The Writing on the Wall A Novel

Four



THE writing slanted like a ramp toward the floor but didn’t quite touch. In the six-inch space left blank Dottie had inserted a photo, wedging its bottom edge into the molding that formed the border with the fractured maple of the floor. Vera reached down and gently tugged to see whether it would slide out without having to use her scraper, and when it did, brought it over to the kerosene lamp where she could study it closer.

It looked like an old-fashioned Polaroid, the kind that only took one minute to develop. Andy—it could only be Andy— stood on the back steps of the house with his arms outstretched, holding what appeared to be a pie fresh out of the oven, since he held it with a fuzzy white mitt. He was younger looking than she imagined and more handsome, with his blond hair in a crew cut that was long enough now it could have used combing. He wore khaki work pants and a white t-shirt, and it was this last that made the photo seem ancient. No logos in those days, no shaping, just that bleached, angel-like whiteness billowed out from his chest. His expression seemed a bit exasperated, as if his mom had badgered him into posing, but patient enough now that she was actually snapping it. The gentle shyness she had described was plain enough on his features—just the kind of boy Cassie had felt comfortable with back in high school. No brain, no jock, somewhat bashful, good with cars.

He wasn’t the only one in the picture. His mother had posed him on the steps, with the kitchen window to the left; on the glass Vera could make out the reflection of a woman who must be Dottie, captured in the act of taking the photo, an accidental self-portrait. Between the dullness of the reflection and what the years had done to the print, there wasn’t much visible, just a watery, lemon-colored shape distinct enough she could define it as feminine. There was a smeared half-circle that could have been her forehead and hair, a minute silver flash that could have been earrings—but at least she was looking at her, and it hit her even more powerfully than seeing Andy. Reading, she had pictured Dottie liking bright, extravagant colors. So yes—lemon made sense. It would have been her favorite summer dress.

There was no date stamped on the back, no identifying information. She brought it back to the wall, got down on her knees by the molding, made sure she tucked the edge back exactly the way she found it. Staring at it had given her an idea. She went out to the kitchen, turned on the ceiling light, propped open the door so its brightness could arc across the first twenty feet of backyard.

She had discovered the blueberry bushes on her very first walk around the house, but she hadn’t checked to see whether they still held any berries. Seeing the picture, she had immediately decided that this is what she must do—go out to the bushes Dottie had planted, the ones Andy had helped her pick for their pie, find a berry, just one berry, and hold it in her hand.

She pushed past the screen of briars to where the bushes grew thickest, forced her way into their middle, grabbed a high branch, followed it back to its woody core, then ran her hand back out again, flattening the leaves. They felt good against her skin, the oval texture with a hint of wax, but she found no berries on the first bush, none on the second, none on any of them, though she searched very hard. Did blueberry bushes have a life span? If they did, then theirs had long since expired.

Disappointed, she followed the widest beams of kitchen light around to the front, suffering the same wild restlessness she had experienced when she finished reading Beth. As before, she thought about getting in the car, but that seemed too drastic a response—she wanted space, not separation. Never in her life had she gone so long without driving. Between Jeannie stocking the house like a bunker and her absorption with the walls, it had been weeks now and she wasn’t even sure the car would start.

Other than walking back up to the deserted neighbor’s, there was only one place left to explore. Ever since she had arrived and particularly now that she no longer trusted the radio, the sound track to her days had come from the little trout stream across the road. It had sounded strong and percussive those first few nights, to the point she thought she could discern pebbles and stones clattering against each other in the current, but now that it hadn’t rained in so long it seemed more a soft neutral humming that suggested the play of molecules, not rocks.

It was mucky, the first few steps off the road, but then she came onto the hard gravel plain the stream had scoured through the swamp. The rocks were slippery with moss, she could easily break her ankle, and so she sat down on the first flat boulder she came to, pulled her sandals off, let her feet dangle in the water. Even on a moonless night the stream seemed to generate its own incandescence; finding her ankles, it covered them in frothy white. The current ran north toward Canada, and, like so many other things here, gave her the sense that the land was tipping away from America, going stubbornly off in its own direction.

She enjoyed that feeling. She enjoyed the cold velvet clutch of the water on her skin, the way the sensation was so intense and immediate and yet carried with it memories of wading barefoot when she was little on one of her family’s rare summer picnics. It made for two currents, two layers, and she couldn’t have said which was the more satisfying.

Did Cassie have memories like that? Not for the first time, she wondered about bringing her here once her sentence was over, to see whether quiet and solitude could help her take the first steps toward healing. There were complications, of course. How long it would take for her discharge to go through. Whether Jeannie and Tom would want to have the house for themselves. Whether, quite simply, she and Cassie could still find a way to talk to each other, repair all that had been torn. If she did come, then the first stop would have to be the stream. Cleansing, baptism, purification. Vera never believed in any of those notions, they were just empty words and Cassie would frown if she used them, yet it was exactly this that she needed. After a month in the stockade of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to be plunged into an icy trout stream and, shivering from the shock of it, begin the long slow process of absolution.

