You Know When the Men Are Gone (22 page)

“Maybe she’s in the basement,” Trish replied. Nick quickly scanned the dim room and spotted Anne Lisbeth sitting on her haunches a few feet away, staring at him.

The cat lifted a paw and indifferently licked. Nick made as if he was going to kick it and it shot off, a blur of raccoon gray, bursting up the stairs, and he heard his daughter’s shout of happiness.

When Nick’s mid-tour leave came up at six months, he just didn’t tell Trish. He said he wasn’t coming home; he said a private’s wife was having severe complications in her pregnancy and Nick gave his leave to him.

“There isn’t some single soldier who could make the sacrifice instead?” Trish asked. Then, when Nick didn’t say anything, “Fine, be the good guy. That’s what I’ll tell Ellie. You can’t see your daddy because he’s being the hero again.” She didn’t sound angry or even that upset, just giving him shit because lately she always gave him shit about something.

“Anything you want to tell me?” he asked calmly. “Anything at all?” He wasn’t sure what he was getting at, if he was asking for a confession or a fight.

There was a long silence, as if Trish wasn’t sure what he was getting at either, and then the predictable talk of Ellie: A’s in the first grade, her most recent piano recital and the birthday party he had missed, all the milestones and transformations that had passed Nick by.

“She misses you,” Trish said softly, as if she didn’t want their daughter to hear. Nick imagined Ellie paging through her
Grimm’s
in the living room, arching a thin eyebrow when her mother’s voice dropped low, knowing the way all children do when their parents are talking about them. Nick waited for Trish to say that she missed him, too, but she hadn’t said that in months.

Trish continued, “Last night, during prayers, she asked God to blow up the bad guys before they could blow you up.”

Nick tried to laugh but instead closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the hot metal of the pay phone and felt like all the gravity of the world was pulling on his rib cage.

“Kiss her for me,” he whispered, and two hours later he was boarding a plane for home.

Nick, being Nick, had every step planned out. When he was sure, absolutely sure, that his wife wasn’t cheating on him, he would leave the basement. He would wait until Ellie and Trish went to bed. Then he would jog the four miles to the Travelodge just off Indian Trail and get a room. He would take a really long shower, shave, brush his teeth, make sure there wasn’t any dirt under his nails, eat a hot meal, get a few hours of sleep in a bed. First thing in the morning he would change into the uniform that was carefully folded in his assault pack. Then he’d call Trish, catch her before her run, and tell her he was on his way, that he had gotten leave after all at the last minute and had to jump on a plane, that he hadn’t had a chance to contact her when they stopped over in Kuwait, but he was here at the Killeen Airport, he was home, he was about to get into a cab and he couldn’t wait to see her and Ellie. He would say that he loved them, he was sorry, he was everything and anything he ought to be. Then he’d hang up, tell the cab-driver to stop at a florist, and Nick would buy a huge bouquet and whatever stuffed animals he could get his hands on.

However, he did not know what he would do if he found out that Trish was indeed cheating on him.

The scrape of the car keys, the corralling of Ellie out the door, time for first grade, time for Trish to go to work at that Montessori School in the ritzy neighboring town of Salado, finger painting to Mozart, prints of freaky Frida Kahlo with monkeys in her hair gazing down at the kids. Nick started to go up the stairs and then hesitated, sat down on the dim bottom step and waited. Then the front door opened again and he heard the click of Trish’s shoes moving quickly from the hallway to the kitchen. Ellie must have decided she needed something—a juice box or an apple or maybe her favorite Maggie doll. Something forgotten, always something, and then Trish was gone. The old Volvo pulled out of the driveway and Nick tiptoed into the civilian world.

The first thing he did was walk into the kitchen and look out at the backyard.

Sure enough, there was a willow tree sitting right smack in the middle of the lawn. A frail, spindly spider sort of thing. But big enough that it wouldn’t have fit in Trish’s car. Nick took a deep breath. So at least part of Trish’s story was true. That was a good liar’s smoothest trick, to plant bits of reality into the subterfuge. It was the untold that Nick watched for. The slipup. The contradiction. The nervous hands touching a cheek, an ear, the smile or frown that seemed forced, the desire to change the subject. Such obvious signs.

