medal. As it turns out the Purple Heart is reserved for those pilots who are shot down, not downed by their own mistakes.

During one of my visits to North Carolina, Teresa showed me her investigation file, a thick manila folder stuffed with pictures, transcripts, and government documents.

“This thing we got right here,” she said as she handed me a photo, “this crap. This is the worst to me.”

I looked over the image of the crash site.

“You remember they said ‘massive ground fire'? That wouldn't be green if there was a massive ground fire.”

She pointed to a section of the photo where broken tree branches knocked together like knees.

“Remember they told us they went flip-flopping in there? It wouldn't happen like that. You know what I'm saying? There is no ground damage. If you look at these pictures, the irrigation ditches are perfect. The ground's not even burned. This would have been burned if there was a massive ground fire.”

She looked over my shoulder at the photo in my hand.

“And notice they didn't take any trees out on the right or left? They took out a row of seven trees. That's it.”

“So, what does that mean?” I asked.

“That means they fell out of the sky.”

She shuffled through the papers on the table and pulled out another photo.

“Here's the black box. The infamous black box. Massive ground fire and it's not even burned.”

She handed me the picture and turned back to the pile.

“All this information, I'm trying to find this picture that I showed you. There's another one in here and it's not the same. Nothing's the same. I have three reports and nothing matches. This is the official
report, this one that I have in my hot little hands. Like all the stuff I highlighted? Something's not right.”

She handed me another photo of the crash site.

“They landed in the lemon trees,” she said. “Are they big?”

“The lemon trees? No, I don't think—”

“I don't think so, either. They don't look big in that picture. But all this stuff—nothing matches. None of it. Remember, you saw this? There's no ground damage. They took out seven trees and that's it. No ground damage.”

I took the photo she handed me.

“And then here again the same picture. It's green. It's not burned, you know, and the irrigation ditches aren't tore up. Look—more green. Massive ground fire, my butt. Look—no fire there, either. That's the tail rotor, by the way.”

I looked at the warped piece of metal that had once been part of the aircraft.

“Why would—”

“That's what I'm saying,” Teresa said. “Nothing's damaged. They did not go flip-flopping in there like they said they did. I don't care what they tell you.”

The clock on the living room wall chimed.

“Come on, come on,” Teresa said, searching through the pile. “You won't believe all the stuff I have.”

She pulled out a sheet and scanned the writing.

“You know, also, there's a box in the helicopter that if they go down it lets off a signal so the satellite picks it up to find them. That didn't work.”

She paused, reading.

“See, I don't know how much you want to know.”

“I don't really want—”

“Here it is. Here we go.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They don't show us where the guys are in this one. The way the gun's angled.
The impact point's different. The engine's lower. See, they're kind of making up their own story.”

She handed me a printed invoice.

“You know what they did?” she said. “There's two reports. There's a safety report and then there's the cost report. They actually gave you and me a bill. How much it cost them to lose John and Miles.”

“How much did they cost?”

“John and Miles were a million dollars each. The aircraft cost twenty-five.”

I shook my head. “Jesus.”

“Remember we got told originally—I don't know what you got told, but I got told originally—that there were two flashes in the sky. One they thought was the flares because the flares go off—I don't know if you're too familiar with the aircraft—the flares go off to make a rocket hit the flare instead of the helicopter because it has heat. So I think the flares went off but I think they still got hit.”

Teresa sat down in the chair opposite me.

“How much do you want to know about Miles? Like, he wasn't in the aircraft, do you know that?”

“I knew that.”

“He wasn't burned at all. Did you know that?”

I nodded.

“John was burned,” Teresa said. “Bad. They told me thirty-three percent when I buried him. Well, when I got all the stuff I got, it was worse. It was ninety-nine percent. You know their protective gear? Melted to him. It takes eight hundred fifty degrees to do that. You need air and you need heat. He had to be in the sky, on fire, falling, for that to happen. See, they don't understand that I did my research.”

She shook her head as she riffled through the pages.

“But let me see if I can find this. . . . Remember we saw this where they tried to tell us what the last words out of theirs mouths were?”

She waved the audio transcript, then stopped to scan the typed words.

“Like this part. Like, it's not the same, either.”

She read to herself, then stopped and looked up at me.

“All Miles's stuff is blacked out. Do you think you'll ever be ready to look at that stuff?”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

I shook my head.

“I'm going to do the best I can to get this fixed,” Teresa said. “I'm not stopping. They pissed off the wrong wife.”

She put down the page in her hand and looked across the table at me.

