Thank You for Your Service (16 page)

With her nervous blessing, he goes hunting. It’s archery season, she is thinking, and in all of the suicides she’s ever heard of, none involved a bow and arrow.

He puts his bow in the back of his truck and heads for the most
isolated reaches of Fort Riley. Four lanes become two lanes, and after a while he is the only one on the road. He passes a tree split by lightning and a charred log covered with crows. He passes fields of prairie grasses lined with long patches of smooth sumac that have turned bright crimson for autumn, and from one angle they look like red leaves and from another they look like bleeding gashes cut into the grasses. He keeps going, past a spot where they trained for the war once—a plywood replica of a village, a fake mosque, a few burned-up cars—and it appears so abruptly and is gone so quickly it might be a mirage. He turns onto an even thinner road, and then a dirt road, and when that road ends, he gets out and starts walking into the woods. He selects a tree and climbs it until he is hidden in the leaves, and then he begins to wait. The wind is gusting. Leaves are dropping. Clouds are skidding. Bushes are bending. Birds are cartwheeling. Everything seems in crazy motion, spinning and swirling, and so it is again with his thoughts. Saskia. Zoe. Jaxson. Emory. Doster. All of them are running together. His life is once again feeling out of control, and he knows now to be worried when such thinking comes tiptoeing back. He needs to steady himself. The deer is coming. He is sure of it. All he has to do is wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it.

There. He is still. He is ready. He feels so alive suddenly. If only the moment could last.

Since moving, Amanda has driven by the old house only once.

The grass needed mowing.

What’s with that birdbath?

The mailbox was different.

“Who changes the mailbox?”

She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Not that she was settled into the new house, either.

“No, the tree has to be done
tomorrow
,” she is saying into the phone. She is talking to the owner of a nursery who dug up a baby maple tree at the old house that had been planted in honor of James. For months, it has been at the nursery, surviving on a drip line. He had promised to replant it at the new house on the third anniversary of James’s death, and now is saying he might not be able to get a crew. “It’s a big deal,” Amanda says, near tears, and Kathryn, who has been half listening, asks, “Is tomorrow your anniversary?” She has her eyes on a dozen red velvet cupcakes that have been overnighted from a cupcake store in Washington, D.C., and some flowers, sent by a friend, who wrote on the card, “I know James is proud of you.”

“No,” Amanda begins to answer, and then says, “All right. Let’s go for a walk and track down Larry.”

Kathryn gets her scooter. Grace gets her bicycle. Amanda leads them up their long, unfinished driveway toward Larry’s, who designed and built the house, and who Amanda phones, texts, e-mails, or goes in search of when anything goes wrong. Surely he can help with the tree, which
has to be planted tomorrow, has to be, but as Amanda nears his house she can see he’s not home.

Grace, Amanda, and Kathryn Doster

So it’ll be that kind of day, lousy through and through.

There are so many of them now. His birthday. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. Their wedding anniversary. The day they met. Father’s Day. Valentine’s Day. She knows it’s out of hand. But the day he died is the worst of them, so bad that she begins feeling its arrival weeks before. As she wrote in a letter to a friend, “Things, all manner of crazy things, stupid things, mean things, have been happening lately, and it seems as if September is out to get me.”

She has been writing a lot lately. Get it down on paper, she has been told. It’ll help. Might as well try.

“This morning was a beautiful taste of what autumn is going to feel like and my deepest desire was to take a walk with James, hold his hand, and catch up on the past three years,” she wrote one day. “It hit me that this loneliness, this overwhelming feeling that a part of me is missing, will never really go away. Sometimes it’s a dull ache that I can push aside and just keep going. Today my heart actually hurts from missing him.”

She wrote that, read it back to herself, felt no better at all.

“This morning was the Ceremony of Remembrance for the Fallen at Ft. Riley, followed by the 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony,” she wrote on September 11.

She felt a little better after that one.

“I am melancholy. Again. Still. Whatever,” she wrote a few days after that.

Not every day was that bad. Eleven days before the anniversary, she wrote, “As sad as I am, it’s such a beautiful season here. The sorghum is beginning to change and the soybeans are turning golden. The sunflowers are going strong and take my breath away. Mornings are crisp and the apples are nearly ready so pies can be made. This is what I love about Kansas.” But such days were rare for her in September.

“I worry that I’m forgetting him. I can’t remember the certain way he dried off after his shower anymore. It sounds silly, I’m sure. But I’ve lost that piece of him forever now and I can’t ask him to show me again. It’s simply gone,” she wrote, and then, with a week to go, it was, “What went wrong? Why us? Why me?” and now it’s the day before and where is Larry and what is she going to do about the tree?

She decides to keep walking around the neighborhood with the girls. It is a neighborhood so new that it isn’t yet on maps. No one could find this place accidentally. The streets all dead end. The neighbors all wave. Surely, a safer place to take a walk doesn’t exist, but as Kathryn and Grace get ahead of her, Amanda calls sharply to them to wait for her by the side of the road until she catches up.

“Okay,” she says when she does. “Now you can go.”

“To where?” Kathryn asks.

