Blue Stars (34 page)

“Oh, I know what I can tell you about. Shelby.”

“The reporter?” Serena’s voice perked up. “So what’s the story? Are you a whistle-blower?”

“I think I’d have to be an employee to be a whistle-blower, wouldn’t I? Anyway, I’m not even officially on the record yet. It’s strange … so far I’m still not sure
what
she’s reporting on, but it’s not a puff piece, that I can tell.”

“Absolutely. So listen. After you told me her name, I googled Shelby Levine. Ellen? She’s done front-page work from all over. Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Chechnya. What is she like? I feel sure she’s on to something big, related to the war.”

“What is she like? Well, she’s like … the best grad students or new colleagues you’ve ever had. Those once-in-a-lifetime, dedicated, brilliant women. The ones you know will get the fellowship, the TT job at Stanford. In fact, Shelby went there for her PhD in poli-sci.” So far Ellen had met with the reporter twice, once for coffee and once for lunch at Charlie’s Diner, one of the handful of businesses on Georgia Avenue one block north of Walter Reed. Each time she had tried to ask about the project, Shelby neatly deflected her questions and turned them back on her own experience, and Michael’s, and what it was like for them being thrown into this military hospital environment, all at once, for an unknown period of time. It seemed like, above all, she wanted to get to know her. And Ellen, quite frankly, basked in the attention. She hadn’t realized how much she had been missing that particular blend of warm conversation, rich with bookish ideas and allusions, the winding elegant dependent clauses, the expectancy of understanding.

“So she’s using you for access,” Serena mused. “To the administration, to some kind of higher-ups involved in Michael’s care. Maybe that gets her closer to whatever decisions were made to prosecute that blasted war. Or a cover-up! Something to do with how we never
see
these injuries, these deaths.”

Ellen rolled her eyes at
using you
. And at Serena, typically as blunt as ever. “Maybe. Although frankly she seems much more interested in who I’ve met here than who works here. My friend Lacey, for example.” Yes, Shelby asked a lot of questions about the women living at Mologne but soon zeroed in on Lacey when Ellen told her—maybe she shouldn’t have—what Building 18 looked like on the inside. Still, she rarely if ever wrote anything down, and as far as Ellen knew she wasn’t taping it. But at the end of lunch Shelby had asked if Ellen thought Lacey would be “amenable” to meeting her.

She wasn’t sure. Lacey would shift her eyes if Shelby went into raptures again about the most recently published journal of Susan Sontag, and she might storm out if the two of them disparaged all of Bush’s cabinet members as vigorously as they had. The image of Lacey even at that table in Charlie’s—in her too-tight jeans and too-blond highlights—made Ellen uncomfortable. Would Shelby perceive how funny and unique she was? Would she love her feistiness and New York attitude and staunch loyalty as much as Ellen did? And why was she so interested in her, anyway?

“I wish you were here,” Serena said. “I wish I could beam you here, even just for dinner. And I hate to run, but—”

“No, go. Of course. I’ll call again, sooner this time.”

“Happy New Year, darling.”

They hung up. Ellen sat in the waiting room a moment longer. New Year? She supposed that was right. Though how many days into 2006 they were now, she couldn’t say.

But then Ellen had an idea. The perfect way to have Lacey meet Shelby, and best of all, it could involve food, home-cooked food. The teenager started up in the sudden silence, as if her voice had kept him asleep. He was startled, suspicious; she gave him a small wave and saw recognition awaken in his pimpled face:
Ah, fuck. I’m still here.

Now she hurried through the hallways back to Michael, buoyant with thoughts about her new plan and how to carry it out.

But even several doors down from Michael’s room she could hear the commotion from within. Others passing by stopped to peer in the window. Ellen’s heart lurched and she began to run.

“I don’t fucking care! You can’t tell me what I don’t know! Don’t touch me, don’t
fucking touch me
!” Michael yelled. His voice skittered up to a high range, and when she came in she saw he was backed up as far as he could go on the bed, using both hands to shove himself up higher on the backrest. He pushed with his only bare foot, fighting to get away. A man in blue nurse scrubs, hands raised, was trying to be heard above him, calling for him to calm down.

“What’s going on?”

