WALTER REED ARMY MEDICAL CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.
OCTOBER 2005
By the middle of the fourth day Michael had been in surgical intensive care at Walter Reed, it had been determined that he would probably survive. Probably. Ellen didn’t fully understand who had decided this, or by what measurement, since he was still in a coma—light coma, medically induced—and she couldn’t see any change in the terrifying condition of his body, but the force of her gratitude kept her from asking too many questions. It was hard to form thoughts or questions here. Yellow curtains pressed closely around Michael and the other four men in their beds. Gowned personnel barreled in to work on him—Ellen roughly ushered aside—in new emergencies she couldn’t detect. Digital shrieks came from monitors and equipment attached to unconscious Michael and the men behind the other curtains. The doctors didn’t speak much to her, aside from brief updates that left her more confused than before. She got the sense they were hedging their bets.
Yet it wasn’t the doctors or the nurses that infuriated Ellen—or the many ranks of half-medical, half-military staff with their jargon and hurry and protocol—it was herself. Why couldn’t she find a way to make herself heard, here? Who was this woman, stammering and feeble, passively agreeing to procedures she wasn’t clear on? Why did she let that one surgeon cut her off on the question of pain in a coma? She, who could lecture to the back of a two-hundred-seat auditorium without a microphone, who could summarize salient points and counterarguments at the drop of a hat, who was no stranger to the blazing self-importance of young men with highly advanced degrees?
(“We can get back to saving the liver and spleen, or I can stand here discussing it with you.” That’s what the impatient surgeon had said when she fumbled around asking about pain levels. In response, what could anyone do but shut up and step aside?)
Mom, they constantly called her here. Too busy with life-or-death to learn names. “Step outside now, Mom.” “Okay, Mom, we’re gonna need you to…” “Your signature here, Mom, and here…” Each time, the word burned her. But I’m not, she cried inwardly, afraid she was a fake or fraud, afraid this biological lack would doom his chances somehow. But she moved, she signed, she did what she was told.
* * *
It didn’t matter what she said or thought, anyway. Michael would survive, or he wouldn’t. Whole cadres of people worked around the clock to stabilize him, using every effort and technique at hand. There wasn’t a lot of critical abstraction involved. Maybe this was the time that people who could, prayed.
If it hadn’t been for the wife of the man in the bed two down from Michael, Ellen might have continued in this confounding meek state. But the woman she overheard yesterday afternoon—they all did, no one could escape that New York accent—was anything but meek.
“You gotta be kidding me! No. No way. Still on dialysis, still with the balloon pump, and … you see this? Look at that color. I showed you people that yesterday, Jesus. That’s plasma leaking from the vent, so don’t—”
Ellen had stayed rock-still, shocked and a little thrilled to hear this torrent unleash. From where she was huddled on a plastic chair, in the back corner of the SICU—Michael was having another round of lab draws—she couldn’t see the owner of that indignant voice. It was coming from somewhere inside the warren of yellow-curtained rooms.
“No. He’s not ready. No way in hell. Just ’cause you need the space doesn’t mean I’m gonna roll over—”
A murmuring voice, or two, in response, trying to calm her.
“Maybe you think I don’t know the rate of death for patients moved out of Intensive before fully stable. Or the risks of cranial swelling. They go crazy, they pull their own tubes out! I’ve read about it, you’ve seen it—”
At this, Ellen’s attention sharpened. Michael was scheduled to be moved to one of the wards, later today or tonight. But … that was a good thing. She’d been told he was better, he was ready … wasn’t he?
As the woman’s voice rose higher, stubbornly refuting every doctor’s murmur, Ellen suddenly realized there wasn’t just insistence in her words, there was also logic. And informed experience. And the distinct sense that there were more perspectives to consider aside from the hospital’s authority.
Ellen bent forward on her chair and pressed her torso close to her thighs. She craned her head farther down and peered under the curtains. At first she could see nothing but the rolling wheels of crash carts and the movable levers of the hospital beds. Nurse and staff clogs, moving steadily around the beds and the equipment. Chair legs where other visitors sat by the beds, perhaps also listening in silence. And then Ellen found what she was looking for; she knew.
