Blue Stars (35 page)

“Yeah. Can you talk for a sec? Everything’s all right, I mean.”

“Oh man, I was gonna say. I thought something had happened, or something.” Neither of them said aloud what that might be. “So, how are you? What’s going on? This is me being cool, by the way. You like it? My heart’s revved up over sixty, though.”

“Yeah, it’s stupid.” Lacey picked up a box of sea salt–crusted oat crackers and set it down. “I went with an urge, but…”

“Go with it! Always, always go with the urge.”

She laughed. “You have to tell
me
that? So where are you? You got the girls?”

“Yeah. One of them has a party to go to so we’re gonna drop her off and then go to the mall. ’Cause I’m a sucker.”

“Daddy treats them right.”

“Can’t help it. They’re getting so big. So beautiful, you know? You should see Marissa in her winter dance picture. She’s a knockout. Except for this loser standing next to her.”

“What, you?”

“Very funny. No, some skinny piece of shit who makes her cry and who she texts all hours of the day and night but who somehow knows better than to show up around here.”

Lacey smiled at the vehemence. She trailed Ellen, Eddie, and the aide by an aisle’s length, holding the phone close.

“How’m I doing?” he said. “Do I sound natural? Is this okay, is this what you want?”

“I want everything and nothing. Don’t go down that road.”

“So tell me how he is. But mostly how you are.”

Lacey told him about the special night-vision goggles Eddie now wore for optics treatment. They were building up his sight reaction times, testing him for any responses to light and darkness. Maybe it was just her, but it seemed like the doctors were now a little more interested in working on his eye. They had either started listening to her, or were impressed with her dedication (the notebook where she wrote down every day and time Eddie mentioned the flashing in his eye), or they wanted to get rid of her by actually working on it. But there was movement there, more so than in the past weeks.

She told him about Ellen and this crazy dinner party plan; about Jane who kept calling her every few nights; about how beat-down she felt. How she missed music, all her music, driving around listening to her CDs or Z100 or the time she made Otis listen to both Pink albums and got him to dance around the house with her. That hearing half a Bruce Springsteen song on the shuttle bus driver’s radio yesterday had brought tears to her eyes.

“But you probably think Bruce is corny.”

Jim answered gravely. “Lady, you have no idea how many Springsteen shows I’ve been to. This is not a matter to be joked about.”

“Hey, can you do me a favor?” They’d reached the frozen section. Ellen was motioning for her, and Lacey held up a finger:
One sec.

“You bet. I’ll get in the car now.” A smile in his voice.

“A favor for there.”

“That kind’s a lot less fun.”

She let it hang in the air between them, the sweet ache of wanting each other. A gay couple pushed their cart past her; six bottles of fizzy water and a bunch of flowers.

“Will you go see Otis? I’ll tell his grandma. You can say you’re a friend, whatever. He can’t come down again until next weekend and I just want … someone to check in on him. Like, take him out to eat or something.”

“’Course I will. I’ll go over there tomorrow! I could have done that a lot earlier, if you’d—if we hadn’t—”

“I know. Listen, Jim?” Eddie was shaking his head at the aide. She kept a hand on his elbow but he didn’t want to go any farther. Lacey hung back near the canned soups. “It doesn’t mean … whatever it could mean. This call, you seeing Otis. Don’t think I’m going to be all over you for stuff.”

“Look. When it comes to you, I’m a pro at not letting things mean what they really mean. All right? So don’t even think about it.”

“Thank you. You can tell Otis I miss him like crazy. Text me how he looks, how he’s doing. Tell him I been e-mailing his teacher and—never mind. Never mind.” The aide was craning her head around for Lacey, so she spoke fast. “Also one night after I’d had a few I started feeling like I wanted to call you so bad I pulled the battery out of my phone and put it in a bag of water in the freezer.”

“Lacey. I—”

“I gotta go. Thanks.”

She ran to catch up with them. “What’s the matter?” Eddie was stuck still in the middle of the aisle; a backup of shoppers from both directions waited to go around him.

“He tired of the crowds, maybe?
Que pasa, papi?
”

“Let’s go, Ed.” Lacey tugged on his sweatshirt. “We gotta get out of the way here.”

