An unnamed military base, United States of America
Day 299
What are the chances that I’ll be thrown in jail if I punch Susan in the face? Pros: punching Susan in the face, brief sense of satisfaction, Susan will leave me alone. Cons: could break my hand, Susan would never stop going on about it, I don’t have kids and Susan does so I’d get thrown in jail and it wouldn’t matter because I have no dependents.
I sigh. It always comes back to kids. I try to tune my brain back in to whatever nonsense Susan is babbling on about now. It doesn’t even make sense for her to be here. She didn’t like me when we were army wives and she sure as hell doesn’t like me more now that we’re army widows.
“So.” She looks so excited. She must have gossip. Here we go. “The army’s introducing a draft and we’re going to be drafted first!”
“You and I?” I ask stupidly. I don’t understand. Susan rolls her eyes and raises an unplucked eyebrow.
“No, stupid. Army spouses. We’re already on base, and we have ‘an understanding of what the job involves,’” she says, in air quotes as though this is ludicrous. “Isn’t it outrageous!” She’s looking at me expectantly. In the old days, before Daniel died, I would have gone, “Yes, outrageous. Wow,” and played along, but I can’t be bothered now. Daniel’s dead. It doesn’t matter to him or the other men in his unit if Susan and I get on. And I never gave a shit.
“I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”
Susan purses her lips and cocks her head to the side as though I’m a toddler who just peed on the floor.
“What’s going to happen to my kids, huh? There’s no one to look after them, and after all we’ve been through, why would they pick on us like this?” She pauses to catch her breath. “It’s not the same for you. You childless wives, it won’t affect you.”
I don’t snap or lose my temper. I know exactly what I’m about to do and I’m not proud of it. It’s not going to be my finest moment, or actually, maybe it is. If I’m being really honest, Susan is lucky I don’t punch her repeatedly in the mouth. I get up from the table, take her coffee cup out of her hand, and pour the glass of water I’ve been drinking over her head in such gloriously slow motion I can see her expression shift from bland surprise at the absence of her coffee to disbelief to total horror at the cold and the wet.
“Go fuck yourself, Susan, and, while you’re at it, get the fuck out of my house.” The joy of saying those words I’ve cradled at the back of my tongue for years is particularly sweet.
Susan gapes at me, scraping her chair back. Her badly dyed hair is plastered against her cheeks. “You’re insane! I always said you were crazy, I warned everyone: That lady’s about to crack.”
“I said out, Susan. Now.”
Susan’s still blathering as she makes her way out of my house and slams the door behind her. Good riddance, to Susan and to part of my identity. Calming, pleasing, careful, placating army wife. My husband and I met in a nightclub in Madison, Alabama, which is possibly the tackiest way in the world to meet the love of your life. I didn’t know it then, but when you marry someone in the military it’s not just a partnership. It’s an identity, and one I’ve always rebelled against. Whenever he was deployed, I would leave the base and go home to Maine for a fortnight and, if he was away for over a year, I would move in with my parents and transfer to a hospital there. He never seemed to have the kind of deployments that meant a wife could move too. He was sent to dangerous places, faraway places, terrifying places. So I did my best to survive without him and I worked and stayed away from the base. It was too hard to see the other wives waiting for a man to come back in the way we all feared.
Then the Plague came and Daniel had just come back from a posting in Germany. The number of times I’ve wished I had just gone with him to Europe. He’d never been told his wife could move with him before but I wouldn’t have been able to work in a hospital there. We could have had six more months together before the world fell apart. He had only been home for three days when the call came in that all active military personnel were to return to active duty, but this time, in the States.
Daniel’s unit was one of the most successful in terms of surviving, and that’s not just the rose-tinted view of a lonely widow. I don’t know how or why but Daniel survived all the way until May, the last in his unit to die. Not a single one of them was immune. Every phone call I had with him I begged him to desert. What would they do—shoot him? He was going to die, probably. We had hoped he would be immune but the army tested for immunity and he was negative. I just wanted more time with him. I wanted to be a wife for a little while longer.
But when you marry a man with the integrity to go into the army—for patriotic reasons glistening with valor and honor—you can’t be surprised when he stays at his post until his last, dying day. “I’m helping people,” he would tell me, always patiently, when I cajoled and cried and begged. “Help me,” I would reply. “Please help me.”
So now, I’m a widow, and the one silver lining is that I don’t have to be liked anymore. The other wives always found me weird and now I’ve confirmed all of their suspicions. We’re all widows, supposedly supporting one another, but “widow” is the most common title in the world now. It’s still unbearable. Just because lots of people are experiencing something alongside you doesn’t make it any better. If anything, it’s harder because you’re not special. There are no allowances or respect for grief. The whole damn world is grieving. What’s one husband when almost all the men are dead? What’s one woman’s grief in the face of billions of lost sons, fathers, brothers and, yes, husbands?
