Two nights later, fifteen people crammed into Lacey’s one-bedroom apartment in Building 18, and Ellen thought she must have been mad to arrange this. Shelby still hadn’t arrived, thank God, because the spaghetti sauce had to finish cooking and there wasn’t enough room on the stove top to boil the water at the same time. So she’d have to finish the sauce, store it somewhere (not in the minifridge, not on the nonexistent counter, maybe on the coffee table?) while she used both burners to try to heat up water—a giant pot borrowed from the Mologne House restaurant—for the noodles. She could only hope the two big bowls of salad, stacked on top of each other on the floor, weren’t wilting too badly. Lacey had solved the problem of drinks by emptying hers and all her neighbors’ trash cans and filling them with ice, soda, and beer. There were also bottles of wine teetering on every available surface, including the small radiator cover. Eddie had helped her strip the bed, push it to the wall (which only gained a foot or two of space, but still), and then cover it with a plain sheet. So now women were lounging on that, laughing and talking.
People don’t turn their noses up at a party, Ellen told a worried Lacey. Especially not here, not now.
What was Lacey so nervous about, anyway? She was drinking even more than usual, which wasn’t good. Ellen kept giving her little tasks to try to take her away from the beer, but Lacey eventually snapped at her: This was your idea and I’m not the help. Yes, it was a cramped, ugly place. But everyone knew it wasn’t hers. And since when did Lacey care what other people thought, Ellen told herself, wiping perspiration off her forehead with a paper towel, awkwardly aware that she was springing Shelby on her friend without warning.
People kept coming in. Some Ellen recognized from Mologne and Ward 57. Others she didn’t. The word had spread, as she’d wanted it to. Women came bearing boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts, liters of Sprite, a pizza from the place up on Georgia Avenue. One plunked a giant can of cheese dip in the middle of Ellen’s carefully trimmed crudités. Several of them shed coats and immediately pitched in to help out in the kitchen, sizing up its limitations and adjusting seamlessly. They hand-washed pans and dishes, they wiped up spills. They set out napkins and plastic forks and paper bowls.
A few injured soldiers turned up. One man missing a hand was demonstrating how he could spin his electronic prosthetic 360 degrees. A few others poked their heads in but lingered in a group just outside in the hallway. Eddie was there, of course, in a seat of honor—one of the only available chairs—and he was quiet, maybe taken aback by all the new voices, all the motion around him.
The rest of the partygoers were women. Moms, sisters, wives, girlfriends, daughters, cousins, aunts. They didn’t seem to care that it was standing room only or that dinner wasn’t nearly ready. They didn’t bother to introduce themselves or find the host. Coats and bags were piled in Lacey’s small closet, and the drinks were flowing. Ellen caught snatches of cross-talk as she balanced the sauce pot onto the sink—Yeah, I’ve seen you on Fifty-seven; how’s he doing? Anyone else see a red-tail fox in the woods out by PT? You mean a fox like an actual animal? Who goes outside?—but she’d forgotten to fill the pasta pot with water first. An older woman, no English, picked up the sauce using her sleeves as oven mitts and nodded at her to go ahead; I’ll hold this.
As soon as the water was set to boil—it might take an hour—Ellen saw Shelby in the doorway, holding her coat and a bottle of wine. She waved her over and gave her a one-armed hug, mindful of her spattered apron.
Shelby’s eyes were roving the crowd. “I owe you my firstborn.”
“Sure, go mingle,” Ellen said. “I’m afraid dinner will be on hold—”
“Is everyone here from Building Eighteen?”
“Some. Some stay in Mologne House, like me … I suppose you want to go cultivate some contacts.”
“Yes, but first—” Shelby took out her phone. “Do you think your friend would mind if I gave myself a little self-tour? Nothing personal of course. Just to get a sense of the—” She took a photo of the buckled linoleum under their feet, the rolling hills that Ellen kept tripping on.
“Well there’s not much more than you’re already seeing, and there are people in the bedroom, so…”
“Great, thanks.”
“Wait.” Ellen held Shelby back by the arm. “I can’t feel right about this, entirely, if I don’t know what’s going on. What is the story? Please tell me.”
