Homefront (23 page)

Everything will be fine
tomorrow.

I love you I love you I
love you. I do.

Mia

Stifling top-floor humidity
cools, thins, on the way down the stairs. A thick and steady wind
comes through the hallway window high on the wall, and for a moment
I stand there, letting the breeze—though warm—chill the sweat and
lift the heat from my skin before I move on, down to the ground
floor.

My mailbox is empty, but the
white corner of an envelope sticks out from behind the brass door
of number one’s box, the one beside mine. It’s been such a long
time since there’s been a letter for me that there could—there
must—be a mistake. The mailman might have accidentally left my
letter in the wrong box, for example. Or he might have had a
substitute, someone new who didn’t care about the route or about
the people waiting for important mail and who just wanted to get
the day over with.

Unlike the corner of a
business envelope, this one, I notice as I tug at it, has none of
the black bar code lines near the bottom edge, and nothing on it
crinkles the way an address window would crinkle. The paper tears a
little with the yanking, snags on some sharp imperfection in the
thin brass, but it’s out almost far enough for me to see the
address and the handwriting. Black is all I’m getting, now, just
the bottom curve of an ‘s’ in the town name and the points making
up the bottom of ‘TN.’ I push it back inside the box, bit by bit,
holding the smallest wedge of corner so I can slide it up higher,
maybe bypass that—

The door opens and I let go,
step back and examine my own envelope to make sure the address is
correct, the stamp right-side up.

Brian, windblown and
sweating, smiles with white, square teeth.

“Good timing,” he
says.

His loose clothes, khaki
pants and white shirt, cling to his sweaty skin. But I don’t
notice. His attractiveness is obvious. Uninteresting.

I tell him I was just
checking the mail.

“Ah. As you
were.”

I reach up to put my letter
in the bin, which is not a bin at all, but a thin, plastic bookend,
its flat bracing ledge tucked between the wall and the tops of the
mailboxes.

The landing is small, and
when I turn, Brian’s body blocks the stairway. “Excuse
me.”

He steps aside. “Denise
wants me to pick up her lighter.”

“It’s upstairs. You can come
with me, if you want. Or you can stay down here.”

He waits in the kitchen
while I lift cushions and rug corners. At the desk, I sit down and
move stacks of paper and slide the lamp to the side. It leaves a
clean path in the dust.

He bends around the corner.
“Find it?”

“Not yet.” I spin to face
him and cross my legs.

He steps into the room and
leans against the door frame and puts his hands in his pockets. “Do
you think you might keep looking for it?”

“I will. I’m thinking. I
could swear I just saw it, and I’m trying to remember
where.”

He waits, looks at the muted
commercial on the television, and then behind me. “Is that your
Christmas tree?”

“So,” I say, “do you think
it’ll be over soon, then?”

“I don’t know if you’ve
noticed,” he says, “but Christmas has been over for a couple of
months, now.”

“I mean the war.”

“The war?”

“It’s almost over, don’t you
think? News has been good. Considering.”

“I don’t know.” His fingers
move in his pockets and there is clicking, clinking.

“You must know something.
You’re one of them, aren’t you? In a way, anyway.”

“Like I said, I don’t know,”
he says. “It’s pretty hard to change a country, no matter how
pretty the pictures they give us. We see what they want us to
see.”

“But, we’re in control, now.
We have the control. Maybe it’ll be over in a month.”

“Maybe,” he says. He runs
his hand over his head, through hair thick with waves. It hides his
fingers. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’ll be fine.”

“William wasn’t.”

William wasn’t.
Wasn’t.

That William is dead…William
is
dead
,
dead,
dead
…does not
seem real, or likely, or probable. They say, yes, on the news, that
people are being killed. Every day, almost, they say someone dies,
but surely they’re not actually being
killed.

William is not really
dead
.

“True,” he says, “but what
are the chances of both of them not making it back?”

“That doesn’t
work.”

“I guess it
doesn’t.”

He lifts his chin, looks
across the room and out the window. “Still,” he says, “you’ll get
nowhere assuming the worst every day.”

I swivel in the chair, side
to side, and then spin. “No,” I say, “but it’s safe,” and I spin,
pulling my legs to my chest, and spin, using the desk to push me
along. I think of Superman, circling the Earth fist forward,
around, around, fast enough to reverse the rotation and reverse
time and arrive with just moments to save Lois. I close my eyes and
try for the second week of February, the day before he came home
with the news. We would fill the gas tank and load the cat and
drive the scenic routes to Canada or Mexico.

Brian says, “What are you
doing?” but I don’t answer, just spin, the chair knocking at its
base under my unbalanced weight, and it is when the spinning starts
to feel like sitting stationary—though I knew it before, of
course—that it comes. Future as fact rather than as a possibility
with options on top of options.

We would never have made
it.

We’d never have gotten out
of the state, because (I stop pushing, open my eyes and watch the
floor spiral) Jake would never have left with me.

The chair slows, then stops,
and I am dizzy and sick. I rest my head on the desk and he asks if
I’m okay.

“Don’t you think it’s a
little strange,” I say, “that she sent you to pick up something of
her dead husband’s?”

“Proximity. That’s all it
is.”

Sitting straight helps level
my head, but he still sways some where he stands. “Why did you say
yes?”

“Pathetically devoted. By
the way, I really have to get the lighter to her before she goes
tomorrow, so if you—”

“I’ll find it. I just have
to remember where it is.”

