You Know When the Men Are Gone (20 page)

They had to carry him into the motel room. Helena opened the door, her eyes swollen with sleep or tears, wearing one of his army gray T-shirts over a pair of sweatpants.

They put him on his bed.

“You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” Dupont asked for Helena’s benefit, and Kit shook his head. “Call us tomorrow, okay?”

Then they left, heads bowed, and Helena closed the door behind them.

“You smell like you’ll have a headache tomorrow,” she said, going to the kitchenette sink and pouring him a plastic cup of water.

Kit drank, and when she filled the cup again, he drank that, too.

“I was worried about you,” she said.

Kit crushed the cup and tossed it at the wastebasket, missing. “Well, soon enough you won’t need to worry, right?”

“I guess not.” She turned off the light and he heard the springs of her bed creak. “Is your foot okay?”

“No.” He wanted to say that it was never going to be okay, that he couldn’t screw it up any more tonight than it already was. His eyes started to get used to the darkness and he could make out her outline by the alarm clock’s light, how she sat at the edge of her bed.

Kit tried to arrange the pillows behind his head. He would have to wait until Helena fell asleep and then he could put on the TV. He knew, with the pain, he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.

“Let me do that,” Helena whispered, and stood. He lifted himself up and she arranged the pillows under his shoulders, the army T-shirt brushing Kit’s face, and he could smell her skin, the warm, new-kitten smell of it, her apricot shampoo and the vanilla drugstore perfume she liked to put on her wrists. He put his hand out, he couldn’t help it, and touched the ends of her hair. She hesitated, hovering over him, and then he felt the bed shift and suddenly she was next to him, breathing on his throat in the dark.

“Is this my consolation prize?” Kit asked, feeling an electric surge of cruelty rush through him so strong his hands began to tingle. “You want to make yourself feel better by giving the cripple one last lay before you leave him?”

“You’re not a cripple,” she whispered, and put her lips on his.

Afterward, she rested her cheek against Kit’s chest and he watched the small rise and fall of her head in time with his breath. He could hear a thick saturation in her throat that meant she was trying not to cry, and he tried to think of something to say, something that would stitch her to him forever.

“You haven’t asked about the baby,” she whispered.

He blinked. “I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”

She didn’t reply for so long he was sure she had fallen asleep. “I never told you about the sonogram.” She lifted her head and Kit could see her profile, her nose and her tough little chin. “I heard his heart, Kit, his wildly beating heart. So strong. I could see it on the screen, too, like a fist opening and closing. Three days later he was dead.”

Kit played with her hair, running his fingers through its length, wondering what she was accusing him of. “I called as soon as I got the Red Cross message—”

“I know you did,” she said, and Kit felt a drip of hot water on his bare skin. “I just can’t get it out of my mind.” She hesitated. “The sound of that heartbeat. I wish you had been there.”

“Me too.” Then, in the dark, he almost told her about Sergeant Schaeffer, how his body had pinned Kit down, his arms outstretched over him like some Old Testament angel. How he could smell Schaeffer burning and he thought it was his own flesh. How Kit had cried in that Humvee, hearing his friends screaming in the smoke, every intake of breath frying his throat and lungs, tongue and teeth. He had tried to pray but he couldn’t, just cried like a child, helpless, until Dupont got him out.

But he couldn’t tell her. And he couldn’t tell her about his foot either—how he knew he was going to lose it, how he would become one of those guys people glance at with a jolt of pity, trying not to stare. He knew that when they fixed him up with a metal limb he would be out of the infantry, and he needed Helena to know that without her, without the army, he would have nothing.

Instead of speaking, Kit kissed the top of her head and played with her hair until she fell asleep against him. Exhausted, body aching, still half-drunk, Kit fell asleep, too.

He woke up when she opened the dusty motel blinds and let the sun into the room. When the light exploded across his retinas, he thought he was back in his tent in Baghdad, unhurt and whole, but when he put his hand over his eyes he felt every muscle of his body throb from a combination of being thrown by a bull and thrown by tequila, and he realized where he was.

Helena turned toward him, dressed in dark jeans and a tank top, her hands on her hips. “I should have made you drink more water.”

Kit glanced around the room and saw her suitcase packed and ready on her unmade bed. He saw his crutches leaning against the far wall.