Shelby nodded. “It’s about the conditions here at Walter Reed.”
“Conditions? You mean the treatment for the soldiers?”
“No. Nothing to do with the medical side. It’s conditions here. The ones she’s living in, and others like her.” With that, the reporter aimed her phone at a cabinet door half off its hinges.
Before she could think this through, someone knocked over the salad bowls and spilled lettuce that needed to be scooped up off the floor and thrown away. Ellen decided to set out the salad for serving, and that involved finding room on the sole coffee table, not having any serving utensils and deciding to pick up the bowls and essentially dump out salad onto whoever held a paper plate out for her. The Pyrex mixing cup of her homemade vinaigrette was passed from hand to hand. (She noticed more than one person flicking pomegranate seeds out of the lettuce to the side of their plates.) Meanwhile, the pot boiled, the spaghetti needed to be stirred—where was the long-handled spoon?—and it was foggy and hot in this room where the windows couldn’t be raised more than two inches.
“Have you seen Lacey?” she asked two women in the bedroom doorway.
“Who’s Lacey?”
Eventually the spaghetti with sauce was dished out to anyone who wanted it, or to those who hadn’t already filled up on pizza and doughnuts. Ellen perched on the side of Eddie’s chair, after asking him if it was all right. Conversation loosely ranged around the room before coalescing into the one topic they all had something to say about.
“Remember that day last month when they actually held formation, out by the old Red Cross building, with the snow?”
“I remember the temperature. Negative fourteen, they said on TV.”
“Sorriest-looking bunch of soldiers ever, not even any snow gear. That can’t help morale.”
“What would happen if the army couldn’t actually give some dumb orders one day?”
“How many documents have you filed this month? I did fourteen at, like, four different commands.”
“Ha. Try twenty-two.”
“Four different commands? I been to that many this week.”
“Did you hear about that family, you know—the mom is from Tennessee, she’s got that real cute accent?—she was telling folks that Processing II couldn’t find any record of her boy having been to Iraq. Not one thing in the computer. She was like, ‘C’mon up to Heaton and he can prove it to you pretty fast.’”
“But they’ve got a new system now—or is that Processing III? We got a visit from a Staff Sergeant Michaels who—”
“The one with the burns on his neck? He’s a patient too! He lives in Mologne with his mom! The two of them decided to take matters into their own hands, and God bless. They made up an Excel document, and we’re on their e-mail list now. You should too.”
“Someone’s doing that on our ward too. After one of the young Marines went postal at Processing I.”
“Yeah, I heard that.”
“Don’t blame him. And my son’s headaches are so bad when he moves around. With the lights, you know? I hate having to bring him to all those different offices. Once we had to leave before they even saw us, and we were waiting at least an hour.”
“At least you knew when your appointment was. Jared says he keeps getting calls and stuff about where he’s supposed to go and when, but he forgets. One time we were here for over a week without talking to one person other than the nurses. Not one doctor, not one admin, no social services, nothing. I thought I was going to go crazy.”
“Like Kafka.”
“Like you’re here but they don’t even know it.”
“How many times have y’all seen some poor young boy wandering around by the Fisher House looking for a building he can’t find? I help one of them every other day it seems. And they are out of it, I’m telling you.”
“Yes! That area is ridiculous. How does it go? There’s Building Twenty-nine and Twenty-five over on that one side … and then, what? Nineteen and…”
“Thirty-four next to it.”
“No, Thirty-five!”
“Yes, Thirty-five, and then the ones in a row on the south side are, um, Building Thirty, where we went for uniform req—twice, because they lost our form—and then Twenty-six next to it, and Twenty-two next to that.”
“Whose genius idea was it to name them with numbers, huh? Building Eighteen. I mean, really.”
“Who do you think? Same guys who probably signed off on the ‘preexisting condition’ of my brother’s ulcers that he gets. Now they’re finding ulcers. Guess what that’s gonna do to his chances for disability?”
“But he was good enough to send over there. Damn.”
“Did anyone get to meet Miranda Lambert? She came onto the ward last week. She’s real sweet. Signed all this stuff for Freddie. And climbed onto his lap for a photo! He was in heaven.”
