There was almost nothing for Lacey to do on the Internet anymore. Where had she used to spend all that time? Facebook was particularly painful. Every other post was an FRG friend putting up a link about remembering the troops on Presidents’ Day—while you get a day off they’re fighting for our freedom—or reminding everyone about a blood drive or showing off photos of recent get-togethers. Lacey scrolled through as fast as she could, willing herself to not click on any of the smiling women, arms around each other, the kids she recognized, the parties she’d missed. There were a few private messages to her but she barely read them. Thinking of you. How is he? Praying for your soldier. She started to type Martine’s name in the search bar and then quickly closed the window. No, it was no good to spy on Martine, even though missing her could come on like a gale-force wind. How good it would have been to be able to go through this, even long-distance, with Martine. None of that “praying for your soldier” from Mart. No, she would have had some choice words about this whole situation, would have made Lacey laugh, would have let Lacey bitch about all of it here at Walter Reed, no judgment. Well. So much for that.
She was killing time in one of the computer labs in the Evaluation Board building. They were doing some tests on Eddie, Neuro this time. Memory games, language assessment, large and small motor movements. She hoped with all her heart he would fail them definitively. In the mammoth hive-mind that was the Benefits Admin, all these tests and decisions would add up to dollars someday, and they needed every one they could get, assuming that Eddie would never work again. Problem was, he was so damn good at these tests—he aced them in PT over and over again, and clearly he loved the praise from the aides when he did. How messed up was it that his success could be such a huge liability? Lacey didn’t trust those dopes in Benefits to have any common sense. With her luck, they’d probably rate him high just because he could walk an obstacle course using nothing but a cane and his superhero proprioception … never acknowledging that the man was now, essentially, retarded.
She listlessly checked the news, but her heart wasn’t in it. A bomb in Karbala kills four service members. Coalition forces announce a new curfew for M.A.M.s in Baghdad. Bush vetoes $124 billion spending bill by Congress because it includes a timetable for withdrawal by U.S. forces.
It floated far away from her, the significance of these facts. She was four floors underground in the belly of Walter Reed, surrounded by thousands of injured soldiers and on-duty soldiers and yet Lacey felt less connected to news about the war than she’d been in her kitchen in Mount Vernon, streaming Coldplay in the background.
Probably she was just jittery about Ellen. They’d pretty much ignored each other since the dinner party disaster last week. Not that Lacey missed her appointment with Mike yesterday. When she showed up at the right time, carrying two foam rollers, an exercise band, and a Dr Pepper (his favorite), Ellen had calmly stood up from her chair and ceded the room to her. The two of them had actually nodded to each other, like snooty royals passing in the castle hallway! Even Mike thought it was weird. “What’d she do to you?” he said. Lacey mumbled nothing and got him started on wrist rotations. She wasn’t about to bail on him, just because his mom, or whatever she was, had been such a bitch.
Mike was looking good these days, about to get his new leg. His doctors were happy with her work with him; they liked the increased mobility in his shoulders, his built-up core. When she teased him that girls were going to go crazy for a cute guy like him with a fancy new digital limb he got all blushy and grinning before he remembered to be all crabby and whatever, I don’t care, what do you know. It made Lacey wish she had a photo of him just then, boyish and carefree, to send to Jane.
Lacey swiveled side to side in the computer chair, clicking around aimlessly. The movement eased her pounding headache because it echoed it, matching the pain in her temples with the creak-crak sound of the chair’s squeaky axis. A guard in the front looked over with a sour face. Lacey ignored him. She was dully hungover from leftover wine from the party, the air in here was dry and cold, and no one else was at the computers.
It would soon be Otis’s winter break and he and Lolo would take the train down, to stay a whole week. It was too much: the ferocious need to hug her boy, hear his voice, coupled with the nerves and dread about dealing with Lolo. Eddie’s devotion to her may have driven Lacey nuts, but at least when he was all there upstairs she could share that duty with him. Now it was just her and Lolo as the only functioning adults. And her mother-in-law sounded practically perky these days when they spoke. She was going to all kinds of new support groups—Wounded Warrior Moms, Mothers for TBI Hope—and she was raring to go on taking care of Eddie.
Swivel, swivel, swivel. What else? Lacey guessed she could check e-mail, though she rarely did anymore. As expected, it was a depressing list of FRG events she wasn’t going to go to and didn’t care about, notices about Otis’s school stuff that she couldn’t attend, and one abrupt e-mail from her boss in reply to Lacey’s last week. She’d told him she wouldn’t be back “for the foreseeable future” (a phrase Ellen had recommended) and asked him to hold her job for her, based on seven years of good reviews (Ellen, again). His response, which Lacey had read without a shred of surprise, said basically, I don’t think so. The economy was tight (no shit) and since business was down it looked like Gwen could cover the cutback classes and walk-ins (thanks a lot, Gwen). So they were probably going to do away with her position eventually. So, in fact, she was doing him a favor by being off on her busted-husband hospital vacation! (He didn’t say that part.) Her private client e-mails had also fallen off, after a surge of initial “of course I’ll wait for you!’s.” Now they’d found other trainers, ones she’d recommended.
Work-wise, she was a free woman.
Lacey was about to log out when she glimpsed two blue unread messages at the top of the screen from an address at first she didn’t recognize. And when she did, it was as if someone had plucked her hard from within, down in the deepest part of her body. Leahy2005@aol.com.
The first was a photo of Otis, a full-color big file that took several seconds to unroll down her screen. Jim must have taken it when they went out to eat together. She put her hand to her mouth, stifling a short laugh, and a pinwheel of emotions. Otis was making a scrunched-up, whatchyou doing that for face, but there was a hidden smile blended in. She studied every minute feature: he was outside, it looked like the boardwalk at Orchard Beach; sunny, patches of snow on the ground behind him. He had his green parka on, and some new blue scarf that Lolo must have gotten him. His cheeks were pink, his hair was a little long, he looked bigger and older than she could have imagined, and Lacey rocked herself on the computer chair, eyes filling up. Her boy, her boy. What was she missing in his life while the days unspooled here in blank sameness? Why wasn’t she there with him, goddamn it all to hell. Fuck Eddie, fuck her promises to him that he couldn’t even remember now anyway. She wanted her boy.
Lacey wanted to know everything. It took all she had not to call Jim immediately—she hadn’t since that time in Whole Foods—to demand all the details. Where did they go? What did they do? What did he say? Does he miss me? What did he eat?
But then she clicked open his second e-mail and Otis slipped from her mind. The subject line read, Because I had to. And the e-mail had nothing, no message, only an audio file. A short line with a play button next to it. Lacey looked around the room, cheeks aflame. No one but the guard up front.
“Hey, um … do you have any headphones? Like, to borrow?”
“Say what now?”
“Never mind.”
Lacey clicked play. Warm, quick-thrumming chords came through the PC’s small speakers. They almost knocked her out of her chair. It was a Springsteen song and yes, he’d had to. Because even before the lyrics, the restrained urgency of this music—now, in this chilly room, filling her aching brain—sung every part of her ache and how tightly she’d been fencing it in. Maybe the singer was Bruce but it was Jim, and it was her own self too.
Lacey, with her eyes closed, drank the music in through her skin and every nerve ending. Let it all out when her favorite part came up, about staying hungry, about starving tonight. And when the guard mumbled a caution she sang louder. As it ended she held her breath as Clarence Clemons played them out on his sax, the rising tones lifting up, lifting higher. Blowing holy energy straight back into her bones.
“Sorry about that,” she called breezily, passing the guard on her way out. “But it’s the Boss.”
Now back to Eddie. And weirdly, that love song from Jim—if that’s what it was—gave her strength to tackle Benefits once again: the numbing forms, the redundancies, the mindless bureaucratic maze of offices spread out miles apart. Her phone buzzed with a text: My name is Lorna and we’re in Wd 57 w my son. Got your info from Ellen today and she says you do phys training? Jack is AK too and wants to work on his arms and abs. Your rate is fine, can you come this week? Also I know three other guys who are interested. Text me back ASAP pls.
Lacey had to read it twice. More work, actual money coming in? Ellen … who had recommended her? She had to break into a jog on the way to the elevator bank, slipping around the waxed hallway floor in her boots. What if … Maybe she could create a small group boot camp for guys on 57? Get the doctors’ buy-in, sweet-talk the nurses, charge a lower rate for a package of classes. Maybe they could use one of the conference rooms? Or what about the Healing Garden? High on ideas for what that money could do, and on Bruce, and on her sweet Otis arriving in a few days, Lacey was full up in her heart. She wanted a drink so bad; she didn’t need any kind of drink, ever again. Humming and planning and hurrying back to Eddie.