“Should I leave the rental car?” Helena continued quickly, checking under her bed. “I could take a cab. But the rental place is at the airport so it’s really best if I drop it off now. Maybe one of your friends can drive you to the storage unit for your truck?”

Kit tried to sit and agony blossomed up his left foot. “You’re not still leaving—”

“I got you a bagel and some Gatorade; that should help with the hangover.”

“Helena, sit down. Talk to me.” He had meant to tell her about the lists he used to make, how each one of them made him realize how much he needed her, and how could he go back to a life without her now that he had categorized everything that made life with her so good?

She reached for her suitcase. “I really have to go. Call my mom’s house when you get your cell phone activated.” She took a step toward the door. “The room is paid until tomorrow; I didn’t know when you’d want to check out.”

Kit leaned over the bedside table and used it to help him stand up, sucking in his breath. “Wait.”

But the door was open and Helena stood in the shaft of bright light, looking at him over her shoulder, her hair lit up like flame, her hand still on the knob.

“We’ll talk soon,” she said, the click of cracked glass shimmering through her voice. “I promise.”

Kit made a move toward the door, throwing himself at it, hoping something would catch him before he hit the ground, a bureau, a chair, anything that would get him out that door, anything that would get him near Helena so he could touch her again, kiss that freckle under her eye and put his arms around her and he would not let her go. But the door shut behind her and there was nothing for Kit to hold on to, nothing to break his fall, and as his knees buckled beneath him he knew with certainty that Helena, that everything, was gone.

LEAVE

T
hree A.M. and breaking into the house on Cheyenne Trail was even easier than Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash thought it would be. There were no sounds from above, no lights throwing shadows, no floorboards whining, no water running or the snicker of late-night TV laugh tracks. The basement window, his point of entry, was open. The screws were rusted, but Nick had come prepared with his Gerber knife and WD-40; got the screws and the window out in five minutes flat. He stretched onto his stomach in the dew-wet grass and inched his legs through the opening, then pushed his torso backward until his toes grazed the cardboard boxes in the basement below, full of old shoes and college textbooks, which held his weight.

He had planned this mission the way the army would expect him to, the way only a soldier or a hunter or a neurotic could, considering every detail that ordinary people didn’t even think about. He mapped out the route, calculating the minutes it would take for each task, considering the placement of streetlamps, the kind of vegetation in front, and how to avoid walking past houses with dogs. He figured out whether the moon would be new or full and what time the sprinkler system went off. He staged this as carefully as any other surveillance mission he had created and briefed to soldiers before.

Except this time the target was his own home.

He should have been relieved that he was inside, unseen, that all was going according to plan. But as he screwed the window back into place, he could feel his lungs clench with rage instead of adrenaline.

How many times had he warned his wife to lock the window? It didn’t matter how often he told her about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who had gained access to his victims through open basement windows. Trish argued that the open window helped air out the basement. A theory that would have been sound if she actually closed the window every once in a while. Instead she left it open until a rare and thundering storm would remind her, then she’d jump up from the couch, run down the steps, and slam it shut after it had let in more water than a month of searing-weather-open-window-days could possibly dry.

Before he left for Iraq, Nick had wanted to install an alarm system but his wife said no.

“Christ, Trish,” he had replied. “You can leave the windows and all the doors open while I am home to protect you. But what about when I’m gone?”

She glanced up at him from chopping tomatoes, narrowed her eyes in a way he hadn’t seen before, and said flatly, “We’ve already survived two deployments. I think we can take care of ourselves.”

Take care of this,
Nick thought now, twisting the screw so violently that the knife slipped and almost split open his palm, the scrape of metal on metal squealing like an assaulted chalkboard. He hesitated, waiting for the neighbor’s dog to start barking or a porch light to go on. Again nothing. Nick could be any lunatic loose in the night, close to his unprotected daughter in her room with the safari animals on her wall, close to his wife in their marital bed.

Trish should have listened to him.

This particular reconnaissance mission had started with a seemingly harmless e-mail. Six months ago, Nick had been deployed to an outlying suburb of Baghdad, in what his battalion commander jovially referred to as “a shitty little base in a shitty little town in a shitty little country.” One of his buddies back in Killeen had offered to check on Trish every month or so, to make sure she didn’t need anything hammered or lifted or drilled while Nick was away.