Vampires in the Lemon Grove (23 page)

At home, Beverly licks at her chalky lips. Her heartbeat is back to normal but her ears are still roaring. Is she lying to herself? Possibly the flashback is really nothing but her own projection, a dark and greedy way to feel connected to him, to dig into his trauma. Perhaps all she is seeing is her own hunger for drama spooling around the sergeant’s service, herself in hysterics, a devotee of that new genre, “the bleeding heart horror story.” So named by Representative Eule Wolly in his latest rant on TV. He’d railed against the media coverage on the left and right alike: prurience, pawned off as compassion! The bloodlust of civilians. War-as-freak-show, war-as-snuff-film. “All the smoky footage on the seven a.m. news to titillate you viewers who are just waking up. Give you a jolt, right? Better than your Folger’s.”

Was it that? Was that all?

That week, Beverly sees her ordinary retinue of patients: a retired mailman with a herniated disk; a pregnant woman who lies curled on her side, cradling her unborn daughter, while Beverly works on her shoulders; sweet Jonas Black, her oldest patient, who softens like a cookie in milk before the massage has even begun. By Friday the intensity of her contact with Sergeant Derek Zeiger feels dreamily distant, and the memory of the tattoo itself
has gone fuzzy on her, that picture no more and no less real to her than the war accounts she’s seen on television or read. Next time she won’t allow herself to get quite so worked up. Dmitri, who is working with several referrals from the VA hospital, tells her that he can’t stop bawling after his sessions with them, and Beverly feels a twist of self-loathing every time she sees his puffy face. No doubt his compassion for the returning men and women is genuine, but there’s something else afoot at Dedos Mágicos, too, isn’t there? Some common need has been unlidded in all of them.

What a sorrowful category, Beverly thinks: the “new veteran.” All those soldiers returning from Fallujah and Kandahar and Ramadi and Yahya Khel to a Wisconsin winter. Flash-frozen into citizens again. The phrase calls to mind a picture from her childhood Bible: “The Raising of Lazarus.” The spine of the book was warped, so that it always fell open to this particular page. Lazarus, looking a little hungover, was blinking into a hard light. Sunbeams were fretted together around his forehead in jagged green and yellow blades. His sandaled pals had all gathered outside his tomb to greet him, like a birthday surprise party, but it seemed to be a tough social moment; Lazarus wasn’t looking at anyone. He was staring into the cave mouth from which he had just been resurrected with an expression of sublime confusion.

When, fifteen minutes into his third massage, Sergeant Derek Zeiger begins to tell Beverly the same story about Pfc. Arlo Mackey and April 14, she pauses, unsure if she ought to interject—is the sergeant testing her? Does he want to see if she’s been paying attention to him? Yet his voice sounds completely innocent of her knowledge. She supposes this could be a symptom of the trauma, memory loss; or maybe Derek is simply an old-fashioned blow-hard. As her hands travel up and down his spine, he tells the same
jokes about the
jammous
. His voice tightens when he introduces Arlo. His story careens onto Route Roses …

“Why did you call it that? Route Roses?”

“Because it smelled like shit.”

“Oh.” The flowers in her imagination shrink back into the road.

“Because Humvees were always getting blown to bits on it. I saw it happen right in front of me, fireballs swaying on these big fucking stems of smoke.”

“Mmh.” She squirts oil into one palm, greases the world of April 14. Just his voice makes her crave buckets and buckets of water.

“I killed him,” comes the voice of Sergeant Derek Zeiger, almost shyly.

“What?” Beverly surprises both of them with her vehemence. “No. No, you didn’t, Derek.”

“I did. I killed him—”

Beverly’s mouth feels dry and papery.

“The bomb killed him. The, ah, the
insurgents
 …”

“How would you know, Beverly, what I did and didn’t do?” His voice shakes with something that sounded like the precursor to a fit of laughter, or fury; it occurs to her that she really doesn’t know this person well enough to say which is coming.

“You can’t blame yourself.”

“Listen: there are two colors on the road, green and brown. Two colors on the berm of Route Roses. There was a
red
wire. I didn’t miss it, Bev—I saw it. I saw it, I practically
heard
that color, and I thought I probably ought to stop and check it out, only I figured it was some dumb thing, a candy wrapper, a piece of trash, and I didn’t want to stop again, it was a thousand degrees in the shade, I just wanted to get the fucking generators delivered and get back to base, and we kept right on driving, and I didn’t say anything, and guess who’s dead?”

“Derek … You tried to save him. The blood loss killed him. The IED killed him.”

“It was enough time,” he says miserably. “We had fifteen, twenty seconds. I could have saved him.”

“No—”

“Later, I remembered seeing it.”

Beverly swallows. “Maybe you just imagined seeing it.”

When Beverly’s mother first started coughing, those fits were indistinguishable from a regular flu. Everybody in the family said so. Her doctors had long ago absolved them. At the wake, Janet and Beverly agreed that there was nothing to tip them off to her cancer. And their father’s symptoms had been even less alarming: discomfort on one side of his body. Just an infrequent tingling. Death had waited in the dark for a long time, ringing the McFaddens’ doorbell.

