You Know When the Men Are Gone (12 page)

Delia glanced at her for a moment, her blond eyebrows drawn together, suddenly looking like the child Ellen once knew. Then she shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

Ellen continued with her instruction in a singsong voice, but felt slightly dizzy. She had expected Delia to apologize for her outburst. But her daughter, so unrepentant, so coiled against her, was terrifying.

After her search turned up nothing, Ellen went home. She raced up the steps, telling herself that her children had returned and were right now sitting peaceably at the kitchen table, eating the strawberries left over from breakfast. But before she even opened the door she could sense the silence of a childless home, the kind of quiet that she usually longed for, greeting her like a slip into the bathtub, head ducking under the water, warm nothing filling the ears.

The answering machine light was blinking and Ellen tripped over a forgotten box of Texas grapefruit as she struggled to push play.

“Hello, Ellen, this is Dr. Pierce. You had an appointment this morning. We know you signed in at the front desk but you seem to have vanished. I’ve rearranged my schedule to squeeze you in tomorrow morning at ten—it is important that I give you your results as soon as possible.”

Ellen stood with her finger an inch from the red button, fear clouding the corners of the room. What did that mean—it was important that she get the results as soon as possible? That she was clean and he wanted to tell her the good news so she could stop worrying? Or that he had found trace cancer and they needed to aggressively treat it immediately?

When Ellen had first been diagnosed, she had looked up the word
remission
in the dictionary, too proud to ask the doctor for the exact definition of her only hope.
Forgiveness,
she had read,
a decrease in the magnitude of a force,
but not the eradication, just the respite, a second chance. Three months ago Dr. Pierce told her that her body had so far proved resilient, the cancer was in remission (the doctors never said “gone,” they never said “cured”), still slumbering deep in her cells, and the longer it stayed asleep the better, and this was the best and only victory for a cancer patient. But she needed to be tested every three months for the first year, and every three months her cancer could once again rise up, alert and terribly awake.

When the high school let out at 3:15, Ellen drove over to the McNair Village Apartments, slanted and gray, with unshaded outdoor parking that baked the paint off the cars lined out front. Crissy Hachett lived there, the daughter of a fellow captain in John’s battalion and, lately, one of Delia’s closest friends. Every time Ellen saw Crissy she wondered if the girl really had an abnormally small head or if the size was accentuated by the mass of tight cornrows that crossed her pink scalp.

Crissy did not seem surprised to see Ellen at her door, her lip-glossed mouth open as if she tried to cultivate the air of a subpar IQ.

“Hello, Crissy,” Ellen said, trying to smile.

“I already told that MP I don’t know where Delia is,” the girl said, but something in her close-set eyes told Ellen that she did.

“Crissy, dear.” Ellen paused around the word
dear
as if it were a threat. She leaned closer and could smell patchouli, which made her frayed temper flash irrationally. When Ellen was in college, the only kids who liked patchouli were the potheads. “Please tell me where my children are or I will immediately inform Sergeant Jaboski that you are withholding information. You wouldn’t like the MPs to come to your home and question you again, would you?”

“Mrs. Roddy, if Crissy knew, she’d tell,” a quiet voice chimed. Ellen looked beyond the girl and saw the shadow of Mrs. Hachett. She was wearing a T-shirt with a fire-breathing horse that must belong to her husband. It hung past her hips and had a tear at its seam. Ellen stood up as straight as possible. The entire Hachett family was completely at odds with her idea of how an officer’s family should behave, with their wrinkled clothes and dented Honda hatchback, never trying to set an example or present their best face to the world. She remembered the Hachetts showing up at a soccer game a few months ago, right before Delia quit the team. They had arrived late, of course, Mrs. Hachett looking harried and windblown in a pair of unflattering shorts and another one of her husband’s XL T-shirts. Her chubby ten-year-old son trudged next to her, scabby-kneed with a sore that looked suspiciously like ringworm on his left cheek. Ellen had been cheering on the sidelines and immediately stopped to stare. She was embarrassed. The mangy Hachetts made all the other captain families look bad. Then she saw Crissy, her uniform still grass-stained from a previous practice, saunter over to her mother and throw her arms around her big-breasted girth. Ellen had come early to the game with snacks for the whole team, she and Landon decked out in matching sage Ralph Lauren polos, and she couldn’t remember the last time Delia had smiled at her, let alone relinquished herself to a hug.

“It’s Ellen Roddy, isn’t it?” The woman pushed open the screen and looked Ellen up and down. Ellen tried to remember her name. Martha? “How’s your husband doing?”

“Fine,” Ellen replied carefully. “And yours?”

“Oh, you know, sick of the desert and missing home.” The woman grinned. “No sign of those kids of yours yet, huh?”

