by Joe Meno
Janet is falling in love with a patient named Private Dan. He is a vet from the first Gulf War, around thirty-five, and is missing most of his left leg. He is handsome in a dull way, like an unpolished stone or the sheer face of a cliff. He suffers from PTSD and may have a Gulf War illness. He is in and out of her wing of the VA like a celebrity. He served four years in the reserves and was discharged as a private, which does not say much for him.
Today Private Dan is complaining about a rash. And chronic diarrhea.
“You have to wait like everybody else,” is what Janet tells him, though when he frowns, pretending to pout, he makes her heart feel small and quivery.
If you look, you can see Frances dressed as a ghost, sitting alone on her grandma’s front porch: The bus has dropped her off early and Grandma, not expecting her so soon, has gone to the store to get diapers for the baby. Frances is sitting on the top step of the porch, waving to you as you ride past in the backseat of your parents’ minivan. It is only a glimpse of a girl dressed as a small white phantom. You smile and wave but already she is a blur; already she has disappeared. Frances picks up her pink bicycle from the driveway and rides as close to the curb as she can without crossing into the street. The front wheel dangles dangerously close to the gray concrete edge and Frances imagines crossing the road while no one is looking. She has been warned never to ride her bike in the street. She edges the front wheel on the black pavement but does not go any farther. She slowly turns and sees her grandmother arriving home now, the old blue car teetering up the road from the other direction. Frances hops off her bike. She pulls the white sheet from her head and waves hello. Grandma kisses her cheek, almost forgetting the baby who is still buckled in the car seat. Frances points across the street and Grandma nods after checking for traffic. Frances hurries across to go play with a neighbor girl named Allie. Allie is not really Frances’s friend: She’s three years older and likes to think she is something of a mother to the small, strange girl. Allie is weak-shouldered and skinny, with stringy blond hair and yellow teeth. She will try to carry Frances around like a baby, but Frances will fight, biting the older girl’s shoulder if she does not put her down quickly.
Allie has decided they will go into the woods and throw rocks at a beehive she has recently discovered. Frances does not think this is a good idea. She hates bees. She is completely terrified of them. She stops walking and holds her hand to her mouth at the spot where she had been stung. She decides she is not going into the woods. She is going to head back to Grandma’s and sit and watch TV. Allie stares at Frances and calls her a baby, then walks off toward the woods by herself. Frances decides she does not like being called a baby. She decides she is not a baby and so she hurries to follow Allie. The two small girls gather all the stones they can find and begin pelting the side of the papery brown honeycomb. Allie laughs. Frances thinks maybe there is nothing to be scared of, all they are is dumb bees anyway. Frances throws another rock, then one more. Almost immediately, a string of glittering bees descends, stinging Frances on her face and hands. Allie, a little older but not much brighter, turns and runs away, leaving her small charge to fend for herself. Frances tries to cover her face but they are on her now, the whole hive, stinging her through her blue dress and pink tights.
At the VA, Private Dan insists on a physical exam. Janet draws the curtain as Dan unbuttons his blue shirt.
“How’s your husband?” he has the gall to ask.
Doesn’t he know the way I look at him? Is this his way of letting me off the hook? “I get e-mails from him every few days,” Janet says. The e-mails are sometimes single lines like:
—Found a kid hiding an explosive device under a Humvey.
—Ate candy all day.
—Think our children will no longer recognize me.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Private Dan says. “Six months over there and I never fired a round. It was a different war, though,” he mutters.
“So tell me about the rash,” Janet says, trying to establish some decorum.
“Here,” Dan says, pointing to a red mark on his chest. “It really burns.”
Janet pulls on a latex glove and carefully pokes the vet’s chest. Still in shape, Janet thinks. Which is why he took his shirt off. The showboat.
“What do you think?” Dan asks.
“I’m not a doctor,” is Janet’s reply.
“So?”
“So you’ll have to wait to see Dr. Grant.”
