“Mom! Someone’s at the door!”
Lacey stuck her head out of the shower. “What?” Couldn’t Otis get off his butt and come tell her whatever he was yelling about from the living room? And why did anything need her attention now, during the ten minutes before the hot water inevitably conked out?
She wrapped herself in a towel and came out, giving Otis the stink-eye as the doorbell rang again. “You couldn’t get off the couch and answer it?”
“I’m reading.”
“Uh-huh.” A computer game catalog.
Cold October air leaked under the front door to swirl around Lacey’s wet legs. “Yes?”
“Lacey?”
She checked the peephole. Shit. Anne Mackay, right there on the doorstep. “Hi! Oh, hi, Anne. You know, I just got out of the shower. Give me one—” No, she couldn’t leave her out there in the cold. Lacey opened the door, cursing herself for not owning a robe. “Come on in.”
“I am so sorry,” Anne said. “I would have called but I was actually running errands in the neighborhood—”
“No, it’s fine,” Lacey insisted. “Just let me throw something on.” She led Anne into the living room, swatted Otis’s feet so that he would sit up and make room on the couch. Then she ran into the bedroom as Anne greeted Otis and began to ask cheerful questions to which he responded mostly in half phrases or single words. Lacey pulled on jeans and dug around for a clean top. She combed out her wet hair and tried to picture how messy her place looked through Anne’s eyes. Not much she could do about it now; did she even have any decent snacks to offer?
Back in the living room, Otis was unwillingly showing his catalog to an enthusiastic Anne, whose trim slacks and crisp white blouse made Lacey want to rewind the entire morning. What was she doing here on a Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m.? What was she doing here at all?
“I was just going to make some coffee, I don’t know if you—”
“That would be perfect!”
“Right. Okay. Otis, maybe you can help me in the kitchen for a sec?”
“Help you make coffee?” But he shuffled in after her.
Lacey pushed a brown paper bag at him. “Look,” she whispered. “We need to clean up the place some. But without her noticing. So just go around and pick up stuff, all right?”
“What stuff?”
“Clothes, toys, anything lying around. But don’t do it so it looks like you’re cleaning up. Oh, crap. Is there still a pile of laundry on the chair out there?”
Otis shrugged. “Why are you freaking out? You never care about cleaning.”
“She’s like my boss, all right, so cut the ’tude and help your mom. Don’t tell me we’re out of milk.” Luckily she did have a new can of Chock full o’Nuts, so Lacey was able to bring out two decent mugs with sugar and powdered creamer on the side.
Once they were settled, Anne launched into a long funny story that Lacey could only partially follow; it had to do with Anne having thought she signed her daughter Isabella up for basic ballet lessons but somehow mixed up the class descriptions and got her nine-year-old into an advanced toe-shoes and barre class, which the teacher seemed to think was perfectly okay even though Isabella was in way above her head, and started arguing with Anne when she tried to switch the girl into an easier lesson.
“So she’s, you know, this classic hair-scraped-back ballet teacher, not an ounce of fat on her, and she just goes off on me in this ridiculous French accent! With all these little bun-heads standing around and snickering! I mean, I don’t even think the woman is French. It’s the role she feels she has to play. Anyway, she goes—” Here Anne put her nose up and let out a trill of Frenchy-sounding words interspersed with English.
“So I’m a little ticked, right? Bella is practically in tears and this woman is insisting she has to stay in this class if she wants to be in their program. Well, maybe it wasn’t nice of me but I pull out my college French—I spent two semesters in Paris—and I go, Eh bien, excusez-moi, mais je pense que je connais ma fille mieux que vous!”
Lacey kept a smile on her face, wondering whether she was supposed to pretend she could tell the difference between fake and real French. The caffeine was helping her catch up; there were no errands that could possibly take Anne Mackay around here. So what was it? Maybe it had gotten around that Lacey had been to two different vet agencies for prepaid grocery and gas cards, and a box of freebies she’d been handed and had carried, mortified, to her car and into her house. The roll of toilet paper in the bathroom she prayed Anne wouldn’t ask to use was from that very box. Maybe Anne was here to offer some kind of we’re-all-in-this-together moral support or, worse, an actual loan.
