Now and Again (23 page)

Louise came home a little while later. “Did you get the job?” she called down the narrow hallway. He could hear the liquid rustle of her jacket against the silk of her blouse as she took it off and hung it on a hook in the vestibule. “I've just discovered something. Do you want to know what it is?”

“I've discovered something too.” Penn could hear her opening the refrigerator and setting something on a shelf.

“It's actually really good news for you,” called Louise.

After considering whether to share his news or listen to hers first, Penn said, “What did you discover?”

“Come out here and I'll show you.”

“In a minute. Just tell me.” He had left the television tuned to CNN, and in the background, the six o'clock anchors talked crisply of world events. For days the news had been filled with the case of Ehren Watada, who was the first commissioned officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq on conscientious grounds and whose case was making its way through the military courts. Penn strained to listen to the story over the sound of Louise's heels clicking against the polished floor, but he lost the thread.

“I've discovered costume jewelry!” she called from the bathroom. “I never understood it before, but now I do.”

The next story was about collusion between the government and the media and the blurred line between news and propaganda. Was his crime not just that he had failed to properly lead his men but that he had thought he could lead them at all in such murky circumstances? Was Watada a coward or was he insanely brave to risk being called about the worst thing Penn could think of? The questions swirling through Penn's mind had given him the idea that he could partly make up for his mistakes by helping Watada or someone like him. That he could do something to clear away the fog and tell the truth about the war. Louise's voice floated toward him: “Just wait until you see!” He would help Watada, and if he could help his men in the process…He didn't know yet what he would do, but it wouldn't be theoretical help. It would be practical and real, and nothing Louise or anyone else said or did would stop him.

When Louise walked into the bedroom, his clothing was stacked in neat piles on the bed next to his open duffel, but she didn't see it at first. “It's really fabulous, and it's so cheap,” she said, striking a pose that showed off the strings of colorful baubles draped around her neck. “You'll never have to give me anything measured in carats again!” She caught herself and laughed. “Or, well, almost never.” Then her eyes swept the room and she saw the piles of folded clothing.

“It's not you, it's me,” said Penn when Louise sat down next to the duffel and started to cry. He was reminded of what he loved about her—her sincerity, her elegance, her pleasure in new things. Even when she was crying, her skin was like porcelain, her eyes like glass. But he and Louise were like trains traveling in opposite directions—either they passed each other safely by or they met and destroyed each other.

“Obviously it's you,” she said.

The tears threatened to give way to anger, but Penn had nothing more to say. The knot in his stomach was back, tense and ticking. He knew it wouldn't go away as long as he and Louise kept each other trapped inside old versions of themselves.

Louise raised her damp eyes. Behind the tears was a smoldering clot of questions, as if she too housed a ticking mechanism and she was waiting for him to either set it off or snuff it out. Penn was sorry for so many things. “I'm sorry, Louise,” he said. “I'm so, so sorry.” He could see her deciding whether to continue to cry or to shout at him, but her indecision lasted longer than usual, as if she finally understood about more than costume jewelry. He felt sorry for her, but the good thing was, he no longer felt sorry for himself.

Penn tracked Le Roy Jones down at a computer repair shop. Le Roy found Hernandez in a veterans' database, and Hernandez had the number for Kelly's parents' house in New Jersey. Kelly had Danny Joiner's number, but Danny wasn't answering his phone.

Penn explained his idea of going to Seattle to support Watada. “Or we can do something else that will expose some of the lies about the war.”

“You can count me in,” said Kelly. “I don't have anything better to do.”

“Or there's a protest in Washington, DC,” said Penn. “What do you say we go to that?”

D
anny arranged his uniform carefully on a hanger. After everything was in order, he noticed a thread hanging from the sleeve of the jacket, so he rummaged through the kitchen drawers for a pair of scissors, worried that Dolly would come home for lunch and surprise him. It was nearly noon. He had hidden the prescription bottles deep in the bathroom trash. If she thought he was sleeping, she would leave him alone, but if she saw the contents of the kitchen drawer in disarray, she might come into the bedroom to wake him up. He shouldn't leave the uniform out either. If she came into the room, it would arouse her suspicion. He could put it on, but he worried that was disrespectful. Instead, he straightened the kitchen drawer. He tipped over the trash to make sure the two amber pill containers were all the way down at the bottom. Then he looked under the pillow to see if the locket his mother had given him was there.

—Why wouldn't it be there?

He didn't know why, but why had he been diagnosed with personality disorder? Why were Iraqis killing Americans, or was it the other way around? Why was Pig Eye dead and why didn't he stay that way? Why did the postmaster insist on saluting whenever Danny went into the post office, and why did poor people keep voting to give rich people all of their money and their lives?

It seemed a shame to hang the uniform in the closet where he couldn't see it, so he hung it on the back of the closet door. Then he pushed the discarded toothpaste tube and the wads of Kleenex aside to look for the two pill containers—just to make sure they were there—and then he covered them up again so they couldn't be seen by anyone who was casually glancing in the direction of the wastebasket.

The contents of the kitchen drawer were as neat as a pin, but were they too neat? Before joining the army, Danny had been the messy one, but now it was Dolly who scattered things here and there. He decided that the neatness of the drawer would worry her. Just the other day she had called him a neatnik and made a comment about obsessive-compulsive disorder. “If only I had that,” he had told her. “Maybe that would be covered by the plan.”

