Lacey jerked awake, sweaty and gasping. Where was she? What was that noise? Slowly, it came back: the dusty, overheated room, Eddie’s bandaged face on the pillow near hers. The screeching noise was a power generator outside their window; even from four flights up they could hear it whine and thump all night. Now she let her heartbeat slow to its grinding wheeze, and felt around for her phone on the nightstand: only 12:10 a.m. She’d been asleep for less than an hour.
Days had been sliding together, and sleep was a natural casualty. After Otis and Lolo left—God, she missed Otis—there was nothing to make Lacey get up and get dressed. Often she stayed in the same clothes for days, throwing on a coat when she needed to take Eddie across the street for an appointment. She ate here and there, slept for large chunks during the day, and cared less and less about what the nurses, doctors, and staff might think about her greasy hair or limp jeans.
When the ATM wouldn’t let her take out another twenty or forty bucks, she waited until it would, getting a check here or there from MedFAC and taking as much free food as she could find. All of Eddie’s basic needs were accounted for, of course—meals and clothes and medical. But Lacey once had to sneak a handful of dressing bandages to use as menstrual pads. Though really, all she needed cash for was booze.
In her clearer moments—not that this was one of them, jarred awake, sweaty and disoriented—even Lacey would say that things were getting out of hand in that department. Instead of sitting in on Eddie’s therapy sessions or diagnostics or scans, anything that didn’t need her presence, she’d begun to go outside to “take a walk”—that is, sneak around in the woodsy areas behind those severe brick buildings to drink vodka from a flask. Right, only vodka during the day, or beer if she was back in their room. Brown liquors were for nighttime only. But making up all these rules, then praising herself for sticking to them—another was that she was allowed to drink more of the cheap stuff on the theory that eight-dollar bourbon wasn’t intended to be savored—well, she knew how dumb that was and what it probably meant. I’m not an idiot, Lacey told herself. Not one of those “I don’t have a problem” people. But did owning it make it better or worse?
Frankly, the only time she got it together was when she saw Ellen or Michael. She’d dry out—as much as was possible in a half day or so—shower, find a decent shirt, shoes. And put on a show. The funny thing was that pretending to be okay actually helped her, for a while, feel okay.
She’d gone over to Ward 57 twice so far for training sessions with Michael. If she’d worried that accepting money from Ellen would feel awkward, well, it did—but less so than being broke. It helped that Ellen herself was distracted and nervous around Michael. His sullen grouch routine really got to her, Lacey was surprised to see. She took it too seriously! Too personally. The right way—Lacey had sized that up within a minute of being in his room—was to get on him, not to take any shit, make sure he knew you had his number.
“Oh, is that too tough, Mike?” she’d said, that first day, when he balked at repeating the simple abs-and-arms circuit she ran him through. “Huh. Sure, I’ll modify it for you. My girlfriend does four sets of these, but…” Soon enough he was fighting her to give the weights back. Also it helped to speak up about his missing leg when he whined. “Off balance? Yeah, you’re off balance, because you’re missing a leg! That’s why you need to strengthen the rest. Let’s go.” It wasn’t hard; she could do that flirty-steel routine in her sleep. She and Gwen once did off-season training for a Jersey City arena football team, and this was a lot like that. Except for the bandaged-up half leg.
“He doesn’t respond like that,” Ellen said afterward. She’d heard all their laughter and banter from outside in the hall. “Not with any of the therapists here—”
“Well, duh. They’re part of this—” Lacey circled her arm around, meaning: Walter Reed. “And I’m not.”
“But not with me, either,” Ellen had said quietly. To that, Lacey could only nod.
* * *
No magic answers is what she told herself now, lying in bed in the dark with Eddie. No magic. Lacey rolled on her side to face him. Under the bandages, relaxed in sleep, his face looked young, unfamiliar. She gently touched his smooth upper lip, still so strange without the mustache. He flinched, twitching his nose, and she took her hand away. Lacey studied his swollen face on the right side. At her insistence—the Ocular guys argued there was so little hope that it was pointless—they’d begun some steroid shots in the nerves around his remaining, damaged eye. From what she’d read online, two surgeries were necessary: one to repair the nerves, and one to remove any debris still in the eyeball itself. But getting the surgeons to agree on, or even to admit to, a plan of treatment was like getting Otis to be excited about fish sticks for dinner. Why were they so opposed? You’d think these guys’d be raring to go when it came to slicing and dicing. If Lacey hadn’t been on them all the time—it was really the only thing she still had energy for—she got the sense they would have relegated Eddie to the lost cause file long ago. It was hard enough to stop Rehab from putting him in all these blind-accommodation courses. He’s not completely blind! she wanted to shout. Not forever, anyway. “Little lights,” Eddie had said once. That’s what he saw. Short flashes of light, which meant there was still a chance.
Carefully Lacey took his heavy arm and laid it across her chest, then waited. When that seemed okay, she scooched closer to his warm body and slid her leg between his. Lacey pulled up her T-shirt and maneuvered Eddie’s hand onto her breast, where it lay heavily, unmoving. She touched herself. Thoughts and memories, present and past, lit up the screen of her closed eyes and Lacey tried to ignore them, tried to get herself to the place where they didn’t matter.
