American War(14)

She sat on the well-worn swing. The branch gave a little, letting out a faint squeak as Martina’s weight pulled the rope tight into the rut in the bark.

She ripped open the gel packet and scooped the orange gunk into her mouth with her finger. Because of its texture the food could not be chewed with any conviction; she mashed it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, letting it slide down her throat. It tasted not of apricot but of apricot perfume, of apricots as envisioned by engineers unfamiliar with the fruit as it existed in the natural world. In a minute she felt the sugar coursing through her nerve endings.

She heard the sound of shuffling feet. Startled, she began to ask who was there, but stopped, frozen solid. The shuffling came closer, until it was nearly upon her. That was when she finally saw the source of the sound—an emaciated, mangy dog wandering blind through the empty field. It was a foxhound. It moved slow and reticent toward her, probing for any sign of hostility.

Martina squeezed the last of the apricot gel onto her palm and held it out to the dog. It sniffed at the food. Though starved, the dog paused to consider the gel and then turned away.

Martina looked up. A small orange dawn suddenly lit up the sky.

It was a half-dome of bright light on the horizon, visible only for a few seconds. Then it was gone.

In a moment it came again, and this time in its wake a horn of flame shot high into the night sky. It hung in the air for a few seconds, sustained, and then retreated. The sight offered no sound, each wave of illumination as though in a vacuum.

Then came a half-sun to dwarf the previous bursts of light, and a few seconds later a roar unlike anything Martina had ever heard. The sound collided with her chest and sent her tumbling backward off the swing. She fell to the dirt, staring dumbstruck, her ears overwhelmed by a dull ringing. The foxhound yelped and fled. And then Martina too was running, back in the direction of her children and her home.

She sprinted, summoning the legs of her youth. A quarter-mile down the road, her lungs burning, a bang even louder than the one before it shook her off her feet once more. By the time she’d reached her home, winded and bracing against the porch railing for support, two more explosions had shattered the night.

She found her children inside the house, frantic. The twins were huddled together on the floor near their parents’ bed, Sarat hugging her wailing sister. Simon was at the front of the house, trying to swing shut the shipping container’s hopelessly rusted door, which the family rarely had reason to close in the summertime.

“Where were you?” he asked his mother. “What’s happening?”

Martina grabbed her son by the arm and pulled him to the back of her house. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just a factory down the way caught fire. It’s just a sound, it won’t harm us.”

She sat on the floor by her children and held them close. She pulled a little-used blanket from the space below her bed and wrapped it around herself and her daughters. “It’s just a factory down the way caught fire,” she said. “It’s just a loud sound, that’s all. It’ll be over soon.” The more she repeated it, the truer it became.



THE ERUPTIONS DID NOT RELENT until the early dawn, arriving with unpredictable frequency and severity. By the end of it exhaustion had desensitized the children—the twins curled up against their mother’s breast, Simon seated on the floor beside them, unmoving, watching the sunlight seep through the window.

Martina stared ahead at the entrance to her home, waiting. In the wake of the explosions she listened now for small sounds—footsteps, whispered directives, the cocking of a gun. None came. There was only the distressed clucking of the chickens and the audible pulse of the crickets and the sound of her children breathing.

Look what stubbornness took from you already, she thought. Don’t let it take any more.

She motioned to her son. “You think you can get us across the river in your boat?”

“Yes,” Simon said without hesitation.

“Go on to your room—quiet so you won’t wake the girls—and pack as many change of clothes as you can get into your backpack.”

“Why?” Simon asked.

“Hurry now. I’m counting on you to get us across the river. Your father’s counting on you.”

The boy stood up quietly. Martina waited until he was done packing and then she stood up and carried the girls, still groggy and half-asleep, to their beds. She set them down and instantly they dozed off again. While they slept, she pulled the Chestnuts’ biggest piece of luggage—an old bronze-detailed suitcase that once belonged to her grandmother—from under the bed. It was deep and wide and brittle at its copper hinges. Stickers covered its sides, each commemorating a visit to some historic site or state park that Martina knew only from the schoolbooks of her youth.

She laid the suitcase open on the bed; the room filled with the smell of mothballs. Inside she found a couple of pens and a cracked frame with no photo inside. She tossed these things on the floor. She opened her dresser drawers and began stuffing the suitcase with clothes and toiletries. Instantly and without thinking, she developed a hierarchy of need, starting closest to the skin and working outward—tampons, underwear, dresses. She packed two towels and two rolls of toilet paper and a packet of wet-naps. When the suitcase was almost full she stopped and went to the kitchen. She took jars and containers of the least perishable foods—jams, peanut butter, all the remaining military rations. She took the large plastic soda containers and emptied their contents outside in the dirt, and then refilled them from the tap connected to the rainwater tank. She packed the suitcase until it threatened not to close. She sat on it to keep it shut but the old clasps would not hold, and so she took two of her husband’s belts from the dresser and tied them to each other and looped them around the suitcase to keep it from bursting open. Then she found Sarat’s and Dana’s matching Minnie Mouse backpacks and filled them with the girls’ clothes.