Chapter Nineteen

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, September 30, 1995

 

As time passed, Lillianna viewed his memories as reflections of the human spirit, saturated with old associations, his secret dreams, his hopes, and fears. Each one led to another, up and down, through passages of dark and light, always leading to the same end—a glimpse into the soul of her father. Which was, in part, her own soul as well.

He touched her in a place she’d walled off years ago, a sequestered place she’d given up all hope of ever being touched again. But there were areas of enormous depth in the human psyche that burst open in times of crisis. And she dropped, head first with him, into one of them.

“What did happen to Mario?” She urged her father to go on. “Was he all right?”

“I tried and tried to find out.” His eyes narrowed. “But no one would tell me. Jim Bob broke a leg in the explosion, and he’d hobble down to my hospital room to visit.” Calvin paused, his eyes hooded and a line of veins along his neck rose as memory seeped into his mind like ink on soft paper.

 

Fort Jackson Army Hospital

August 1945

 

“Damnit, Jim Bob. How come everybody clams up soon as I ask them about Mario? They get a dumbass look on their faces and tell me nothing. I’m sick of hearing how I gotta concentrate on getting well. I can’t when all I keep thinking about is Mario. One of you has to know what happened to him.”

Jim Bob had positioned himself at the foot of Calvin’s bed and stared down at the purple and yellow toes sticking through the end of the cast on his own leg. He propped his crutches against the wall and hopped over to the chair. With his eyes riveted to his shorts, Jim Bob picked small balls of lint from the padding sticking out from the top of his cast. He rolled them between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, then flipped them onto the floor in front of him.

Calvin stared out the window where the moon had swung itself around in the sky, leaving the window dark. “Mario’s dead. Isn’t that right, Jim Bob?”

Jim Bob remained quiet.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Calvin had asked himself that question repeatedly as if the answer hung some place in the back of his mind. And he was uncertain whether or not he’d voiced it aloud until Jim Bob replied.

“I guess somebody’s got to tell you. Yeah, he’s dead, Calvin.” Jim Bob glanced up when he said Cal’s name and held his gaze. It was a moment in which Calvin hoped to find a lie, the hint of a sick joke, anything except what he heard and what he saw in Jim Bob’s eyes. “Killed instantly. Him and three other guys.”

“No,” Calvin shouted. “Oh no, not Mario.” He clamped his eyes shut, hoping blocking out his sight would take the meaning from the words and turn them into the lie he longed to hear. Mario was his friend, his best army friend, and he loved him like he loved Billy VanDyke. Like a brother. Mario was only twenty-two years old. He couldn’t be dead. It was impossible.

“What about Rose and little Tony? Where are they? What are they gonna do now?”

“They took the body back to his family in New York. Rose will stay there with her mom and dad. She hardly knows a soul here. She’ll be all right.”

“It’s all my fault, Jim Bob. All my fucking fault. If I hadn’t been so damn interested. If I’d just let it be.”

“It wasn’t your fault. We all horsed around playing catch. Remember? None of us had any inkling what it was. It didn’t look like no grenade I ever saw. Besides, if you ask me, it’s the army’s fault for leaving something that dangerous lying around. Did you hear anybody say a damn word about grenades in that field? Left over from World War I training. Well, I sure as hell didn’t. If you’re gonna blame someone, Calvin, blame the stinking army.”

Calvin closed his eyes again and didn’t say another word.

After a few minutes, Jim Bob stood, then hopped over to his crutches. “I’m sorry, Cal. I guess I shouldn’t have told you. Not yet, anyway.” He hobbled away, the thump of his crutches echoing his path along the tile corridor.

It had been more than two weeks since the accident. Only Cassandra and Greg remained with him. The rest of Calvin’s family had returned to their lives, secure that while he might not walk again, he would live. Everyone said he was blessed. They touched their fingertips to his forehead, a part of his casts, or his bandaged hand like they held some kind of lucky charm—a horseshoe or a rabbit’s foot.

A few men from his platoon stopped by almost every day to see him. At first, he was glad, but as he lay there, crippled and immobilized, their visits grew self-conscious. Those guys lived in a world where people moved about of their own free will, on their own two feet. They waited to be sent to Europe or the Pacific to fight for their country. They didn’t understand Calvin’s world and the one they lived in no longer interested him, either. Their stories about the maneuvers, or the baseball team and TJ’s great slide into home plate only reminded him of the game he’d played with Mario.

