Blue Stars (37 page)

She was killing time in one of the computer labs in the Evaluation Board building. They were doing some tests on Eddie, Neuro this time. Memory games, language assessment, large and small motor movements. She hoped with all her heart he would fail them definitively. In the mammoth hive-mind that was the Benefits Admin, all these tests and decisions would add up to dollars someday, and they needed every one they could get, assuming that Eddie would never work again. Problem was, he was so damn good at these tests—he aced them in PT over and over again, and clearly he loved the praise from the aides when he did. How messed up was it that his success could be such a huge liability? Lacey didn’t trust those dopes in Benefits to have any common sense. With her luck, they’d probably rate him high just because he could walk an obstacle course using nothing but a cane and his superhero proprioception … never acknowledging that the man was now, essentially, retarded.

She listlessly checked the news, but her heart wasn’t in it. A bomb in Karbala kills four service members. Coalition forces announce a new curfew for M.A.M.s in Baghdad. Bush vetoes $124 billion spending bill by Congress because it includes a timetable for withdrawal by U.S. forces.

It floated far away from her, the significance of these facts. She was four floors underground in the belly of Walter Reed, surrounded by thousands of injured soldiers and on-duty soldiers and yet Lacey felt less connected to news about the war than she’d been in her kitchen in Mount Vernon, streaming Coldplay in the background.

Probably she was just jittery about Ellen. They’d pretty much ignored each other since the dinner party disaster last week. Not that Lacey missed her appointment with Mike yesterday. When she showed up at the right time, carrying two foam rollers, an exercise band, and a Dr Pepper (his favorite), Ellen had calmly stood up from her chair and ceded the room to her. The two of them had actually nodded to each other, like snooty royals passing in the castle hallway! Even Mike thought it was weird. “What’d she do to you?” he said. Lacey mumbled
nothing
and got him started on wrist rotations. She wasn’t about to bail on him, just because his mom, or whatever she was, had been such a bitch.

Mike was looking good these days, about to get his new leg. His doctors were happy with her work with him; they liked the increased mobility in his shoulders, his built-up core. When she teased him that girls were going to go crazy for a cute guy like him with a fancy new digital limb he got all blushy and grinning before he remembered to be all crabby and
whatever, I don’t care
,
what do you know.
It made Lacey wish she had a photo of him just then, boyish and carefree, to send to Jane.

Lacey swiveled side to side in the computer chair, clicking around aimlessly. The movement eased her pounding headache because it echoed it, matching the pain in her temples with the
creak-crak
sound of the chair’s squeaky axis. A guard in the front looked over with a sour face. Lacey ignored him. She was dully hungover from leftover wine from the party, the air in here was dry and cold, and no one else was at the computers.

It would soon be Otis’s winter break and he and Lolo would take the train down, to stay a whole week. It was too much: the ferocious need to hug her boy, hear his voice, coupled with the nerves and dread about dealing with Lolo. Eddie’s devotion to her may have driven Lacey nuts, but at least when he was all there upstairs she could share that duty with him. Now it was just her and Lolo as the only functioning adults. And her mother-in-law sounded practically perky these days when they spoke. She was going to all kinds of new support groups—Wounded Warrior Moms, Mothers for TBI Hope—and she was raring to go on taking care of Eddie.

Swivel, swivel, swivel. What else? Lacey guessed she could check e-mail, though she rarely did anymore. As expected, it was a depressing list of FRG events she wasn’t going to go to and didn’t care about, notices about Otis’s school stuff that she couldn’t attend, and one abrupt e-mail from her boss in reply to Lacey’s last week. She’d told him she wouldn’t be back “for the foreseeable future” (a phrase Ellen had recommended) and asked him to hold her job for her, based on seven years of good reviews (Ellen, again). His response, which Lacey had read without a shred of surprise, said basically,
I don’t think so.
The economy was tight (
no shit
) and since business was down it looked like Gwen could cover the cutback classes and walk-ins (
thanks a lot, Gwen
). So they were probably going to do away with her position eventually. So, in fact, she was doing him a favor by being off on her busted-husband hospital vacation! (He didn’t say that part.) Her private client e-mails had also fallen off, after a surge of initial “of course I’ll wait for you!’s.” Now they’d found other trainers, ones she’d recommended.

Work-wise, she was a free woman.

