Eleven Days (20 page)

He wishes he could go and see Sara once more but decides that a phone call before he heads back out is enough. On New Year’s Day they talk. He assures her he is not alone and that he did not have to cook the turkey. He apologizes for not coming home this one time but tells her he is sure this next deployment will be the last. They discuss graduate schools (law versus business, Yale versus UVA). They discuss what she’s reading (a new
Anna Karenina
, the last president’s memoir).

“Uplifting stuff.”

“Preferable to the papers.”

“Why don’t you work in something lighter to the cycle, Ma?”

“What do you suggest?
Goldfinger
? I’m
fine
,” she says.

“Fucking Insecure Nervous and Emotional?” he says, and they laugh.

“No, really. I’m good. I’m—busy.”

“Did you go by the neighbors’?”

“They came here.”

“They came there?”

“Yeah, can you believe it? It was really sweet. You know—you
know, I don’t think you ever saw it—well, we never did it, but there’s a bit of a tradition here or, well, in their family. A Christmas tradition where the women, all the cousins you know, the women and children dress up and visit houses in the area bringing gifts—”

“Like elves?”

“Like elves, but not, you know, dressed like elves. Well, not dressed
entirely
like elves. Each woman provides a different gift for one of the twelve days of Christmas, so each—”

“Twelve gifts for each house?”

“Yes. They’re little things, silly little things, like fruitcakes. Fondue pots.”

“Homemade fruitcake?”

“Yes, of course it’s homemade.”

“And what else?”

“They might bring … chocolates. Chocolates stamped with Thomas Jefferson—that was one thing. A pack of postcards from the museum: Old Pew. A set of little candles carved at Williamsburg.
Americana
.”

“Edible Americana.”

“Right. Anyhow, they came here. They’ve never come before. It was very sweet. Thank God I was dressed and had the fire on. They all came in, made a fuss.”

“And did they stay?”

“I asked them to, but no, they didn’t stay. They’d arranged all the gifts in a darling little basket; I think they made the basket, too. And left it with—with a Thermos of eggnog.”

“Eggnog?”

“Yes, but when I opened it, it was only half full. I think it was theirs and they left it by accident. They sprinkle cinnamon on the eggnog. I’d forgotten that.”

“Cinnamon.”

“You know people don’t know what to say.”

“About what?”

“About me. About you. People don’t know what to say to a mother whose son’s not home for Christmas.”

“How about ‘Merry Christmas, ma’am.’ ”

“That’s
exactly
what they should have said. I should have helped them.”

“Are you sure everything’s all right?” He knows, but he wants to hear her say it anyhow.

“Everything’s swell. I’m attending two parties tonight alone.”

“Where?”

“Blair House and the Naval Observatory, where else?”
And in their lies by lies they flattered be
, she thinks.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too. Don’t drink and drive. Or—don’t drink and handle any sophisticated weaponry.”

“What’s weaponry?”

He hung up the phone and smiled. She hung up the phone and wept.

WASHINGTON, D.C., NIGHT,
MAY 11, 2011

In the backseat of the Town Car, driving to D.C.’s Dulles International Airport, Sara closes her eyes and opens them. She is nowhere near sleep. It is almost eight o’clock at night. The godfather has a FIJI water bottle filled with martinis; she can tell because she sees—and smells—the olives. Like David, he takes three. Unlike David, he takes his drinks without rocks.

She thinks about the Marines on the train. She thinks about her conversation with Jason just after Christmas, and his chastising her for referring to his Teammates as “boys” rather than men. She couldn’t help it. She still thought of most of the men she knew as boys, too. What is the definition of a man, anyhow? That he can vote? That he’s been in love? She stares out the window. It’s raining. Would the flights be delayed?

Sara tells the godfather that she only just learned, in the car tonight on the way to the train station with Sam, that Jason has been in love—
is
in love.

“Did you know that?”

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully assert my right to remain silent.”

“Come
on
.”

“He’s not ten years old, Sara.”

“But who is she? Did he use the word ‘love’?”

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully—”

“Forget it. I’ll find out.”