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“You don’t know? You just wanted to see me with my shirt off then?” Dan smiles. He has a big toothy grin that makes Janet laugh.
“The doctor will be right in.”
“Nurse?”
“Yes?”
“If you ever want to talk, I mean, I know it can be pretty lonely, waiting for somebody.”
“I have to go,” she says.
“Nurse?”
“Yes?”
Private Dan winks, then, before Janet can turn in mock disgust, he blows her a kiss. It hits her, the invisible kiss, it is as real as a real kiss, and exiting from the exam room and rushing back to the nurses’ station, Janet knows she is blushing.
Grandma is looking for Frances, holding the baby in her soft, flabby arms. She sees Allie sitting alone on the other side of the street and calls out, “Have you seen Frances?”
Allie, alarmed, looks up and shakes her head. No is what her head is saying, but Grandma has raised three kids and knows damn well when they are lying.
In the parking lot of the VA, Janet sits in her station wagon beside Private Dan. They do not touch. They do not talk. They light up one of her joints and watch the front seat fill with smoke. Finally, Private Dan begins to speak.
“I can feel my toes wiggling when I get high sometimes.”
“Hmmm?”
“On the missing leg. I can feel them wiggling when I get high sometimes.”
“Oh, that’s weird.”
“It’s okay.”
The pair is quiet for a while. Then Private Dan speaks again.
“I would sure like to kiss you, Nurse Janet.”
“I’ve got a guy,”
she says.
“I know.”
Janet is pleased with herself suddenly. She feels like an adult, like a television actress on a soap opera, like someone’s real wife. She begins smiling, thinking of Mickey the Jerk on the other side of world and the way he looks when he is on the couch sleeping.
“I should head back in,” she says.
Meredith, the other nurse from the same wing, comes hurrying out into the parking lot, looking panicked.
“It’s the phone. Your mom. Something’s happened.”
Okay, first of all, Frances is okay. She is as swollen as a newborn, but she’ll live. Janet looks at Frances’s face and arms and hands and counts nine stings. Grandma has, as usual, completely gone overboard. Frances is lying on the corduroy sofa and every visible part of her is coated in pink calamine. Frances has arranged her small hands over her waist like a photograph of someone beautiful lying in a casket.
“What happened?” Janet asks, but knows her mother has no answer. She turns to face Frances, who is pretending to be asleep. She pats Frances’s hands and asks Grandma where the baby is.
“Oh, I almost forgot! I left him with Allie across the street.” Grandma gets up and moves briskly through the front screen door.
At home now, Frances wears the white ghost sheet at the table. It is dappled with dots of pink calamine lotion from all of her stings. Janet looks up from the TV dinner, unsure what kind of wet brown meat she is eating. She wipes her mouth on the paper napkin and stares directly at Frances.
“Frances, we are going to have a talk.”
Frances blinks, becoming suddenly still.
“Frances, that sheet of yours has got to go.”
Frances does not move.
“Frances. Do you want to be a big girl like Mommy or a
baby like the baby?”
Janet cannot see the expression Frances is making beneath the white blanket.
“Do you want to be a big girl? Big girls don’t carry their blankets around with them.”
Frances does not move.
“You can keep it in your bedroom. But no more wearing it to school. Or at the table. Today is the last day.”
Small dots of gray begin to form around the ghost’s eyes: Frances has begun to cry. Janet can already hear it, the soft gumming of her teeth, the tightening of her small lips.
Janet gets up from her chair and puts Frances in her lap. She places her mouth right beside her daughter’s ear and begins to sing: “Frances / Frances / please don’t cry / please don’t cry …”
Of course, it is true: If you cover your ears, a whisper does not feel the same as a kiss. A laugh does not make the small hairs around your neck startled the way it does when someone is shouting. When someone cries, it feels like you are waiting for the rain. When someone sings, it feels like the shape of a heart is being traced along the center of your chest.