Calvin spent hours interrogating himself. How come he wasn’t dead, too? How come he lay trapped in the hospital with tubes sticking out of him and a numb body wrapped in plaster that felt more like concrete? Why? Why, goddamnit? Why?

The reflecting surfaces in the room accused him; the face of the clock, his own face in the black window, the white walls, and the shining linoleum floors. No emotion flickered through his thoughts when the idea leaped into his head and hung there, suspended.

He stared at the gauze globe at the end of his right arm. One edge flapped loose, the tape no longer adhering, and he slowly unraveled it. Around and around. The use of his left arm limited by the bandages, it took a long time for him to loosen enough for his purpose. Intent, Calvin kept unwinding until he could wrap the material, three times, around his neck. He tried to toss the end of the gauze up and over the traction bar, but it was too light, and he couldn’t raise himself, or his left arm, high enough to hook it over the top.

He glanced around the room, desperately searching for a heavy object to tie onto the end of the gauze, something whose weight would carry it over the bar. When he spotted the silver lighter Cassandra had given him for Christmas, Calvin laughed.

Alone in this decision, he didn’t allow thoughts of his wife and son to enter his head, or the bargain his pa made with God. With so much taken from his life, Calvin tended to forget about regaining the things he lost and focused on recovering his self-respect, his pride, maybe, or his sense of fairness.

Powerless to stop what he already set in motion, Calvin didn’t try. He knew he was supposed to die in that accident and he was merely correcting the error. Emotion didn’t enter into his thinking. All he wanted to do was make things right.

Feeling hot and light at the same time, a profound clarity emerged from the center of his breast. Something dropped over him, a shadow, and he thought for a second about all the lives destroyed and lost to this war. All of them pressed down, one on top of the other, like layers of rotting cloth or decomposing black leaves.

The tangled and confused strands of his life had come together: his shame, his rage, and his guilt tied neatly into this ribbon of gauze. As he got used to the idea he was next to die, he saw only empty space in front where he could tumble and roll like a child, laughing and plunging, head over heels, and then straight up into a faraway star. Up. Up. And free. And who knows, maybe he’d find his mama there.

His own shattered body was such an indisputable truth, there was no way Calvin could lie to himself about anything now. And he believed in the rightness of his action, not only for himself but for Mario, for Cassandra and for Greg.

She was young and beautiful. Cassandra would rediscover love. Calvin would only be a burden to her, a crippled carpenter with most of his right hand gone. What kind of husband, father, and provider could he be? Only yesterday, one of the doctors recommended amputation of his seriously infected right leg.

“You’ll be better off without it, Miller. If that bone starts rotting, it’ll probably spread. And even if we could save it, that leg will never be strong enough to hold your weight. There isn’t enough bone left. Think about it, Miller. That’s all I’m asking. Think about it.”

Those were the doctor’s words and Calvin heard them long after that young military surgeon, energetic and whole, strode away from his bed.

Even now, as he wound the gauze around his silver lighter, he thought about those words. Calvin used his teeth and his left hand to tighten the knot, tossed his lighter easily up into the air and over the steel bar above his bed. He tugged with all the might he could assemble, yanked with the combined forces of his arm and his mind. As if awakened from a horrible dream only to find himself within another one, Calvin let go, sucked backwards into that mothering darkness from where he came.

For a long instant, he could neither measure in minutes nor thoughts, death made absolute sense to him, a desperate and innocent kind of logic—beautiful and dark.

Then he came to his senses and couldn’t do it. More than the lack of strength in his left arm, more than the fact he couldn’t yank the gauze tight enough, hold it until his breathing stopped, Calvin knew he couldn’t deceive himself any longer. And admitted he feared death as much as he feared life.

He collapsed on the bed, defeated and exhausted from the effort. Calvin Miller had failed again. A sob burst from his chest, and the thunderous sound of it in that dark and empty room summoned Mildred, the night nurse.

When she gently removed the gauze from his neck and rewrapped his hand, though he tried to hold back, everything crumbled—all of it torn away. He felt the danger. The nakedness. But he couldn’t help himself, and everything he tried to hide, more and more sorrow, shame, rage, loneliness and all the old aches of his past poured out. His heart hurt in the same childlike way it did when his mother died. He fell through the floor of a rapidly-growing depression where nothing remained but bitterness and the curdled taste of failure and disillusion.

