Home Front(65)

When she finally drew back, shaking, her pale face streaked with tears, he felt a surge of love as powerful as any he’d ever known. “I love you, Betsy, and we’re all going to be okay. That’s what we have to believe. She’ll come home to us.”

Betsy nodded slowly, biting her lower lip.

“Hey,” Lulu said, coming into the room. “I want a hug.”

Michael opened his other arm and Lulu scampered up beside her sister. “I think I should take my girls to the beach today,” he said after a moment.

Lulu drew back, her eyes big. “You?”

“But it’s a workday,” Betsy said.

“I’ve worked enough,” Michael said. The unfamiliar words loosened something in him, made him feel buoyant. He reached for the phone on the end table and called his mom. “Hey, Ma, I’m going to stay home with the girls today. We’re going to hang out at the beach. You want to come?”

His mother laughed. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do at the store. I’ll meet you there?”

“Perfect,” Michael said, hanging up. Then, to his stunned daughters, he said, “Why are you sitting there? I thought we were going to the beach.”

“Yay!” Lulu yelped, bouncing off his lap and running upstairs.

In the garage, Michael found that Jolene had everything organized neatly—folding beach chairs, marshmallow-roasting sticks, lighter fluid, coolers. He had an entire cooler packed by the time Betsy and Lulu came back downstairs, wearing their bathing suits and carrying beach towels. “I got Lulu ready,” Betsy said proudly.

After breakfast, Michael grabbed the cooler, directed the girls to get the buckets and shovels, and down they walked, toward the beach. At the street—quiet this morning—they crossed holding hands and went to their small dock.

They spent the whole day on the beach, making sand castles, looking for shells, wading in the cold blue waves. Sometime around noon, he built a fire in the round, metal, portable pit on their small deck, and in no time at all they were roasting hot dogs over an open flame.

At about one o’clock, his mom showed up and joined in the fun. For the first time in months, Betsy dropped her preteen attitude and became a kid again, and come evening, when the sky turned lavender and a ghostly moon came out to see who played on the beach below, they sat in chairs pulled close together, with blankets wrapped around them.

“Daddy,” Lulu said, tucked in the lee of his arms. “I’m scared about starting school. When is next week? Can Mommy come home?”

An emotion moved through him, tightened his chest. “I know your mommy would love to walk you into school, but she can’t. I’ll be there, though. Will that be good enough?”

“Will you hold my hand?”

“Of course.”

“How come I have to go all day? Mommy said I would be done by lunchtime.”

“It’s different now, baby. You need to be in the all-day program.”

“Cuz she’s gone?” Lulu asked sleepily, fingering the small metal wings pinned to her bathing suit.

“Right.”

“What if I get scareded?”

“It’s always scary on the first day,” Betsy said quietly. “But everyone will like you, Lulu. And you have a great teacher—Ms. MacDonald. I loved her.”

“Oh,” Lulu said, sounding unconvinced.

Michael smiled. “Let me tell you what it’s like…”

As he talked to his youngest daughter about kindergarten and teachers and cubbies and recess, it was as if he were another man from another life. For years, he’d strived to make a difference in the world, and he’d worked like a dog to make that happen, and yet here he was, a man sitting on a dock with his children, and never had he felt more certain that his words mattered.

That was what Jolene had been trying to tell him every time he missed an event. It matters, she’d said.

“Okay, Daddy,” Lulu said at last. “I guess I can do that ’cause I’m a big girl now. If you hold my hand. And I’m taking my pink ribbon.”

“Ah, Lulu,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Much later, when the girls had fallen asleep in their chairs, while the waves lapped along the pebbled shore and the stars shone down on them, his mother looked at him. “Jolene would be proud of you today,” she said quietly.

Michael looked at her, over Lulu’s dark head. “I let her down,” he said.

His mother nodded, smiling sadly, as if she’d known this all along.

*



September was a bloody month in the war. It seemed that every day a helicopter came back to base shot up. Hero missions and suicide bombers were commonplace now. Jolene had begun to avoid the Haji Mart altogether; she couldn’t stand thinking that the cute boy selling videos might someday have a bomb strapped to his chest. It had begun to rain in the past few days; the base had become a huge mud hole. The trailer’s cement floor looked like dirt. There was no way to get the viscous red mud off your boots.

Tonight, the sky was clear and black, spangled with stars. It occurred to her that only a few months ago a sky like this had made her think of her family at home, sleeping peacefully beneath the same stars. These days, she didn’t dwell on what was happening at home. She was too busy and exhausted to think about that. She was in the air constantly now, flying units into location, transporting workers to job sites, and flying Iraqi troops and civilian and military VIPs. More and more often, she flew air-assault missions, carrying troops to their mission-landing zones.