For herself, she was beginning to understand how a person could fall in love with this forgotten corner of land, or, like Dottie, fight through to a grudging, tough-love kind of acceptance. Like a lot of hard places it was more beautiful at night. She had been here long enough that the stars had changed slightly their pattern, so Vega stood directly overhead now and the long stretch of Andromeda rose in the east. A pleasantly astringent smell, part marigold, part sage, wafted downward from the cloud of the Milky Way. Could stars cast off smells? If it was possible anywhere it would be here.

Tom claimed there were trout in the stream, though they must have been tiny ones, the water was so shallow. What would they make of her, if they watched through the foam? She stayed on her rock until the shivering spread upward from her toes; she had to rub them to get the circulation back to the point she could walk. The flinty gurgle of the stream drowned out the crickets, but back near the house their chirping took over, and much later, when she finally left off her fixed staring and let herself collapse back on the mattress, the strong tropical clatter of the sound cushioned her over into sleep.

Dottie wrote about the determination to protect her son that had come to her in the night. Beth’s decision to buy the book of poems had come to her suddenly on a winter’s morning. And now it was her turn—she woke up before dawn feeling an energy and purpose stronger than she had known in months. If anything, its suddenness made her suspicious, so for most of the morning she half-expected the determination to disappear. But it was the suddenness that disappeared. She realized that, without it ever becoming explicit, her purpose had formed the very first moment she had uncovered Beth’s writing and learned, in that instant, that walls would accept ink as readily as paper.

The dining room was the last room needing to be stripped. Since that first tour of inspection on the day she arrived she hadn’t stepped into it even once; now, dragging in the ladder and supplies, she realized it was by far the most attractive room in the house. This was largely due to the three tall windows with their transoms of stained glass—facing north, they still let in more light than the other rooms enjoyed, so it was the only place in the house that wasn’t shrouded in dust. Even the wallpaper, Dottie’s wedding cake pattern, the pink-veined white velvet, didn’t look quite as awful as it did in the hall. The flooring was in better shape, too—shiny enough to slide on if she wore slippers. There was a positive, accepting aura to this space, she didn’t know how else to put it, and it seemed to exist independently of anything in the room itself.

She started scraping by the door. The first strip was hardest because she half-expected to discover more words beneath the paper and it made her wary. Finding none, it became easier, though it still involved the same slow, painstaking work as before. Using the scraper like a knife to get the edge started, sliding it under the largest piece possible, prying, lifting, pulling— and then the whole process repeated again, clearing two or three inches at a time. One long strip shaped like a map of Chile she worked on for three hours. The air was drier in the room, it seemed to have petrified the paper, and she was carving out deep fjords and winding bays and whole estuaries before Chile came off.

Working this hard, it was impossible to remember ever having worked on another task, to the point that teaching, housekeeping, waitressing in college all became memories from a distant life. When she took a break she looked down at her hands and they had become a scraper’s all right, there was no other way to describe them. Palms red and scratchy, veins cord-like on her wrists, the pads on her fingers puckered and cracked. No amount of massaging or stretching could soothe the tightness in her forearms—every tense molecule in her body seemed to have migrated there to hold a convention, party, whoop it up. And yet the odd thing was, when she looked down to examine it, the flesh on her arms, even after all that hard work and tenseness, seemed to have become noticeably looser in her time there, grainy the way wet sand is, slack, so it looked like it would look when she turned sixty.

She understood now that without Beth’s and Dottie’s stories leading her on she would never have had the stamina to do this. Even now, with only one room left to strip, she wouldn’t have been able to finish without this sudden surge of confidence and energy that had come to her in the night. Stripping the other rooms, she had been content just to get the top layers off and ignore the little flecks of paper underneath, but now she needed to clear these off too until the walls were perfect.

Or almost perfect. As bare as she made them, they still weren’t quite ready. Mixed in with the supplies was a package of sandpaper, and she used the finest to scrub away at the rough spots on the plaster, the grainy upsurges, the rice-sized bumps, until her finger could trace a line from the window to the door around to the windows again without hitting anything that wasn’t smooth. It was fussy of her, compulsive, anal—but she trusted the feeling, it was part of her confidence, this overwhelming sense of being ready at last.

It took her two full days to scrape the paper off, then another day to do the sanding, so it wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day that she started writing. With all the supplies Jeannie had left her there was one essential she had missed—pens—and it was only because she found a ballpoint to go along with the roller point in her purse that she didn’t need to drive to town. She had the worst handwriting of any middle school teacher in the country, so she decided to print, to take pains over it, make the words perfectly legible. She wouldn’t start so high that a ladder would be needed and she wouldn’t go so low anyone would ever have to kneel to read, and yet, with four big walls to work on, she should have more than enough room.

She started with the roller pen from her purse, but the plaster sucked the ink in too greedily, so she immediately switched to the ballpoint which worked much better, though she often had to bring it down from the wall and shake the tip. And yet the walls still seemed greedy—no matter how fast she wrote, they constantly demanded more. Always before, writing on paper, she felt the space between words as little obstacles or hurdles, ones she could only jump by writing the most obvious banalities or cliches; now, the needed words seemed sensitive to her pauses and leapt in quickly on their own.

