Casualties (31 page)

Ruth paced back and forth from the table to the beds, stopping every so often to listen for Casey. He was hiding, the coward. He'd left his daughter the same way Stella had left her. Ruth walked over to the dresser where the box with Robbie's ashes lay. She cupped her hands on either side of the box.

“I didn't leave you. I never left you,” she said, and then, realizing she'd spoken out loud, shot a glance at the bathroom door, but the water continued to run. She pressed her palms against the metal sides of the box until the edges made grooves in her skin. That last day, she'd told Robbie she'd see him later, just as she had done countless times when he was a child, each time believing that it was a sacrifice she had to make.

The rush of water in the bathroom ceased. Ruth waited for Casey to emerge.
Please. Come out. I won't ask you any more questions.
But the door did not open.

—

Casey steadied himself on the crutches in front of the bathroom door. He leaned his forehead against the damp wood and waited for the echoes of Mike's voice, and his own, to fade. Maybe Ruth had left enough vodka for him. Maybe he could get her to take one of those painkillers from Walmart and go to sleep without talking. He straightened, turned the knob, and swung through the crutches into the room.

“All done,” he said. “Sorry I took so long.”

Ruth was almost lost in shadow over by the screen door. Her skin looked gray in the light cast by the string of lights running through the trees of the campground.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

Ruth turned. She leaned against the doorjamb, her hands behind her back, defenseless.

“Every time my mother called, I'd ask her when she was coming back to get me and my brother. Every time, she gave me another reason why she couldn't come.”

“You don't have to tell me all this again.” Casey looked at the kitchen area where she'd left the overhead light on. The pint bottle of vodka glinted back at him.

But Ruth didn't stop. “I hated the place I lived because she hated it. I counted the days until I could leave my grandparents' farm.” She looked down at the floor. “I hated myself because if I were someone different, maybe she wouldn't have left me in the first place.”

Casey flinched. “Maybe she knew she couldn't give you what you needed.” He wanted it to be true. “I was afraid I was going to hurt my kid. I hurt everyone who cared about me.”

He had to sit down. He made his way to the bed, lowered himself to the edge, and put his crutches on the floor. He leaned over, with his elbows on his knees, his face in his palms.

“Why did you want to see her all of a sudden?”

“I never forgot her. I always meant to go back when I was clean. Even when I wanted to forget, I couldn't.” He looked up at Ruth. She looked back at him, eyes narrowed, brows lifted in a skeptical frown. “I sent her money. Not just what the government takes out of my disability check for child support—more, so she could save it for college, whatever she needs to have the life I didn't. Every time I went to the table, I'd be thinking about how much I could send.” That commitment got him out of bed, pulled him through the empty days. When he wrote Emily's name on the envelope at the post office every month, it was the closest he came to touching his daughter.

Ruth's frown deepened. “None of that explains why you wanted to go now.”

Casey inched to the end of the bed and pulled up his bag. He rummaged around in the front flap and pulled out the envelope Katie had sent with the newspaper clippings. He handed them to Ruth. She leaned over and switched on the small lamp between the beds so she could read them under the light. After a moment he handed her the letter, too.

“I got this in the mail the day after you came along with your fancy car. The note is from her grandmother, Mike's mom.”

“Mike? What does he have to do with all this?”

So Casey told her. He told her about the fight. He told her how every tear running Katie O'Brien's cheek cut like a razor, how she and Mike's father made it worse by worrying about him. He told her how he and Moira gripped hands when they heard the news, but couldn't look at each other. He described the funeral, the way the casket seemed to grow heavier and heavier as he and the O'Brien boys walked it up the center of St. Francis Church. He was grateful when the extra week the Army had given him ended. He fled to basic training and for the next nine weeks pounded his body as if he could pound the guilt and grief out of himself.

Ruth broke in. “What happened to Mike's sister?”

“She didn't give up on me. She wrote, she called. She came down to Kentucky to see me graduate from basic training. She visited a couple more times and we talked every week.”

“Did you love her?”

“No. Yeah. Like I loved all of the O'Briens, but not like . . .”

