A Dangerous Age (17 page)

“I’m jealous,” Olivia said. “I want to be here with you and be doing what you are doing. I want to quit my goddamn job and come out here and help with this. No one in the United States has any idea of what is going on in the military or who we are up against. They forget it more than they remember. I get depressed trying to think up ways to explain what I know. I can’t print half the stuff I know or I’d lose readers. I can’t talk about science or mechanics or drone airplanes in any depth, and it frustrates me.”

“I’m missing you, is what I’m mostly doing,” Bobby said. He moved nearer and began to touch her breasts and stomach with
his hand. “I miss all this. I’m horny and I’m lonely and I want to tell you things. It’s not all good, Olivia. I can’t tell you about the strikes, but I don’t like doing it to populated places. Still, I know we have to go there. They hide in houses with women and children. They treat women like shit over there. Brian told me stuff I don’t even want to know.”

“What are you doing to my stomach?” Olivia moved closer. She was starting to get turned on, and she didn’t care anymore about drone airplanes or war or anything else. She didn’t care about anything except getting off the rest of her clothes and the rest of his and maybe remembering to have one or the other of them get up and close the drapes.

M
AY
2, 2005, T
ULSA
, O
KLAHOMA
. Olivia woke at 5 a.m., pulled herself out of bed, and went to the window to watch a thunderstorm pound against the maple trees outside her window. In a neighbor’s yard an apple tree that had burst into bloom a few days before was being bent almost to the ground by the wind. Tornado watch, Olivia decided, and turned on the television long enough to hear the news. More violence on the Palestinian-Israeli borders. A runaway bride in Duluth, Georgia, was about to be charged with filing a false kidnapping report and might be fined a hundred thousand dollars to pay for the police overtime during the three-day search. The film
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
had made $21.7 million its first weekend at the box office, and the young woman who had been filmed holding a prisoner on a leash at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad was awaiting sentencing in North Carolina.

Olivia had come in from her trip to Nevada at eleven o’clock the night before and had gone to bed without brushing her teeth
or washing her face. She had slept restlessly all night, waking to the rain and thunder, thirsty, her nose stopped up from allergies.

I can’t do this, she decided. Six months ago I was a powerful, in-shape, productive woman thrilled to get up every morning and worry about circulation and advertising profits and how to run the show at the
Tulsa World
, and now I am a sniveling, sick, allergic hypochondriac who is doing a really crappy job of carrying a child in my womb. I’m going to see Kathleen this morning and get a complete checkup and find a way to deal with these allergies. At least they’ll be better today, because it’s raining.

As she watched the TV, tornado warnings were beginning to appear on the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Olivia went into the bathroom and took a shower, then put on a seersucker robe and pushed a button on a remote control to brew coffee in the kitchen. Next she went into her workroom and started pounding out an editorial for Tuesday’s paper.

When she had written four sentences, she went to a laptop and set the screen to follow the sentencing of the Abu Ghraib guard, a five-foot-tall, twenty-two-year-old girl from a farm in West Virginia who was about to be sent to prison for doing what she thought the military wanted her to do.

“This is it,” the editorial began.

I can no longer be quiet about the insanity of blaming twenty-two-year-old soldiers for overreacting when we
take them from small, unsophisticated lives, barely train them, send them off to a fiercely hot, sandblasted terror of a country that they didn’t even know existed and about which their half-assed educations in public schools taught them nothing, tell them the enemy is the devil and that it is up to them to protect the
entire United States of America
plus all their family and friends from nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare (imminent, planned attacks that we may or may not be able to thwart in time), and set them to work guarding large numbers of highly trained, deadly, furious, and frightened prisoners, and then expect them, without any psychological training or oversight, to treat these same scary prisoners with professional and dignified strategies.

These kids were scared to death. What do you do when you are scared? You strike out. It’s a wonder the abuses were not more widespread and worse. Every scared citizen of the United States secretly hoped and believed that the government of the United States and the United States military and intelligence forces were questioning prisoners with every means possible to find out what was going to happen next and where and how the terrorists were going to strike next.
Anyone
with
any sense
knows
what
these soldiers thought they were supposed to do, whether they were given orders or not given orders to solicit information from prisoners by whatever means available.

Where is common sense? Where is comprehension? Where in the name of heaven is the justification for treating these young, scared, unprepared soldiers as though they had thought up
for themselves
some unimaginable behaviors and carried out those behaviors? I have talked to thirty-year-old men who were in Iraq who say they are still shaking sand out of their hair and ears and minds months after they returned from combat. Not to mention the nightmares and the damaged body parts and the abiding fear that they will have to return to the godforsaken place.

The rest of the media can continue to play their coy, enabling game of tiptoeing around the truths of this conflict, but I was raised to tell the truth, and I get sick when I play around with it.

We went to Iraq to make a statement about what happens if you defy and attack the United States of America, to protect our ally Israel, to protect the oil fields in the area, to make certain that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, and to destroy all weapons of any kind that he did have before he used them to supply al-Qaeda, and because the American public, I myself included, wanted revenge.

I am married to a marine who is on active duty. I am five months pregnant with our child. I have skin in this game. I want some cards on the table.

Olivia checked her e-mails, went into her bedroom, pulled on a dress and some panty hose and a pair of medium-heeled shoes, combed her hair back into a ponytail, and left the house carrying a hard copy of the piece she had just written. She didn’t want to trust it to the computer.

At ten minutes to eight she reached the newspaper building parking lot, parked in her reserved space, and went into the building, still seething.