It was hard pressing horizontally, not down—like using a blackboard, though all she ever wrote there were lessons where the chalk skated across the surface on its own. With the walls, she had to position her body just so, slide her fingers down the barrel of the pen from where they went normally, and the difficulty of this made her feel even closer to Beth and Dottie. My fellow contortionists! Their arms had trembled the same way hers did; their shoulders had known the same nagging pain. It was hard, she constantly had to stoop, reach, swivel and twist as she moved along the wall, and yet that other tightness, the bone-deep soreness, the weakness, the weariness of soul, all disappeared the moment she began writing.

I played a game with Cassie when she was little. On Friday nights, as a special treat, we always went out for dinner somewhere simple, a family restaurant where they had a salad bar and brownie sundaes. Dan would meet us there late because of having to square away whatever construction job he was working on before the weekend. Cassie crayoned horses and dogs on her placemat while we waited, and that was fun for a while, but if it got really late and she had already finished her quota of rolls and crackers, I was forced to improvise.

“Watch the people coming in,” I told her. “I bet you the cherry off your sundae that every one of them touches their face when they come through the door.”

Her eyes danced upwards in amazement. The “Cassie dance” we called that, we saw it so often.

“Every single one of them?”

I nodded. “When they get in as far as the cash register and see everyone looking up. Yep, you watch. They touch their nose or ears or glasses and sometimes their chin.”

And of course I won. This was a great revelation to Cassie, that adults could be so nervous in a fussy, impossible-to-control way. Every Friday after that she would stare over her menu at the people coming in, checking out everybody’s little tic, with a wise, knowing expression on her face a lot older than her years.

That’s what I was thinking about when they led her into the courtroom in June, our harmless little game. And what’s more, I knew she was remembering this, too, knowing I was sitting there watching. She must have been nervous, the temptation to touch her hair or nose must have been irresistible, but she wasn’t going to give into it, that simple human weakness. She paraded in, wearing her dress uniform with the flesh-toned stockings, the tightwaisted skirt—paraded in, marching at attention, and just when I thought she was going to at least nod to us or thinly smile she stopped and snapped off a salute toward the flag. Beside it, standing three abreast behind a high metal table, the members of the court martial saluted crisply back.

Not my girl, I remember thinking. It’s impossible to describe how savagely the thought came, and how, for the space of twenty seconds, it afforded me relief. But of course it was my girl, the uniform couldn’t hide that, nor the rigidly obedient way she stood.

Two of the judges were majors, one was a sergeant—all three were female. The MP who followed Cassie in was female, the prosecutor was female, so for a moment it resembled an elaborate sorority initiation during which Cassie had been ordered not to smile. The lieutenant they had assigned to explain things to us was a woman, too, and the defense counsel, Captain Sosa, was the only male in the room besides Dan.

It was a small room, with only three rows of seats. The one spectator was a young, nicely dressed woman who I immediately recognized, though without quite remembering her name. She wasn’t a reporter—she held no laptop or pad—but I had seen her face on television and if I hadn’t been so focused on Cassie I would have come up with her name a lot sooner than I did.

What else? Pear trees out the window, the leaves looking dry and shriveled, though it was only June. The air-conditioning blowing too strong, so even the majors shivered. A tornado warning on the wall telling us where to run if sirens went off. Dan reaching to find my hand, me tugging it back from him. The cricket chirp of the stenographer’s machine. A sign over the judges’ table, Fort Sill Oklahoma, in flowing cowboy script.

The whole atmosphere stayed calm, as if the tornado had come and gone and we the survivors must quietly go about our business. Like that—and like it had all been rigidly choreographed, and everyone, even Dan and me, were playing our assigned parts.

The reporters, cameramen, bloggers and journalists had already left town. Cassie wasn’t pretty enough, her crime wasn’t sufficiently brutal, to capture their interest. It had been the first series of trials, the general court martials held a week ago, that had created all the excitement—Cassie was small potatoes in comparison. She had not tied any of her prisoners to a leash or covered their heads in panties or pissed on the Koran or sodomized them with a broomstick or forced them to adopt “stress positions” while country music blared through peanut-butter covered pods taped to their ears. She had not been stationed at Abu Ghraib prison nor played a role in the crimes committed there. As a guard with the 363rd Military Police company of the 500th MP Brigade, U.S. Army Reserve, she had been assigned to watch the overflow prisoners who had been sent to a detention center near the city of Al-Kut—Camp Patterson, called by the MPs “Camp Patty.”

While on duty there, guarding what few female prisoners Patty held, she had gotten a call on her cell phone from a sergeant telling her to hurry down to Tier One Alpha. This same sergeant had asked her to play pool the night before and she had said no. Now, afraid she had hurt his feelings, she said she would be right down.