“Not like who?”

“I was gonna say, not like you're supposed to. I felt like she was still grieving and she needed me. I thought she'd figure it out and just stop. I wanted her to. I was beginning to think about how things would go after I got out; I'd have money for school. I could still do something.” Teach. He'd wanted to teach literature; he'd have been able to read all the books he wanted.

“But you wanted her to make the decision.”

He closed his eyes. It wasn't that simple. Moira brought love with her, and a sense of home, but she also unleashed a confusion of pain, anger, and loss that was all tied up in Mike. When she was gone, Mike disappeared behind the drills, the tasks, the blackjack in the barracks, the nights of liberty with a lot of guys Casey was coming to know like the fingers on each hand.

He heard Ruth sigh. A moment later he heard the springs give on the bed opposite him. He saw her sitting on its edge, facing him, the papers still in her hands. “She gets pregnant, right?”

Casey nodded. “It happened right after Easter. I'd gotten some time and gone to New Jersey. She came down a month and a half later and told me. She said her parents knew, they were happy. ‘A new life is what this family needs.' Moira wanted me to know that that's exactly what Katie said.” Casey remembered how Moira's lip quivered a little when he didn't respond. He remembered how she brushed her hair out of her eyes, eyes the same greenish brown as Mike's, and told him, “You don't have to marry me.”

A life for a life, that was how it was supposed to go. But Mike got three. The baby's. His. Hers. “What about your nursing degree?” he'd asked her.

“I'll take time off and then finish,” she'd said so fast that he knew she'd figured everything out. He saw it all: the wedding, the baby. Christmases, birthdays, Thanksgivings. Mike would be right there with him, in stories around the table, in photographs that lined the O'Briens' hallway, and in the eyes of his own child.

“I love you, Case,” she said. “I always will.”

There, with Ruth watching him, waiting for the rest of his story, Casey saw his younger self slumped on the motel bed, next to Moira, a beer in his hand. She was the only woman who'd ever said she loved him except for his grandmother. She meant it, he saw now. She meant it and still he couldn't say it back. Instead he'd drained the bottle of beer, set it on the floor, and grabbed her hand, and looked at it, looked at every freckle on the back of her hand instead of her eyes. “Okay.”

“I got stationed in Georgia but in between, I had some liberty. I went to New Jersey and we got married,” he said. “She wanted to move closer but before any of that happened, Iraq invaded Kuwait and in August I was on my way to Saudi. I was still there in January when Emily was born.”

Ruth made a sound, as if she were starting to say something, but Casey didn't wait. He told her how his vision cleared when he was stuck in miles of sand waiting for a war to start. He saw what a miserable fuck he'd been to Moira and how he wanted another chance. He kept the photograph she'd sent of Emily in his helmet. He looked at it until he memorized the tiny, sleeping face at the end of a pink tube of blanket. After years of living with a borrowed family, he had one of his own.

“I met her for the first time at Walter Reed. They shipped me there after the amputation in Germany.”

He stopped and looked at Ruth, saw her look toward the duffel. When she faced him again, her eyes were wet. “I'll shut up,” he said.

“No, you've gone this far, tell me the rest. Tell me why you left. What could an infant do to you to make you leave?”

Casey shook his head. “Nothing. She did nothing. Moira did nothing. It was me. I couldn't give them what they wanted, what I wanted.” He reached for a crutch thinking he had to move, get away from the shame raining down on him, but the crutch slipped from his hand. Neither one of them moved to pick it up. “Tell me,” she said.

“I was useless. Everything hurt all the time, my leg, my head. I couldn't get away from the pain. We had to live with her parents because we couldn't afford a place. Moira went back to school. I stayed with her mother and the baby. Her dad was still working then at the fire department. All I had was my damn disability. It was only supposed to be for a year or so.”

He pretended he believed Moira when she told him it was going to get better, that he had to be patient, but his head worked unevenly, like a clock that had been dropped down the stairs. A door would slam and he would drop whatever was in his hands. He was afraid to pick up Emily. He tried to get better, he told Ruth. He stumbled through the next few years, trying to work, doing stretches in rehab to unhook himself from the painkillers, weed, and booze. He failed at all of it.