Based on his last set of MRIs, and the continued disinhibition, it’s likely that we’re looking at some level of permanent damage to the prefrontal cortex. Language, emotional lability, memory loss.
The time he told her he didn’t like her on top; the time he said she was too loud in bed.
Oh that feels soooo good, doesn’t it? Look, he likes it! Eddie getting a sponge bath in SICU, head almost entirely wrapped except for his uncovered mouth, thick and loosened with physical pleasure.
The time he threw out her vibrator, disgusted. The time he said it wasn’t normal for the woman to want so much sex, after she’d had kids.
And Jim. Jim, Jim. What if it were Jim’s hand on her bare breast, what if it was his warm legs around hers. Lacey’s breathing got faster.
Scritch. Scrabble scrabble. Right under the bed! Lacey wheeled up just in time to see a small mouse streak across the room and disappear into the closet.
“Are you kidding me?” She flung off Eddie’s arm; he mumbled and rolled over the other way. Lacey sat up, filled with horror. A mouse, inches from her face. What if it climbed onto the bed while she slept? Made a nest in her fucking hair?
Right then, her cell phone rang and Lacey pressed ANSWER, too freaked out to take notice of the late hour.
“You’re not asleep, are you?” It was Ellen’s daughter, Jane, sounding not at all concerned that she might have been. Lacey heaved herself out of the bed and went into the living room. No more beer, which was what she really needed—throat dry, face flushed—but in back of the kitchenette’s one cabinet she found the last-resort-only bottle of mulled wine that someone had left on a holiday baked goods table.
“Clearly not,” she said, gagging from the sticky sweetness. “Gah. Hang on.” In the fridge was a liter of flat lime seltzer, and Lacey chugged just enough to be ready to face the wine again. “What’s up? How come you’re up?”
“Why go to bed when I’m up four times a night to pee? When does that stop?”
“When you have the baby. Only then, you’ll be getting up four times a night because of his peeing. And pooping. And needing to be fed.”
“Everyone tells me that like I don’t already know it. Anyway, we’re going to co-sleep.”
“Whatever. You can’t co-diaper, or is that a thing now too?” Lacey sat cross-legged on the sagging couch with both bottles nestled on her lap. She listened to Jane launch into another diatribe against Ellen—it had a slight variation but the standard theme, she doesn’t get me—and kept a worried eye out for any mice movement in the corners of the room.
These phone calls from Jane, meandering late-night talks, probably weren’t the smartest idea. Lacey wasn’t sure why, but she knew enough not to mention them to Ellen. They’d started a few weeks ago when Lacey, bored one night and half drunk and lonely but pretending to be concerned about Jane after Ellen had sent her away (that’s how Jane always put it, “when Mom sent me away”), had sent her a short text. Who knows what it said, something along the lines of you ok? But possibly Jane was feeling as bored and lonely because seconds later Lacey’s phone rang, and what should have been a short conversation stretched to almost an hour. Neither of them had a lot to do at night. This had continued, off and on, and although Lacey wasn’t kidding herself that Jane wanted much more than a willing ear for her to vent about her mom, she sometimes tried to slip in a few pieces of relevant information: Yesterday Michael got a 95 on one of the cognitive tests, but he’s calling it 100 and claiming he’s always been color-blind so the color-matching section isn’t relevant. He’s gonna get another surgery soon, but this is a good one—move some nerves around so his C-leg will work better. Hey, how does your mom get ahold of so many damn books, even out here? I barely finish one and then she’s got me into the next. With typical teenager self-absorption, Jane rarely asked about any of them at Walter Reed, how Lacey was, or how her mom was holding up. Still, Lacey thought she could detect care in there, hidden under the required blasé.
“Four more months,” Jane said now, apropos of nothing.
Lacey could barely remember what week it was. “So … April something?”
“Yeah.”
“You getting scared? About the birth? Don’t worry—once the drugs kick in it’s really not that bad.”
“I would never get an epidural,” Jane sniffed. “It stays in the baby for up to a week afterward. They’re sleepier, they—”
“Ha! You should be so lucky, ‘they’re sleepier.’ I don’t think Otis went down once for a nap longer than thirty minutes until I put him in day care. And even then I don’t know what he did, but it wasn’t my problem from nine to five.”
“Did it … was it really bad?”
Lacey drank, first some cough syrupy wine, then flat seltzer. Should she mix them? “Which part?”
“When he … came out. The stitches, and all that. I once had to get stitches on my chin and Mom says I almost passed out when I saw the needle. I really, really, really don’t like the idea of needles. Down there.”
“Yeah, well … luckily you can’t see any of it; you’ll barely notice what they’re doing down there. And by that point you’ll be holding him. Or her. Think about that. Holding your baby. One moment they’re not alive, and then they are, and you’re holding them. I mean, it. Him, her, you know.”
“Mm.”
“Look, it’s normal to feel freaked out by it. But Jane, I gotta say—” Or did she? Lacey went ahead anyway. “If that’s the biggest fear you have, you’ll be fine.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Your mom is totally willing to house and feed both you and the kid for an indefinite—”
“I didn’t ask her to do that! Nobody’s making her be all in charge. She just wants to run my life, that’s all that is.”
“Will you grow up for a second? I know you think you and I have all this in common, like, the single mom thing. But I would have given my right tit for my mom to be able to let me and Otis live with her rent-free, not to mention even give a shit how I’d handle everything. I took a cab home from the hospital, with this little baby on my lap. I had no idea.”
“Just because we have, like, some money doesn’t mean—”
“She loves you. You hear me? She isn’t here because she’s choosing him over you, or some shit like that. She’s here because no one else would be. And it sucks, everything—” Lacey had to take a quick chug of sweet wine to cover a sudden fierce wobbliness in her voice. “Everything here sucks. So maybe cut her a little slack.”
Jane was quiet. So, maybe that did it. Now this girl would hang up on her, stop calling, go ahead being pissed off. Would Lacey now be forced to read, while drinking, until she could sleep again? She eyed Ellen’s latest, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which she was two chapters into and actually kind of enjoying.
Except Jane stayed on the phone. “All right. I mean … whatever. Can we change the subject?”
“Definitely.” Relief. And in the girl’s vulnerable bravado, Lacey suddenly heard echoes of Bailey. Bailey, from her FRG group, a million years ago. What had ever happened with her? Was anyone looking out for her? Lacey pictured her, and then Anne Mackay, and then Martine and Felicia and the women in the group she’d led and Aimee, someone who’d lost her husband, and all the others. They hadn’t totally stopped trying to reach out to her—except for Martine—but Lacey’s silence to every call or text must have let them know to back off. Or maybe they’d moved on, busy counting down the days until deployment ended and real life resumed.
If she wanted to, she could find a different mil-wife activity to join every hour here at Walter Reed. Flyers abounded; there were prayer groups and errands co-ops, support groups and mentors and volunteer opportunities everywhere she turned. Yet Lacey stayed away.
It was like she was floating alone in outer space, tethered only barely to a life where all of that mattered. How busy she used to be, running from work to FRG meetings and back again, helping out and dragging Otis along for the ride. And all that time, ignoring the fact of Eddie, who he really was and how they were not meant to be. Filling up her days with military stuff, everything and everyone except Eddie.
And now here they were, the two of them. One broken in the head and the other—Lacey let herself think it, go ahead and wallow—broken in the heart. Alone.
“Will you tell me some stuff about, like, the fun parts? When he first walked or … cute things he said. I need something to look forward to.”
Lacey took a deep breath. “Fun parts, fun parts. There are fun parts?”
“Not cool.”
“Yeah, I’m kidding. All right, let me think.” Drink. “Okay. One time—there’s this book, Goodnight Moon? It’s like a—”
“Oh my God, Lacey. I know about Goodnight Moon!”
“So anyway. I’d read it to him a thousand times, he was about two or something. It’s really basic, just good night this and good night that. I used to pray it was going to make him sleep through the night. Wait. ‘In the great green room, there was a telephone. And a red balloon. And a picture of—’”
Jane chimed in. “‘The cow jumping over the moon.’”
“That’s really weird, now that I’m thinking of it. Why the telephone? Is that the most important thing in the room?”
“This is what my mom would call deconstruction. She’d give you an A.”
“Well, this one time, after we’d finished reading, he was in his pajamas, the zip-up footie kind…” Lacey closed her eyes, her body vividly remembering the warm weight of Otis then, his wiggly chunk of a body, the softness of his cotton fireman pajamas. “I was carrying him over to his crib, and we had this thing where I had to fly him there, like zoom him around the room before dumping him in. And he was in my arms, facing up to the ceiling and I was…” Lacey swayed, on the couch, cupping her arms. “And he was staring up, and he whispered, ‘g’night moon, g’night stars.’” She held still, there again with her baby.
“Wow. That’s adorable. Was that, like, his first words?”
Lacey opened her eyes. “No. He’d been yakking for a while.” She wouldn’t explain more, about the magic of that moment, what it was like to be there when little O sent up his own whisper-prayer to the moon and stars. It was okay if Jane didn’t get it.
Jane yawned. “One more thing. I don’t know how else to do this, but … do you think you could tell Mike a couple of things for me? Or, you know, let him know some stuff?”
“What stuff?” The thick gooey wine kept Lacey from being as alarmed by this request as she maybe should have been.
“Oh … Just some things. I’ll figure out how to get it to you. Like a letter for him, or something you can tell him from me. When she’s not around, obviously.”
“Look, I don’t think I should get between—”
“It’s nothing serious, I promise. I just want some privacy without her all in my business. You know?”
Lacey did know. Maybe she should have refused, but she couldn’t help it. She knew about being young and messed up and in love. Fuck, she knew about being older and messed up and in love too.