“Miranda who? We got that guy from Seinfeld. And John Stamos.”
“Jerry Seinfeld was here?!”
“No, one of the other guys.”
“Oh.”
“We don’t get anyone in Fifty-two. They all go to Fifty-seven.”
“Gotta get that promo shot with a real live amputee!”
“Don’t you love when the cameraperson subtly tries to get you out of the frame?”
“Keith Urban, the guy from Top Chef, that woman from Sopranos, and a couple of football players. He was asleep each time. They left signed photos. And T-shirts, of course.”
“God, I’m tired of all those T-shirts. I’d give them away, but they say shit like ‘They Bleed Red, So We Wear Red.’ Who the hell wants that?”
“There’s this place where they can turn them into quilts—”
“No one wants another damn quilt! These are young men, not some old grammas!”
“So, did you all hear about that mom who was so freaking tired of being late to PT because of the shuttle schedule that she, like, commandeered one that had the keys in it and drove a whole bunch of people around on the route, dropping them off and making pickups? And then just left the van outside PT when she and her boy went in there.”
“She’s my hero. That shuttle is the bane of our existence.”
“Who else was in Mologne for the fire drill that time?”
“Was that a drill? I heard one of the guys pulled it. Drunk, obviously.”
“Well, either way it was a scene. Whoever could had to fireman-carry the guys down who can’t walk, three flights, and then there was this line of moms passing down their wheelchairs.”
“Yup. We was on that brigade. My shoulders were sore for a week afterward.”
Ellen hung on every word. Lacey reappeared in the doorway, listening in with a few other younger wives. She pointed at Eddie once: Is he okay? And Ellen rubbed Eddie on the back and nodded. Throughout the main conversation hovering around the living room couch, Shelby wove in and out, talking quietly with women one-on-one while always keeping one careful ear on the conversation. Ellen didn’t see her take any notes, although she handed out several business cards, writing something on them.
She wished Serena could be here. She wished Jane could be here. Both of them would love this group of women naming, solving, and laughing together about all these problems, large and small. The visual of all of their men, back at Heaton right now or in PT or thickly asleep from their medicine—as happened to Michael, a scarily deep sleep more like unconsciousness than real rest—affected her deeply, that each woman was tethered to pain and injury and loss with a loved one, even while they forked up soggy salad and glutinous pasta. (Ellen could admit she’d been bested by that abominable kitchenette.) All those times Serena had made her attend town hall forums against the war. All those animal activist meetings Jane went to. Ellen never felt she could fit in. Life on the page is where she’d felt at home. In fact, there was barely any occasion she could remember, outside time with Jane and Wesley, where, if she wasn’t wishing she was off alone to read, she was comparing life to a book, or remembering a book, or making a mental note of a book to read in the future. Until now.
I made this happen, she thought to herself. Looking around at the animated faces of women talking. Me.
“You got another spray cleaner?” Someone called to her. Ellen touched Eddie briefly, then went to join the two women who were valiantly attempting to wipe down the greasy sink and counters. They were grimacing at the ineffectiveness of Ellen’s all-natural eco-product. “Anyway,” the first woman went on. “All a sudden he can’t stand to be around me. Nuh-uh. Oh, I’m fine when there’s something he needs done but other than that … Tch.”
Her friend laughed in agreement. “Mine gets real shifty-looking, with his eyes? Here I am saying something to him, and he’s looking all around the room like there might be someone else he could talk to instead.” She mimicked the darting desperate eye movements. “Sorry! No one else in your room but me.” They cracked up.
Ellen eagerly joined in. “Are these your—what ward are they on? And do you think it’s related to PTSD? Because mine’s been going through the same thing, sounds like—”
“Ha. No, these are some at-home kids we talking about. My nephew, her younger boy. Two of a kind, sounds like—God love them.”
“Oh.” Ellen was confused. “I thought…”
“Teenagers,” the second woman said, putting a sympathetic hand on Ellen’s arm. “There’s no cure for it.”
After some time, most of the older women left and it became a primarily younger, noisier crowd. Bottles of liquor had appeared, and the women got louder and rowdier. Luckily Ellen had plenty of help clearing places and bagging up trash. There was nowhere to put these bags except out in the hallway, where she unwillingly lined them up against the wall. On one trip out there, Lacey appeared and grabbed her hand.