When she got there, he and his fellow sergeants led her to a shower stall at the end of the cell block. A dead Iraqi lay there in a pool of crusted blood. All night he had been subjected to an interrogation that involved not only beatings but a handler holding back a barking, snarling German shepherd inches from his face. He snapped under this. When the interrogators finally left to get breakfast, he began pounding his head against the cement wall of the shower stall and continued doing so until he was dead.

After wrapping him in ice, the sergeants called their friends among the other guards asking if they wanted to pose next to him for a souvenir photo before they carted him off on a waiting gurney. Cassie had been one of three soldiers who posed.

At the judges’ table one of the shivering majors finally had enough—he waved the MP over to adjust the air-conditioning, which she did but only by standing on a chair. In the interval, the lieutenant assigned to explain things to us, Lieutenant Vidic, leaned over our laps and rapidly whispered.

“They’ll be asking for her plea. It’s not dereliction of duty since it wasn’t her prisoner and the incident wasn’t even on her tier. That’s why it’s only a special court martial, not a general. It comes down to whether or not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice she engaged in conduct bringing discredit to the military.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Dan said, reaching across me to shake her hand. That was the fourth time he had done that since we arrived at the courtroom, shake her hand. Dan is stolid, he can do stolid so well, but right then at that moment what I needed was an agonized husband, a trembling husband, a husband on the verge of breaking down at what had happened to his girl.

“Guilty,” Cassie said, the moment the air-conditioning quieted.

She looked tiny as ever, standing by the much taller MP. Doll-sized, barely one hundred pounds, with the bangs she had worn since she was seven exaggerating the effect even more. She was always forgetting to put her contacts in, and the only expression on her face was the vaguest of squints. Other than that? I could see her acne was better. She looked like she had been eating okay. I didn’t like the rigid way she stood at attention.

Between us and the front sat the woman I mentioned, so I had to look past her shoulder in order to see Cassie. She was not much more than twenty-five or twenty-six, dressed in an attractive brown suit that made her look like a businesswoman, crisp and very competent, though her frizzy red hair suggested something wilder. She sat formally, with her hands on her lap the way people do at funerals. Some stirring of the pear trees outside caught the light and she looked sideways toward the window. It was the kind of open face you immediately like, and the openness came mostly from her wide and caring eyes. Again, I wondered where I had seen her, and why, with no one else looking on, she had brought that look of sympathy to Cassie’s trial.

As well as being choreographed down to the slightest detail, the trial moved very fast. The prosecuting officer and the defense counsel approached the judges with papers they dealt across the table like cards.

Lieutenant Vidic cupped her hand over her mouth and whispered:

“The prosecution goes first, now that they’re proceeding to the sentencing phase. She’ll be presenting matters of aggravation, things that tend to worsen the offense.”

It was a photo she had placed in front of each judge, and I didn’t have to be handed one to know what it showed. A young Iraqi man, detainee #143488 according to a sign balanced across his chest, wrapped in ice bags with bright red and green Arabic lettering. The ice bags packed right up to his chin, pressing it backwards like an icy bib, making it look like he was staring up at something stuck on the ceiling well behind him. Unshaven, his beard the same brown color as his skin, his nose and cheeks caked in blood, his mouth rigidly open. Eyes covered in duct tape. A body bag wrinkled beneath him like a sheet he had kicked aside. Black pointy hood like a sorcerer’s flopping sideways toward his ear. Behind him, closer to the cement wall, a white plastic lawn chair, the kind you can buy at any mall. A fuzzy football-shaped something underneath its legs.

Squatting by his head, leaning over to make sure she posed in the same frame, Cassie. Brown t-shirt tucked into baggy camouflage pants, sand-colored with scattered chocolate-chip dabs. Green plastic glove. Big smile on her face, beautiful smile, the smile of someone who had never looked so beautiful, vivacious and incandescent before. The best photo of her ever taken.

The prosecutor, now that all three judges were staring down at it, felt confident enough to step back from the table.

“Please notice the defendant is not just passively posing, but makes a thumbs-up gesture to the camera while Sergeant Mendoza takes the picture with—” She glanced down at her pad. “Sony Cyber Shot Three camera. The prosecution contends that this gratuitous and vindictive gesture brings even more discredit upon the military than alleged in the original charge.”

The defense counsel, who until now had seemed content to let the women run the show, cleared his throat.

“This can not be considered an aggravating factor, since it was merely the defendant’s habitual nervous gesture. Specialist Savino is often very shy and never knows what to do with her hands in a photo, and this is where the thumbs-up gesture originates from.”

Dan leaned over to our lieutenant. “That’s true,” he whispered. He straightened back up, whispered now to me. “You know that’s true.” The major in the center pointed the prosecutor back to her seat. “Matters of mitigation?” she said, waving the defense counsel up in her place.

“Thank you, Major Adams. The guard dog involved in the incident became very agitated in the course of the night, to the point he was impossible to soothe, even by his handler. It was the defendant, Specialist Savino, who calmed him down and returned him to the kennel, thereby removing a potential threat from the tier. She stayed with the dogs all morning, talking to them and stroking them to make sure they remained passive. Every officer in camp marveled at her influence with dogs.”

