Learning to Stay (3 page)

I worry for Darcy. I think that today, right now, in Mia’s bedroom, might be the last time Darcy feels anything akin to happy, ever again. I imagine the loneliness that will burrow its way into her life now, following her around like an extra shadow.

I open the door.

“Mrs. Rutledge?”

“No,” I say.

“Is she home?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get her, ma’am? I need to speak with her.”

“No. She’s putting the baby down. We’re about to eat dinner.”

I say this as if he had asked if I wanted to buy some candy bars or maybe a new vacuum cleaner.

The officer pretends as though mine is a perfectly rational response. Which is to say, he doesn’t flinch.

“Ma’am,” he counters. It’s a statement. Not an introduction, or a bridge, or a question. It says, “We’ve done this before; we’re here to help; let’s all try to deal with this the best we can.”

“Darcy and Mia, they’re happy right now,” I plead, whispering. I think of Darcy in the dark, in Mia’s room, and how right this minute, maybe she’s thinking of Collin—about the last e-mail he sent her or when she’ll receive another, about the things they’ll do together when he comes back, about their upcoming anniversary and how she’ll celebrate it alone. I know these thoughts, because they’re mine, too.

And in her thoughts, right now, Collin is still alive on the other side of the world, going about his day. But out here he’s lifeless—just a body. Maybe not even that any longer. He might not even be an identifiable whole now. A shudder runs through me.

The officer doesn’t smile, but his stoicism radiates reassurance and something just shy of warmth. He raises his eyebrows and gestures toward the inside of the house, toward the living room. I nod and point toward the couch.

I close and lock the door behind him. Then I think of the other officer out by the car, in the November cold, and as if it makes some sort of difference, I flip the dead bolt open again.

The air fills with a charred smell.
Shit, the chicken
. I hadn’t watched it. And now Darcy’s dinner is ruined. Does it matter, though? Will she even be hungry? Is Darcy someone who eats when she’s upset, or does she go into starvation mode? Should I order a pizza, just in case? For all of the intimate details I know about Darcy, this—how she grieves—is one that, until this moment, I have escaped having to know. I turn the burner off and think that already, I am a failure at picking up her pieces. She doesn’t even know her whole world has crumbled and I’m already bumbling and stepping on the shards.

And then, a small, defeated sigh escapes from the hallway, where Darcy must have seen the man in full dress greens standing in her
living room. And I wonder if I should have been the one to tell her, kneeling down in front of her in Mia’s room instead of her coming out to this. I wonder if I did the right thing, letting him in at all.

She crumples right where the hallway opens into the living room. I get her up and over to the couch. The CNO doesn’t offer to help, but perhaps he can’t. I know there are strict rules about their interactions with us, though I’ve been careful not to learn what any of them are. He sits across from her, perched on the edge of his chair, one hand on each of his knees.

Darcy has wedged herself into the couch like a wounded animal, cornered. Her knees are folded to her chest, arms encircling them. She shakes her head side to side, slowly, as he talks.

“Ma’am, the Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your husband, Second Lieutenant Collin Rutledge, was killed in action in Iraq today,” the officer says. “The secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your loss.” Darcy studies him in a way that, if I were he, would make me uncomfortable.

I watch Darcy watch the CNO. My head should be filled with concern for her. But right now my only thought is,
Thank God it wasn’t Brad.
I know this news doesn’t involve my husband because Collin had recently taken over for the Company XO, who had to leave the theater because of a death in the family, and Collin had spent his most recent days inside the wire at the Tactical Operations Center. After Collin was promoted and tucked safely inside the FOB, I spent a fair amount of time being bitter that my husband was still out patrolling Iraqi roads for bombs lying in wait to blow him up. And I try not to think this, but my mind overrules my better sensibilities: It’s ironic, really, that Collin would end up being killed within the safety of the TOC, presumably from a mortar, while Brad is still out there, lumbering along in a Humvee. Waiting. Watching.

