Learning to Stay (4 page)

I duck into the kitchen, dig to the back of the refrigerator for two bottles of Guinness, and gesture with my chin toward the front door. Staff Sergeant Gerlach follows my lead.

We settle shoulder to shoulder on the front stoop and the night hangs big and quiet around us. It hasn’t yet snowed, but you can almost smell it on the air. It won’t be long now.

I give thanks that the street is empty of cars. There’s a faint sound of tires rolling down Park Street some blocks away, but, mercifully, none turn in our direction, saving my battered heart the trouble of leaping up into my throat at the possibility of one of those cars carrying clones of Staff Sergeant Gerlach from stopping in front of this house.

I offer him one of the beers. He declines. “On duty,” he says. I ask him how long until he isn’t on duty. “Midnight,” he says.

“For twelve oh one,” I say, setting the open beer on the step below us. “So that’s the cutoff?” I take a sip of my own bottle. The stout slips over my lips, bitterly cold, and jolts me better than any shot of espresso might.

Staff Sergeant Gerlach nods.

“And they wait, then? Until morning?”

Staff Sergeant Gerlach nods again.

“No offense,” I say, “but of all the idiotic things the military does, I think that takes the cake. Who is honestly supposed to magically stop worrying at precisely twelve oh one, turn in for a good night’s sleep, and wake up at six a.m. to do it all over again? What idiots,” I spit.

Staff Sergeant Gerlach holds his hands up in a conciliatory gesture.

“I know, I know,” I say. “Don’t shoot the messenger, right?”

“At least not this one, please, ma’am,” he says.

I look askance at him and catch the faintest hint of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

“Did you just make a funny?” I ask.

He purses his lips as if pondering it, then nods.

“Are you
allowed
to do that?”

He shrugs.

I look at him again. Not straight on, but out of the corner of my eye. Staff Sergeant Gerlach has a face that might have been augmented by a good, shaggy mop of surfer hair had the Army allowed that sort of thing and if his own weren’t more red than dirty blond. His face as a whole is mostly unremarkable: kind brown eyes, a perfectly fine nose, a chin that’s neither particularly strong nor jutting. He smells of spearmint and aftershave.

I do this sometimes—compare my husband to what else is out there. It’s a mental exercise, just to double-check. Just to make sure. I think if they’re being deep-down honest, everyone does this now and then. I can’t be alone. What’s important is landing on the right side of the question: Would I marry him again—still?

Me? It’s yes every time. It’s always been yes. A hundred thousand times yes.

I know I shouldn’t, but my mind jumps ahead—to jerking awake every morning with the realization that Brad isn’t simply not with me, but he isn’t anywhere anymore, fresh as the first minute I got the news. To replaying the last message he left me, knowing that that voice no longer exists in the world and that it can no longer make a sound. To packing up his clothes, contacting his friends with the news, throwing away (or keeping?) his toothbrush, cologne, hair
goop. To having to go about my daily life again—preparing research memos, meeting with clients, going to court, grocery shopping, and pumping gas—all the time knowing that I’ll never, ever talk to, touch, or see my husband again.

The sheer stress of it all pushes down on me, as if I were pulling twelve g’s right here on my front steps. It alternately hurts and it aches, but it doesn’t seem to ebb. My head throbs. My stomach spins. I try a deep breath and come up empty. Then another, and another. Before I know it, I’m gasping.

“Ma’am?” Staff Sergeant Gerlach places a hand on my shoulder, trying to turn me to look his way, but I can’t move. “Ma’am,” he says, gently shaking my shoulder. “Ma’am, hang your head between your knees. Right between your knees, ma’am.”

I succumb to the little pressure he places on my back. I do as I’m told.

“That’s it, ma’am,” he says. “Just like that. Nice, slow breaths now.”

I am not going to survive this: the waiting—and the everything that is to come after the waiting is over. I don’t know why people don’t actually cave in on themselves; I don’t know why piles of rubble that used to be people who have lost someone they loved don’t dot the sidewalks, living rooms, and kitchens of the world.

I look at the time. It is 11:11, a time Brad marks by holding both arms straight over his head. I mimic this memory. It’s a reflex: hands straight up as if I were signaling a field goal.