Callie Mayfield was already at her desk. “Get me some breakfast from McDonald’s,” Olivia said. “And a large coffee, please. How you doing? You doing okay?”

“I’m okay. There’s a funnel cloud near Healing Springs.”

“It’s okay. I really need something to eat.”

“I’m going.” Callie got up from her desk, took a raincoat from a rack, and started away. “Eggs, bacon, toast, all right?”

“Perfect. There’s money in the jar on my desk.”

“I know.”

“Stop worrying about me, Callie. Just get me some food.”

“All right.”

O
LIVIA SAT DOWN
at her desk, edited the editorial slightly, read it again, and got up and walked across the newsroom and handed it to the editorial page editor. “Don’t mess with it,” she told him. “Just like it is.”

“All right,” he answered. He never argued with Olivia, just as he had never argued with the last editor or the one before that.
He had two married daughters and grandchildren getting ready for college. He liked his job and he intended to keep it.

C
ALLIE RETURNED WITH
Olivia’s breakfast, and Olivia ate it slowly and carefully and then went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She started bleeding as soon as she got up and started walking. Not profusely, but enough so that she had blood running down her legs by the time she reached a sink. She mopped it up with paper towels and turned to a secretary coming out of a stall. “Get Callie Mayfield,” she told her. “Get her now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m bleeding. Get her in here. I may need you too.”

H
ALF AN HOUR
later they had made their way from downtown Tulsa in a torrential downpour and were turning into the parking lot of a new doctor’s building. A nurse came out the side door and helped Olivia into an examining room. In a few minutes, Olivia’s old friend Kathleen Whitman was beside her, and the nurse followed with a hypodermic needle and gave her a shot. Two other nurses undressed her and set up a drip beside the table.

“We’ll put you in the hospital for a few days,” Kathleen said. “Don’t panic, Olivia. These things happen. They don’t always end in miscarriages. Half the time, all you need is bed rest.”

“Oh, God.”

“Have you been under stress?”

“What do you think?” Olivia said with a laugh. It was the first light moment. “Goddamn, I love you, Kat. Do with me what you will. You’re the doctor; I’m the patient.”

“Hold that thought. We’re going to add a light sedative to the drip, Olivia. I know you want to be calm, and I just want to be sure you are.”

“Anything you want. Save my son, Kathleen. I want this baby. This one right here, not another one.”

“I’ll try.” Kathleen put her hand on Olivia’s arm as the sedative began to take effect. Olivia and Kathleen had run hundreds of miles together on the University of Tulsa outdoor track and on the trails in the park and around the hospital’s quarter-mile track when Kathleen first started practicing medicine. They didn’t see much of each other now that both of them had busy careers, but the bonds they had formed in their running days were strong.

“I’d have let you be my doctor when you were fifteen years old,” Olivia mumbled. “You go ahead. Do what you want to do. Call Bobby, Callie, but don’t scare him. No, don’t call him—scratch that.”

Olivia slept.

S
HE WAS STILL
somewhat sedated when the reaction to her inflammatory editorial began the following day. “What were you thinking?” Big Jim Walters asked as gently as he could. He was standing by her hospital bed holding a bunch of flowers his secretary had bought for him to take to Olivia.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she answered. “I was reacting.”

“Well, now they are reacting. Much of it is positive. I’ll say that. But you’ve brought the university nuts out in full force.”

“Fuck them.”

“Okay. Well, how are you doing in here? Is this going to go on much longer, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Jim. I may have to take a leave of absence. My cousin’s an internist, and she called and said for me to settle down and get ready for some serious bed rest. Oh, God, there’s my doctor. You know Kathleen, don’t you? Who used to be my running buddy? Now she’s an obstetrician, for God’s sake. Kat, come in. You know Jim.”

“I’ll wait outside,” Jim said. “I’ll just wait out there.”

K
ATHLEEN SCREWED UP
her mouth and tried to look serious and professional, which is possible with close personal friends, but sometimes tricky.

“You have to stay in bed, maybe for weeks, maybe a few months. I think we can stop this, but you can’t walk around.”

“I knew this would happen. My cousin Susan already called and told me.”

“Can your aunt Mary Lily stay with you?”

“I suppose so. Call Jim back in here, would you? I’ll tell him.”

“I
HAVE TO STAY
in bed for a while, and I’m burned out anyway,” Olivia told him when he came back into the room, still holding the flowers. “Put the flowers down.”

“For how long?”

“Six months. I need to have this baby, and I need to stay home and take care of it. I’m tired of the rat race, Jim. I don’t like the work anymore. I might not come back at all.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I never intended to be a goddamn editor. I’m a writer. I wanted to write books.”

“Olivia.”

“What?”

“Let’s don’t burn bridges.”

“I’m on a bunch of drugs right now. Maybe we should talk next week. You want me to write a follow-up to the editorial?”

“No, I’ll have Cameron do it. Wait until they sentence her, then write it. I’m not mad about the piece, Olivia, I liked it.”

“Yeah, you’re mad. You should be. Are they canceling subscriptions?”

“Some are.”

“Okay. Thanks for the flowers, old friend.”

He stood at the foot of the bed looking down at the five-foot-four-inch dynamo he had brought in to save his empire. He still believed she could do it if she would. It’s true about women, he decided. They don’t give a damn about making money; they just like to spend it.

Olivia didn’t want to talk to him anymore. She wanted to go back to sleep and think about how glad she was that her baby was all right. Her little boy, the one she was going to watch play ball and teach to ride and take with Little Sun to sit before the earth island and listen to the earth and sky and trees and plants, and take to the zoo to see the elephants and zebras and chimpanzees.