Facing two sets of sea green pant leg scrubs were shoes that could only be worn by the owner of that voice. Even in the requisite blue shoe covers that Ellen herself had on, the stacked heels were high on that pair of peeling black leather boots. Pushing herself upright, Ellen glanced down at herself: an oversize gown made of some material that was a cross between paper and cloth, plastic gloves that made her hands sweat and itch. Under that, plain slacks, a simple blouse, a light wool cardigan; and under the shoe covers, a pair of flats. Some variety of the same clothes she’d been wearing since she arrived in Washington, D.C., three days ago. A few more sets of each hung in the closet of her room in the Marriott in downtown Silver Spring. What would it be like to stride these floors with the height of such boots?
The woman’s voice had gone quiet. Some agreement had been reached. But now Ellen was alight with urgency. She had to be back with Michael, but as soon as she could she went out into the bright spaceship-like hallways outside their room. Past the soiled linen containers, more crash carts, the hand sanitizer boxes affixed to each doorway. She caught a glimpse of tight jeans under a visitor gown and—yes, those black boots—disappearing into the women’s restroom by the elevator banks.
“Excuse me,” Ellen said, pushing in after her. “Why shouldn’t he be moved? My—well, my son is scheduled for later today.” Ellen glanced down the row of stalls—empty. “I heard you back in there, and … Please. Do you know something?”
The woman turned from the mirror to face Ellen. She was tall and strong, maybe forty. Her smeared black eye makeup looked like it hadn’t been washed off in days. Ellen tried to smile, tried to regulate her ragged voice, aware that she was far away from a normal social interaction. Suddenly afraid this woman would simply shrug, and dismiss her.
“How long have they had him in the coma? He’s got TBI, right?”
Ellen nearly swooned with relief. “It’s been three days. The last X-ray showed less swelling, but—”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “Propofol, right?”
“Yes.”
“All I know is, better to be in SICU when they bring them out to check function. It can get rough.” The woman twisted her long blond hair up and tied it into a knot. There were faint pockmarks on her cheeks, and her lips were chapped.
Ellen swallowed. “Rough how?”
“Psychosis, delirium. They get wild, in a nightmare you can’t calm them out of. And they can do a lot of damage before they’re sedated again. They can’t talk, they think they’ve been kidnapped and shit, they want to fight you. My girlfriend’s husband vaulted out of bed, and this woman told me—”
“Are you a doctor?”
The woman turned and gave herself a rueful smile in the mirror. “No. So don’t listen to me. Ask his care manager, or whatever they’re called.” She tousled her bangs this way and that, pushing them out of her eyes.
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine.” She went briskly into a stall. Ellen started to speak, but the rushing stream of urine covered up her words. When the woman came out a moment later, she looked surprised to see Ellen still waiting there.
“I apologize, that came out wrong. I can tell you know a lot about this, and I don’t and … I just don’t know if I’m getting the full picture—in there.” Ellen nodded in the direction of their room, brimming with tears of shame. “I don’t want to make any mistakes,” she whispered. She leaned back against the cool concrete wall and watched the woman push up the elastic sleeves of her gown and wash her hands, slowly and thoroughly.
“What I did was, I got them to agree to Eddie staying one more night and one more day in SICU. Also that they have to bring him up from the coma, at least for the first time, here and not on the ward.” They made eye contact in the mirror, ghosts in matching translucent gowns. “Try that. He’ll get a better shot.”
Thank you. Ellen breathed. And then she was gone in a rush of new energy, walk-racing as fast as she could down the achy-bright hallway to find Michael’s doctors, already organizing persuasive sentences in her mind.