“Did I come at a bad time?
You seem…troubled.”

His hair is too long. Jake
has seen hair shorter than that and has bent to whisper in my ear,
“That’s not regulation.” (I feel his breath, thinking of it
now.)

“Not a bad time.” William’s
lighter presses against the crease of my upper, inner thigh,
through my pocket. I adjust it.

“Well,” he says. “I suppose
I can wait a bit.”

I stand up to look behind
the computer monitor, twisting the screen, even. “What did you
think? When you heard, I mean.” I sit back down.

“About William?”

“What else?”

He sighs and again runs his
fingers though his hair, then pulls a brown box from his shirt
pocket. “May I?”

“You may.”

“I’m quitting when I’m
thirty-five,” he says. He smiles. “And I don’t know why I told you
that.” He tilts his head while lighting, then slips the matchbook
back into his khakis. “I don’t mean to be impatient,” he says, “but
the sooner you find the lighter, the sooner I can go to—I can get
it to Denise.” The sun has shifted behind the blinds and shines in
his eyes. He squints, shields them. “You know how you women are
about our things.” He turns to the TV and it’s dust, dust and
sun.

“Especially once you’re
dead.”

“I would imagine, especially
then.”

I turn up the sound, but
there’s nothing new, today, just a replay. A reel from early April.
Citizens—miles, towns from Jake—push through the square like a
water surge and surround the stories-tall fallen statue. A boy,
nine, maybe ten, smacks it with a shoe he’s taken off and grips
tightly in his hand, and his rage—it should be impossible in
someone so young—is mirrored in those around him, their cheers
filled with triumph, resentment. The anchors smile. It’s a good
day, still, looting aside. We must remember that, they
say.

Brian watches with an
eyebrow raised.

I open a drawer and move
pens around, pick up a linked string of paperclips and unhook them
one by one. “Denise, for example. All she has left of William is
whatever he left behind. Imagine having only that to hold
onto.”

He shrugs. “I—”

“You can’t imagine, can
you?”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can’t. You
haven’t been over at all, yet, have you? I never thought it was
possible for one person to have so much luck.”

Brian plucks a piece of
tobacco from his tongue, looks at it, and takes it into the
kitchen. He runs the water, comes back out, and stands where he was
before, again shading squinted eyes until he notices the sun has
moved. He drops his hand. “You think I’ve somehow, what,
manipulated the system to keep myself out of the war?”

“I didn’t say
that.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“Is that
possible?”

“I’m sure it is, to some
degree.”

The paperclips unstrung and
loose, I return them to the drawer and close it. “And have
you?”

He looks at me while
see-sawing his cigar between his fingers. “To some
degree.”

“Well,” I say, and it
happens so quickly—my getting up, my walking over—that I am
surprised by the hot, itching sting of his face on my palm. He
yanks my wrist from where it hangs in the air—just beside his
cheek, floating—and pushes me away. There should not be tears—this
is not a time for tears—but I must have them, because once he seems
sure I won’t try to hit him again, he goes into the kitchen and
comes back with a paper towel and uses it to wipe my
face.

“I understand,” he says.
“Don’t be sorry.”

“I’m not.”

“But I think you might want
to take a minute to try to understand me, too. I’m not a
deserter.”

“You may as well
be.”

“And? What if I were? If
you’re so in favor of the war, why aren’t you suiting up? What,
because you’re a woman you’re exempt from duty to country? If
you’re on the side of the war, surely you feel the responsibility
to—”

“I never said I was for
it.”

“No?”

“No.”

“And why?”

“I’m just not.”

“That doesn’t answer the
question. Come on.” He points at the television. “You saw that as
well as I did. The statue fell, the people rejoiced. Did you see?
That was the word they used, I think. Rejoiced. How, after
something like that, can you offer no support for your opinion one
way or the other?”

“Anything I say will sound
stupid to you, because I don’t involve myself in politics, and I
don’t—”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean,
‘ah’?”

“I understand,
now.”

“What do you
understand?”

“You. It’s natural, of
course, but it’s a shame that your involvement….or, rather, your
interest…only exists because your boyfriend is there.”

“I didn’t say
that.”

“There was no
need.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I? In that case, I’d be
interested to know your views.”

“Leave it alone, will you? I
watch the news. I know enough, but not enough to discuss it with
you like someone who has all—or even one—of the answers. I don’t
know. I don’t know anything about why it happened other than what
they told us, but I know it feels wrong. That’s enough for me. I’m
against it, and that’s all.”

“Well, good,” he says.
“That’s good. You understand me, then, and you see I’ve done
nothing wrong.”

“Nothing wrong?”

“No.”

“You joined the Army and
you’re avoiding the war—”

“War? When did it become a
war?”

“The conflict, then. You
avoid the conflict, and you see nothing wrong with
that?”

“I’ve done nothing
illegal—”

“Adultery. That’s illegal in
the military, isn’t it?”

He sighs. “Nothing illegal,
and if they needed me, they would send me.”

“They do need you. To
replace William.”

“It doesn’t work quite that
way.”

“Lucky for you.”

“This is not a war I agree
with,” he says. “I don’t even think it was a war William agreed
with.”

“Should you be talking about
him?”

He doesn’t answer. He folds
the paper towel into a square and slides it in his loose cargo
pocket.