by Dana Canedy
“Did you sleep good?” he asked.
Sleep well, I almost corrected him, but caught myself. We still had not kissed, but lying in his arms felt right. We were finally relaxed enough to talk.
“So what happened? Why didn’t you call me?” I asked softly, searching his face.
“I didn’t know what to say, and I was upset that you didn’t believe me and thought I was cheating on you.”
I said that I was disappointed in us both. “I can’t believe we gave up on us so easily. Does that mean it wasn’t as real as we thought it was?”
He shifted his weight and stroked my hair again. He said he didn’t know.
“Listen, we have to be able to talk. I know it’s not easy for you, but I’m a communicator and I get really frustrated when you shut down.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say. But I still love you.”
“I love you, too,” I told him. “I know what happened was my fault, too, but we can’t have a relationship if we can’t talk, especially because of the distance between us. Sometimes talking is all we have, and we have to hold on until we can be together again.”
“Are you saying you still want to be with me?” he asked.
I was scared. I was not about to leave my job, so I wondered how we would cope if he got stationed in Germany or Hawaii. Until then, all my serious relationships had been long-distance; I had literally kept men from getting too close. But I did not want to end up alone, and the time had come to let go of the pain I had carried around since childhood. There was no reason to believe that I was fated to be like my mother. Not every wife was so submissive, and most husbands did not have a second life with another woman.
Our time apart had also forced me to be honest about something else. Charles’s love for me had been so intense that I had taken it for granted; I had not entirely opened up my heart to him. After all that time I had still not let go ofthat ideal imaginary man.
Now I realized that Charles was my ideal man. He was strong and kind and humble. He had the most character of anyone I had ever known and was the best judge of it in others. He considered it just as much his responsibility as mine to make our bed and scrub the bathroom. He was also the only man who had ever made me feel beautiful and protected. I loved his voice and his laugh and the way he walked. Most of all, I loved the little ways he loved me.
Once I had a suit-wearing, big-salary boyfriend who hated sharing his food and recoiled if I ate from his plate. Charles was the opposite: the more he enjoyed a meal, the more of it he fed to me.
Charles’s heart was as big as his biceps, and even though I still found it irritating when he mispronounced a word, I had grown to love his mind. He could create landscapes from dots of ink but could also plot a battlefield on a computer. He quoted extensively from the Bible and began each day in prayer, but he could accept a woman who had not yet found her spiritual center.
I thought back to all the times I had said I loved him and realized that it was usually in response to his having said it first He deserved better.
“Yes,” I told Charles as he lay beside me. “I want you back in my life if you still want me. I love you so much.”
He smiled broadly and then kissed me deeply.
“Crazy woman,” he said. “I love you, too.”
I realized that day that our relationship would never be perfect Only perfect for us.
Six
Dear Jordan,
On December 31, 1999, the taste of champagne still on our lips, your father and I stood in Times Square and kissed through the change of the year, the decade, the century, the millennium. I could never have imagined that, in the year to come, I would find myself in Florida in the middle of the unprecedented election melee that ultimately put George W. Bush in the White House; that September 11 would follow so swiftly; and that the man I dreamed of spending the rest of my life with would one day be sent to Iraq to help fight “the war on terror.”
There we were that New Year’s Eve, in each other’s arms, confetti streaming around us—such a wildly romantic beginning of the end.
The Times published the race series in the summer of 2000, and in the fall I was promoted to national bureau chief in charge of news coverage for the state of Florida—a reward for my work on the project. That meant moving to Miami, a great news town and not a bad city to hang out in for a few years, I thought. True, Florida was farther from Kansas, where your father was still stationed, but by then we were used to jetting back and forth.
The plan was for me to move on Election Day 2000 and spend a week or so settling in before I began my new assignment. Charles would visit as soon as I got my bearings. Those plans changed just hours after my plane touched down in Miami on November 7. I watched the seesawing Florida vote count from my hotel room in disbelief. By the time I went to sleep well after midnight, this peculiar election was still not over. It was the story of a lifetime, and I knew that there would be no phasing into my new job.
Day broke with a glorious streak of sherbet-orange sunlight stretched across the Atlantic. I longed to walk on the beach and savor it, but there was no time: the Times was flying in a team of political reporters from the Washington bureau. I sent an intern to my new apartment to meet the movers and went about trying to assess the magnitude of the election meltdown.
It was apparent within hours that the problems were widespread and that no one was in control. Ballots were missing in several cities, registered voters were turned away at the polls in some precincts, and there were claims of rigged results in others. The story I filed that day was the first of dozens of dispatches I wrote from around the state.
The pace of the work was grueling; I ran from news conferences to court hearings to voter protests. Elections officials in one county would halt ballot recounts only to be ordered by a judge to resume. Another county would proclaim its counting complete and then discover more uncounted ballots.