There is a long silence, and then Darcy raises her chin. It’s a proud, defiant act. “Thank you,” she says, almost inaudibly. “Thank you,” she says again, and this time all of us hear her. “I know it’s not easy, this part of your—job.” She almost chokes on that last word, but she forces it out.

“Ma’am,” the officer says, his voice husky with all he probably isn’t at liberty to say.

“What happened?” Darcy asks. She pats the cushion next to her and gestures to me. I sit, and she reaches for my hand. A squawk sounds from the baby monitor and I feel Darcy tense, bracing to see if another cry will follow—if she’ll have to add a fussy, overtired baby to this mix. The CNO pauses, noticing Darcy’s averted attention. But seconds pass, and all is quiet down the hall. Darcy sighs and looks back toward the CNO.

“Lieutenant Rutledge was leading a patrol outside of Fallujah, ma’am. The convoy came across an improvised explosive device—an IED.”

I am focused on the CNO’s trembling hands. Then his words register. She blurts, “But he doesn’t go on patrol.”

They have the wrong guy. Oh Sweet Jesus, they have the wrong guy.

Though even as I think these words, I don’t fully believe them. I hope, but I don’t believe. This is the Army, after all, an outfit not prone to such mix-ups.

“The platoon leader was ill,” the CNO says. “Lieutenant Rutledge subbed in for him.”

I wonder if he should be telling Darcy this—that her husband, Mia’s dad, isn’t coming home because he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been. And then, the CNO’s words start to congeal into a chain of horrifically linked thoughts: Brad’s squad leader was sick out the window of their Humvee the day before. Brad and Collin weren’t ever
supposed to be on duty together, but from the sound of it, they could have been today. Collin is dead. Brad could be.

I don’t think I let the sound welling up inside me—a cry heavy with surprise and shock and fear—past my throat, my lips. But Darcy and the CNO’s eyes train on me, and time seems to slow almost to the point of pausing. Until this second, I hadn’t even entertained the possibility that Brad could be caught up in all this—the formality of dress greens and “ma’ams” and the Secretary of the Army’s bullshit condolences.

“Were there other casualties?” Darcy asks, looking at me. My fist is in my mouth, fingers against my teeth.

“Several, ma’am.”

“Oh God,” I breathe.

“Several as in two others, or as in ten others?” Darcy asks.

“I don’t have an exact number, ma’am.”

“How in the hell can you not have an exact—” Darcy is winding up, getting ready to light into the CNO, but he ignores her.

“Do you have someone over there?” he asks me. He has turned his entire body toward me, waiting for my response.

I nod. “In that platoon.”

“Husband?” he asks.

I nod again.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to go home and wait there, please. Right now.”

I can’t breathe. It feels as though the blood has drained from my face and my body. I half expect, as I look down, to see my heart lying right there on Darcy’s nice cream carpeting. I think of the night I showed up, shaking and unable to get it together, on Darcy’s doorstep. I made the mistake of watching the nightly news with Peter Jennings, and as he and the reporter calmly narrated B-roll of Blackwater
agents being dragged from burning cars and beaten, I couldn’t stop. Because that was exactly where Brad was—in that same city where the charred bodies of the Americans were hanged from a bridge while throngs of people not only stood by, but cheered as if they were at a goddamn street festival. I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up my dinner. Then I drove straight to Darcy’s.

“I can’t do this,” I said, without even saying hello, when she opened the door. That night, she rubbed my back as I hung my head between my legs and tried to breathe. “You can do this,” she said. “You can and you will.”

But she was wrong. I’m not cut out for this—for any of it. I don’t know how. I don’t want to know how.

I look at Darcy. She squeezes my hand. “You don’t know anything for sure yet,” she says.

“But what about you?”

“It’s okay. I’ll have my own team of these guys here before you’re even home.” She looks over at the CNO, who nods. He even manages not to frown. It’s nearly a smile.

I don’t know how she can be so composed, so
with
it, when I already feel myself breaking. Already feel broken. Because it’s not okay. None of it. Not by a long shot.