He turned away from her, frowning. It was an expression she knew minutely and she almost expected him to come out with a quick and scornful reply. “Push bar,” he muttered to the shelves of body lotions and vitamins. “Push hand.”

“You can hold my hand,” Lacey said. “Here, right here.”

But that wasn’t it. He batted at the shelves, her hands, the aide’s. By now the blockage of carts was causing murmurs and audible frustration. Eddie stepped in small circles, left and right, saying his two-word sentences over and over.
Like Rain Man
, Lacey thought. Then he started to yelp and she got desperate.

“Maybe he wasn’t ready,” the aide whispered.

“Oh, that’s really fucking helpful now, thank you,” she hissed back. “C’mon, Eddie. Let’s go, we can go outside. All done, okay? All done.”

“Can we get through here already?” someone called from a cart back in the aisle. “What’s the problem?”

Lacey whirled to face a train of shopping carts. “What’s the problem? You want to know about our
problem
? Okay, let’s see. The problem of the bomb-filled road in Iraq where my husband’s Humvee flipped? Or the one where his head got bashed in and he lost an eye and has dents in his skull because he was over there fighting to protect your right to buy organic shampoo!”

People glanced away; the carts began to back up awkwardly.

“Anyone else want to hear a problem?”
Oh lord,
the aide whispered. “How about the problem of my bosses and how they decided to stop holding my job for me? Or the one about my dead car that got towed out of the hospital garage and now I’m getting charged a hundred forty bucks for the privilege of going to get it?”

Barely anyone was left now but Lacey stared them all down, the retreating carts. She was just getting warmed up, she was ready to roll. Then Ellen came back, eyes wide. “What happened? I could hear you all the way over in the bakery!”

Eddie was still turning around in tight half circles, making popping and peeping sounds with his mouth.

“He’s done,” the aide said. But Ellen was asking Eddie himself,
Are you all right? What do you want?
In a tone of such naturalness, as if she were asking anybody else in the store, that Lacey about fell over. How did she do that? “Push bar,” Eddie told her.

“Like this?” Ellen brought his hands to the cart handle. “He was touching it before,” she explained. “I said he could take over pushing.” Lacey and the aide were silent, flabbergasted. Eddie lit up, expertly swiveled the cart to and fro. “So, great. This way I can focus on finding fresh bread crumbs. This way, Eddie. Thank you. Why do you think they would only have the dried kind? They taste like sawdust.”

When Lacey tried to go with them, Ellen gently shouldered her away. “We’ve got this.” She smiled up at Lacey and whispered, “You do this all the time; why don’t you take a little break, get something at the coffee bar.”

“I’m fine! What, do you think I’m losing my grip? None of these people get it. They have no clue what we’re going through! You think I’m gonna back down from letting them have it once in a while?”

“I would never think otherwise. But look how well this is going.” And it was. With only one of Ellen’s hands lightly guiding the cart, and the aide walking alongside to block any oncoming traffic, Eddie was utterly focused on pushing. No laughing or barking. No more circles.

“All right. Thanks. How much more do we have to get?”

Ellen went back to the list. “Damn, I knew I’d forgotten something. Can you run back to produce and get four—no, better make that five—pomegranates? Make sure they’re the heavy ones, those will have the most seeds. We’ll meet you at checkout.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, we’re fine!” And around a corner into the next aisle went the three of them.

Lacey walked slowly back to the giant room of fruits and vegetables, all the rows of food products flowing past her. She was tingly, in a daze, as all this energy left over from shouting at strangers leaked away. And Jim. Talking to Jim. Heat rose up through her stomach and chest, and she replayed every moment of the call in her mind.

“Excuse me?” A girl in a green apron, holding out a tray. “Would you like a sample of our new German-style lager?”

“Sure.” Lacey picked up the paper cup, half full. And then she set it back down. “Actually, no. I’m good.”

This fizzy hunger inside was all she needed right now. So Lacey went around and around the produce section, past peppers and clementines and clear plastic boxes of strawberries. She hugged herself, smiling.

Now what the hell had Ellen wanted her to get?