“I left three times, the last time for good,” he said. “I was out of chances with Moira. After the second time I left, she told me not to come back.”

Ruth leaned forward, eyes dry now, her nose flared. “What about Emily?”

“Moira told me if I wasn't going to hang in there for the long haul, I'd better walk away. That I would hurt Em with the on-again, off-again crap.”

“So you did. You just stayed away.”

He nodded. Behind him moths batted against the screens; the soundtrack of a
Star Wars
movie burst through the open windows from an RV, then faded. Casey waited. There was nothing he could say to make any of it better. Maybe Ruth would. If not better, then clearer.

Ruth walked over to the lamp between the two beds and sat down. She held the clippings and the letter. Casey braced himself for a verdict. Instead, she asked a question.

“What would you tell Emily if you saw her?”

Casey leaned forward on his knees again, face down. “I don't know. I don't know. I just wanted to see her. Just once.”

“What do you mean, ‘wanted to'?”

“I don't know if I can do it.”

Ruth looked down at the papers in her hand. “When, then?”

“What?”

“If you don't do it now, when will you go?”

Casey shook his head. He shrugged.

Ruth sighed. She rose and dropped the article and the letter onto Casey's lap and then entered the bathroom. He didn't look up. His eyes remained on the photograph of his daughter going up for a jump shot, pushing through the air, reaching with both arms. A perfect release.

When Ruth came out of the bathroom, she sank onto the bed across from Casey. He was sitting with his back against the headboard. On the table between them was the flattened tube of cortisone cream he'd gotten from the nurse at the hospital. The end of his stump stuck out from under the rolled-up hem of his shorts, a raw lump smeared with traces of white cream. His eyes were closed. The letter and the clipping had disappeared.

She eased down farther on the bed. As the minutes ticked by, her arms and legs grew heavy but her eyes remained wide open. A mosquito's whine filled her ear. She slapped at it and rolled over, facing the wall. The faint outline of a pineapple emerged from the shadows, then another, and another until she realized she was counting them on the wallpaper, trying to quiet her mind, which switched from Casey's story to her own and back. He blamed himself for his friend's death, abandoned his daughter, had apparently spent the past decade or so trying to lose himself. Yet here he was, with her, because he'd let himself think he could find a way back.

Casey's voice rasped from the other bed.

“Ruth, you still awake?”

She ignored him.

“What would you have done if your mother came back after all those years?”

As a teenager, Ruth used to imagine what it would be like to turn her back on a penitent Stella. In these fantasies she was the powerful one who could inflict pain or mercy. Even in fantasy, however, Ruth's need would betray her. When she imagined her mother's face crumpling in defeat, Ruth's resolve always softened.

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what would have happened. She never tried.”

“Do you wish she had?”

Ruth thought of the day she'd hunted Stella down in the cheap Florida apartment. “You're better off,” Stella had told her. And Ruth had tried to believe her, but she didn't, not then and not now.

“Yes,” she said.

—

Casey dropped a crutch coming out of the bathroom. Shit. He looked up but Ruth did not move. She must have finally gone to sleep. He leaned against the wall for support, stooped and felt for the fallen crutch. His armpits and his shoulders hurt. He wasn't used to the damn things. He adjusted them under his arms and then stumped his way to the kitchen, stooped over to get another Coke out of the refrigerator so he could swallow another ibuprofen. He didn't know why he bothered; the pain in his head seemed to be there all the time now, as it had after his accident.

Thunder cracked the silence; Casey nearly dropped his can of soda. The wail of a child sounded from the RV parked by the picnic tables. He glanced at Ruth, who stirred but did not wake.

Shit. Another fucking rainstorm. He used to wish for rain in Nevada, but the novelty was gone. A cloud seemed to have followed him out of there and wouldn't quit.

