Home Front

When had she written it? Yesterday, just before her flight?

He clicked on it.

My loves.

Thanks so much for the care packages you sent this week. I was the Queen of Dpod, I can tell you! Everyone wanted some of my tasty treats and the baklava was awesome. I took one bite and thought of all of you. Ask your Yia Yia to tell you the story of when she taught me to make it. I was not her best student, that’s for sure. Not as good as Betsy.

You know what else makes me think of home? The weather over here. It’s September and that means rain, even in the desert. The base is one big mud hole. You’d love it, Lulu. Splash! Splash!

Things are pretty much routine over here these days. I’ve been flying a lot. Recently we flew to a place called the Green Zone and had made-to-order milkshakes. Yum!

The Black Hawk is getting to be my home away from home. It has so much equipment, the whole world is at my fingertips. Whenever I look at the GPS, I think of you guys and home and I count the days till I’m back.

Until then, I know how much you both miss me, and I want you to know I miss you just as much. You are the first thing I think of every morning and the last thing I think of at night.

Lulu, I can’t wait to hear every little thing about your first day of school. I know you still feel a little scared, but try to remember that everyone feels the same way. Have you made any new friends? How is your teacher? Tell me everything!

Betsy, I know how lonely you sometimes feel these days. Middle school isn’t easy for anyone, especially not for a girl who is worried about her mom and having troubles with her friends. Life is messy—especially now—it will help if you accept the mess and let it be. Don’t be afraid to talk to Sierra about what scares you. Or Seth. Or your dad. You never know who will say just the thing you need to hear. And remember, a girlfriend can get you through the worst of times. I know because Tami is helping me every day over here.

One thing I see from here, from a distance, is how lucky we all are to have each other.

I love you both to the moon and back.

Mom

He sat back. I love you … both.

He deserved that, of course, but still it hurt. He’d thought his letter might have made a difference, but why would it? One letter—coming so late—could hardly undo the harm he’d done.

“Michael?” his mother said behind him, coming into the office.

Slowly, he turned. His chair squeaked. “There’s a letter from Jo. The girls will want to read it in the morning.”

“Come with me,” she said.

He followed her out of the office and into the family room, where she sat down in the overstuffed chair by the window. He sank onto the sofa’s deep cushions. Between them was an antique coffee table—Jolene’s first “faux finishing” project—pale blue and covered with the detritus of family life. A pencil, two photographs in drugstore frames, a poorly fired thumb pot from one of the girls, an unread magazine. If Jolene had been here, it would have been cleaner.

“You need to be strong for your girls,” his mother said. “All of them.”

“Before she left,” he said, knowing even as he formed the thought that he shouldn’t speak it aloud—it would make her ashamed of him—but he couldn’t help himself, “before she left I told her I didn’t want to be married to her anymore.”

His mother’s face seemed to fall at that. “This is what she took away with her?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Michael.” She sighed heavily. “I wondered. Her letters…”

“Are to the girls. Yeah.”

“Well,” she said. “You are an idiot, of course. But we’ve all been idiots when it comes to love. It’s not as if your father and I never had our problems. He once moved out—for six months. You were young. I made excuses. I waited. It is a long story that doesn’t matter anymore, except for this: he came back, and I took him in. We found a way to be happy again. So will you.” She got up from her place and stepped around the coffee table. Sitting down on the sofa, she put an arm around him and pulled him against her, soothing his tattered nerves in the way that only a mother could. “I’ll take care of the girls. You go to her, Michael.”

They sat there a long time. When his mother finally fell asleep, Michael got up. He covered his mother’s sleeping body with one of her own hand-knit blankets and wandered through the dark house. He checked on his daughters repeatedly, standing in the doorway and watching them sleep, hating the new life to which they would awaken. Unable to sleep, he started drinking coffee at 5:00 A.M., mostly because, although he couldn’t sleep, he was so tired he kept stumbling, hitting things, knocking them over. Sometimes an image of Jolene, smiling, flashed through his mind, and it caused a kind of temporary blindness. That was when he’d stumble into a chair or knock over a family photo.

He was awakened by the doorbell. At the sound, he jerked upright—realizing he’d fallen asleep in a wooden kitchen chair. He got unsteadily to his feet and went to the door, opening it.

Three men stood there. They introduced themselves as Jolene’s fellow guardsmen and offered to do whatever they could to help out. Out on the road, he saw a car turn into Carl and Tami’s driveway. No doubt there were three more soldiers in that car, ready to render aid.

Michael tried to get rid of them—couldn’t—and ended up showing them to the family room, where they stood together along the wall. They said they were prepared to do anything—drive carpool, grocery shop, mow the lawn.

“Ma?” he said, bending down to waken her.

“Huh?” Bleary-eyed, she sat up.

“There are some of—”

Before he could finish, the doorbell rang again.

