Home Front(72)

His mother’s face seemed to fall at that. “This is what she took away with her?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Michael.” She sighed heavily. “I wondered. Her letters…”

“Are to the girls. Yeah.”

“Well,” she said. “You are an idiot, of course. But we’ve all been idiots when it comes to love. It’s not as if your father and I never had our problems. He once moved out—for six months. You were young. I made excuses. I waited. It is a long story that doesn’t matter anymore, except for this: he came back, and I took him in. We found a way to be happy again. So will you.” She got up from her place and stepped around the coffee table. Sitting down on the sofa, she put an arm around him and pulled him against her, soothing his tattered nerves in the way that only a mother could. “I’ll take care of the girls. You go to her, Michael.”

They sat there a long time. When his mother finally fell asleep, Michael got up. He covered his mother’s sleeping body with one of her own hand-knit blankets and wandered through the dark house. He checked on his daughters repeatedly, standing in the doorway and watching them sleep, hating the new life to which they would awaken. Unable to sleep, he started drinking coffee at 5:00 A.M., mostly because, although he couldn’t sleep, he was so tired he kept stumbling, hitting things, knocking them over. Sometimes an image of Jolene, smiling, flashed through his mind, and it caused a kind of temporary blindness. That was when he’d stumble into a chair or knock over a family photo.

He was awakened by the doorbell. At the sound, he jerked upright—realizing he’d fallen asleep in a wooden kitchen chair. He got unsteadily to his feet and went to the door, opening it.

Three men stood there. They introduced themselves as Jolene’s fellow guardsmen and offered to do whatever they could to help out. Out on the road, he saw a car turn into Carl and Tami’s driveway. No doubt there were three more soldiers in that car, ready to render aid.

Michael tried to get rid of them—couldn’t—and ended up showing them to the family room, where they stood together along the wall. They said they were prepared to do anything—drive carpool, grocery shop, mow the lawn.

“Ma?” he said, bending down to waken her.

“Huh?” Bleary-eyed, she sat up.

“There are some of—”

Before he could finish, the doorbell rang again.

This time it was four wives, standing on his porch, each holding a foil-covered casserole dish and a bag full of groceries. They gave him sad, knowing smiles and hugged him—all without tears—and then started organizing the food they’d brought. In no time the house smelled like frying bacon. They were making breakfast for the girls.

By nine o’clock, the girls had walked into this quiet, crowded house of theirs. Lulu had taken one look at the commotion and crawled up into her grandmother’s lap. Betsy had put in her iPod earbuds; she sat in the corner, listening to music and playing some electronic game.

Michael was about to go say something to her when the doorbell rang again.

Exhausted by the thought of more help, he went to the door and opened it.

In his rumpled state, it took him a moment to process what he was seeing. A familiar-looking woman with a pert little haircut, wearing too much makeup, stood on his porch. She was holding a microphone. “I’m Dianna Vigan from KOMO TV. Are you Michael Zarkades?”

He nodded dully, noticing that people had begun to place bouquets along the fence line. Someone had tied a yellow ribbon around the stanchion beneath their mailbox.

“Your wife flew into battle with her best friend as her copilot, Warrant Officer Tamara Flynn? I understand they met in flight school when they were still teenagers. You must be so proud of your wife. How do—”

“No comment.” He slammed the door and stepped back, so upset that it took him a minute to notice that the room had gone quiet. The guardsmen and the wives—and his family—were all staring at him. He had failed in some way; that was obvious. What was it they wanted him to say? That he was proud of her? Proud that she’d been shot down?

How could they expect that of him? How could he even form the word now, when his world was falling apart?





Sixteen



It was one of those foggy days in Seattle, where it seemed there was no sky at all, just layers and layers of gray. Jolene could hear the ferry’s foghorn in the distance, rippling like the water it floated above; a seagull cawed.

Betsy loves feeding those gulls. How many times had they stood on the ferry deck, hand in hand, lashed by a cold wind, throwing food to the beady-eyed birds who seemed to float so effortlessly?

A car horn honked.

She frowned, confused.

The sound changed, became an insistent beep-beep-beep.

She realized suddenly that her eyes were closed. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow. No. There was something in her mouth.

She came awake slowly, fought to open her eyes.

Overhead, instead of sky, was a white ceiling tracked with harsh lighting. She blinked. There were machines clustered around her, tall stands with monitor heads, like thin washed-out mourners, clucking and beeping.

The something in her mouth was a tube. Another tube went into her chest from the machine to her right.

A giant sucking sound came and went, rising and falling.

She heard footsteps, then a door opened, closed.