Yes, the locket was there—at first he didn't see it because it had slipped inside the pillowcase, so he slid it out again and tucked it farther toward the middle of the bed before fluffing the pillows over it. Then he went into the kitchen to mess up the drawer slightly—just enough so that it looked like Dolly had straightened it instead of him. Dolly didn't care if the knives with the red handles and serrated blades were mixed in with the butter knives. Then he switched on the closet light to check the uniform for dust and stray threads and the bathroom light to check the wastebasket again before turning both lights off. Off or on? It hadn't occurred to him to consider which was better. It was possible neither was better, but if one had even the slightest advantage, then that's the way he wanted it. Everything as right as he could make it, even if he couldn't make it perfect, which he realized with deep regret that he couldn't. He knew that sometimes both options were good and sometimes neither was, but in either case, you had to choose.

As Danny considered this, his eyes strayed to the window, which admitted a rich band of late-summer sunlight into the room. Everything happens for a reason, he thought, for the sideways glance at the window was enough to convince him that natural light was eons better than artificial light, especially since Dolly had switched all of the lightbulbs over to compact fluorescents, which weren't as soothing as incandescent. Not that he really believed everything happened for a reason. Some things just happened—what possible reason could he give for what he had done to Pig Eye and what he was about to do to himself? He believed in chaos, which might partly explain the OCD, which he decided he probably had, not that it made a difference now.

The ice had melted in the glass of water, so he thought about going to the kitchen and replacing it. Cold water would taste good, but why did it matter? He should get a fresh glass because he wanted to do things right. He also wanted to be kind to himself the way everyone he talked to said he should. It was too bad the melting ice made the glass sweat. The condensation would drip on the table and leave a stain. But then he told himself that nature wasn't bad or good and that if he was going to try to change the actual physics of things, he was setting himself up for failure. Failure, he thought, and then he laughed.

It was 12:30. If Dolly were going to come home for lunch, she would have been there by now, so it was a pretty safe bet that she wouldn't be home until after five—later if she stopped at the store. He had plenty of time to check for the two amber pill containers, but this time he found, buried underneath a folded piece of cardboard that he had thought was the bottommost piece of trash, a receipt from an expensive shop and a third container, the little round dispenser of the birth control pills Dolly used. When he peered down into the very depths of the trash can, he saw that the dispenser still contained some of the little pink pills, so he removed it, thinking they must be the placebos the manufacturer added on to the end of the month because it was easier to take a pill every day than to take them three weeks on, one week off. Just in case she had thrown it away inadvertently, he set it on the countertop where she would see it. As he did so, he counted more than seven days of sugar pills—almost half the pills were there. Why would Dolly throw away the medication she relied on? Was she trying to deceive him by getting pregnant without asking him first? Was she already pregnant, and if she was pregnant, was the baby his?

He rearranged the garbage in the can the same as it had been, exactly the same except that now the two amber containers with his name on them were wrapped together in a thick cocoon of tissue. He didn't know if that was better or worse than wrapping them separately, but he couldn't decide because now he was distracted by the new mystery of Dolly's intentions regarding the birth control pills. Not that it mattered. He had already decisively concluded that Dolly would be better off without him, which meant that she would be better off without him with or without a baby and that he would have to trust her to make her own decisions from then on.

In the bedroom, the pillows were perfectly arranged. With the new quilt Dolly had bought, it looked like a bed in a magazine. He hated to disturb anything, but he picked up a corner of the pillow and peered underneath it, just to make sure the locket was there.

It made Danny sad to think that he would never see the locket again, that he would never see his mother even if he didn't kill himself, because his mother was already dead. “Never forget who you are,” she had told him the last time they talked. But he
had
forgotten, and maybe he had never known.

He was wondering where dead people went when he heard a sound on the roof. It was probably a squirrel. He liked squirrels. He liked all animals. If he hadn't been going to kill himself, he'd get a dog. He didn't think they went anywhere, at least he hoped they didn't. He didn't want to go to all this trouble merely to wind up somewhere else. He checked the drawer again, separating the knives by color because that's the way he liked them and then mixing them together again because that was more realistic. What was real? What did realistic even mean?

He backed down the hallway toward the bedroom like a floor-waxer making for the exit. The glass of water with fresh ice in it was already sweating. A handful of bullet-shaped pills spilled across a magazine, covering Condoleezza's face. He had scooped half of them into his cupped hand when the phone rang. What if it was Dolly? He should answer it. He should answer it just to say good-bye—not that she'd know what he was doing. He would make sure the conversation went well—he wouldn't say anything about the discarded birth control pills or the receipt from the expensive shop. He picked up the phone, practicing the perfect tone to use in his head, but before he could say anything, he was surprised to hear the voice of his old company leader, Captain Sinclair.

“Yes sir,” he said when Sinclair asked him if he was doing okay. “Yes sir,” he said when Sinclair asked him if he thought much about the war.

“I owe you an apology,” said the captain, to which Danny replied, “Yes sir.”

Danny was so surprised he sat down on the bed, but then he jumped up again because he didn't want to rumple the new coverlet. He still didn't know why Sinclair was calling.

“Guess what?” shouted Sinclair. “I'm here with Joe Kelly and Le Roy Jones.”

“Here with Kelly and Le Roy? Where's here?”

Captain Sinclair had never really liked Joe Kelly, and Danny hadn't really liked him either. Danny didn't like hotheads, but perhaps Danny would like him now, since now Danny was a hothead too.

“I'm here in Oklahoma with Kelly and Le Roy. We've got a plan and we're headed over to pick you up.”