You Know When the Men Are Gone (24 page)

Then Trish came down and her voice was low and she laughed a lot, softly though, as if shy to show her teeth, and Nick knew from the way the door of the fridge kept opening and closing and glasses were clinking that they were drinking those bottles of white wine. Then a stretch of silence that could only be a kiss, and Nick pushed the knife into his thumb until he bled, just enough to keep him angry instead of wanting to put it to his own neck.

Nick was still holding his knife two hours later when he crept up the cellar stairs, utilizing every ounce of stealth he had ever learned. He had his assault bag, all evidence of his arrival packed up and wiped clean from the basement, and could be on his way to Iraq by dawn. He kept thinking of the Little Mermaid. Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, not the singing movie desecration. How, brokenhearted, she went to the prince’s room on his wedding night and looked down on his sleeping face, his arm thrown possessively across his new bride. If she killed the prince and his wife, she would be set free, back to the sea and the waves that could crash over her until all of this human awfulness had faded away and she was a soulless water creature again.

The moon was near full and filtered through the blinds of the windows, filling the house with a thick, underwater blue. Nick went into Ellie’s bedroom and stood at the edge of her bed, close enough to touch her, close enough to see the rise and fall of her chest. She was curled around her Maggie doll, her hands cupped together by her chin, her lips turned in a faint grin. She slept like her mother—deeply, innocently, unafraid, dreaming things he would never know.

Anne Lisbeth followed him as he crossed the hallway, moving soundlessly from Ellie’s room into the master bedroom, her eyes knowing and reflective green like a witch’s familiar. Nick stopped at the threshold. There was his wife and there was a stranger sleeping next to her. Trish’s face was tilted toward the door, a bare arm trailing off the bed, the toes of one pale foot poking out from the sheet, just as Nick had imagined her night after night. The man was turned away, his back a wall, his head half hidden by a pillow, anonymous. But Nick could see the ridges of his fragile spine and knew that he and his Gerber could take him. Easily.

Nick moved the knife from his right hand to his left and then back to his right again and took a step closer to the bed.

He had done it. Here it was, finally, after all his searching, after all the lies and lies and lies, the shifty informants with their misinformation and subtleties lost in translation. Here, in his own home, was a single and undeniable truth. Nick felt a wave of sweat seep through him and his bowels twist, but he felt a sense of relief, too, that finally, for once, there was no doubt.

The knife continued to move from hand to hand, the blade catching the moonlight, a pendulum swinging from one side to the next, a judge’s gavel raised, and Nick waited to see where it would land.

YOU SURVIVED THE WAR, NOW SURVIVE THE HOMECOMING

C
arla Wolenski spent the drive from Fort Hood to Austin, one hour and thirty-six minutes, leaning forward, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that she could feel her fingernails straining against her bitten cuticles. She was about to pick up her husband, the father of her child, from jail.

The collect call from the city correctional facility woke her early that morning. Ted hadn’t told her why he was there, just asked her to come get him, and then they had been disconnected. Now, the long stretch of flat Texas highway before her, Carla imagined all of the things that could have happened the night before: drunken pranks gone wrong, jaywalking, urinating on a sidewalk, public intoxication, bar fights, car accidents, DUIs. Whatever it was, it was serious enough to warrant a night in prison, which meant it was serious enough that it could potentially ruin Ted’s army career.

She turned off Guadalupe onto Tenth Street and saw the jail, an ordinary, concrete façade with narrow, parallel stripes of windows, looking more like a telephone company or municipal building than a place full of human beings forcibly removed from society.

Ted was sitting on a low wall in front, bent-shouldered under a DO NOT ENTER Sign. He had gotten back from Iraq only three weeks ago, and Carla still felt a jolt of electricity flood through her whenever she saw him, a shiver of amazement that he was really home, a mental realignment that she had a husband living in the same time zone. She tucked her blond hair behind her ears and quickly pinched her cheeks to bring out the color; she wasn’t quite used to him yet and, even in her confusion, tried to look like something he’d want to come home to.

Pulling up to the curb, she noticed that his khaki pants, which she had so meticulously ironed the night before, were rumpled with streaks of mud on the knees, the collar of his polo shirt hung open and askew across his shoulders, the buttons clearly torn off. He lifted his head, saw her car and stood, revealing a swollen cheek and a face smudged with grime. It looked as if some divine giant had taken a paper doll of her handsome husband, crushed it, then smoothed the remains onto the side of the street.

Ted got into the passenger side and put on his seat belt, not meeting his wife’s eyes. He did not speak, offered no apology, no gratitude, no explanation, just stared straight ahead.

“What happened?” Carla whispered, putting a hand on his knee.

“I don’t remember.” Still not looking at her, Ted covered his face with his hands, his knuckles misshapen and cut. He had taken command of Alpha Company at the tail end of the deployment. When Carla complained about him working too hard these past few weeks, he would point to the fridge, where he had stuck his job description under a magnet from the Waco Zoo:
The Company Commander of a Mechanized Infantry Unit is responsible for the health, welfare, physical fitness, training, discipline, and combat readiness of 130 soldiers. Responsible for the accountability and maintenance of vehicles and equipment, all assigned weapons, home station equipment, and deployment-provided equipment in the company, valued in excess of $50 million. Teaches, counsels, mentors, and develops all subordinates
. A night in prison could relieve him of this duty and there was no way to hide whatever he had done. Battalions on Hood received a monthly copy of all the police blotters in Central Texas, and if the blotter somehow didn’t get to his command, a rumor surely would.