The cat stepped in front of Nick, weaving between his legs as if deliberately trying to trip him.

“Shoo!” Nick stamped his foot and the cat hissed and ran.

He opened the fridge and stared at the shelves of plenty: a gallon of organic milk, a block of sharp cheddar cheese, fresh squeezed orange juice, and weirdly hourglass-shaped bottles of pomegranate juice. Nick hadn’t seen such vividly colorful food for more than six months. He poured himself a cup of orange juice, careful not to take enough to be noticed. He did the same with the milk and savored it, full fat and fresh. Then a handful of blueberries, cherries, grapes. The garbage bag was new and empty so he put the cherry pits in his pocket. He shaved a few slices off the cheese with his Gerber knife and let it melt in his mouth.

Then he noticed the two bottles of white wine, both opened. His wife always drank red. Did that count as proof or had his wife just started drinking something new? Maybe she had a girlfriend over one night who had brought the wine, maybe they watched movies, painted their nails, told themselves how good their hair looked, or did whatever women did when their men were away.

He carefully washed and dried his glass, made sure everything was put back perfectly in the fridge, and left the kitchen.

He went directly to the master bedroom and stood in the doorway. He had picked out this furniture set of dark mahogany, choosing it because the headboard had a pillow of leather pegged into the wood with medieval-looking brass nails. Trish said it looked like the Inquisition but that was what Nick liked—the bed seemed like it was made for history, that it would be fixed in their lives forever.

The room was immaculate. No strange baseball caps or sneakers, no boxers or tightie-whities in the laundry basket, no new lingerie in Trish’s top drawer. His relief hit him hard enough that he had to sit down on the mattress. It felt like it always did, the bed, the room, the house; it felt like it was
his.

On his way back to the basement, he walked through the living room and, like the bedroom, it was the same, the family photos spaced nicely around the flat-screen TV, an abstract oil painting over the fireplace, a few charcoal sketches perfectly accenting the black leather sofa. He ran his hands along the cushions as if he could channel who had sat on the leather from its soft touch. They had fought over it. Trish had whined and whined, wanted an ugly stuffed corduroy couch with clawed feet like an old bathtub, but Nick had won. Now the leather leered at him, so soft, so sexy. He had wanted it because he imagined making love to Trish on the supple length and then somehow they never had, she was a bedroom-only kind of girl, but now he wondered if, like the white wine, she had developed new tastes.

There was a day at the forward operating base, a day like any other, the guys coming in from their latest mission empty-handed, unsure if not finding a cache of guns at the local imam’s house was a good or bad thing. They were exhausted, hungry, the Humvee’s AC busted again, and they knew they had missed DFAC’s one hot meal of the day. They exited the Humvee, snapped off their forty pounds of Kevlar, took off their dusty Oakley sunglasses, and wiped the sweat from their eyes.

A private was sitting on a folding chair cleaning his rifle and drinking Wild Tiger, an Iraqi energy drink reputed to be laced with nicotine, the radio at his feet blasting Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With.” He was singing along, intent on the greasy insides of his gun.

Nick stood listening and thought of Trish’s hips sashaying to the refrain,
When you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.
She grooved on all those long-haired seventies sounds, Bee Gees, Rod Stewart, Eagles, whipping out her old high school cassette tapes when feeling frisky.

Then Nick heard a hissed “Motherfucker.” He glanced up in time to see Staff Sergeant Torres, one of the most laid-back guys he knew, walk straight over to the private and stomp the radio to smithereens.

The private leaned back in his chair to get away from flying bits of plastic. Nick and two other soldiers moved in close, ready to pull the men apart if Staff Sergeant Torres planned on smashing the private’s face as well.

Instead Torres looked down at the shards under his boots. “I’ll pay for that,” he said, then turned and walked back to his tent.

None of the men looked at each other, as if refusing to acknowledge what they had witnessed. They knew there was only one thing that would make a guy snap like that, make him want to crush those words out of existence, and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with life in Iraq.