“Make a wish,” he always says when the clock reads all ones. And so I do:
Please bring him back to me
.
I don’t care if he’s missing a leg, or an ear. As long as he’s with me.
At this moment, I’ll do anything. I’ll do whatever it takes.

“Ma’am?”

I shake my head, lower my hands, take a swig of beer.

•  •  •

The rest of the night passes like this:

My cell phone displays 11:42. Staff Sergeant Gerlach asks me what Brad is like. I appreciate that he uses the present tense. I have a hard time thinking of what to say, of untwining the slideshow of memories of Brad playing through my head, of how to describe his smells and sounds: the strong, manly mix of him after a workout; the sweet strawberry essence of his hair after a shower, regardless of the shampoo he uses; the tangy sour of his morning breath that I’ve never minded a bit; the grunt that he lets out when something amuses him; the hurried whisper of his breath in my ear that turns into a low, contented moan—almost indiscernible—when he comes. The way he snores like a cartoon character—his lips fluttering and flapping on the exhale; and how it drives me nuts that he keeps a stash of plastic picks with him at all times and digs at his teeth with them at the table; how he’s the only man I’ve ever met who subscribes to and actually reads
The Economist
flap to flap; that he loves pizza and taking midnight walks to the Union Terrace just to dip his toes into Lake Mendota; that he always finds a dollar or some change to put in those covered coffee cans at cash registers—for someone stricken by cancer or a car accident, or to support the local animal shelter—and that he knows the homeless woman who used to wander the street in front of our old apartment by name (Helen) and always thinks to pick up her favorite sandwich (ham and cheese) for the next time he sees her.

These things are, to me, Brad. But there is so much more—so many intangibles. And so I fall back on generalities. I tell him that Brad is the kindest, smartest man I’ve ever met, equal parts patience and handsome, and that he’s going to be a great dad. (Here I stumble over the tense—future simple or past conditional? I correct myself, settling on future conditional: “He would make a great dad.”) I wonder how many times Staff Sergeant Gerlach has heard this exact same
description from other wives. And I think, maybe none of our love stories are half as special as any of us think.

12:06. That’s the time on my cell phone. I’m still watching for headlights, thinking that maybe there’s a discrepancy between my time and the time on the dashboard of the car on its way to my house. But if there’s an outfit that would likely sync every clock in its possession, it’s the military. “So, that’s it?” I ask Staff Sergeant Gerlach. Greg. He nods and without a word, prods me to my feet and gets me inside. We shed our coats in a pile, and I retire to the armchair by the front window to continue my lookout. But things outside are quiet and dark now, and I stare down the barrel of the night stretching between me and six a.m. and wonder if anyone has ever died from waiting, from not knowing. I decide I could very well be the first.

It’s 12:16. I ask Staff Sergeant Gerlach, Greg, if there isn’t someone—anyone—he could call. He shakes his head, tells me there are no strings to pull, calls me ma’am. I tell him that if I’m never called ma’am again as long as I live, it’ll be far too soon. Then, all the wiles I honed through hours and hours of moot court and client negotiations exhausted, I try plain old-fashioned begging. “Please,” I say, “can’t you just do something?” He shakes his head and I tell him that he can go fuck himself—and the Secretary of the Army, too—while he’s at it. I think I see him flinch, though I can’t be sure.

It’s 12:42. I put on Ellis Paul and turn off the lights. I lie with my back on the floor and my feet propped on Brad’s recliner—a worn, brown leather monstrosity that he found at an antique store on Sherman Avenue and that looks like something my law firm might have been fond of in the 1920s. Staff Sergeant Gerlach, Greg, propped upright on the couch, has fallen asleep. I know this when I hear soft snoring behind me. I pull a blanket from the basket near the fireplace and float it over him.

It’s 2:58. I will Brad to be alive. The patience to meditate has always
eluded me, but this one time I perform like a lifelong yogi. My mind is a white sheet, billowing on a breeze of three words: “You are okay.” My pulse slows, my eyes rest, and my muscles sag. My body is thankful for the release. I add yoga to the list of things I will gladly do if only Brad comes home.

