Lacy sat alone at the window of her dorm room, watching the street below awaken from its long summer nap. Cars parked and doors slammed. Teenagers dragged suitcases ahead of parents loaded with boxes. Everywhere families completed the Labor Day ritual, settling in their young Longhorns and then, after hugs and tears, driving away with empty cars. Lacy scoffed at the maudlin scene. She opened her copy of The Return of the King to a dog-eared page and rejoined Gandalf and Pippin at the siege of Minas Tirith. But the midday heat left her languid. She fanned herself and gazed out the window again, down the street and up to the Tower, where Charles Whitman had opened fire her sophomore year. Thick clouds were rolling in. And like Sauron’s darkness creeping across Middle Earth, Lacy sensed a portent in their weight.
A knock startled her from her reverie. “Miss Adams?” a voice drawled. “It’s Miss Clifton, from down the hall?” Lacy waited. She hadn’t had a single visitor her first year of grad school, or the whole summer. She chose this dorm, with ten black girls and tons of vacancies, precisely because it was a ghost town. And what was the point of lying to her mother about living in a mixed hall, Lacy groused as she opened the door, if not to get some peace and quiet?
“Hello,” the dark-skinned girl began, “I’m Helen Clifton.” Lacy watched her through the narrow crack. “A junior? Sorry to interrupt. My fiancé’s stationed in Da Nang, north of Saigon, and in his last letter he mentioned a soldier in his company who has no one to write home to. A white gentleman. And I thought if you had the time—”
“He wants a pen pal?” Lacy asked. “Any old stranger for a pen pal?”
The girl stared at Lacy and handed her a slip of paper. “His name is Aaron Warner, from Midland. That’s the address, if you want to do something for our troops in-country.”
Lacy shut the door and threw out the paper. For the rest of the day, as she lay reading in her underwear, she thought back to the intrusion. She didn’t want to be reminded of what was going on over there. Nobody wanted to see it on the news—piles of bodies, or monks in flames, forests stripped by chemical plague down to ashen netherworlds. Then twilight came. Lacy imagined the night ahead. Trudging to the hall kitchenette for her TV dinner, with the foods in their separate squares. Eating at her desk, not talking to a soul, reading Asimov or Bradbury until she tired her eyes out enough to sleep. Loneliness gathered into a cold spot in her chest. She found her hand reaching into the trash. Slowly, almost indifferently, she took her best fountain pen and a sheet of the monogrammed stationery her mother insisted was a hallmark of proper ladies—even lost causes like Lacy—and composed a letter.
September 1, 1969
Dear Mr. Warner—
My name is Lacy Adams. I received your name from the fiancée of a gentleman in your company, who thought you might like a pen pal. She suggested your family were not the best correspondents. I’m no stranger to those sorts of things. I was raised on a farm where we fattened our anger and resentment right beside the cattle. I am pursuing a PhD in chemistry at UT Austin. I know nothing of yours, but I am of a serious disposition.
As an organism, there are two ways your tour could end—1. You could come home, or 2. if not, your valuable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur will be returned to the earth to create new life. (That’s a joke.) In seriousness, I appreciate your sacrifice. Whatever anyone thinks of this war, your service is something our country never asked of me, or any woman, and for that you have my gratitude. If you ever need a friend on a long night, my address is below.
Very truly yours,
L.A.
In the morning, as the mailbox swallowed the letter, the thought crossed her mind of whether Aaron would respond and what she might have gotten herself into. Lacy shook it off. She’d had twenty-three years of being herself, and all the good that did her, and she figured she could scare off a guy halfway around the world as fast as she did here at home. In stockings and cashmere twinset, she marched to the chemistry building, popping a stick of Juicy Fruit to calm her nerves.
It was the moment Lacy had worried about all summer: would she finally get placed in a lab with faculty, like the rest of her cohort, and launch her career? She entered the office with jaw clenched on her gum and took the envelope from her mail cubby. By letter from Department Chair Wallace, she learned instead that for the third straight semester she would grade undergrad problem sets if she wanted to keep her fellowship. Tears swelled, threatening to blow her meticulously serene exterior.
“Miss Adams.” A hand patted her shoulder as Wallace hurried through the office. He turned at the door and smiled blandly. “Always a lovely sight.”
They watched each other. In his face Lacy could recall every expression she had cataloged since her freshman year—his bemused smile when she declared her major, the wrinkled amazement when she said she applied to the PhD program. The man who controlled her fate, who gave her money to live so she’d never have to ask her mother for anything again. Gone, out the door. She sank into a chair, pressed a Kleenex to her eyes, and told herself for the millionth time that there was no problem, she wasn’t a problem, and science wasn’t for the fainthearted. She checked her watch; she was late for biochem. And without a better idea of what to do, she rose and soldiered on to class.
One Monday evening, while Lacy sat grading in her room, she heard the labored steps of the housemother distributing the mail. For the first time in more than a year her feet paused at Lacy’s door. Under it whisked a letter with Private Warner’s name and hers printed on a dirty envelope. She tore it open. Dear Lacy was scrawled in a wild hand, followed by words and dark boxes all over—phrases blacked out with a marker, whole lines at a time. She squinted, looking for a full sentence, as random bits dashed into view: dying clock ticking … people in the trees … losing my mines … and near the bottom a repeated stream of look ma no hands!!!