He made his way to the Formica table again but nearly lost his balance. He grabbed the edge and then sank into the chair in front of Ruth's laptop. He set down his Coke. This was nothing like the computers in the public library he sometimes used. He poked the touchpad on the front and watched the screen flicker to life. Ruth had been busy; a bunch of windows tiled across the screen. E-mail, articles, the results of an Internet search, and something that looked like letters and memos. He guided the cursor over to the e-mail and peered at the screen. The open message was addressed to
[email protected]
. That name again, RyCom. The subject line read,
Please Help
.

He read the e-mail and his insides went cold.

RyCom. He knew now why it sounded familiar. So Ruth was some muckety-muck in the same company that was screwing those contractors. He looked around for the newspaper she had brought with her from the gas station. There it was, its rolled-up edges poking out of the small wastebasket under the counter.

A whimper came from the bed. She was having another dream. He got up and retrieved the newspaper, opened it to the photograph of the asshole walking by the woman with the sign. There was a guy in a wheelchair behind her too. Disgust surged through Casey. Then he caught sight of the metal box on top of the dresser. The woman in the e-mail had mentioned Ruth's tragedy. Had Ruth tried to help her? He remembered now how Ruth had gone quiet when he'd ranted about the story in the newspaper.

Not his business. None of this was his business.

Then he thought of how he'd felt when he told her about Mike and Emily, half hoping she could help him, as if she had some kind of moral authority.

The skies thundered again. This time lightning lit up the inside of the cabin.

There would always be people like Ruth. People who had everything. Took what they wanted and tossed the rest away. Mike. The Army. A few years of his life, a leg, a daughter, a future. If he hadn't
had something Ruth needed, she wouldn't have looked twice at him. This was the woman he'd trusted with his story.

The paper in his hand rustled as he gripped it. These contractors thought they were scoring a sweet deal, but where were they now? People like Ruth were the ones who made out. Then he remembered something she had said after the trooper stopped them. She was no longer with her company. Maybe she had been thrown out, too.

Either way, he needed to know. He propelled himself out of the chair and over to the bed across from Ruth's.

“Wake up!” he hissed.

She moaned and clutched the pillow to her chest. Strands of hair webbed against her cheek and forehead. In the shadows, it looked as though she were trying to hide behind what little hair she had.

“Look at this!” He reached across the small divide and gripped Ruth's shoulder, rolled her toward him.

She turned onto her back. He switched on the lamp between the beds. Her eyelids fluttered open, struggled, and then squeezed shut against the sudden glare.

He shook the paper at her. “You work for them, don't you?”

“What? What are you . . .”

“You work for the son of a bitch who is hanging those contractors out to dry, don't you?”

Ruth seemed to shrink from him. “Don't. You don't understand,” she whispered.

“Try me. And don't tell me they knew what they were getting into. No one knows what they are getting into. Robbie didn't know, did he?”

Ruth went still. Slowly, she raised her face to his but her eyes were not focused on him. She was staring straight through him.

“It's my fault,” she said so quietly he wasn't sure he heard her correctly.

“Yeah, it is. You guys were making money off these people.”

“No. Robbie. It was my fault. He died because of me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Robbie. He was alive when he came home. Then he died. He killed himself. It was my fault.”

Casey's anger rushed out of him. He was silent in the half light. Ruth sank to the floor and clutched her knees to her chest. He wanted to look away but he didn't.

“What happened?”
Don't tell me. Don't make me go there with you.

She began to rock back and forth. “He was home on leave. He had just gotten back from Iraq. A few more weeks and he was done, going to get out for good.” Ruth pressed her head against her knees. “He checked into a motel and put a gun to his head.

“I might have been able to stop him,” she said.

Her voice was muffled but he could hear every word.

“He came to me that day. He wanted to go to lunch. But I couldn't. I thought there would be time. I want more time. I need more time.”

There was nothing brittle about Ruth now. The pain came pouring through undammed. Casey pushed himself to her bed. He eased down and pulled her to him. He thought about telling her it was not her fault, that there was nothing she could have done, but she would think he was lying to her. And she would be right.

“I know,” he said.

He wrapped his arms around her and curled around her like a shell. His back stiffened and his stump throbbed, but he did not move. He held on until the night was over and a gray dawn filtered through the blinds above them.