An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  She did not talk about the Pentagon-staged rescue of Jessica Lynch, a pretty young soldier who was Claire’s age, or the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, or the looting and violence there, except to Diane and Tom.

  “Freedom is untidy,” Donald Rumsfeld pronounced. “Stuff happens.”

  Spring came. The fields and meadows greened up, the trees leafed out, swaths of violets and trillium blanketed the forest floor. Charlie continued to keep a careful distance from her, his determination to live in the present moment unwavering. Had he purged her from the Museum of Charlie in his mind, she wondered, and, if so, how had he accomplished this? Her own mind reeled with memories so vivid that she was constantly distracted, surfacing with surprise to see him, a man in his fifties, or Claire grown into a young woman. Jo in the nursing home, blank and suffering.

  When the call came, she was the one to answer it: Jo had awakened feverish, with chest pain and respiratory distress that the doctor had diagnosed as acute onset pneumonia. They needed Charlie’s permission to admit her to the hospital in Traverse City. They should be prepared to consider what measures should be taken to save her life.

  “Of course they should take her to the hospital if she needs to go.” Charlie said, when she went out to the clinic to find him. “But for Christ’s sake, do we need to talk about . . . the other right now? She might come out of this just fine.” And he glared at her, as if daring her to say what she was thinking: And would that be a good thing?

  He was ominously silent on the way to the hospital. Entering Jo’s room, where she lay tethered to an IV, breathing in oxygen through a nasal catheter, he stopped short, shocked at the sight of her, then walked out again. Claire followed him; Nora didn’t dare. She pulled a chair up to Jo’s bedside and sat down, brushed her tangled hair away from her damp forehead. Jo was hot and clammy to the touch, her breathing labored. The hand that wasn’t restrained by the IV scrabbled on the bedcovers; it felt skeletal when Nora lifted and stilled it, folding it into her own.

  She bent close to Jo, kissed her cheek and, in a low voice, told her everything.

  Jo’s eyes remained closed, her body motionless. There was no recognizable sign that she’d heard a word Nora said. But Nora had read that some people who’d been near death and survived vividly remembered the sense of floating above the scene of their own demise, observing panicked doctors and grieving loved ones with an equanimity that puzzled them upon re-entering their bodies.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “We’ll be all right. I promise.”

  When the doctor arrived to examine Jo, she joined Charlie and Claire in the waiting room. Charlie pointedly concentrated on the magazine he was leafing through. Claire’s eyes were fixed on whatever game show was on the television, but when Nora sat down beside her and gave her a brief hug, she allowed it. When a nurse appeared perhaps fifteen minutes later to escort them to the conference room where the doctor was waiting, Charlie stayed both of them with a glance, rose, and followed her, alone.

  “I told Dad, she’s not here anymore,” Claire said, tearfully. “She wouldn’t want to be this way. Not knowing us, not even knowing herself.”

  But it was Mo who finally convinced him to accept that fact Jo was dying, who sat vigil with him until Jo finally took her last breath, and stayed beside him through the funeral and until the last person had left the reception at the Hummingbird Café.

  “You know Mo,” Diane said a few days afterward. “She’s going to take care of Charlie forever. You don’t have to worry about that. And all you had to do was look at Claire and Dylan at the funeral to see he’s the one who’s going to make sure she’s okay. When he comes back next week for summer break, forget about seeing much of Claire, no matter how well you’ve been getting along.

  “So what about your life, Nora?” she asked. “What are you going to do about that?”

  33

  “Here, There and Everywhere”

  On the first of May, President Bush had swaggered in full flight regalia from the jet that landed him on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, grinning, giving the thumbs up to the hundreds of sailors lining the flight deck under a banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.”

  “Combat operations in Iraq have ended,” he announced. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

  But troop strength remained essentially the same, fierce battles continued to rage, the death count rose. One hundred thirty-eight Americans had been killed by the Fourth of July, a third of them after Bush’s pronouncement. Thousands of Iraqi civilians had died in air strikes and explosions, were injured or displaced. So far, not a single WMD had been found.

  Recently, a taped message from Saddam Hussein, who remained at large, had urged guerilla fighters to continue their resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.

  “Bring them on,” President Bush responded. “We’re not leaving until we accomplish the task, and the task is going to be a free country led by the Iraqi people.” He offered no timetable for the withdrawal of American forces.

  “Oh!” Nora said. “I guess he forgot the war was over. Not to mention the fact that he went AWOL from the Reserves when it looked like he might get sent to Vietnam.”

  Tom glanced at her sharply.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know I’m not responsible for it. I’m just saying . . .”

  He smiled. “Okay, then. Progress.”

  They were sitting in a restaurant on Front Street in Traverse City, half-watching the news on the TV above the bar, half-watching the townspeople and tourists there for the Cherry Festival pass by on their way to the park along the lakeshore to watch the annual air show. They waved little American flags, wore tee shirts and baseball caps plastered with flags and stars and eagles. “American Patriot,” “In God We Trust,” “These Colors Don’t Run.” Usually, the air show featured the Navy’s Blue Angels in a festive, conspicuous display of aerobatic maneuvers. This year it was the Air Force, with a tactical demonstration of the aircraft being used in Iraq, including a simulated weapons deployment.

  “Fun and games,” Tom said.

  He paid the check and they walked, hand-in-hand, in the opposite direction of the crowd, toward Nora’s apartment. She could not stop looking at him. They had talked every day since she’d come back in March but had waited until this weekend to see each other. It had made her feel young again, the way she’d felt waiting for him that long ago summer, and her first sight of him the day before had brought back the boy leaning against a post at the bus station, waiting for her bus to arrive. The sense that life, everything was still all before them.

  “It is,” he said, when she told him that. “It’s just going to be a little shorter than we planned.”