They drive. It’s raining hard now. And Sara says, “You know, Sam said he was very good at what he did. Jason.”

“Of course he was.
Is
.”

“
Is
. Yes. At what he
does
. Sam said he
is
very good at what he
does
. Let’s talk like that, okay?”

“Okay.”

“How long—”

“Long. I have Ambien. You should sleep.”

They drive in silence for a while.

And then the godfather says, “He’s
twenty-seven
, Sara.”

“And?”

“And you’re mad if you think a twenty-seven-year-old’s never been in love. Especially your Romeo.”

“Romeo?”

“He’s a flirt.”

“He’s not.”

“He is. Unavoidable, given the gene pool.”

“Well, he’s never talked to me about any one girl in particular.”

“You know how hard it is for a Team guy to find a girl who will worship him?”

“No.”

“About as hard as it is to find a lobbyist on K Street.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“They call them
warriors
, for chrissake, Sara. The girls pursue them like paparazzi.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

It’s raining harder now.

“Will the flight be delayed?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Trust me. And we’re not flying out of Dulles. We’re flying out of Andrews.”

“Andrews?”

“Sara, just—don’t stress the flight plan, okay? I’ll explain.”

“Can you explain the allure of falling in love with someone who regularly places his life on the line?”

“Um, I think I’d have to say that question falls into the category of If You Don’t Understand It Immediately It Cannot Be Explained.”

“Well, I guess that makes me an idiot.”

“It makes you a hypocrite.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sara, David?”

“David didn’t place his life on the line.”

“He did.”

“You romanticize him. David sat at a desk.”

“David placed his life on the line for this country.”

“Behind a desk.”

“I’m not sure you understand the full extent of what he did.”

“If I don’t, the fault is not mine.”

“He—”

“Let’s not revisit that, all right? I’ve made my peace. Please don’t compare what David did to what Jason does now. That’s ancient history, anyhow. Let’s not have history lessons.”

They are passing the Washington Monument. At night, lit, it’s breathtaking. She always forgets the sheer beauty of this city, how
wide the sky seems with its low architectural lines, how pristine the pieces of the Mall’s iconography are. She would take it over Paris.

“Anyhow,” the godfather says, “Jason doesn’t let it get to his head. Most don’t. These guys don’t spend too much time worrying about the reasons people obsess over them. Or protest their participation. They do their jobs. They move on. They spend about as much time on fan blogs as they do on
The New York Times
op-ed page.”

“My son reads
The New York Times
.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t take his cues from their views.”

“No, he doesn’t take cues from anyone. That’s what David gave him: a clinical inability to take cues from anyone other than his conscience.”

At Andrews, they turn in to the hangar reserved for private planes. She asks—meekly—why they aren’t flying commercial and who is paying for this. He tells her there were no direct flights. She asks where they are going. “Jeddah,” he tells her. And the first thing she thinks of is “Christmas,” because “Christmas” and “Jeddah” have always been synonymous in her mind. She has never seen the inside of a private plane. It is so clean. “Jeddah, by way of Sigonella. We have to stop to refuel, change crews. You should sleep.”

“Sigonella—”

“Italy.”

“What is this plane?” she asks, mildly alarmed, looking up at it.

“Boeing Business Jet. It’s like a converted 737.”

“Right. How much does it cost?”

“Fifty million. New.”

“Jesus.”

The plane was like a piece of art.
And that’s perhaps why it costs as much as a Picasso
, she thinks. He tells her a bit about the person who owns it, a defense contractor who runs training camps for international paramilitary groups. “Former Special Operations Forces guy, actually. Former Team guy.”

*

The inside of the plane reminds her of a painting by Andrew Wyeth, one that hangs in a small museum only a few miles from her home. It’s the one place she took Jason each year at various holidays—Thanksgiving, Easter. It’s dedicated to nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, and Sara loved the romance and the realism of those periods. Her son loved it because many of the paintings in one of its galleries were of pirates, and pigs.