Lacy stuffed the letter in her desk drawer and locked it. But after one look, Aaron’s words had already begun mutating in her head into a voice she could not quiet. For days she barely slept and stumbled through her classes, imagining the man who wrote them. And then, on Friday evening, the housemother paused again and four more letters shot under her door. He’s writing me every day, Lacy thought with a shiver as she locked them away, unopened, that week, and the next. Yet with each letter her fear was gradually inflected with mystery. Why did he keep writing? What lay behind the redactions? What if Aaron was trying to tell her something and she’d done nothing to decipher them after promising friendship?
She held out until late on a Saturday night. The girls down the hall cranked their Motown and sang along, turning gray skies blue, their voices echoing off the walls of the empty dorm. At the stroke of midnight Lacy took Private Warner’s ten letters from the drawer. She laid them out on her yellow silk duvet, cautiously, reverently, like tarots, and opened the second one.
Aaron began with an apology. His last letter was crazy talk, but when he got hers it was like a ray of light blew up a dam and he couldn’t help but gush, and just knowing she’s out there reading this means the world, it’s life and death so please keep reading. Lacy continued. She sensed a hint of crazy in this letter, too, despite the square, manly handwriting—some nonsense about how he was really supposed to be in med school and not over there. But then he told her he laughed out loud when he read about the cattle on her farm growing up, the anger and the cows, and how her family must be like his. Suddenly it seemed as if Aaron was in the room beside her, whispering hot words in her ear. He had to sign off, but he’d talk to her tomorrow.
Her pulse skipped as she tore open the remaining letters. Are you the disfavored one?—the next letter began without a greeting—Lacy, are you the black sheep in your family too? She read these words and instantly knew him. Not from data or thoughts in her mind but through her very being, the way Legolas and the Elvish knew rocks or the souls of trees.
Aaron wrote his life story on letterhead scrounged from the Red Cross. He told her about his brother with the stutter, and the parents falling over themselves to praise the average one. And to Aaron, who got straight As and a full ride to UT, did his dad say congrats? Still he put his head down and strived, because that’s the American Dream. But how does it work anymore? Twenty-three years you believe things matter, school, jobs, to end up in the jungle? To see it slip through your fingers halfway around the world, in a hell so deep you start wishing for death. You dream of it and wake up cursing your eyes for opening. So, thank you, Lacy—he closed his last letter—if you’re there. There wasn’t much left of Aaron Warner to write home about, but when he thought of her reading, it’s like God said let there be light and it shined on these chicken scratches of what he used to be. He heard it took five days for mail to go from A to B, and maybe in five days he’d be dead but could she send him a sign?
The last words were smudged where her tear had mingled with the blue ink. Lacy wiped her eyes and breathlessly paced the room, rereading each letter. The Tower bells chimed twice, vibrating through the now silent hall. A night curled in on itself and gone to sleep, she thought, while she had been with Aaron.
She sat at her desk and, hours from dawn, wrote with a focus as sharp as hunger. She didn’t believe in God, she told him, so she wouldn’t pray for him, but she’d send a letter every day, so that he’d know someone at home was willing him not to die. To keep writing back. She could hear him in his letters, she said, a man of substance in dire straits. Hold on, Aaron, every day until the next one.
In the morning Lacy rose with purpose. She didn’t linger over her doughnut at the diner, picking at the Formica counter and fretting over school like usual. She returned to her desk and wrote another letter. Aaron wasn’t alone in his loneliness, she assured him. Her two best and only friends from UT were engaged before graduation, married after, and launched on their husbands’ vectors to Tulsa and Corpus Christi. And if Aaron wanted to talk family, well, she hadn’t spoken to hers in thirteen months, so, yes, she was a black sheep too. She wasn’t the girl her mother wanted. How she looked, or talked to men, or had a brain full of more than beauty secrets—no detail was too small to escape her mom’s eye. And one day, after Lacy beat her head against that wall enough times, she realized it could kill her. And stopped trying.
She mailed the letters on her way to class Monday morning. In the evening, as she sat to write again, Aaron’s next letter flew under her door. Thus began their system: writing across continents and each other, their words like ships passing daily. They talked about themselves. They asked questions that went unanswered, or responses lagged for days or weeks, appearing out of nowhere to forgotten queries.
Lacy wrote about the dissertation proposal she submitted early—silicon etching on CMOS wafers—and how cool computers were and maybe someday they’d be more than big calculators and be like our friends, too. Aaron wrote that the cigarettes were awful lately, and he had some fungal thing on his chest. She confided that the last time she went home her mother invited an old classmate of Lacy’s to dinner. Heir to a funeral home chain, recently divorced—her mom whispered during cocktails—very eager to remarry. And when Lacy left the table after the boy shushed her, her mother trailed her to the foyer and asked, “Who do you think’s going to marry you, Lacy? You’re not like other girls, be smart!” Aaron said in his nightmares a vulture kept ripping his eyes out. But a week later he wrote, Never marry? Shushed you? God forbid Lacy Adams patents a computer chip and makes a million dollars—I hear the sky falling already!