* * *
That was awkward. Lacey skidded getting out of the elevator, nearly went down flat on her ass in the front lobby, had to hop around to get those booties off. She’d been bitchy to that woman, the gray-haired teacher type, but it was just auto-bitch, spillover from having to ream out the doctors. Not to mention the mother-in-law nightmare waiting for her back at Mologne, in the single room she, Lolo, and Otis were crammed into. Or the fact that Eddie had lost an eye, most of his sight, and an unclear but possibly significant amount of brain capacity. Or her negative bank account; the unpaid vacation days she was using up; those ten hours of sleep she’d gotten, in total, over the last three days.
Or the unmentionable, the unthinkable: Jim.
Wind whipped her hair and flattened her thin shirt against her body as Lacey crossed the hospital campus. Set far back from the entry gates on Georgia Avenue, the main building was called Heaton—an ugly 1970s-era behemoth, with tall thin pillars that appeared to struggle to hold up the flat bulk of the structure. You could use an underground tunnel to get places, but she went instead along the interior road that wound around the front of the Old Hospital. Why she liked to take this route, past the fountain and the great lawn and the white pillared grandeur of a building not even in medical use anymore, Lacey wasn’t sure. Even though it pissed her off, this “ye olde hospital” false face of Walter Reed—the one in the postcard photos at the gift shop—she was drawn to it as well. In the short space between the shit she’d left in Eddie’s room and the shit that awaited in her own, it was good to have these moments of walking, fast, in the wide silence of this open space.
Mologne House, where they were staying, had its own weirdness. As if insisting on its usefulness today, they’d slapped a giant futuristic awning on this red brick Georgian with a porthole up top. Automatic entry doors slid open and two guys in wheelchairs passed Lacey coming in. Her “hey guys”—tired but obligatory flirty tone—went unnoticed. More wheelchairs clustered at the bar in the lobby, where the implacable servers knew when to put a lid and straw on the beer glass, and how to cut someone off after the third time his mom called down to insist.
On the way up to the fifth floor Lacey bit her inner cheek: Be cool, be cool, be cool.
“And he just look at me like I’m not speaking English or like he’s a robot man—” When Lacey unlocked the room and came in, Lolo continued her diatribe, merely shifting it in a different direction. “‘What are we suppose to do about a sink that won’t drain?’ He don’t know. And the ones above us? All night long. All night, Lacey! With the music, it’s going bump bump bumpa bump right above my head.”
At Lolo’s imitation of house music Otis snickered, on the couch with his DS player.
“Right above my head,” Lolo insisted, and her voice shook.
“At least your head was in a bed,” Lacey muttered. Otis was sitting on what was her bed, a saggy pullout. She flopped down next to him and pulled him in for a hug, let him squirm away, back to the game.
“I’m hungry, Mom.”
“You just had lunch! And did anyone pick me up something?”
“We didn’t go.”
Lacey stared at Lolo, who shrugged defensively. “It’s crowded and the food is bad. Pasta, lasagna, every day. And the meat was off.”
“It’s subsidized! We can’t—”
“You could smell it! Bad, like it was sitting out for hours. I’m not feeding him that. What I could cook is—”
“You can’t cook here, Mom! There’s nowhere to cook! And we can’t keep ordering in, all right?” The army lodging advance was $150 a day, eaten up quickly by their room charge and service fees. Then she was supposed to get $64 a day for incidentals—i.e., food—but for some reason the actual disbursement turned out to be 80 percent of that (no one explained why), so that was $51.20, which was rounded down to $50 a day. Didn’t go far for three people. Especially when one of them needed a drink or three at the end of the day so badly she started counting down the hours before noon.
“I will pay for my own lunch,” Lolo announced stiffly. “And Otis too. But I will not allow my grandson to be sitting there with the hooligans, the way they drink and talk—”
“All right, Mom.” Lacey dug her wallet out of her bag and handed over a twenty-dollar bill. Ten left. “Get something from the chicken place. But save me at least one piece.”
