Thank You for Your Service (26 page)

Authors: David Finkel

Worse, the calls and texts are sporadic, leaving her waiting at night to hear from him. If it were a deployment, she’d be more understanding. But this is California, not a war zone, and here she is, once again spending another night at home, waiting for any word at all from a man always in possession of his cell phone. She pulls Jaxson onto her lap. It’s been sixteen months since Adam dropped him, and she’s always checking him out. Why isn’t he talking yet? she wonders. Physically, he’s a little acrobat—just last night he climbed onto the couch, balanced on the back edge, and beat the wooden blinds until he broke a couple of slats—but developmentally she worries that he’s behind. She wraps him in a blanket and kisses him again and again on his cheek until he’s asleep, and then she holds him for a while more, just looking at him. He looks so much like Adam in this moment, down to the way he is sleeping with his mouth open. “Must be a boy thing,” she marvels. She taps his forehead. “Like nothing’s working up here. Mouth wide open. Flies buzzing. Mouth-breathers.”

She needs to get out of the house, she realizes.

Even one night would help, and so she arranges to leave the kids with Dave and his wife, Donna, across the street and go out somewhere with her friend Christina, who happens to need a night out, too, because her husband has gotten into photography lately and she has been driving him all over Kansas so he can take pictures of cornfields.

A Friday night now. Donna comes over for the kids. It’s race night at Whiskey Lake, and that’s where the kids will be going. Saskia gathers up
extra bottles and diapers, and as she does, Donna tells her about a dream she had. She was on her front porch smoking, and when she looked across the street, Adam, Zoe, and Jaxson were standing in an empty lot. Their house was gone, and Saskia wasn’t there, either. “It was so weird,” she says, and wonders if it was some kind of premonition.

Saskia shrugs. She’s not a premonitions type of person, although when she goes out on the front porch and sees that a bird has built a nest in her hanging plant overnight, she mutters, “That can’t be good.” She turns to Zoe. “You better behave yourself.”

“She will,” Donna says.

She goes inside to change. She has an outfit in mind. Something kind of fun. Other than for her job interview, she hasn’t dressed up, really, since she and Adam went on a date to the Cozy Inn. When she emerges a few minutes later, though, she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “I got no one to impress, huh, Eddie?” she says, petting the dog, whose leg seems to have fully healed. She hugs Zoe, who asks, “Where are you going?”

“To the mall.”

“All night?”

The mall is a half hour away. She and Christina start off with a jumbo margarita at Carlos O’Kelly’s Mexican Cafe. They go into Victoria’s Secret. They go to Maurices and the Children’s Place and get French manicures at Cali Nails and are in Dillard’s, looking at purses, when Saskia’s cell phone rings.

A California number.

“Hello?”

It’s Fred Gusman, calling to introduce himself and to let Saskia know that Adam has been having a bad day.

“Really?” Saskia says, thinking of him fishing. “It sounds like he’s having a pretty good day.”

Someone went in his room and flipped things around, Fred explained. Weekends are hard out here, especially at first. He was missing Saskia and the kids. Maybe she should come out, Fred suggested. They’d pay for it if she would come.

“Maybe,” she says. They talk for a few minutes more. Fred promises
to call again and tells her to call anytime she has questions. She says she will and hangs up. How could she go out there? How could she take time off from work? Who would watch the kids?

Eight o’clock now. The margaritas have worn off, and they’ve exhausted the mall. Christina goes home, leaving Saskia standing outside in the last gray of the day. She calls her sister. “What the fuck do I do now?” she asks. She calls her mother, who suggests going to the Cozy Inn, sitting at the bar, and striking up a conversation.

She goes to Walmart and buys toothbrushes and a set of shelves for Jaxson’s bedroom.

Home now. It’s just her.

She looks around for a hammer to assemble the shelves. Maybe it’s in the furnace room, but there’s no way she’s going down there, not when there’s no one else in the house. She sits in the living room. She’s tired, but she dreads going to sleep nearly as much as she dreads the basement. She always lies awake thinking over and over about money, the bills, the kids, and Adam, and now the women who are her clients and who all seem so utterly alone. Her version of footsteps and voices.

The phone rings.

Adam.

She grabs for it.

“Hello? … Hey … What’d that guy do to your room? … Well, who did it? … Why? … Mm-hmm … Mm-hmm … What do you mean? … What do you have planned for the rest of the night? … Tacos? … Really? … Okay, I guess … Well, no shit … Do you know where the hammer’s at? … Okay, I’ll just go buy one … Because I can’t find anything in the garage, and I’m not going through the basement …”

She starts chewing on her nails. There goes her manicure.

“Must be nice … Okay … All right … Love you, too … Yeah … Love you, too … You, too … Okay …”

All the next day, a Saturday, she feels better, and, as a result, the house feels almost normal. Zoe reads a book. Jax finds a plastic bucket, puts it
on his head, and staggers around. One of the dogs curls up next to her on the couch. “You stink,” she says, pushing the dog away, which reminds her that she needs to clean up the piles of dog shit in the backyard. Jax removes the bucket and starts throwing toys across the room while hollering at the top of his lungs. “Here,” she says, picking up the bucket and dropping it back over his head.

