You Know When the Men Are Gone (25 page)

“Jesus, Carla.” Ted stared incredulously. “All we need now is a ticket. The battalion commander will love that.”

She put the phone in her lap, rolled down her window, and smiled innocently at the civilian guard who scanned their military IDs and the microchipped Fort Hood sticker on their car; he either didn’t notice Carla’s open cell phone or didn’t care. However, the guard did look Ted and his tattered clothes over a couple of times before waving them through.

“Yes, hello?” Carla said into her phone, ignoring Ted, who crossed his thick arms over his chest so violently she was sure he must be hurting his bruised self.

“Hi, ma’am? You don’t know me; I’m Leslie Gray. My husband is in, uh, your husband’s company?”

“Leslie Gray?” Carla looked at Ted. He shook his head, then ran a dirty finger under his throat, telling Carla either to hang up the phone or that he was going to kill her, she couldn’t be sure.

“This really isn’t a good time—” Carla began. A military police car passed her on the left and Carla quickly put the phone to her right ear, hoping he hadn’t seen her.

“Oh please!” the caller nearly shrieked into the phone. “Everyone keeps trying to get off the phone! I called the first sergeant, the platoon sergeant, even that nice born-again chaplain, and everyone said they can’t do nothing!”

Carla’s back stiffened with dread. The caller’s voice was hoarse and blurry with tears, so frenzied that Carla missed her turn down Battalion Avenue. “Okay,” she said into the phone. “But I only have a minute.”

“Are you kidding me?” Ted shouted. “Then pull over and let me drive.”

Carla pressed the phone against her chest and hissed at him, “What if one of your soldiers sees you on the side of the road? You look like a psychotic hobo.” She put the phone back against her ear in time to catch a story, midstream, about Captain Morgan rum mixed with orange soda, an argument about whether Christina Aguilera was “hot,” and then neighbors calling the military police. “I hit my husband first,” Leslie wept in a voice that sounded Deep South and seventeen. “I pushed, bit, and punched at him until he finally hit me back. But I started it and I ain’t pressing charges. And they’re still making him live in the barracks instead of with me.”

“That’s unfortunate.” Carla kept her voice as coolly professional as possible.

“Jimmy can’t even visit me!” The voice at the other end of the phone was out of breath. “I waited a whole year for him—now he’s only five miles away and he might as well be back in Iraq.” Carla was struck with a sudden image of the girl: thin-hipped, mascara-stained, pacing a small apartment with dirty rugs and Plexiglas windows. Carla shook her head, trying to free herself of this vision of a life ragged with a different kind of war-torn.

Leslie exhaled and continued, “Everyone said that Captain Wolenski’s real strict and he’s the one who decided the punishment.” Carla looked at her husband, nodding her head
.
“They also say Captain Wolenski could let Jimmy off if he wanted to. Please, ma’am, you’ll talk to him, won’t you?”

“My husband is just following army regulations for this sort of thing,” Carla said, then heard the girl sob as if she would never be able to catch her breath again. “Wait, I didn’t say I
wouldn’t
talk to my husband. I just can’t promise anything—”

“Damn it, Carla!” Ted shouted.

“Is that Captain Wolenski?” Leslie whispered. “Am I on speakerphone?”

“No, I’m in the car. That’s some idiot on talk radio.” Carla glared at Ted, who was shaking his head and staring out the window.

Leslie sounded like she had collapsed on the floor and was talking into the little exhaust fan at the bottom of a refrigerator. “Oh, okay. Phew.” Carla heard the long inhale of someone smoking a cigarette down to the filter and she wondered how in the world the girl’s lungs could carry on a conversation, sob hysterically, and smoke all at the same time. “I just thought a woman would understand, you know? I figured you might soften your husband up or something. Jimmy never raised a hand at me before, ever; he’s the sweetest guy you’d ever know.”

“Leslie, I have to go now,” Carla said gently. “I’ll speak to Ted, I really will.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” The girl’s voice was quiet, as if she knew there was no hope of leniency but needed to talk to another human being, needed someone to listen to her cry, needed to blow smoke into a phone at a stranger just to know she was alive.

They pulled into their carport. Ted had already clicked off his seat belt and had his fist on the car handle before the car slowed to a stop.

“Her husband just got back from Iraq—” Carla started.

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Ted pulled the handle but didn’t push the door open. “Private Jimmy Gray is six-four, two hundred and eighteen pounds, and his wife is five-one, wouldn’t be a hundred pounds soaking wet. She spent the night in the hospital. Did she tell you that? Missing tooth, sprained wrists, bruised ribs? I have the photos and medical report upstairs; you can take a look.”

Carla put her forehead against the steering wheel, feeling nauseated: Was she really defending a wife-beater?

But she turned her face toward Ted, glancing at his bloodied knuckles and the dirt on his pants before she looked him in the eyes. “Crazy things happen,” she whispered.

He stared back. Stared as if Carla had taken her keys and used them to stab him in the testicles.
“This,”
he said hoarsely, flexing his empty, wounded hands, “is not the same thing.” Then he got out, slamming the door so hard that the whole car shook.

