You Know When the Men Are Gone (15 page)

Kailani held the phone against her forehead, inhaled, and put it back to her ear.

Manny’s voice was begging. “You love me, you know you do. But you got to say it, baby, or I can’t hang up.” He waited, breathing loudly into the phone. They never hung up without saying those words, fighting or not. It was their unspoken acknowledgment that at any moment Manny could be blown into thousands of gory pieces. Kailani thought of Sergeant Schaeffer—what had his wife said to him the last time they spoke on the phone?

“Be safe,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and said in a low, broken monotone, “I love you.”

When Manny first left for Iraq, Kailani’s family had asked her to move back to Hawaii for the twelve-month deployment, but she knew that while there was not
one
thing that could compare to her love for her husband,
all
of the details of the island of Oahu would conspire against him. The avocado trees in her mother’s backyard, the scent of plumeria after a mid-afternoon rain, the black-and-yellow myna birds heckling traffic as they strutted across the street, the sun setting over the sand while sea turtles rested in the shallows. All of the islands would be begging her to stay, and she did not know if she was capable of leaving them again.

So Kailani had held out these eleven landlocked months in central Texas, living in an apartment building on base with her potted hibiscus, the leaves yellowing, the buds small and crinkled, moving it around each afternoon to the three small windows in the living room trying to catch the sun. Her children in a playpen rather than growing up with sand between their toes or sea salt drying in their hair. Her baby, Javier, had never seen the ocean, and Ana wouldn’t go into the pools on post without her Little Mermaid floaties bulging around her arms, afraid of the sting of chlorine in her eyes. When Kailani was Ana’s age, her mother had already taken her surfing at Nanakuli Beach. Little Kailani would be perched at the front of the board, her long hair touching the water while her mother paddled out and found the perfect wave to ride in, then stood with loose knees while Kailani squealed at the sudden speed.

When she missed Oahu the most, Kailani forced herself to imagine Manny back safe, his arms lifting up his baby boy, his low voice singing Spanish songs to Ana while she sucked her thumb and her lids grew heavy with sleep, his mouth on Kailani’s throat in the dark bedroom. He was her island, her ocean, her trade wind breeze. Until michelle.c.rand@
us.army.mil
.

Kailani drove her children to the Family Readiness Center. A month before she had signed up for a long-awaited video conferencing slot. The three of them would get to talk to Manny through a television screen for a whole half hour. Kailani had been excited about this “date” with her husband for weeks. Now she considered not showing up, leaving Manny to sit in Iraq in front of a blank screen to demonstrate the uncertainty of their future. But she woke that morning and donned her prettiest dress, a red birds-of-paradise print with spaghetti straps, and buttoned the kids into the matching Hawaiian shirts that her mother had sent especially for the occasion.

“Wow, you guys are beautiful,” Manny said, his lips moving slightly out of sync with his words. Ana reached out to try to touch the screen.

“Hey, baby girl,” Manny said. “You getting so big. And look at our little man, he almost not even a baby no more.”

Kailani fretted over the collar of Javier’s shirt, refusing to look at her husband. Her anger felt like a meek case of static cling, more annoying and cloying than the galvanizing rush of electricity and fire she had expected. She rubbed her legs and twitched her hair nervously, anything but make eye contact.

“You look great, Kay,” Manny said.

She faced the image in front of her, about to say, “Do I look as good as Michelle Rand?” but the sight of Manny unsettled her, left her with her lips parted, forgetting to breathe. He looked too thin. His hair, which he had always kept as long as regulations allowed, had been completely shaven, the stubble on his scalp a grayish-blue. Even with the screen’s poor resolution, his old scars looked livid and new.

Manny waited for her reply, smiling so hard Kailani wondered if his cheeks were aching from the effort.

“You not still thinking about that e-mail?” he asked in a lowered voice, glancing offscreen and rubbing the smile away with his knuckles. “I told you the truth about that: it was a mix-up. Do you want me to change my password back so you can check my account whenever you want? I’ll do that. I’m not hiding anything.”

“You’ve had days to erase all the messages,” Kailani said. “Of course you have nothing to hide.”

“I’ll be home in less than a month.” Manny leaned forward and his head was suddenly blurry and too big. Ana hid her face in her mother’s hair. “Kay, you got to believe me. I love you. I love my babies. We got a good marriage. I’m gonna be home soon and I’ll prove it to you. Okay? One month.”