Lacy knew then that he was listening. He’d been listening all along.
She shared more. Things she could never say aloud flowed from her pen. The awful memory of being pulled from class in fifth grade, when her dad died, and the red-hot unfairness of her mom’s house, where she had no place. Her feckless brother who could do no wrong, who totaled a Stingray at sixteen and got the whopping punishment of a purse-lipped “boys will be boys” from their mother. Lacy’s words were sharp and controlled; she liked who she was in her letters. Some days she recalled a turn of phrase, a curated intimacy mailed to Aaron, as she sat in class. She started raising her hand more and kept it up until the professor acknowledged her. Her grades, always good, turned excellent.
On Halloween, an undisguised Lacy made her way to the chemistry building through students dressed as Popeyes and Jeannies. She delivered a typed memo to Department Chair Wallace describing how each day of biochem had begun that semester: a compound listed on the chalkboard—PCB or resveratrol—that a male classmate would diagram and always coincidentally looked like a pair of breasts. She noted the professor’s response every time—“hubba-hubba”—and asked if this lived up to the academic standards of the University of Texas. Lacy never heard back. But for weeks Aaron ended his letters with Give ’em hell, Lacy!
And then, around the time Aaron’s vulture stopped visiting his sleep, a nightmare of her own came true. One evening the housemother didn’t stop at her door, and again the next night. For a week no letters came. Lacy couldn’t eat. She bought a pack of Virginia Slims and took up smoking. At night she was plagued by the same sliver of a dream: the housemother paused at her door, but when Lacy opened it a duty officer stood there with a somber face. Each night Lacy awakened, sweating, to the reality that no one would come tell her if Aaron died. To the world outside they were nothing. The word entered her mind as though for the first time: Love? She pushed it away. But harder to subdue was a bittersweet truth of their letters—that the world they created there, together, was better than where either of them was fighting.
A letter arrived on the eve of Thanksgiving. Aaron was sorry for the gap. He tried not to talk war stuff, but he was a minesweeper and his partner tripped a partial dud while they were scouting. Aaron was laid out, exposed and bleeding. He thought of letting death come. A bullet from anywhere any second. But he thought of Lacy, the way she dotted her i’s, and he dragged himself to cover. He had a letter to write. You’re a cherry lifesaver, he said.
Soon their letters bore flashes of open affection, twinkling like the lights going up around the shop windows on the Drag. Lacy wrote that Willie Nelson just played the Armadillo, and of course she didn’t go, but when his song came on the radio she thought of Aaron. He was always on her mind. She hadn’t even asked what he looked like, she wrote, but she saw him in places—in the face of a cook at the diner, or Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Aaron hoped it wasn’t too forward, but could she send him a picture? To put a face to the beautiful words? She didn’t have any of herself, she replied, but she’d get one.
After her last exam of the semester, Lacy was skipping down the steps of the chemistry building on her way to the Sears photo booth when Professor Wallace called out to her. He led her to his office and shut the door. “Is this about my dissertation proposal?” she asked. “Or the biochem memo? I’m in town the whole break if you—”
“It’s about everything.” Wallace rubbed his eyes behind his horn-rims. He told her how proud he was of her, how much he enjoyed the experience of having her in the program, and how he thought it best if she finished out the year with her master’s and left. Lacy’s mouth went dry. She asked if her performance was substandard. No, he said, flicking his hand at the question, she was near the top of her cohort, but science isn’t strictly about results. Lacy objected that science is precisely about results, to which Wallace replied irritably that scientists worked with others, in labs and companies in the real world, and Lacy had proven a distraction. Her fellowship was a resource better allocated to a student with a real future, surely she could understand? But with a master’s why not teach high school chemistry? Wallace knew a number of elite private schools that would be happy to have her.
It happened fast. Lacy couldn’t remember if she said goodbye or if she thanked Wallace as she was leaving, out of habit. Instead of Sears she found herself a few minutes later at the diner. She ordered a Coke and a Frito pie in the bag. “Make it two pies,” Lacy called out, too shell-shocked to care about her hips. She devoured the first one and was turning to the second when the waitress leaned over the counter. “When’s your friend coming?” she asked. Lacy stared. The waitress pointed to the second pie.
“Oh.” Lacy’s eyes watered. “Soon, I hope.”
But he didn’t. No letter came from Aaron that night, or the rest of the year.
The dorm cleared out for the holidays. Inside her room, Lacy heard the thumping of suitcases down steps, and silence. She was alone again, but the ache of it was different now. She had tasted something she learned too late was love, she had made shelter with Aaron, and now nothing could protect her from the emptiness. Time was too big, and her imagination terrible. She filled the void with Tolkien, studying every passage about Aragorn, a humble man risking his life to fight against evil. One night she was tracing Aragorn’s path on a map of Middle Earth when a passage from one of Aaron’s letters came to mind. A dream he shared before he went silent. He was a diplomat traveling the world—like the beginning of Casablanca, he wrote, that map of Africa?—ending wars, on missions of peace, with a strong woman at his side. And not some trophy wife. A lady who brought science and progress along with peace.