Carla went to her neighbor’s apartment to pick up Mimi.

“Thank God,” Meg said, pacing her living room with a screaming Mimi thrown over her shoulder. “I don’t know why she won’t stop.”

Carla reached for her daughter. “She is teething and seething,” she said, kissing Mimi’s wet cheek, which made Mimi take her small fists and smash them into her mother’s face as hard as possible.

Carla knew that Mimi was hungry. In her haste to get to the jail, she had forgotten to leave a bottle, and now the baby’s exaggerated rage was springing from one insistent biological desire, the tears and beet face all symptoms of going without food for almost four hours. Carla hushed, rocked, and bounced Mimi on her hip as she walked toward home. “Shhhh, my little monkey-head,” she said, cuddling the baby close. Mimi pressed her face into Carla’s chest, trying to find her milk source the way a famished vampire bat with a heat sensor in its nose tries to find the throbbing vein of a cow. Carla had quickly nursed the baby that morning, latching her to a breast while sitting at the computer and printing out directions to the city correctional facility. Usually the morning feeding was the best part of Carla’s day, having such stillness between mother and daughter, the shared joy and sustenance, Mimi’s pupils reflecting Carla’s face. Carla would feel an emptying out and refilling of quiet joy as she looked down at the sleep-creased cheeks of her daughter. She would think to herself,
This is happiness,
knowing at that small and tenuous moment she was everything her child needed. Except that morning she hadn’t been able to let the world slip away, that morning she had been worried about her husband, worried about Mimi’s future, worried because ever since Ted’s return, it seemed as if something irreplaceable was about to break.

When Carla and Mimi got back to the apartment, Ted was already standing a few inches from the CNN-blasting television set, staring at images of an overturned, burning bus and an asteroid-sized hole in a road. Carla read the ticker streaming at the bottom of the screen:
17 dead and 42 injured in suicide bomber attack in crowded Mutanabi market
. He turned suddenly and kicked Mimi’s stroller, sending it careening down the hallway.

“Please tell me you knew Mimi wasn’t in there,” Carla said.

“That was my sector!” Ted shouted, fists at his sides. Carla could see the rusty-looking scabs on his knuckles stretch and start to bleed. “I bought your scarf there!” He pointed wildly at the screen even though now it was showing clips of Paris Hilton trying to outrun paparazzi. “That’s where my interpreter’s father sells dates!” He stared at Carla as if this were somehow her fault, as if she were guilty because she hadn’t yet worn the gold-threaded scarf he had brought back for her or because she didn’t like dates. Carla blinked and held the baby tighter, not because she was afraid of Ted, no, but she needed the baby to anchor her to her sanity. Who was this man in her living room? This stranger who put Carla through the roughest year of her life while he was in another country, then continued to tear everything apart when he returned? This man who had the audacity to say “Fuck you” when she picked him up from
jail
. Without Mimi’s fifteen pounds of ballast, Carla suddenly wanted to launch herself at Ted’s wide chest and beat her hands against the stone of him. To let loose, give in to irrationality, the delirious frenzy of hitting and being hit. She wanted, for just a moment, to not think about repercussions or reputations, she wanted to know what it felt like to be Leslie Gray. To be so desperate to get through to your husband, to be heard and seen and listened to, even if it meant coming to blows, attacking until he had no choice but to fight back, all the walls down. Anger and misunderstanding boiled down to a physical reaction, fists aching against skin and bone, the collision and then the inevitable release.

“God damn it!” Carla screamed. She even stomped her foot. Then she shut her eyes and felt a wave of heat fill her face, burning from her eyelashes to the edges of her ears. “God damn it,” she said again, softly now, into Mimi’s fuzzy head. The baby was still crying, the TV blaring, but it all seemed more manageable with her eyes closed.

Then the baby tugged Carla back by grabbing at her shirt, her balled-up fists pulling Carla’s neckline. She could feel the cotton pulled low, and Carla, not wanting Ted to see her dingy nursing bra, opened her eyes and pried the T-shirt free. She put her finger in Mimi’s mouth and for a moment the baby was silenced, her hard gums with those slender-edged new teeth digging into Carla’s pointer. The only sound in the room was a commercial for wart remover and Mimi’s slurping. Then Mimi realized there wasn’t any milk in this fingertip—
there was nothing in this fingertip!
—and started screaming again.

Ted’s hands had dropped to his sides, his action-figure shoulders into a mortal man’s slouch. He was looking at Carla, the white of his left eye filled with a starburst blood clot. It felt like the first time he had looked at her in a very long time.

He lifted his arms. “Do you want me to hold her?”

Carla glanced at Mimi, her gummy mouth open and gulping for air.

Ted said, “It’s okay, let me try.”

Carla watched him, unsure. Did he think she was mad at Mimi? That she was about to shake her baby when instead she wanted to shake him? It almost made her laugh, the sudden concern on his face. She stepped toward him and placed Mimi against his shoulder. He tried to pat the baby’s back but slapped the back of her head instead, then readjusted, holding her tucked under an arm, facedown, like a football. Mimi screamed even louder.