This time it was four wives, standing on his porch, each holding a foil-covered casserole dish and a bag full of groceries. They gave him sad, knowing smiles and hugged him—all without tears—and then started organizing the food they’d brought. In no time the house smelled like frying bacon. They were making breakfast for the girls.

By nine o’clock, the girls had walked into this quiet, crowded house of theirs. Lulu had taken one look at the commotion and crawled up into her grandmother’s lap. Betsy had put in her iPod earbuds; she sat in the corner, listening to music and playing some electronic game.

Michael was about to go say something to her when the doorbell rang again.

Exhausted by the thought of more help, he went to the door and opened it.

In his rumpled state, it took him a moment to process what he was seeing. A familiar-looking woman with a pert little haircut, wearing too much makeup, stood on his porch. She was holding a microphone. “I’m Dianna Vigan from KOMO TV. Are you Michael Zarkades?”

He nodded dully, noticing that people had begun to place bouquets along the fence line. Someone had tied a yellow ribbon around the stanchion beneath their mailbox.

“Your wife flew into battle with her best friend as her copilot, Warrant Officer Tamara Flynn? I understand they met in flight school when they were still teenagers. You must be so proud of your wife. How do—”

“No comment.” He slammed the door and stepped back, so upset that it took him a minute to notice that the room had gone quiet. The guardsmen and the wives—and his family—were all staring at him. He had failed in some way; that was obvious. What was it they wanted him to say? That he was proud of her? Proud that she’d been shot down?

How could they expect that of him? How could he even form the word now, when his world was falling apart?

Sixteen

It was one of those foggy days in Seattle, where it seemed there was no sky at all, just layers and layers of gray. Jolene could hear the ferry’s foghorn in the distance, rippling like the water it floated above; a seagull cawed.

Betsy loves feeding those gulls. How many times had they stood on the ferry deck, hand in hand, lashed by a cold wind, throwing food to the beady-eyed birds who seemed to float so effortlessly?

A car horn honked.

She frowned, confused.

The sound changed, became an insistent beep-beep-beep.

She realized suddenly that her eyes were closed. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow. No. There was something in her mouth.

She came awake slowly, fought to open her eyes.

Overhead, instead of sky, was a white ceiling tracked with harsh lighting. She blinked. There were machines clustered around her, tall stands with monitor heads, like thin washed-out mourners, clucking and beeping.

The something in her mouth was a tube. Another tube went into her chest from the machine to her right.

A giant sucking sound came and went, rising and falling.

She heard footsteps, then a door opened, closed.

She needed to think. Where was she? What had happened?

A tall man in a white coat came to her bedside. He was wearing purple gloves and a white mask over his nose and mouth. He pushed back the curtains that created a semicircle of privacy.

A bed. Yes. That was it. She was in a bed.

“Chief,” the man said. “You’re awake.”

She tried to speak, but the tube made her gag.

Pain. She was in pain. It came to her suddenly, swallowed her; had it been there all along? Beside her, a monitor started to beep faster.

“Calm down, Chief,” the stranger said through his mask. “You’ve been in a terrible accident. Do you remember? Your helicopter was shot down.”

His voice drew out the word, elongated it: ac-ci-dent.

Smoke. Burning bits of metal. Tami.

Adrenaline surged through her. Pain spiked—where was it coming from? She couldn’t tell, couldn’t isolate it.

She wanted to ask about Tami, about her crew, but she couldn’t make anything work. She stared up at the stranger, thinking please …

She imagined herself reaching out, grabbing the man’s arm, demanding to know how her crew was, but she couldn’t do any of it. She thought of Tami, remembered holding her, promising her they’d be okay.

Blood on her face … everywhere.

The man did something to the bag hanging by her bed, and, slowly, the fog came back, rolled around her, softened the view until she was far away from here. She was on her own back porch, with her feet up on the railing, listening to the high squeak of Lulu’s voice as she ran around the yard and to the even, reliable whooshing of the distant waves.

Pain snapped her awake.

Jolene opened her eyes, gasping, desperate to fill her lungs with air. The tube was out of her mouth now. How long had she been here, drifting in and out of consciousness?

She couldn’t track the passing of time. When she woke, it was a barely there kind of waking; she was foggy, confused. A few times nurses had come into her room, and she’d pleaded with them for news, but all she ever got were poor you looks of sadness and a promise to call the captain, but if he’d ever came back, she’d been asleep.

She was awake now, though. Her bed was angled up a little, and some of the machines were gone. The overhead lights were harsh, unforgiving. In the small window to the right she could see that it was rainy. For a muddy, drawn-out second, she thought she was home …

She studied the room—saw the small metal chair positioned by the window, and a TV tucked up in the corner between the wall and the ceiling, and gray-painted walls. Then she slowly looked down. Her right arm was in a white plaster cast from elbow to wrist. But that wasn’t what got her attention.