Ellen shook her head and tried to stay composed. She wondered what was behind Mrs. Hachett’s words—that Ellen had a husband home and still couldn’t keep track of her children? She wanted to say something scathing, wanted to fill Mrs. Hachett’s smug face with terror, wanted to blurt out that there had been an attack today in Iraq, did the cozy Hachetts know about it? When was the last time they had heard from their soldier? Ellen wanted to wield something over them, anything to wipe that smirk off the lying, pinheaded daughter, who was looking down at her fake-Birkenstocked feet.

“Please call me if you think of anything,” Ellen said, imagining how good it would feel to slowly tug those braids until a screaming Crissy released an address, a name. And then she would have liked to kick over Mrs. Hachett’s planter of half-dead geraniums. “Here is my phone number.”

Mrs. Hachett reached out to take the piece of paper and this time her smile seemed more genuine. “I sure hope they get home soon.”

For a moment Ellen thought Mrs. Hachett was referring to her husband and the other soldiers in Iraq, implying that, if he wanted to, John could somehow bring them back tomorrow. Then she realized the woman was talking about Delia and Landon.

“Thank you,” Ellen said, hesitating. She looked into Mrs. Hachett’s brown eyes and saw relief staring back, relief that this was happening to the Roddys and that the life of the Hachett family, for at least this one day, was still unbroken.

It was almost five when Ellen pulled into her driveway. She had gone to all of the guard gates and asked if anyone had seen a teenage girl and a little boy walk by. She had gone to the five swimming pools, the six schools, and every playground at the housing developments and youth centers. She checked her phone: neither the kindly military police sergeant nor her husband had called her back with an update.

She sat in her car, staring down at the manicured lawns of Patton Park. Three years before, new to Fort Hood, they had lucked out when the housing lottery gave her this home on Marshall Street, in the company and field-grade officer housing, although John was just a junior captain at the time. When they had first moved in Ellen had clapped her hands like a child at Christmas, amazed at the wood fences and picture windows and new hardwood floors, feeling like she and John had triumphed over everyone else whose lottery number had sent them to the smaller, older, shabbier places on post. But now she looked at the thorny rosebushes and weepy pansies lining the street and wondered what was happening within the other immaculate walls, at the dinner tables of other families. Were those children holding hands and saying grace or stonily refusing to eat the meals their mothers had prepared? Pretty Patton Park to tired McNair Village, what were all of those children doing without their dads at the head of their tables, and were the mothers, like Ellen, just barely holding on?

When she finally exited her car, she entered her home slowly, her arms around her chest, no longer hopeful that her children would miraculously be sitting in the kitchen. Inside, Ellen slowly walked into Delia’s room. She had looked through it briefly that morning with Sergeant Jaboski. He had wanted to know if Delia had packed a bag or taken her allowance savings. Ellen found twenty dollars in a glass jar under the bed but wasn’t sure if that was the extent of her daughter’s money. Now Ellen looked around the room again. She just meant to snoop but within minutes she had torn it apart, the drawers upended, the closet gutted so that shoes and jackets spilled out the door, even half of the Harry Potter and teen vampire books pulled down from the shelves, the pages splayed like the feathers of murdered birds.

There was nothing out of the ordinary, no drugs or condoms or cult paraphernalia, just a Marilyn Manson CD that Ellen had expressly forbidden Delia to buy, hidden in a brown paper bag in Delia’s sock drawer. Ellen was almost disappointed—she wanted to find something tangible that would explain everything, something that could be fixed, something that could be blamed.

Then the room dipped wildly to the left and Ellen put her hands out, grabbing the edge of Delia’s desk to steady herself. Had she eaten anything today? Her heart suddenly seemed to beat so frantically that she thought she could see her blouse moving up and down from the motion. It reminded Ellen of the way the unborn Delia used to kick when trapped in her belly, legs flailing so hard that she could see the outline of miniature feet stretching the skin. Ellen sat down on the floor and took a deep and what she imagined was supposed to be a calming breath. Perhaps this was a case of vertigo, a panic attack, or a heart attack. Something suitably awful that would strike down a woman who couldn’t find her own children.

She reached under her shirt, the small silicone bag falling out of the left cup of her bra, and placed her palm over her heart. She tried to count her heartbeats as she breathed. Her hand felt cool against the blank space of her chest, against the rippled, almost slippery scar tissue where she had once had an A cup breast. Ellen couldn’t believe how close her hand could be to her heart, how clear and desperate the beat was without the flesh of her breast to mute it, as if she contained some small and wild ocean inside.

Then, almost as if it were an extension of her own internal clamor, she heard keys rattle. She glanced around the mess and stood.

“John?” she called out as she walked shakily toward the front door. John would know what to do; he understood the nature of emergencies, he would take over. And on a deeper level Ellen was glad that his early arrival home meant that he, too, was worried. She knew that against the backdrop of soldiers’ lives, of war and insurgent attacks, perhaps the disappearance of their children did not loom large, but this was still a family crisis and she wanted, more than anything, her husband beside her.