You Know When the Men Are Gone (18 page)

Helena had been pregnant when he deployed. A lot of wives had been, as if the soldiers started trying to procreate when they got their orders for Baghdad, tried to imprint themselves in a desperate scramble for immortality before ending up in the unknown. She claimed that she was showing when he left but her belly looked just as sweet to him as it always had, a little round, maybe, but he liked that, liked that her body was so soft compared to his. She lost the baby at the beginning of the second trimester, and by the time Kit got back for mid-tour leave, she seemed unfazed by the miscarriage and wouldn’t give him any details. She made sure to take her birth control pills for the fourteen days that he was there, and she told him that she wanted to move home with her folks, to take classes at the community college, be near her high school friends and wait tables at the restaurant where she used to work, Grits to Gravy. Kit hadn’t objected. He had even helped put all their stuff in storage. He liked the idea of her with her momma. But now he wondered if she had met someone else, a waiter from Grits, a manager at the local Kmart, even her smarmy high school volleyball coach, who always hugged her too long, someone who had stayed while Kit was gone.

When the pizza was finished and the beer bottles emptied, Helena went into the bathroom and came out in a baggy sweatshirt and sweatpants, her face shiny-clean and her breath minty, gave him a chaste kiss on his cheek, climbed into her own bed, and clicked off her bedside light.

“Sweet dreams,” she said lightly, and Kit said absolutely nothing in return.

He woke a few hours later, his foot throbbing with heat. He imagined the skin swelling around the stitches and narrow steel rods, blood and pus seeping out, sand still flecked around the edges of the wound, as if Iraq would not let him go. He wondered if he’d be able to find his bottle of Vicodin in his duffel, then remembered how the doctor said it was his last refill, from now on he’d have to make due with Tylenol, and he figured he’d better save it.

He glanced over at Helena. She was making that cooing sound she made when she was in a really deep sleep, her hair hanging off the pillow and catching the green light of the alarm clock. Two A.M.

When he was deployed, in his cot at night, in a tent with eleven other guys farting and snoring and jacking off around him, he would make lists in his head to help lull himself to sleep. At first it was the same lists other guys made and swapped while on guard duty or during a long patrol, all those empty, hot desert hours to fill, like listing the five best Steven Segal movies, or remembering the winners and losers of as many World Series as possible, or all the different sexual positions tried with different women. But the longer Kit was in Iraq, the more specific his lists became. Like
All the Things at Home I Never Thanked My Wife For,
which was his longest. The current absence of all the things on this list perfectly illuminated how much life sucked in Baghdad. Besides the obvious, like how Helena cooked him a hot meal every night rather than served him food from a bag that had waited in a warehouse for a year, then rode on a boat for a few months, then sat on a truck for a few weeks, then was picked over by a disgruntled staff sergeant who took all the decent meals and handed lowly Kit
Chicken, Chunked and Formed, with Grill Marks,
or
Beef Frankfurters
(more commonly referred to as
Five Fingers of Death
).

The things Kit listed in his head, such wonders of Helena’s female ingenuity, were: how there was always toilet paper on the roll and a backup within reach, unlike being caught in the shitter at midnight only to realize that the roll of scratchy Chinese toilet paper at his feet had been sitting in a puddle of urine; the mirrors in the bathroom were never covered with catapulted floss gunk or tagged with wannabe army Latino gang slang; there was always something cold to drink (and not just that small swishable amount that guys left behind in the fridge because they were too lazy to throw the carton out); the sheets were fresh instead of oily with old sweat and crinkly with new sand; the towels were dry rather than rolled up and damply soaking his pillow; his socks were matched and paired like little heads of lettuce in his drawer rather than shoved, stiff with days of use, under his cot; there were clean clothes to choose from instead of a pile to sniff through, and those clean clothes smelled like American soap detergent instead of the cheap, astringent cologne that the local national cleaners doused the soldiers’ clothes with when they were contracted to do the laundry.

That list could go on for hours, and often did. Of the twelve soldiers crammed into a tent that could comfortably sleep eight (though most of the other tents were jammed with eighteen, all asses and elbows, so no one in Kit’s tent was complaining), there was always someone coming and going to guard duty or to take a piss or cursing under his breath in his headlamp as he read letters from home. The sun in Iraq rose at 3:30 A.M. The spiteful light would burst into the tent every time the door opened like a nuclear camera flash that singed the retinas of all the soldiers tossing in their cots. Kit would pull his sheet over his head and think of his list with such fervent desire that the semi-unconscious state of longing was almost as good as being asleep.

And now here she was, everything Kit wanted, the only person who could figure out how to make something good of his situation, and she was there in another bed, as far away as she had been before he stepped onto the plane. Kit tried to sit, feeling around on the bedside table for the TV remote. He either wanted to throw it at Helena’s head, as hard as only a Lincoln High MVP pitcher could, or click on the TV. The impulse to remain a functioning part of society won. He turned the volume up, glancing at her every few minutes, wanting her to roll over and blink those eyes, wanting her to smile at him and ask him what was wrong so he could talk to her, so she could tell him that things between them were okay. But she slept on and Kit watched cheetahs hunting on PBS, the twist and somersault as they brought an antelope down and then tore it into bloody bits.

