You Know When the Men Are Gone (11 page)

“Ma’am, just to make sure I have this down correctly: you last saw your children when they walked out your front door? You didn’t see them get into a stranger’s car or anything like that?” Sergeant Jaboski seemed uncomfortable, as if he knew that asking these questions would lodge unpleasant scenarios in Ellen’s distraught mind.

“No,” she whispered, deciding that it was time to sit down. “I didn’t see anything.”

The sergeant finally managed to get his spindly limbs out Ellen’s front door, refusing her iced tea, coffee, homemade snickerdoodle cookies, and everything else she had tried to make him stay. The authority of his uniform calmed her, but he backed out of the house, smiling and wild-eyed, as if desperate to be inside the safety of his jeep, away from Ellen’s near-hysteria.

She watched him drive off, a bit faster than the twenty-five-mile-an-hour residential speed limit, and couldn’t help peering out at the guard shack of the East Gate, only a few blocks away, that led to seedy Rancier Street and the huge world outside of Fort Hood’s confines. Sergeant Jaboski had told her not to worry, that he would put out the descriptions of the kids on the radio, have the entire MP force do drivebys across the base, searching all the usual places that teenagers liked to go to (the Captain D’s food court on TJ Milnes Boulevard, the arcade at the Warrior Way PX, the matinees and Slurpee machine at Howze Theater). He reminded her that Delia gave the bus driver an excuse for Landon’s absence and therefore deliberately took her brother, which meant a stranger had not.

Ellen glanced up at the clock and did the math. It was 10:30—her children had been AWOL now for almost two and a half hours.

The Roddy family problems started about a year ago. Ellen’s husband was getting ready to deploy to Iraq when his chain of command found out about Ellen’s diagnosis, treatment, and upcoming surgery. It used to be “if the army wanted you to have a family, they’d issue you one,” but there had been a perceptible shift as the years of war continued, and in an attempt at familial appeasement, John was appointed the rear detachment commander, a position that allowed him to stay behind. He became the man who handled everything on the home front, from shipping supplies from the States to the forward operating base outside of Baghdad, to approving army emergency loans to families.

So while all of their friends were getting ready to send their fathers and husbands off to war, the Roddys were going to Darnall Hospital. They started to peel away from the army community, a slight unmooring, their foundation coming loose. There was something unseemly about John being home when all the other husbands were not. Not that anyone was overtly jealous of the Roddys, for crying out loud, Ellen had
cancer
. And yet John being home made her different from everyone else in a way that even the cancer did not.

John slept beside Ellen except when a body returned draped in a flag and he traveled to the military funeral. He was there every single night, which might seem normal for civilians but to the military families Ellen knew, it was extraordinary. When neighbors needed a man, they knocked on Ellen Roddy’s door and bashfully asked to borrow John yet again—there was a tire that needed changing or a mouse that needed killing or a baseball stuck in the gutter on a roof. Random children who were neither Landon’s nor Delia’s age showed up on the edge of the lawn on the weekends, hoping that John might emerge with a football or Frisbee. John was a man, that was it, a man inhabiting a military base that was suddenly devoid of its most prominent commodity.

The unit coffee nights and FRG meetings were hell for Ellen; she would sit awkwardly, staring into her lap, while all the women around her commiserated with each other’s loneliness, discussed what they ought to send in care packages, or shared the contents of recent letters and e-mails (“Did you hear that they still don’t have flush toilets? They’re pooping in bags of kitty litter” or “My husband said for us to send flea collars to stop the sand fleas from getting into their cots at night. But tell them not to put the collars around their ankles; if the stuff gets into their skin it’ll cause nerve damage”). Someone eventually tried to cheerily change the subject, to ask Ellen how she was feeling, or if John had imparted any secret knowledge that she could share with the group, but anything Ellen said made her more guilty—she was feeling great, actually, look how nice and thick her hair had grown back! or that John was hardly ever home, but how could she complain about that when he was only three minutes away on Battalion Avenue instead of on the other side of the world?

So Ellen stopped going to the events for the spouses. And when Delia started dropping out of things, like soccer, the Art Club, and band, Ellen let her alone. Ellen understood. She imagined Delia was going through the same thing, the sideways glances of the kids at school, the whispers about her father. Delia’s dad, in this world of camouflage and guns and absent but heroic fathers, despite his Ranger tab, Combat Infantry patch, and Bronze Star, was not man enough to go to war, instead doing paperwork in a cushy stateside office while other dads were putting their lives on the line.