No letter.
Another night Lacy smoked at the window as a storm rippled nearby. Carols played on the radio, fading on the hour so the DJ could wish everyone out there a very merry Christmas. Nat King Cole came on, imploring her to hear the angels’ voices. Lacy pressed her cheek to the windowpane and tried to hear like the Elvish, like Arwen for her human king. She listened for any sound. The patter of rain, or the Tower bells. A car on Guadalupe. But no sign of whether in a faraway jungle Aaron had turned into valuable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur.
“Private Warner, can you hear me?” Aaron opened his eyes and saw her. His angel, Lacy. “Merry Christmas, Santa’s here!” She fiddled with his arm. “High as a kite now, huh? And I’ve got another present.” She leaned down to his ear. “The doctor says we’re gonna get you good as new. Almost.” Then she was gone. She would stop by to fix his pillows or give him sips of water. Every time she said his name so sweet. One time she asked if he remembered what happened to him, and that’s when he heard it for sure—an accent, like how the New York mobsters talk in the movies.
“You’re not Lacy,” he mumbled.
“Nope, I’m Nurse Maureen. Is she your sweetheart?”
“I have to write a letter,” Aaron croaked. “I need a pen and paper.”
“Stay still.” She pressed his shoulders down. “You’re broken all over. I don’t suppose you’re left-handed?” He shook his head. “Well, the good news is you got four working limbs. First we lower the morphine, and then you can dictate your letter to me.”
“It’s private.”
“Easy.” She dabbed his face with a towel. “Relax.”
Aaron drifted in and out of sleep. With each awakening, time and place slowly reemerged, carving at the soft oblivion with questions he couldn’t answer. How long had he been here? Where was here? Not a field station, judging by the ceiling fan, but a real hospital. It was OK. He lifted his head and saw a mummy body, a cast from ribs to feet and another on his right arm. That was OK too. He repeated the nurse’s question in his head, What happened? until he could uncoil the memory of that day.
He remembered the sun and the dirt road, and giant banyan trees on both sides. He and Peanut were at the front of the company with their headphones on, listening for clicks as they swept the road in slow arcs. Peanut’s walk was weird, off-balance. He stumbled forward and the ground exploded and things went black. Aaron woke up to Peanut screaming and rolling in the dirt with no legs. Big Boy tried to drag Peanut behind the jeep, but he got picked off, and then Aaron watched the company shot down one by one as they tried to save him—Dash and Gorey and on and on. Aaron tried to yell it was a trap, but no sound came out. The snipers shot Peanut last and it was quiet again. He remembered the hard tree roots pressing into his back, and the heaviness in his eyes. Stay awake, he thought, stay awake stay awake.
But that day seemed far away to Aaron as he watched the hospital fan turn. Happening to people he used to know, distant like the body attached to his head. Things were OK. The only thing that wasn’t, that nagged at him through the haze, was the thought of Lacy out there not knowing that his heart was still beating and hers to keep.
“Morning, Private,” Maureen said gruffly. She busied herself between his legs. “We switched you over last night. No more strong stuff, just old-fashioned Tylenol now. You’ll be feeling more,” she said, wiping him down there with a moist towel. “You’ll tell me if you gotta go number two? You’ll help and call us when you get that feeling?”
“Can I have your pen?” His face burned. “And paper?” She paused. Then she came around his left side and turned a page on her clipboard and settled it below Aaron’s hand. He gripped the pen, aching at its cumbersomeness. He raised his head as best he could and wrote Dear Lacy. Maureen sighed at the childish scrawl. Aaron’s eyes watered.
“How’d you think you’d do that with your right arm in a cast, huh?” she scolded. “You’re a hero. No crying like a baby. Give it time.”
“How am I supposed to write home,” he snapped, “to let her know I’m alive?”
“Private Warner,” a voice boomed. A square-jawed officer stood at the foot of the bed. “Major Colin Hanford. Don’t worry about contacting your parents. My staff notified them by phone that you’re alive and receiving the honor that brings me here today. The United States Army has awarded the Purple Heart to you and Private William Gorey of your company—”
“Gorey’s alive?” he rasped.
“He’s doing fine. I’d present you with the medal today, but we’re holding a ceremony here at the hospital soon. Stay tuned.”
“What’d they say?” Aaron asked. The officer furrowed his brow. “My parents?”
“They said ‘thank you’ and—they said ‘thank you for calling.’ Rest up.”
Aaron tried to sleep after the major left, but Maureen was right. He was sensing everything. Lysol and rotten smells. He was itchy under the casts and pain throbbed in his core, jangling a thousand new points in his hips. The once quiet air teemed with breathing. “Hey,” a voice called, “welcome to Special Surgery.” Aaron glanced sideways and saw a freckled ginger waving at him with a thumbless hand. Nineteen, tops. He scanned the room and counted maybe a dozen beds, bodies in traction or threaded with tubes. “They had you doped up for weeks,” said the voice. “I’m Rob.” And Aaron, who had always made friends as easy as breathing, pretended not to hear. Panic flooded his veins until gradually it subsided, leaving behind a cold residue. A whisper of nothingness ahead.
