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I say, “I just don’t
understand how you can be okay.”

“I’m not ‘okay,’” she says,
“but, I am better than I could be. I don’t want to go into why, if
you don’t mind. But I do have my reasons. Do you trust that I’m not
evil, not cold?” She pauses while I nod. “What about you?” she
says. “How are you?”

“I’d rather talk about you.”
Which is true. Since I arrived, I haven’t thought about the
messages Jake hasn’t sent.

She lays her cigarette in
the ashtray and comes around the table to hug me. Her arms are thin
and her shoulder bone is sharp on my cheek. The closeness is
awkward, but even so I want to hold her close far longer than she
stays.

We don’t look at one another
again until she’s back in her chair on the other side of the table.
“He’ll come home,” she says.

Before leaving, I pretend to
have to use the bathroom and snatch one of her souvenirs, a
porcelain model of the White House, from a shelf in the
hallway.

Outside, after goodbyes and
when I’m sure she’s not watching from the window, I set it in front
of my tire and listen for the pop of the hollow glass when I pull
away from the curb.

MAY 20, TUESDAY—MAY 26,
MONDAY

The local newspaper’s
editorial office will call if something becomes available, but for
now, the woman says, they think they’re okay.

I want to tell her they’re
not, no, and that in the space of four days I found two misplaced
apostrophes, four typos, two errant commas, and at least seven
sentences lacking parallel structure.

“No one pays attention to
that stuff,” Denise says when we meet one afternoon for coffee. I
tell her they should, that attention to detail is part of what
keeps us civilized.

She does not ask about her
White House.

I use Jake’s card to buy a
new television, a small thirteen-inch, and put it in the bedroom
for the nights I can’t sleep. Without it, I lie awake listening to
Chancey moving between rooms, pawing at his litter, scooping water
with his tongue. Listening to the computer humming and waiting for
the email chime to ding.

Time, too much time, passes
with no word from Jake, no visits from Denise, not even a call from
Olivia, and I wonder if I am dead. If, as in some movies, we die
and aren’t conscious of our deaths until a spirit guide takes us to
see our lifeless bodies, bloodied and grotesque, or pale, limp, and
peaceful. I might have had a stroke in my sleep, it occurs to me,
and the days I move through are not real, but are instead my own
creation, something I continuously conjure to ease the transition
into the eternity I’ll be spending here on the second floor of this
nondescript apartment building. The real panic comes when even
Chancey ignores his name being called and I can’t find him
anywhere, and when I hear a voice outside—Safia!—I thrust the
window fully open and say “Hey!”

A long few seconds pass
without a reaction and I start to feel weak, but then she turns,
looks up, and waves, and Chancey walks in with a string of dust
hanging from his whiskers.

Jake’s card also buys more
darts for my gun. During press conferences, I hold it the way Jake
instructed when we visited a range a few years ago. His chest
bumped the back of my neck and he held his arms straight against
mine to demonstrate. “You have to not be aware that you’re pulling
the trigger.” His hands cupped my hands. “It should be as natural
as breathing, and your breathing should be even and relaxed.
Squeeze, actually—don’t pull—slowly toward you—slowly—and when the
bullet fires, you should be surprised.”

The gentle-squeeze method
doesn’t work well with the toy gun; the trigger is stiffer and
clicks roughly into place. But my aim is improving. I’ve made some
dead-on shots, even from the kitchen doorway. Chancey chases the
darts that bounce off the screen.

I send Jake one more
email:
I need you.

I don’t know that I
do.

________

Shellie pets her Chihuahua
and coos “Aw, Puddin’” when he stretches his black and gold neck
for a treat she holds in front of his nose. “I don’t see why not,”
she says to my returning to work. “Lionel ain’t hired no one else,
and Charlie sure would like to lose the extra days you left
him.”

I tell her I didn’t mean to
do that to Charlie. That I just had to leave. Hard times, all
that.