Otis pumped his fist and reached for the phone. He let Lacey press her mouth and nose to his head while he ordered the food, and she breathed in his warm familiar boy-scent. Was he doing okay? He said so, but the one time they’d let him in to glimpse Eddie he’d gotten shaky and later pitched a fit about nothing, like a toddler. Also he was having bad dreams, Lacey could hear him moan and cry out from her couch in the next room. She’d go in to soothe him—Lolo in a deep sleep, flat on her back—and in the morning, he’d never remember, or admit to, what he’d been dreaming about. It’s what brought her closest to crumbling, this fear of how damaged Otis might become, by everything here.
Which is why she was sending him home tomorrow. Lacey took a deep breath. “Mom?”
“It still won’t drain. Come look at this. This is unacceptable!”
This is unacceptable? Still, she dragged herself into the small, worn bathroom. Lolo was gesturing wildly at a filmy inch of water in the sink, talking so fast Lacey could barely break in.
“So. You gotta take Otis back tomorrow. I’ll keep the car, and they think there’s a flight sometime in the afternoon.” Greyhound, is actually what the social worker had said to Lacey, but fat chance of that. Lolo was still going on about the sink. “Mom.”
“Leave him here? In the coma, with all the tubes, with…” The older woman faded out but Lacey heard what she didn’t say: With YOU?
“You’ll come back, in a week. In a few days, once I figure things out.”
“When he wakes up, he’s going to want me.”
“If he wakes up.”
“How dare you!” Lolo threw up her arms in the small space, to push away what had been uttered. “If that’s how you think, if that is your attitude—”
“Doesn’t matter what kind of attitude anyone has! And if you think that, you might as well go home and pray from there, all right?”
“But—”
“I can’t do all of it, I can’t. Be over there all night with him, then back here to take care of you and Otis, and then go stand in line at Benefits, and then call insurance for hours, and then back to Eddie…”
“So I do the papers. Give me the phone numbers and—”
“Also, Otis can’t miss any more school—”
“Tst. He’s a smart boy. He won’t—”
“You think it’s good for him to be here?” Lacey hissed. “I don’t want him just sitting around while we wait to see. Until we know which way it’s going to go.”
Lolo sucked in her breath. “Don’t.”
“All right.” Lacey had more—the worst part was still to come, didn’t she understand?—but she subsided. The toll had been taken: when she’d gone over to tell her mother-in-law about Eddie, Lolo had collapsed. And a couple of times over the next few days, she’d cried so hard she’d made herself faint. After that, Lolo’s breakdowns weren’t as severe, but they were still intense. Staff in ICU tried to restrict her to short visits with Eddie after the first time her sobs rocked the floor and she’d needed oxygen to recover. Now Lacey saw, in the harsh yellow bathroom light, the trauma’s reverberations in Eddie’s mother’s elegant face. A broken capillary snaked red lightning across one eye; flaky patches of skin ran down her jawline; sunken skin fell down around her eyes.
Lacey reached to gently brush back a tuft of her hair, only for Lolo to lurch back in a scowl. “Let’s do your face,” Lacey said, not reacting. “After lunch, we’ll go to him.”
Her mother-in-law glanced into the mirror above the plugged sink. Lacey could see her struggling to be nice. The dark bags under her eyes did it. “Yes.” She sighed. “He can’t see me like this.”
Lacey found her makeup bag, and neither woman commented on the words left hanging in the air. He can’t see me.
* * *
That night Ellen and Lacey seemed to be the only ones in SICU, aside from the staff, aside from Eddie and Michael. Each was aware of the other, in soft movements or noises from the other side of the room, or the occasional rustle of a yellow curtain. The men’s monitors beeped in low-toned counterpoint. Sometimes a nurse would speak to one of the women, and then she would step outside to the achingly bright hall, stretch her sore legs with a short walk, and then return to her chair.
Without discussing it, both Ellen and Lacey were determined to stay all night, this last night in SICU, in case through error someone tried to move either of the men. The three other soldiers that had been in this room were gone, moved up to one of the wards earlier today. Ellen felt the quiet emptiness of the room to be a reprieve, although she imagined the extra spaces, with their curtains drawn sharply back on the rods, would be filled with new arrivals at any hour. For now, though, there was a bit more peace.
