A Dangerous Age (16 page)

“I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

“Good girl. Look, I have to go. I’ve got a kid from the university sending me copy from Lebanon. He fell in love with a Lebanese girl and went over there to visit her family. He’s been there
while the Syrian troops have been leaving. We’re printing his pieces every week. Get on this job. We’re in a war, Winifred. It’s hard to remember that sometimes, but it’s true.”

“I will. Thanks. Listen, are you coming here to see Bobby?”

“Maybe next week for a few days. I’m going to do a piece for the paper as soon as I get the interviews set up.”

“Are you really pregnant, Olivia? You don’t sound like you are.”

“It’s just like normal except you can eat all the time and wear loose clothes. I like it. Look, I have to go.”

Olivia hung up, and Winifred finished arranging things in the living room, put the painting notes somewhere where she would never see them again, and went to work reading the faxes that were coming from Olivia’s secretary.

At three that afternoon she was at the Nellis Air Force Base hospital, waiting to be interviewed. She had a portfolio of her grades and MCAT scores. She had recommendations from her old professors at Duke, and she had every piece of paper she could imagine them wanting to see. She was wearing flat shoes, a seersucker skirt, and a beautiful white cotton designer blouse that no one would ever guess cost two hundred dollars. I might as well wear one nice thing, she decided. It doesn’t hurt to look nice if you want to be taken seriously.

Two hours later she was signed up for a fellowship to study with a group of handpicked medics from around the United States. There were six medical school graduates doing their internship in the program. A new wing was being added to the
existing hospital to house the program, and everyone Winifred talked to was excited and in a hurry. “The hours may be more than you want,” one of the directors told her. “Be prepared for that.”

“I’m good,” she answered. “I can take long hours.”

Regional pain management. Notes, 2003. 1st Battlefield. Lower leg blown away. Regular pain, ten out of ten. Catheter in lower leg, muscles gone, tibia fractured but holding. Applied tourniquet. Brought to field hospital. Had already received 15 to 18 milligrams of morphine. Still in great pain. Placed a lumbar catheter in a spinal block. Tibia snapped. After fifteen minutes, surgery completed to shore up area; patient was awake, alert, pain free. Culmination of many years of work. Later, used eternal fixator, bone put together, leg saved for sixteen months, then had to be amputated. Prosthetic device working well. Despite valiant efforts to keep the leg, Officer Walker agreed to amputation as venous system beyond repair.

The rehabilitation center at Nellis Air Force Base was not as large as the one at Walter Reed, but it was so high tech that it looked more like a space station than part of a hospital. Lieutenant
Brian Kane walked in the automatically opened doors and was met by a six-foot-seven-inch-tall nurse’s aide, who saluted him and handed him a form that was already almost completely filled in. “Sorry about this, sir. We try to keep paperwork at a minimum, sir. I got most of it off the computer. I’m Aaron Lightfoot, sir. Civilian, sir. I’m only seventeen.”

“You aren’t in school?” Brian asked, laughing. The serious, gangly teenager was the last thing he had expected when he left the apartment that morning, annoyed that he had to waste two hours in physical therapy when he didn’t want any more advice, exercises, cortisone patches, or reminders that his face had been blown up.

“Why in the hell are they making me do this?” he had asked Winifred.

“To piss you off,” she said. “Obviously that could be the only reason.”

“I’ve got work to do.”

“Just go to the appointment. I want your face to go back to normal. I don’t like that little place where the hair doesn’t grow.” She pushed him out the door, then pulled him back and kissed him on the scar tissue. “See, you don’t even have feeling there. Damaged goods, that’s what I married.”

“See if you can get that electrician over here today, okay? I need those outlets in the guest room. We’ve got to find a bigger place.”

“This place is fine. Go on. Get out of here.”

N
OW
B
RIAN
WAS
leaning on the check-in counter, filling out the forms while the lanky black-haired volunteer watched worshipfully.

