You Know When the Men Are Gone (16 page)

There had only been one time, in all the years they’d been together, that Kailani asked Manny about his scars. They were sitting on a towel at Waiamea Bay, drinking bottles of warm Longboard Lager, watching the sunset and a few surfers out on the water. Kailani could tell they were a bunch of newbies by the way they were paddling frantically and kept missing the waves.

Manny put his arm around her, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder, peering at the line in his throat. “Did a car bomber do that to you?” she asked, so close she could see the little pink pinpricks where the thread had stitched the skin back together again.

“That’s what you civilians say.” He glanced at her. “The army officially calls them ‘suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.’”

He rubbed at the scar with his palm, almost hitting her with his elbow, but she couldn’t help herself. “Did you see it coming?”

Manny shrugged. “This was early in the war. We didn’t have all the barriers and shit we have now. We didn’t think the sonabitches would blow themselves up.” He stood up and shook sand from his shorts. “I was in front of our checkpoint waving down traffic, and this car sped right by me. I could see the driver. I could have shot him if I had a clue. Shit, I could have reached out and punched him in the face, he was so close.”

Manny kept his eyes on the black figures paddling out. He certainly wasn’t a local, but he was athletic enough not to make an ass of himself when he was in the water. Like Kailani, he knew that only an expert or an idiot would surf Waiamea at this moment, the tide high and deadly. She stood up next to him. It didn’t take long for two of the surfers to get trapped inside the break, the waves roiling full force on top of them, and as they tried to swim forward they kept getting shoved under again by the next wave. It had happened to Kailani often enough, each wave crashing on top of her just when she thought she’d made it out and could take a deep breath. Instead she would get all turned around, not knowing which way was up, and swim down toward the sand, choking, or come up just to get pummeled again. She knew she had to keep her cool, keep trying to paddle until she made it to the other side, surfacing in the undulating waters just beyond the point where the waves were set loose and wild upon the shore.

Manny started pacing, looking as if he was about to wade in and drag the surfers to the beach, when they finally paddled through and emerged on the smoother side, bobbing on their boards, high-fiving and coughing up sea salt.

When Manny and Kailani got to his car, the parking lot dark and quiet except for the slapping noise of a surfer peeling his wet suit from his skin, Manny continued as if their conversation had never been interrupted. “Afterwards there was blood everywhere. You couldn’t tell the bits that were American from the bits that were the bomber. Everything was all mixed up.”

Manny tried to smile as if he had told her some sort of joke, and, awkwardly, Kailani smiled, too. She reached out and put her hand on the place where his neck and shoulder met, trying to feel the damaged, puckered skin under his T-shirt. He’d been promoted to sergeant and was getting transferred to Fort Hood soon, and she had assumed their relationship would end when he left. But, standing in that parking lot, talking about death, knowing he had been close to it and survived, she wanted to marry this man. She wanted to give up her islands for him and his scars.

The Manny who walked into the auditorium, his uniform stiff with dried sweat, his cheekbones gaunt, hunched beneath his camouflage assault pack, was a different man from the tan and wide-shouldered soldier who had swaggered into his blue bus just twelve months ago. But Kailani spotted him immediately; she knew her husband’s walk; she knew the brown eyes that he turned on the cheering crowd, squinting, until he found her holding Javier up in the air, Ana at her side jumping up and down and waving a teddy bear dressed in camouflage. He had to stand at attention in formation with everyone else until the pounding music stopped and then the battalion commander, Colonel McCormick, limped across the room and said a few words about bravery and blood and keeping America free; but Kailani was too busy holding on to her children to listen to his words.

The colonel released the soldiers and the formation broke down into a swarm of uniforms and searching men, women bursting through the ranks to jump into the arms of their husbands, mothers touching their grown sons’ smooth faces, vets and fathers walking around shaking hands, children screaming and laughing and veering wildly into the legs of daddies who were strangers.

Kailani waded through the bodies, shushing Javier, who, frightened by the mayhem, cried into her hair. Then Manny was there, smiling so wide that, in his suddenly thin face, it seemed as if he had too many teeth, and Ana pulled Kailani’s skirt over her face and Javier started screaming louder. Kailani had meant to stay aloof, had meant to stay out of Manny’s arms until she was sure they had never been around anyone else, but instead she collapsed against her husband, pressing her face to his uniformed chest. She knew she was smelling the sand of the desert, but it felt as if she was breathing in the air of a sun-baked beach.

