Thank You for Your Service (32 page)

Shawnee keeps looking at the steps, which she has been trying to go up and down as little as possible.

“Maybe he took a running start,” she says.

Here’s what she knows for sure, that when the 911 dispatcher asked if she could cut Danny down, she went to the kitchen and got a knife and felt sick to her stomach and thought she might pass out, and that as she sliced the cord, it made a sound—“a boing,” she says—that she has been unable to stop hearing since.

Now she looks down at Aurora, who is trying to crawl up the steps. “No, you can’t,” she says gently. She lifts her and moves her away, but Aurora comes right back and starts up the stairs again, and so Shawnee takes her outside and sits with her on the front stoop.

Someday, she is going to have to pass on to Aurora the legacy of her father, that he went to a war, that he came home, that he tried, that he stopped, but first she will have to understand it for herself. “How could you do this to me and Aurora?” she says she screamed at Danny just after he died, and then, overwhelmed with guilt for asking such a question, whispered to him, “I take it back.”

Another day: she went to visit her own father, who, as she was leaving, leaned in the car window and asked her, “What’s the lesson learned?”

Another day: “Valium. A ton of Valium. Take some. Go to sleep. I wouldn’t be brave enough to jump down the steps,” she says of the lesson she’s learning, while in Chester, Iowa, Mary Holmes, whose own learned lesson is her inability to stop asking questions, is sitting at her dining room table with the black plastic box that contains Danny’s cremated remains.

“Why did you hang yourself?” she asks him, crying and furious.

“How could you hurt Aurora this way?”

“What happened over there?”

“What was so bad?”

Meanwhile, in Kansas, on what for her is day 1,395, Amanda Doster decides to send Saskia Schumann a message.

“Hey there Saskia,” she writes. “I was wondering if you had thought about ways you could start paying me back the money I loaned you so long ago.”

She is sitting by a pool when she writes this, waiting for the kids to finish a swim lesson. There’s no particular reason for the message. It’s not like she’s running out of oops money. She and the Schumanns haven’t been in touch in months. But she thinks often of them, sometimes wondering how they are, sometimes wondering why they cut her out of their lives, and so she sends the message to the last address she had for Saskia and is surprised a few minutes later when she gets a reply.

“Yah of course. Right now its kinda tough. I’m not working and adams in a ptsd facility. We’re hoping to get social security and back pay from that. If they backpay from the day he filed i could just do it all at once.”

She rereads the message. A facility? Adam? She knew he hadn’t been well when he came home. But the “one guy in particular,” as James had once put it?

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she writes back, and is suddenly in a conversation she didn’t expect.

“We’ve been through a lot and had to witness many horrifying things with him,” Saskia writes. “I hope to god this program works and he comes home somewhat ‘normal.’ ”

“I can’t even imagine what he must be going through. And you guys having to see/deal with all of that must be difficult,” Amanda writes back.

“Sounds terrible, but i’ve lost a lot of sympathy for adam. I guess u get cold after being treated like crap for so long,” Saskia writes.

The conversation keeps going, off and on, through the rest of the
swim lesson, and it continues at home now, where Amanda should really be starting dinner.

“How r the kids?” Saskia asks at one point.

“They struggle and I struggle,” Amanda answers. “It usually hits out of nowhere.”

“Poor kids. Have you had them in any kind of therapy? I’m starting it with zoe now, she has seen and heard too much.”

“No. I’ve spoken to my counselor about them and they are having normal grief reactions. When they are a little older maybe …”

“That’s good your seeing someone. Has it helped? I just started seeing a therapist bout a mth ago.”

“I’m not sure. There are days I take the kids to school then go back to bed and cry all day.”

“I know how the crying all day thing is, there are days when it feels like everything around me is falling apart and I have no control over anything.”

“I couldn’t save James—it was out of my control. So I try to control everything I possibly can.”

“Have you started dating at all?” Saskia asks at another point. “It wont replace him but it may help with the loneliness you have.”

“I still only want my James,” Amanda answers.

“It seems like everything just happened yesterday,” Saskia writes at another point, and to Amanda those words are the most gutting of all.

For a while, she was wearing her wedding ring on her right hand, but now it’s back on her left hand. She is no longer seeing James behind the wheel of a pest control truck, but she might have recently spotted him on TV. As for Grace’s perfect acorn, it didn’t work out so well, but she will collect more when she next goes to clean James’s headstone in order to try again.

So she is trying, too.

“Yah, the day b4 he left he threatened to hit me, that was the last for me, thats why hes in a facility right now,” Saskia writes now.

“I’m grateful that he didn’t hit you,” Amanda writes. “There’s no excuse for that behavior.”

“No,” Saskia writes. “i talked to a lady whose husband is in the same
place and she said he tried to kill her and shes still with him. How does someone ever get past that?”

“My mom stayed with my dad for years and put us through that. It took 25 years for her to leave and it damaged me forever. His was PTSD from Vietnam …” Amanda writes, and then brings the conversation to an end because Grace is at her side, showing her a recipe for some kind of raspberry dessert.

Time to get busy with the lives they’ve moved on to, which for Amanda involves loading some new dishes she bought into the dishwasher. “I hate that they don’t fit the same way,” she tells the girls. “It’s making me crazy.”

Saskia, meanwhile, is left to wonder where she will get the money to pay back Amanda when her pressing concern is a house with broken air-conditioning during a summer heat wave and Adam nowhere around to fix it.

At least there’s the swimming pool in the backyard to cool off in, but the house is blistering, and the next afternoon, Dave from across the street comes over to see what he can do. Donna, his wife, comes, too, and they all head down to the furnace room to look at the air handler. Saskia hates the room more than ever, with its smudged light and sickening echoes, and when Jaxson gets in the way, she points him toward the hallway and tells him to go play with Zoe in her room.