“My dad was killed the first week in Afghanistan,” Aaron said. “Except for basketball season, I do an internship here in the mornings. I make, well, very good grades. I sort of have a photographic memory, so I don’t have to go to school too much. I’m going to start premed classes at the University of Nevada this summer, sir. So, anyway, I’m your man when you’re here. I’ll check you in, make sure your therapists are waiting, and be available if you need to call.”

“Lead on,” Brian said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Twenty minutes later he was reclined in a comfortable leather chair and a therapist was applying small pads to the injured area. “If you can stand a little stinging, it only takes fourteen minutes,” the therapist said. “If it bothers you, we’ll turn it down.” The therapist was an auburn-haired girl who didn’t look much older than Aaron. “I’m Jessica. Aaron will be here unless you’d like him outside the door. There’s a television screen. You can watch videos or a film about this process, if you like.” She moved a small screen near the chair and nodded to Aaron. He stood at attention beside the screen.

The room in which they were sitting was painted pale gray, with white woodwork. The floor was soft blue tile. The tables and chairs matched the therapy chair. The whole place looked as sterile as an operating room. “Keep your face as still as possible,”
Aaron said. “Talk if you need to, but it’s better if you don’t.”

“Tell me about your last basketball season,” Brian said. “Start with the first game and tell me who you played and if you won.”

Aaron turned on the electrodes that activated the cortisone-soaked pads, squinted to make sure everything was where he wanted it, and then began to tell Brian about the Fortier Warriors’ past season, which had culminated in a regional final they lost by two points in overtime.

“A lot of guys cried,” he added. “My uncle cried. He was home on leave. I don’t get it when men cry over basketball games. I never did do that, even when I was a little kid.”

War, Brian was thinking. This glorious goddamn kid with no father to watch this flowering. I’m going to cry, goddamnit. Think about something else. Think about wildlife. Think about duck hunting.

“Are you okay?” Aaron asked, squinting. “You want me to turn this down, sir?”

Brian gritted his half-titanium, half-plastic jaw and shook his head. “Okay,” he mumbled. “It’s okay.”

“D
ON’T MAKE ANY
plans for me for Saturday morning,” Brian told Winifred that night. “I’m going to watch basketball tryouts at a local high school.”

“What’s that about?”

“My intern at the rehab center is trying out for starting post for his senior year. He’s got competition from a kid who transferred here from New York.”

“Okay,” Winifred said. “Well, sure. That’s good.” She looked across the table at this man she had married, and knew that she had not begun to sound the mystery of his being, the breadth of his interests, the boundless life that had been unleashed by the pain and injury he had endured. I’m so lucky, she thought. How did I get lucky enough to marry this man? I’m not that good looking. I’m not interesting like Olivia or Louise. I’m not even all that smart. I’m just hardworking, and at least I stopped being chubby. If I hadn’t lost weight for the wedding, Brian would never have looked at me.

“What’s that look?” he asked. “What’s the sad face?”

“I don’t know why you married me,” she answered. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”

“I wanted a cook and a slave,” he said. “I’ve told you that. Did the electrician come?”

“He put two extra outlets in the guest room.”

“Good girl.”

F
RIDAY NIGHT
, T
ULSA
, O
KLAHOMA
. Olivia sat in her office, staring at the front-page makeup for Saturday’s paper. After a few minutes she got up from the desk and walked across the newsroom and pulled up a chair next to the headline desk.

“I want to lead with the Greyhound bus wreck and the president’s
visit to Arkansas next week. Put the bombings on the lower left hand. We can’t lead with the bombings every day. People recoil and are brutalized. Either they quit caring or they don’t let it register. I talked to a psychiatrist in North Carolina about it for an hour last night. She said the overkill takes away the validity.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Just rearrange it.” The skinny headline writer bent over his keyboard and moved things around so that the main headline read,
BUSH VISITS PLANT IN ARKANSAS.

“President Bush,” Olivia said.

“I’ll try. Okay,
PRESIDENT BUSH TO VISIT AREA
. Is that all right?”

“Then get the bus wreck in the right-hand column.”

“It’s still death, Olivia.”

“All right. What else do we have?”

“The ivory-billed woodpecker thing. That’s still alive.”

“Get it up there. I’ll call someone at the university and get some quotes. Go on, do it.”