“Get him out of here! Get out!” Michael seized a water bottle off his movable tray and fired it across the room; it slammed the wall, missing the nurse by inches. He grabbed for something else and knocked over the tray. Ellen came in as close as she dared. He was spitting and red-faced. She spoke a rush of low steady words, and his terrified eyes went from her to the man and back again.

“All I am trying to say is—”

“He was choking me. Had his fucking sand-nigger hands on my throat!”

Ellen whirled between Michael and the nurse, who was now backing out of the room. Others came in, including an aide named Rob Beers, one of the only guys Mike really liked, whose name was a never-ending source of delight. They helped Ellen talk him down, they sent a sedative into his drip. Mike sobbed, sometimes rearing up again in outrage. No one knew what he was talking about. Rob Beers agreed with everything he said, matter-of-factly, and retaped the catheter bag that had torn away. Ellen stroked Mike’s sweaty head, told him over and over that he was safe, he was all right, no one would hurt him now. As soon as he sank down into longer periods of quiet, Ellen slipped out into the hallway.

Several people looked up as she came out; one of them pointed to the nurses’ station. And there was the man in blue scrubs, leaning over the counter and using Rosalie’s phone. When he saw her approach he hung up.

“Look, it’s happened to me before. It’s all right. You don’t have to apologize.”

Ellen stared. “I came to ask you what happened. What made him so agitated?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” The man pointed to his name tag.
MOHAMMED JEET.
“He was asleep; I went in to do a vitals check, and he suddenly woke up and shoved me away.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Ellen studied the man’s smooth olive skin, his dark hair bundled into a topknot.

“My parents are Sikh from Punjab, but I consider myself only culturally so.” He seemed to expect some kind of response from Ellen. “In fact, I grew up in Austin, of all places. Texas.”

“He must have been having a bad dream,” she said stupidly. “Or a flashback…”

“Nah,” Mohammed said. “Just the usual; lots of guys react that way, at first. Not many go all the way into a total rage spiral like that, but hey! It’s better than depression and lethargy.”

“I know he doesn’t think that way. What he said. I mean, he wouldn’t ever speak like that if he hadn’t—”

“I get it. Anyway, I gotta go. I just stuck around to make sure you were okay. And tell you that you didn’t need to apologize, or whatever.”

“Thank you,” Ellen said, automatically. She wanted to ask if this was his usual route; he wouldn’t be back in their room anytime soon, would he? But Mohammed pushed away from the counter and sauntered off. Surely he wasn’t pleased to have provoked another Marine?

In the short time it took to return to Michael, Ellen fumed. Well, so what if this man was ethnically Indian, as opposed to Middle Eastern, was Sikh instead of Muslim? Was it such a good idea to send in guys named
Mohammed
to draw blood from Iraq vets with PTSD? Wouldn’t Lacey have a field day with this one. And how smug he was, carefully explaining to another clueless-mom-type his
Texas
origins, as if to rub it in more, the ugly racism from her son. Well, at least most of the other nurses and aides, the ones they usually saw, were white.

She froze in midstep. Shame coursed through her. What was happening to them here? Ellen made herself go back into the room.

23

Two pounds, eight ounces. Two pounds, thirteen ounces. Three pounds, four ounces—oops, too much. Lacey watched the mom in a puffy fur-lined winter coat and skintight yoga pants scoop green beans back out of the scale and into their bin. Then she twisted the bag with a neat knot and tossed it in her cart behind a toddler playing with her phone.
HAND-TRIMMED ORGANIC HARICOTS
VERTS
read the sign.
$
6.99
PER POUND.

“Over twenty bucks,” Lacey said. “For a pile of beans.” But no one was listening to her in this suburban Whole Foods. All over the produce section, people were weighing, fingering, sniffing. Slanted wood bins spilled over with multicolored fruits and vegetables. Six kinds of pears. Tomatoes on the vine, off the vine, heirloom, conventional, organic. Peaches from Ecuador, peaches from Colombia, peaches from Nepal. Carrots that were $2 a pound and bananas that were $4.99 a pound.

A cold mist spurted out over the lettuce section, wetting the arm of Lacey’s jacket. She yelped and moved away, rubbing at the leather. She pulled a few grapes off a nearby display and ate them, staring blatantly at one of the cheerful green-aproned stock girls, who only grinned as if to say,
Eat more! Eat as much as you can hold! Aren’t they juicy and delicious?