Or what if one of the girls from the group had complained about her? Could you get fired from a job you hadn’t even applied for? That someone had asked you to do? That didn’t pay?
“We had a nice day with Bailey last weekend,” she said, testing the waters. “Right, O? At the zoo?”
“Bailey…” Anne said, frowning, as if she’d never heard of the person Lacey had e-mailed her about several times, checking that she was saying the right thing to this frustrating girl who was threatening to walk away from all of it.
“When you made us walk around for hours in the cold and all the animals were, like, inside because it was freezing?” Otis said. But he gave her a teasing smile.
“When we took the tram out and back,” Lacey countered, “and you got hot chocolate and an ice cream?” She’d worked overtime at the gym that Friday, since Otis was at a sleepover, but had rallied as she could, treating Bailey to lunch and a day at the Bronx Zoo she had planned because Anne’s handbook suggested including wives, especially ones without children, into fun outings if they seemed depressed.
“I think she had a good time,” Lacey said. “But maybe you want to call her? She told me she hasn’t talked to Greg—that’s her guy—in a while. And the thing is, she didn’t seem that upset about it.” Huddled in her jean jacket, Bailey had stared at the ibex and shrugged while Lacey kept on with gentle questions about how she was doing.
“Maybe it’s not for everyone,” she whispered while the long-horned goats shuffled around their feed pen.
“What isn’t?” Lacey said. But Bailey hadn’t answered, merely moved on to join Otis at the Great Bear Wilderness.
Anne clucked, nodding in concern, but in a general way. What Lacey didn’t say was that Bailey most likely had something else going on, someone on the side. The girl was furtive in a new way, smiling to herself, as if Lacey wouldn’t notice, was both more cheerful and more stressed. It wasn’t hard to tell she was keeping a secret.
Takes one to know one. That old-school comeback, one of the first Otis had learned to toss around. Lacey used to think it was funny. Now it pierced her. Who did she think she was, showing off her fake perfect life, la la la I’m taking my son to the zoo on two hours of sleep, to someone who was struggling with the same ugliness and failure that she was? Who was she trying to convince?
“Mm-hmm,” Anne said, eyes wandering around the room.
“How are things for…” Lacey stalled out, forgetting if she’d ever known the name of Anne’s husband.
“What? Oh, Roger’s good. He says he got eight of our letters on one day, after about a month of nothing. I don’t know. Everyone’s using MotoMail now, but I guess I’m old-fashioned.”
“MotoMail?”
“That service? Where you e-mail a letter and it gets printed out at base and then delivered? You should try it.”
“Not very private, though.” Lacey glanced at Otis. “Not for those kinds of letters, I guess.” This kind of joke would be a no-brainer with Martine, but Anne just smiled blankly.
Martine. A pain winched through Lacey. Since that night at Chap’s, they’d barely had contact. Next morning, Lacey had called and called, but Martine never picked up. Over the next week, Martine would only text her, not speak directly. Whatever, she wrote to Lacey, who was desperate to know if they were in a fight. I don’t want to be involved. Also, You’re apologizing to ME?! This after Lacey had left a message saying, I’m sorry. Finally: I don’t think so. Lacey had texted: Can we get together?
She was sorry, no lie, a sorry excuse for a soldier’s wife. But was she truly sorry for what she’d done with Jim? Sometimes. She thought about calling it off, again. But since they’d resumed, with late-night calls and one feverish lunch hour of kissing in her car, there was calm again in her mind, in her life. She could handle Otis and this crappy new sassing-back of his; she could hold her head up in the checkout line paying for food with charity. She subsisted on coffee and takeout and had cut the drinking down and was as sweet as she’d ever been to Eddie, when they talked.
Lacey wasn’t dumb. She knew none of that mattered, balanced against the bad. She’d be honest with herself, if not with anyone else. She didn’t make any promises to Jim, and he didn’t ask for any. But just say the word, Lace, and we’ll make this right. You’ll do right by him, when the time comes. We can make a good life out of this.