The painting on her mind now is one of a woman looking out the window of a private jet. She is alone on the plane, and she is wearing a white coat. Her head is turned away, so you cannot tell how old she is; in fact, she might be a girl, not a woman, but would a girl travel alone on a private jet? Would anyone? She is looking out her window and through the clouds, almost as if she were looking down from heaven. And for the first time Sara thinks:
Yeah, because in heaven everyone gets to ride on jets like this
. But in the painting what the woman sees through the window isn’t angels; it’s a house, a little farmhouse. The painting at first appears to be a realistic portrait: a woman on a plane looks out the window. But if you looked more closely you could see the more fantastic, almost disturbing elements in it: the plane’s windows are sized like those of a vast ship, not like the traditionally and necessarily tiny rounds of an aircraft. And the chairs are enormous, as is the table between
them. The painting owes as much to
Alice in Wonderland
as it does to
Christina’s World
.

And Sara loved it for that mix: the harsh, cold American realism and the sly joy of a fantasy whose meaning was left to the imagination of the beholder. Sara had always looked at it as tragic, that this horrible thing was transporting the woman away from the place that she loved. Her view has not changed. Yes, the girl in the painting has her plane, but she is alone. And so she dreams about the house she sees below.

Sara is embarrassed to be in such luxury but also slightly numb and slightly giddy from stress. There is a private bathroom at the back with monogrammed blue linen towels, and tiny soaps wrapped in pleated blue tissue paper. It’s all robin’s-egg blue, a color she loves. When she lifts up one of the soaps to use it, she notices that the china dish underneath has a Trident painted on it in gold.

There is a girl dressed in blue who brings Sara a menu that includes filet mignon, smoked salmon, and cheeseburgers. The girl offers her a cocktail. The godfather falls asleep and encourages her to do the same. She has a drink, quickly, and starts on a second one. She cannot sleep—yet. This is her first trip abroad since not long after her son was born. David had insisted they get away, and leaving her little one with a friend, they’d taken off just the two of them for a quick Grand Tour: Rome, Paris, Vienna, Salzburg, London, Munich. And Normandy, so she could see the beaches. David had wanted her to understand what had occurred there. The climate at the time—it was summer—was welcoming. They stayed in an enormous château owned by another Yale classmate of David’s, where the owner kept his collection of hot air balloons running and staked to the lawn, ready to rise, his horses tacked up in the barn—just in case. She’d been afraid to go up in a
balloon for a ride, and David had teased her for being so hesitant. He’d finally convinced her, and then they’d taken it together, with a guide. They flew close to the beaches and, at David’s insistence, right over the American cemetery. “They buried the brothers next to each other,” he’d said. “Thirty-eight sets.” He’d brought binoculars and stood behind her, holding them up to her eyes. As they’d looked down over the nine thousand plus headstones, he’d said in poor French, to the guide, “The Pacific Theater got no respect.” He was trying to make a joke.

It was one of her more magical memories of being with him. Those weeks he had been generous and affectionate, and she even thought that he might propose marriage. He was on his home turf: travel and grandeur; good meals broken up only by learning or interesting introductions. He couldn’t trade those addictions for more mundane tasks, like negotiating the logistics of parenting or being nice to dull neighbors. He never did propose. His gift to her was a small set of memories. And a son. He was not capable of giving more than that.

She had thought she’d have a life where she traveled more, at least more than along the northeastern train line. But there was never time. When she was younger, her parents dragged her everywhere. They lived lives unallied with any regimen or convention, and often they’d just decide, “It’s Tuesday, it’s Istanbul.” Travel to her in those years was the essence of stress and dislocation, an experience of missed flights and lost tickets and old arguments. And she hated it. Only later, spending the summer in London before the summer when she met David, would she see the lure of being in a foreign place, and the luxury of learning new things coupled with the luxury of anonymity and rootlessness.

That summer she’d pretended to take classes but spent most afternoons at the National Portrait Gallery, and in the War
Rooms. In the Portrait Gallery she liked to sit on the bench by the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, the one where the Virgin Queen stands astride the globe, the one onto which, in tiny script at the bottom, the artist had written the following phrases: