Lulu drew back, her eyes big. “You?”
“But it’s a workday,” Betsy said.
“I’ve worked enough,” Michael said. The unfamiliar words loosened something in him, made him feel buoyant. He reached for the phone on the end table and called his mom. “Hey, Ma, I’m going to stay home with the girls today. We’re going to hang out at the beach. You want to come?”
His mother laughed. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do at the store. I’ll meet you there?”
“Perfect,” Michael said, hanging up. Then, to his stunned daughters, he said, “Why are you sitting there? I thought we were going to the beach.”
“Yay!” Lulu yelped, bouncing off his lap and running upstairs.
In the garage, Michael found that Jolene had everything organized neatly—folding beach chairs, marshmallow-roasting sticks, lighter fluid, coolers. He had an entire cooler packed by the time Betsy and Lulu came back downstairs, wearing their bathing suits and carrying beach towels. “I got Lulu ready,” Betsy said proudly.
After breakfast, Michael grabbed the cooler, directed the girls to get the buckets and shovels, and down they walked, toward the beach. At the street—quiet this morning—they crossed holding hands and went to their small dock.
They spent the whole day on the beach, making sand castles, looking for shells, wading in the cold blue waves. Sometime around noon, he built a fire in the round, metal, portable pit on their small deck, and in no time at all they were roasting hot dogs over an open flame.
At about one o’clock, his mom showed up and joined in the fun. For the first time in months, Betsy dropped her preteen attitude and became a kid again, and come evening, when the sky turned lavender and a ghostly moon came out to see who played on the beach below, they sat in chairs pulled close together, with blankets wrapped around them.
“Daddy,” Lulu said, tucked in the lee of his arms. “I’m scared about starting school. When is next week? Can Mommy come home?”
An emotion moved through him, tightened his chest. “I know your mommy would love to walk you into school, but she can’t. I’ll be there, though. Will that be good enough?”
“Will you hold my hand?”
“Of course.”
“How come I have to go all day? Mommy said I would be done by lunchtime.”
“It’s different now, baby. You need to be in the all-day program.”
“Cuz she’s gone?” Lulu asked sleepily, fingering the small metal wings pinned to her bathing suit.
“Right.”
“What if I get scareded?”
“It’s always scary on the first day,” Betsy said quietly. “But everyone will like you, Lulu. And you have a great teacher—Ms. MacDonald. I loved her.”
“Oh,” Lulu said, sounding unconvinced.
Michael smiled. “Let me tell you what it’s like…”
As he talked to his youngest daughter about kindergarten and teachers and cubbies and recess, it was as if he were another man from another life. For years, he’d strived to make a difference in the world, and he’d worked like a dog to make that happen, and yet here he was, a man sitting on a dock with his children, and never had he felt more certain that his words mattered.
That was what Jolene had been trying to tell him every time he missed an event. It matters, she’d said.
“Okay, Daddy,” Lulu said at last. “I guess I can do that ’cause I’m a big girl now. If you hold my hand. And I’m taking my pink ribbon.”
“Ah, Lulu,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Much later, when the girls had fallen asleep in their chairs, while the waves lapped along the pebbled shore and the stars shone down on them, his mother looked at him. “Jolene would be proud of you today,” she said quietly.
Michael looked at her, over Lulu’s dark head. “I let her down,” he said.
His mother nodded, smiling sadly, as if she’d known this all along.
September was a bloody month in the war. It seemed that every day a helicopter came back to base shot up. Hero missions and suicide bombers were commonplace now. Jolene had begun to avoid the Haji Mart altogether; she couldn’t stand thinking that the cute boy selling videos might someday have a bomb strapped to his chest. It had begun to rain in the past few days; the base had become a huge mud hole. The trailer’s cement floor looked like dirt. There was no way to get the viscous red mud off your boots.
Tonight, the sky was clear and black, spangled with stars. It occurred to her that only a few months ago a sky like this had made her think of her family at home, sleeping peacefully beneath the same stars. These days, she didn’t dwell on what was happening at home. She was too busy and exhausted to think about that. She was in the air constantly now, flying units into location, transporting workers to job sites, and flying Iraqi troops and civilian and military VIPs. More and more often, she flew air-assault missions, carrying troops to their mission-landing zones.
She walked beside Tami toward the trailer that housed the Charlie Company flight-planning room. They didn’t bother to talk; they were both too tired to make the effort. It was 2200, and they’d already flown two missions today. Yesterday had been even busier.
Jolene stepped up the muddy wooden steps and entered the trailer. The walls were covered with pieces of paper—schedules, reports, flyers, calendars. Every aircraft’s route was tracked from here. Computer screens sat on every desk. Here was where they stored all their machine guns and ammo and flight gear.
As she stepped into the trailer, the electricity snapped off and everything went dark. She heard someone say, “Shit. Again?”
Jolene knew the generator would kick in soon, but she was supposed to be at the helicopter in five minutes. “Zarkades, sir,” she said into the darkness. “You have a mission plan for Raptor eight-nine?”
There was a rustle of paper, then the creaking of footsteps on the plywood floor. “Air assault, Chief. You and Raptor four-two are going to Al Anbar. We have a marine unit trapped in a ditch. They’re taking heavy fire.”
The generator started up; the lights came on.
Captain Will “Cowboy” Rossen was standing in front of her, holding out her orders.
“Yes, sir.”
The captain nodded. “Be safe.”
Jolene and Tami went to the small room attached to the op center and retrieved their things. Jolene put on her heavy vest with the Kevlar plating and grabbed her flight bag. As they walked down the muddy streets, it started to rain. She looked up, saw a layer of pale gray clouds cover the stars.
“Shit. Viz is deteriorating,” Jolene said.
They increased their pace, boots sloshing through the mud. Jolene felt Jamie come up beside her, but neither of them said anything as they headed to their aircraft. Then Smitty showed up, strapping his helmet on as he walked.
“Your turn in the left seat?” Tami said when the bird was checked out and ready to go.
Jolene nodded and climbed into the left seat and strapped herself in. She clicked the night-vision goggles onto her helmet and pulled them into place.
In less than five minutes they were taking off, rising to just below the cloud cover.
It was a two-helicopter mission. They flew together, always in contact, across the black expanse of desert, over Baghdad to Al Anbar province, just past Fallujah.
As they came into Fallujah’s airspace from the north, the first round of machine gun fire sounded. The tap-tap-tap on the fuselage was small-arms fire.
“Raptor eight-nine, taking fire, seven o’clock, two hundred meters,” Jolene said into the comm. The other helicopter responded instantly.
“Raptor four-two taking fire, nine o’clock, banking right.”
They flew over a small village. A machine gun was set up on a rooftop, shooting at them.
Jolene scanned the area below; her night-vision goggles revealed dozens of greenish-white dots moving through the darkness. The soldiers trapped in the ditch or insurgents looking for them? She reached forward to flip a toggle switch, and everything exploded.
An RPG hit the fuselage so hard she was thrown sideways; her right foot arced up and kicked the instrument panel.
The cockpit filled with smoke. Flames filled the back of the aircraft; she could feel the heat. Jolene called out for her crew, got no response. She clutched the cyclic and tried to keep them in the air, but they were falling—plunging—downward at one hundred and fifty miles an hour.
The power on engine number two went crazy; the instrument panel went dark. Nothing. Not even engine temperature.
She called out to her crew again, told them to brace for impact, and then she tried to Mayday her position, but the smoke was so intense she couldn’t breathe. All she got out was “Mayday—” before they crashed.
After a long day spent taking depositions of the police officers who interrogated Keith Keller, Michael came home, dead on his feet, and made dinner for his daughters—one of Jolene’s chicken and rice recipes that he found in the overstuffed three-ring binder. Later, when the girls were asleep, he walked out to the empty family room, standing there alone, noticing how quiet the house was.
An unusual emotion rose up in him, so odd that it took him a moment to recognize it. Loneliness.
For so long, he’d felt a kind of simmering anger at being Mr. Mom, felt emasculated by being responsible for his children and the cooking and shopping. He’d blamed Jolene for leaving him adrift on a sea of responsibilities he didn’t want and which he barely knew how to perform. But in the last few weeks, it had changed. He’d changed. He’d found a new side of himself; he loved reading to Lulu before bed, hearing her quirky questions about the stories, watching her small finger point at the pictures. He loved it when Betsy sat by him at night, watching TV and telling him stories from school. He loved how they’d become a team at the grocery store, working together, how a game of Candyland could make them all laugh.
He missed Jolene. How was it he hadn’t foreseen what his life would be like without her?
She was so far away, and every day she was getting shot at, dodging IEDs, changing in ways he couldn’t imagine. And what had he given her to take with her? I don’t love you anymore.
He walked over to the TV, turned it on. Her latest tape was in the machine, as always; the girls watched it endlessly.
He hit Play.
And there she was, Jolene in uniform, smiling at the camera, pointing out landmarks around Balad—here’s the place where we get that good pie …
His wife.
The tape ended, and the last image of her froze on screen. She stood with Tami, both in uniform, their arms slung around each other. Jolene was smiling brightly, but he saw the truth in her eyes. She was scared and lonely, too.
He wanted to talk to her so much it was an ache in his chest.
There was no way to call her, though. All he could do was write her a letter.
The thing he’d never done. He’d started several in the past weeks, but he’d deleted them all before sending. He was so ashamed of how he’d acted before; how could he just drop her a letter now and pretend that everything was different?