Can a dream cause tragedy?
This isn’t how our glory day is supposed to happen.
CLOISTERED AND WHISPERING in our baby’s room, the farthest room from the kitchen in our tiny ranch-style duplex, just twenty-four hours after Elizabeth and I decided we could float and not sink, I try to absorb Jack’s words when he calls Saturday night. When the phone rings, I recognize the number. Military line from Afghanistan.
Elizabeth and her two boys have walked up the street to share a pizza inside. She is busy cutting the barely cooked cheese pizza into bite-sized pieces with kitchen scissors, a little trick I taught her for the kids, when the phone rings.
Earlier that afternoon, I had spoken with Elizabeth and she had lamented that Laura was beyond furious that her rear detachment commander would not return her avalanche of phone calls asking for intel. Laura was on edge more than normal, according to Elizabeth, probably due to the roller coaster of hormones following the birth of a baby. Laura wanted answers, dammit! I can’t say that I blame her. Jack is in a staff position, so I don’t have anyone to call to demand answers from, or I would probably be doing the same. My point of contact is scary Linda Stewart, and no way in hell am I going to breach protocol about seven hundred different ways by calling her. We are supposed to wait for news to arrive through official channels. Even if the waiting goes on for an entire day and then a little longer.
“Laura told me that she heard footsteps in the baby’s room late last night,” Elizabeth said. “She went to look, and of course, the baby was sleeping. I hope she’s not losing it. This is her first deployment with a baby. She is sleep-deprived.”
Elizabeth said her own phone rang off the hook all day, as she fielded calls from freaked-out wives and mothers who saw the ticker on CNN all the way in Montana. I encouraged her to bring the boys to my house and wait it out. My phone hadn’t rung once.
With five children arguing over pizza in the background, coupled with the delay and echo of a phone call from Afghanistan, when my phone finally rings I scurry away from everyone else to answer. I move with the phone into the living room, still within earshot of Elizabeth and the kids and the pizza festivities.
“Hello? Jack? What’s going on? Are you all right?” Please let it be his voice on the other end. I push away visions of the woman retching after Mass hours earlier.
He starts to answer, and I can barely hear him over the static on the line and the kids. I notice Elizabeth standing in the kitchen doorway looking at me, trying to read my face for clues. I don’t realize this until later. I don’t stop to consider how she perceives this phone call from Afghanistan, how it could apply to her.
I take the phone and quickly walk down the long hallway in Greta’s room, the baby’s room. Isolating myself in a separate room is instinct. And also necessity; I couldn’t hear a word he was trying to say out there in the kitchen.
Jack doesn’t begin with hello. “What have you heard back there?”
“I’ve heard nothing, D, commo blackout. No one has any idea; it’s deadly silent here. What the fuck is going on? Wives are losing their minds. Some woman barfed in the chapel parking lot.”
“Ang, I can’t talk long. Getting ready to head out to an FOB [Forward Operating Base], where there are no comms [communication: email or phones]. The chief of staff ordered me to call you and tell you I may not be coming home. I could command here now. Well, that’s what it looks like now. We’re in crisis mode. I was directed to call and tell you, and only you.”
And with those words . . . I remember. Jack’s dream flooded back to me. The dream and the pancakes that followed. “Was it Rob?”
A silence. Maybe it’s the delay, or maybe he can’t speak for a second. “Yes. Rob jumped on the Chinook at the last minute and didn’t manifest. We haven’t made notifications, because we can’t get a team down the side of the mountain to the wreckage, and anyway, it completely torched. General Stewart wants to do all notifications at once, even though the rest of the manifest is clear. He expects that by tomorrow morning, the casualty notification teams will be in place.”
“Jack. That dream. It was a premonition.”
“Can’t talk anymore. Don’t tell anyone what I just told you, got it? Very close hold.”
“Shit. Elizabeth Bianci is here, in the next room!” Now I hear myself whispering loud enough to meet the criteria of a shout, if that’s possible. A shrill hiss is a better description.
“Oh Jesus, Ang. Cover it up. She can’t know yet. I wish you told me she was there before I started talking.”
As if I’m going to think to interject that little nugget of the scenario right off the bat, under the circumstances.
