Blue Stars (23 page)

Or the unmentionable, the unthinkable: Jim.

Wind whipped her hair and flattened her thin shirt against her body as Lacey crossed the hospital campus. Set far back from the entry gates on Georgia Avenue, the main building was called Heaton—an ugly 1970s-era behemoth, with tall thin pillars that appeared to struggle to hold up the flat bulk of the structure. You could use an underground tunnel to get places, but she went instead along the interior road that wound around the front of the Old Hospital. Why she liked to take this route, past the fountain and the great lawn and the white pillared grandeur of a building not even in medical use anymore, Lacey wasn’t sure. Even though it pissed her off, this “ye olde hospital” false face of Walter Reed—the one in the postcard photos at the gift shop—she was drawn to it as well. In the short space between the shit she’d left in Eddie’s room and the shit that awaited in her own, it was good to have these moments of walking, fast, in the wide silence of this open space.

Mologne House, where they were staying, had its own weirdness. As if insisting on its usefulness today, they’d slapped a giant futuristic awning on this red brick Georgian with a porthole up top. Automatic entry doors slid open and two guys in wheelchairs passed Lacey coming in. Her “hey guys”—tired but obligatory flirty tone—went unnoticed. More wheelchairs clustered at the bar in the lobby, where the implacable servers knew when to put a lid and straw on the beer glass, and how to cut someone off after the third time his mom called down to insist.

On the way up to the fifth floor Lacey bit her inner cheek:
Be cool, be cool, be cool.

“And he just
look
at me like I’m not speaking
English
or like he’s a robot man—” When Lacey unlocked the room and came in, Lolo continued her diatribe, merely shifting it in a different direction. “‘What are we suppose to do about a sink that won’t drain?’ He don’t know. And the ones above us? All night long. All night, Lacey! With the music, it’s going
bump bump bumpa bump
right above my head.”

At Lolo’s imitation of house music Otis snickered, on the couch with his DS player.

“Right above my
head,
” Lolo insisted, and her voice shook.

“At least your head was in a bed,” Lacey muttered. Otis was sitting on what was her bed, a saggy pullout. She flopped down next to him and pulled him in for a hug, let him squirm away, back to the game.

“I’m hungry, Mom.”

“You just had lunch! And did anyone pick me up something?”

“We didn’t go.”

Lacey stared at Lolo, who shrugged defensively. “It’s crowded and the food is bad. Pasta, lasagna, every day. And the meat was off.”

“It’s subsidized! We can’t—”

“You could smell it! Bad, like it was sitting out for hours. I’m not feeding him that. What I could cook is—”

“You can’t cook here, Mom! There’s nowhere to cook! And we can’t keep ordering in, all right?” The army lodging advance was $150 a day, eaten up quickly by their room charge and service fees. Then she was supposed to get $64 a day for incidentals—i.e., food—but for some reason the actual disbursement turned out to be 80 percent of that (no one explained why), so that was $51.20, which was rounded down to $50 a day. Didn’t go far for three people. Especially when one of them needed a drink or three at the end of the day so badly she started counting down the hours before noon.

“I will pay for my own lunch,” Lolo announced stiffly. “And Otis too. But I will not allow my grandson to be sitting there with the hooligans, the way they drink and talk—”

“All
right,
Mom.” Lacey dug her wallet out of her bag and handed over a twenty-dollar bill. Ten left. “Get something from the chicken place. But save me at least one piece.”

Otis pumped his fist and reached for the phone. He let Lacey press her mouth and nose to his head while he ordered the food, and she breathed in his warm familiar boy-scent. Was he doing okay? He said so, but the one time they’d let him in to glimpse Eddie he’d gotten shaky and later pitched a fit about nothing, like a toddler. Also he was having bad dreams, Lacey could hear him moan and cry out from her couch in the next room. She’d go in to soothe him—Lolo in a deep sleep, flat on her back—and in the morning, he’d never remember, or admit to, what he’d been dreaming about. It’s what brought her closest to crumbling, this fear of how damaged Otis might become, by everything here.

Which is why she was sending him home tomorrow. Lacey took a deep breath. “Mom?”

“It still won’t drain. Come look at this. This is unacceptable!”

This
is unacceptable? Still, she dragged herself into the small, worn bathroom. Lolo was gesturing wildly at a filmy inch of water in the sink, talking so fast Lacey could barely break in.