In the afternoon Maureen said she had a surprise for him. Aaron shut his eyes and pondered how he ever could have mistaken her—an old bottle blond with ham-hock arms—for Lacy. “OK, look,” she said, returning a moment later. A black typewriter sat on a stool beside his bed. “Now you can write your girl and keep busy till the casts come off and we get you walking again.” She guided Aaron’s free hand to the keyboard, but he couldn’t reach, so she moved the stool and stacked books under the machine, but the keys were always just past his fingertips. “Mother of God,” she grumbled. “Hang on.” She came back and handed Aaron a chopstick. “You got it? Hit S for me? Do it,” she ordered. “Now L? Hit return? There you go.” She loaded a sheet of paper. “Call me when you’re done and I’ll mail it out.”
At last Aaron began the task he’d pined for from the moment he returned to the living. But after all the waiting, his mind felt blank. Each keystroke was a shaky effort. An hour and three near drops of the chopstick later, he had typed:
dear lacy, im alive in hispital in saigon. im ok, ten fingers and roes.
write me at address on envelope. your loving aaron
“Done?” Maureen asked later, on a round past his bed. She pulled the page from the typewriter. “This is it?” He nodded. “Well,” she muttered, “I’ll get it out today.”
Aaron fell back on his pillow and rested his neck, sore from craning as he poked at the keys. He thought of their letters in the fall, toppling over each other in the mail. How he’d written her every day and found a place where he was still alive, where he could redraw the outline of himself that was breaking into dots. But the terror he’d been outrunning had finally caught up to him. A mummy trapped in a bed. He knew it in the cold sweats that woke him up at night. He was different now.
He would lie in the darkness and think of who he once was. Because of all the things that returned to him—his mind, pain, shame at being wiped like a baby—the fire inside had not. He remembered the kid who left his redneck town and fought his way to UT, who pledged Sigma Nu with the rich sons of Dallas and Houston, who entertained them and drank with them and maybe someday would work with them and be rich too. He thought of the hours of study, politics, history, grinding toward grad school and, the minute the war was over, the foreign service. The intense new study when the deferment rules changed and he went premed, two years of bio and chem in one so he could apply by senior year and never risk getting sent to the jungle. Topped off by the Monday last spring, when he went to the post office after no response from ten med schools, not even rejections, and learned that a shipment of mail was lost right around the time he sent his applications. All that work, to save his own life, flushed down the drain by the US mail. He remembered the cold rage at his luck. The world laughing at him. He saw it all in a flash that day at the postal counter—how he would graduate and be drafted and rather die than give his dad the satisfaction of hearing he dodged.
Aaron revisited these places at night, as he lay in the wheezing dark of Special Surgery. He marveled at the kid he used to be and mourned the flame that had burned in him. He thought of the escapes he’d imagined just a few years ago, and the dirtier trick the world had played on him—coming inside his mind and extinguishing it, so there was nobody left to escape. Aaron Warner. Not missing like a thing to be found, but dead.
Then one morning he got his first letter in months. Lacy’s handwriting was bigger and bolder than before. Right when I gave up on miracles, she wrote, your letter comes? Do you know I blew a fuse on the army switchboard looking for you? Do you know I thought of you every night, and cried and dreamed your dream—the two of us, diplomat and scientist, saving the world? I have a list of questions a mile long, Aaron! What happened? When are you coming home? What can I do? Please tell me what I can do!
Your Truest Love, she signed it, Aaron would remember until the day he died.
He didn’t wipe away the tears. He let them run down his face in joy, and fear. Maybe he had no fire or a family who cared if he lived or died, but he had Lacy. He couldn’t lose the one good thing in his life. If she still wanted the diplomat, he’d have to fake it. Anything Lacy wouldn’t want, the broken, unworthy things inside him, she didn’t need to know and he wouldn’t write them down. i have to keep this short, Aaron typed in his next letter, with the chopstixk and all. we hit a mine, company mostly dead, im in casts but will walk and be fine, pls tell me aboit you, how is school?
And with this they resumed their pattern of daily letters, hers in pages of chatty script and his in a few terse lines. Lacy wrote that she was leaving her program to teach at a private school in Houston, which was a good thing in its own way, and did Aaron think a lot about the day he was injured? i lost my partner on that mission, he typed a few days later. Aaron didn’t mention his recurring dream of Peanut screaming get my legs! or the guilt he bore, knowing Peanut had been snorting heroin cut with Saigon’s garbage ever since he tripped that first dud a while back, but having no idea what to do about it. so, Aaron typed in closing, leaving the phd? before you get your patent? good for you but good how?
