“Of course. I went to all her games. I never could figure out why she suddenly quit after two years.”
“Oh, I know exactly why she quit. If she didn’t score at least a goal a game, she figured she’d had a bad game. She quit because she couldn’t be as good at it as she wanted to be. Basketball was her first love. And of course, she was starting to get serious about her schoolwork at this point. Hockey was taking a backseat, and she didn’t want to do something she couldn’t give her all to.”
That made sense to Pam. Laura never went halfway with anything she set her mind to. “Well, then, I expect she’s right about this journal being the best.”
Pam continued reading out loud.
“Nov. 9, 2012:
“The first day of the next fifteen months in Afghanistan. I am now boots on the ground, in theatre, in the ’Ghan, for my second tour here. I arrived in a US C-17, which is basically a huge cargo transport plane. Landing at Bagram Air Field is an adventure. Outside a war zone, travelers are used to the gentle descent, cheerful announcements, a soft landing and sometimes applause for the pilots. In Afghanistan, a slow and direct approach leaves a plane vulnerable to missile attacks, so the plane stays high and at the last possible moment drops into a steep spiral dive. Even if you know what’s coming, it is no fun. Makes you want to vomit, to be honest. G-force pushes and pulls on your body as the pilot aims the plane toward the ground like a dart. At the last minute the plane levels out, then it hits the runway.
“It’s hot, dusty here, and the bright morning sun hits me hard as though I had been struck blind. I’d forgotten my sunglasses on the plane, and there was no time to go back for them, so I marched on, tears streaming down my face as I tried to adjust to the light. I know some people might think I’m upset to be posted in this country again, but I’m not. I’m ecstatic. This is exactly where I want to be, doing what I was trained to do. And it feels damned good to be around people who don’t look at you like you’re crazy for wanting to be in the middle of the war, the way they do back home. I’ve always hated sitting on the bench during a really big game, watching everybody else play. I want to play, need to play and now I get to play.”
“But it’s not a game,” Trish interrupted, her voice growing tense. “How can she compare war to a game? You don’t lose your goddamned life in a game.”
“No, you don’t. But the way she wrote it, I can understand how she felt when she wasn’t over there. Can’t you?”
Trish sighed, sipped her tea. “I guess.”
“I don’t think she was trying to trivialize war. And she wasn’t a novice. She’d been to Afghanistan before. And Iraq.”
“Exactly. Which is exactly why she should have known the danger. It’s exactly why she shouldn’t have wanted to go there.”
Gently, Pam closed the journal. “I know you’re angry, but…”
“Aren’t you?” Trish demanded, her face flushed.
“Of course I’m angry that my sister is dead. And I’m angry that my parents are gone too. But being angry isn’t going to change anything. It’s not going to make my life better. And it’s not going to help me understand why Laura’s work was so important to her.”
Trish rose in a flurry, her anger making her brittle. “I’m sorry. I need to take a walk or something.”
“We don’t have to do this journal together if it’s too hard.”
“No. I want to. I just need to take a breather.”
She watched Trish stalk out the door and wondered why she didn’t feel the same kind of anger. She was sad—sad to the core—and full of an empty kind of loneliness. It left her listless some days, confused, not herself. The episode with Connie was evidence of that. But who was there to be angry at? The army? Laura had willingly joined, knowing and even embracing all the risks. The army never tried to sugarcoat what it was about. She could be angry at the Taliban, but they were a faceless, evil enemy that was easy to hate in an abstract way. She wasn’t particularly religious, so blaming God wasn’t an option either. Anger was a wasted emotion, she told herself.
When Trish returned a short while later, she looked far more at ease. She apologized, said she wanted them to read more of the journal together. Trish’s anger, Pam decided, was her own, and was not something she would allow herself to be sucked into. She could only control her own emotions and not someone else’s.
They read more about Laura’s chaotic surroundings at the base. The cement air-raid shelters every few dozen yards, the large dining hall, the bunkhouses, the boardwalk with its café, restaurant and general store, the noisy trucks kicking up dust everywhere, the loud jet engines of planes and helicopters coming and going every few minutes. She described the hospital too, which was actually quite state-of-the-art, all things considered. There was a blood lab, ultrasound machines, a new CT scanner. Laura noted how much it’d improved in the three years since she was last there.
Over take-out pizza for dinner, Pam confessed that reading Laura’s own words, reading about her daily life over there, almost made it seem like she wasn’t gone. Like she was still there in the desert, dodging trouble.
“I know,” Trish agreed, staring blankly past Pam. “What’s going to happen when we come to the end of it?”
Pam didn’t have an answer to that.
“Nov. 20:
“We tried to practically kill each other in a game of road hockey tonight. Probably it’s because an entire artillery company is heading outside the wire tomorrow on a long convoy. It’s a way to blow off steam, to pretend there is no fear of what might happen. IED and suicide attacks have been increasing lately in this part of the region, and tomorrow’s mission is damned dangerous.
“Neil Jackman’s a twenty-two-year-old corporal heading out on the mission. He’s a reservist on his first tour. He tries to act tough, but I can see he’s the nervous type when people aren’t looking, always checking and double-checking his equipment, taking apart his weapon and cleaning it constantly. Earlier today he came into the hospital and sought me out. I’d taken some blood from him a week ago because I suspected he was a little anemic. We were going over the results (he isn’t anemic, so his symptoms are probably from stress). He seemed really tense and uptight, so I came straight out and asked him if he was scared about tomorrow. He looked around to make sure nobody was listening. Then he broke down in tears. Sobbed like a little boy.
“I can’t tell him everything’s going to be fine, because I don’t know that. One thing about the soldiers serving here, they want the truth. Doesn’t matter what it’s about, whether it’s about enemy activity, the extent of an injury, or if your mate back home is screwing around. There’s no time here for sugarcoating anything. It’s too real here for lies. The sun is brighter, pain hurts more, laughter is deeper, and so is sadness. Everything cuts twice as deep here. So I let Neil cry for a few minutes, then I asked him what was really bothering him. He told me he’d had a bad dream that he wasn’t coming back. Ever since, he just can’t shake that nagging feeling that he is going to get killed, he confessed. Who am I to tell him it’s just a load of crap? I asked if he wanted to talk to a padre or a social worker. He said no. I even asked him if he wanted me to try to get him out of it for medical reasons. Again he said no, that he didn’t want to be a coward, that he had to man up. He thanked me for the talk and I watched him leave a few minutes later. It’s hard to walk toward what might be your own death. I told him to keep moving forward, that it’s what we do as human beings, even when we don’t know what lies ahead. I hope he’s okay.”
Pam and Trish quickly paged ahead to Laura’s entry two days later. It was a simple one-liner.
Cpl. Neil Jackman, KIA today.
* * *
They spent a couple more hours on the journal Sunday before Trish said she’d better start the drive back to Ann Arbor. Pam agreed she wouldn’t read any more of the journal in Trish’s absence, which made Trish happy because it would be too much to bear reading alone for either of them. It was hard not only because
Laura was gone, but because it was written in such a way that it felt like they were right there with her, as though everything she wrote about was still happening. It’d been heartbreaking to read about the young soldier who’d had a premonition about his death, and Trish wondered what Laura had felt when she was told the news. She hadn’t commented in the journal, perhaps because the soldiers didn’t allow themselves to grieve too long, to show too much emotion. She wondered too if Laura had had a premonition about her own death.
“I have to work next weekend,” Pam announced. “But what about getting together the weekend after that?”
“I’ll be done teaching for the summer by then. I can come here again.”
“Or I could come to your place?”
“All right. Come to my place.”
Trish hated the awkwardness between them since the kiss. She was hesitant now to hug Pam or to even touch her, fearing it might be misconstrued. They needed to talk about it, but not now.
After much hesitation Trish said, “Are we okay?”
Pam leaned against the front doorframe. A smile spread slowly, mellifluously, across her face. “We’ll always be okay.”
Trish’s instant relief weakened her knees. Whatever they needed to clear up between them didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that they were still here for each other. They were still friends.
Trish found a 1980s station on the radio and cranked it up for the drive home. She smiled as she listened to the Culture Club, Tina Turner, George Michael. Songs from her and Laura’s youth. She felt numb, but almost pleasantly so, wrapped in adolescent memories of innocent joy.
Chapter Eleven
Trish and Rosa followed their usual Saturday tradition—an early morning swim and then breakfast at The Broken Egg downtown. They’d had to miss last weekend when Trish was in Chicago, and just as she’d expected, Rosa had spent most of the morning grilling her about her visit with Pam.
Trish told her about the journal and the other items in the box that belonged to Laura. Not one to miss anything, Rosa had noticed right away Laura’s ring dangling from a necklace around her neck. She frowned at it, kept making disapproving faces, but said nothing. It wasn’t long before the dam burst.
“How come she never gave you a ring when she was alive?”
Trish’s fork stalled just before she was about to shove it in her mouth. It teetered in her suddenly shaky hand, bits of scrambled egg spilling over. She gave up and set the fork back on her plate. “What are you talking about?” she asked on a long sigh.
Rosa screwed up her face. There was no mistaking her feelings. “She never gave you a ring while she was alive. Why would you wear her ring now?”
“Because I loved her. You know that. It’s the only thing I have of hers.”
“But Trish, a ring is something special, don’t you think?”
Trish rolled her eyes. She knew where this was going and didn’t like it one bit. Rosa and her goddamned self-righteous moralizing. “Of course a ring is special. What Laura and I had was special. Jesus, Rosa, you know our whole history, chapter and verse.”
“Yes, but this ring thing is new. And I don’t like it.”
Trish pushed her plate aside, her appetite gone. If Rosa was trying to provoke her, well, she was damned well succeeding. “You never liked anything about Laura, admit it.”
“No, you’re wrong. What I didn’t like was that Laura still had a hold on you all these years. Years you could have been making a life with someone else.”
“Look, Rosa, it was never going to work out between you and me in the long run, Laura or no Laura.”
“Fine, maybe not.” Rosa’s eyes were misting over. She’d been hurt by their breakup, but Trish thought she was long over it. Perhaps she’d been mistaken. “But we were never going to know, because Laura was a constant albatross around our necks. She was always with us.”
“Do we really have to go over all this again? God, Rosa, I can’t believe you are still so consumed by jealousy for Laura. It’s getting old!”
“Fine. I’m jealous, okay? Always have been, always will.”
Wow, that was a first, Trish thought wryly. Rosa admitting a fault. If they weren’t discussing such a sensitive topic, she might savor it.
“But you still don’t get it,” Rosa continued.
Oh, Christ. She really did not want to fight with Rosa right now. She needed a friend, someone who understood what she was going through, and a little sympathy too. She didn’t need this condemnation, and she certainly didn’t need to rehash their breakup.
“Don’t you see?” Rosa continued, her voice full of barely suppressed rage. “She was never coming back for you, she was never going to change. And yet you held on and held on, blind to anything else but that one single-minded fantasy.”
Hastily Trish took money out of her wallet for her share of the check. She didn’t need this crap, and she would not listen to it any longer. Clearly, Rosa was pissed at her and was letting her have it with both barrels. It was totally unfair.
“She’s dead,” Rosa continued. “And now you’re holding on to a dead woman. A ghost.”
“Stop it,” Trish hissed, on the brink of tears.
“No, I won’t stop it because you need to hear this. If you don’t let her go, you’re going to die right along with her. Life is for the living, Trish. And that means you. If you want to remember Laura and your time with her, fine. But take off the rose-colored glasses and see her and your relationship with her for what it really was. And then get on with your life.”