The sergeant judge now spoke for the first time.

“This is mitigation?”

“We believe that it is.”

The major stood up. “Ten minutes before sentencing.”

There was no reason to leave our seats. The judges disappeared out a side door which no one bothered closing. Cassie stood at ease, but still didn’t look at us. Dan got up to flex his bad back. The clock on the wall ticked. The woman in front of us sat staring down at her hands, then turned suddenly around, like she was going to say something. Too late. Cassie, the prosecutor, the defense counsel, the stenographer and MP guard. They all stood to attention as the judges filed back in.

The sergeant had been chosen to read out the sentence. It was her big moment and she milked it for all it was worth—her voice wouldn’t have been so deep and stern if Cassie had committed genocide.

“Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Specialist Cassie Savino, for conduct bringing discredit to the military, is sentenced to thirty days in the stockade, reduction in rank to private, and the forfeiture of half a month’s pay.”

Cassie saluted, turned ninety degrees and saluted her defense counsel, swiveled and saluted the prosecutor, then followed the MP out the door.

“That’s that,” Dan said, slapping his hands together.

Out in the lobby our lieutenant stood explaining what would happen next—Cassie’s sentence would be served right here in Fort Sill, she said—when the MP came over and pulled her aside.

“Let’s go,” I said, but Dan wouldn’t budge.

“Thirty days seems fair,” he said. “Those Abu Ghraib guards got much more.”

“Thirty days for smiling?”

“Someone told her to smile. You pose for a picture, the one who’s taking it says ‘Smile!’ Anyway, it doesn’t have anything to do with smiling, you know that as well as I do.”

Dan closed his eyes, made a half-pucker with his lips, as if he were trying to squeeze something from his mouth that didn’t come naturally.

“It’s thirty days for defending her country. Thirty days for standing up for what’s right. You think those detainees are Boy Scouts? They’re killing our boys and it’s a lucky thing they didn’t kill her. She’s over there on a mission and the mission sometimes involves things you and I can’t stomach, but so what? You remember 9/11, how we didn’t take our eyes off the TV for a solid week. That’s two thousand reasons right there. If some raghead terrorist takes it into his head to kill himself I don’t see why anyone over here should care.”

I remember 9/11, I felt like saying. I remember how before that you were so funny and skeptical when it came to politics or world events, how you would always be on the side of the underdog, the army and generals and president could all f*ck themselves as far as you were concerned—and how, that September night when we finally tore ourselves away from the television and went up to bed, you stopped by the window, looked out across the lawn and said “God bless America,” not ironically, not as a joke, but with all the sincerity and passion your soul was capable of.

“Mrs. Savino?”

Our lieutenant was back. She came over and hesitated—it was obvious she wanted to talk to me alone.

“Cassie would like you to come see her tomorrow morning before you leave for home. She’s allowed half an hour, but I think we can extend this some. It would have to be early. Is eight okay? The stockade abuts the south gate.”

Dan nodded. “We’ll be there.”

“Cassie asked for her mother to come alone.”

That’s why the lieutenant looked so agonized, but her distress was nothing compared to the look that came across Dan’s face. Crushed is too mild a word—his face jerked sideways like he’d been slapped.

“No problem,” he said, smiling, and I know what that cost him. “We want to thank you again for all your help, Lieutenant. If you rotate back there, give them hell.”

When we were alone again he took my arm.

“Let’s go back to the hotel.”

“I’d like to walk.”

“In this heat? We have the car.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

His face reddened. A little thing, but coming after the tension of the trial, his disappointment, it was exactly what could set him off.

“Okay,” he said softly.

“It must be a woman thing,” I said. Stupid of me, but I couldn’t think of how else to lessen his hurt.

“That’s fine. The two of you can have a good talk. Did you notice she didn’t turn around and look at us, not once?”

I told him to be careful with the traffic and he told me to be careful walking in that sun. A marble staircase led down to the first floor, just like in a real courthouse. Once through the revolving door he turned left toward the parking lot, and I was still standing there trying to get my bearings when someone stepped out from the shadows along the wall.

“Mrs. Savino? My name is Pam Cord.”

“I know who you are,” I said.

In the courtroom, I’d gotten the impression of someone tall, which must have been from the formal way she sat, because I saw now she was shorter than me, maybe even shorter than Cassie. The sun brought the red out in her hair, and, seeing me stare, she patted it like someone putting out a fire.

“I saw you on TV last week outside the other court martials,” I said, which was true enough. “It seemed strange to think you were at Cassie’s, and I didn’t really recognize you, not until the very end.”

“Then you saw our demonstrations. The way the networks edited it made it seem like there were only a dozen of us, where there were hundreds. We still have lots of tricks left to learn.” She tilted her head to the side and smiled. “Feel like coffee?”