Lacy wrote that the pay was generous, and believe it or not she wasn’t one of those girls burning bras at Miss America, and even with her degrees maybe she wondered about living on her own, not in her mom’s house or some man’s, so good in that way, a new challenge. welcome to the wirkforce, Aaron typed, you will be a great teacher. so much i want to tell you when im out of my casts. But Aaron didn’t put into words his strongest desire, to be enveloped in her safety. To have someone take care of him, plug the hole inside and love him. Aaron had always sensed Lacy’s safety. Not just her soon-to-be-generous pay, but her background. The stationery with her initials on top, her brother’s Stingray, or the way she wrote—a way no one did from an average farm, so Aaron knew what kind of business her family must have owned.
When will you be out of your cast? Lacy wrote. soon a week or two, he typed, im excited to walk. He didn’t tell her the former running back might have a limp. She wrote how wonderful it was that he’d come home intact and have a future, didn’t he think? Aaron knew the truth about the future but couldn’t share it: that it was a myth once you looked chaos in the eyes, saw a dozen men die taking a Vietcong road, only to find the next day it’s been replanted with Australian mines. Things didn’t move forward. Destruction in circles, yes, but no future. Still, when he dreamed of himself lying on the roots of a banyan tree, a helpless child in an enemy land, someone did reach out her hands to lift him up. It was Lacy.
when i come home, Aaron typed, i want to meet you.
Albino raisin. It was his first thought when the doctor sawed off his casts and exposed his shriveled limbs. “Daylight’s wasting,” Maureen said as soon as he was free, working a pair of scrubs up his legs in no time. “Got to get you on your way.” She swung him around, angled crutches under his armpits, and hoisted him to his feet. Aaron gasped and fell back onto the bed, clutching his hips in shock. “Oh, Mr. Baby.” Maureen sighed. “Fine. A pain pill to tide you over, but we’re going for a walk today. We are winning this war. You’re not going home in a box, and not in a chair either if I have any say. You’re a lucky one, so set an example.”
Lucky. For weeks this was her refrain on their walks around the hospital, no matter what Aaron lobbed at her. He had no filter. At first he yelled it was a sick joke, and he could barely feel his legs so what the hell were they doing? “You’re lucky you got them at all,” she would mutter, balancing him with a squeeze to his stringy biceps. But the more weight he put on his legs, the more he felt things inside them, odd pressures, objects that he bellowed at Maureen for the doctors to remove. “You’re a survivor,” she said, unfazed. “Those pins are a point of pride to some men.” Aaron was left to distract himself from his woes. He focused his mind on the heat of Maureen’s body and her smell, of talcum and old-woman sweat. On many walks he yearned for his casts again, and all they had kept at bay—the proximity and contact.
Do you wear perfume? he wrote Lacy when he was strong enough to sit up and use a pen. Other parts of him were sitting up too, and he sorely wished she’d sent that photo of herself before he got blown up. I wear Chanel No. 5, she replied a few days later, do you like it? That was all she wrote. Her first and only short letter. Aaron checked the envelope to be sure, and his heart nearly stopped. Inside he found a sweet-smelling picture of Lacy Adams. Black hair to her shoulders, curled out at the bottom. Smoky eyes with a hint of defiance, full lips and cheeks, but the cheekbones—almost a Mexican shape going on in her face. For the rest of the day Aaron looked at her, and kissed her, and put her away and repeated it again, waiting for cover of night.
The next morning, as Aaron studied the photo with exciting new memories, Maureen led Major Hanford into the ward. “Amazing,” he said, approaching Aaron’s bed with a smile. “A new man, Private Warner. Healed and on your feet, I hear.”
“Soon, sir.”
“Very soon. Next week is the Purple Heart ceremony. Two public affairs officers will be there to take your photo and get some background information.”
“My photo?” Aaron asked.
“There are naysayers back home, Private,” the major explained, “saying this battle isn’t worth the price, and we don’t have what it takes. What better way to change hearts and minds than a story like yours? A young man broken head to toe, who survives to stand for God and country.”
“We’re winning this war,” Maureen interjected.
“With men like Warner we are.” The major looked Aaron over. “And when you get back home? Have you thought about it?”
“I’m just thinking about my next walk,” Aaron said.
“Complete the mission, right, Private? See you next week.”
The major wasn’t the only one talking to Aaron about his plans. Hardly a day went by that Maureen didn’t remind him of how many soldiers never left, or never left the same, so how would he use his second chance? Lacy set in on him too. Are you going back to school when you get home? she asked once. He ignored it. But letter after letter she kept at it with the questions, in passing at first, until she pressed right on the button. Did he need more school to take the foreign service exam? He’d mentioned med school once—did he want to be a doctor in the service? I’m thinking about a lot of things for when I get back, Aaron wrote eventually. But he only thought of one thing, truly, one devouring numbness that he couldn’t tell her about, that whispered, we’ll all be dead soon, and no one, not even Lacy, could tell him a single thing he could do with his life now that would matter in the least.
