Forecast (10 page)

‘Hey!' Stacey yells, iPhone to one ear and an index finger pressed hard against the other. ‘Can you guys turn that down?'

‘How can you stand it?' her mother asks. ‘That's not music, it's unbearable noise.'

‘Can you hang on a minute, Mom?'

Stacey signals to the friends in her room who have been passing a joint around. ‘It's my mom,' she says, pressing her phone into a pillow. She screws up her face and rolls her eyes to indicate long-suffering ennui of the affectionate familial kind. ‘Gotta deal with this.'

Everyone groans sympathetically, gathering up laptops, iPods, and books. No problem, they signal.

Kelly, with her soulful eyes, says: ‘I do hope it's not bad news about your dad.'

And from Liz: ‘I don't know how you can bear to watch the news. I'd be a wreck.'

‘Mom?' Stacey says. ‘Can I call you back in five minutes?' And to her friends she says: ‘Cross your fingers for me.'

‘I know this is going to sound sick,' Elise says – she is a Media Arts major who already has an internship with local TV – ‘but I have to say I hope it doesn't end completely before I get assigned to Kabul. I want to be embedded for ABC.'

Everyone is shocked. That is
sick sick sick
, they tell Elise. More troops have to die just so you can reach for your brass ring?

‘But I want to be Martha Raddatz,' Elise protests.

With your eye makeup? they say scornfully. Who are you kidding? You want to be Diane Sawyer or Christiane Amanpour.

‘They are
all
my role models,' Elise insists, aggrieved. ‘Freedom of the press is one of the things we're fighting for.'

Enough already, they say. So if an IED gets Stacey's dad, we can thank you for having such pure goals.

‘Oh shit, Stace,' Elise says. ‘I wasn't thinking … I guess that was a dumb thing to say.'

‘It's OK,' Stacey says. ‘Listen, can you all scram? I gotta talk to my mom in case she's had a call from Army HQ.'

See you, they say.

Kelly comes back with the half-smoked hand-rolled toke. ‘You probably need this.'

‘At the moment, yeah. Thanks.'

‘End's in sight, remember. The President's bringing them home.'

‘Right,' Stacey says.

‘Only combat troops for now, I know that, not backup. But your dad's in combat, right?

‘Yeah. He's in combat. Front lines.'

It's not a lie. You
could
say that, Stacey thinks. She accepts a reassuring hug and waves Kelly out. She inhales some weed deeply and slowly before she lifts her iPhone and hits redial. ‘Sorry, Mom. Had a bunch of friends in my room and couldn't get rid of them. What's up?'

‘Are you sitting down?'

‘Yeah. I'm on my bed. Is this bad?'

‘I think you'll need to be sitting down.'

Stacey's heart misses a beat and then kicks into an erratic stumble-run. ‘Uh oh,' she says.

‘Your father has made contact.'

Stacey takes a long suck at the joint. Her father has made no contact for five years, not since his military discharge, not since he became someone else. ‘How is he?'

‘Okay, I guess, considering. He's had the last of his surgeries, he says. He still has to take heaps of medication.'

‘I've been saying he's still in Afghanistan. Saves explaining too much, you know?'

There is a long silence. ‘Well,' her mother sighs, ‘we've always been just a phone call away. We never put ourselves out of reach.'

‘No,' Stacey says. ‘We didn't.' It was, in fact, the other way around. After his discharge, her father had written from a military hospital in Germany. He said that he wanted a divorce, that he was leaving his wife and daughter, that he had been wanting to do so for years, that for the time being, he did not want to see them again. There was a woman, another woman, who'd been haunting him. For years, she had been vivid in his imagination. She'd taken up residence there, permanent residence. He could no longer dislodge her.

‘This isn't your fault, Mom.'

‘It's like putting together a puzzle,' her mother says in a bewildered way. ‘Little things come back … Little things that didn't quite add up.'

‘No one could have seen this coming, Mom.'

‘It must be the war. It's messed with his head.'

