You Know When the Men Are Gone (5 page)

“Of course I will,” Meg answered. Natalya nodded, as if it had never occurred to her that Meg would say no, and turned back to her apartment. Meg got her keys, closed her door, and followed. “They must sleep at nine. Boris already been outside. That is all, yes?”

Meg stepped into the apartment. She was immediately disappointed. No red velvet hung from the walls and no vodka bottles lined the windowsill and shelves; nor did she see sinister posters of Tito or Milosevic. It looked like any of the wives’ apartments: light wood table and chairs, fat paperback novels on the bookshelves, a soldier’s military awards on the wall, a few primary-colored children’s toys scattered on the floor. There was no hint that Natalya was anything but American except for a stack of fashion magazines on the coffee table with Cyrillic writing on the covers, as if she had wiped every shred of her past life away, everything but this one last comfort of elusive beauty.

Natalya got down on her knees and spoke Serbian to her children.

“They will be good,” she said when she stood. She turned to Meg. It was hard to take her stare, as if all of the makeup and jewelry in the past had been a filter and now Meg was looking directly at the sun.

“Thank you,” Natalya said, her accent making the words sound impossibly grave.

“When will you be home?” Meg asked. The troops were arriving at the First Cavalry parade ground the following day at ten and she wanted to be rested and ready.

“Soon.” Natalya kissed each child on the mouth, patted Boris’s square head, picked up her small beaded purse, and walked out, leaving her noisy keys behind.

Her children were every bit as good as she had promised they would be, playing quietly with a set of wooden blocks, then going to bed as soon as Meg led them to their room.

Of course Meg crept all around the apartment, especially in Natalya’s bedroom. The bed was perfectly made, the walls a somber green, the bedspread a shocking white. There were no family photos on the walls or bureaus, none of Natalya holding twin infants at a hospital, no wedding photos, and no scenes of Serbia. A luminous icon of Jesus, His beard as black as His wet eyes, hung directly over the bed. Meg thought of Natalya in this dark-walled room and understood why she would resist bringing her nightly visitor here. But he had been here the night before, hadn’t he? He had finally wormed his way into Natalya’s bed. Meg peered at the pale comforter, looking for something sordid, the lacy edge of see-through panties perhaps, and she wondered why Natalya could not have waited just a little bit longer for her husband to come home. Then Meg went out to the living room, turned on the TV, and thought of Natalya’s husband, how, like all the others, he was sitting on a plane right now, so excited to return to the States, to his home, to his family. The wives had ensured that his dog and his children had not been taken from him, but Meg knew that his wife had. She knew he would not be returning to a happy home.

Leaning back into the pillows, Meg kicked off her shoes. Soon she wouldn’t need to worry about Natalya. Tomorrow Jeremy would be home. That interminable waiting, waiting, waiting for her life to continue—such a long, gray nothingness between departure and return, huge chunks of existence she filled up and pushed through as if it were a task rather than a stretch of her young life—would be over. There was such unreality to the waiting, such limbo; sometimes she didn’t even know what she was waiting for. So much wasted time. Time was the enemy, waking her up alone at night and ticking so slowly, each minute mocking her. But now it was over. Jeremy would be back tomorrow and her life would resume and she would no longer care what Natalya did within these walls.

Boris woke her as usual. But this time it was his snout pressing up against her shoulder rather than his bark. It took Meg a moment to realize where she was, that she was stretched out uncomfortably on Natalya’s couch. She sat up so quickly that she nearly fell off the cushions, her elbow knocking over the foreign fashion magazines on the table, splaying bare arms, thighs, and lipsticked mouths across the carpet.

Daylight filtered in through the shaded window, Boris was trying to lick her face, and Natalya had never come home.

Meg rose, pushing the dog away, feeling her stomach shift with uneasiness. It was seven in the morning; she told herself that there was still time for Natalya to walk in, for the day to right itself. She creaked open the door to the twins’ room. Peter had crawled out of his bed and into his sister’s, their small bodies pressed together as if still curved in a womb. Meg closed the door, got Boris’s leash from the hook by the door, and took him outside.

He pulled her up and down Battalion Avenue, trying to run into traffic, looking back at her as if he were having an amazing amount of fun. Then he squatted on the perfectly manicured lawn of the Relocation Center and would not move no matter how much she tugged his leash or begged. She hadn’t brought a plastic bag to pick up after him, so she covered his mess with leaves, not making eye contact with an old woman who watched from a park bench.

She returned to the apartment, quickly slipping inside. The twins were both sitting up, blinking. They didn’t seem surprised to see Meg rather than their mother, and they didn’t cry.