She was parked in a handicapped spot—a small rental car yellow with dust. On our way out we had to pass the gatehouse and the sentry there snapped to attention and saluted. Pam gave him the finger, though with the windows being tinted, I don’t think he saw. She drove fast, even recklessly—stop signs didn’t seem to interest her.

“I’m sorry about your husband,” I said. I thought that was important, to say that right away.

“Thanks.”

She gave a lot of thought to where we should have coffee. There was a diner and then a drugstore with a lunch counter but she drove on past and turned left into a seedier part of town. The bars were here, the beer joints for soldiers, and she parked in front of the one that looked roughest.

It was early afternoon, there was hardly anyone inside, and, as in the courtroom, they were mostly female. The bartender. The soldiers playing pool. They were all dressed in desert camouflage, and when we walked through the door they looked us over with suspicion and hostility, which didn’t seem to bother Pam Cord at all.

“Back here in the dark okay?” she asked.

The bartender took her time coming over. I ordered coffee. Pam ordered a beer, then waved toward the bar and changed that to vodka.

On television she always looked angry, so I wasn’t prepared for how young she was, how friendly. She had become famous very fast, but I could tell that meant nothing to her. She had a trick of pointing off to where her words had gone, and she did this now, gesturing out the window toward what she had told me before.

“The media are already tired of us. Tired of me. I’m surprised they even gave us thirty seconds. Everyone went home afterwards, but I thought I’d stay on for your daughter’s trial. I knew it was impossible, seeing her picture, that she could hurt anyone. At the first court martials all you had to do was look at their mouths to know they were capable of anything. Weak mouths, too gullible and frightened. The upper lip especially. If you want to search for cruelty, that’s where you should look.”

“Did you study my Cassie’s lips?”

She shot me a look.

“Strong. Even. It wasn’t her fault.”

The bartender came over with my coffee and her vodka, stood with her hands on her hips until Pam paid. More women swaggered in now, sergeants, and over by the pool table things were getting pretty loud.

“You’re wondering how the notorious Pam Cord got into the courtroom. We have friends—you’d be surprised. Lots of military think this is all wrong. Did you see that arrogant major staring down at me? She knew who I was. It made her nervous and that made me glad.”

I noticed something about her when she took the first swallow from her drink—as professional and competent as she looked, she seemed tired, tense, even weary, and the only reason I noticed is because the vodka forced some of that away. Her hands never strayed very far from the glass. They were beautifully long and tapered, a model’s, and yet red and chapped, like she still believed in washing dishes by hand.

“The only surprise is that even more of them weren’t caught up in this. So I wouldn’t be too hard on Cassie. They were badly trained—hardly trained at all. Reservists, amateurs. It all seemed just too weird to them, like a video game that moved too fast so they needed to smash the screen. The MPs who were prison guards back in civilian life ran things on the worst tiers. The hard site they call it. You notice how comfortably they use those terms?

High value detainees. Stress positions. Previously existing lesions. They can really talk the talk.”

“Yes, it’s awful,” I said, to the coffee mug more than to her.

“They were pumped so full of anthrax vaccine it made them half-crazy. There was no privacy, hardly even toilets. Bladder infections, UTI’s. There was hardly a girl who didn’t have one. She had one, right?”

I nodded.

“There must have been pressure from higher-ups. You think privates like your daughter knew anything about Muslim customs, how to humiliate them? They were being told to soften them up for interrogation and they were being told exactly how. All the rest is just covering up.”

You could see that her anger lay very close to the surface. Again and again she would try to lay out a simple, matter-of-fact explanation, find her voice rising, grimace, close her eyes, then start over.

“I had an e-mail from Jimmy just before he stepped on the mine. He realized it was all wrong by then, he wasn’t stupid. We knew when he joined the reserves there was always a chance he would have to go fight somewhere. But we needed the money, the benefits. I hadn’t found a job yet, and when I did it was only halftime.”

I had a sudden intuition.

“Do you teach?”

She nodded. “Fifth grade art.”

I smiled. “Middle school science.”

“Middle school’s hard, good for you . . . So, we went into it with our eyes wide open, or at least that’s what we told each other.

But we were blind of course. What bothered him most was how much the people hated us, and how he could put nothing against that except being nice to the Iraqi kids. He loved his men. He had the best men possible he wrote in his last letter. Everyone thinks I’m protesting the war just because of him, but it’s because of his men and those kids and girls like Cassie and moms like you . . . It hurts to think Jimmy knew the bigshots were lying, but it would hurt even worse if he had believed them.”

She told me about her organization, how it had started, how many parents, wives and husbands they had recruited and how more military families were joining every day. Who could speak out better than people who had loved ones over there, how could their voices not be heard? They couldn’t be dismissed as radicals, they had given too much to their country. Their pain and despair needed an outlet, and she was no longer surprised at the depth of that anger and their determination to fight back.

Somewhere during this I realized she was asking me to join. It bothered me a little, it made it seem that all along she’d had this secret agenda to recruit me and Dan.

“I don’t know how you get up the nerve to speak in public. It’s all I can do to talk to my class.”