Lacey was about to log out when she glimpsed two blue unread messages at the top of the screen from an address at first she didn’t recognize. And when she did, it was as if someone had plucked her hard from within, down in the deepest part of her body.
[email protected].

The first was a photo of Otis, a full-color big file that took several seconds to unroll down her screen. Jim must have taken it when they went out to eat together. She put her hand to her mouth, stifling a short laugh, and a pinwheel of emotions. Otis was making a scrunched-up,
whatchyou doing that for
face, but there was a hidden smile blended in. She studied every minute feature: he was outside, it looked like the boardwalk at Orchard Beach; sunny, patches of snow on the ground behind him. He had his green parka on, and some new blue scarf that Lolo must have gotten him. His cheeks were pink, his hair was a little long, he looked bigger and older than she could have imagined, and Lacey rocked herself on the computer chair, eyes filling up. Her boy, her boy. What was she missing in his life while the days unspooled here in blank sameness? Why wasn’t she there with him, goddamn it all to hell. Fuck Eddie, fuck her promises to him that he couldn’t even remember now anyway. She wanted her boy.

Lacey wanted to know everything. It took all she had not to call Jim immediately—she hadn’t since that time in Whole Foods—to demand all the details. Where did they go? What did they do? What did he say? Does he miss me? What did he eat?

But then she clicked open his second e-mail and Otis slipped from her mind. The subject line read,
Because I had to.
And the e-mail had nothing, no message, only an audio file. A short line with a play button next to it. Lacey looked around the room, cheeks aflame. No one but the guard up front.

“Hey, um … do you have any headphones? Like, to borrow?”

“Say what now?”

“Never mind.”

Lacey clicked play. Warm, quick-thrumming chords came through the PC’s small speakers. They almost knocked her out of her chair. It was a Springsteen song and yes, he’d had to. Because even before the lyrics, the restrained urgency of this music—now, in this chilly room, filling her aching brain—sung every part of her ache and how tightly she’d been fencing it in. Maybe the singer was Bruce but it was Jim, and it was her own self too.

Lacey, with her eyes closed, drank the music in through her skin and every nerve ending. Let it all out when her favorite part came up, about
staying hungry
, about
starving tonight
. And when the guard mumbled a caution she sang louder. As it ended she held her breath as Clarence Clemons played them out on his sax, the rising tones lifting up, lifting higher. Blowing holy energy straight back into her bones.

“Sorry about that,” she called breezily, passing the guard on her way out. “But it’s the Boss.”

Now back to Eddie. And weirdly, that love song from Jim—if that’s what it was—gave her strength to tackle Benefits once again: the numbing forms, the redundancies, the mindless bureaucratic maze of offices spread out miles apart. Her phone buzzed with a text:
My name is Lorna and we’re in Wd 57 w my son. Got your info from Ellen today and she says you do phys training? Jack is AK too and wants to work on his arms and abs. Your rate is fine, can you come this week? Also I know three other guys who are interested. Text me back ASAP pls.

Lacey had to read it twice. More work, actual money coming in? Ellen … who had recommended her? She had to break into a jog on the way to the elevator bank, slipping around the waxed hallway floor in her boots. What if … Maybe she could create a small group boot camp for guys on 57? Get the doctors’ buy-in, sweet-talk the nurses, charge a lower rate for a package of classes. Maybe they could use one of the conference rooms? Or what about the Healing Garden? High on ideas for what that money could do, and on Bruce, and on her sweet Otis arriving in a few days, Lacey was full up in her heart. She wanted a drink so bad; she didn’t need any kind of drink, ever again. Humming and planning and hurrying back to Eddie.

26

The third time Ellen got up to vomit, she didn’t bother going back to bed. The tile floor of the bathroom cooled her bare legs as she waited for the next bout, but after a few minutes she was shaking all over. So she crawled on hands and knees back out to the carpeted floor in the small entrance hallway between the outer door and the bathroom. She was shivering there half asleep when the knock came, the one she’d been expecting. With difficulty, Ellen got herself upright and opened the door a crack.

“Thank you, Marietta.” The day maid handed her a stack of folded, warm fresh towels and sheets. “I have another, if you can possibly manage.” In a pillowcase, this morning’s soiled load. Ellen gave the girl a twenty-dollar bill.

“You sure I don’t call doctor?”

