She reaches that point where her breathing evens, and when she knows she can go for a good long while. Her heart beats very slowly, like an athlete’s. It had always given her doctors the impression she was calm; it now gives that illusion to everyone else.
*
Sara told her son that his father died of a heart attack. He was traveling for work. And that work, according to him, was so important that he had had to choose it over being a more traditional dad. She always told Jason that his father worked for an embassy in Europe, because that was her understanding. First it had been France, then Spain; in the last years of his life, it was Sweden. But thinking back to a time before cell phones and e-mail, God only knows where he was and what he did. She was so mired in the process of caring for a little child and, when he slept, patching together work, that over time she didn’t even ask anymore where David was or what he was doing. She had no illusion he cared for her or would one day be coming home and sitting at a table for meals with the two of them. She would hear rumors from friends about where he was but people didn’t ask anymore if she minded. More often they wanted to know how she minded being alone. Didn’t she want to marry?
She assumed David did well as the size of the checks he sent began to rise. This meant she could send Jason to good schools, so she forgave the fact that she had no idea what kind of work generated them. She forgave the fact that they came with no letter, no return address. She knew who had sent them. And almost always he would call soon after. “Did you get the cash?” The calls felt cold and transactional, like a drug deal. She quickly stopped caring. She was rational and pragmatic. Romance is vastly overrated, she thought.
Jason was a senior in high school when she dropped him off that day in early September ten years ago. As she did on most days, she dropped him off and then returned home to take a nap. She wasn’t sleeping well, and the insomnia had worsened as the anniversary—December—of David’s death approached. Usually she didn’t fall asleep; she just lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, took deep breaths and then made herself get up. When she was ready, she would sit down at her computer and do her work: editing interminably dull research papers written by former colleagues of David’s. They all had books, and in the nearer term they had articles, white papers, and always possibly revolutionary essays to be submitted to prize-winning policy journals. They all had editors, too. At first they began giving her work because they felt sorry for her, but then when they saw she was good they would ask her again and again, until the relationship became a dependency, enough of one that they were willing to pay very well for her input. She had a healthy sense of humor about the fact that the content of much of what she worked on was foreign to her; she just tracked the value of the lines by their rhythm and let the politics stand “on author.”
It was easy to forget about everything else once she was lost in her work, even as she was filled with mild self-loathing each time she sat down to it. It seemed so odd that she had ended up here, in the “middle of nowhere,” poring over details in documents that only a very few people would ever read, and in which most people would fail to see any relevance. But then she would remember she was the mother of an extraordinary boy and she would think, That’s enough.
Her real job was simply biding her time until school let out. This was perhaps the one reason she had not let Jason have a car. She knew these were the last few months she would have with him. They were already consumed with college applications, and in nine months he would move out. Then there would be marriage, she was sure of it. Jason wanted a “whole” family. When he left, her real work would be taken away. Or, at least, shifted. Being with him was all she had known her entire adult life: she’d become a mother when she was not much older than he was now. Two years older, to be exact.
*
But that September day was different. By nine o’clock, her phone was ringing off the hook. At first, seeing the 202 area code and assuming it was one of her Washington friends calling (“What are you doing with yourself these days?” Or “Have you had time to work on the piece?”), she didn’t answer. But then the numbers changed: 202 became 917 and she saw it was Jason’s cell, which he almost never used. He was meant to be in math class now. She knew that because he had moaned and groaned about it all the way through egg and cheese sandwiches that morning.
“What’s the use of math?”
She tried to argue its practicality.
“Mommy, math never saved anyone’s life.”
“It might save yours if it gets you into Harvard,” she said. Harvard was not out of his reach.
She picked up the phone. Her son was crying. She had not heard him cry in a long time. He possessed a remarkable, almost inhuman gift for tolerating pain, something she’d always attributed to losing a father—not once but twice: as an infant, and then again as a very young boy. To lose the father you never even really had in the first place was a unique tragedy, she knew; it promised a long tail of processing and forgiveness. Yet Jason was stoic. Physical pain didn’t affect him at all. The day he’d dislocated his shoulder on the football field he didn’t shed a tear. He was the quarterback. He had never been injured in six seasons of play. But that day she was there, and she saw him go down. When he stood up, his arm hung slant from the socket. While they waited for the EMT, the coach said to her, “Miss, I’ve seen three-hundred-pound linemen weep when this happens. Your boy is tough.”
She knew that. This was a kid whose father, while brilliant and very funny, was no model in the morals—or the courage—department. His father played tennis and chess. Jason liked contact. He was an excellent experiment for scientists studying nature versus nurture, or tiger mothers keen to divine the special sauce for making great men, because the template was there was no template. There were genes. She’d done nothing but love him unconditionally. She had loved him and treated him with respect. She had tried to discipline him, but he disciplined himself. Sometimes at night she’d hear him running sprints around the house.
But that September day when he called, he was shaken. He was begging her to come to school and collect him. So she did, and in the car on the radio she heard the news. When they got home, they sat in front of the television, liked two stoned Deadheads post-show. Realizing it was almost nine o’clock, Sara went to make dinner.