Michael’s unmoving face was swollen and streaked reddish white. Catheter lines came out of each of his shoulders, and one threaded into an artery on his right thigh. A thin tube ran up his nose and a larger one was taped to his mouth. He wore a blue gown, stained in yellow patches from the iodine, which bunched up around his waist.
As she did several times a day, Ellen reached in carefully among the tubes and gently, slowly, tugged the gown down so it covered his genitals. In doing so, she avoided looking at the giant swaddled lump of bandages wrapped around where his left foot had been. Gone. It was gone.
In the shattered hours when she first arrived here, when they wouldn’t let her in for more than a few minutes at a time and the doctors said he might not live, the loss of one foot hardly registered with Ellen. It barely seemed to matter then. But tonight it was hard to face, the full contours of Michael’s body—uneven, unbalanced. Slightly but sickeningly out of order, like a broken toy.
On the phone that first day with Jane and Wes, they had all cried about his foot.
“Does he know yet?” Jane had said. “Mom, who’s going to tell him?”
One of the doctors would, Ellen supposed, once he was awake. Or, maybe, she’d have to. She wiped her face; a person waved at her through the glass panel on the door. Outside, she was surprised to see one of the volunteers with a cart; it was late for them.
“Saw you in here,” the man whispered, in his seventies maybe, smiling at Ellen and nearly bowing. “Take something, it will help pass the time.” Uncomprehending at first, she followed his gesture to the cart, where rows of books were neatly arranged.
“Oh. Well…”
“Do you like mysteries?” The old man whispered. He had a large button pinned to his shirtfront: I WORK FOR SMILES. “How about…” He tapped his fingers lightly along the creased spines. “This one, and—oh yes, this one. And one more. Here.” Ellen turned over the worn books he had put into her hands. Sin and a White Sand Beach. Lady Merley’s Secret. And, improbably, Northanger Abbey. She felt a slight flush of indignation on poor Jane Austen’s behalf, lumped together with the bodice rippers. Ellen handed the books right back; she couldn’t imagine reading here, now. But the little old man was persistent, pulling out another choice. “I’ll find you something, now let me see— Oh. No. Not this.” Vaguely curious at what he dismissed, Ellen glanced at the book he had quickly reshelved: red hardcover, no dust jacket.
“May I see that?” Astonished, she reached for the book. Yes, it was: A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton. Ellen laughed shortly. The chances of this particular book—one of Wharton’s least-known, worst-selling novels, published at a time when the public was eager to be rid of reminders of the Great War, rarely in print—appearing with these dusty hospital giveaways, to her of all people … it was a surreal shot-in-a-million. Though of course it made sense. Down the line someone made a well-intentioned mistake, thought from the title it might be rousing, inspiring, to a parent trapped in today’s version of war’s hell. Promptly discarded.
“I’ll keep this. Thank you.” Ellen brushed off the old man’s entreaties to try something else, something lighter. When he left at last, she pushed the book away in her bag. She wouldn’t read it, though. Reading itself was like a country she’d left, oceans away.
* * *
Meanwhile, on the other side of their shared SICU room, Lacey tried to pray. Eddie would expect it, everyone would expect it, and hadn’t she done it so many times before, in church and at every FRG meeting? Whenever bad news came about other women’s husbands? Well, now it was her turn, so she bent her head and mouthed the words printed on the tiny booklet:
Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ. Rest your weary ones. Bless your dying ones. Soothe your suffering ones. Pity your afflicted ones. Shield your joyous ones. And for all your love’s sake. Amen.
She crossed herself and put the booklet back into its plastic bag with the rosary, under no illusions that Jesus or God or any higher power would listen to what she had to say. Because even if she’d had no contact with Jim after sending him one text—Eddie hurt bad. Going to D.C. Don’t call—he was still in her mind. Somehow, bits and pieces of remembered happiness could float to Lacey’s awareness, during odd moments, like losing a dollar in a vending machine, or walking in the dark back to Mologne for a few hours’ sleep. What he’d say. His sideways smile. The way they just fit each other. Amid fear and chaos a small fierceness inside Lacey would sometimes assert: So I did find it, the real thing.
