Casualties (3 page)

July 2008

The banners seemed to come out of nowhere. They rippled along the chain-link fence right up to the main gate that separated Camp Lejeune from the tattoo parlors, strip clubs, motels, used-car lots, and bars along Route 24, each scrawled, painted, or stitched with words that had been saved up for this moment.
You are our hero!
We love you Daddy!
Welcome Home Son.
Some of the Marines pressed against the windows of the bus, whooping and clicking cameras. Others reached for cell phones and dialed the wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers waiting to meet them inside the gates. “Soon, baby, soon.” “Almost there.”

Robbie waited for the tide of euphoria to take him. Instead he picked up the anxiety behind the shouts and grins stretched too wide and too tight. He smelled it beneath the stink of diesel fuel, swampy feet, and sweat.

Korder's elbow jabbed Robbie in the ribs. Robbie slammed him back, but Korder kept looking at his phone.

“She's got us a motel room. Says she's loaded it with food and booze; we don't have to come out for three days. Christ, now that
I'm here, I can't fuckin' believe it.” Korder let out a bark that was supposed to be a laugh.

The darkness inside Robbie shifted and stretched like an animal waking. He looked out the window, wanting to fill up on the light that spilled down on the caravan of buses bearing his unit through the main entrance. Most of his unit. In seconds he no longer saw the banners or the sweeps of moss hanging from the pines. He saw the outpost, a concrete school building surrounded by concertina wire and a wall of sandbags covered with as much grit and dirt as they contained. Inside, his cot sat jammed tight against others in a space reinforced by wood framing and more sandbags. He saw the coffeemaker, Korder's Xbox, the daisy chain of power cords they'd rigged to keep things going. He saw Garcia in full gear, Kevlar on his head, stretching his neck like a turtle toward a small mirror nailed to a two-by-four so he could pop a zit.

“There's the armory,” Korder said. Garcia disappeared. The bus rolled to a stop. Just a few more hours to go. They would check their rifles in at the armory, get their barracks assignments, and then climb back on the buses that would take them across the base to the waiting families and friends, and those whose Marines were dead, but wanted to be there anyway, to see and hug the ones who lived.

“Your mom'll be glad to see you.” Korder stood, but he couldn't go anywhere until the bus started to unload.

Robbie shook his head. “I told her not to come.”

There was no point. He'd be through with active duty in another couple of months and then he'd be in the reserves unless he re-upped. His mother had already started thinking again about schools, sending him e-mail after e-mail with links to colleges he could attend once he got back to San Diego. She'd sent pictures of a new house she'd built near the beach with another picture of his truck in the new garage. Her e-mails were like brochures for travel in a country called Home. Before his laptop died, he'd looked at the messages to see if his mother wrote anything besides
This place looks great
or
You'll
love this
, and then deleted them. He saved only the ones she sent—about her business trips, the weather, her workouts, the construction of the new house—that ended with
Be safe. I love you, Mom.

He would reread them just to arrive again at the last two sentences. Sometimes he felt a tug, like the nibble of a trout on a line he'd been casting for hours. For a few seconds he felt the promise of something he couldn't see but knew was there. If he looked too long, though, the words read like one of the commands Ruthie used to squeeze out when he was a kid and she was racing to make a flight. “Finish your math. Be good for the babysitter. I'll call you tonight. I love you.” Even if she was furious with him, she said “I love you,” like she was reminding herself, or just making sure she covered all her bases in case the plane went down. When she said “I love you,” nine out of ten times it meant she was leaving him.

That was the problem with letters and phone calls from home, he'd once said to Garcia; they could make you want everything back the way it was, even stuff you hated. Garcia hadn't answered him. He was staring at his girlfriend's new Facebook page. She'd posted a picture of herself in the lap of a guy Garcia knew from home.

“I hate her, man, I hate the bitch,” Garcia kept saying. Peterson jumped on him to make him stop. Hanny, Korder, and Robbie had to pull them apart. None of them wanted to see Garcia's pain or be reminded that their own lives could be going to shit and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it.