Frances lays her head against her mother’s neck and slowly stops crying.
By the time the baby is asleep, Frances is ready for bed too. Janet sits beside her and reads her a story that has a horse and a princess and a castle in it. She dabs calamine at the sting above Frances’s left eye and then switches on the nightlight. She goes downstairs and waits a half hour, flipping through the channels. When she thinks Frances is asleep, she climbs back upstairs and sneaks into her room, carefully, oh so carefully, tugging the white sheet from beneath her daughter’s head. She does not know what she is going to do with it, and sits on the couch composing another imaginary letter to her husband:
I did a bad thing tonight, one of the most terrible things ever: I waited for her to fall asleep, then stole the sheet from under her head. I am missing you or maybe just the idea of you. I have begun seriously thinking about other men. I am afraid I am not strong enough or tough enough for this. I am afraid all the time. I have not slept well in months. When are you coming back, you jerk? We are all trying to be brave without you and doing a real crummy job of it. I do not want to have to be brave anymore without you.
Janet holds the white sheet against her face and feels like crying, but she doesn’t. She pulls it over her head and sighs, sitting on the couch like that for a while, a ghost staring through the small eyeholes at the TV. Then she carries the sheet downstairs and hides it with the rest of the laundry, once again afraid she is not doing the right thing.
The morning begins with the phone ringing nonstop. First it’s her mother, then Meredith at the VA asking about Frances, then some annoying guy from the military selling life insurance. By the time Frances is awake, the baby has already been fed. Soon Janet has everyone the station wagon. She turns the key, adjusts the rearview mirror, and throws the vehicle in reverse. Frances immediately begins fussing. She has forgotten something. She has forgotten her white sheet. She kicks her legs and begins sobbing. Janet puts the station wagon in park and takes a breath, then turns to her daughter, lowering her chin so Frances can read her lips.
“Frances, I need your help. I need you to help me get through this today.”
Her daughter’s face is stony-white. Small beads of tears hang at the tips of her black eyelashes.
“Frances, we are going to try to get through the day without the sheet. If we make it, we will have ice cream sundaes after dinner. But if you throw a tantrum, I think I am going to quit right now, honey. I think I am going to go back inside and never get out of bed again.”
The station wagon sounds like it is going to die. Janet stares at her daughter, ready to cry herself, waiting for her daughter to begin screaming. But Frances turns, still pouting, staring straight ahead. She is mad, she is angry, but she does not cry. Janet decides this is okay, this is fine. Angry she can handle. Angry sounds great.
illustration by
Evan Hecox
Out on parole, Jan Olsson walks into the Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, located within the central banking district of Stockholm, Sweden; he has a small pistol in the pocket of his jacket. He does not think the pistol actually works as it has been stolen out of the glove compartment of a stranger’s car. Since the car was a rusted-out American model with a broken windshield, Jan instinctively believes the pistol will be unlucky. Jan has recently taken a large dose of amphetamines; because of this, he mistakenly thinks he can see things other people can’t see.
Within the revolving glass doors of the Kreditbanken, Jan Olsson decides now is as good a time as any and pulls the pistol from his pocket, raising it above his head, his dark eyes wide and menacing. He sees his bearded face and unwashed hair reflected in the glass of the revolving door and is terrified. He looks like a character from a children’s book, someone who has sold his soul to the devil and has become a wolf. He begins shouting even before he has exited the revolving door: This is the beginning of a long series of amateurish mistakes. Bank patrons watch the young man in the dark leather jacket waving the small pistol above his head and immediately start to panic. A woman in a black dress and white furs sees the weapon and faints, falling stiffly to the marble floor. A black toy poodle, coddled within its owner’s arm, begins to bark. A child holding her mother’s hand wails loudly. Her tiny lungs collapse and expand with such terrific urgency that her screams become more frightening than Jan’s shouts.