Trish tossed a ten-dollar bill on the table. Without a word, she stalked out. Tears streamed down her face as she began to run down the sidewalk, away from Rosa and her stupid petty jealousy. Rosa didn’t understand. Nobody did. Well, Pam probably did, but Trish was afraid to rely too much on her because she didn’t want her emotions and her neediness misinterpreted. Christ, could she not do anything right these days? She’d led Pam to think she wanted to sleep with her, and now her best friend was pissed at her.
As she reached her car, she fingered Laura’s ring. It was strong, solid, like Laura. It felt as though Laura were here with her now, or at least a piece of Laura, and it was reassuring. Why couldn’t Rosa understand that? She missed Laura, was grieving for the only true love of her life. Why did Rosa have to be such a fucking bitch about it?
She slumped against the steering wheel, gathering her thoughts. If she wanted to hold on to Laura, it was nobody’s business but her own. She’d hold on to her for as long as she damned well wanted.
* * *
Pam took the elevator to the hospital’s third floor, where the ICU units were located. She had an hour or so of break time and wanted to check on the status of a woman who’d been rushed to the ER yesterday by ambulance.
The thirty-four-year-old single mother of two had arrived unconscious; she’d collapsed suddenly in her kitchen in front of her kids. Pam accurately suspected a brain aneurysm, which had been confirmed by an emergency CT scan. She’d called in neuro, and the patient was rushed into surgery. She’d survived the surgery, but her recovery and survival remained uncertain.
Pam was greeted by neurology resident Nancy Watters, who was checking the computers supplying oxygen and nutrients to her patient. Pam and Nancy had done their one-year general internships at the same time.
“How’s she doing?”
“Still too soon to tell. It’s out of our hands now, if you know what I mean, but Pearson did a wonderful job last night.”
Dick Pearson was the best neurosurgeon in the city. He would have given her the best possible chance, for whatever that was worth. The odds of her surviving were less than twenty percent, but so far she was holding her own.
Pam cast her eyes in the direction of the room across the hall, where a man with second- and third-degree burns lay unconscious. He hadn’t come into the ER on her shift, thank goodness, but she’d heard all about him. Three days ago he’d shot his wife and teenaged daughter to death, then s
et the house on fire, hoping to kill himself in the process. So far, he’d survived.
“What about him?” Pam asked with a jerk of her thumb.
Nancy made a face of undisguised contempt. “Looks like he’s going to pull through.”
“Figures, doesn’t it? It’s so goddamned unfair.”
Nancy placed a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Don’t try to figure out what’s fair and what’s not fair in this place. Fair is a place where you ride Ferris wheels and buy cotton candy, as my grandma used to say.”
Pam smiled, even though she felt like crying in frustration. “I know, you’re right, it’s just…”
“I know. Hey, how are you doing by the way?”
Pam shrugged casually, but inside, panic was squeezing her chest like a vice. She needed to get out of here. “I’m doing okay,” she managed, failing to fight the urge to flee. “Sorry, Nance, I gotta run.”
She pounded down the stairs, which ended right next to the chapel. She was not religious and had only ever poked her head inside once, just after she first started at the hospital, to see what it looked like inside. Now she felt an unusual pull to sit quietly in a pew. Not because she sought the comfort of God or religion or whatever it was, but because it was a quiet place where she could perhaps be alone with her thoughts. Maybe she could even find some peace and get out of this dark place she felt trapped in.
Pam sat down and stared, unblinking, at the flickering candles on the faux wood altar. She thought about the single mother upstairs fighting for her life, how she needed to pull through for her kids’ sakes. She thought of the killer who deserved to die but probably wouldn’t. And then there was Laura, who was only trying to help people, and yet she’d been rewarded for her good deeds by getting killed in a helicopter crash. What fucking sense did any of it make? she wondered bleakly. What’s the point of trying to do anything good, when there is no justice, no fair God or Goddess, no heaven, no ultimate reward?
Last Salute Page 9