“So. You gotta take Otis back tomorrow. I’ll keep the car, and they think there’s a flight sometime in the afternoon.” Greyhound, is actually what the social worker had said to Lacey, but fat chance of that. Lolo was still going on about the sink.
“Mom.”

“Leave him here? In the coma, with all the tubes, with…” The older woman faded out but Lacey heard what she didn’t say:
With YOU?

“You’ll come back, in a week. In a few days, once I figure things out.”

“When he wakes up, he’s going to want me.”

“If he wakes up.”

“How dare you!” Lolo threw up her arms in the small space, to push away what had been uttered. “If that’s how you think, if that is your attitude—”

“Doesn’t matter what kind of attitude anyone has! And if you think that, you might as well go home and pray from there, all right?”

“But—”

“I can’t do all of it, I can’t. Be over there all night with him, then back here to take care of you and Otis, and then go stand in line at Benefits, and then call insurance for hours, and then back to Eddie…”

“So I do the papers. Give me the phone numbers and—”

“Also, Otis can’t miss any more school—”

“
Tst.
He’s a smart boy. He won’t—”

“You think it’s good for him to be here?” Lacey hissed. “I don’t want him just sitting around while we wait to see. Until we know which way it’s going to go.”

Lolo sucked in her breath. “Don’t.”

“All right.” Lacey had more—the worst part was still to come, didn’t she understand?—but she subsided. The toll had been taken: when she’d gone over to tell her mother-in-law about Eddie, Lolo had collapsed. And a couple of times over the next few days, she’d cried so hard she’d made herself faint. After that, Lolo’s breakdowns weren’t as severe, but they were still intense. Staff in ICU tried to restrict her to short visits with Eddie after the first time her sobs rocked the floor and she’d needed oxygen to recover. Now Lacey saw, in the harsh yellow bathroom light, the trauma’s reverberations in Eddie’s mother’s elegant face. A broken capillary snaked red lightning across one eye; flaky patches of skin ran down her jawline; sunken skin fell down around her eyes.

Lacey reached to gently brush back a tuft of her hair, only for Lolo to lurch back in a scowl. “Let’s do your face,” Lacey said, not reacting. “After lunch, we’ll go to him.”

Her mother-in-law glanced into the mirror above the plugged sink. Lacey could see her struggling to be nice. The dark bags under her eyes did it. “Yes.” She sighed. “He can’t see me like this.”

Lacey found her makeup bag, and neither woman commented on the words left hanging in the air.
He can’t see me
.

*   *   *

That night Ellen and Lacey seemed to be the only ones in SICU, aside from the staff, aside from Eddie and Michael. Each was aware of the other, in soft movements or noises from the other side of the room, or the occasional rustle of a yellow curtain. The men’s monitors beeped in low-toned counterpoint. Sometimes a nurse would speak to one of the women, and then she would step outside to the achingly bright hall, stretch her sore legs with a short walk, and then return to her chair.

Without discussing it, both Ellen and Lacey were determined to stay all night, this last night in SICU, in case through error someone tried to move either of the men. The three other soldiers that had been in this room were gone, moved up to one of the wards earlier today. Ellen felt the quiet emptiness of the room to be a reprieve, although she imagined the extra spaces, with their curtains drawn sharply back on the rods, would be filled with new arrivals at any hour. For now, though, there was a bit more peace.

Michael’s unmoving face was swollen and streaked reddish white. Catheter lines came out of each of his shoulders, and one threaded into an artery on his right thigh. A thin tube ran up his nose and a larger one was taped to his mouth. He wore a blue gown, stained in yellow patches from the iodine, which bunched up around his waist.

As she did several times a day, Ellen reached in carefully among the tubes and gently, slowly, tugged the gown down so it covered his genitals. In doing so, she avoided looking at the giant swaddled lump of bandages wrapped around where his left foot had been. Gone. It was gone.

In the shattered hours when she first arrived here, when they wouldn’t let her in for more than a few minutes at a time and the doctors said he might not live, the loss of one foot hardly registered with Ellen. It barely seemed to matter then. But tonight it was hard to face, the full contours of Michael’s body—uneven, unbalanced. Slightly but sickeningly out of order, like a broken toy.

On the phone that first day with Jane and Wes, they had all cried about his foot.

“Does he know yet?” Jane had said. “Mom, who’s going to tell him?”

