The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (21 page)

Other than walking back up to the deserted neighbor’s, there was only one place left to explore. Ever since she had arrived and particularly now that she no longer trusted the radio, the sound track to her days had come from the little trout stream across the road. It had sounded strong and percussive those first few nights, to the point she thought she could discern pebbles and stones clattering against each other in the current, but now that it hadn’t rained in so long it seemed more a soft neutral humming that suggested the play of molecules, not rocks.

It was mucky, the first few steps off the road, but then she came onto the hard gravel plain the stream had scoured through the swamp. The rocks were slippery with moss, she could easily break her ankle, and so she sat down on the first flat boulder she came to, pulled her sandals off, let her feet dangle in the water. Even on a moonless night the stream seemed to generate its own incandescence; finding her ankles, it covered them in frothy white. The current ran north toward Canada, and, like so many other things here, gave her the sense that the land was tipping away from America, going stubbornly off in its own direction.

She enjoyed that feeling. She enjoyed the cold velvet clutch of the water on her skin, the way the sensation was so intense and immediate and yet carried with it memories of wading barefoot when she was little on one of her family’s rare summer picnics. It made for two currents, two layers, and she couldn’t have said which was the more satisfying.

Did Cassie have memories like that? Not for the first time, she wondered about bringing her here once her sentence was over, to see whether quiet and solitude could help her take the first steps toward healing. There were complications, of course. How long it would take for her discharge to go through. Whether Jeannie and Tom would want to have the house for themselves. Whether, quite simply, she and Cassie could still find a way to talk to each other, repair all that had been torn. If she did come, then the first stop would have to be the stream. Cleansing, baptism, purification. Vera never believed in any of those notions, they were just empty words and Cassie would frown if she used them, yet it was exactly this that she needed. After a month in the stockade of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to be plunged into an icy trout stream and, shivering from the shock of it, begin the long slow process of absolution.

For herself, she was beginning to understand how a person could fall in love with this forgotten corner of land, or, like Dottie, fight through to a grudging, tough-love kind of acceptance. Like a lot of hard places it was more beautiful at night. She had been here long enough that the stars had changed slightly their pattern, so Vega stood directly overhead now and the long stretch of Andromeda rose in the east. A pleasantly astringent smell, part marigold, part sage, wafted downward from the cloud of the Milky Way. Could stars cast off smells? If it was possible anywhere it would be here.

Tom claimed there were trout in the stream, though they must have been tiny ones, the water was so shallow. What would they make of her, if they watched through the foam? She stayed on her rock until the shivering spread upward from her toes; she had to rub them to get the circulation back to the point she could walk. The flinty gurgle of the stream drowned out the crickets, but back near the house their chirping took over, and much later, when she finally left off her fixed staring and let herself collapse back on the mattress, the strong tropical clatter of the sound cushioned her over into sleep.

Dottie wrote about the determination to protect her son that had come to her in the night. Beth’s decision to buy the book of poems had come to her suddenly on a winter’s morning. And now it was her turn—she woke up before dawn feeling an energy and purpose stronger than she had known in months. If anything, its suddenness made her suspicious, so for most of the morning she half-expected the determination to disappear. But it was the suddenness that disappeared. She realized that, without it ever becoming explicit, her purpose had formed the very first moment she had uncovered Beth’s writing and learned, in that instant, that walls would accept ink as readily as paper.

The dining room was the last room needing to be stripped. Since that first tour of inspection on the day she arrived she hadn’t stepped into it even once; now, dragging in the ladder and supplies, she realized it was by far the most attractive room in the house. This was largely due to the three tall windows with their transoms of stained glass—facing north, they still let in more light than the other rooms enjoyed, so it was the only place in the house that wasn’t shrouded in dust. Even the wallpaper, Dottie’s wedding cake pattern, the pink-veined white velvet, didn’t look quite as awful as it did in the hall. The flooring was in better shape, too—shiny enough to slide on if she wore slippers. There was a positive, accepting aura to this space, she didn’t know how else to put it, and it seemed to exist independently of anything in the room itself.

She started scraping by the door. The first strip was hardest because she half-expected to discover more words beneath the paper and it made her wary. Finding none, it became easier, though it still involved the same slow, painstaking work as before. Using the scraper like a knife to get the edge started, sliding it under the largest piece possible, prying, lifting, pulling— and then the whole process repeated again, clearing two or three inches at a time. One long strip shaped like a map of Chile she worked on for three hours. The air was drier in the room, it seemed to have petrified the paper, and she was carving out deep fjords and winding bays and whole estuaries before Chile came off.

Working this hard, it was impossible to remember ever having worked on another task, to the point that teaching, housekeeping, waitressing in college all became memories from a distant life. When she took a break she looked down at her hands and they had become a scraper’s all right, there was no other way to describe them. Palms red and scratchy, veins cord-like on her wrists, the pads on her fingers puckered and cracked. No amount of massaging or stretching could soothe the tightness in her forearms—every tense molecule in her body seemed to have migrated there to hold a convention, party, whoop it up. And yet the odd thing was, when she looked down to examine it, the flesh on her arms, even after all that hard work and tenseness, seemed to have become noticeably looser in her time there, grainy the way wet sand is, slack, so it looked like it would look when she turned sixty.

She understood now that without Beth’s and Dottie’s stories leading her on she would never have had the stamina to do this. Even now, with only one room left to strip, she wouldn’t have been able to finish without this sudden surge of confidence and energy that had come to her in the night. Stripping the other rooms, she had been content just to get the top layers off and ignore the little flecks of paper underneath, but now she needed to clear these off too until the walls were perfect.

Or almost perfect. As bare as she made them, they still weren’t quite ready. Mixed in with the supplies was a package of sandpaper, and she used the finest to scrub away at the rough spots on the plaster, the grainy upsurges, the rice-sized bumps, until her finger could trace a line from the window to the door around to the windows again without hitting anything that wasn’t smooth. It was fussy of her, compulsive, anal—but she trusted the feeling, it was part of her confidence, this overwhelming sense of being ready at last.

It took her two full days to scrape the paper off, then another day to do the sanding, so it wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day that she started writing. With all the supplies Jeannie had left her there was one essential she had missed—pens—and it was only because she found a ballpoint to go along with the roller point in her purse that she didn’t need to drive to town. She had the worst handwriting of any middle school teacher in the country, so she decided to print, to take pains over it, make the words perfectly legible. She wouldn’t start so high that a ladder would be needed and she wouldn’t go so low anyone would ever have to kneel to read, and yet, with four big walls to work on, she should have more than enough room.

She started with the roller pen from her purse, but the plaster sucked the ink in too greedily, so she immediately switched to the ballpoint which worked much better, though she often had to bring it down from the wall and shake the tip. And yet the walls still seemed greedy—no matter how fast she wrote, they constantly demanded more. Always before, writing on paper, she felt the space between words as little obstacles or hurdles, ones she could only jump by writing the most obvious banalities or cliches; now, the needed words seemed sensitive to her pauses and leapt in quickly on their own.

It was hard pressing horizontally, not down—like using a blackboard, though all she ever wrote there were lessons where the chalk skated across the surface on its own. With the walls, she had to position her body just so, slide her fingers down the barrel of the pen from where they went normally, and the difficulty of this made her feel even closer to Beth and Dottie. My fellow contortionists! Their arms had trembled the same way hers did; their shoulders had known the same nagging pain. It was hard, she constantly had to stoop, reach, swivel and twist as she moved along the wall, and yet that other tightness, the bone-deep soreness, the weakness, the weariness of soul, all disappeared the moment she began writing.

I played a game with Cassie when she was little.
On Friday nights, as a special treat, we always went out for dinner somewhere simple, a family restaurant where they had a salad bar and brownie sundaes. Dan would meet us there late because of having to square away whatever construction job he was working on before the weekend. Cassie crayoned horses and dogs on her placemat while we waited, and that was fun for a while, but if it got really late and she had already finished her quota of rolls and crackers, I was forced to improvise.