There was nothing like having a front-row seat while history was being made. I was nearly trampled outside the Miami County Board of Elections office when someone mistakenly thought a Democratic official had slipped a ballot into his pocket and dozens of Republican operatives and Democratic strategists began shoving one another. Less dramatic but far more troubling were the young people I spent a day interviewing. They had voted for the first time and now wondered whether their ballots had been counted. I felt so sad for them that their first experience at the polls had been marked by doubt and confusion rather than the pride I had felt when I voted for the first time.
My colleagues and I put our personal lives on hold. About three weeks into the recount, some of us discovered that we had run out of clean clothes and stopped into a store to buy socks and underwear. My boxes were still packed, and on the rare evening I was home before ten I had neither the time nor the energy to rip them open in search of my microwave oven or pots and pans to cook. Over dinner at a restaurant late one night, a reporter from Chicago said he had tried to call home for his messages and discovered that his phone had been disconnected because he had not had time to pay his bills. One of my colleagues had run out of prescription medication and decided to do without it until the story ended. Another was driving with an out-of-state license that had just expired.
We all worked well past midnight every day and did not stop until, five weeks after Election Day, the United States Supreme Court declared President George W. Bush the winner.
“Well, you said you wanted a challenge,” Charles reminded me in one of our few conversations during those hectic days.
I told him that I could not believe I was bearing witness to events that our grandchildren would one day be studying in history class.
“I mean that metaphorically,” I added quickly, “not that we’re necessarily going to have grandchildren together.”
“I know what you meant,” he said.
By the spring of 2001, not only had I survived the Florida recount, but the race project had been chosen as a finalist for a Pulitzer Pri
ze. I flew to New York that April to stand among my colleagues when the judges announced the winners. As we waited in the Times newsroom, I struggled to contain my emotions. There was a time when someone who looked like me—black and a woman—would have only been in that spot if she were emptying a wastebasket I thought about my grandmother, Everlener Canedy, who was forced to drop out of school in the seventh grade and work as a domestic in order to support her brothers and sisters after her father died and her mother became gravely ill. She could read little more than birthday cards and traffic signs, but she could recognize my name, and she loved to see my byline.
Through a fog I heard these words: ‘The prize for public service goes to the New York Times, for ‘How Race Is Lived in America/”
Someone handed me a glass of champagne. There was hugging, shouting, more champagne. The executive editor made a speech I did not hear as I picked up a phone and left a message for Charles.
“Sweetie, we won!” I shouted into the receiver. “I wish you were here.”
When I finally reached Charles late that night, I reminded him that the Pulitzer project was a team effort, but that was picking nits to him.
The times we saw each other were blessed respites from our exhausting work lives. Charles spent long weekends with me in Florida, since his living arrangements tended to be sparse and he liked escaping to Miami. We danced salsa, or tried to, at Latin clubs on Ocean Drive, watched elderly Cuban men in guayaberas roll cigars in Little Havana, and awoke to see dolphins splashing in the bay outside my bedroom window.
We also took cruises to the Caribbean and made love in cabins with tiny beds, turquoise water flashing through the porthole. Charles would stretch out in a deck chair and sip rum punch to the sounds of a calypso band. In Puerto Rico, we kissed greedily at sunset on the beach. Once, on a ship with a rink, I convinced Charles to go rollerblading—the only thing besides dancing that he was bad at
At each port your father insisted on sticking a camera in my face, and each time I protested that the camera added ten pounds and asked him to stop. He would smile and keep snapping.
As much as we cherished those interludes, Charles and I were old enough to realize that real love could not survive on picnics in a kayak and weekend getaways to the Florida Keys. There would come a time when we would finally live together and contend with each other’s laundry and bouts of flu. I wondered how we would handle the change.
Then came September 11.
I was in Miami covering a campaign appearance that dreadful day. Janet Reno, the attorney general during the Clinton administration, was running for governor in her home state against incumbent Jeb Bush. Ms. Reno was appearing at a senior citizens center and was running late, which was unusual for her. She finally arrived, looking grave—also unusual for a woman who enjoyed campaigning so much that she traveled the state in a red pickup truck to meet voters. Two planes had just struck the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon was on fire, Ms. Reno announced. The United States was under attack. I stood there writing what she was saying in a notebook and then abruptly stopped. I was worried about my colleagues and friends in New York. And Janet Reno’s campaign was no longer news.
I ran to my car and turned on the radio. A commercial plane was in pieces in a Pennsylvania field. I called Charles in Kansas and told him to turn on his television. The cable news stations were broadcasting an almost continuous loop of footage of a plane slicing into one of the towers.
“Oh, man,” Charles said. Then he spoke the words I was afraid to say aloud. “We’re going to war with somebody.”
I drove back to the office with the radio on, listening in horror as the towers, one after another, collapsed. I was terrified of this unknown enemy who hated America so fiercely. I thought of all the people who had probably just died in the attacks and said a silent prayer for their souls.