But I didn’t throw the water over Susan because of grief. No. I did it because I’m childless and Susan knows that it’s the one weakness I can’t bear to have poked and she just rammed the knife in. I know we’re meant to use the term “child-free” now but, let’s face it, that’s bullshit. Most of us are childless and not by choice. Daniel and I started trying for a baby as soon as we were married. By the time he died, we had been married for five years. I have been pregnant eight times and miscarried every single time.
That does weird things to a person, it really does. You go cuckoo. It hasn’t helped that I’ve been a neonatal nurse, but what was I meant to do? Stop working? Stop doing the one thing that kept me sane? One of the feelings I was least prepared for when Daniel died was the relief. I wasn’t relieved that he was dead. Not at all. But as I moved out of the all-consuming fog of grief, I started poking around in my brain a little and, yep, relief was there. Relief that any possibility of being a mother was gone. All I have ever wanted was to be a mom: to get pregnant, finally give birth, have sleepless nights of breastfeeding, complain about the exhaustion, cry as I watched a brown-eyed, serious-looking little girl sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” up on a stage with other kindergartners. It was all I ever wanted.
And the hardest thing about infertility that no one ever tells you about is the hope. It’s not the going wrong that’s the most painful part. It’s the betrayal of hope that this time you had the audacity to think it would be different. It’s the searing pain of hope as you try again and fail again, and try again and fail again, each time knowing you’ll fail and yet hoping you won’t. Without a husband and with only 10 percent of the world’s men alive, I am not going to be a mother. That is abundantly clear. For the first time in my life, I know for sure. I’m not going to get pregnant and birth my own baby. We used up our last frozen embryo in our most recent round of IVF. There is no frozen sperm from Daniel and I have no frozen eggs.
And then I didn’t have to be a neonatal nurse anymore. That was a different strand of relief. I adored my job. Every time I cared for a tiny baby, born into this scary, cold world far too soon, I had three thoughts: How well is the baby breathing? How well is the baby feeding? How would I want to be treated, as a mom, if I was in this situation? I was a really, really good nurse, and I needed my job. I would have had a breakdown if it wasn’t for my job and the other nurses I worked with. But it was also a bit like a failed artist working as a security officer at an art gallery, or a failed author working in a bookshop. There’s a constant reminder of how close you are to the thing you want, and how far away from it you are. Even though the babies were tiny aliens fighting to survive, they were babies and their moms were moms.
The day they told me I wasn’t needed on the neonatal ward anymore and I was to start the training process for oncology, I cried in my car all the way home. I don’t have to do it anymore. I don’t have to do it anymore. Thank God.
The biggest difference between Susan and me is that, before the Plague, Susan loved her life. She was ambivalent about her husband—that wasn’t a love match for the ages. But to her, her life was perfect. Her husband was out of her hair for most of the year, she had three daughters who were all athletic and popular, she ran the social scene on the base and she was slowly sliding into the kind of bored but bitchy middle-aged housewife her mom before her had no doubt been.
Before the Plague hit us all sideways, I loved my husband but I hated my life. I hated my body for being broken and failing me, even though I had been to nineteen sessions of a support group where I was assured that I wasn’t broken despite all evidence to the contrary. A part of me hated that my job required me to face up to my infertility every single day. I hated how often my husband was away and missed him desperately. And I fucking hated women like Susan who looked down on my life as frivolous and devoid of meaning, as if I skipped out of my house to an illegal rave every night of the week while she toiled away at the altar of motherhood like an underappreciated Mother Teresa.
So, yeah, I’m a little excited about the draft. Bring it on. I’ve been a nurse for over a decade. I’m ready for something different and I know I can handle it. I’ve seen some shit. I’ve seen babies die. I’ve lost eight of my own children. I’ve lost my husband. I can eat women like Susan for breakfast and spit them out again.
The next day, the letter is dropped in my mailbox. It tells me everything I need to know and there, at the bottom, is a magic box. “Tick if you would like to apply for the First Class program. Additional form enclosed.” The army’s in dire straits, I mean, hello. There’s a draft, so it makes sense. They need junior leaders. I can apply to be fast-tracked for promotion and, if selected, as soon as I complete basic training I’ll be a Private First Class. Daniel would get a real kick out of this. I can just imagine him watching me, smiling that lovely warm, proud smile he always had, as I fill out the form and explain why I have the characteristics they’re looking for. Resilience. Good at handling extreme pressure. Unafraid to lead. Fast learner. Physically fit. Experience in a physically demanding role.
I know I’m going to get it, and I do. Another week goes by and there it is. A big, fat envelope full of extra papers telling me about the requirements of the program. I can’t keep the smile off my face for the two days until I have to report for training. Unlike Susan, I’ve spent the last decade working in a high-stress, high-stakes job that involves following procedure, a hierarchical structure and exposure to life-and-death scenarios. It’s the most satisfying day of my life when we turn up for our first day of basic combat training and I go in the door to the right for the fast-track recruits. Susan, face slack with shock, goes in the door to the left.