Casualties (11 page)

January 1985

Ruth gets to the doctor's office before they can call to cancel because of the snow. The receptionist releases a sigh of resignation as Ruth pulls off her wool hat and shakes her hair; ice particles and clumps of snow scatter on the carpet.

“My husband's coming too.” Outside, the afternoon has darkened; from the twelfth floor of the medical building, Longwood Avenue looks like an artery of lights pulsing slowly through the murk. Ruth is aware of the pulsing in her own veins in a way she has never been before. From the moment the home pregnancy test strip turned blue, she has been impatient for this moment. This will make the baby real.

The door swings open and Jeff is there. At the same moment, the nurse opens the door that leads to the examining rooms. “Hurry, guys, we need to get home while we can.”

Minutes later, Ruth shivers in the stirrups, the hospital gown pulled open. Jeff holds her hand while the technician moves the ultrasound wand over her belly. She hears him inhale sharply and turns to the screen. A shape, like a fiddlehead, or a fish, swims onto the screen and floats. She can see the head, the feet, the heart. Everyone, Jeff, the technician, the doctor, all disappear. The wand
skims over the greased surface of her belly and Ruth imagines she feels the baby turning inside her to look back at her through the video screen. The baby is only a few inches long; the technician is saying, do they want to know the sex? Ruth nods. Jeff squeezes her hand. A boy, the technician says. Jeff's voice rumbles nearby but she doesn't hear what he says. Her ears are filled with the liquid sound of her son's heart
.

If.

If she cried, it would be real.

His body did not make it real. She saw the tattoos inked onto his forearms, the pimples on his collarbone. No one made her see these things. She told the sheriff and the officers to take her to him. She said that the Marines could not be sure of who he was, fingerprints, dog tags, records be damned.

She watched while the sheet was peeled back from his body, saw the shield with those names on his arm, the “meat tag” on his ribs, his ruined face. Even as she nodded, she thought,
not Robbie
. And she was right.

Walking out of the morgue, she didn't see Neal, who had driven there to meet her, but Robbie, lounging against the fender of the SUV wearing a black T-shirt and baggy jeans. In the car, he was a child of five straining against the seat belt, craning his head so he could see her in the rearview mirror. She could summon him up, whole and unblemished at any age, just by keeping still, closing her eyes. He was inside her; to cry would be to lose him, tear by tear.

If.

If she said the things people expected of her, they would leave her alone. Neal and Terri talked of “arrangements.” She agreed to nothing. At any moment, Robbie would call her on the phone, tell her he was on the next flight. He was still away, that was all.

She could not talk to her grandmother or her brother. That would make her son's death real. She'd called them both when Neal brought her home from the morgue. She dialed the number, listened to the rings. Big Ruth's voice quavered through the phone line.

“Ruthie? Baby?” Ruth saw her grandmother as though she were next to her, leaning into her walker, speaking into the yellow receiver attached to the wall phone by a long beige cord. “Kevin, it's your sister!”

She could see her brother too, leaning against the counter, drinking a cup of coffee after his lunch, getting ready to head back to the garage for the afternoon. Her shy brother who still stuttered sometimes and would avoid talking altogether if his grandmother would let him. He'd been the one who sat in patient silence when two-year-old Robbie was learning to talk, who could stop his tears just by sitting down next to him and showing him a toad he'd just caught, or how to hold a wrench. They had their own language, Kevin and Robbie, one that Ruth had never been able to follow.

As she tried to talk to her grandmother, she knew Kevin would be looking at Big Ruth, his red hair swept back from his forehead, eyebrows raised the slightest bit, as if he'd asked a question out loud and was waiting for an answer.

“Gramma,” Ruth said. Then she stopped. She had not used that name in years. She called her grandmother Big Ruth or BR. Her hands began to shake. “Gramma, I'm calling about Robbie.”

“Doesn't he look wonderful? Thin. Too thin. But it was so good to see him.”

“Gram . . .”

Her grandmother went on, happy to relive the visit. Such a surprise. He was amazed at the changes in Gershom; did he tell Ruth about
the kids? Vonnie, Jeff's widow, brought them over. Justin, the oldest, so big now, and his sister Luanne, nearly seventeen now and so pretty.

Ruth tried again to speak but her throat closed. She dropped the phone. Neal was the one who picked it up. He was the one who explained that Robbie was gone. Ruth did not have to hear her grandmother cry or her brother's silence deepen.

Neal held the phone out to her. “They want to talk to you.”

Ruth shook her head.

“They want to come.”

Ruth again shook her head. She turned away so he could not look at her.

A few seconds later she heard him speak again into the phone. “She needs a little time; it's been a long night. Too soon to make any decisions. We'll call back.” Silence. Then, “Don't worry. I'll stay with her.”

And he did stay. He was the one who called Terri, who came over with flowers and some food that Ruth could not eat. She handled communications with Don and others at work. Neal fielded the phone calls from Captain Dixon, accepted his condolences, confirmed what details he could for the reports they had to make.

She woke from a drugged sleep one afternoon and believed it was the morning after Robbie had come home. She decided to peek in on him. Anticipation filled her. She was halfway across her bedroom floor before Neal knocked on the door to tell her he was ordering out. What did she want to eat? In seconds, the true present materialized and the whole progression of events that led up to it extended before her, each interlocking, unchangeable piece.