It was the best I could come up with. I said nothing about the shame involved, that my daughter could smile so vivaciously over a dead man. Or the guilt, that I hadn’t protected her from monsters.

“I would have said the same thing once,” she said. “When I got invited to the White House after Jimmy died, I hesitated for a long time. I was still in the fog that descends, I couldn’t see straight. Half of me wanted to buy into it all, the idea that he had died defending his country and fighting for freedom. The other half worried he had died for a lie. When the Pentagon called and said I was one of ten wives the president wanted to meet with to express his condolences I decided to go, because I thought maybe that would decide it, whether Jimmy was a hero or a sucker . . . Okay, here’s where we get to the emotional part. Ready? More coffee?”

That was her way of ordering another vodka. When it came, she kept it in the middle of the table where the glass caught the light.

“It was a photo op for him, his poll numbers were sinking, so that’s why the ten of us ended up in the Oval office with the generals and cabinet members and TV cameras. We stood in a semi-circle on the carpet, the one with the presidential seal. I was toward the end and I could see him putting his arm around the other women’s shoulders and saying something that judging by his little smirk was supposed to be a gentle joke. Despite the solemn men behind him he was enjoying himself greatly. There were three more women before me. I’m from Nebraska, it said that on the name tag along with Jimmy’s name and rank, and I was absolutely certain he was going to say something about football, like ‘Go Cornhuskers!’ or something awful like that. He came up to me, a general leaned over his shoulder to tell him who I was, but his eyes fastened on my name tag and the word Omaha. ‘Go Cornhuskers!’ he said. Then he mumbled something that was meant to be comforting and moved on to the next woman in line.”

She reached for the drink, put it to her lips, put it back down without tasting.

“They had refreshments for us in the next room. Punch and cake. There were knives on the table to cut the cake, surprisingly sharp ones. You know how you wonder if you ever had the chance to meet Hitler whether you would have the courage to kill him? Kill evil? That’s what I was thinking about, staring at those knives. I thought of grabbing one and plunging it into his chest and then I thought about stabbing myself instead, and it didn’t really matter, the important thing was to put death into that room as a fact, something real, not just the abstraction he and his henchmen could talk about so smoothly. I didn’t have the courage, obviously. But all that emotion was still in me, and so when the president went before the cameras to make his little speech I screamed ‘Butcher!’ as loud as I could, and the rest you probably know about.”

I knew about the rest. The uproar. The storm of attention. The hate. I read that she received more death threats in a day than anyone in the country, and I’m sure that was no exaggeration. Reading about her, seeing her on TV, I had been curious, I wanted to listen to what she said, but Dan always grabbed the remote from me and pressed mute.

Until now the only sound in the bar had been the click of pool balls, but the bartender turned the music on and three or four of the sergeants began dancing. I wondered what they would do if they knew the notorious Pam Cord was sitting there. Beat her? Shake her hand? I thought of what she said, how you could tell the brutal ones by the shape of their mouths, but with all of them chewing gum or sucking on beers it was difficult to tell.

I had the feeling, turning back to face her, that she was trying to decide whether or not to invest more emotion in me. As I said, there was a professional, even steely side to her, sympathetic as she was. And she was harried and overworked—I could see that, too.

“I haven’t known you long, I can’t read what’s in your heart, but I sense you need to be part of something larger than just your worry over your daughter. Speaking personally, leaving aside matters of right and wrong, I’ve grown tremendously thanks to my involvement. I was big-time Barbie before that, all I cared about was shopping and clothes. So I’ve grown. Three cheers for me. But you know something? Despite all the uplift I’ve found and the solidarity and consolation, sometimes I wish I had grabbed that knife.”

She finished her vodka, waved to the bartender for our check.

“Here’s the business card they made for me, with my phone number and e-mail. Contact me directly, okay? My flight isn’t until tomorrow afternoon. Are they letting you see Cassie?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Tell her Pam Cord say it’s not her fault. She’s a victim, too.”

She dropped me at the hotel where Dan waited. I didn’t tell him about meeting her, mumbled something about getting lost. There was so much distance between us it was intolerable, so we lay in bed together watching TV, touching, holding each other, but not saying a word. It wasn’t any easier in the morning. We packed so we could leave on time, paid the bill, ate breakfast in the coffee shop, talked about the fleecy clouds we could see out the blinds. I needed the car to get into the base, which left Dan with nothing much to do, but our waiter told us about a World War Two museum in town and that’s where I dropped him off.

“Say hi for me,” he said. “Tell her how proud we are.”

The camp looked purposeful and empty at the same time. There was a tank, but it was an old one, harmless, mounted on a pedestal. I asked the first soldier I saw where the stockade was and she pointed to a low building I had already passed; it resembled the kind of motel you would only stay in if you were desperate.

Someone invisible buzzed me in. The visiting room had a high counter in the middle there was no way around. Strands of wire mesh ran along this counter like a ping-pong net, with metal stools on either side. There were no bars on the window, no surveillance cameras, none that I could see.