Kailani shrugged. “Talk to your daddy.” She pinched her daughter, who remained shy, sucking her thumb. “Tell him about the neighbor’s puppy.” Ana nodded and in an incomprehensible three-year-old babble, told Manny about the Jack Russell terrier next door.

A red light blinked over the screen when their half hour was up.

“I’ll be home soon,” Manny repeated, and Ana blew kisses at the screen while Javier tried to swallow his curled fist. “You better be waiting for me, Kay. Please.”

Kailani tipped her chin in a noncommittal nod and picked up the toys that littered the table in front of her.

It was strongly recommended that all the spouses, from the battalion commander’s wife to the newest private’s eighteen-year-old bride, attend the Redeployment FRG Meeting. When Kailani walked in, Cristina beckoned with her rhinestone-studded fingernails. Kailani joined her and the other wives of Manny’s closest buddies, what he called his Mexican Connection: Diaz, Sanchez, Garcia, Rosado. Their wives were welcoming but their first language was Spanish and they always reverted back to it. Kailani would watch them, how they leaned into each other, their quick whispers and laughter, and it made her yearn to be home, to have such an understanding, to be a part of a whole.

When Captain Roddy stood, women stopped chatting and straightened in their fold-up chairs. He always seemed slightly uncomfortable with the spouses, with the niceties involved with dealing with women, the feelings that could be hurt, the hope of good news in the waiting eyes. He glanced around the room as if he wished he were in Iraq, briefing a roomful of infantry meat-eaters, cursing his head off and spitting tobacco into a battered Coke bottle.

“We’ve had a dark day,” he began. “Please keep the Alpha Company soldiers and their families in your prayers.”

Then, looking relieved, he handed the floor over to the chaplain, who began a digressive talk about the Resurrection, which veered into the benefits of families praying together, which somehow led to PowerPoint slides about marriage counseling, and finished with him exhorting everyone in the room to attend at least one counseling session when the soldiers returned. A colonel with a medical branch patch stood beside the chaplain, nodding his head, and then showed some PowerPoint slides of his own about how to spot post-traumatic stress disorder. Finally a pregnant sergeant from Finance, her desert camouflage pant bottoms tucked into white sneakers and her uniform jacket straining over her massive belly, went over everything from balancing checkbooks to telling them not to let their husbands spend all their deployment savings on new trucks.

Cristina elbowed Kailani and shouted loudly enough for the entire auditorium to hear, “New truck my ass. We’re spending that deployment cash on me!” The wives laughed maniacally and much too long, as if completely broken by the deluge of bad news and desperate to think about anything else. They started shouting out random desires, “Pedicure!” “Nanny!” “Liposuction!” “Toddler muzzle!” “Boob job!” until Captain Roddy stood up with a look of such disgust that the wives, afraid he was about to tell them about a new attack, immediately shut up and hunched their shoulders protectively.

“I want to thank you once again, on behalf of our soldiers, for your continued love and support,” he said. Staring, it seemed, at Cristina, as if he were imagining making her do push-ups until all of her fuchsia nails fell off. “Our soldiers couldn’t do their jobs over there if they were weakened with worry about all of us over here.”

As the women filed out, their momentary giddiness forgotten, the battalion FRG leader, Bonnie McCormick, stood at the door and thanked everyone for coming, smiling widely as if they had all just gotten free aromatherapy massages rather than descriptions of how emotionally stunted and easily angered their long-lost mates may be. Kailani hesitated at the exit. She could pull Bonnie aside and ask her to find out if there was a Michelle Rand at the men’s forward operating base. She knew the army took adultery seriously, especially if two soldiers were involved; there could be demotions, pay loss, transfers to other bases.

Kailani had never asked Bonnie for anything before, though she had often made sweet Hawaiian bread stuffed with pineapple jam for FRG bake sales, bought the requisite raffle tickets, helped wash cars, and everything else the FRG had asked of her. She could ask Bonnie to do this small thing; she didn’t even need to mention adultery, just find out if there was a Michelle Rand at the FOB.

But Kailani walked right by Bonnie McCormick without even making eye contact, fleeing the meeting, not even saying good-bye to Cristina, Maria, Fran, and Rosie, who stood in the parking lot chatting in rapid Spanish, hands moving like moths in the dim streetlights.

Kailani would wait. Manny would be back in a couple weeks. She would talk it all out with him in person. Wasn’t that the mature thing to do, the married thing to do? She didn’t want his superiors, or anyone else, to know their business, and maybe, just maybe, Manny was right.

Maybe it had been a big mistake.