“If anything,” Teresa said, “I want to change ‘pilot error.' You know what I mean? They're the most trained soldiers we have and they fly a multimillion-dollar aircraft, and you can blame them when you don't know what's going on? That shit's wrong to me. You know, John can make mistakes. He's human. You know? I'm not saying he didn't. And that was the night Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death. So you're telling me they're flying in the home territory of Saddam Hussein and you're going to tell me nobody tried to take a potshot at our husbands? Bull. I say bull. They always miss the first aircraft and hit the second. That's the way it is. You know?”

Much later, when we were
five, nearly six years out, I asked Teresa why it mattered so much that our husbands receive the Purple Heart.

“You can feel it,” she said. “Some of my friends, even acquaintances, they go, ‘Your husband never received a Purple Heart?' They don't say it, but you can see it.
You're not part of this.
Well, I
am
part of this.

“I watched my husband go to Desert Storm and I watched him go to Afghanistan. I watched him go to Iraq, and when he came home he didn't come home the way he's supposed to. My husband was a soldier.
He gave his life. And he—and I, and his girls—shouldn't be thought less of because of the way he died.

“I don't care what anybody says, but people make you feel less proud. He was doing his job. He didn't come home from doing his damn job.

“You sit there and you look around at the graves at Arlington and you see
P
URPLE
H
EART
,
P
URPLE
H
EART
,
P
URPLE
H
EART
.
And then you don't see it on your husband's grave. You're like, is he less of a hero because of it?”

At the Tuesday night group,
Richard asked us what might bring some comfort.

“I would eat a big, heavy meal,” I said. “Meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Chicken and dumplings. That sort of thing. I would eat and I would sleep and I would wake up and do it all over again. I would eat and sleep until I felt better.”

“So, why don't you give it a try?” he said.

“Oh, no.” I raised a hand as if to stop the idea before it could take hold. “I would never do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would never end. The eating and sleeping. I would fall into that hole and never climb out.”

But on my way home from work the next day, a box of barbecue sat reassuringly on the passenger seat. I stopped in front of my driveway, opened the gate, and nosed in. I parked the car, shut off the engine, and for a full minute I breathed in the sweet smell of barbecue sauce. On the way to the door I ignored the one-armed cactus in the front yard, the hole in the porch screen, the mud caked on my tires and flung up behind the wheel wells. I ignored the too-high grass, the chain-link
fence, the
BEWARE OF DOG
sign left over from the previous tenants. The front door stuck and I had to push with my hip until it gave. I half stepped, half fell into the living room and the screen door clapped my heels. I didn't flinch. I carried the plastic bag of food into the kitchen and set the Styrofoam cup of tea on the counter. It sweated in the heat. I stripped off my work clothes on the way to the bedroom, kicked my sandals toward the closet, and stood in my cotton underwear. I pulled out the drawers to my dresser, first one, then the other, until I found my at-home shorts, frayed at the waistband, then a thin-strapped tank top. The light through the window gave the room an underwater quality and I could smell the barbecue from its depths.

In the kitchen a line of ants crawled over the counter. They started in the windowsill where the wall met the frame and marched to the drain and back, ant after ant after ant, past the breakfast dishes gathered in the sink, the bowl with a rim of milk at the bottom, the spoon set beside it. I didn't care. I opened the plastic take-out bag and a puff of steam rose up. I was slow, slow with it, careful. I reached in, pulled out the Styrofoam container, and slid the tab back on the box. There it was: pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw. Red sauce smeared on the underside of the lid and condensation beaded on the top. The bottom of the box was still warm. I didn't bother to put it on a plate. I carried the box through the dining room, past the secondhand table and the mismatched chairs painted pink and green. Watermelon colors. Someone else's art project. I set the take-out box on the couch and sat beside it, my back to the armrest, facing the television. I was starving, a hole of hunger blown through me. Some people say children mistake hunger for other discomforts. They say
I'm hungry
when what they mean is
I'm sleepy.
They say
I'm hungry
when what they mean is
I'm sad.
I wanted to eat the pork in two greasy bites. I wanted to shove macaroni into my mouth, to pick up the coleslaw with my fingers and cram it down my gullet. I wanted to run my fingers around the edge of the container and collect the sauce stuck to the sides. I would raise my fingers to my
mouth and suck off the sauce, even the bits caked under my nails. I wanted to eat and eat and eat until I was sick with it. Until I was full. But instead I flipped through the channels. I found a
Baywatch
rerun. I took my time. I ate the pork one slow bite after another. I took careful forkfuls of macaroni. I chewed until the food was paste in my mouth. I swallowed. I took another bite. Sunlight dripped from the picture window behind the couch and spilled across the laminate floor.