You Know When the Men Are Gone (14 page)

Except for Cristina. Cristina stood there in her pink tank top while everyone else had tried to put on something red, white, and blue, or maybe a sunny “I’ll be waiting” yellow. Cristina, rigid-backed in her hooker-heels, her perfect head of hair not moving in the wind.

“Look.
Mira!
” she said, and it was as if she lit a match, the flicker of its light illuminating each woman’s face as they turned and followed that knife-tipped nail and watched the supply soldiers trickle into their bus. The wives, pausing in their tears, eyes peering, lips biting, wiping at their faces with the back of their hands, glancing at each other, their grief forgotten and filled with a new wariness.

“Twelve?” Rosie Rosado asked, shaking the baby on her hip.

“Fifteen,” Cristina said, finally dropping her arm to her side with a chime of sliding bracelets.

All the wet eyes watched that final bus, how it revved its engine to keep up. That supply bus held a threat that had never occurred to any of them when they thought of faraway insurgents and bombs and helicopters crashing.

That supply bus with its fifteen women.

Ten and a half months into the deployment was marked with a long and ominous silence, longer than any other.

Not one wife of Bravo Company, not one wife of the entire battalion, received a call or e-mail from her soldier for three days. There had been silences in the past that usually meant there had been an attack. They called it a “comms blackout” when the FOB shut down all communications: phone, Internet, e-mail, even confiscating the local Iraqi cell phones that some of the U.S. soldiers were starting to buy and hide under their cots. Finally, on day four, the rear detachment commander, Captain Roddy, initiated the telephone roster that existed in each company’s FRG, the wives calling each other in a carefully connected DNA strand, repeating an approved script to separate fact from fiction, hushed voices reassuring the wife at the other end that her husband was okay.

Cristina was tasked with calling Kailani. “Alpha Company got hit,” she said calmly. “Sergeant Schaeffer died.”

Kailani blinked. This wasn’t any script she had heard before, this was Cristina being Cristina and unable to soften shock, unable to resist delivering a punch line without euphemism or explanation. Kailani felt a murky terror and relief—she remembered meeting Sergeant Schaeffer at the battalion farewell barbecue, how he had joked about not being able to swim as he hefted his muscled self onto the rickety dunking booth, letting all of his soldiers take aim over and over again, plummeting him into a tank of contaminated-looking water. Cristina’s voice continued, “They got two soldiers at the Baghdad ER with burns, another in Germany in critical condition, but Captain Roddy, he say they all gonna make it.” There was a long pause, Kailani still too frightened to speak.

“You still there, Kailani? You hear me? I said it was Alpha; Bravo is fine. Our guys had to secure the blast site, but they okay. They gonna call home any day now.”

But Manny didn’t call.

By day seven, when there was still no word from Manny, Kailani put her three-year-old daughter down for her nap, her thirteen-month-old son in his pack’n play, and paced the living room, braiding and unbraiding her long hair as she considered her options. Could Cristina have been wrong? Maybe Manny was one of the soldiers in the Baghdad ER, burns on his legs and arms, too hopped up on meds to remember her phone number? She could telephone Cristina, ask if she had heard anything new, if the comms blackout was officially over, or if Cristina had heard from her man yet. But if Cristina
had
spoken with her husband, then she would know that something was up with Manny. Cristina worked at a salon, gossiping and inhaling nail polish fumes, and Kailani didn’t want to be one of her woozy topics.

So Kailani sat down at the computer and, convinced it was the only thing she could do, broke into Manny’s e-mail. It wasn’t hard. He had used the same password for as long as she had known him:
MonsterManE
.

She accessed his account and glanced down the page, seeing her past missives
ARE YOU OK????, Javier took two steps today!!!
and yesterday’s
E-MAIL ME ASAP,
all the while feeling something growing behind her lungs, something that wanted to swallow the air inside of her. Most of the e-mails had not been opened yet, but her husband had definitely been online: a message from one of his high school friends, dated just two days before, was no longer in the New Mail section. At that point she ought to have clicked the mouse on the little
x
in the corner of the screen, ought to have leaned back in relief, certain he was fine. But she felt the thing in her chest expand, and she continued skimming over the messages that Manny had read. There was one from his brother, a forward from another buddy from home, something she hoped was junk mail advertising pictures of Britney Spears’s crotch, and one from a name she didn’t recognize, a [email protected] .mil, titled
So lonely
. “@us.army.mil” was tacked onto every active-duty soldier’s name as an e-mail address. The mouse hovered, the little arrow pointing at
So
. Who was this Michelle Rand and why was she telling Manny she was lonely?

