You Know When the Men Are Gone (23 page)

By the time Trish and Ellie returned from school, Nick was firmly ensconced and almost comfortable with his setup. He had shoved some of Ellie’s discarded stuffed animals into an old pillowcase and propped it against the wall as a cushion for his back. He had dug through the boxes he could reach and found a few of his books. Maybe not his favorites, his
How to Eat Soup with a Knife, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,
and
Crime and Punishment
were still in his office upstairs, but here were the books he had liked before he joined the army, his Grisham and Clancy and
Black Hawk Down
.

A couple of Ellie’s fairy tales were here, too, a yard sale version of Hans Christian Andersen and a lesser known collection of Grimm. He picked the Grimm up gingerly, as if he were touching his daughter’s hand. He wondered if she was finally over her obsession, if she was listening to ordinary stories now with happy endings, stories that other children liked, the fluff that made Disney worth millions. He opened it and started reading a story titled “Child in the Grave,” whose first sentence stated:
It was a very sad day, and every heart in the house felt the deepest grief; for the youngest child, a boy of four years old, the joy and hope of his parents, was dead.
He closed the book and shut his eyes.

That was life. The motherless Hansel and Gretel, starving and lost in the forest, arriving at the cannibal witch’s ginger-bread cottage. The little mermaid rescuing her prince from the stormy sea, then giving up her voice and her fin for painful legs only to watch him fall in love with the woman he mistakenly thinks saved him from drowning. The young army corporal, a mere three days from going home to his wife and newborn, gets hit by a sniper. Such vicious twists dealt to the undeserving.

And those were the stories people knew about. The ones that stayed silent could be almost just as bad: the everyday horrors of lonely and quietly disappointed wives, of husbands deployed to the desert for years and years, missing their children’s first steps, spelling bees, scraped knees.

Nick stretched; his neck and back ached from sleeping contorted on the hard cement. It was day three and he was starting to smell; as soon as his girls left for school he would risk a shower. And he desperately needed to dump the latest bottles of urine; even the cat shit above couldn’t mask the acid and meaty stench of his slightly dehydrated, over-proteined piss. Trish hadn’t been grocery shopping so he couldn’t eat much of the dwindled-down fresh food but he could eat a can or two of tuna. She wouldn’t miss a couple of tablespoons of mayo or slices of bread. Nick might even turn on the TV for an hour or two to see what was happening in the world.

So far there had been no sign of this Mark Rodell—maybe Trish had told him the truth, Nick thought, letting himself feel hopeful. Maybe he really was just a pal.

Or maybe he planted the willow in the backyard and then planted something else. Nick took a deep breath and told himself he could live with that. He could forgive. He could handle it as long as Trish’s feelings hadn’t changed toward Nick, as long as she still loved him, and this ... this
aberration
faded with time until it was nothing but a memory overshadowed by anniversaries and vacations and Ellie’s high school graduation. He could do it, he could, if it meant keeping the life they had, the beautiful life of Trish next to him, her hip pressed against his in the night, her hands tracing the bones of his spine, her body pulling him toward her, against and inside her, to a place he knew and longed for, safe with her and home.

But what if, what if, damn it, the
what-ifs
burned his brain and he pushed his filthy hands against his eye sockets. What if it had happened in his bed, on his couch, in the newly redone tub of the master bathroom? Relax, he told himself, relax, don’t kick the wall or kill the cat. Then he thought of the sergeant busting the radio to bits, how good it must have felt, that release and revenge, in crushing that sound into nothing.

That night Nick kept rearranging his pillowcase of Ellie’s animals. It was after midnight and he couldn’t sleep. His body missed his morning five-mile runs, missed the exhaustion of a long day of constant movement and thought, fueled by endorphins, adrenaline, caffeine. There was always another informer waiting with a story, the rumor of small arms crossing borders, or the sighting of a high-value target visiting a second cousin. There was always something for Nick to chase. But now the only thing he could do was wait. He told himself that he needed a couple more days. He just had to get through the weekend and then he would be satisfied. If Trish lived blamelessly through a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, then all was well.

He imagined her asleep above him, her brown hair fanned out across the pillows, her long legs kicking free of the sheets and twitching the way they did when she dreamed. Her bedside table set with the glass of water she filled each night but never drank, her wedding ring and pearl earrings in one of her grandmother’s china teacups, the framed photo of Nick in uniform holding a confiscated AK, smiling as if he owned the whole damn world. He had seen that photo when he went into the bedroom, and what woman would bring a lover to bed if there was a picture of her husband with a gun staring down at them?

