The Summer Before Boys

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  Fifty thousand women were on active duty in Korea and even though women were not allowed in direct combat and still are not, army nurse Genevieve Smith died in a plane crash on her way to Korea. One navy nurse died when her hospital ship was rammed by a freighter, right off the coast of California. Eleven nurses died in a plane crash on the way to Japan. Vera Brown died in a plane crash and so did two other air force nurses. And maybe back home, their own kid was just eating dinner when it happened. Maybe right at the moment their mom or dad got killed they were biting into a hot dog. Or pitching the ball in a kickball game. Brushing their hair. Staring at a pimple in the mirror and getting really upset about it.

  You can’t ever let down your guard. You can’t ever stop remembering and paying attention or anything could happen. And then it really started to sink in.

  This was my fault.

  All of it.

  Eliza heading off on the trail. The state troopers being here. The dogs burying their snouts in Eliza’s pink sweatshirt and getting all excited, wagging their tails and turning circles on the colorful carpet in the grand tearoom. Mrs. Smith wringing her hands. Aunt Louisa pacing back and forth in the kitchen, looking out her window at the night pressing in, maybe even crying like I imagined she would be.

  —The halogens on the roof lighting up the sky.

  —Now the dogs barking and pulling on their leashes. (Dogs aren’t even allowed at Mohawk.)

  —Everyone out on the trails with flashlights and walkietalkies shouting out into the darkness. “Eliza! Eliza! Can you hear me?”

  All of this for a boy.

  All this for one kiss.

  thirty-two

  Even though nobody knew the trails better than Uncle Bruce, he was told to stay put.

  “It happens every time.” The trooper held his wide felt hat in his hands and rubbed the brim with his fingers as he spoke to us. “We find the lost person and then we have to send everyone back out to find the family members who went out looking on their own. We call it double indemnity.”

  We were sitting together on couches—me, Uncle Bruce, Steve, Pam, and Mrs. Smith—waiting, but I couldn’t get my heart to settle down, not for one second. I tried holding my breath so that I would take in less oxygen, but I just felt lightheaded. I tried visualizing a calming waterfall, like I heard about on one of Aunt Louisa’s talk shows, but I kept thinking of Eliza splashing around crying for help.

  When my phone vibrated it took me a full second to realize what it was. It was another text from Michael.

  I think I know where Eliza might be.

  My heart went wild. I looked around the room as if anyone else could have heard it. I typed back.

  What are you talking about? How could you know?

  My cell phone buzzed back immediately.

  Don’t tell anyone. Meet me behind the stables. ASAP.

  I flipped my phone shut and stood up. “I’m just going to the restroom.” I said out loud, but no one was paying attention to me anyway. After I had explained exactly where I last saw Eliza, there wasn’t anything anyone wanted from me.

  “Just don’t go anywhere,” the state trooper told me.

  I guess he was trained to notice things. I wonder if he suspected anything, if he knew it was all my fault. I nodded and as soon as I was out of eyeshot, I darted toward the back porch and down the steps. I took them two at a time, landed on the gravel with a thud, and took off running straight into the darkness.

  “Julia?”

  “Where are you?” I whispered back. I couldn’t see anything. The smell of animals and hay and manure was strong in the night air. I could hear the horses snorting and shifting around in their stalls.

  “Right here.” Michael’s hand just barely brushed the back of my shirt, but I jumped. “It’s just me.”

  “I know,” I said. Finally I could see him in the shadows, but clearly. We were alone together again. It was only a few hours ago he kissed me but it felt like a hundred years. What had been the most important moment of my life was barely a memory anymore. The knot in my stomach had swallowed it right up, but if we could find Eliza maybe I could make this all better.

  Maybe.

  “So why do you think you know?” I asked Michael. “What could you possibly know?”

  “I know all the hiding places,” Michael told me.

  I knew Michael’s dad was one of the staff, like Uncle Bruce, but Michael’s family had housing right here on Mohawk grounds. It did make sense he would know something like that.

  “Okay, so why don’t we just tell someone?”

  There was one bare bulb at the end of the barn near the wide doors. We headed toward it. “I thought maybe I could be a hero,” Michael said.

  Being a hero sure sounded better than being the bad guy.

  “And me?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Everybody loves a hero.

  thirty-three

  Everybody loved Jessica Lynch. She was a private in the regular army. She got a Bronze Star, which is for “heroic or meritorious achievement or service,” and she got a Purple Heart, which is a medal for getting wounded (or killed) by the enemy.

  She was part of a convoy of the 507th army maintenance unit that was ambushed by Iraqi forces. The Humvee she was traveling in turned over, and Jessica was badly injured but she lived and she was taken prisoner.

  That was in 2003 and my mom hadn’t been deployed yet, but we all knew it was coming. We just didn’t talk about it. She had been in the National Guard for two years; already some of the other nurses she trained with at “summer camp” were in Iraq. A lot had been sent to Afghanistan. We just never talked about it.