It’s 3:03. I try to imagine Brad not breathing, unable to smile that big smile of his, his lips singing “Come on Eileen” and changing all the lyrics to “Elise” when he wanted to talk me into anything. I try to imagine him as a body, instead of him. I’m trying to prepare myself for what’s to come, for the shock of it. But even the preparing is too awful, and I retreat instead to a memory of Brad twirling a section of my hair around his finger. It’s so real, I can almost feel the light tug, his finger grazing the skin of my scalp.

It’s 3:36. I am caught in that shadowland between sleeping and waking, between not real and real, where someone is holding my hand. I press myself against the hand, and the body attached to it. But something is off. There’s the cold metal of a watch where there shouldn’t be, sharp angles of bone not there before. I open my eyes and start. “I’m sorry,” Greg says. “You were crying out, in your sleep.” My hand is warm where he holds it. I close my eyes and try to pretend that it’s Brad’s skin pressed to mine—his warmth flowing through my fingers, my palm, my pores.

It’s 4:17. I’m on a roller coaster, but not one that goes around in circles. This one goes wherever I want it to. I am using the roller coaster to save Brad, who is stranded at the top of a mountain, and I am rocketing down a particularly hairy drop that’s jostling me hard back and forth, back and forth, when a loud beeping sounds, and then suddenly it’s not Brad I’m going to save but Staff Sergeant Gerlach I’m trying to get to. I come to, to Staff Sergeant Gerlach—Greg—shaking me and holding my cell phone, telling me to hurry up and answer it.

I croak hello. A voice at the other end asks if I am Mrs. Bradley Sabatto. I say what Granna drilled into me as a little girl was proper phone etiquette: “This is she,” despite learning in college that it wasn’t at all proper grammar. If this were any other time, on any other night, I’d let him know that I still have my own first name, thank you very much.

“Ma’am, my name is Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Spencer.”

I hear a sharp intake of breath on the other end that I’m sure Lieutenant Colonel Spencer didn’t intend. “I have some news about your husband,” he says.

Brad is not the only soldier in his convoy to survive. But he is the only one to walk away in one piece, more or less. He spends a few days in and out of surgery in Iraq, and he is transferred to Germany for further medical attention. The IED blast that killed Darcy’s husband and six others has left Brad’s body looking like a scrapyard of shrapnel, but since there are a mere handful of weeks before the rest of his unit leaves the theater, he will be coming home ahead of them.

I am not a religious person, nor am I a great mathematician, but over the past weeks, I have considered all the odds against my husband’s safe return. After each calculation, I said little prayers of thanks. I say one more now for good measure, looking out over Madison’s Capitol Square, the scene below bathed in afternoon sun like a picture plated in gold.

Brad enlisted after his best friend was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Up until that afternoon, when he came home and told me he had spent the afternoon with a local Army recruiter instead of taking his GREs, we had our life planned. He was fresh back from studying in Oxford, and I was an associate at a local law firm. We had so much ahead of us. Good things. But the military came out
of nowhere, a car running a red light, and T-boned those perfect plans of ours.

I told Brad it was fine—that we’d be fine; that he’d be fine. I played some version of what I thought a good military wife should be, because what else was I supposed to do? Tell him that his selfish, stupid, wholly unilateral decision meant, at best, one more year of postponing an addition to our family, and, at worst, reducing our twosome by half? No, I kept that to myself, where it festered and burned until I was almost glad when he deployed, because I didn’t have to swallow it back down every time I laid eyes on him.

But right now, blanketed by the knowledge that my husband is alive and will soon be on his way home, I’m suddenly freed to feel proud of him like I could have—should have—been all along. Below my office window, on the sidewalks around the Capitol, a couple walks hand in hand. She’s wearing a red peacoat and he has on a three-quarter-length wool dress coat with a smart plaid scarf draped around his neck. He says something to her, and she recoils in mock surprise or anger before he pulls her into him and wraps an arm around her, marching her forward and kissing her cheek. They’re near enough to my window now that I can make out her earrings, glinting silver in the sun, and the wedding band on his left hand. Before I got the call that Brad was okay and that he’d be coming home, I would have turned away from the couple long before, unable to stomach the agony that comes from window-shopping for something you know you might never have.