The skinny writer bent his scrawny shoulders over the computer and reworked the page. In the lower left-hand corner in small letters the headline read,
IN IRAQ, BOMBS KILL
40
AND INJURE
100.

Olivia looked around the messy room, with its desks piled with papers and uncapped pens and leftover coffee cartons. She started rubbing her chin with her left hand, an old habit from when she was in grade school. When she had the front page of
Saturday’s paper the way she wanted it, she thanked the skinny headline writer, told him to go on home, and went back to her office. Then she called a biologist at the University of Tulsa and talked to her for thirty minutes about the sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in central Arkansas. “I had one around my house for three years recently and no one would believe me when I spotted it,” the biologist said. “I’m an activist in feminist causes, as you know, and people are always gunning for me. Anyway, I didn’t believe it myself the first two years. I called the wildlife people and they came out and set up a trap, but I took it down as soon as they left. I stalked it every chance I got. It would start pecking on the house when I took naps in the afternoons. It was May. All three times it was May. My girlfriend was there at least twice and she saw it too. You can call her if you like. Crissie Jennings. She teaches in the political science department. Her number’s—”

“That’s okay,” Olivia said. “I believe you. So what happened the third year?”

“It pecked on the house for about a month. I saw it twice more. The goddamn thing was huge. The biggest woodpecker I’ve ever seen, but I never got a picture of it. I drew it a few times. You want to see the sketches?”

“Yes, can you fax them to me? Would you mind if I put one in the paper?”

“Sure. As soon as we hang up. How many do you want to see?”

“All the ones you have.”

A
N HOUR LATER
a drawing of a believed-to-be-extinct woodpecker was on the front page of the
Tulsa World
’s Saturday morning edition, replacing a photograph of a blown-up tank. Two hours later, Olivia was at the Tulsa Airport, catching a night flight to Dallas en route to Nevada. By the time the twenty-passenger Air Tulsa flight took off, a storm was moving in from the gulf coast, carrying hail and tornadoes. Olivia didn’t give a damn if the storm blew the airplane to California. “I’m going to see my husband,” she told the Wal-Mart executive who was the only other person on the flight. “Where are you heading?”

“I’m going home,” he said. “My little girl is going to her prom tomorrow night. I have to be there to dance with her.”

“Olivia Tree,” Olivia said, extending her hand. “I bought some junk food in the airport. If you get hungry, tell me.”

“I’ve got a couple of train bottles of scotch,” he answered. “We’ll share.”

A
PRIL 29, 2005,
Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Bobby picked Olivia up from the airport at nine at night and took her to a resort near the air base that catered to servicemen and their visitors. It was a beautiful resort run by the Four Seasons Hotels. Bobby had heard about it from Winifred the week before.

“I love this place,” Olivia said. “Don’t ever tell me how much it costs.” She was settled into a large room overlooking a golf course, and below was a swimming pool with a waterfall, surrounded by beautiful pale blue beach umbrellas. She had tried out all the sofas and chairs and then climbed up on the king-size bed. “It’s just like Winifred to come to an air force base and find a resort nearby.”

“I really like her,” Bobby said. “And her husband, Brian. He’s been in and out of my unit a lot the past few weeks. I never saw anybody pay less attention to themselves. He has to wear these patches on the side of his face, and he just pulls them off
when he wants to talk to you and sticks them on his uniform, and then he sticks them back on. They have cortisone in them to make the stitches heal. He told me he’d go back to Iraq in a minute if he could get sent. He wants so much to fly the drones, but his vision got messed up enough that he can’t. You have to have perfect hand-eye coordination to fly them. But he knows how to check them to make them work. That’s what he’s doing here. Fine-tuning. I’m not supposed to talk about anything we do, and I’m
not
talking about it. I just can’t get over how they work. I’m taking this course twice a week on electricity and sound waves and a bunch of really interesting science. I would have paid attention in school if they’d had teachers like the one I have here. There’s this guy from MIT who’s the worst genius you ever saw in your life. I really want you to meet him someday. He can make you think you understand things that are so complex you’d give up if you read them in a book.”