  The story of Jessica Lynch was all over the news that spring. They even had footage of the Army Special Forces breaking into the Baghdad hospital where she was prisoner, and taking her out on a stretcher. She had both legs in casts and a big bandage around her head. She looked scared. She was nineteen years old. My mom and dad and I didn’t want to watch but we couldn’t help it. Everyone was talking about it. Wondering what had happened to her. Was she tortured—or worse—because she was a woman?

  Then we saw the video of Shoshana Johnson, who was also captured the same day, in the same attack, but she didn’t get rescued for another twelve days. On the TV, one of her captors was holding a microphone right in front of her face and demanding answers. Shoshana looked terrified, her eyes darting left and right. Her terrible fear was so clear, so real.

  It was like watching a really scary horror movie. Your brain had to remind you that this was not acting. This was a woman. Somebody’s mother.

  “She’s just the army cook,” my mother told us.

  We were in the living room watching the news. The dishwasher was turned on and humming in the kitchen. It had been my favorite time of the day. We are all content and stuffed from dinner. There is not enough time to start anything too big or too busy but it’s too early to get ready for bed. My mom’s usually too tired to start bugging me about my homework. My dad doesn’t watch much TV, so he just flips through the channels. Usually he puts on the news. That’s when we saw Shoshana Johnson.

  “How do you know?” my dad asked.

  “One of the nurses at the hospital. She’s in the Guard too. And she’s from Texas. Like her, like Shoshana. She told us at lunch today. It’s just terrible.”

  On the screen they flashed photos of Shoshana from her childhood. They had some guy who had been a POW during the Vietnam War reliving his experiences. They talked about the seven other soldiers still being held and what their captivity might be like but nobody really knew. They talked about Lori Ann Piestewa whose body was found when they rescued Jessica Lynch. Lori Ann Piestewa was the first Native American woman killed in military service. So for a while everybody acted like they cared. Or pretended they did.

  But what I will always remember is that Lori Ann Piestewa was the first American woman to die in Iraq.

  thirty-four

  Michael and I moved
as close as we could along the huge stone foundation on the far end of the hotel, behind the prickly shrubs and tall, thick hydrangea bushes so no one would see us. Every few minutes another staffer or two would walk by, a beam of light tracking back and forth across the walkway in front, calling out.

  One kid we recognized as a busboy from the kitchen staff was singing hip-hop lyrics and clicking his flashlight on and off like a strobe. He clearly wasn’t too worried about finding Eliza.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Michael when the rapper had passed and seemed far enough away.

  “Just stay close. And quiet.”

  There was something about being told what to do by a boy that I liked and at the same time made me completely annoyed. And I wasn’t sure which would make me look better to Michael, saying something cute and angry? Or just doing what I was told?

  Honestly, what did I care what Michael-what’s-his-name thinks of me?

  I heard one of the ladies in the tearoom asking Mrs. Smith if she thought Eliza had been abducted. Certainly not, Mrs. Smith had said. My stomach lurched again thinking of that.

  “Just a little farther.” Michael didn’t turn around but I saw his hand, his fingers reach out behind him. I took his hand. It was rough and warm and we broke into a run across the great lawn and into the night.

  “Eliza, we know you are up there.”

  “She is?”

  I saw Michael shrug his shoulders at me as if to say, I don’t know but it’s worth a try. Then he lifted his head and looked back up into the tree.

  “Eliza, come down from the tree,” he said.

  It was not an ordinary tree and if Eliza were here, I couldn’t believe that she had climbed up into these branches. I couldn’t believe that she had never taken me here before. Michael had called it the elephant tree and now I could see why.

  The trunk of this tree was thick and wrinkled, like the skin of an elephant. The branches were low and tangled. They hung like hundreds of elephant trunks, dangling close to the ground and reaching upward into an intricate mass of steps and swings and balconies. In contrast to the massive form of bark and trunk and branches, its leaves were tiny and delicate, almost like little feathers. It was a tree meant to be climbed. To hide away in.

  And then like magic Eliza’s voice came down from the tippy top. “What do you two want?”

  “Eliza! Is that you? It’s you!” I picked up my head and shouted. My relief was indescribable. She was found and she was safe. I could tell by her voice, Eliza was all right. The weight lifted off my chest.

  It took me only a few moments more to get mad.

  “Eliza, everyone is looking for you. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know how late it is?”

  Of course she did. It was way past dark, pitch-black in fact, and besides, Eliza had to see those lights on the roof of the hotel. She probably heard the dogs barking. She must have heard everyone calling out her name.

  And she still hadn’t come down from the tree.

  She let everybody worry about her. She had to know what big trouble I was going to be in. Maybe that was her plan all along.

  “We saved you,” Michael spoke up. “Now come down.”

  Eliza’s little voice shot back. “No.”

  Eliza hadn’t ever been lost; she was hiding, but Michael still seemed bent on being a hero.

  “Well, you are going to come down and walk back with us or I’m going to start shouting,” he threatened. “And I bet Mrs. Smith comes over.”

  I looked at him. “Are you going to pretend you just found her?”

  “Well, it would look better for all of us, wouldn’t it?” he answered.