One of the doctors would, Ellen supposed, once he was awake. Or, maybe, she’d have to. She wiped her face; a person waved at her through the glass panel on the door. Outside, she was surprised to see one of the volunteers with a cart; it was late for them.

“Saw you in here,” the man whispered, in his seventies maybe, smiling at Ellen and nearly bowing. “Take something, it will help pass the time.” Uncomprehending at first, she followed his gesture to the cart, where rows of books were neatly arranged.

“Oh. Well…”

“Do you like mysteries?” The old man whispered. He had a large button pinned to his shirtfront:
I WORK FOR SMILES.
“How about…” He tapped his fingers lightly along the creased spines. “This one, and—oh yes, this one. And one more. Here.” Ellen turned over the worn books he had put into her hands.
Sin and a White Sand Beach. Lady Merley’s Secret.
And, improbably,
Northanger Abbey.
She felt a slight flush of indignation on poor Jane Austen’s behalf, lumped together with the bodice rippers. Ellen handed the books right back; she couldn’t imagine reading here, now. But the little old man was persistent, pulling out another choice. “I’ll find you something, now let me see— Oh. No. Not this.” Vaguely curious at what he dismissed, Ellen glanced at the book he had quickly reshelved: red hardcover, no dust jacket.

“May I see that?” Astonished, she reached for the book. Yes, it was:
A Son at the Front
by Edith Wharton. Ellen laughed shortly. The chances of this particular book—one of Wharton’s least-known, worst-selling novels, published at a time when the public was eager to be rid of reminders of the Great War, rarely in print—appearing with these dusty hospital giveaways, to her of all people … it was a surreal shot-in-a-million. Though of course it made sense. Down the line someone made a well-intentioned mistake, thought from the title it might be rousing, inspiring, to a parent trapped in today’s version of war’s hell. Promptly discarded.

“I’ll keep this. Thank you.” Ellen brushed off the old man’s entreaties to try something else, something lighter. When he left at last, she pushed the book away in her bag. She wouldn’t read it, though. Reading itself was like a country she’d left, oceans away.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, on the other side of their shared SICU room, Lacey tried to pray. Eddie would expect it, everyone would expect it, and hadn’t she done it so many times before, in church and at every FRG meeting? Whenever bad news came about other women’s husbands? Well, now it was her turn, so she bent her head and mouthed the words printed on the tiny booklet:

Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ. Rest your weary ones. Bless your dying ones. Soothe your suffering ones. Pity your afflicted ones. Shield your joyous ones. And for all your love’s sake. Amen
.

She crossed herself and put the booklet back into its plastic bag with the rosary, under no illusions that Jesus or God or any higher power would listen to what she had to say. Because even if she’d had no contact with Jim after sending him one text—
Eddie hurt bad. Going to D.C. Don’t call—
he was still in her mind. Somehow, bits and pieces of remembered happiness could float to Lacey’s awareness, during odd moments, like losing a dollar in a vending machine, or walking in the dark back to Mologne for a few hours’ sleep. What he’d say. His sideways smile. The way they just fit each other. Amid fear and chaos a small fierceness inside Lacey would sometimes assert:
So I did find it, the real thing.

But. She touched Eddie’s warm wrist, her own eyes hot and dry. “Ah, babe,” Lacey whispered. “You deserve better, that is for fucking sure.” His head was almost entirely bandaged, with a steel halo fitted into the top of his skull after the craniotomy. White cotton was packed into the left eye socket, the one he’d lost immediately. The right eye was covered by what looked like a pink plastic soap dish. Three little stuffed animals, two bears and one kitty, were tucked in next to Eddie under his PIC lines and pressed against the bed bars. One held a sign that read
ARMY TOUGH.
Lacey plucked them out and tossed them on the radiator. She had no idea where these came from; every time she turned her damn back someone put another in his bed.

There was a chance his right eye could be saved. That there would be some amount of sight coaxed back by multiple operations after he was stable.
If
he became stable, off the vents and out of the coma. One of the residents had told her as much, probably just to get Lacey to stop haranguing him with what she knew. Then he tried to walk it back; most likely the eye would never function normally, and even if Eddie had some sight later, it might be just flashes or pinpricks of light, nothing usable. For all intents and purposes, he was blind. And she should resign herself to that, prepare for it, amid all the other injuries he had sustained.