At this moment, I am making a terrible mistake, Jan thinks, though it is already too late. He declares, We are having a bank robbery, but his words are muffled by the revolving door’s thick glass. By the time Jan finally enters the marbled anteroom of the bank, a security guard with a brown mustache and thick sideburns has telephoned the police. The security guard, at this moment, holds the telephone in his right hand: It is bright yellow and as obvious as a screeching alarm. Jan sees the yellow phone and thinks of a bird lying in a cage shrieking, its tiny reptilian feet having been pulled off. He thinks of a large fish being torn apart by silver hooks, its innards milky-yellow, struggling to breathe through red gills that no longer work. He thinks of a yellow hive full of bees, crashing together and stinging one another angrily; the buzz of their death rattle mimics the sound he now makes, grinding his teeth nervously. Already two policemen are charging through the glass doors of the bank—one is short and brave-looking, the other is taller and seems quite frightened. Jan Olsson raises his pistol and fires one shot, which hits the first policeman in his right hip, knocking him to the polished floor, though the gunshot does not mortally wound him.
Jan does not know what to do about the other policeman: The bank is intolerably silent now, even with the child crying and the dog barking and the wounded policeman moaning. All of the bank customers have fallen to their knees and are praying quietly. The noise of their whispers is frightful; they sound like sorrowful, disembodied spirits. Jan commands the second policeman to drop his weapon, which the patrolman does, thankfully, his large hands shaking with sweat. Dreading the sounds of these terrified prayers, Jan asks the unarmed policeman to please sing something.
—Sing something? the policeman asks. His eyes are wide and trembling.
—Sing something, anything, Jan says plaintively.
—But I have a very terrible singing voice.
—It’s no matter, please sing something for us.
The nervous policeman, staring at his injured partner who lies there entirely prone on the black-and-gray marble floor, closes his eyes and begins to sing. He does not recognize the words even as he begins to shout them. To him, they are only sounds, the anxious catch and pause of his alarmed breath. The echo his mouth makes is the exact beat of his heart in time with his wounded partner’s fading pulse. Moment by moment, everyone’s hope is now disappearing. Everyone’s heart has become an anvil, a boulder, everyone feels as if they are now drowning.
Jan faces the singing policeman. The man’s face is young and thin; he is handsome with hazel eyes and a contemptuo
us-looking mouth. By staring at the policeman’s face like this, Jan can see that the officer has a wife he thinks fondly of, as well as two kids—a boy who loves to ski and a girl who writes poems about sad horses. Jan knows this as surely as he knows the song the policeman has chosen to sing. It is “Lonesome Cowboy” by Elvis Presley.
Jan Olsson looks around. The bank patrons are all lying on the ground now, weeping. Their trembling hands cover their oily heads. Even with the policeman singing, he can still hear their prayers. He can still hear the child crying and the tiny dog barking. Just then a telephone—the yellow one sitting beside the security guard’s desk—begins to ring.
—Do you want me to answer it? the security guard asks.
—Please do, Jan says.
The security guard speaks into the yellow phone for a few moments and says, It is the police. They would like to know your demands.
Jan looks around the disrupted bank. Everything is now still. Even the tiny dog seems to be listening.
—I would like … Jan mutters. I would like my best friend, Clark Olofsson, brought here.
—What? the security guard asks.
—I would like my best friend, Clark Olofsson, brought here.
—That is your first demand? the guard asks.
—It is, Jan says. He is my best friend. He will know what to do.
The security guard repeats this demand into the yellow phone, which quivers in his large white hand.
—Anything else? the security guard asks.
—Yes. I would also like three million kronor.
The security guard adds this, his teeth chattering as he speaks.
—I would also like two guns. The best guns they can find.
—What kind of guns? the security guard asks.
—Any kind. As long as they are loaded.
The security guard relays this, his words whispered and weak.
—I would also like two bulletproof vests. And two helmets. One for me, one for my best friend, Clark. And also a very fast car.