“Forget Harvard,” Jason said. He was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
They ate in silence until Sara said, “What do mean, ‘Forget Harvard’?”
“I’m not going there,” he said. “I’m going to apply to the Naval Academy.”
And she looked at her little philosopher with his steaming-hot shepherd’s pie, and she knew the argument was over.
“I know what I want,” he said.
This phrase took her breath away. Sara had never said those words. He’s still in shock, she remembers thinking. We all are. This will pass.
*
There are not many cars out, and she keeps heading to a traffic light she has designated as her turnaround point. If she makes it to the light, she will have gone five miles, and so ten by the time she is home. She plans to slow her pace, putting off the return. She knows the house will be clean. She has never had help and it is strange to have it now. Someone from the town sent—and paid for—two housecleaners. They were invisible and meticulous; she rarely saw them but she knew they were there. There was always mess, because her home had become a fort, and a retreat. It had become a base for all those who felt called to protect her.
After years of nights alone, there were so many others around all the time now. They were all good people. She has become close with the local cops; she has their numbers, and they all want to help. One of them offered to move in, too, but she thinks that is overkill. No one is out to hurt her. People only want her story. At the traffic light she stops, and bends over, and takes some very deep breaths.
*
Her increasing interest in all things military ran parallel to her son’s becoming an officer. With Jason
at the Naval Academy, she got back to D.C.—and Virginia—regularly. She would meet friends for lunch. They were all amused to see how she had changed. She was only thirty-seven, so to many of them she was still a girl.
“You’ve traded Athens for Sparta,” teased her old boss from Langley, the only boss she’d ever had, the one who had got her to the conference where everything had started. Or ended, depending upon your point of view.
“Yes, I guess I have,” she said. She was proud of her son. She thought about that trade and thought she was fine with it. Sparta suddenly struck her as mission-driven, and relevant, Athens as lazy. But that wasn’t really what was changing in her. What was mission-driven and relevant was what had always been: her love for her boy. Had he decided to join the circus, she might have developed an obsession with elephants.
Elephants would have been easier. There was a new generation of soldiers and sailors born that September day. Sara had not lost a son on 9/11; she lost him later to something she could not provide at home.
*
Rather than slow down she decides to speed up her pace. What if I could make it home in half the time it took me to make it out here? she thinks. What if I could increase my time by ten percent on each run? At what point will my body simply say, Stop. She runs so fast that, coming to the two-lane she almost trips over a branch thrown down by the storm—one too skinny to see in the dusk but still thick enough to break your leg. The near-miss is exhilarating. She feels like she has been given another chance. She can see the garden up ahead. The tomato vines are bent with rain.
*
The call came late on May 2, the first day of what should have been the last ten days of Jason’s fifth tour. First, last, fourth, fifth: everything in military life involved numbers—or letters. This rigorous precision was not just for art; it was necessary for saving lives. Soon she got good at math, at placing events in time precisely, like a criminal witness. She had not known where he was; he had not been able to tell her throughout this deployment. She had given up reading newspapers, although old friends who knew Jason reached out regularly with a question or a view. Yemen? Libya? It must be the Maghreb. She simply wanted to know he was safe.
Since it is spring, people at the market talk about yesterday’s tennis or last week’s lacrosse games; they discuss plans for the upcoming antiques show or their newly cleaned infinity pools. People rarely mention the war because most of them care very little about it. Those who know her and know she has a son serving don’t ask either; they are not sure what to say. Sara hasn’t met any local veterans although she has heard that there is a retired Army Ranger around. When she thinks of her son, she still thinks of her baby, lining up spoons. She hopes he has enough socks. “Socks” was the request she found most often in a book that was a collection of letters written home by soldiers during World War II. Jason had given it to her.
She’d spent so many years educating him, but now he educated her. Phronesis is a word she never knew before she read about it in a memoir written by a former Team guy, a memoir she never would have noticed or even known about at another time in her life. Phronesis is a quality. “The most interesting people are the people we don’t know,” said the father of another Academy boy at graduation. He had leaned over and whispered this to Sara as they sat there in the thick heat, watching their sons, all in white. She had only just met him and thought his comment was a compliment, perhaps a pass, but when she thought about it later she realized he was talking about all the kids that day, the kids who would leave and fight foreign wars for little pay and less power. And she thought: The bravest people are the people we do not know.
Phronesis was a word that cropped up once, and then increasingly often, in the e-mails she would receive periodically from her son. She never knew where he was when he was writing them, but his heart and his character were the same as they had always been, despite what had gone on in the course of his days. He was not writing about politics or about war zones. Mostly he was writing about what was on his mind that day, and more and more he was preoccupied with the question of whether to come home. Or, how to come home. Any shrink would have loved that. A father and son, both living the better part of their lives in undisclosed locations.
Phronesis, according to Aristotle, is wisdom learned from action that allows you to make choices about what to do in a given situation. It stands in opposition to sophia, or wisdom gained from books. Phronesis was less for scholars than for soldiers. And what Sara learned over time was that each division of the military had its own, even if slight, variation on the larger code and culture of the overall enterprise. The Teams had very strict code. Part of it was from their training. Part of it is soldered in the fight. Her son had elected to join the military when there was a major fight on.