But. She touched Eddie’s warm wrist, her own eyes hot and dry. “Ah, babe,” Lacey whispered. “You deserve better, that is for fucking sure.” His head was almost entirely bandaged, with a steel halo fitted into the top of his skull after the craniotomy. White cotton was packed into the left eye socket, the one he’d lost immediately. The right eye was covered by what looked like a pink plastic soap dish. Three little stuffed animals, two bears and one kitty, were tucked in next to Eddie under his PIC lines and pressed against the bed bars. One held a sign that read ARMY TOUGH. Lacey plucked them out and tossed them on the radiator. She had no idea where these came from; every time she turned her damn back someone put another in his bed.
There was a chance his right eye could be saved. That there would be some amount of sight coaxed back by multiple operations after he was stable. If he became stable, off the vents and out of the coma. One of the residents had told her as much, probably just to get Lacey to stop haranguing him with what she knew. Then he tried to walk it back; most likely the eye would never function normally, and even if Eddie had some sight later, it might be just flashes or pinpricks of light, nothing usable. For all intents and purposes, he was blind. And she should resign herself to that, prepare for it, amid all the other injuries he had sustained.
“Yeah, okay,” Lacey had said, cutting off the standard cautions. She knew they didn’t want to raise patients’ hopes—and especially not the families’ hopes. But she couldn’t help it. If Eddie could just see a little … if he’d only get a tiny bit of vision, enough to walk around or avoid big obstacles or handle stairs …
Then what? Lacey couldn’t shake this secret inner wish. Did she think she’d get a pass on her sins, if Eddie could see? Would that make up for how wronged he’d been? It was stupid, but that didn’t matter, of course. If only, if only, she found herself thinking, whenever she caught sight of the pink soap dish.
* * *
There was no such thing as time in the SICU. Work continued around the clock, and there were few windows and no fresh air. Nor was there any change in lighting—fluorescent tubes ran the length of each ceiling, perpetually on, surgical spotlights rolled from room to room, and even the automatic glare of the bathroom fixtures whirred to life each time the door was opened, day or night. The only sign Ellen and Lacey had that it was 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. was the unfamiliar faces of the nurses and staff on shift. Every few hours they ate some version of the same foods—vending machine granola bars, instant cups of soup, endless coffee—and the wired bodily exhaustion was constant, not noticeably different now from the middle of the day.
Even the arrival of a young aide to bathe and change Michael in the predawn, the one who kindly offered his hand to help Ellen struggle up, stiff and slow, from the chair at his side—even that seemed right on time, appropriate in this never-ending loop of awakeness.
In this world only Michael was asleep. But not for much longer. She’d been told he would be brought out of the coma soon—6:00 or 7:00 a.m.—and kept on observation in SICU for several hours, before being moved, if all went well, to one of the wards. So this was it, Ellen thought. She had to leave the room, and she did, refusing to allow herself to look back, although dread—What if he…? What if this is the last…?—sloshed through each unsteady step she took down the hallway.
The waiting room, painfully bright with flowery vinyl-covered furniture, had magazines and a coffee machine. Ellen wanted neither. She sat, hands empty, and only then noticed her in the room’s opposite corner—the woman who’d told her to keep Michael in SICU, the woman with the boots (kicked off now, her bare feet propped up on a coffee table). She was texting, Ellen noticed, and when she glanced up Ellen called across the room, “Are you allowed to do that?”
“What?”
“All the signs out in the hall—no cell phones on this floor.”
“So?” Lacey kept scrolling her messages—Anne, Bailey, a couple work friends, Felicia, several other FRG women. She only ever wrote to Otis but read them all. Thank God Lolo barely knew how to use her cell phone.
“So maybe it causes problems with the machines. Interferes with the signal, like on an airplane.”