Ellen tried John’s cell phone again. This time he picked up.

“It’s me,” she said. “Didn’t you get any of my messages?”

John hesitated, as if he was listening to someone else speak to him in his office. “There’s been an attack,” he finally said. “One dead. Two in the Green Zone ER, one in critical on his way to Germany. It’s already hit the news. My phone’s been ringing off the hook—wives, parents, reporters—everyone wants to know what’s going on.”

“Did they release the names?”

“No. We won’t be able to contact the families until tonight or tomorrow morning. What’s happening at home?”

“Delia took Landon,” she said, holding her breath. “They’re not in school.”

“Thank God.” John sighed into the phone. “I thought the doctor had bad news.”

Ellen swallowed. She had forgotten all about her appointment. “I never saw Dr. Pierce. Didn’t you hear me? Our kids are missing.”

“Calm down,” he said gently, switching to the voice he used when speaking to the wives who called after hearing about a bombing. “It’s just Delia’s latest stunt to get attention.”

Ellen pressed her fingers into her eyes, the light bursts there oddly soothing.

“She loves Landon. They’ll be home soon,” John continued. Then his voice stretched as if he had placed the receiver against his shoulder and started to bark out orders to soldiers in the room.

“John?” Ellen’s voice took on the same whispered shout she used when they fought just out of earshot of the kids. “The MPs came to the house and are driving around looking for our children. I am going to call the local police, too—”

“Ellen, don’t call the cops.” He sounded so tired, and suddenly Ellen couldn’t remember a time when his placating voice wasn’t edged with weariness. “Trust me, the kids are okay.”

She could hear his office phone ringing, someone else needing him, something else urgent and dire that he had to deal with.

“I have to go,” John said. Before Ellen could reply, he hung up.

Ellen tried not to be angry at John for worrying about soldiers, the children of strangers, more than his own as she drove laps around the streets of Fort Hood: Tank Destroyer, Hell-on-Wheels, Old Ironsides, Audie Murphy Drive. She drove for so long that she was overcome with nausea. She had never had motion sickness or been seasick before being struck with cancer, as if the abnormal and conflagrant cells and their subsequent removal had disturbed her center of gravity, pitching all of her fixed references askew so that even the horizon no longer seemed straight. Then again, when her body began to fail her, when her own breasts seemed to be conspiring to kill her, how could anything else in the world ever seem right?

She parked near the helicopter display outside the First Cavalry Museum, Landon’s favorite place, and peered around retired Chinooks and Apaches, praying to see him scaling the monstrous bug-eyed creatures with their admonishing signs of DO NOT TOUCH.

She kept looking for a long blond ponytail and then having to remind herself that Delia was no longer blond. She had come home last month with her long blond hair shorn and dyed black. It still shocked Ellen every time she looked at Delia; it still made her think,
That is not my daughter.
The blond child had never wanted to miss school, even when she was seven and dappled with chicken pox. Now Ellen was searching for someone else, someone sullen and unpredictable. A makeshift roadside explosive device just waiting to go off.

Like that tantrum two weeks before. Ellen was getting dinner ready when Delia came in with a pair of jeans over her arm.

“I told you I wanted to wear these tomorrow,” Delia said, knocking into the table and spilling Landon’s milk. “You said you’d wash them.”

Ellen took a deep breath, pushing a napkin across the pale white spill. “I’m not going to run the washing machine for one pair of jeans. I told you they’d be clean by the weekend.”

Delia stared, mustering a fathomless anger. “If Landon wanted them washed you would have.”

So Ellen laughed; it was preposterous that her
five-year-old,
that
anyone
with a closet full of clothing, would demand a particular pair of jeans.

Delia reached across the table, picked up Ellen’s mug of green tea, and threw it against the wall, the pottery shattering like a gunshot.

“I wish you had died!” she screamed, her blackened eyes livid with tears. And Ellen, feeling hot tea seep into the back of her blouse, stood there with her mouth open, speechless and scalded.

That night she brought Delia into the laundry room and showed her how to use the washing machine and dryer. Delia stood with her arms tight across her chest, her eyes on the ceiling, ignoring the instructions.

“I’m only fourteen,” Delia said. “None of my friends wash their own clothes.”

“Well,” Ellen returned, flashing her best fake smile, “if I do happen to die, and lucky for you there’s still a chance I might, you’ll need to know how to do a lot of things, including the laundry.”