  The first planes screamed into the sky as they walked, and Nora shuddered, imagining what it must be like to see them coming at you for real, how you’d draw your children to you, try to shelter them, knowing only luck would save them – or God or fate, if you believed in either.

  “You’re quiet,” Tom said. “Are you worried about Claire?”

  “A little. And Diane in Chicago, doing the same thing, waiting for Rose. She’s coming to dinner at Carah’s tonight – Rose is. Diane’s a wreck about it. I know,” she added. “Like me worrying about any of it really helps.”

  The apartment still smelled of the cherry pie she’d baked that morning and of the little doll pies she’d made for Claire. One of four apartments in an old Victorian house, it belonged to a friend of Diane’s, an artist who was in France on a fellowship through the summer. It was on the second floor, airy: white walls hung with her abstract Michigan landscapes; shelves that held driftwood and Petoskey stones, birds’ nests, dried flowers, and branches with bright red winter berries. A bay window overlooked the neighborhood, and after she had made a pitcher of lemonade and set out the plates for the pie, Nora sat in the window seat and watched for Claire and Dylan to come up the street after the air show.

  She
had moved to Traverse City after Jo’s death to stay close to her daughter, found a part- time job at a bookstore to keep busy, and started seeing a therapist, an older woman who listened intently and whose questions and observations turned out to be very much like Tom’s.

  “Talk,” Dr. Whiting would say, when she arrived each Tuesday afternoon.

  And Nora did, surprised by how easy it was to tell the secrets she’d held so close to her, how her whole body lightened as the words they were made of flew out of her mouth and into the air. She talked to Claire, too, more cautiously – and often with a heavy heart. She was still looking for the words to explain that she would give Claire her life, but, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t give Claire her whole and only heart. The heart gives itself away. You can’t control it.

  She had to go slowly. She had to be there. Their best times were when they didn’t try to talk at all – when Claire drove over and they went to a movie, took a picnic lunch to the beach and sat reading together, or walked down by the marina to look at the boats. When Dylan returned for summer break, the two of them came together.

  He was different from last summer, more man than boy. Their relationship was different, too, seasoned by Claire’s troubles, but the “we” of them seemed stronger for it – which Charlie felt as loss, but for which Nora was grateful. What more could you wish for your child than the kind of happiness real love brings, the exclusive friendship, the grounding? And it made her believe that, if she was patient, the time would come when she’d be able to say, “Tom and I were in love that way when we were young,” and Claire would be able to listen.

  Now here they came toward the apartment, talking, Claire’s arms waving. They were still talking, coming up the stairs, and Claire’s first words when Nora opened the door were, “Mom. That . . . stealth bomber. Did you see it? Oh, my God,” she rattled on, before Nora could answer. “It was awful. Like a humongous bat. Like death coming right at you.”

  “Everyone’s cheering and we’re, like, ‘Shit’!” Dylan said. “We need comfort food – hot pie, with ice cream melting on it. Seriously. That thing scared the crap out of both of us.”

  “Whatever they’re doing with that thing, wherever, is wrong,” Claire said, quietly.

  Then she came in and held her hand out to Tom.

  Nora had the odd sense of a camera rolling, recording a rehearsed scene – the introductions, Tom’s inevitable comment that Claire looked like her mother and Claire deciding to smile, and Dylan leavening the moment saying he had a friend who said you should look at your girlfriend’s mother before making any major commitments and he figured he was good to go there, and Tom saying no doubt about that. Nora playing her part, serving the pie and ice cream and lemonade, being surprised by Dylan saying, you know they ought to shove W out of the Green Zone and see how long he survives, and Claire agreeing, saying you were right, Mom, last summer, how you were so upset about the war.

  Nora was in the film, but outside, watching, listening, too. Claire and Dylan holding hands under the table, Tom scratching Astro’s ears, asking Claire and Dylan about their studies and about their jobs at River Rental and drawing out of them that they planned to come back and live here when they finished college, maybe teach at Interlochen if they could get on there, whatever, they’d find something.

  Then Nora saying, “Well, it’s a wonderful, magical place to live your life,” not trusting her voice to say more than that.

  Dishes in the sink, hugs and handshakes, the door closing behind them.

  “It was okay, right?” Tom asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

  He smiled. “Next?”

  Next there would be Tom meeting Charlie and Mo. There would be writing to her parents, who Tom had learned were still alive, in the same house, and the move back to Bloomington in the fall. There’d be problems that could not be solved, sorrows that would never, ever go away. The war would go on and there would be other corrupt wars, too, and she’d be angry about them all, which was all right because she didn’t ever want not to be angry about something so wrong. As an antidote, she would make herself remember the children she had taught so long ago, how their struggles humbled her, how their gratitude for even the smallest kindness broke her heart and at the same time made her feel hopeful that she could make some difference in the world.

  She wanted that hope in her life again.

  Right now, though, the rest of the long weekend stretched out before them. They’d rest a while, maybe make love, then in the early evening pack a picnic supper and drive a road lined with cherry orchards to a secret beach she knew. When the air began to chill, they’d climb the huge dune behind it, a grueling, steep climb – hearts pounding, thighs burning, sand collecting in their shoes – and when they reached the top they’d turn and see the spectacular scoop of shoreline curving to a blue-gray distance in either direction. Soon the sun would flare up and make its glittery path across the water, then sink into the horizon, trailing tatters of pink and orange, its last rays like long fingers raking the clouds. The color would drain from the trees and sand and grasses; the water would go glassy and opaque. And night would fall, showering them with stars.

  BARBARA SHOUP is the author of six previous novels and co-author of two books about the creative process. A native Hoosier, she is the Executive Director of the Writers’ Center of Indiana, an Associate Faculty member at IUPUI, and an Associate Editor for OV Books. She lives in Indianapolis.