The New Neighbor (18 page)

The CO called us all back to our positions, and we went. I assumed my place at the operating table. I switched on the light, and the brightness startled me. I stared up into the light, like I’d never seen such a thing, and then dropped my eyes and shook my head to clear my vision. Captain Steigler was at my table. He looked at me and asked if I was ready. I nodded. He nodded back. They brought the first casualty in. I still had spots in my eyes, so that when I looked at him parts of him seemed to glow, and then that was gone, and I really saw him. Really saw, for the first time, what waits on the other side of ordinary life.

The first thing you notice is the dirt. Never in your life have you seen wounds so dirty. The mud, the grass, and the way it’s everywhere, everywhere. And the blood. The sheer volume of blood. This boy’s legs had been blown off just below the knee, tourniquets tied just above. Beneath the dirt you could see the pallor of his flesh. You could see sinew stringing down into the place where there used to be a foot, blood, tissue, little strands of muscle mixed in, a horror like you’d never seen before. You want to give in to the revulsion, Jennifer, but you can’t, and so you split in two, or maybe more pieces than that, so you can do what you have to do.

He was awake. He was maybe eighteen. He asked Captain Steigler, “How’s my buddy? How’s my buddy?” and Steigler of course had no idea who his buddy was. There was a boy bleeding out from an abdominal wound on the table next to ours—Kay’s table. Was that his buddy? I hoped not. Steigler said, “Let me get you taken care of and then we’ll find out.”

The boy said, “Am I going to die?” Before anybody could answer, he spotted me. He stared at me. He asked, “Are you a girl?”

I took his hand. I said, “Yes, I am.”

It’s such a strange thing about being female. He thought I was an angel, just because I was a girl.

Another nurse was behind him, getting ready to administer the ether, but he kept on staring at me like I had a holy glow. Then he said, “I must be all right, then. It must be safe here, if there are women. I must not be going to die. You’re not going to let me die, are you? You’re not going to let me die.”

And I said no, no I wasn’t, and I meant it, even if I was lying. I had to debride what was left of the legs. I poured water, I picked out dirt and fragments, while the surgeon worked above the tourniquet to see how much of the legs he could save. Bone fragments were embedded in his pelvis. We had to extract those to save the thighs. I’d never done anything like this before, and yet I did it.

I’d been in operating rooms. I thought I had seen some things. I’d never seen anything like this. Our next patient required an amputation. The strangest part was not the cutting through but the moment when the limb actually came off. That first day I carried a whole arm away from the table. I held it by the elbow. The fingers on the hand were still flexed, as though reaching for me, saying,
Hold on a minute, wait, wait
. The arm was surprisingly heavy. You don’t think about what an arm weighs when it’s still a part of the body. And then when it’s off, it’s waste. It gets burned with the rest of the waste.

Parts of your body can come off, Jennifer. You can have a hole in your back so big a man can put his fist inside it.

I hadn’t seen anything.

Later I’d see all of this, do all of this, many times, without sparing a thought to the oddity of it all. This time I’d moved into the extraordinary but hadn’t yet learned how to live there. This wasn’t even a hospital as I’d ever known one, with hallways and wards and nurses in white, but a tent full of blood and guts and screaming. There should have been some other name for it, but we didn’t have one and so we applied the old one, and after a while when I thought “hospital” what I pictured was a tent or an abandoned schoolhouse, sawhorses for the stretchers, and all the patients boys.

How could I know that soon, shockingly soon, I’d come to think of injuries like that first boy had as lesser ones? I’d say things like, “He’s only lost both legs.” Only. Because you can keep somebody with a missing limb alive longer than you can somebody with a gut wound. They bleed out slower. My boy was a low priority compared to the one on Kay’s table, the one bleeding out so fast they couldn’t save him, and he died. I don’t know if he was my patient’s buddy. I don’t remember. I can’t remember everything, you know, and what’s more I wouldn’t want to. In my opinion the human mind is a messed-up thing, the way your memory unleashes these scenes upon you, sixty-plus years after the fact, when you can’t even summon up what you had for lunch today.

Some people cried, after. I didn’t cry, and neither did Kay. We were probably more proud of that than we should have been. I wrote to my mother,
Am finally doing what I came over to do – It’s so different it’s fun
.

Topsy-turvy. But you can get used to anything.

Day after day I soldiered through the work I had to do. I cleaned dirt from torn flesh. I picked metal from someone’s insides, where it should never, ever be. I cut a slice in burned skin so a twenty-year-old boy could breathe. I told boys on the operating table they wouldn’t die, even when I knew they would. I lied. Then I did the next thing, and the next thing, and the next, and no matter what, no matter how tired I was or how hungry or how bone-deep weary, no matter how awful the thing I had to do, I could always do it.

I could always do it, Jennifer. No matter how awful it was.

What about you?

F
rom Margaret’s house
Jennifer doesn’t go back to her own but instead drives all the way into Sewanee and parks in Megan’s drive. Once again she’s rattled by the way the interview with Margaret ended, by the fierce, unnerving expression on the old woman’s face.
What about you?
Why did she look so disdainful, so certain of Jennifer’s weakness? What answer is she hoping for?

Megan opens the door, looking rumpled, a sheaf of papers in one hand. “Hi!” she says, surprised.

“I wondered if you wanted to go for a walk,” Jennifer says.

Megan cocks her head and raises her eyes to the ceiling, considering. “I’m supposed to be grading papers,” she says. “But you know what? Fuck that. Come on in.” She opens the door wide. “I’ll put on some shoes.”

Jennifer steps inside.

“I won’t be a minute,” Megan says. She jogs toward the back of her house, calling behind her, “Sit down if you like!”

Jennifer waits in the hall, jittery. She doesn’t want to sit down. She wants to keep moving. She wants to be distracted. She wants a nice big dose of Megan’s normalcy. In answer to Margaret’s question, she said, “What do you mean?” It seemed possible that Margaret would ask,
I mean, did you kill your husband?
But Margaret just said she was tired and wanted to stop for the day.

Megan reappears, already a little breathless. She’s slipped the shoes on without tying them and now she drops to the floor to finish the job. “Where do you want to go? The Cross?”

“What’s the Cross?”

“Oh, you’ve never been?” Megan bounces to her feet. “Well, it’s a big ol’ cross.” She grins. “It’s pretty. There’s an overlook.”

I could always do it, Jennifer. No matter how awful it was.

“Let’s go,” Megan says. “You’ll like it. Who doesn’t like an overlook?” She ushers Jennifer out the door.

What about you?

Megan claps her hands. “So glad you suggested this!”

The road to the Cross is a hilly one, and as you traverse its ups and downs the great white cross at its end disappears and reappears, a little larger every time. Disappear, reappear. Disappear. Jennifer looks up and watches the branches jog along against the sky, a jagged elegance.

“Something about this road makes me feel like I’m in a fantasy novel,” Megan says. “Setting off on a quest. Wearing a long braid and some kind of robe.”

“I can see that,” Jennifer says.

Megan laughs. “Or you think I’m nuts,” she says. She stumbles and puts her hand on Jennifer’s arm to steady herself. Smiling, she gives the arm a squeeze. “Apparently walking can be a hazardous activity.”

“Don’t do that at the edge of the bluff.”

“Good advice,” Megan says. “I’ll take it to heart.”

They lapse into silence, unsure where to go after the banter. At least that’s how Jennifer feels. In their time together she’s counted on Megan to power the conversation. But Megan might grow weary of this. Already she might be thinking, Lord, will this woman never talk? But what can Jennifer talk about? She doesn’t want to reintroduce the subject of Margaret. She doesn’t want to dwell on that. That’s why she’s here, walking with Megan down this road.
Do you know why I’m telling you this story? Do you know why I’m telling this story to
you
?

“Milo’s been calling himself Dark Flame,” she says.

“Oh, I like that. That’s a good one. Ben just chooses preexisting superheroes: one day he’s Spider-Man, the next he’s Batman. I’d like him to be more imaginative.”

“Milo does that, too. Green Lantern, Iron Man, Superman.”

“Ben hasn’t been much of a Superman fan as of yet.”

“Yeah, that one was pretty brief.”

“Can’t blame them, right? Boring. Insufficient angst. Milo clearly prefers a superhero with a little angst. Judging from Dark Flame anyway.”

“Maybe he’s a villain,” Jennifer says. “Milo said he was morally ambiguous.”

“Morally ambiguous?” Megan laughs. “Smart kid.” The Cross reappears. “There it is again,” Megan says. This hill is effortful, and they climb it in silence. The Cross disappears. “And there it goes.”

“How much do you think kids remember?” Jennifer asks. “I mean, how far back do Ben’s memories go?”

“I’d say not far. Sometimes I’m surprised by what he’s already forgotten.”

“Sometimes I’m surprised by what Milo remembers.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t really want Milo to remember his dad.”

There’s a sudden alertness to Megan. “You don’t?” she asks carefully.

“Some memories wouldn’t be so good.” Why is Jennifer talking? Why is she saying these things? She swallows. She has a lump in her throat. “I’d rather just be able to tell him the good things, and have that be all he knows.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I guess.”

“It is! You want him to have a happy childhood. You want to give him a good start.”

“But I’m lying.” Jennifer risks a glance at Megan, and is almost undone by the sympathy on her face. “I’m lying to him.”

“No, no, no, it’s not
lying
.” Megan frowns. “It’s like what we do when we pretend there’s a Santa. It’s preserving the magic. I don’t see anything wrong with him having good memories of his father.”

Don’t talk, Jennifer. For God’s sake. Say thank you and shut your mouth. “Tommy wanted to be a good dad,” she says. “But . . .” She hesitates, thinking of Sebastian’s claims about Megan, and then says it anyway. “He drank too much. So you could never quite trust him.”

Megan waits.

“Once I woke up in the middle of the night with a bad feeling. I woke up startled—you know that feeling?”

Megan nods, watching Jennifer with a worried frown.

“Tommy wasn’t in bed but that was normal. He usually stayed up late, drinking. I got up and went to check on Milo—he was two and still in a crib—but he wasn’t there, so then I panicked. I searched the house, and he wasn’t anywhere. Then I realized I could hear him crying, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It was like he was a ghost, like he was in the walls—” She stops with a shudder. “Anyway,” she says. “I went outside, and Tommy was on a blanket in the middle of the yard, passed out. And Milo—Milo had climbed through a broken window into Tommy’s storage shed. There was a stack of paving stones beneath the window Tommy never fixed, for the patio Tommy never built. Milo was in there in the dark, with the lawn mower and the rakes. He had little pieces of glass in his hands and feet.” Milo’s face, Milo’s desperate face. When she opened the door, he looked at her with terror. The trail of blood he’d left round the shed, the bloody fingerprints on his pajamas, his diaper soaking, his plump little feet, filthy and bare and stuck with glass. She’d let that happen to him. Because she couldn’t leave Tommy. Because of
love
.

“I’m so sorry,” Megan says. “How awful for you.” She puts a gentle hand on Jennifer’s back, keeps it there as they walk.

“Somebody at the bar told Tommy about a meteor shower, so he got Milo out of bed to show him. It was supposed to be a ‘rare and magical experience.’ He just wanted Milo to see.”

Now Megan stops walking; now she turns Jennifer toward her and embraces her. There is no choice, is there, between steeling yourself and sobbing. Jennifer steels herself. There’s no way to feel just a little bit. “You poor thing,” Megan says. “You poor, poor thing.”

She could tell the story, the whole story. Megan would understand.

Wouldn’t that be a magic trick.

We’re all a little morally ambiguous, Megan. Maybe, as it turns out, even you. We all have a little dark flame. Ah, but that doesn’t mean we understand each other. We do bad things and yet think of ourselves as good. Fundamentally good, you see, despite a slipup or two. Other people, though. When they do a bad thing, we tend to think they’re bad.

Megan pulls back to look Jennifer in the eye. “I’m glad you told me,” she says. “Because that’s a miserable thing to go through, and I can’t imagine you’re not still coping with it. I want you to know that I’m always here to listen.”

“Thank you,” Jennifer says. “I appreciate that.” She turns toward the Cross, which is looming now, enormous and white, so much bigger than she expected it to be. “Almost there,” she says, attempting a smile.

So now she’s told that story and can’t take it back. Exhibit A. Offered as defense in advance of the trial, she supposes, because surely she’d never have told it if Milo hadn’t let
Carrasco
slip, if her secret hadn’t been momentarily exposed. She walks fast and Megan does, too, and she hopes by the time they reach the overlook she’ll have thought of something sprightly to say, so that Megan feels like it’s okay to resume normal conversation, to break the melancholy silence of sympathy.