“We don’t lose our men, ma’am,” she was assured, when they—a chaplain, and a casualty assistance calls officer—arrived at the house that May morning, the morning following the phone call, to talk to her in person. On the phone she had only been asked if she would be at home. They had not told her anything more. On the phone, she had imagined a brigade. In person, there were two of them: an older man, maybe in his mid-fifties, in uniform, and a younger man who didn’t look much older than her son. He was an officer home on leave. He had heard the news of Jason being missing and had asked that he be the one allowed to come, to be there when she heard. He lived three thousand miles away from where he stood now and had been spending his short time at home with the girl he planned to marry, but he had taken a plane and then driven a car across the country to be there to tell Sara this news. He knew her son. He had trained with him at Coronado and at Otay Lakes, and he had lived with him briefly at Virginia Beach. His name was Sam. She had met him before, but she had forgotten him. He looked older. He was missing an eye. When she saw that, she remembered his story.
The two men asked her to sit down, and then she was told: her son had been missing for two days. They said that they had a general idea of where he was, but that they could not tell her any more than that. They told her that Jason had been part of a very important mission, one she might even read about in the papers, but they could not tell her what that was, either—or where it was. Sara didn’t sense any drama from the word mission because it was what her son did every day—and every night. Missions were routine. That was the job. The older man told Sara her son would come home. Dead or alive; is that implied? she thought at the time.
As she listened to them talk, her mind drifted back to that night at the same kitchen table they were sitting around now. “Not Harvard” had been about belief; after that, there had been no turning back. She had been so proud throughout those next years, through all the Academy games and then, later, the early, tense selections for “Mini BUD/S,” followed by her son’s increasingly odds-defying failures to fail. She resolved to remain proud now. And strong. She was not ready for this. She could feel herself starting to faint. It’s okay, she thought; one of these guys will catch me. I know how the protocol works.
Later that same day there was another knock on the door. And then another one. First, it was the local Catholic priest. He wanted to pray with her. Then it was the retired Ranger. He looked like he could really break some glass, and she took his number. He said he would come back every day and that she didn’t have to worry. Then a man in a beautiful suit. He was a former Middle East–based CIA station chief who had traveled from his retirement in northern Maine and who insisted he would stay as long as she needed, down the road, at the little inn. This was all through word of mouth, as far as she could tell. Neighbors flooded her porch with offerings: sweets and alcohol and honey-baked ham. Someone sent a cook to help organize the kitchen and make dinners. A new refrigerator was installed, a gift from a local store. One of the state’s senators arrived and promised to protect her from the press. She thought that was pretty funny. He said the governor would like to come and what time would be convenient for her? She had not even brushed her hair.
Like most people living through such a moment, she did not hear most of what was said or remember who had said it. She knew that things like sleeping and eating were necessary but remembered to do them only when prodded. People fell into various active roles and informally but carefully kept watch over her and the scope creep of her chaos. Come on in. Yes, please. What beautiful peonies. She suddenly did not want to be alone.
She was happy to have Sam in her son’s room. His left eye was the most sensational blue. Ocean blue. And in the place of his right eye was a glass orb, with the NSW Trident inked onto it. She wanted to look at it closely but knew asking that would sound strange. She knew what the Trident was. Like most Team moms and wives, she had read what she could find of the existing literature and history. And she had heard about the glass-eye Tridents, but she had never seen one up close. It was the contrast with the boy’s other eye that made it uniquely upsetting. And yet it was beautiful.
The Trident is made up of four elements: an anchor, a trident, a pistol, and an eagle. When her son had asked her for her interpretation of it, she’d said, “Well, the trident’s for Neptune.” She paused and said, “And the pistol’s for strength?” Jason gave her a little essay on the Trident’s meaning (the kind of thing she loved), which she had saved in a drawer somewhere. The part she always remembered was the part about the eagle. Something along the lines of “the eagle keeps his head down, because humility is the true sign of a warrior.” When the guys are awarded their Tridents, at the end of their qualification training, their diplomas carry not only their own names but also the names of men killed in action. This tradition was not subtle, but it was powerful.
*
When Jason was seven, Sara left him overnight for only the second time. An old friend was marrying another old friend, in Washington. In her toast, the young bride mentioned Naval Special Warfare training. She had seen a documentary about the base in Coronado that her husband had ordered from the Military Channel. Watching what those young men did, she said, made her think that perhaps they were preparing for the real fight of their lives: marriage. Everyone laughed. The groom worked on the Hill, and the only way he was likely to get close to the barrel of a gun was a weekend skeet shoot. He had an idea of his work as deeply civic and virtuous, and he liked to spend late nights watching reenactments of Civil War battles. He always told his wife and friends that he wished he’d gone into the military, but that given the chance at Stanford, well, there had not been any contest. He would marry this girl, they would raise a family, and he would make his mark in some more socially and politically less flammable way. He would write laws and work hard to try and pass them.
Eleven Days Page 2