One afternoon Aaron got two letters, the usual from Lacy and another from Ernest Warner, stamped in Midland, Texas, a week before. He opened the letter from his dad—the first one he’d gotten since he deployed. Dear Private Warner, he’d written, We didn’t expect to hear you’d be coming back, the way this war is going, but we are so very glad you’re alive and we salute you. There’s a job waiting for you here in Midland if you want it. Two veterans working side by side could make a real go of it, swapping stories and making money. Keep in touch.
He opened Lacy’s next. Her voice seemed different, sad maybe. She was graduating two weeks from Thursday, she wrote, but she hadn’t told her family. What’s the point? Days like that never turn out to be what you imagine, anyway, as happy or the big deal you want. But she’d be thinking of him when she turned her tassel, like she had been all year.
Aaron felt a vague stirring inside him, almost forgotten, to get up and go and do.
By the morning of the ceremony, he could walk for ten minutes and stand in place for fifteen. He dressed himself slowly but without assistance. When Aaron was ready, Maureen nodded soberly and escorted him without touching to the hospital courtyard. Aaron stepped into the sunlight and thought of Gorey, the only other guy left who was there that day, and wondered where he redeployed and if he was still alive. Aaron lined up with a bunch of strangers. Somebody talked into a megaphone about sacrifice, and the major went down the row and pinned medals to their chests. Aaron stood up as straight as the rods in his legs. The PR men took photos. One of them asked Aaron, what was the first thing he was going to do when he got back to the USA?
“A surprise,” Aaron said. “You can print that.”
The speeches were over. Graduation had wound down to a blur of names. Lacy stood in cap and gown, waiting at the edge of the stage to be called. She thought of school ending, her world changing, and smiled tightly to control the doubts flickering within—whether she should have fought harder to stay in the program, or if her dreams were too big to begin with. At the sound of her name, she held her breath and crossed the stage. Professor Wallace took her hand a moment before presenting her diploma. “A tremendous mind,” he said, smiling wistfully. Lacy opened her mouth, trying to find a sound for all the mixed-up thoughts running through her brain, when she got a nudge from behind. It was the next guy’s turn.
She descended the stage and wandered through the hubbub. Soon the families would go to lunch, laughing and quibbling together. She would go to her dorm and pack. A man waved at Lacy—for a second she thought she knew him—and asked her to take a picture. Lacy counseled three generations to move in closer, and snapped a photo. She felt so old that morning looking in the mirror, going on twenty-four, but handing the camera back she had a premonition of how long life could be. It struck her that the grudge that had separated her from her family the past few years had become something definite. A milestone missed. And it turned out Lacy wasn’t as good at congratulating herself as she hoped.
Wallace found her in the crowd and asked when she was leaving for Houston. Tomorrow she’d be out of his hair forever, she replied with a faint smile. As he said goodbye, Lacy noticed someone behind him, watching. A tall, handsome man, gaunt-faced, in jeans and a white T-shirt. His golden hair buzzed down to chick fluff and his square jaw covered in stubble. His blue eyes never strayed, and when Wallace left he started toward her. She caught a slight limp in his stride and knew for sure. It was the impossible, standing before her. The love she read about in books. She was flooded with care and relief at a vigil ended. And desire.
“Lacy Adams, master of science.” Aaron handed her a cluster of bluebonnets.
“You came,” she said. “You came home.”
“I came for you. Don’t cry, Lacy!” He wiped a tear from her cheek and took her in his arms. She held him close, her hands searching the hard angles of his frame until he let out a small cry. “Nothing,” he mumbled apologetically. “My hips still give me trouble.” He kissed her timidly. Their faces lingered close. “Nice to meet you, Lacy,” he said. “You hungry?”
They went to lunch. Lacy’s diner would take them, on graduation with no reservation, so there they settled in a booth. The conversation was halting and factual on the walk over: when and where Aaron processed out, how he bought an old truck and drove forty hours straight to get there in time. He gave her hand a squeeze on the table. She smiled. He squeezed again. “So,” he blurted.
“It’s a little weird,” Lacy offered.
“A little bit. Yeah. Because, the thing is…”
The thing hung in the air as Aaron searched for words. Maybe it was their presence revealing the nakedness of their letters, and leaving them bashful. Or the unmet expectations hovering like a chill mist—Lacy heavier than her picture let on, Aaron holding his water glass in a rough way she never imagined. Maybe the thing was that their letters were letters and nothing more. A few months of scribbling at a hard time. A civic duty. A situation that was over now, no matter their words or the places her heart had been.
“The thing is,” Lacy declared, “we have to order.” Firmly she discussed the ups and downs of the menu with Aaron. She analyzed his Reuben when it came, and her cottage cheese salad and a lot of nothing, while Aaron nodded with a lost expression on his face. He finished his sandwich. She stopped to take a bite.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked.
“Moving.” Lacy sighed. “I should be packing now.”
“This is your last night in town? Tonight?”
“Yes. The school found an apartment for me. They’re training me this summer.”
“Great.” Aaron stared at his plate. “I could move you. Drive you there.”
“Oh.” She flushed. “How generous. But you must have plans. You haven’t seen your family yet. Are you going to Midland?”
He thought of his dad driving around town, sucking dirt out of rich folks’ rugs, feeling bigger as he made Aaron small. “No,” he replied. “Nothing much for me there.”
