You Know When the Men Are Gone (27 page)

“Kit, please call me Josie,” she said, opening the door farther, taking in the sight of him. He was young, twenty or twenty-one, tall and bony, his uniform loose around the shoulders and waist as if he had not always been so thin. His skin was the grayish white of a wet piece of paper and there were dark smudges under his eyes. It wasn’t until he stepped across the threshold that she noticed his limp and peered at his left foot and the black ski-boot contraption. Then she realized who he was. Two months after Eddie’s funeral, the army held a memorial service, awarding him the Bronze Star with the V for Valor, suddenly claiming he had saved someone’s life. Josie didn’t go. Eddie’s father had flown down from Michigan to accept the decoration, taking it home with him. That was also around the time the soldiers stopped standing guard over Josie and the wives no longer brought food, as if the community had ascertained she was no longer a risk to herself. Without their vigilance, Josie started just stretching out on her couch all day.

“Are those for me?” she asked Kit.

He looked down at the flowers in his right hand as if they didn’t belong to him, and his pale cheeks turned red, making him look almost healthy. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I thought I should bring something ...”

“They’re very nice.” Josie took the dangling bouquet from his hand. The smell of the flowers made her think of wet dirt thumping down on the coffin, black high heels that pinched her toes, and the Kleenex that disintegrated into pulp as she rubbed it against her eyes. She had tried to be a dignified widow but was barely able to breathe during “Taps.”

Josie found a dusty vase in the kitchen and called out to the soldier, who still stood in her living room. “I hope you like roast beef?”

Kit nodded and walked toward her, pausing in front of all the frames. She had gone through their albums and removed her favorites, putting Eddie wherever she could—on the dining room table, the television set, nailed into the four walls—so that wherever she turned, he would be looking at her.

“Sergeant Schaeffer was the best noncommissioned officer I ever met,” he said softly, picking up a photo of Eddie from his Ranger School graduation, forty pounds thinner than he’d been before Ranger School, his cheekbones sharp slabs.

Josie put a plate of sandwiches and a jug of instant iced tea on the table. Her hands were shaking and the tea sloshed against the rim.

“He loved his job, ma’am,” Kit continued. “He made other people love their job, including me.” He put down the photo and eased into a chair, sitting in front of the sandwiches and taking one before Josie had time to get out the napkins and plates. “He would say things like, ‘There is an entire video game industry trying to copy what you men get paid to do every day,’ or ‘You defend your country, you carry a gun, you blow things up, what do you have to complain about, soldier?’” Kit laughed with his mouth full, his eyes on the photos ahead of him.

Josie poured sweet tea into a tall glass and slid it across the table. This wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Eddie had been planning on submitting his exit paperwork when he got home from Baghdad. He could have gotten out of the army the previous year; his commitment was up five months before the deployment to Iraq, and Josie had been jubilant. But then he told her he couldn’t leave his platoon right before they went to war—it was as if they had all been training for the state championships and now that the practice was over and the big game was here, he was abandoning them. “It’s not a game,” Josie had said. But Eddie didn’t listen. It had been a fight that raged for days. She threatened to leave him, asked who was he really married to, damn it, her or his men?

That was why they had no kids—she wasn’t going to have a child who only saw his daddy every other year. For the five years they’d been together she had used that argument against him, knowing eventually Eddie would want a kid more than he’d want the army, he would get out, and she would win. And then Eddie was dead a month before coming home to her, and there would never be a child now.

That was what her bargaining had got her.

“I want to hear about the IED,” Josie said, sitting down across from Kit, balling up a napkin in her hands. “Nobody would tell me the details.”

Kit swallowed his mouthful and took a huge gulp of his tea. Josie wondered when he had eaten last.

“He saved my life,” Kit said softly, looking into his glass. There were crumbs on his chin.

“Did he
mean
to save your life?” Josie could feel her voice rise with that edge it had taken on lately when she spoke on the phone with Eddie’s father, who seemed proud of his son for dying, for getting blown up thousands of miles from home on a roadside in the middle of nowhere, his blood soaking into another country’s sand. “Did he know he was saving you?”

Kit moved uncomfortably in his chair and didn’t look at her. “We were trapped in our Humvee and his body protected me from the flame, ma’am. It was almost like he was hugging me to keep me out of the fire.”

Kit put his glass of tea down carefully. He kept his eyes on the table and blinked, sucking in his cheeks so that he looked even more starved and sickly. Then he lifted his face and his wet eyes finally looked into Josie’s. “I don’t mean any disrespect, ma’am, but does it matter? I’m alive because of your husband. He was the best soldier I knew and he saved my life.”

She hesitated. There were so many arguments in her head, angry words to toss at this man in front of her, denials and recriminations. The first reports Josie had heard said her husband died instantly in the blast. No heroism, just death. But if Eddie had deliberately saved this boy’s life, then he had deliberately sacrificed his own; he had been conscious and in agony, and he had known he was leaving her behind.

They sat for a while in silence, Josie holding her napkin, Kit with his hands on the table next to his half-eaten sandwich. He cleared his throat. “I would have been at the memorial service but I was still in the hospital in Germany. I’m real sorry I missed that.”

Josie shrugged. “I wasn’t there either. The funeral was bad enough.”

Kit nodded once, as if he understood pain was something you lived with as best you could.

“Thank you for lunch.” He took a piece of paper out of a pocket on his sleeve and handed it to Josie. “Here’s my cell phone number. Please call me if there’s anything I can do. I’m pretty busted up but I can still take out the garbage and open jars of pasta sauce or whatever it is they say men do better than women.” He tried to smile, a half smile that didn’t touch his eyes.