We’re going to war with somebody. I dismissed a nagging thought about whether your father might eventually be called upon to respond to the attacks. My immediate concern was for the people I loved in New York, especially my colleagues at the paper. I knew that many of them had likely headed into danger to report the news.
The thing about journalists is that we often live life backwards. We fly into hurricanes, arrive at buildings that are being evacuated, race to crime scenes while bullets are still flying. It can be grim work, but most of us consider it a calling. Now I needed to know whether my colleagues were safe, but all telephone circuits into New York City were busy. Instead, I reached several of my fellow bureau chiefs in cities across the country. We had a conference call to discuss how we could best help with the coverage. I set about tracking down local and state officials to assess the situation in my state. What was Miami doing to secure its ports? Had Disney World and other theme parks been evacuated? Had the governor heard from his brother, the president, who had been in the state reading to schoolchildren when he heard that the country was under attack?
My contribution to the next day’s newspaper was minimal, but I would soon have much more responsibility. Within days, federal law enforcement officials announced that the terrorists had trained at flight schools in Florida. It was time to dig in for my second big assignment in just over a year.
I tracked down flight instructors who had trained the attackers and neighbors who had had no idea who they really were. I stood in the hotel room where two of the hijackers had stayed the night before the attacks. The remains of a boxed Indian meal were in the wastebasket; the checkout date on their hotel registration card was September n. I visited the restaurant where a bartender told me that two of the hijackers drank vodka and rum for three straight hours the night before the attacks and then seemed reluctant to pay their forty-eight-dollar tab.
For months I was under tremendous pressure to report new developments—a daunting task because every major newspaper and television network was aggressively covering the story. Being relatively new to the city, I also did not have many sources in the police department and the local FBI office to leak me information. I managed to hold my own, but the story was much harder to cover than the election had been.
At about this time, your father was hand-selected by the Defense Department for a new assignment reserved for the military’s most elite personnel. He moved to Fort Irwin, California, in January 2002 to be part of a team that evaluated troops for combat readiness at the army’s National Training Center. The military had built a billion-dollar simulated Iraq deep in the Mojave Desert, complete with mock operating bases and Iraqi villages, in which Iraq’s exiles acted as civilians and insurgents. Charles’s job was to observe recruits as they conducted simulated assaults and gauge their proficiency with weapons and familiarity with combat rules of engagement. The exercises kept him in the field for more than a month at a time, but Charles saw it as a grave responsibility: The training might one day save the life of a young man or woman who less than a year earlier had been taking their sweetheart to the prom, or that of a career soldier close to retirement.
This marked the second time since I had arrived in Florida that your father and I were forced to put our jobs before our relationship. This time, the long stints apart were taking a toll on us. Our conversations had become brief and perfunctory. We sometimes forgot to say we loved each other when we hung up. I considered asking for a transfer to the Los Angeles bureau to be closer to Charles. Then I realized that he might simply get orders for a new posting after I relocated. So we made do with whatever time we could find to be together.
Just before Charles began his job in Fort Irwin, we decided to spend two weeks reconnecting on a cruise from Miami to the Caribbean. We set sail on a sunny Thursday evening and woke up the next morning in Key West I ate conch fritters for brunch and Charles drank coconut milk from a shell. On the second day I suggested we test our skills on the ship’s two-story rock climbing wall. Big mistake. I only made it halfway up the wall and then could not raise my arms above my chest for three days.
The day after our rock
climbing expedition, the cruise director made an announcement about diamond wholesalers at the next port, in Cozumel. Charles suggested that we visit them to look at rings. He had told me years earlier that my reaction when he asked me to be his girlfriend hurt him so much that he would never attempt a surprise marriage proposal. Sol suspected that this was his way of trying to determine how receptive I was to the idea of becoming his wife.
“Are you suggesting we get engaged?” I asked.
He admitted that he had been thinking about it He said he had been lonely lately and wanted to have a family again. I was glad to know that he still loved me so much after our lengthy separation and agreed to go to the jeweler, but hastily added that we should not feel pressured to buy a diamond, duty-free or not
The diamond district was a glitzy strip of shops offering complimentary champagne and a free setting with every stone. We walked into a store and a salesman congratulated us heartily. I wanted to say that we hadn’t yet decided anything, but that seemed rude. I perched on a stool, with Charles beside me, while the salesman laid out a black velvet tray. He asked what size stone we were looking for. Charles was silent.
“I, we don’t know,” I stammered.
The truth was, I felt unprepared for marriage. And why make it official now? We could scarcely find time to be together. Since my job enabled me to move back to New York when I wanted, my hope was that Charles would eventually be the one to arrange for a transfer, perhaps to a base near the city. We could make the decision then. There was just so much that we had never discussed, like the fact that marrying him would mean giving up any hopes of someday becoming a foreign correspondent and moving to a different part of the world. Charles had been through one divorce already, and I had seen how it had torn him up. I did not want someday to be the cause of such heartache.