“I know, sugar. I know. It’s
all right.” She sets her dog on the floor, says, “Lionel won’t like
it, though, if you do like you did, callin’ in all those times, so
be careful.” She pulls out a traced calendar where she writes the
schedules. “Same days okay?”

“Same days are perfect.” I
look at the cheerless walls, the grimy windows. I had thought she
might say no. Better that she said yes—I’m respectable, now. Not a
disappointment to Ja—to myself. Not someone different, or worse,
from who I was.

I slide the chair out. “I
guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Where you goin’, girl?
Cab’s right there.” She nods her head at the wide blue car parked
outside the window. “Charlie took today off to run his
errands.”

Before it’s time to for me
to go home, ten people slide in and out of my cab. One asks if I’ll
buy his food stamps, because some diapers he needs for his little
boy aren’t covered by the program. “Eighty dollars oughta do it,”
he says. I look at the red marks on his arms and neck and tell him
that I’m sorry, I don’t carry that kind of cash.

Another, a woman dressed up
to go nowhere, tells me I should take more care with my looks. “No
excuse, a lady goin’ out without a little makeup. Always try to
look pretty.” She says my hair is okay, but that my face looks like
“some zombie” she saw on cable TV. “Now is when you got to be
takin’ care of yourself, child,” she says.

No tips. After eight hours,
I leave with thirty-five dollars. I stop for a coffee on the way
home and avoid the coffee boy’s eyes. He looks good
today.

MAY 27, TUESDAY

To:
[email protected]
27 May
/ 1632

Subject: re: Hi,
there!

Mia,

Let me start with I love
you.

Sorry I didn’t write
sooner, but I’ve been unbelievably busy. And, yeah, I also wanted
to think a little. I don’t know. I read all your emails. I try to
understand what you’re going through, and I do understand as much
as I can without going through it myself. I know it’s tough. I just
hope that when you sound like you don’t like me it’s because you’re
upset and having a hard time. Not that I want you to have a hard
time. You know what I mean.

It’s really starting to
suck over here, if that makes you feel any better. Misery loves
company, right? The only time I feel like I might not go nuts is
when I’m either planning or flying a mission. Every day is the same
thing and my eyes feel like sandpaper. We change it up every now
and then, play volleyball or have a cookout, and it’s great for
morale, but it only lasts so long. Then the days get back to
normal. A week takes a month to go by, and I feel like I’ll never
really come home. Do I even live there, anymore? I don’t, you know.
This is where I live. Everyone says they’re deployed here because
it makes the stay seem shorter, but I’ve lived places for less time
than I’ll be here.

Are you real? I wonder if
you’re real. The words I get from you are black and white with no
hair or lips or hands. I wish I could see you for five minutes just
to know for sure.

Speaking of seeing you, we
had a meeting today. No chance, it looks like, of us getting out of
here in under a year. I know. I probably shouldn’t tell you. I
don’t want to know, either, but if I know, you should know. It’s
selfish, but I want to go through the shit of it with
you.

On a more positive note,
I’m getting lots of flight time and having a blast flying. You know
about William, by now. Thanks for not asking about it in emails and
for not pushing. It was hard, and I miss having him around and
flying with him. But I don’t want to talk about it much, if you
don’t mind. The last thing I’ll say about it is that he didn’t die
for nothing. He was doing something he believed in.

I have a lot of time to
write, today. Not much to do and no one’s around. I don’t know
where they are, but they’re not here, so I’m sitting in my foldout
chair on the deck I built and writing this on my laptop. I’ll paste
it into an email later. It feels so good to talk to you that I
could spend all day writing. I would call, but—honestly, M, I don’t
want to. I don’t know what we would say. Maybe, for now, one-way
talking is best.

I thought a lot about us and
about you when I got your emails and because you asked, I wondered
too if we only stay together because we’ve been together so long.
This distance makes it easy to look at things like that. How I go
on without you and how you go on without me. I guess neither of us
can ignore
our
my
changing thoughts about the war. I’d like to think we can agree to
disagree about that.