At this, Lacey looked up and studied the woman. Back straight, short simple hairstyle, quiet but with a definite no-bullshit aura. Teacher for sure, she thought. Must be her son in there. “It doesn’t work like that. The only reason they have those signs is so we’re not all zoned out by talking on the phone, clogging up the hallways and getting in the way. Ordering pizza.”
“Oh.”
“That was a joke. The pizza.”
“Yes, I know.”
Lacey went back to texting and Ellen pulled out her own phone and turned it on. Listening to all her new messages—Serena, Wes, Paul, Serena again—took some time, so she sneaked looks at the woman across the room. Slumped down on her couch, chin on chest, blond hair pulled up in a messy bun revealing darker roots underneath. Every few minutes she took a sip from a giant soda cup, or chewed its straw. Her face, though haggard and not quite clean, was intelligent … Must be her eyes, Ellen thought. They were a rich aquamarine. Stunning, actually.
But the last message drew Ellen’s immediate attention. Jane, pissed off. “I know you said to wait, but that’s not going to happen. That’s ridiculous, Mom. I need to see him. I gotta talk to him, as soon as he’s awake. Wes says … whatever. So I got a flight—” Ellen raised her hand and dropped it into her lap. Arriving at National at the end of the week, late at night apparently. No mention of where she’d be staying or who would be picking her up. Ellen herself, obviously. She hung up and thrust the phone back into her bag with a little more force than needed, causing Lacey to look over.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes. No, not really.”
“That’s the truth.”
“It’s just— My daughter’s coming. In a few days. Without asking, without even checking if it’s the right time for him to have people here … She has no idea what it’s like here. I told them, just wait until he’s more stable, when we know if … You know.”
Lacey nodded. She knew.
“This is just like her. Swoop in, no concern for what other people need.” No concern for me, Ellen thought. She should stop talking but once she’d started it just felt so good to let it out. “Seeing him like this … why? What does she think it will accomplish? Then I’ll be taking care of her, and I really don’t have the energy. Not to mention, she probably shouldn’t be traveling all around anyway.”
“Is she at school or something?”
Ellen let out a big sigh and shook her head. “Do you have kids?” she asked, trying to regain polite conventions.
“A twelve-year-old. My son, Otis. It’s not his son.” Lacey tilted her head back in the direction of the men’s room. Why did I say that? “We’ve only been married for a few years. But he was always a career army guy, so—‘what did you expect,’ right? Happens on my watch.”
“No one expects this.”
“I expected worse. The other thing. I didn’t think too much about this happening, about how it would go.”
“Yes,” Ellen exclaimed. “Me too!” She leaned forward. “When I first heard, I thought … I had this feeling that it was my fault, that I’d caused it.”
“How could you have caused it?” Lacey’s heart thumped. She’d felt, of course, the exact same thing.
“I realized that I’d spent so much time being afraid that he’d get—you know—that I didn’t worry enough about this. About just getting injured. ‘Just.’” At this, both grunted. “Magical thinking, I think it’s called.”
“What’s so freaking magical about it? If it was magic, we’d hardly be here.”
“Well, I meant—never mind.”
“I know what you’re saying. It’s like you forgot to picture all this”—Lacey swirled a hand at the flowered plastic chairs, the hallway, SICU, all of Walter Reed itself—“and so it happened. And you’re here.”
Ellen sat back. Yes. That was it exactly. The experience of being understood, to have someone speak aloud the deep inchoate belief so troubling that she hadn’t found words for it herself, rushed through her like a warm, salty ocean. Overcome by relief, she felt the sudden shakiness of having carried this burden so long.
The two women smiled at each other.
“I’m Lacey.”
“Ellen.”
“How did it happen to him. IED?”
Ellen nodded. Yes, she needed to focus. “A grenade, they told me. Michael was on a patrol, in Anbar somewhere, I don’t know exactly—” Lacey leaned forward. “He’d been outside a building, with his partner. And then—someone threw it into the road where they stood.”
“Ah, shit. And the other guy…?”