“No, I’ll be all right. Now excuse me, I need to—oh, oh—” Ellen could barely push the door shut before she had to rush back into the bathroom.

She must have fallen asleep on the floor, because she woke there sometime later curled up under the sink, sore and chilled but without the violent stomach cramps. Slowly, Ellen washed her face and hands with warm, soapy water. One glance in the mirror made her shudder: pale, tightly drawn, bruised under-eyes. Back to bed. She made herself take three sips of water before inching back under the covers. Every motion spiked a nauseating crackle of pain through her head.

It had come on full strength over the weekend, this flu or virus or whatever it was—GI distress with fever, plus cough—but in truth Ellen had sensed its approach a day or two before then. She’d tried to ignore the wooziness, the aches, and the crippling exhaustion, and had made herself keep to the routine: arrival at Heaton by 7:00 a.m. for rounds and Mike’s breakfast; a full day of following him to appointments; TV; his dinner and tidying his room; evening preparation (“meds and bed”); back to Mologne around nine. But on Saturday the first appearance of a dry, barking cough drew ire from the weekend shift in the nurses’ station.

“You turn right around and get that checked out,” they told her, barring her way to Michael’s room.

“I’m fine,” Ellen said, irritated. Her mistake was to think their concern was for
her
. Didn’t she have enough to do around here besides run to the clinic for a simple head cold?

Uh-uh
, they said.
No infectious conditions on the ward
. Period. Ellen protested; a set of regulations were produced (rules and regs abounded in this place, of course). An attending was pulled into the argument and made the final call. A digital thermometer was promptly inserted into her ear and the verdict read aloud: 101.3. She was sent packing with a photocopy of the clinic hours, a box of Emergen-C, and a guarantee that she could return twenty-four hours after she hit 98.7 with no symptoms.

The hotel phone rang, once, and stopped. A few seconds later, her cell phone rang. This was Wesley’s code to pick up, so she fumbled a hand out of the covers to find her cell.

“Hi,” she said, which triggered a thirty-second coughing fit.

“Jesus, Mom. You okay?”

“Fine. Wait a minute.” She coughed a wad of mucus into a tissue. “How is he? What’s happening?”

“It’s amazing. It’s literally amazing. They had him up on the track thing, you know, the one between the bars. And he just killed it, Mom. I mean, first time with the real prosthesis on, and Mike looked like he’d been wearing it his whole life. The aides were, like, literally laughing at how sick it was the way he went through all these exercises. He barely had to touch the bars.”

Ellen moved her head away from the phone to cough as quietly as she could.

“He did their first test strength routine, so that was, um, okay yeah I wrote it down like you asked—leg swings, heel strikes, grid work, and, uh … a couple others. What’s incredible is that even though what everyone hears about is the leg, the leg, this amazing C-leg that’s been invented, the
real
innovation is the knee. It’s called a PK, which stands for—”

“Power knee. I know,” Ellen said irritably. Who was the one who’d already been to a dozen appointments in the Gait Lab?

“Yeah, I was talking to one of the technicians, and he was saying that Mike’s going to be able to go up and down stairs pretty much the way you and I do. Like, step over step. Not, step, together, step, together. You know what I mean?”

Ellen did. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t there today, of all days, when Michael got his leg. What she wanted was to be wholly grateful to Wesley for snapping into action, for his excitement and all the calls and updates, for taking her place, but frankly it was hard to take, being instantly cut out of the action.
Has he asked about me?
She wondered fretfully.
Does he even notice I’m not there?

The day of her quarantine from the ward, from the Gait Lab, from anywhere Michael or other recovering soldiers might be, Ellen had tried to persuade his team leader to reschedule or at least push it back a few days until she was well enough to accompany Mike to the lab. How else would he get there?
We’ll take care of everything,
she was assured. They were on a very specific schedule due to his suction measurements and the availability of the technicians. Ellen couldn’t imagine him there by himself, though, so as soon as she gave up on the doctors she got on the phone to Wesley. It was all arranged within hours: his flight the next morning, a rental car, his hotel room in Silver Spring. Whatever misgivings she had about Michael’s moodiness and how he and Wesley would do were put to rest that first day when they called together. Basically, they made fun of her; the first target was the notes and charts she had all over the room, still tracking his food and liquid intake long after the nurses asked her to.