The check came. Aaron insisted on paying. He told Lacy one last time what an amazing accomplishment, and congratulations.
“Where are you staying tonight?” she asked as they were leaving.
“Hadn’t thought that far ahead,” he mumbled, “but I got a new old truck and—Lacy?” He turned to face her on the street and gripped her shoulders. His eyes were glassy and distant. “I don’t know how to thank you for all you’ve done for me, but—”
“Are you leaving?” A wave of terror hit her. “Sleeping in your car? No.” She threaded her arm through his and pulled him along. “You’re staying with me tonight. We’ll figure it out. If anyone sees you, you’re my brother. Long-lost family here to help me pack.”
And once they made it to Lacy’s room, he did help. She packed her clothes while Aaron sat boxing her books. The activity relaxed them. They talked about their college years, a few of them overlapping on campus, and memories of childhood. They laughed and heard each other’s voices again, even in the same room looking at each other. Lacy sat closer to Aaron on the bed. Letting go of the past seemed possible. So did having a future, stepping into a life that belonged to them and no one else. And gradually, by a conspiracy of glimpses, they were touching, and kissing, and loosening their clothes.
With hands and tongue Lacy explored the body she had long imagined, broken, marked with scars, but warm and manly too. She worked with a zeal that startled Aaron, especially as he made his way into her and confirmed, through her clenched jaw and eyes squeezed tight, that he was her first. They found a rhythm, and it calmed him. The first breath of true protection he felt in years. When he grunted with pleasure, Lacy asked if he was OK and was it his hips? Aaron nodded and beamed at her rocking above him. She slid her fingers into his mouth. They fell asleep around sunset, embracing, and slept through the long cool night.
In the morning Aaron awakened to Lacy watching him from the windowsill. She was smoking in a silky white bathrobe. She turned away and tossed him the pack of cigarettes. “Lighter’s in there. Pretty day,” she mumbled, pulling her knees up and looking out the window.
“Let’s get married,” Aaron said.
Lacy flinched. “It’s 1970. We don’t have to, just because…” Her eyes traveled over the duvet on the floor and the sheets scrambled on the bed.
“I know.” He lit a cigarette. He grabbed The Two Towers off her nightstand and shuffled its edges. Carefully he inched his back up the wall, and smoked, and stared at his feet. “But,” he said, “I’ve been alone my whole life. Maybe I don’t have to be. Or you either.” He looked at her with a raw intensity. “Maybe we could have a kid someday, and tell him about how we met and the day we got married, and protect him so he’s never alone like we were. Maybe he’ll grow up and change the world.”
Lacy’s eyes shined. She nodded. “Yeah?” he cried with a silly grin. “Right now?” She nodded bigger, and the tears started rolling. They didn’t shower. They laughed as Aaron threw on his jeans and helped Lacy into the red crepe de chine dress that fell most forgivingly on her curves. She ran her fingers through her wild bed hair. As they were leaving, Lacy noticed an old black woman coming out of a room down the hall. She was hunched over, walking slowly.
“Ma’am?” Lacy said. “That’s Miss Clifton’s room, isn’t it?”
The woman stopped and looked through Lacy. “Do you know Helen?”
“Yes.” Lacy took Aaron’s hand. “She put us in touch. This is my fiancé, Aaron.”
“Ma’am.” He nodded.
“He served with Helen’s fiancé. I was sorry to hear about him. And for her.”
The woman clutched her purse. “She tried coming back for the spring semester, for a few weeks. The university said, ‘No rush picking up her things, nobody moving into her room soon.’ So I came now.” She turned to Aaron. “Were you there? When he died?”
“With Big Boy? Private Williams. Yes.”
“It wrecked my girl. For now. Was it bad, what happened to him?”
“He died saving—” Aaron paused. “Trying to save a life.”
“But was it painful?”
“It was quick. For him it was quick.”
“Thank you.” The woman touched their hands. “I’m Beverly Clifton. Marriage is a wonderful thing. God bless this marriage.”
Somberly Aaron and Lacy walked to city hall. While they waited in line she thought of how modern they were, dispensing with the white dress and wedding, beginning a new life together that would be a serious one, about the right things. When it was their turn, they handed the paperwork to a woman with a frosted bouffant at the counter. She glanced over it. “There’s another for name change,” she said.
“Sorry?” Lacy replied.
“Another form to fill out. You’re taking his name, right?”
“Not if I take hers first,” Aaron deadpanned.
The clerk’s face puckered. She worked in silence. “I would appreciate it,” she said when she handed them their license, “if y’all didn’t make light of God’s plan.”
They kissed and left a trail of giggles behind them in the hallway. At a deli they made a picnic and walked to Town Lake. Aaron and Lacy sat close and fed each other. They talked about the sunshine on the water, and the cheese, the nice breeze, everything immediate and in front of them. In quiet moments, their minds wandered to the things they didn’t know about each other yet, and the drive to Houston, and whether God had plans. But mostly to what their lives would be like as Mr. and Mrs. Warner.