Being here, getting shot at
(not to be too dramatic, but it happens), knowing I might not come
home, it makes me think about my life. I have no control over my
life, here. I don’t get to come home until they tell me, and
between now and then, I fly the missions I’m told to fly and while
I’m not scared while I fly, I am more than vaguely aware that
flying can get me shot down.

I can’t use the phone when
I want or without someone standing behind me, and I can’t usually
send an email without having to wait in line, and even then I might
only get off a couple of sentences before someone behind me starts
coughing and grumbling.

I don’t know if I’m making
sense.

Thing is, M, I know that
when I come home, I’ll be somewhere I can make certain choices.
Life is too short, they say, and they’re right. You learn that kind
of thing in a way you never really understood before when someone
close to you dies doing the same thing you do a few times a week.
You learn that you want to make your life mean something while
you’re living it instead of after, and that there’s no excuse for
settling into a life you’re not sure is the one you want. Nothing
but the best, if you can do it. Which I can. Which you can. Do you
understand?

I want to be happy. I want
to stay in the Army and keep flying. What do you think about that?
What would you think if I stayed in for life? It sounds crazy after
everything I wrote up there about not having control over my own
life, but part of the control I want is deciding what I want, and
though much of my day-to-day control is in the hands of the Army, I
have to remember I gave them that control when I signed up, and I
did it for a reason.

I know we talked about me
getting out when my time’s up, but the longer I’m here and the
longer I’m in, the more right this feels. I felt a little of this
before I left but was afraid to tell you because I thought you
would leave. Now, though, I kind of think I have to do what’s right
for me, and you’ll either understand and stay with me, or you
won’t. It’s not that I don’t care. Please don’t think that. I love
you and you know I do. But we have to do what’s right for ourselves
whether or not the other agrees with it. And, M, I don’t want you
to stay with me if you don’t want to. Guys talk a lot of shit about
‘supportive’ wives and girlfriends, and a lot of times that means
the women give up their own lives to be nothing but support systems
or appendages. I wouldn’t want you to do that. Never give up
something that’s important to you just to follow me around. My
life, my job, isn’t any more important than what you would do, if
you found something that meant something to you. What I hope is
that I can do my thing and you can do your thing and somehow our
things will work together.

And now I’m thinking about
sex. Great. But that reminds me that I wanted to ask if you’d send
some KY.

Anyway, as for the very
hard to read email you wrote after a whole lot of drinking (you
wrote about “well to wall” carpeting and a “babay” – funny), tat’s
the kind of thing I don’t want you to do. You never wanted a brand
new house, and you were never too on-board with the baby thing.
Don’t give in just because of my life choices, okay? One of the
things I love most about you is that you know exactly what you want
and you don’t buckle to anyone. My being here is no reason for you
to change who you are. My choices are mine alone.

On a similar note, you also
asked me to marry you in a letter you sent early on. I haven’t
mentioned it because I figured you would say you didn’t remember
writing it. Anyway, remember or not, I have it. Proof. It’s taped
to the lid of my tuff box so I can take it from the envelope
whenever I want to read it. Sometimes I read it before going to
sleep. I also look at the picture I brought with me of you on the
fence and say ‘good morning’ to it. Weird? I can’t help it, though.
The sun is behind you and your hair is all over the place and your
face is so beautiful. You are so beautiful, Mia.

No one has ever asked me to
marry them before. You talked about it often enough before I left,
but it seemed like you were waiting for me to ask. Well, even if it
was just the result of an emotional outburst, thanks for asking.
You know, until just now, I hadn’t thought about what I would say
if you actually meant it. The idea of marriage is one thing; being
asked is something completely different. If you were serious, I’m
really sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. Now I’m scared you
feel rejected or something. I swear, M, I didn’t think you meant
it. Tell me if you did, and I’ll give you a better response. And
don’t feel bad if anything I’ve written (about my plans) has made
you change your mind, either. I would understand. I’d be destroyed,
but I’d understand.