He rubbed his hand over his face. Trish had been right. It was so damp down here that Nick felt like his skin was covered in a film of mold. Keeping the window open had actually made a huge difference. He reached out and touched the rough wall to his right. It was slightly concave and uneven, looked like something that had been crafted with a pickax. When they were first stationed at Hood four years ago, Nick had wanted to live on post, wanted Trish to be surrounded by other army wives and families. But she refused. She didn’t like the exposed carports, chain-link fences, or the flat roofs of the houses on Wainwright, and at the time Nick was only a Warrant 1 and didn’t have the rank to get assigned anything nicer. So they started looking off-post in Killeen and Harker Heights, looking at the housing developments that seemed to spring up overnight like mushrooms after a heavy rain.

Trish had chosen this particular house on Cheyenne Trail because of the basement; she said that it reminded her of her childhood and she couldn’t imagine buying a home that didn’t have roots deep underground. Nick had laughed at her, hoping she was kidding. They were in Texas, for goodness’ sake, and basements were unheard of. But the original owner had also been the architect, builder, and contractor of the entire housing development, and he hailed from upstate New York and, East Coaster like Trish, he, too, had decided that he needed a basement. It must have cost him a fortune digging through that unyielding soil of rock and clay. A fortune for a whim. Which was also what Nick thought about the house. Sure, it was fairly spacious, three bedrooms with an office, wood floors, and ceiling fans. But they could have gotten a new house, unlived in, untouched, for less. But he loved Trish like that, loved her enough to do something crazy, loved her enough to buy her one of the only houses in Texas with a basement.

When he made it back from Iraq for good, he was going to rip out this moldering carpet and finally get rid of these damn boxes. Hell, they would redo the whole thing, make it a playroom for Ellie and her friends. Trish would paint huge murals on the walls and Nick would put up new shelving so that Ellie’s toys didn’t have to rest on the floor. Why hadn’t he ever thought of that before? Trish in an old T-shirt with paint on her forehead, re-creating all those fairy tales in their gruesome wonder, and Nick would walk over and hold his bottle of beer to her lips. She would drink deeply, her eyes on his, and Nick would know there was no one else in her life, never was and never would be, and he’d find a way to never leave her alone again.

There were still no visitors by late Friday afternoon, day four of his precious leave, just his wife and daughter. Each day had been almost identical in its simplicity. His wife running every morning, his daughter rising and yelling for that hell cat, off to work and school, and then Nick would creep up the steps like some troll, elf, garden sprite, to steal food, wash his hands and face, peer at the photos of his family together and normal. He would retreat to his cave and his girls would come home, do schoolwork, eat dinner, get Ellie ready for bed, then Trish would watch TV and turn in early.

Tonight he could hear Trish singing softly while she made dinner, the fridge door opening and then sucking closed, the oven timer dinging, and Ellie singing along, not sure of the words but mimicking her mother. Nick fidgeted behind his wall of cardboard, desperate for Sunday to come. He cracked his knuckles gently, finally took out his flashlight, allotting himself an hour of its light to read a bit of the Grimm.

Then a sparkle of white gleamed briefly along the low basement ceiling—a car had pulled up in the driveway. Nick clicked off the flashlight, letting the book fall to the floor with a muted thud, his heart lifting in his chest like it wanted to crawl up and out his dry throat.

The doorbell didn’t sound but Nick heard the unlocked door open and a man’s voice push itself into the rhythms of his wife and child’s song.

Nick fingered his Gerber knife and stood, ready to protect his family. But Trish’s voice called back, comfortable and welcoming, and footsteps creaked toward the kitchen along the floor above.

Nick held on to his knife all through dinner, listening to another man tease his daughter, listening to another man chew and eat his wife’s food, his weight shifting in the chair that Nick ought to be sitting in, opening beer bottles and quenching his thirst with all that Nick loved. He held the knife when Trish took Ellie to bed and he heard the interloper pace, heard him put some dishes away clumsily in the dishwasher, as if wanting Trish to hear him clean up, finally turning on the television set. Nick thought how easy it would be to walk up those steps and slit this stranger’s throat and be out of the house and gone before his wife had finished telling Ellie a bedtime story. But he waited, waited because having a man over for dinner looked bad but it still wasn’t proof.