“This place is freaking me out,” she said to Ellen, who was studying her grocery list. “Why don’t I wait in the car. I mean taxi. I mean, whoops, we have no taxi now, so how the hell are we gonna get back?”

“Don’t be dramatic. Here, what does this say?”

“How’m I supposed to know? Didn’t you write that?”

“Yes, but—did I mean two pounds of eggplant, total? Or two-pound eggplants, quantity unknown?”

Eggplant, gross. Lacey fidgeted away, one eye on the only person in this chilly room who was as out of place here as she was. Eddie. The chubby Latina aide who’d come with them was carefully leading him around displays, occasionally stopping to hand him a sample of overpriced exotic fruit. She talked quietly and steadily to him, even when he made those twisting movements with his head or let out a sharp half laugh, half bark. Basically, all the things that Lacey herself should be doing. From across the produce section, Lacey watched as other shoppers noticed Eddie, took in his cane and the aide and his gray army sweatsuit, the bandages on his face and the way he lolled his head. They stepped nervously out of his way, or ostentatiously made room for the aide to bring him through. She saw a wife elbow her husband and whisper.

Why couldn’t he be an amputee, like Mike? How much simpler that would have been—then, he’d be treated with deference and respect, the meaning of that outward injury so clear and immediate.
And I’d be able to understand him
, Lacey thought. It’d be
Eddie
, minus a leg, giving orders, being uptight. Finding fault with her. So what was she really wishing for, here?

It was ridiculous that he was even here on this outing. Lacey could barely bring herself to be near him, so thank God for the aide. When Ellen had come over a few days ago, burbling about a dinner party and the need to get some of the other women together, as a kind of morale booster—and how she desperately missed
cooking,
the dumbest thing of all in Lacey’s opinion—but there was nowhere else to have it other than Lacey and Eddie’s room, they were the only ones she knew who had a kitchen, well, “kitchen” … she must’ve caught Lacey in a rare good mood. After all, a dinner to boost morale was just what she and the FRG girls used to put together, except for them it meant Wednesday’s free wings night at Warwick’s on North, whereas apparently to Ellen it meant a four-course feast that took a million hours of preplanning and shopping. Where were all these other women going to sit, down on the nasty floor with the mice poop? So why had she agreed to this? That was easy: because of Ellen, of course. Because it was the first time in a long while that the professor had looked excited and happy about something, and Lacey didn’t have it in her to say no, even though she dreaded people seeing the shithole they lived in.

A more confusing question: Why had she gone along when Ellen suggested that Eddie come with them to this suburban Whole Foods, in a special taxi-van the hospital had arranged, happy to have him practice “real world” interaction? Why had she brought his barking and blindness and innocence out here in the Friday afternoon pricey-grocery-shopping madness of the real world?

Because I want to be who Ellen thinks I am.
Devoted wife. No bad thoughts. Immune to the humiliation of Eddie, of me.

Now Ellen was consulting with the aide about her list, the two of them nodding and pointing and sorting out what had to be purchased. Eddie spoke and they both turned to him, Ellen tipping her face up, careful, listening. He’d started saying some two-word sentences now,
It’s gone
(about lunch),
I’m done
(after a haircut). This was celebrated in Neuro; apparently putting together a verb and a word was a big deal in terms of his brain regluing parts of itself together. Of course, no one would say whether he’d ever progress further, they never committed to an actual educated guess. They seemed to think that this two-word development, plus the fact that Eddie—aside from blindness—was remarkably okay in his physical movements and spatial awareness, rarely knocked into something and could dress himself, do all the bathroom stuff on his own … that this was all pretty good.
But it’s not enough!
Lacey raged. Were they going to leave him like that, and her with him? Was this going to be their
life
?

Ellen answered Eddie, or responded to him. She didn’t look like she wanted to jump out of her skin when he did one of his high-pitched laughs next. She and the aide kept talking to him, and each other, and Lacey watched the three of them go around a corner and into the next aisle. Then she took out her phone.

“Hello?” Jim said, wary, incredulous. He’d picked up before the second ring.