She checks her phone. Nothing from Adam, but instead of texting him, she texts Dave and Donna’s young son, a middle-schooler who thinks the world of Adam. Adam would take him fishing. They’d play video games together. When Adam was leaving, the boy hugged him so hard that Saskia got a little teary. “Want to pick up dog poop?” she writes.

“How much?” he texts back.

“Little punk,” she says.

“Ten dollars,” she writes back.

He comes right over. Saskia hands him a trash bag and a scooper and follows him into the yard, where he heads for the biggest pile.

“Damn,” he says as he gets closer. “Dead bird.”

He moves to another pile.

“You wanna work for me this summer?” Saskia asks.

“What, picking up dog shit?”

“No. Watching Zoe. Fifty bucks a week. That’s two hundred dollars a month. And all you have to do is make sure she doesn’t kill herself.”

He approaches another pile. Another dead bird. He says he’ll think about it. Saskia leaves him to it, goes inside, roots around her kitchen cabinets and finds a mix for a lava cake that she bought six months ago with big plans to make it right away. Today’s the day, she decides. It’s the right day for a cake.

A good day, this day.

But then it is the next day—Mother’s Day, as it happens—and she becomes so mad at Adam that she hangs up on him and slams the phone onto the table. She had awakened to Zoe bringing her breakfast in bed, and even though it was a bowl of cereal so sugary that she threw it out as soon as Zoe left the room, it was at least a good try. All morning long she waited for Adam to call, and when he finally did, at two in the afternoon, after he had been on Facebook, which was all the proof she
needed that he was awake and could have called well before two o’clock, she hung up, slammed down the phone, and says now to Jax, who is staring at her, “He can kiss my ass.”

“I’m not going to play this game with you,” Adam texts a few minutes later. “I don’t know what I did. I called to wish you a happy mother’s day. I got u rings and something else, which I’m assuming hasn’t got there yet.”

“How am I playin games??” she writes back. “Imagine how u would feel when everyone around u is made to feel special all day and I don’t even get a card and rings that I told you to order and then you get on facebook before u can even call me.”

“I woke up at 11 sent u a message on FB ate lunch then called u,” he writes. “The days not even over with and ur already assuming thats all I was going to do.”

“Put yourself in my shoes for 5 min and see how u would feel,” she writes. “I feel like shit and im alone.”

“This is getting out of hand,” he writes.

“U cant answer your phone?” she writes after she tries to call him and he doesn’t answer.

“No. Im not going to fight with u,” he writes. “Im sorry.”

“This is so fuckin ridiculous. Im so tired of fighting with you,” she writes, and waits for his answer.

A few minutes later, after trying another call to him, she writes again.

“Can u pick up the phone please.”

Five minutes later:

“Im not doing this. U dont wanna b mature and pick your phone up then im done.”

Eight minutes later:

“Way to show me your true colors, u cant even talk to me.”

Five minutes later:

“Damnit adam, I cant fucking go through this again, pick up your phone.”

Six minutes later:

“if you give a fuck about me then call, i cant do this anymore. I dont understand, all this is doing is tearing us apart and u dont even try.”

Five minutes later:

“Point fucking taken, i guess. Im done, im leaving. Good luck taking care of everything.”

Twenty-four minutes later:

“Can you please call me, i need to know what u want me to do with everything.”

Another twenty-four minutes later:

“Can u please talk to me, i dont know what to do im a fucking mess, do u just not give a fuck anymore? Im trying to say sorry and all your doin is making things worse.”

An hour and nineteen minutes later:

“why r u doing this.”

So he’s not going to call. So she is going to leave him. She will go back to where she grew up and get a goddamned basement apartment if she has to and he can come home from his fishing to a foreclosed house and a furnace room where he can pull the trigger at last. No, she can’t do that. He went to war. He needs help. He’s in a good place. She will call back Fred Gusman. She will get herself under control. That’s always been the goal: control. And hope, too. Hope and control. She calms down. She cleans up. She sits on the couch and instead of checking her phone for messages decides to look at her calendar to see what she has tomorrow.

First appointment: the pee woman.

“God
dammit
,” she says.

A few days later, she goes into the office after hours, when no one is there, and drops her keys and ID tag on her boss’s desk. Too much sadness. She can’t do it. She doesn’t leave a note but figures she doesn’t have to. He’ll know what it means.

The one who needs help is her.

Dispatch. Sharon.”

“Sharon, it’s Elaine over at Fort Riley.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I have a domestic physical in process for you.”

“Okay. Hold on.”

“Tell me when you’re ready.”

“Okay. What’s the address?”

“One one one nine Cannon View, apartment number 8, in Grandview Plaza. Your victim is Theresa—”

“Mm-hmm.”

“—last name Aieti. I’ll spell. Alpha India Echo Tango India.”

“Okay let me make sure on the last name. A-i-e-t-i?”

“Correct.”

“Okay.”

“Husband’s first name is, uh, Tausaloa. It’s t like Tom, a, u, s like Sam, a, l, o, a. Same last name. He’s in the house with her wearing T-shirt and jeans. He does not have weapons. Abuse was fisticuffs only.”

“It’s what?”

“Fisticuffs. Hitting her.”

“Oh okay. Physical domestic.”

“Yes. And she is locked in the back bedroom with her baby, and he is in the front of the house. And she said that, yes, you could call her …”