He tapped the remote against his cast, pretending he had an itch, but that didn’t wake her either. Kit fell asleep as dawn started to filter through the gaps under the motel curtains. The light of the television flashed over both of them in their separate beds, unheeded like a lightning storm.

They went to a Waffle House for breakfast and Helena drove the rental car, Kit sullen and yawning in the passenger seat.

“We can get your truck out of storage today,” she said brightly. He shrugged. He didn’t think he’d be able to manipulate his boot enough to drive a stick shift, but he didn’t want to say the words aloud.

Inside, he ordered too much food, then watched his wife as she added creamer and sugar to her coffee and would not meet his eyes.

My wife,
he thought, and outrage struck his chest as forcefully as a wild baseball. “Who is it?” he let loose, angry at himself for being angry instead of trying to win her back.

She glanced up. “Who what?”

“There’s someone else, right?”

She moved her hand to touch his wrist but he quickly lifted his own coffee cup to get out of reach, the black liquid scalding the inside of his mouth.

“There’s no one,” she whispered.

Kit looked down at his place mat. “Three weeks ago you were telling me that you would find an apartment, that you’d try to transfer your credits to a school in Texas, that you missed me—” He stopped, afraid his voice would crack.

“Look at me,” she said, and this time she managed to put her hand on his. Kit lifted his face and took her in. She looked exactly the way she had when she graduated from Lincoln High two years ago, sturdy and confident the way a girl who got straight A’s and played varsity volleyball since freshman year ought to look. She had always been plain, pale-skinned, with a few freckles on her cheeks, blue eyes so clear you could only see pupils, and a slight underbite that made her chin look stubborn and ready for a fight. Guys looked at her because of her long red hair and then they usually looked away. But when she smiled, her jaw clicked back into its rightful place and anyone who saw her smiling usually kept looking and had no choice but to smile back; she seemed so aware of the people she was with, she seemed to watch them like she could take their pulse with her silvery eyes.

“I love you,” she said just as the waitress put down their sunny-side-up eggs and his side of sausage, bacon, and pancakes. When the waitress left Helena leaned forward again. “I love you but I don’t think I can do this anymore. I want to be home. I like my college classes and I need to be near my family.”

“I’ll get out,” he said, and it was the first time since he’d seen those two separate motel beds that he felt hope. “I’ll work at the lumberyard; my stepbrother’s always telling me he’ll give me a job. I’ve got only six months left of my commitment. You can wait that long, can’t you? You can stay at home, I don’t care. I’ll get out.”

Helena pushed her fork across her plate, piercing a yoke and watching it bleed across her hash browns. “You can’t get out until your foot is better,” she said softly. “I’ve looked it up. You’d get awarded partial disability, about twenty-five percent of your salary, and what’s that? Six grand? What could you do at the lumberyard with your foot like that? And we’re more than three hours from the closest VA hospital—how would you go back and forth for physical training?”

Kit sat back in the booth. He had forgotten about his foot. “Then I’ll stay in. But I won’t deploy again.” His voice picked up speed. “The army will have to give me some cushy office job. I’ll only be working from eight A.M. to five P.M.; it will be like a regular civilian job. I’ll be home for dinner every night. You can handle that.”

“I’m happy now.” Helena shook her head. “I don’t want to come back here.”

“Happy without me?” Kit wanted to throw up on all the food in front of him, the eggs getting cold and hard with a film of gray grease on top.

She took an envelope from her purse and a breath to steady herself. “I talked to a lawyer.” Kit looked over his shoulder to see if he recognized any guys in the booths behind him. “These are the papers for a legal separation. If we separate and don’t divorce, you’ll still get your housing allowance and extra marriage pay, but you can move into the barracks and save up. I’m making enough money of my own so you don’t need to worry about me.”

“You don’t want to do this.”

“I do,” she whispered, as if deliberately echoing the words that had once tied them together. “Yes, I do.”

The waitress boxed up all the food they couldn’t eat even though Kit had told her not to, and he held the foam awkwardly balanced on his lap during the drive back to the motel.

Three months into the deployment, his buddy Blake had opened up a package from home and found divorce papers underneath a bag of melted M&M’s. Blake almost choked on his lip of dip, then went on a tirade so long, obscene, and flecked with tobacco spittle that their platoon sergeant, Sergeant Schaeffer, told him to shut up or go talk to the chaplain. But Helena hadn’t chosen the easy way out like that, hadn’t told him this news in a letter or over the phone; she had flown out to Hood, been waiting, was sitting next to him still. Hell, the thing that always set Helena apart, from the cheerleaders or ponytailed softball players eager to sit with Kit in the back of the bus, was her kindness. How she volunteered at the animal shelter, spent her Thanksgivings at soup kitchens, waited at the curb at dawn to give Pepsis to the garbagemen. Would someone who voluntarily hosed dog feces out of kennels really leave her busted-up and Purple Hearted soldier husband just days after he returned?