Meg changed Peter’s diaper, his green eyes watching her stoically as she covered him with baby powder from his thighs to his ribs. Then Lara led Meg by the hand to the bathroom and pointed at the toilet, and did not let go until Meg clapped her hands in praise at the contents. It was eight o’clock in the morning and Natalya had not returned.

Meg held a child on each hip as she made her way to the First Cavalry parade grounds, the greenest stretch of grass on all of Fort Hood. Carla spotted her and rose from her seat high up in the bleachers, almost dropping Mimi in shock. Meg nodded at her friend and squeezed onto a bench in the front, sitting next to a man who wore a baseball cap stitched with
Veteran of Foreign Wars
. He leaned over and gave Lara and Peter small American flags to wave, and Peter immediately shook his flag as if he were trying to separate the stick from the cloth. The Horse Calvary Detachment was beginning its show, soldiers dressed in Custer-era uniforms riding in perfect figure eights across the parade field, their sabers and spurs glinting in the harsh Texas sun. Behind them, a long line of blue buses pulled up on Battalion Avenue.

“Here they come,” the vet said, pointing at the buses. “Bet you are excited to see their daddy.”

Meg nodded. She had no idea what their father would say, or what she would answer. The sleek horses on the field lined up at one end. A howitzer cannon erupted and the horses charged across, their riders shooting their rifles into the air. The crowd surged to its feet, stamping, clapping, and shouting, and Peter screamed at the uproar, dropping his flag. “Mama,” he sobbed, putting his hands to his ears.

“Shhh,” Meg whispered, trying to bounce the children. Behind the smoke of the cannon and guns, the soldiers were beginning to exit their buses and line up in formation, their feet slightly apart, their backs so straight, their eyes scanning the crowd for a face that loved them. Meg searched the miraculously appearing men for her husband. “Shhh.” Then Lara started to cry, too.

“London Bridge is falling down,”
Meg began to sing,
“falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady!”

Lara glanced up at Meg’s face, recognizing the song. Meg knew there were other stanzas about gold and silver, about locking people up, the destruction and rebuilding of the bridge over and over again, but wasn’t it still standing today? It had been toppled by fires and wars, and each time it was resurrected with sturdier stuff. Then Lara began to join in, letting loose a jumble of mysterious syllables, and Peter, his eyelashes clotted with tears, started to softly mumble along.

Meg, repeating the little she knew of the song over and over again, turned toward the men. She had no idea what their father looked like; would he spot his children, who had grown and changed during the year he’d been deployed? Would he recognize them sitting on a stranger’s lap? He would be looking for his wife, for her clear blond hair, her patchwork coat, her thin hands. Meg thought of Natalya raising these children alone, Boris bolting and barking and scratching on the door all day, how the twelve months must have been so long in a place where she couldn’t even read the directions for instant rice. And so Natalya had gone searching for a man to get her out of the uncertainty of it all, perhaps the way she had searched for a man to get her out of Kosovo. Searched for someone who would always be there, who could take care of her and hold her when she cried at night for the lives she left behind. Natalya had escaped one war and found herself caught in the wake of another; perhaps she realized she could survive without her children but she couldn’t take the waiting anymore.

And then Meg saw Jeremy cross through the smoke.

She put the children on the grass, holding their tiny palms, their fingers tight on her knuckles.

Jeremy lined up with all the other soldiers and he immediately found his wife, his eyes locking onto hers. He didn’t even glance at the children, just stared at Meg as if she were the anchor that held his life. And Meg did not hesitate. She stood and took a step toward him, knowing suddenly and without a doubt that he was, and always would be, worth the wait.

CAMP LIBERTY

D
avid Mogeson didn’t like to tell people about his life before the army, how he had been an investment banker. The words sounded ridiculous to him and therefore he assumed they sounded ridiculous to anyone else. There were the lifted eyebrows, the incredulous laugh—women in bars who thought he was trying to get them into bed or men who thought he was boasting about a mythical life that could never be lived on a soldier’s salary. But he wasn’t the only one who had joined up after September 11, who threw away a stable, ordinary American life of freedom and money, stirred by waving flags and the elusive vocabulary of an older generation: duty, honor, country. The others who enlisted for the same reasons were easy to spot: they were older and smarter than their rank said they should be and lately they were more cynical than their army peers. They tended to stick together although they didn’t talk about their previous lives with one another either. Civilians thought they were patriots but they understood that they were just more naïve than the rest of the country; they had heeded a call that most had not, and now they bided their time, waiting to get out. They told themselves they would tell their war stories to their kids, their grandkids, and then it would all be worth it.