If she'd just closed the door in the deputy sheriff's face, if she had walked out of the office with Robbie when he came for her at lunch, if she had never gone to work that day in the first place. Each “if” launched her into a waking dream, so real that she could almost believe that she had made the right decision at each of these points, that the events unfolding around her were happening to the mother of another boy.

He'd been hurting and she hadn't seen. She hadn't seen how much he needed her. Neal had tried to tell her to look more closely, but she hadn't looked closely enough.

She wanted to sleep. If she could fall asleep again, she could wake up and start over. She'd go back as far as time would let her go. Change everything.

She could bring him back.

—

The envelope arrived two days after Robbie was found. The plain envelope, postmarked Imperial Beach, contained one page. It confirmed that Robbie, not some other person that Ruth could find and blame, had put the gun to his head. It was his gun. He'd added it to the shotgun and the rifle that came to him when his father died, all of which Ruth had packed and locked in the cab of his truck when they moved into the new house. Then she had forgotten them.

Mom,

I'm sorry for everything. It's not your fault. I love you.

Robbie

The paper, a lined sheet torn out of some notebook, was still crisp. The envelope was postmarked the day after he died. He must have stopped to mail it on the way to the motel where they found him. He'd missed the last pickup of the day but it hadn't mattered. He'd made his decision.

It's not your fault.

The words flayed her. He'd thought to leave her absolution. He knew she would need it.

Ruth sat up straight in bed, eyes wide, heart thudding, the doorbell reverberating in her ears. After a few seconds, she understood it had been a dream. The pills she'd taken hammered her into an hour or two of unconsciousness, but after that a dream or noise would jerk her awake and leave her stranded with hours of night remaining.

Neal's snoring ripped through the darkness. She thought of rolling him over but did not want to wake him. He'd stayed every night, often waking when she did, trying to keep his promise not to leave her alone. The promise had taken its toll. His face looked ashy instead of tan and she heard a rough edge in his voice when he made work calls from her office. She should be grateful, she knew. She lay still, trying to summon gratitude. Instead Neal's breath seemed to fill the room until she thought she would suffocate.

She rose, careful not to jostle the bed. Barefoot, she made her way across the carpet. A few minutes later, she was back in the guest room, Robbie's room, the overhead dimmers shedding more
shadows than light. On the bed was the old stuffed rabbit he'd loved as a baby. She'd found it in the box from the garage that lay now on its side next to the bed, along with other boxes of Robbie's belongings she'd dragged in. Ruth scooped up the rabbit and sank onto the bed. The duffel lay at her feet, untouched since Robbie had left.

“If anyone opens it, it will be me,” she'd told Neal when he asked her if she wanted him to clean it out.

“I'm sorry. I was just trying to spare you,” he'd said.

“I can do it. I want to do it,” she'd said. But she hadn't. Not then, not in the days that followed.

Ruth hugged the small toy, ignoring the dust and mildew that had settled into its fake fur, once white, now yellowed. She remembered how she had been proud of herself for not looking inside the duffel, for giving Robbie his precious privacy. She kicked the side of the bag; her toe bent backward as it struck something hard. She stifled a cry. Ruth dropped the rabbit and knelt on the floor to rip open the zipper. She had to know. There had to be more he could tell her.

Opening the bag released the same smell of wood smoke and pine Ruth had picked up before, combined with the sharp musky smell of his deodorant. It had always struck her as too strong, but now she inhaled until her eyes stung. She unrolled a sweat-stained T-shirt and buried her face in it, then pulled it over her head, shoved her arms through the sleeves. She pawed through the other clothes: shirts, socks, jeans, clean and dirty, all rolled and stacked. She found his green and khaki service uniform, then his fatigues. A digital camera. His Dopp kit, a couple of dog-eared copies of
Dirt Rider Magazine
she remembered sending him months ago. When she lifted out his fatigue jacket, a thick photo album dropped back into the bottom of the bag. She recognized the scuffed vinyl binder from her grandmother's house. But as she picked it up, a black-and-white composition book tumbled from between its covers onto the floor. The name on the front was hers. Dried stains obscured the last few
letters of the precise script she'd practiced in high school. She picked it up and flipped it open. What had made Robbie want it?

The first few pages revealed the girl she had been: a maker of lists, a keeper of assignments, a compulsive note taker. A believer in the power of plans. The book contained lists of colleges she'd never be able to afford even if they accepted her and notes on conversations with the overweight and overburdened guidance counselor more familiar with vocational schools than college scholarships. Neat checks marked tasks completed: get applications, complete essays, meet deadlines for mailing them in.

Then her rounded
m
's and uniformly slanted
b
's and
l
's gave way to Robbie's scrawl. Ruth was aware of a rushing sound in her ears, like rapids at a river bend. She crawled nearer to the bedside table and turned on the light. Words ran across the pages, unbound by dates or times, spilling into the margins. Skipped lines, sudden gaps of white space, were the only indication that time may have passed between entries.

same fuckin dream—know they're in there, gotta get 'em out—can't find—unzip the bags but all i see are pieces—hanny's leg—pete's—try to put pieces together—too many

Ruth stopped. She became aware of her own breathing, short, heavy, panting. Her nightshirt stuck to her chest and back. She could stop now, close the book before she read another word.
No.
Then she forced herself to open it again. Her son was in there. She had to look.