Home Front(22)

How much a world could change in three hours …

They’d always known she could be deployed; at least since September Eleventh they’d known it, and yet she and Michael had never discussed it. How could they? Michael didn’t want to hear about her career in the military. Every time she even brought up the idea of other soldiers deploying, he’d gone off on a rant about the wrongheadedness of sending troops to Iraq.

She knew what he thought, what he saw—the military’s dark side, the mistakes, the way the brass let down soldiers and veterans. That was politics, though. Separate, somehow. For her, it was different. The Guard was her family, too.

Honor. Duty. Loyalty. These were more than words to Jolene; they were part of her. She’d always been two women—a mother and soldier—and this deployment ripped her in half, left a bloody, gaping tear between the two sides of her.

Who would help Betsy through the rocky terrain of adolescence, give her advice about bad boys and mean girls and all the kids in between? Who would walk Lulu into kindergarten and hold her when she woke, sobbing, from a nightmare?

And there was the risk. Jolene was a helicopter pilot. She would tell Michael and the girls that she wasn’t allowed in combat, that she would be far from harm’s way, but she knew it wasn’t true. Helicopters were shot down all the time.

We’ll come home, Tami had said.

Jolene had nodded, smiling, although she knew—they both did—that no such promise could be made. It didn’t matter now anyway. Tomorrow and the future wasn’t something they could control. For now, they had a job to do, a job they’d been trained for. Civilians didn’t understand, maybe they couldn’t, but a soldier stepped up when he or she was needed. Even if she was afraid, even if her children needed her. It was Jolene’s time to give back to the army, her time to serve her country.

She placed a hand over her chest, feeling the slow, even beating of her heart. She closed her eyes, hearing her heartbeat mingle with the whooshing of the waves on the pebbled beach and the exhalations of her breath. Tears stung her eyes, fell down her cheeks, mixing with the rain. She imagined all of it—the good-bye, the missing, the loss. She pictured her daughters crying for her, reaching out for her, unable to really understand her absence.

But she had no choice to make. At that, she felt a kind of peace move through her, an acceptance of the situation and a realization of who she was. She had given her word that if called to serve, she would go.

She hated leaving her children—hated it with a passion that could have crippled her if she gave in to it, but she had no choice. She would go to Iraq for a year, do her job, and come home to her family.

That was what she would tell them … what she would believe.

She was prepared, had always been prepared, for this moment. For more than twenty years, she’d trained for it. A small part of her even wanted to go, to test herself. She wanted to go … she just didn’t want to leave.

She pulled her hand slowly away from her chest, let it fall in her lap. At her feet, a small collection of dried white sand dollars lay in a cloverleaf pattern, a reminder of last summer. She bent down, plucked one up, rubbing the pad of her thumb over the porous surface. Then she stood up.

She was going to war.

*



At one o’clock Jolene called the preschool and arranged for Lulu to stay later, and then she called Michael at work. He kept her waiting long enough that she began to think he wasn’t going to answer, and when he did finally take the call, he sounded preoccupied.

“Hi, Jo. What is it?”

“I need you to come home tonight,” she said.

He paused; she heard him breathing. “I have a lot of work to do. I think I’ll sleep at the office tonight.”

“Don’t, please,” she said, hating how it sounded as if she were begging. “Something has come up. I need to talk to you.”

“I think we need some time apart.”

“Please, Michael. I need to talk to you tonight.”

“Fine. I’ll be on the six o’clock boat.”

For the next few hours, she tried not to think about the future, but it was impossible. As the time for carpool approached, she found her spirits lagging. The thought of seeing her children—looking at them, seeing their bright smiles, and knowing the pain that was coming their way—was terrible. She kept losing her balance, stumbling. Once, in the kitchen, she’d looked at the yellow-school-bus framed photo of Betsy’s school years, and she actually had to sit down.

Help me through this, she prayed more than once.

At the preschool, she parked out front and went inside slowly, hearing the high-pitched buzz of children’s laughter before she even reached the gate that led to the backyard.

“Mommy!” Lulu said, shrieked really, throwing her hands in the air and scrambling to her feet. She ran at Jolene, threw herself into Jolene’s arms.

“Do you have something in your eye, Mommy?” Lulu asked. “Cuz I gotted sand in my face at lunch and it made me cry.”

“I’m fine, Lucy Louida,” Jolene said, grateful that Lulu didn’t hear the thickening of her voice. She carried Lulu out to the car, strapped her into the seat in the back, and drove across town to the middle school. As usual, Betsy was one of the last ones out of the school. She hung back from the other kids, as if she didn’t want to be seen. Then she ran to the SUV and climbed into the backseat, slamming the door shut.