Maryland
You want to come to breakfast?” Ellie whispered outside of Jamie’s door. “Or do you want me to bring it in? I’m glad to.”
Joe was lying awake in bed, and his face was twisted as he listened. As Joe saw it, the more Ellie pampered Jamie, the more Jamie was going to see himself as an invalid. He tried to never look at what remained of Jamie’s leg.
“He’s not six years old,” Joe told Ellie one night, a week after Jamie had come home. “You’ve got that old singsong voice you used to use when the kids were little and sick. Jamie’s lost a leg, but that doesn’t mean he’s a little boy again. And you can’t treat him like one.”
Ellie, who had been quietly crying herself to sleep since Jamie had come home, bristled when Joe spoke to her that way.
“Don’t you tell me what my own son does and doesn’t need,” she said. “A mother knows what she should do. Don’t make it your business to start monitoring everything I say to him.”
Now, both Ellie and Joe waited for Jamie’s reply. A truck—probably Dilbert Ray’s tow truck—drove past, causing the house to shake like a subway car.
“All right,” Jamie said after a while. “I’m coming.”
Joe hoped Ellie would not respond with high-pitched enthusiasm, but she did.
“Breakfast for you, too,” she said to Joe, sticking her head in their bedroom. He could see that she had erased her grin, lest he see it. Lately they were constantly studying each other’s expressions.
“Coming,” Joe said.
Joe heard Jamie push himself off his mattress and onto his crutches. And because he had to stop himself from listening to Jamie negotiate his way from one room to the other, he got up and forced himself to cough.
In the kitchen Miriam had turned the radio up, and her grim expression told everyone not to try to talk over it. Jamie rested his crutches against the wall and took two hops over before working himself into a chair at the end of the table. Miriam reached over and ran a hand over his hair.
“I want to hear, too, but it’s too loud,” Ellie said, and indicated with her fingers how minimally she was lowering it. “What a day for that family. My God.”
Joe wanted coffee but didn’t feel like making it, and he hesitated to ask Ellie. She had stopped drinking coffee much lately, and now that she was doing so much for Jamie, she didn’t want to spend any more energy on Joe than she had to. These days, he thought about coffee as much as he drank it.
“Jamie, do you still feel like talking to that reporter today?” Ellie asked. “This was the day he was going to come over. I still don’t understand what they want to write about, exactly.” Since Jamie had returned home, she had come to enjoy pretending to be uninformed.
“It’s all right with me,” Jamie said. “I don’t know what I have to say, though. I lost a leg. Charlie’s winning the war. And does anyone want to hire Captain Peg Leg for a job?”
They were used to his making comments like this, but even now it could still make them skip a breath. “Don’t say stuff like that,” Miriam finally said. She tried to scold him with her version of a glare, but he wouldn’t look over. “So how do you know exactly what he’s going to ask?” she said. “I mean, what if it’s one of those reporters who accuses soldiers of killing women and children?” Before the last words had come out, she felt a great tightness in her chest. This was not an altogether new sensation for her; Miriam frequently said the wrong thing, and her family hadn’t grown more tolerant over the years, but instead, seemed to, in ways only she could measure, move further and further away from her. She had been acutely aware of this in recent weeks as she watched her parents stare at Jamie. And when they did return their gazes to her, she was sure they remembered again their disappointment in her.
Before her mother or father could speak, she was going to beat them to it.
“I’m just saying, you don’t always know what someone wants to say about the war. I know Jamie didn’t do anything like that—God! Of course I know that. Don’t even look at me like that. I just want to protect Jamie. How do we know what this reporter wants to ask? How do we know, is all.”
Ellie kept her mouth open, but it was unclear when a reply might come out of it.
“That’s enough of that kind of talk,” Joe said. “The Gazette’s not that kind of paper, and Jamie shouldn’t have to hear that garbage in his own house. From his own family.”
There was a hint of enjoyment in Jamie’s face then—not for the scolding that his sister received, but for how quickly such upset could befall them all. He knew better than anyone how on edge his family had been since his return, and he was grateful when the hushed reverie and manners could be so easily pierced. He only wished that it happened more often.
Miriam studied Jamie’s face, wondering if she needed to apologize. She could see that she didn’t.
Ellie was content for once that her husband had more or less expressed the appropriate message in a reasonably appropriate manner. Still, she cocked her head toward Miriam out of habit.
“I’ve got to get this house in order is what I need to do,” she said to all of them and to no one. “I can just see the first sentence of that article now. ‘Jamie West lived in cleaner quarters while serving in Vietnam than he does in his own home.’”
“I’m going to go listen in my room,” Miriam said, feeling confident once more, “where I can actually hear it.” She put her hand on Jamie’s shoulder and squeezed as she moved past. “Do you want to come?” she asked him.
Jamie shook his head. He could see that his parents were interested in his answer either way. Generally they seemed to worry that he was spending too much time alone—alone on the front porch, alone in his bedroom, alone in the backyard, where Joe had set up two round targets at the yard’s end for Jamie to practice archery. As a soldier, Jamie was an expert marksman, the best in his company with the M-16, the M-60, and M-79, and Joe had encouraged him not to let those skills recede just because he had lost a leg. In junior high school Jamie had placed third in the state’s national target archery finals for his age division, and the summer before he was drafted, he briefly considered trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for most consecutive bull’s-eyes from forty meters. Now, seated on an overturned wooden barrel, he spent a couple of hours most days shooting with his longbow; Joe had bought him thirty arrows and a backpack so that he wouldn’t have to keep getting up and retrieving them; Ellie was only too eager to sit out there with him, sorting through the wet laundry and hanging it on the lines and pulling the arrows out every few minutes to hand him, and in the evenings Joe liked to do the same, though he didn’t busy himself with anything but watching Jamie shoot. Or often Jamie’s friend Sutton came over and held a small tin of chewing tobacco out for himself, watching Jamie shoot into the two small yellow circles. Sutton walked with a limp because of a football injury in high school. A tackler had crushed his left femur as Sutton tried to take the ball into the end zone, and it was poorly reset. Jamie was one of the team’s wide receivers, and when he watched Sutton’s leg bend left when the rest of his body was knocked right, he knew that Sutton would never play football again. Now Sutton worked as a driver for Pepsi. He didn’t have to worry about the draft.
“Do you know how long this reporter will take?” Jamie asked. “Sutton was coming over later to watch the train pass by. Since the shooting, Sutton thinks he’s Walter Cronkite. Last night all he could talk about was Sirhan Sirhan and Arab nationalists.”
“I keep wondering if there is going to be a Jack Ruby in all of this,” Joe said. “I keep thinking Mr. Sirhan is going to meet the same fate as Oswald.”
“Then more killing and more killing,” Ellie said, untying her apron strings. “More violent chaos. I hope they don’t shoot that man. Or when is it ever going to end?”
She stopped to look at Joe and Jamie. Jamie’s thin face looked like Joe’s when they first married, like the picture from their honeymoon in Ocean City they had gotten a stranger to take, with Joe’s arm around Ellie on the boardwalk, the ocean breeze lifting a lock of his hair and sending it across his broad forehead, his expression almost stunned. Had he really just met this girl Ellie two months prior?