“Watch the people coming in,” I told her. “I bet you the cherry off your sundae that every one of them touches their face when they come through the door.”

Her eyes danced upwards in amazement. The “Cassie dance” we called that, we saw it so often.

“Every single one of them?”

I nodded. “When they get in as far as the cash register and see everyone looking up. Yep, you watch. They touch their nose or ears or glasses and sometimes their chin.”

And of course I won. This was a great revelation to Cassie, that adults could be so nervous in a fussy, impossible-to-control way. Every Friday after that she would stare over her menu at the people coming in, checking out everybody’s little tic, with a wise, knowing expression on her face a lot older than her years.

That’s what I was thinking about when they led her into the courtroom in June, our harmless little game. And what’s more, I knew she was remembering this, too, knowing I was sitting there watching. She must have been nervous, the temptation to touch her hair or nose must have been irresistible, but she wasn’t going to give into it, that simple human weakness. She paraded in, wearing her dress uniform with the flesh-toned stockings, the tightwaisted skirt—paraded in, marching at attention, and just when I thought she was going to at least nod to us or thinly smile she stopped and snapped off a salute toward the flag. Beside it, standing three abreast behind a high metal table, the members of the court martial saluted crisply back.

Not my girl, I remember thinking. It’s impossible to describe how savagely the thought came, and how, for the space of twenty seconds, it afforded me relief. But of course it was my girl, the uniform couldn’t hide that, nor the rigidly obedient way she stood.

Two of the judges were majors, one was a sergeant—all three were female. The MP who followed Cassie in was female, the prosecutor was female, so for a moment it resembled an elaborate sorority initiation during which Cassie had been ordered not to smile. The lieutenant they had assigned to explain things to us was a woman, too, and the defense counsel, Captain Sosa, was the only male in the room besides Dan.

It was a small room, with only three rows of seats. The one spectator was a young, nicely dressed woman who I immediately recognized, though without quite remembering her name. She wasn’t a reporter—she held no laptop or pad—but I had seen her face on television and if I hadn’t been so focused on Cassie I would have come up with her name a lot sooner than I did.

What else? Pear trees out the window, the leaves looking dry and shriveled, though it was only June. The air-conditioning blowing too strong, so even the majors shivered. A tornado warning on the wall telling us where to run if sirens went off. Dan reaching to find my hand, me tugging it back from him. The cricket chirp of the stenographer’s machine. A sign over the judges’ table, Fort Sill Oklahoma, in flowing cowboy script.

The whole atmosphere stayed calm, as if the tornado had come and gone and we the survivors must quietly go about our business. Like that—and like it had all been rigidly choreographed, and everyone, even Dan and me, were playing our assigned parts.

The reporters, cameramen, bloggers and journalists had already left town. Cassie wasn’t pretty enough, her crime wasn’t sufficiently brutal, to capture their interest. It had been the first series of trials, the general court martials held a week ago, that had created all the excitement—Cassie was small potatoes in comparison. She had not tied any of her prisoners to a leash or covered their heads in panties or pissed on the Koran or sodomized them with a broomstick or forced them to adopt “stress positions” while country music blared through peanut-butter covered pods taped to their ears. She had not been stationed at Abu Ghraib prison nor played a role in the crimes committed there. As a guard with the 363
^rd
Military Police company of the 500
^th
MP Brigade, U.S. Army Reserve, she had been assigned to watch the overflow prisoners who had been sent to a detention center near the city of Al-Kut—Camp Patterson, called by the MPs “Camp Patty.”

 While on duty there, guarding what few female prisoners Patty held, she had gotten a call on her cell phone from a sergeant telling her to hurry down to Tier One Alpha. This same sergeant had asked her to play pool the night before and she had said no. Now, afraid she had hurt his feelings, she said she would be right down.