“I will call you when I get more information,” he says. “I hope the chief’s reaction was just a possibility. I love you.” And the line is dead.
I stare at Greta’s crib. Too stunned to hyperventilate or cry. What just happened? I need to get my shit straight, walk unscathed back to the kitchen, grab a piece of cold pizza, and announce that Jack and Eric are okay. That the whole crash is a confusing mess, and, no, he didn’t say anything else.
I will never be able to pull this off. She knows me too well. I can’t stay in this bedroom forever.
I open the door of Greta’s room to find Elizabeth, whose legs have given out, sliding down the hallway wall to the floor. She heard bits of my end of the conversation and thinks Eric, her husband, is dead. She is certain he is dead, as our children eat pizza and laugh at Finding Nemo, viewing number sixty, just at the end of the long bowling-alley-like hallway in the kitchen.
“It was Eric,” she says. Her back is against the wall and she falls to her side. Her voice sounds hollow, nothing like her regular voice.
I drop next to Elizabeth. “No. No. It wasn’t Eric. It was Rob. Rob is dead.” Less than a minute after hanging up with Jack, I’ve spit out what I was supposed to keep secret.
Elizabeth and I lie together there in the hall, crumpled in awkward positions, not touching—she is not the hugging type—both of us laboring our breath and occasional mutterings, “Holy Fuck” and “Oh God.” I can’t remember who cries first, and I don’t remember how long we stay there that way. I don’t remember anything of our collection of five children just at the end of the hall. Do they stay away because they sense they should? I don’t remember putting my children to bed that night; I don’t remember anything after that time in the hallway with Elizabeth. The politics and posturing and shenanigans of our external world and personality conflicts are gone in that moment. Of course they will come screaming back all too soon, but in that dark hallway, we breathe together and absorb the shock as the intimacy of death hits our group for the first time. How did Elizabeth have the intuitive sense to choose the word buoyant?
I remember pulling ourselves to our feet, together and without a word. We stand and know we have to put our game faces on, our war faces.
“I’m Laura’s person on her Soldier Readiness Contract,” Elizabeth says. “I can’t go home. What if she calls me? I can’t just sit there while she talks into my answering machine. We’re going to have to stay here until ten o’clock. Casualty teams can’t make notifications past ten. What’s the earliest they can visit? I think it’s something like six in the morning. Did Jack say when they’re going to do this?” Her voice is shaking, but she has moved into tactical mode.
“Umm, I think he said tomorrow, but it’s tomorrow there already. I would assume, yes, by first thing in the morning. I can’t remember what he said exactly. But no one can ever learn that we both knew before she did. Why don’t you leave the boys here? You stay too; you can go home early and be ready when they call.”
We are fooling ourselves for thinking no one else already knows, that maybe that’s why everyone has stayed hunkered at home all day long. Nothing is secret in our circle for long, and this happened twenty-four hours ago.
“We’ll stay until ten,” she says, “then go home and sleep there. Eric might try to call me. I’ll bring the boys back here early, or whenever they call me. Okay. That’s a good plan. Oh my God. This isn’t happening.”
We make a pact that neither of us will ever tell a soul about that night, the phone call she overheard, and the details we learned about Rob’s death while his own widow stewed at home that her rear detachment commander hadn’t called her yet.
The next morning, Sunday, she brings her sleepy boys to my front door before dawn. I can tell she hasn’t slept, and neither have I. She looks at me and says simply, “They called. I have to go be with her. I think they’re doing the notification now.”
“I’ve got the boys. No worries about them.”
I don’t think we had a name for it yet, but a new phenomenon was swirling up from between us and would manifest in the coming weeks into an exhaustion, an exhaustion that bled from the members of Laura’s inner circle into the inner circles of those members, and on and on. It wouldn’t be long before the army had a name for it: caregiver fatigue. The energy it took to hold up one of us taxed the rest of us. Meals poured into Laura’s house, meals that weren’t being eaten by anyone in her home. But the women who stood vigil by Laura in the coming weeks had passed their own children on to their own circles of support. Within a year, we would have systems in place for this; we would realize that the caregivers needed care themselves, and so on down the chain. But this was the first one in our group. This is the one that wrote the script for what to do, and what not to do, for tragedies to come.