Amanda scans the empty road. “We’re going slow until we get to the straight spot,” she says, pointing to a spot not even twenty yards away, just past a slight curve.

They take off, get to the straight spot, and wait.

“To the driveway,” Amanda says, picking out the next landmark.

They get to the driveway and wait.

“To the corner …”

To the corner. They wait.

“Okay, black-and-white mailbox …”

“Okay, around the circle to the orange bucket …”

Three years ago right now, we were eating pizza, Amanda is thinking. We were about to go to some yard sales. James was about to call. “Talk to you later. I love you,” he was going to say before hanging up. “I love you,” she was going to say back. So she had the last words in their last conversation. But wait. Did she? Maybe she said, “I love you” first and then he said, “Talk to you later. I love you.” Or maybe he said, “I love you” first and then he said, “Talk to you later.” Did he have the last words? What were those words?

“Mommy!” Kathryn suddenly screams from ahead, interrupting. “Car!”

Amanda looks up and sees it.

“Grace!” she screams.
“Stop.”

Grace freezes. Kathryn does, too. Amanda starts toward them but can’t get there in time.

Here comes the car. The driver is a waving neighbor. He’s going maybe five miles an hour.

It’s not that she sees herself as beyond repair. A person doesn’t get through the chaotic upbringing she had without developing some spine. In most ways, she believes herself more sufficient than needy. She almost never breaks down in front of the children. She’s begun taking boxing lessons and is proud of her bruises.

Still, even as she insists she wants no one other than James to lean on, she has found them anyway, including a succession of people with one thing in common: James himself.

Adam was the first and, along with Saskia, ultimately the most painful to her. In those first days, Amanda wanted to have the wife of her husband’s favorite soldier around as much as possible, and so Saskia was with her as the army explained about headstones and urns, and Saskia was with her when she picked out a casket, and Saskia was with her when she signed the insurance papers. She
needed
Saskia, she would say later, and not long after the funeral, when Saskia asked her about borrowing some money to fix up the house for Adam’s homecoming, she didn’t hesitate. She dipped into her survivor’s benefits and pulled out several thousand dollars, and three years later, the friendship fizzled, the reasons still unclear, she is realizing that the Schumanns won’t be paying her back, and neither will they be returning the glass dish in which she made seven-layer bean dip on the day that they watched the Super Bowl.

After Adam and Saskia came Alex Boland, who was the lieutenant in charge of the platoon. Along with Adam, he had delivered one of the eulogies at James’s memorial service in Iraq, and nine months later, home now, James on his brain, he telephoned Amanda to introduce himself and wondered if she might want to talk. They met at a restaurant, and it was Adam at the airport all over again.
How did it happen? Did he suffer? Were you there?
From the restaurant they went to Amanda’s porch, where they spent much of an afternoon, and soon he was staying for dinner and the girls were calling him Uncle Alex. She texted him, and he always texted back. She telephoned him, and he always tried to answer. “My voice of reason” is how she began thinking of him, and then he had to leave Kansas for another assignment, and Kathryn was back to having nightmares again, and that was when Amanda drew ever closer to another
platoon member named Matthew Stern, which has turned into the most complicated relationship of all.

“Poor Matt, being one of the ones who tried to save him and now being my friend,” Amanda says of him. “It can get very bad. The blame. The guilt.”

“We’ve all got our little quirks from that deployment” is what Matt says.

He was the medic in the platoon, and on the day that he didn’t save James, he was twenty years old. Usually he and James rode in the same Humvee in their convoys, James front right, him back left, but for whatever reason they switched things up on that trip. There were seven vehicles in all, strung out over a hundred yards. James was in number two. Matt was in number six. They had said goodbye to Schumann, who was staying back, and were traveling at about the same speed a waving neighbor might go through a Kansas subdivision when the explosion came from the right. The roar faded. The dirt settled. Someone was on the radio:
Hold your positions
. “Fuck it,” Matt remembers saying. “I’m going.” He ran forward. People were shooting now. He dove to the ground, and as some of the soldiers fired back, he got to James’s Humvee, opened his door, felt for a pulse, grabbed him, and pulled him out. “And that’s when I saw the full extent of what happened. The one leg missing. Half his pelvic area was missing. Like three quarters of the other leg.” Years later, a therapist would tell Matt how James was like a father figure to him, and maybe so, but what Matt had on his mind was that leg, the left one. It was hanging by a piece of skin, nothing else, and Matt couldn’t bring himself to cut it. It wouldn’t have made a difference, but he thinks about it anyway. Some medic, is what he thinks. So the leg hung there while Matt went to work on the rest of James, trying to control the bleeding. “I think I stuffed thirty-three rolls of Kerlix in him,” he says, and then James was dead, and then everyone came home from the war, and then he was taking antidepressants for night terrors and depression, and then, as Adam had done, and Alex Boland had done, he was meeting James’s widow. “I was really scared. I didn’t know how she was going to react to me. I didn’t know if she was going to blame me. I said, ‘Mrs. Doster, I’m Specialist Stern. I was your husband’s medic.’ ”