Stacey has nothing to say to this.

‘But then sometimes,' her mother says, ‘it frightens me that I must have been living in total denial for years. And it frightens me that I, you know, still miss him, that I still—'

‘I don't,' Stacey says. ‘I'm too angry with him.'

‘He's been in hell, Stacey.'

‘So have we.'

‘Not his kind of hell. We have to make allowances, Stace.'

‘I've tried,' Stacey says.

‘He wants to see you.'

‘Well, I don't want to see him.'

‘He says it's a condition of continuing to pay your tuition.'

‘Shit,' Stacey says.

‘Please don't use that kind of language, Stacey. It distresses me.'

‘Sorry, Mom. But I can't see him. I can't handle it.'

‘Then he says he'll come calling on you.'

‘What?!' Stacey feels nothing but panic. ‘Tell him,
not here
, okay? Not on campus. Is he still in New York? Tell him I'll come up and meet him there.'

‘I'm afraid it's more complicated than that.'

‘Oh shit, what?'

‘Stacey, please …'

‘Sorry. What does he want?'

‘The thing is, he's here in town, staying at the Wayside Inn. Apparently he checked in last night. I was still drinking my coffee this morning when the doorbell rang and there he was, on the front porch, with his car in the drive. He gave me no kind of warning whatsoever.'

‘Oh Jesus, Mom!'

‘Stacey, please.'

‘Was he—? Was it, like … I mean how did he look? Like before or like after?'

‘Like after.'

‘Oh, Mom!' Stacey focuses on the posters taped to her wall but they seem to move. They will not stay in their fixed places. They seem to be changing shape. ‘What was it like?'

‘It was weird. And then it was just sad, Stacey. Unbelievably sad. I don't know what else to say.'

‘Did anyone see him?'

‘I don't know. I kind of pulled him inside.'

‘What about at the Inn? Did they recognise him?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What name did he register under?'

‘Ours. He says he has no reason to be ashamed. It's
his
name, after all. And he says he wants to take you out to dinner.'

Stacey's breathing turns rapid and choppy. She has trouble getting air into her lungs. ‘When?' she gasps. She begins to cough and can't stop. ‘You can't let him come here. Mom,
promise
me you won't let him come here. I'll drive home. Tell him to stay where he is. I'll meet him at the Wayside Inn.' Stacey feels as though her brain is on amphetamines. She has a test in two days. She'll have to make a two-hour drive upstate, skip classes, stay overnight, drive back. This is not the
best way to prepare for a critical test – she needs an A – but the alternative … well, the alternative is unthinkable.

‘I haven't given you the bad news yet,' her mother says.

Stacey holds her breath.

‘Stacey? Are you still there?'

Stacey grunts, the only sound she can manage.

‘He told me he dropped in to see the Wilkinsons, and they're throwing a “Welcome Back” cocktail party for him this Sunday afternoon.'

‘
Fuck!
I'm sorry, Mom, but there's no other word for it. How
dare
they?'

‘I got an email from Sally Wilkinson this afternoon. An invitation. I'm going to read it to you.
We think this is such a brave thing to do and we want to celebrate. We do hope you'll come. We're assuming Stacey will be home for the weekend and we hope she'll come too.
'

‘Those slimy vicious hypocritical self-righteous Republicans! I can just picture them gloating over their martinis.'

‘Well, that's not quite fair, Stacey. They're good people, generous people. They were very kind to me when, you know …'

‘Yeah, right. You know what the subtext is, don't you?
This is what being against the war leads to. This is what a Liberal looks like.'

‘At least they are not cutting Terry dead. They're acknowledging that he's brave. Your father
is
brave, Stacey.'

‘Yeah, I know. I'm the coward. Mom, are you crying?'

‘I thought I was all cried out. I didn't think it could still hit me this hard.'

‘Don't cry.'

‘He says he still loves me.'

Stacey has nothing to say to that, though, under the circumstances, her father's comment seems to her obscene.