“The goddamn toilet is plugged and I can’t fix it!” Her face was lightly coated with sweat—so was Ellen’s—and puffs of warm alcohol blew out with her breath. “What am I going to do?”
“Did you plunge it?”
“With what plunger? And I called Building Services but of course no one answered. Ellen, it’s about to overflow!”
“All right. Let me think. Did you try jiggling the handle?”
“That’s what you do when it keeps running, not when it’s disgusting and backlogged!”
“’Scuse me?” Someone stuck her head out into the hall. “Kind of seems like your toilet isn’t working?”
Lacey looked stricken. Then a teenager came out, leading four or five people down the hall. “Mom says they can use our bathroom. 3G. Stay in line, no cutting!”
“See? Problem solved.” But Lacey wasn’t comforted. If anything, she looked angrier.
“Listen. What were you doing, inviting that reporter here?” she blazed. “Without asking me? Huh? I mean, we don’t know her. She’s not part of … this.” She circled her arm around, at the hallway, the garbage bags, the line for another bathroom.
“I did tell you, remember I said I’d been meeting with this woman and she was really interested in learning about—”
“She’s a snoop! And she’s in there right now, taking notes about how banged-up my husband is. What is she, gonna make a little article about how cuckoo he sounds when he barks like a seal? So everyone can read about us?”
“Oh, Lacey. That’s not it, not at all.” She hated how trembly Lacey was, arms crossed over her chest. And wished to God she hadn’t drunk so much. “No one would think that way. But that’s not what she’s—”
“I’m sorry … Mrs. Diaz?” This was Shelby, now appearing in the hall. “Is there a problem?”
“I was just explaining that what you’re working on isn’t about the actual injuries of our—of the soldiers.” Ellen prayed that this was right. “We’re not sure we want any coverage of how they are, right now. They’re still recovering, after all.”
“There won’t be any coverage of anything, unless you agree.” Shelby’s glance shifted from Ellen to Lacey and back again. “This is me trying to understand what living here is like for you.”
“Oh yeah? It’s not some gotcha journalism where you’re gonna try to get Eddie to say bad things about the army? He’s on ten different drugs! I don’t know if he knows where he is!”
“Absolutely not,” Shelby said. “Mrs. Diaz—”
“Christ. It’s Lacey.”
“Lacey,” Shelby said, smoothly restarting, “we are not asking you for anything you wouldn’t want to tell us. Outpatients like your husband outnumber inpatients at Walter Reed twelve to one. There is a literal overflow of men being warehoused in substandard buildings like this one. Why should you and Major Diaz have to stay in a place with mold on the walls and broken fixtures? What about when your son comes to visit?”
Lacey shook her head, not buying it. “You know how much Mike’s prosthetic leg costs?” She pointed at Ellen. “It’s top-of-the-line shit! Plus, all the refitting and adjustments and therapy and … All of it, taken care of. Forever! For all of them! How about she does a story on that?”
“No one’s saying—”
“Thing is, you’re not the only one having trouble,” Shelby added. “You heard everyone in there. The endless bureaucracy, the disorganization…”
“Whining about the army. That’s original.”
“Maybe your story, of what it’s like to live here … maybe it could help other families who are in your shoes. You deserve better, and we want to tell that story.”
“I deserve better. I deserve better.” Lacey tipped sideways in her heeled boots and Ellen caught her elbow, which she yanked away. “Look, maybe you two never had to live in a place with roaches and mice before. Right? ‘Oh, this is awful, this is terrible, we better put this in the newspapers.’ Don’t come into my place and start telling me how shitty it is. I know exactly how shitty it is. Go find someone else to be your patsy.”
“Lacey. I’m—” Ellen reached out to her.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know about us!” she shrieked, backing away. Pointing at them. “How do you know what I fucking deserve. Get out of here!”
Before either of them could stop her, she ran back into her apartment and slammed the door. And Ellen stood there, in her sauce-stained apron, wrecked.
“Well, that could have gone better,” Shelby said, sighing. Then she took a picture of the garbage stacked along the wall.