  I could hear rustling in the branches and leaves above, like Eliza was shifting around. Maybe ready to come down. Maybe not.

  “I got scared.” Eliza’s voice was closer but I still couldn’t see her.

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “I never went up to the sky tower. I just waited until you were far enough away and then I went back.”

  It was the first time I got to rewind the images in my head. Eliza was never lost in the woods, lying with a twisted ankle or fallen in some deep ravine. I could breathe. “So where were you this whole time?” Michael asked.

  “I just waited. I waited in one of the gazebos. I think I fell asleep. I thought you’d come back, Julia. I thought you couldn’t have just left me there. But you did.”

  I listened.

  “Then it was starting to get dark,” she went on. “And I decided to make you worried. I just wanted to see if you’d get worried and come back for me. I never thought everyone would start looking for me.”

  I could hear the tears coming into Eliza’s voice.

  She was crying. “I didn’t know what to do. So I came here.”

  “To the elephant tree,” Michael filled in.

  “Yeah. We used to hide here when we were kids. We had a clubhouse for a while.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I asked because I knew it wasn’t me. I didn’t even know about this hiding place. And I couldn’t believe Eliza had friends I didn’t know about.

  “Me, Michael, and those kids whose parents both worked here and then they moved away. Remember them, Michael? We all used to come here.”

  I guess you don’t really know someone until you almost lose them.

  I could see Eliza’s foot and then one of her bare legs. She was still in shorts. She must have been freezing.

  “When I saw the police cars coming, then I got really scared. I had no idea so much time had gone by,” Eliza said.

  “C’mon,” I said. “We have to go back or else they are going to start looking for all of us.”

  She dropped to the ground. “Okay, but I’m still really mad at you.”

  “Well, I’m still mad at you,” I said.

  “Well, we’re not going to tell them the truth, are we?” Michael complained.

  I still wasn’t sure what the truth really was, but somehow I still had the feeling that once Eliza was found safe, the focus was going to turn to me. The state troopers. Aunt Louisa. Uncle Bruce. Even Mrs. Smith knew I was the last one with Eliza, so even if she wasn’t lost I was still the one who walked away and left her.

  And after everyone stopped being worried about Eliza they were going to get real mad. At me.

  And boy, was I right.

  thirty-five

  There was another joke going around last spring. It went like this:

  What’s the five-day forecast for Baghdad?

  Answer: Two days.

  I didn’t hear that one from Peter, though. I heard it on TV, on a stand-up comedy show, and I was the one who came to school and told it to him.

  “That’s not funny,” Peter said.

  Mrs. Jaffe had just walked out of the room for a minute. We were supposed to be writing in our journals.

  “You just don’t get it,” I said.

  “I get it. It’s just not funny.”

  I guess I knew that already. The five-day forecast? Like a weather report, only no one in Baghdad is going to live long enough for it to matter. That’s not funny. I felt terrible.

  When Michael, Eliza, and I got back to the hotel, we walked straight into the tearoom, which had become some kind of a operations headquarters, and we stood waiting for someone to notice us.

  I don’t know how long we actually stood there, but it was Uncle Bruce who finally shouted out, “Eliza!”

  And then it got real quiet. For a long moment all you could hear was the empty static of the two-way radios—until one of the dogs resting on the floor lifted his nose into the air and took a giant sniff. The dog jumped up and started barking, followed by the other two, then all of them came running toward us. The dogs went crazy circling around Eliza, whining and howling, trying with everything they had not to jump right on top of her.

  I can hardly remember anything after that.

  Except the barrage of questions.

  And Eliza crying.

  She started cr
ying so hard that no one was ever going to be mad at her. She cried so hard her face got puffy and red and her voice was warbly with mucus. I could only make out a couple of words, like “sorry” and “scared” and that was enough. At almost the same time Michael was talking, really fast like he was trying to outrun the wrong question.

  “Remember? That’s when the Miller twins lived up here too. Remember their dad was an electrician and their mom was a sous-chef? We all used to play together. We made a club in this tree—”

  I don’t know who he was talking to really, but he was on a roll. Eliza was down to an involuntary but loud, sniffling inhale of breath that made everyone turn to look at her.

  “Then I remember that guest’s kid—remember? Last fall or something,” Michael went on. “When we all thought she was lost but it turned out she was hiding under the bed. The cleaning crew didn’t even see her—remember? Remember that? So that’s when I thought—”

  He would have kept going and going, trying to make everyone think he was a hero, forgetting all about including me, but Mrs. Smith put up her hand and stopped him. She stopped everyone, even the dogs.

  “It’s over,” she said. “Everyone back to work.”

  I think my problem was I didn’t cry.

  My mother was supposed to be coming home soon. Summer was just about over. I started seventh grade in two weeks. It all worked out, any way you cut it.

  Except that my dad took away my cell phone, forever.

  Eliza hadn’t said two words to me since she got grounded for her part in the whole mess.

  Mrs. Smith said she was going to reevaluate the privileges of the workers’ children on the grounds.

  And I hadn’t seen Michael since the day he kissed me, and the night we all got in big trouble.