“You think it’s hindsight, Derek, but it’s not that. It’s regret. It’s false, you know, what you see when you look back—it’s the
illusion
that you could have stopped it …”

Beverly falls silent, embarrassed. After a moment, Derek lets out a raucous laugh. He allows enough time to elapse so that she hears the laugh as a choice, as if many furious, rejected phrases are swirling around his head on the pillow.

“You trying to pick a fight with me, Bev? I saw it. Believe me. I looked out there and I saw something flash on the berm, and it was hot as hell that day, and I didn’t want to stop.” He laughs again. “Now I can’t stop seeing it. It’s like a punishment.”

He lets his face slump into the headrest. On the tattoo, Fedaliyah is becoming weirdly distorted, pulled to Daliesque proportions by the energy of his shuddering. His shoulders clench—he’s crying, she realizes. And right there in the middle of his back, a scar is swelling. Visibly lifting off the skin.

“Shhh,” says Beverly, “shhh—”

At first, it’s just a shiny ridge of skin, as slender as a lizard’s tail.
Then it begins to darken and swell, as if plumping with liquid. Has it been there all along, this scar, disguised by the tattoo ink? Did the oils irritate it? She watches with ticklish horror as the scar continues to lengthen, rise.

“I saw it, I saw it there,” he is saying. “I can see it now, just how that wire would have looked … why the
fuck
didn’t I say anything, Beverly …?”

Quickly, without thought, Beverly pushes down on it. An old, bad taste floods her mouth. When she lifts her hand, the thin, dark scar is still there, needling through the palm grove on the tattoo like something stitched onto Derek by a blotto doctor. She runs her thumbs over it, all reflex now, smoothing it with the compulsive speed that she tidies wrinkles on the white sheet. For a second, she succeeds in thumbing it under his skin. Has she burst it, will fluid seep out of it? She lifts her hands and the scar springs right back into place like a stubborn cowlick. Then she pushes harder, wincing as she does so, anticipating Zeiger’s scream—but the sergeant doesn’t react at all. She pushes down on the ridge of skin as urgently as any army medic doing chest compressions, and from a great distance a part of her is aware that this must look hilarious from the outside, like a Charlie Chaplin comedy, because the scale is all wrong here, she’s using every ounce of her strength, and the red threat to Sergeant Zeiger is the width of a coffee stirrer.

And then the scar or blister, whatever it was, is gone. Really gone; she removes her hands to reveal smooth flesh. Zeiger’s tattoo is a flat world again, ironed solidly onto him. This whole ordeal takes maybe twelve seconds.

“Boy,
that
was a new move,” says the soldier. “That felt deep, all right. Do the Swedes do that one?” His voice is back to normal. “What did you do just now?”

Beverly feels woozy. Her mouth is cracker-dry. She keeps sweeping over his back to confirm that the swelling has stopped.

“Thank you!” he says at the end of their session. “I feel
great
. Better than I have since—since forever!”

She gives him a weak smile and pats his shoulder. Outside the window, the snow is really falling.

“See you next week,” they say at the same time, although only Beverly’s cheeks blaze up.

Beverly stands in the doorway and watches Zeiger scratching under his raggedy black shirt, swaying almost drunkenly down the hallway. Erasing it—she hadn’t intended to do that! Medically, did she just make a terrible mistake? Should she have called a real doctor? Adrenaline pumps through her and pools in her stiff fingers, which ache from the effort of the massage.

Call him back. Tell Derek what just happened
.

Tell him what, though? Not what she did to the scar, which seems loony. And surely not what she secretly believes:
I saw the wire and I acted. I saved you
.

The next time Sergeant Zeiger comes to see her he looks almost unrecognizable.

“You look wonderful!” she says, unable to keep a note of pleasure out of her voice. “Rested.”

“Aw, thanks, Bev,” he laughs. “You, too!” His voice lowers with a childlike pride. “I’m sleeping through the night, you know,” he whispers. “Haven’t had any pain in my lower back for over a week. Don’t let it go to your head, Bev, but I’m telling all the doctors at the VA that you’re some kind of miracle worker.”

He walks into the room with an actual swagger, that sort of boastful indifference to gravity that Beverly associates with cats and Italian women. One week ago, he was hobbling.

“Are you done changing?” she calls from behind the door.

She knocks, enters, lightheaded with happiness. Her body feels so fiercely tugged in the boy’s direction that she takes a step behind the counter, as if to correct for some gravitational imbalance. Derek rubs his hands together, makes as if to dive onto the table. “God, I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all week. Counting down. How many more of these do I get?”

Seven sessions, she tells him. But Beverly has already privately decided that she will keep seeing Zeiger indefinitely, for as long as he wants to continue.

She grabs a new bottle of lotion, really high-end stuff, just in case it was only the oil she used last time that provoked his reaction. Ever so lightly, she pushes into his skin. The little fronds of Fedaliyah seem to curl away from her probing fingers. Ten minutes into the massage, without prompting, he starts to talk about the day that Mackey died. As the story barrels onto Route Roses and approaches the intersection where the red wire is due to appear, Beverly’s stomach muscles tighten. An animal premonition causes her to drape her hands over the spot on Zeiger’s back where the scar appeared last time. She has to resist the urge to lift her hands and cover her eyes.