24

Two nights later, fifteen people crammed into Lacey’s one-bedroom apartment in Building 18, and Ellen thought she must have been mad to arrange this. Shelby still hadn’t arrived, thank God, because the spaghetti sauce had to finish cooking and there wasn’t enough room on the stove top to boil the water at the same time. So she’d have to finish the sauce, store it somewhere (not in the minifridge, not on the nonexistent counter, maybe on the coffee table?) while she used both burners to try to heat up water—a giant pot borrowed from the Mologne House restaurant—for the noodles. She could only hope the two big bowls of salad, stacked on top of each other on the floor, weren’t wilting too badly. Lacey had solved the problem of drinks by emptying hers and all her neighbors’ trash cans and filling them with ice, soda, and beer. There were also bottles of wine teetering on every available surface, including the small radiator cover. Eddie had helped her strip the bed, push it to the wall (which only gained a foot or two of space, but still), and then cover it with a plain sheet. So now women were lounging on that, laughing and talking.

People don’t turn their noses up at a party, Ellen told a worried Lacey. Especially not here, not now.

What was Lacey so nervous about, anyway? She was drinking even more than usual, which wasn’t good. Ellen kept giving her little tasks to try to take her away from the beer, but Lacey eventually snapped at her:
This was your idea and I’m not the help.
Yes, it was a cramped, ugly place. But everyone knew it wasn’t
hers
. And since when did Lacey care what other people thought, Ellen told herself, wiping perspiration off her forehead with a paper towel, awkwardly aware that she was springing Shelby on her friend without warning.

People kept coming in. Some Ellen recognized from Mologne and Ward 57. Others she didn’t. The word had spread, as she’d wanted it to. Women came bearing boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts, liters of Sprite, a pizza from the place up on Georgia Avenue. One plunked a giant can of cheese dip in the middle of Ellen’s carefully trimmed crudités. Several of them shed coats and immediately pitched in to help out in the kitchen, sizing up its limitations and adjusting seamlessly. They hand-washed pans and dishes, they wiped up spills. They set out napkins and plastic forks and paper bowls.

A few injured soldiers turned up. One man missing a hand was demonstrating how he could spin his electronic prosthetic 360 degrees. A few others poked their heads in but lingered in a group just outside in the hallway. Eddie was there, of course, in a seat of honor—one of the only available chairs—and he was quiet, maybe taken aback by all the new voices, all the motion around him.

The rest of the partygoers were women. Moms, sisters, wives, girlfriends, daughters, cousins, aunts. They didn’t seem to care that it was standing room only or that dinner wasn’t nearly ready. They didn’t bother to introduce themselves or find the host. Coats and bags were piled in Lacey’s small closet, and the drinks were flowing. Ellen caught snatches of cross-talk as she balanced the sauce pot onto the sink—
Yeah, I’ve seen you on Fifty-seven; how’s he doing? Anyone else see a red-tail fox in the woods out by PT? You mean a fox like an actual animal? Who goes outside?—
but she’d forgotten to fill the pasta pot with water first. An older woman, no English, picked up the sauce using her sleeves as oven mitts and nodded at her to go ahead;
I’ll hold this.

As soon as the water was set to boil—it might take an hour—Ellen saw Shelby in the doorway, holding her coat and a bottle of wine. She waved her over and gave her a one-armed hug, mindful of her spattered apron.

Shelby’s eyes were roving the crowd. “I owe you my firstborn.”

“Sure, go mingle,” Ellen said. “I’m afraid dinner will be on hold—”

“Is everyone here from Building Eighteen?”

“Some. Some stay in Mologne House, like me … I suppose you want to go cultivate some contacts.”

“Yes, but first—” Shelby took out her phone. “Do you think your friend would mind if I gave myself a little self-tour? Nothing personal of course. Just to get a sense of the—” She took a photo of the buckled linoleum under their feet, the rolling hills that Ellen kept tripping on.

“Well there’s not much more than you’re already seeing, and there are people in the bedroom, so…”

“Great, thanks.”

“Wait.” Ellen held Shelby back by the arm. “I can’t feel right about this, entirely, if I don’t know what’s going on. What is the story? Please tell me.”

Shelby nodded. “It’s about the conditions here at Walter Reed.”

“Conditions? You mean the treatment for the soldiers?”

“No. Nothing to do with the medical side. It’s conditions
here
. The ones
she’s
living in, and others like her.” With that, the reporter aimed her phone at a cabinet door half off its hinges.