“Wait,” Josie said, standing. “Don’t leave yet.” She glanced around the kitchen. “I’ll wrap these sandwiches so you can take them with you. I’ll never eat all this food.” But instead of getting out the tinfoil, she stepped around the table and stood in front of him, her thigh almost touching his bent knees. Kit looked up at her, alarmed, as if she might hit him or kick his wounded foot.

Before he could get out of his chair, she sat down in his lap.

“Ma’am, um, I have to be back at Headquarters—”

“Shhhh,” Josie whispered, linking her fingers around his neck. She pressed her face into the stiff folds of his uniform and felt the Velcro of his rank against her cheek. She tried to smell her husband, but this uniform was too clean, too new, this soldier too thin and fragile, so rigid in the chair, sucking in his breath. But Josie held on, the camouflage material swimming in front of her eyes, the back of his neck smooth.

After a dazed moment, Specialist Kit Murphy put his arms loosely around her and Josie Schaeffer clung to him, knowing this man was not her husband, that her husband was never coming back, but for now she was as close to him as she could get and she would not let him go.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

An army base in a time of war is a very insular place. The guards at the entrance gates check the cars and driver’s licenses of everyone trying to enter, often turning people away if they don’t have a special visitor’s pass or military ID. And for those who live on base, they need never step foot into the civilian world—we have our own child care, grocery stores, gas stations, movie theaters, bowling alleys, libraries, and gyms, the demarcation line between Fort Hood and the civilian world beyond ringed clearly with a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

We have our own rules, too: grass that must be mowed before it reaches a certain height, roads that shut down completely so soldiers can run their length during morning physical training, times when the entire post comes to a stop and stands at attention to listen to the evening bugle rendition of “Retreat,” parking spots for generals and sergeant majors or, more tragically, parking spots for families who have lost a soldier in combat.

In my stories, I tried to create a window into that world. I wanted to capture the moments that lead up to a deployment as well as those that follow a return. And I wanted to focus not only on the soldiers fighting on the front lines but also on the families that wait at home and try their best to stay intact, try their best to find everything they need within those guarded gates.

I began writing
You Know When the Men Are Gone
in Fort Hood, Texas, when my husband had just returned from his second deployment and was gearing up to deploy again. In 2006, soldiers deployed for a year or more, and spouses were grateful if their soldiers were home for an entire twelve months before heading back to the Middle East. So as much as I cherished having my husband safe and next to me, sharing a life together again, I was always aware of the fact that he was not going to be home for long.

These thoughts of a deployment color every aspect of a military spouse’s life. When we meet another spouse for the first time, we ask, “How many times has your soldier deployed?” It is a way to compare years of experience in a few short sentences. It is our way, without the obvious map of a soldier’s uniform, to check out the medals on the other spouse’s chest, to know what she, too, has survived and what she is made of.

We make immediate friendships with other military spouses; we have no choice. The army usually moves a soldier and his family to a new base every six months to three years, depending on the soldier’s job. This cycle of new neighborhoods, schools, zip codes, and time zones makes it hard for a spouse to work outside the home. We are far from our siblings and parents, cousins and childhood friends. The person we depend on the most in the world, the parent of our children, is suddenly seven thousand miles away and regularly getting shot at. So we create our own new and tenuous “families” with fellow spouses. The pizza play dates, informal coffees, and Family Readiness Group meetings—the structure they lend to our days, and the feeling that we spouses are in this together—help us get through the deployment.

While
You Know When the Men Are Gone
is a work of fiction, I hope that I was able to reflect the spectrum of the current army-family experience. There are so many more stories that I wished I had written; there are so many spouses who continue to inspire me with their constant support of their soldiers. They are independent, patient, fearless, remarkable men and women, and I am grateful to be a part of their community.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my amazing agent, Lorin Reese. Every time I told him the collection was finished, he would read it, then, in his no-nonsense Boston accent, tell me it was
not
finished, and I had better get back to work immediately. His suggestions made the stories infinitely stronger.

Thank you to my editor, Amy Einhorn, for being her legendary self, sharp-eyed, insightful, and kind. I wake up every day amazed and grateful to be working with her. Thank you, Marilyn Ducksworth, Stephanie Sorensen, Mih-Ho Cha, Kate Stark, and Michelle Malonzo for treating me like a superstar, and Ivan Held, Ellen Edwards, Halli Melnitsky, and everyone at Putnam and NAL for your enthusiasm. You have all made me feel that my stories are in the safest of hands.

Thanks to the people at literary magazines who printed my stories just when I started feeling like a lousy hack, especially Jenny Barber of
Salamander,
and Ashley Kaine, Betsy Beasley, and Robert Stewart of
New Letters
. And to my best writer/ reader friends, Jenny Moore and Olivia Boler, who scribbled things on my manuscript like “C’mon, does this really happen on an army base?!” Thank you to vastly talented authors Benjamin Percy and Jean Kwok, who are also generous with their time and knowledge.

Thank you to my family and friends, including my army “family” spread across the United States from Hawaii to New York. I can’t imagine having made it through my husband’s three long deployments without your wisdom and encouragement.

I’d like to thank my husband, KC, who is my first and last reader, my military expert, fact-checker, harshest critic and most adoring fan, who continues to brave my moods and give me honest criticism, and who makes every single thing I write so much better than I could on my own.

And finally, I offer my unending gratitude to my parents, Bobbie and Eamon J. Fallon, who have always supported me. They taught me to chase my dreams, and I have, and it’s wonderful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Siobhan Fallon lived at Fort Hood while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty. She earned her MFA at the New School in New York City and lives with her family in the Middle East.