“Fuck your girlfriend, fuck the Internet, fuck letters from home,” he'd told Garcia that night. “It's all different now. No one back there knows anything about you anymore. You got us.”

Two nights later, they helped to zip his arm, his leg, and what they could find of his powerful body into a black bag.

That was what was still out there waiting for him and every other Marine on these buses. After the hugs, when the signs were propped up in the corners and the balloons collapsed on the floor, it would be you and the things the desert had done to you or the people you
cared about. . . . Meanwhile, all the people who'd been left back home, worrying, wanted their due. Ruthie wanted him to get it right this time. That was what her e-mails were really all about. A do-over.

Panic struck Robbie like a cobra. His breath seemed trapped in his lungs. He tried to focus on the Marines lining up outside the bus to turn in their weapons, but he felt his mother's presence, even here in North Carolina. He saw her standing with her arms open, eyes eager and expectant, not knowing that he couldn't breathe, couldn't even do this simple thing. He felt a hand grip his left shoulder.

“Get it together, O'Connell,” said Korder. “Get it together.”

He stood. He wasn't sure if he'd done it on his own or if Korder had yanked him up. All he knew was he was standing and his lungs were working. He sucked in air and heaved it out: in, out, in, out. A little better now.

“Ready?”

Robbie nodded. He shook himself free of Korder's hand and stepped into the line of Marines moving off the bus.

Ruth guided the Jaguar to her parking spot in the company garage with the kind of blind instinct produced by years of routine. She'd told herself she'd make her decision when she arrived, but here she was, still torn between Robbie's wishes and her own impulses.

She decided to leave the car running until she made up her mind. She could wait for Robbie to come home “his own way,” as her friend Neal put it when he warned her to be patient. Or she could hop a plane tonight for North Carolina. All Ruth wanted was to see him, even if it was just for a few hours. That would be enough time to let it sink in that he was really home, really safe. After that, she could wait a little longer for the Marines to finish with him.

Screw patience. Ruth reached for her purse and extracted her phone. It wouldn't hurt to check for flights.

A text from Robbie greeted her from the display of her BlackBerry:
all gd call u sn.
When had he sent it? Damn it. She'd been listening and watching for word from him, and now all she had was
another text with the same message he'd been sending since he'd called her after landing. Eighteen days ago and counting.

A knock on the driver's-side window made Ruth jump. The phone fell into her lap. Danny. She switched off the ignition and waited for Danny, security man, garage attendant, and self-appointed valet to RyCom's senior executives, to step back so she could open the door.

“Jag need a wash today, Ms. Nolan?”

“Yes, please, Danny.” Ruth wasn't sure if she was sorry or grateful for the interruption. Either way, his smile pulled her into the start of another workday, the kind of day that had gotten her through both of Robbie's deployments. No doubt this one would offer more than enough to keep her occupied while she waited a little longer to hear from her son. She grabbed her purse and briefcase. “There's some dry cleaning in the back, too.”

“I'll take care of it.” A glint of silver flashed beneath Danny's mustache when he smiled again. His warmth and his eagerness spread like a balm over Ruth's agitation.

I'll take care of it.
Magic lived in those words. Ruth felt her lips relax into a smile as she strode toward the elevator that would take her up to RyCom's main entrance. In fourth grade she'd figured out that the way to escape her tormentors at recess was to raise her hand every time Mrs. Pelletier needed someone to clean erasers, stack books, or help Rainey McKinnon with her math. At sixteen, she'd told the manager of the North Woods Lodge & Restaurant he didn't have to train another waitress for evenings. “I'll take care of it,” she'd told him. He'd made her an assistant manager in her junior year.

The strong magic came, though, when Ruth learned to see a problem—and come up with a solution—before others even knew it was there. Initiative. Like Danny's and maybe a few of the people hunching over their computers right now to make sure she had what she needed for her business development meeting, which would start—Ruth looked at her watch—in exactly eighteen minutes. She
punched the button for the elevator that would take her up to the ground level and the main entrance of RyCom.

As the door opened, she came face-to-face with Gordon Olson, or as much of his face as she could see through the cigarette smoke that rose between them.

“You look pleased with yourself, Ruth.”