‘I don't think politics has anything to do with this,' her mother says. ‘But what will we do?'

‘I don't know. I'll drive home. I'll see you in a couple of hours.'

‘I think it wouldn't hit me so hard if she weren't everything I'm absolutely not. It's like a slap in the face.'

‘We'll figure it out and we'll face it together, Mom.'

‘Bless you, Stacey.

 

Stacey emails two of her professors.
Family emergency,
she writes.
I regret that I will not be in class today as I have to drive upstate to be with my mom.
I expect to be back tomorrow. Please let me know of any reading or assignments I will miss. Thank you.

She turns on her TV and flips through the cycle on her remote until she finds headline updates on CNN.

In the wake of the Taliban's brutal attack,
an embedded reporter says,
in the hitherto safe region of the north
,
fears of further deterioration grow. While it is still hoped that General Petraeus can turn the tide in Afghanistan, the general himself admits that the forecast is continuing turbulence.

She gets the latest weather alert.
Travel Advisory
:
Tropical storm Delia is now over Bermuda and could strengthen into a hurricane. Present wind speeds of 50 mph have been noted. Trajectory of the storm will bring heavy wind and rain to the entire east coast.

Stacey turns off the TV.

She texts her friends:
News no Big Deal, but Mom needs me. Will be gone for today.

She stuffs pyjamas and toothbrush and books for the test into a duffel bag. She picks up the framed photograph on her desk. It shows her mother and father, arms linked, sitting on the front porch of their house. Stacey, aged about ten, is between them, a white ribbon in her hair and lace around the edges of her bobby sox. Her father is so good looking, with such beautiful eyes and such long lashes that his friends used to tease
You should have been a girl.
Her father is in uniform. Tucked behind the frame is Stacey's photocopy of the letter he wrote after his discharge, after he took off the uniform for the last time. It is folded and refolded into a small neat square. She opens it and reads it again.

This is the start of a new life. I have always been loyal to country and family, but I am against war and I am not suited to the role in which I have been cast. After I'm patched up, I'll be able to do something that I've wanted to do for a very long time. I hope you can forgive me. I do love you both – I know you'll find that hard to believe – but I won't be coming back.

Stacey runs her fingers along the spines of books shelved above her desk and lets them settle on the leather-bound
Collected Works of Shakespeare
, the last birthday present he gave her before he was deployed the last time. She was still in high school. She pulls at the volume and turns to the title page, to the inscription written in a very military hand. The thick nib of the fountain pen has left punctuation so emphatic it suggests stab wounds of ink.

Below this, in smaller and finer cursive, is a quotation:

Stacey thinks about adding the Shakespeare to her duffel bag but changes her mind and reshelves it. She tosses her bag into the back seat of the car and heads north on the Interstate for the two-hour drive. On the way something becomes crystal clear: she will not go to the Wilkinsons' party. It cannot be done. In spite of the two sixteen-wheelers, side by side, neck and neck, who won't let her pass, she calls her mother, one hand on the wheel, the other to her ear.

‘Mom?' she says. ‘I'm on my way. Listen, I've made a decision—'

‘Before you say anything,' her mother says, ‘and no matter what you decide, I've made up my mind. I'm not going to go to the party.'

Stacey starts to laugh and then she begins to cry. ‘Mom,' she says, ‘I'm going to have to pull over. I can't even see.'

 

To Stacey's immense relief, the only car in the drive is her mother's. Before Stacey has braked, her mother is running down the steps from the porch and the two simply hold each other without a word for two minutes, three, maybe five.

‘So where is he at this moment?' Stacey asks.

‘We both thought that your first meeting should be private. Just the two of you. You and your dad.'

‘You
discussed
this?'

‘Stace, whatever else, you're his daughter. He cares about you. We both do. We're worried about you. That's not going to change.'

Stacey kicks a few stones from the drive. ‘I feel like I've stepped into a parallel universe,' she says. ‘Tell me, Mom, is his face …? Will I recognise him?'