“Staff Sergeant Gerlach came here with me. He’ll drive you home, wait with you there,” the CNO says. “One of us will deliver your vehicle if you leave a key with me.”

I scan the room for my purse, my cell phone, my jacket, and locate them hanging on a spare dining room chair, pushed up against a wall. They all seem so far away, and it reminds me of one of those dreams in which I need to run but can’t coordinate my limbs to move, as though they’ve just then tripled in size and weight. My brain knows what to do; my body, though, isn’t willing.

I hand my keys to the CNO and Darcy takes me by the shoulders.
“The sooner you get home, the sooner you’ll know,” she says. She pulls me into a tight hug. I half expect to feel metal and wires beneath her skin.

Making my way down the front walk and toward the waiting Staff Sergeant Gerlach, I glance back. There’s a warm glow seeping out into the night from the Rutledge’s little bay window, and it betrays the scene unfolding inside. Even from my perch on the sidewalk, I can see Darcy standing in the middle of the living room, unmoved from where she hugged me, hands over her face, her body trembling.

Staff Sergeant Gerlach so believes in the economy of words that by the time we drive the few miles from Darcy’s east side bungalow to my house on Vilas Street, almost equidistant from each other on opposite sides of the glowing Capitol, we cover most of my questions: “When will I know?” (Not certain, ma’am); “Is there a chance he’s still alive?” (Can’t say, ma’am); “Could this be a mistake? Might it be another patrol, another unit, and you got some bad information?” (Highly unlikely, ma’am); “How does this work? Do you just drive me home and drop me off? How long will you stay?” (As long as you would like me to or need me to, ma’am).

I am better at solitude than most. Instead of finding company for the nights I’m alone—which have been many these days—I usually light a candle, put on some Amos Lee or Ellis Paul, and relax into it. Tonight, though, Brad’s absence looms large in our house. The thought that he might not come back here has transformed the familiar and comfortable quiet dark into something heavy and sinister and booming loud. It yells to me that all the nights of my life to follow could look precisely like this one. But because it doesn’t yell as loudly with him there, Staff Sergeant Gerlach stays when I ask him to.

Any military spouse knows how this works, because we’ve all heard the urban legends about a friend of a friend of a friend who has had to weather the notification process. We know they will notify you only at your registered residence, never by telephone, and not between the hours of midnight and six a.m. We know the notification officers have to race the clock to inform next of kin before the twenty-four-hour news cycle does, and what they used to have three weeks to accomplish now must be done in less than eight hours after confirmation of a casualty on the battlefield. We know that if there are outstanding notifications yet to be made, e-mail stops flowing in, temporarily blacked out by the military powers that be. We breathe easier when the Internet highways reopen. We no longer feel our hearts trying to beat right out of our chests. We are like visitors at a zoo. We feel for those who slog through hours in agony, awaiting any definitive news that will end the wait, but we are thankful, too, not to be them.

Or tonight, not to be me.

Sergeant Gerlach perches on a small part of a couch cushion, using only as much as is absolutely necessary, and when I hear a sound, or catch the briefest flash of lights in the street outside, I spring up to the window and watch. I wear a path from the window to the kitchen to check the time—10:13, 10:17, 10:20, 10:25, 10:32—and back to the couch. Staff Sergeant Gerlach’s eyes follow me like a dutiful dog tracking the movements of its owner.

At 10:49 I decide this isn’t working. I root in the closet until I find a hat and mittens and my down jacket. Staff Sergeant Gerlach has only a flimsy-thin trench coat with him, so I eye his slight frame and fish out a weather-appropriate jacket and hat that will cover it.

I cross from the front hall closet to where he sits and hold the jacket out to him. He eyes me, then the jacket, and then me again. It’s a nondescript black ski coat, and I can tell what he is thinking:
Wearing this woman’s dead husband’s jacket when she finds out he’s actually, officially dead could be all sorts of bad. So I tell him that it’s mine—a necessary lie to prevent from freezing the person who is to keep me tethered to sanity tonight. He takes the coat from me.