“It’s all right, Calvin. Go ahead and cry.” Millie’s voice soothed him. “I know you found out about your friend today. And I know how much it hurt.” She wet a washcloth and wiped his face before she folded it on his forehead. “Just let it all go. Cry it all out. Your wife and son aren’t here, so no one but me is gonna hear you. It’s about time you did, soldier.”

She pressed another cool, wet cloth against his neck where the gauze had scraped his skin raw. Then she sat beside him and held his bandaged hand in her own, the steady pressure of her fingers pressing against his palm. “I know it’s hard. But you’ve got things to live for. You really do. You got one hell of a family. I see so many guys with no one who gives a damn. And we practically have to build a special waiting room just for your family. I never saw anything like it.” Millie smiled as she turned the cloth on his forehead.

“And your wife. She’s one beautiful southern lady. You didn’t see her when they first brought you in. But I did. She never gave up. Told us all you’d beat this thing. And that son of yours. He’s so damn cute, it makes me want another one. After I got mine all grown up. I must be crazy.”

Calvin heard what she said, and he had a flash of memory: Cassandra bringing Greg into bed with them on Sunday morning while he was on leave. A heavy nostalgia crumbled over him, then drifted away with the sound of Millie’s voice again.

“That black-eyed, beautiful little boy. It won’t be long until he learns to walk. And he’s gonna strut right out into the world. And you know something, Calvin Lee Miller, that little boy will need his daddy.”

Those were the words she said to Calvin and then she grew silent, only a quiet presence, while the remainder of the fear, rage, and sadness slipped out of him. So much that when he finally emptied, he filled right back up with the unbelievable joy of getting rid of it all.

When Millie looked straight into his eyes and smiled, Calvin sunk back into his pillows, drained of tension. She’d seen this happen before, he thought. But it didn’t matter. He remembered all the people who’d loved him—one by one until it was too late to stop something new from seeping into his heart.

That something new was hope.

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, September 30, 1995

 

Lillianna stared at her father. When he stared back, the keen edge of his gaze pierced her own past. And she stood again with Jack, just after her mother’s death. That time in her life, like a persistent song memorized in childhood, played itself over and over, the needle stuck in the same groove.

“I tried to kill myself once, too.”

“Y-y-you,” he stuttered, obviously flabbergasted. “God, no. I didn’t know anything about that.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t. I didn’t even tell Greg.” She stared at the pointed toe of her shoe as she used it to trace one of the square tiles on the floor.

“Why, Em? Why would you wanna do a thing like that? You got the world on a string. Always did.”

“I suppose I wanted everyone to think so.” She flushed, stopped, then started again. “Not long after Mom died, I discovered Jack was seeing another woman, one of my best friends, and I cracked. Went a little crazy and thought the world ended when both of them left me.”

He gave her a sad smile. “God, I’m sorry, Em. That son of a bitch. I never did think he deserved you. But I wish you’d said something. Maybe I coulda helped.”

“Not much you could have done. Anyway, as you can see, I didn’t succeed. I’m a suicide failure.” She shrugged. “Just like you.”

She was about to spill the whole ugly story when Aunt Pam and Uncle Joel arrived.

With their reprieve, Lillianna had the rest of the night off. When the shuttle dropped her in front of the hotel, she remained outside, scanned the darkening sky as if she waited for a neon sign to light. Bingo. Connection. There was something new now that joined her to her father, a dark bridge spanning both their lives. The two of them had shared more than she’d known before today.

After buying her usual canned Pepsi, she stood outside the lounge, tempted by the melancholy singer doing a good job with Patsy Cline’s I Fall to Pieces. Who would know if she did? She’d order a couple drinks, cheer herself up. Forget about the past.

But her conscience had other ideas. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, the notes of the singer’s heartbreaking song still rising.

Lillianna sucked air into her lungs, then hurried down the corridor on weak legs. She steadied her right hand with the left as she inserted the key. Mustn’t think about that time. It’s over now. You have a new life that no longer includes bars and alcohol. Don’t blow it now. Not after you’ve come so far.