A few minutes later, Zoe comes in.

“Where’s Jax?” she asks.

For a moment, Saskia is confused. Hasn’t he been with her? She gets up and checks the laundry room. He’s not there. She looks behind the freezer. “Jax?” she calls. “Jax?”

Now she and Donna head upstairs, and while Saskia checks the kitchen, Donna goes out back to see why the dogs are barking.

Just some birds.

Then something catches her eye.

“He’s in the pool!” she screams, seeing him on his back, floating near the four-step ladder he somehow managed to climb. His eyes are closed, his lips purpling. She grabs him by a leg and yanks him out as Saskia comes running, and soon another conversation is under way:

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“My son just fell in the pool,” Saskia says, crying, “but he’s breathing, so I think he’s okay.”

“Okay do you need an ambulance to come check him out or anything?”

“Yeah.”

“How old is he?”

“He’s going to be two in November.”

“Did he go underneath the water at all?”

“Yeah, he was under.”

“And he’s breathing okay?”

“Yeah. I think so. He won’t open his eyes.”

“He won’t open his eyes? Is there chlorine in the pool at all?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I want you to stay on the phone, I’m going to get an ambulance in route to you, okay?”

“Okay, thank you.”

“Are you in the front yard or the backyard?”

“The backyard.”

“Okay. Hold on just a moment.”

“Jaxson.
Jaxson! JAX!
”

“Saskia, how’s he doing now?”

“He threw up a little bit. He’s really tired. He won’t open his eyes.”

“Okay you’re gonna have to calm down for him, okay? ’Cause if you calm down, he’ll calm down, okay?”

“Oh my God …”

Later, after riding in the ambulance with Jaxson to the hospital, after telling the doctors that she didn’t know how long he was underwater, after tests and X-rays and listening to a doctor lecture her about pools and in the middle of everything getting a message from Adam asking, “You okay?” and writing back, “Phone’s dying,” and shutting it off, she is home wondering what to say to him.

For the second time in his life, Jaxson, somehow, is fine. Breathing evenly. Not even a mark. How can that be? But it is.

She gives him spaghetti for dinner and listens to him laugh as he
makes a mess of it, and then she sends Adam a long message telling him what happened.

She feels a little dizzy. The house is so hot. The forecast for tomorrow is 110 degrees. There’s no way they can sleep upstairs. Zoe leads the way down to the basement, and Saskia follows with Jaxson in her arms. They go past the furnace room and into Zoe’s room, and as they lie next to one another in bed, Saskia’s mind drifts. How long was he underwater? How did he get back to the surface? What if Donna hadn’t been there? What if the dogs hadn’t been barking at some birds? It would have been her fault. It
is
her fault.

She thinks of what Adam finally wrote back to her, after they had talked on the phone and he heard for himself that Jaxson was okay:

“Well, we’re even now.”

She sets her alarm to wake up in an hour. She will get up every hour, all night long, to check on her lucky son. She will put her hand on his chest. She will listen for his breaths. It’s a plan that gives her enough relief to shut her eyes, but she is still wide awake when at 2:00 a.m. her phone buzzes with another message.

What mean thing is he going to say now?

“I can’t sleep. All I can think of is all the death I’ve seen, caused.”

“You didnt cause any of it,” she writes back after a while. “You cant have that kind of guilt. Thats the cost of war.”

“Yes I did,” he replies.

In California, he lies in the dark, in need of forgiveness. In Kansas, so does she.

Everywhere, the war keeps trying.

“Love u,” one of them writes now.

“I’m so sorry,” the other writes back.

As they keep trying, too.

Hey, you wanna come in here and work some menus?”

General Chiarelli’s aide says this to General Chiarelli’s chef, who at the moment is on shoeshine duty in the basement of General Chiarelli’s house. It’s a position with perks, vice chief of staff of the United States Army. One of them is to live in a huge brick house on Fort McNair along Washington, D.C.’s waterfront, another is to always have good-looking shoes, and another is the ability to invite important people in Washington to dinners overseen by a chef and an aide.

“What’s the topic?” asks the chef, an army sergeant first class, because the dinners always have a theme. “Readiness” was one. “Budget” was another. “Modernization” was another.

“Suicide prevention,” says the aide, an army master sergeant.

“Okay,” says the chef, sucking in his breath.

“I already told the chorus,” the aide says. “Gave them a few ideas.”

Another perk: a chorus, usually the U.S. Army Strolling Strings, whose members surround the guests after dinner and serenade them.

“We should probably have some kind of greens,” the chef says, starting with the appetizer, which will be a pistachio sea bass that will need to be topped with something. “Or frisée.”

“How do you spell that?” the aide asks.

“e-e,” says the chef, as the aide types into a computer. “Render down the bacon,” the chef continues, “use the bacon itself as a crunch in the frisée. With vinegar.”

“What do you call that?” the aide asks, wondering what to type.

“I’d call it warm bacon dressing,” the chef says.

Adam Schumann, on his way home

“Could we call it vinaigrette?” the aide says.

“Yeah,” shrugs the chef.

“I like that,” says the aide, typing it in.

Members of Congress come to these dinners. So do “Thought/Action Leaders,” “Military/Government” types, and “Media/Opinion Shapers,” according to the lists that Chiarelli’s staff starts assembling a few weeks before each dinner. The goal is twelve people minimum and sixteen people tops, because more than sixteen means two tables and everyone wants to sit with the Vice.

Next course: a soup with butternut squash, parsnips, and mushrooms.

“You could call it an autumn vegetable bisque trio,” the chef says.

“Seasonal?” asks the aide, noting it’s not quite autumn yet.

“You could do seasonal,” the chef says. “That would be safer.”