Kailani clicked
Open
:

Kailani pushed her chair away from the desk and stared at the computer screen, at the jeering cursor pointing at
ur body so bad
. She felt a stillness overtake her; she could hear nothing but blood beating in her ears like the surf—no other sound, no breath, no life. She dropped her head on the keyboard and tried to inhale. Then she stood up so fast she felt dizzy, overturning her chair and making Javier squeal with joy at the noise of it hitting the linoleum. Kailani needed to move, to act; if she didn’t do something immediately she would never be able to breathe again.

She leaned over and clicked the mouse on
Reply
, a portal opening up between her shaking fingertips and somewhere dark and wrong so far away. She began to type faster than she could think:

Kailani clicked
Send
and then immediately flipped the switch on her computer, not bothering to shut down the Internet connection, just pressed hard as if it had somehow become an evil thing and she had to kill it. She looked over at her son hitting two rattles against each other over and over again, grinning up at her, glad to have reclaimed her attention. She smiled back, tears blurring her vision until he was a swirl of noisy underwater color in the middle of the room.

That night, after putting Javier and Ana to sleep, Kailani tried to get into her husband’s e-mail again. The password
MonsterManE
was now invalid. So she went to bed in her clothes, not even taking off her sneakers, feeling the underwire of her bra poking her skin.

Her husband was all right. The knowledge no longer offered relief. She shifted under the blankets, her fingers and toes cold, as if her blood had left her extremities in order to fill her heart instead. Manny had been blown up once, during his first deployment, before Kailani had known him. A car loaded with explosives had careened into his checkpoint. He had been lucky, just got scarred by flying shrapnel. Four years ago those scars drew Kailani to him when they met on a beach in Hawaii, those lines in the middle of his handsome face drawing a map down his throat and curving under his right shoulder, an outline of where his Kevlar could not protect him, a path of history and mortality that she longed to follow with her fingers and mouth. She had wanted to make that marked flesh, that foreign land, her own. And now that land belonged to someone else.

Manny called an hour later. Kailani hadn’t been sleeping, just lying in bed staring at the ceiling with tears burning down both sides of her face, still curling and uncurling her toes for warmth.

“Did you hack into my e-mail?” he asked as soon as she picked up.

“Hacked? I used your password.” Her voice was slow and she felt too tired to talk, let alone muster the anger she needed for the situation.

“Thank God it was you,” Manny said, and Kailani blinked, preparing herself for his excuse. There was always an excuse, sweet-talking, honey-tongued Manny. “I thought it was someone from the outside playing with me, you know?” he continued quickly. “I thought I was going to have to report a leak to Operations Security. I thought I was gonna be in big trouble.”

“You don’t think you’re in
big trouble
?” Kailani whispered back, her voice strained, wanting to shout but careful of the kids in the next room. “I’ve been worried sick about you, that you were hurt in that attack. I just wanted to know if you were okay and then I find out—”

“That’s the crazy part.” Manny actually laughed. “You’re not going to believe how crazy this is.”

Kailani said nothing. She looked at her closet. She had taken out a suitcase earlier and opened it up on the floor but hadn’t put anything inside it. She also hadn’t called her mother or her friends. They would tell her what they always told her: to leave him, to return to Hawaii, to get back to where she and her children belonged.

“Kay, listen to me. This is all a mistake. The lady who sent me that e-mail, she got some boyfriend in the army named Manuel Rodriguez, but he ain’t me. She just type in my army address thinking it’s him, get it? I e-mailed her back already a few days ago and told her she had the wrong guy. And then you e-mailed her! Man, she write me right away and was real upset and apologetic. Crazy, huh?”

Still Kailani was silent.

“You know how many Mexicans there are in the army? C’mon, don’t be like this. You know there’s even another Rodriguez in my company! It’s Spanish for Smith.” He tried to chuckle. To chuckle, for goodness’ sake, as if that were the secret to winning her over. Kailani sat up in the bed and looked again at the suitcase, lying there as if its arms were wide enough to embrace her entire life. She would pack, damn it. She would pack and be home by the weekend, waking up to the ocean every morning, falling asleep to it every night. Then Manny’s voice dropped low and Kailani imagined him standing in the front of a long line of impatient soldiers tapping their boots and eyeing their watches, his machismo blushing as he whispered, “Baby, I love you. I would never cheat.”

“I’m going to find out,” Kailani finally said. “I’m going to call the Family Readiness Group leader and ask if there is a Michelle Rand on your FOB. I’ll find out, Manny, you’ll see.”

He took a deep breath and for a moment there was static, and Kailani thought they had been disconnected. Then his voice came back, distorted at first and then normal again. “—do that. But it’s all some twilight zone mistake. I gotta go, the captain’s waiting on me, we’re about to go on patrol to find the fuckers who lit up Alpha. Tell me you love me before I hang up.”