“Good morning to you, too, Gordon.”

She stepped aside to let him out, but he just shook his head. “Just riding up and down until I finish this.” His eyes slitted as he inhaled again.

Ruth forced herself to step inside the elevator. The man brought out the mule in her, as her grandmother used to say. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of an elevator to himself.

“Think you can hold your breath to the next floor?” Gordon said. He smiled a lipless smile as he exhaled. His face was the color of wet sand, and every wrinkle looked like a fissure formed when the tide goes out. He was only sixty-five. He looked eighty.

“How are you not dead yet?” Ruth said, waving the smoke away.

“God doesn't want me. The devil doesn't seem to want me. Guess you're stuck with me.”

The elevator bell dinged as it hit ground level and Ruth burst through the doors before they'd opened all the way, but his voice caught up to her.

“Not so fast. Got a couple of questions for you.”

Ruth glanced at her watch. “Let's walk and talk.”

Gordon inhaled one last time. He dropped the cigarette and ground it into the granite walkway, then fell into step beside Ruth as she walked toward their building. “How're things looking in the body business? We hitting our marks?”

We.
That was rich. Ruth remembered how he'd rolled his eyes when she'd proposed the whole idea five years ago. “We're a tech company, not some temp agency,” he'd said. Don Ryland was the
one who counted, though, and he'd liked the idea. He'd been willing to try anything that would keep his company out of Chapter 11. But she knew that it was the Transglobal deal that was driving Gordon's interest. The whale of all defense contractors wanted to buy RyCom, thanks to the success of her “body business.” He'd get millions out of the deal, so would Don, and more importantly, so would she. That was what initiative could do.

“We've renewed all existing contracts or are about to,” she said. “A few new RFPs are coming this week. KBR is close to signing another eight-hundred-million-dollar contract.”

“Close? Close doesn't count.”

“What's the matter, Gordon? Afraid the lungs'll petrify before you get your payout?”

“I don't count my winnings until I can hold them in my hand.” He stopped at the next elevator but didn't press the button, only looked at her through his heavy-lidded eyes.

Ruth felt heat start to rise again from her neck toward her face. “I'll take the stairs,” she said as Gordon pressed the button for the elevator that would ferry him up to the executive floor.

“I'm not finished, Ruth.”

“Catch me later, I've got a meeting,” Ruth said over her shoulder. She felt him watching her as her heels clicked across the atrium floor.

He and Don knew about the house, of course. They knew she had gone for it, overspent on the waterfront lot, on the construction itself, and even the Jaguar. Ruth had bought the car used from one of Neal's friends who'd gotten overextended. She'd imagined driving it to the airport, picking up Robbie, letting him have the keys to drive it home. This was the reason she'd drained the account holding the last of the loan she'd taken out. She already owed nearly two million dollars. What was another sixty thousand? For the first time in her life, Ruth had bet on the come, as Don used to call it. Spending money she didn't have, was how her grandparents would have
put it. The size of her mortgage was more than a hundred times what they'd earned from the farm or the woods around it.

Damn Gordon Olson. She had the KBR contract to deal with, a whole day of meetings and phone calls about the Transglobal deal, and—

“Morning, Ms. Nolan,” sang Marcia, the receptionist. She sat like a wren on her eggs, peering over her half glasses from the center of her control station. The circle of wood, stone, and glass was draped with a huge banner bearing the RyCom logo and lettered in blue and red against a white background, YOUR PARTNER FOR A SAFER U.S.A. WE'RE ALL IN.

“Morning, Marcia.” Ruth flashed a smile but kept moving. Maybe she could get to the door to the stairwell before Marcia asked the inevitable question.

“When's that boy of yours coming home?”

Shit.
Ruth glanced over her shoulder, “Still waiting to hear. Should be any day now.” It was what she'd said when Marcia first asked eighteen days ago when Ruth, reckless with joy, had told her, had told too many people, that Robbie had landed in North Carolina and was on his way home.

Marcia's eyebrows tented upward and her crows' feet arranged themselves into an expression of what Ruth took to be puzzled sympathy. The receptionist looked as though she had something else to say, but a call came through and her gaze shifted abruptly to the switchboard. Ruth escaped into the stairwell.