What she could use most of all was someone to talk to. And yeah, Martine was probably never going to be that person—Lacey bit down on the rush of sadness—but now she’d made sure of that, hadn’t she?
A beat of silence stretched out uncomfortably, there in her living room. Martine wouldn’t have, would she? No way. Lacey tried to find something to say, any topic, while she spun crazy circles of fear inside. She’d known, of course, that Mart would never tell Eddie—through her husband or any other connection. She would never risk distracting him, over there. It was a code they had never discussed, but Lacey felt it as strongly as if they’d signed a contract in blood. That didn’t mean, though, that Martine wouldn’t tell Anne.
Who now stood, smoothing her dark pants down slim legs, stepped uneasily around the pile of laundry to a side table where she picked up the digital photo frame Lacey had given Eddie for Christmas last year. Over the woman’s shoulder, Lacey saw the images flick by in a tilted slide show: Otis at Orchard Beach, Eddie and Lacey swanked out for a night on the town, Lolo stiff on the front steps in City Island.
“I like this,” Anne murmured. Her voice was subdued. Lacey felt a flash of terror.
“It’s too bad, but we’ve got to get going.”
Anne set down the frame and studied Lacey. She showed no sign of taking the hint.
“Otis has a game,” Lacey said weakly. She prayed he wouldn’t contradict her. “But it was really good to see you…” Why wasn’t she leaving? Would she confront Lacey here, in her own home, in front of her son? Spit on her, curse her out?
From back in the kitchen, her cell rang. Lacey ignored it. “Maybe we can get together sometime, like for a drink—I mean, coffee or something?” She urged Anne toward the door with every inner impulse.
“Why don’t you get that. I’ll wait.”
“That’s okay. It’s probably my mother-in-law. She’s, you know.” Lacey made a face. Her armpits pricked.
“Answer the phone, Lacey,” Anne said quietly. Otis looked up from his catalog. Lacey went in a daze around the corner to where her phone was lilting on the counter under a pile of mail. Now she knew. Why Anne had come. In her hands, the phone had quieted but almost immediately began to ring again.
She walked slowly back to the living room, where Anne still stood, her face now broken open by fear. “How bad?” Lacey said.
Anne shook her head, she didn’t know.
Lacey nodded. He wasn’t dead; that would have been casualty officers at the door. “Hello,” she said into the phone. And pointed to Otis, then the back bedroom. Anne bent quickly to the boy and led him out of the room.
In the next few minutes, Lacey learned that Major Diaz had suffered injuries to face, chest, and limbs in a Humvee accident in Baghdad, was receiving treatment at base, expected to be medevaced by Huey within the hour. Routed through Landstuhl, transferred to Walter Reed within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Current status of Major Diaz: stable, though unconscious.
Lacey stayed calm; she drew on all the times she’d heard wives go through this and knew enough not to press the RDO rep for details, answers, that weren’t available yet. She didn’t write anything down, but she made sure to confirm her eligibility for Travel and Transportation Orders—reimbursement for three people in terms of gas for the car, lodging and food expenses while at the hospital. Once that was cleared, there was nothing else to do except put down the phone and call Otis to her.
She held her baby, she kissed his head and told him Eddie got hurt but he would be okay. Everything was going to be okay. Otis began to cry. Anne knelt in front of the two of them, promising help, crying also. Only Lacey stayed cold and strong. A long list of immediate actions formed in her mind. The first, and hardest, would be to tell Lolo. And she’d need to borrow money from Anne for the trip to D.C.; she could pay her back as soon as the T&TO funds cleared. But for now she rocked Otis and let Anne go on about how she found out only an hour ago and came rushing over as soon as she heard, that Lacey would have every bit of support from the entire FRG, and that she’d get through this, she would, she had them all in her corner.
Inside, though, Lacey listened to a voice calmly explain why this had happened. You did this to him, it said. You made it happen.
I know, she thought, and braced for what was to come.