Kailani kept putting off the conversation about michelle [email protected]. Of course she didn’t want to ruin Manny’s return, his reunion with his children. The next day, after he had slept for thirteen hours straight, woken up famished, gratefully eaten her fried eggs over Spam and white rice, kissing whatever part of her came near the kitchen table—her hip, her shoulder, her wrist—well, she couldn’t bring it up then, either, while he was so happy and the kids were starting to get used to him. Ana had finally whispered, looking between the framed photograph that she had been carrying around for the past few weeks and Manny’s ashen face, “Daddy?”

He checked in at work on the third day. He had to attend a week of army counseling, then classes about reestablishing himself in a family and handling the civilian world. Kailani found the pamphlets from the most recent brief and read through them while Javier and Ana napped. They had titles like “Road-map to Reintegration,” “What to Expect When Deployed Soldiers Return,” and “Communicating with Your Spouse,” and were filled with lots of glossy photos of families reunited.

She scanned the bold print of “Things a Soldier Should Remember”:

There was a section on the back that made her blush with relief when she read it, glad to know why her wolfish husband had not yet molested her
: Psychologists recommend that you do not engage in intercourse with your wife immediately upon return. Wait a few days until she shows signs of responding to you. BE PATIENT!!!

Manny came home from work that night with a six-pack of beer, and they drank a few with dinner, making eyes at each other while Ana ate her dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and Javier chased his peas around with chubby fingers. Manny helped with Javier’s bath, squirting his wife with the rubber ducky, then whistling when she knelt down at the side of the tub.

As soon as the children were in their beds, Manny turned off all the lights in the apartment and Kailani was touched to see that he had lit candles in the bedroom (
be charming!
). When he kissed her, his lips were shier than they had ever been, and for a moment she was disoriented, as if feeling a stranger’s mouth. Then Manny’s hands slid down the sides of her waist as if he owned her, and she let him lead her to their bed, let him lay her down, let him back into her life completely.

Kailani was woken by Manny moving next to her. She blinked in the dark, thinking her husband was ready for more. But when she rolled over and looked at him, she saw him flailing, his hands searching through the sheets tangled around him.

“Manny, wake up,” she said gently. She wasn’t sure if she should touch him, if she should startle him awake, and she backed away, afraid that his elbow, his knee, his fist, would land on her as he wrestled with the blankets.

He opened his eyes. His arms hovered in the air for a moment, then dropped to his sides. “Shit. I thought I was in my tent. I didn’t know what was wrapped around my legs.” His voice was hoarse. “I was freakin’ out ’cause I couldn’t find my rifle.”

Kailani watched her husband’s profile, the thin glitter of sweat on his forehead, his chapped lips. She edged closer. “Do you want me to get you some water, some milk?”

He shook his head. Then he turned toward her, his eyes shining in the red light of the alarm clock. For a moment she thought he didn’t recognize her, that he was expecting a different woman to be next to him. Kailani sat up and pulled the sheet against her breasts, helplessness burning the back of her eyes. Now was the time to ask her husband for the truth, to watch his face and see if she could detect his lies.

But he looked away. “I’ve been having nightmares for a while.”

Kailani watched his Adam’s apple move slowly in his throat, up and down, as if he were trying to swallow the dreams. She didn’t know what to say; she wished she had paid closer attention to the pamphlets. She had seen nightmares listed as a symptom but couldn’t remember if it indicated something serious.

“I dream about body parts,” he continued abruptly, as if the words, the dreams, had escaped his throat and once they were loose in the night he couldn’t stop them. “Christ. You can’t believe how many times we had to clean up corpses or just parts of them, Kay. You just wouldn’t believe it. Those fuckers left bodies all over the place, bodies of their own people, all bloated and tortured and tied up and shit. Once we found just a hand, a little hand from either a woman or a kid, on the side of the road. Still had on a tarnished pinkie ring.” Then he took a deep breath and rolled away from her.