Sun streamed through the wall of windows that ran the height of the building and separated her from mounds of impatiens and palms grouped around a few benches.
This is what it would be like to be trapped in a terrarium
, Ruth thought, as she began to climb to the fourth floor. Ruth under glass. Like a pheasant steaming in her own juices or, in her case, frustration and anxiety. She knew, at least, that Robbie was alive and safe and would be out of danger from here on out. There was no longer any need to stand guard against her own
imagination every time the men she worked with talked about “the situation” in Iraq or someone like Marcia started collecting donations for military widows and orphans. On top of that, the Transglobal deal would bring all the money she would ever need and more time, too. Lots of time if she chose. She could help Robbie start his new life. She could start a whole new life herself.

Ruth finally stopped climbing. The sun burned through the tinted glass and the air-conditioning, but it wasn't the heat that pinpricked its way up and down her nerves. It was the failure of these facts—more money, new lives—to erase the apprehension triggered every time she tried to imagine her days after Robbie finally returned.

She'd been floored by the sudden void created by his absence, especially at first. It was nearly a year before she walked into her house after work without expecting to see a pile of greasy T-shirts on the laundry room floor or to hear rap music pounding from his bedroom. When she shopped, she would put a jar of peanut butter or a gallon of milk in her cart before she caught herself. The new quiet on the fringes of her days echoed with things she wished she'd said more patiently, or simply left unsaid. She could have laughed more with him; she could have just listened.

But there was work. She'd had the most successful four years of her career, as it turned out. There was the house to build and there was Neal, her friend “with benefits” as Robbie once described it, back again in their continuing cycle of on-again, off-again companionship, his presence familiar and comfortable. After a while, missing Robbie throbbed less urgently, like a sore back that didn't hurt at all some days, ached a little on others, or flared raw and fresh when a text, a letter, or an offhand remark by a colleague reminded her where Robbie was and what he was doing and how much he was changing.

The waiting and the missing would soon be over, but Ruth didn't know what, or who, to expect when he finally came home. He was twenty-three. He'd been to war.

Wanting to fly to North Carolina was like wanting to jump into
the swimming hole near her grandfather's farm: get in, get past that first gasping shock, and just keep swimming until she stopped noticing the cold. Ruth wanted enough time with Robbie to get to know him before he went on with the rest of his life.

She wanted more. She wanted him to forgive her for the mistakes she had made. But her mother had taught her that wanting anything from another person could be wanting too much. Robbie wasn't a child anymore. He could choose.

Her BlackBerry sounded from her purse. Terri's ring. Ruth clicked her nails against the Bluetooth perpetually in her ear.

“I'm almost there.” The sound of her own voice steadied her.

“Good, Andrea was all set to start the meeting. I'll tell her you're on your way.”

“Thanks.”
And while you're at it, tell Andrea to shut up and wait her turn.
There was a fine line between taking initiative and trying to usurp your boss. Don's newest protégée didn't seem to be walking it too carefully.

Ruth wiped a few beads of sweat from her upper lip and picked a stray hair, mostly red with white near the root, from the nubbed silk of her jacket. Then she ran up the rest of the stairs.

—

Her staff meeting was nearly over when Gordon Olson appeared at the door to the conference room. His persistence didn't surprise Ruth, but his presence did. It wasn't like him to stand in front of a room full of people; he left that to Don and to her. Don was the idea man, at least as far as clients were concerned. Ruth executed the ideas. Gordon took care of the money and all the boring necessaries that fell into a big drum called operations. She smiled for the benefit of her staff, directors all, who had just closed their laptops and grabbed their empty coffee cups, expecting to be dismissed.

“We were just wrapping up. We've been putting the final touches on the KBR proposal.”

“Good. I'll wait,” Gordon said. When he stepped into the room, most of the men and women around the table got up and headed for the door, without waiting for Ruth to call the end of the meeting. Andrea, of course, lingered, but not, Ruth knew, out of any deference to her.

“How can I help you, Gordon?” The conference phone buzzed, but Ruth ignored it.