“He wasn’t hurt badly. So he was able to get Michael to safety, before he—” Before he could bleed out. Ellen heard herself speak the facts, but it felt as if they were someone else’s words. “What about yours?” She made herself ask, because this must be what one did.
“Still don’t know much. His Humvee was in some kind of explosion.” It made Lacey jittery, how little they were telling her. She cut off Ellen’s polite sympathy. “What time did they tell you they’d bring him up? Morning sometime?”
“Yes. I tried to get her to be more specific, but it was that head nurse at the desk, Ms. Jameson, and—”
“God, what a cunt.”
Ellen laughed. “Sometimes, yes. Did you hear the way she yelled at that poor woman who pressed the wrong call button? The one whose husband, both his hands were—”
“Yeah, I heard her.” Lacey thunked down her soda cup. “She told me I was going through too many gowns and if I wanted more spit cups to ask for them, not help myself from the cart. As if I’m not saving them time and effort. I’ve worked with bitches like that. Ones with the stick so far up their…”
“I know,” Ellen said. She was shivering with exhaustion.
“Like the details outweigh the big picture.” Now Lacey was striding back and forth. “Like she wins if she goes home at night having policed every tiny breach of procedure. Goes home solo to her sad cats in her sad one-bedroom—”
“Well—”
“Eats a low-cal dinner, and then gives herself an enema. For fun. What’s wrong?”
Ellen had slipped sideways on the vinyl love seat, and was trying to find a way to rest her head on her arm that wasn’t so painful. “I’m so— I can’t sleep but I just can’t be … All these lights, and it’s so cold…”
Lacey came over and sat in the adjoining couch. “Where are you staying? Mologne?”
“No—no, at the Marriott.”
“What?”
“The one in Silver Spring.”
“You’ve been there the whole time?” How rich was she?
Ellen sighed. “I’ll have to figure something else out. With Jane coming, for who knows how long … and also it’s just too much, all the highway intersections. I hate that drive, especially at night.”
“You should try the Mologne House. Better commute. Especially once they move him to Prosthetics.” Lacey stopped herself from saying and it’s real nice. Who knew what “nice” meant to someone with Marriott tastes?
“Oh, but I…” But I won’t be here that long, is what Ellen almost said, confused. But she’d have to be here, somehow—wouldn’t she? Who else? She raised her head an inch—it did feel better, lying down. “Is that where you are, the Mologne House?”
“For now,” Lacey said darkly. The truth was, she couldn’t afford it. Yes, it was covered, but being reimbursed was not the same as taken care of. She already owed one week back, and even if she moved to a smaller room now that Lolo and Otis went home—which, frankly, she didn’t have the energy for—there was no way. The social worker had mentioned something ominous about Building 18, a lower-cost option farther back in the hospital campus. Lacey knew nothing more except she was certainly headed for a downgrade.
Ellen pushed herself back upright, head pounding. She felt nauseated.
“You don’t look good. You should take a nap.”
“I can’t! What if they come and—”
“So, set an alarm. You’ve got your phone.” Lacey had been considering the same thing for herself, in fact.
But Ellen looked so out of it, greenish around the mouth and silvery hair smooshed up on one side, that Lacey didn’t push it. “All right. We’ll take shifts. You go first, and I’ll wake you up in thirty, forty-five max.”
“You don’t have to do that.” Voice wobbly. “I can’t—”
“Ellen. I won’t let them move him. I’ll get you up, if they come.”
The woman’s blue eyes were steady, determined. Ellen lay down again, grateful. She could trust a person with eyes like that. A soft poof of fabric fell down over her head; Lacey’s jacket.
“For a pillow. Or use it to block the light. I’ve got a sweatshirt back in the room,” Lacey said.
“Thank you. Just for a few minutes.” The jacket’s mingled scents: perfume, tobacco, and a faint, not-unpleasant body odor. Ellen let her eyes swoon closed. “Your turn next,” she murmured, as she heard the door open.
“My turn next,” Lacey agreed. Back down the hallway that led to Eddie, that led to whatever might come next.