Ted put his hands out and looked at them, front and back, as if astonished to see bruises there. “I remember doing shots of Irish whiskey, then waking up with my face aching, in a cell that smelled like piss.”

She thought he smelled like piss, too, and was glad she hadn’t brought their seven-month-old baby, Mimi, along for the ride. “Is anyone pressing charges?” she asked. “Was it a bar fight?”

He dropped his hands on his lap but was careful not to touch her fingertips. “The cops said we were in the street. The other guy got away. That’s all I know. And I’m done talking about it.”

If he had just looked at her, put his hand on hers or, best of all, whispered,
I’m sorry,
she would have forgiven everything and anything. She would have said,
We’ll get through this,
or
Your chain of command will understand.

But he continued to stare into the distance and she felt her chest tighten around her own anger, around her own fear, and she lifted her hand from his lap. “What are you going to do?” She clicked on the car’s blinker and pulled into traffic, emphasizing each “you” as if he were a stranger she had no responsibility for. “Do you have to go to court or pay any fines? Will you need a lawyer? Will they put a permanent letter of reprimand in your military file?”

Ted turned toward her, giving her that look of disgust he usually reserved for the times he happened upon Mimi nursing at one of her distended and blue-veined breasts, as if Carla were the intruder in the home, some marauding, grotesque creature with her leaking chest and baby-weighted thighs.

“Jesus, Carla, I said I don’t want to talk about it. Can’t you give me five friggin’ minutes of peace?”

She shifted into third so quickly the car shuddered, on the verge of stalling out. “Peace?” All those weekends Ted had spent training on the range, the late nights preparing for Iraq, and the deployments themselves; all of those days and nights, months and years he spent excelling at his job, she had been home alone, making sacrifices as well. “You’ll have plenty of peace since you’ve effectively destroyed your military career. But that’s okay; it’s not like you have a wife and daughter to provide for.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she knew they were the cruelest things she could say.

“Fuck you,” he answered.

Carla sat up so straight she almost hit her head on the window visor. She wanted to stomp the brakes and give him whiplash but there was an ice cream truck riding her bumper, singing its plaintive song.

She stared ahead, afraid that if she turned to look at her husband, she would burst into a volcano of furious, scalding tears. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he were slightly startled with himself as well, but also a little pleased. Carla rammed the clutch around the grid streets of Austin, then raced seventy-five miles an hour north on Highway 35 toward Fort Hood, hoping to force her husband to speak first, even if it was to tell her to slow down. But he only leaned the passenger seat as far back as possible and pretended to fall asleep.

Carla thought of college, of the night she had met Ted. She’d had a boyfriend at the time, a premed student with long, tapered hands and a Saab, but a few friends convinced her to put her books away and go to an ROTC frat party. She spotted Ted immediately, that square face and army-short black hair, T-shirt too tight around his biceps, jeans low on his hips, swigging from a bottle of tequila. He looked like everything she stayed away from in a boy. But he honed in on her, waltzing right over with that bottle of tequila and half a lemon, and he spent the rest of the night dragging her around like his personal shot glass, licking salt and lemon juice from the inside of her elbow, pulling her close and breathing fire down her mouth, and she swallowed every burning drop.

But right now, she wondered what her life would have been like if she had stayed in her dorm that night with her sociology textbooks and chamomile tea, if she had only gone to bed early and dreamed of being a doctor’s wife.

They slowed down behind traffic outside the Fort Hood main gate, near the big sign that said WELCOME TO THE GREAT PLACE, FORT HOOD. Carla always got a kick out of that optimistic entry. Like everything in Texas, Fort Hood’s claim to greatness was an attempt to seem bigger and better than—yet set apart from—anything else in the country; a boast, a dare, the flick of a huge middle finger at the rest of the United States. But the sign in the opposite direction, the sign that greeted cars as they drove off the military installment, the sign she could just barely read in her rearview mirror as she slowed to a stop, seemed to Carla to negate the grandiose welcome. It read: YOU SURVIVED THE WAR, NOW SURVIVE THE HOMECOMING. Under the words was a digital counter that recorded the automobile fatalities of the soldiers each month. It was always highest when a division returned from a deployment; today it read 16. As if that wasn’t enough, resting on the median below the sign was the twisted metal skeleton of a car, so crushed and burned that nothing made of flesh and bone could have escaped its destruction.

It was their turn to roll up to the guard gate when her phone began to ring. Ted lurched out of his seat and said, “Don’t answer that.”

Carla hadn’t intended to answer the phone until her husband told her not to. It was illegal to talk on a cell phone while going through the checkpoint, and there was a seventy-dollar fine for talking on a phone while driving on post, but she clicked it open anyway.

“Can you hold on for a second? I’m going through the main gate,” she said into the receiver. She heard a stranger’s voice answer, “Yes, ma’am.”