I sat there for a long time before Cassie came in. Alone, thank god—all the while we talked there was never any sign of a guard. She gave me a smile which didn’t last very long. She touched one side of the ping-pong net and I touched the other. She looked pale compared to how she looked in the courtroom, tired. I had the feeling she would have been happier if she could have rested her head on the counter, not have to sit up straight.

“How are you?”

Any mother would ask that first. Any daughter would frown in just that way.

“Yucky. I’ve started. Of all the bad times.”

“Are you taking anything? I have Motrin in my purse.”

I started to dig.

“I don’t think you better do that, Mom.”

“For cramps.”

“Uh, I’m a prisoner?”

“Well, do they have a medic? Ask them for some. Are you getting enough to eat?”

She shrugged. “Food was better over there. Tons better.”

“Your hair looks nice. You’re letting it grow long in back again. I’ve always liked it that way.”

She patted it, frowned, but not as deeply as before.

“Dad sends his love.”

“Yeah. Me, too. Tell him?”

“I will. Is there anything you need?”

“My phone back. They won’t let me have it. It’s going to be way boring.”

“I could send you some books.”

“I hate books.”

“You never used to. You always begged us for ones about horses and dogs.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, magazines then. Do you have any favorites?”

It was what I expected, a back and forth not much different than her phone calls from Iraq. Cassie’s always had two looks, the shy quiet one she uses on most of the world, and the easier happier one she saves for us. If boredom is sometimes mixed in with this, if sometimes her eyes drift elsewhere, like all parents we had grown used to that a long time ago.

Like on our phone calls, I filled in her silences with the latest news.

“Dad’s had to lay off three of his carpenters. It’s really bad out there. All your friends you graduated with can’t find work. I ran into Robbie Zimmer the other day and he’s so sick of getting turned down everywhere he’s thinking of joining the army.”

“Robbie? He’d last three days.”

“Nancy’s moving to China, it was the only place she could find a job.”

“China? Cool.”

“Jeannie and Uncle Tom bought an old house way out in the boonies. They’re going to fix it up and use it on weekends.”

“Neat.”

“Ida Rosenberg’s taking my classes at school while I’m down here.”

“Sorry about that.”

“No, it’s okay. That’s not what I mean. School year’s almost done anyway.”

The army was clever with the ping-pong net, too clever, since it seemed more a barrier than solid bars would have been. Sitting there five minutes and already I wanted to rip it apart. Small talk was horrible, there was so much else to say, and yet, like with the net, it seemed impossible to find a way around.

Cassie was the one who tried first.

“So. Wheat did you think of my big trial?”

“We think you were picked on. Not picked on—singled out.

Used for an example. Made a scapegoat. Blamed.”

“Uh, that was me in the photo?”

“Of course it was you. But you were badly trained, you were shipped over there without any preparation. Higher ups must have known how bad conditions were.”

“You haven’t seen shit.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what this terp kept telling me after the photos were taken. He and Truck.”

“What’s that mean, terp?”

“Interpreter. He and this contract interrogator, that’s what they told me. Swear you have not seen shit.”

“Truck?”

“Sergeant Mendoza. He’s built like one.”

“They told you to keep quiet?”

“Not exactly.”

“Cassie?”

She shook her head, this time with real energy.

“It wasn’t a cover-up, not at first. It was Truck’s brilliant idea to snap the pictures, not only of the iced guy, but of everything they did before that, like the dogs and the pyramid and underwear and what they did with sticks. He thought if he took pictures he could sell them for big bucks over the internet to rich guys who get off on that, seeing pictures of real-time interrogations. But then copies were made without his knowledge and so he couldn’t sell them anymore, they went on line for free, and that’s when he got busted. All those guards on the hard site? He was their leader.”

“Why didn’t that come out at his court martial?”

“About doing it for money?”

She gave me the look every mother knows, the one saying how could I be so naïve, so totally clueless.

“But it’s true, what happened? They called you to come down for a picture?”

“Yeah, it’s true.”

“And so you went?”

“I so went.”

“And you smiled?”

“I so smiled.” She cocked her head to the side, screwed her lips up, relaxed them into the bright, dazzling grin she had in the picture. “I can do it anytime I want.”

That hit me hard, her doing that—speechless, isn’t that what you’re supposed to be? But if anything I had too many words, useless words, useless questions, and she only answered them with grunts. I saw her glance at the wall clock. We still had twenty minutes left, but already she seemed bored.

“I met an interesting woman yesterday,” I said. Small talk—or maybe not. “She was in the courtroom, then we had coffee.”

“I noticed. Some weirdo come to stare, I figured, but then she smiled over at me. Who is she?”

“Pam Cord.”

The name meant nothing to her. She started complaining about her phone again, how she was going to go nuts without it—this seemed to be what worried her most. It surprised me, she’d never been particularly addicted before, and I was slow in understanding what emotion that masked.

The visiting room looked like a bad motel, and now, like at a bad motel, we could hear what sounded like a couple arguing three rooms down. Someone must have decided to turn the air-conditioning on, because it suddenly shot down on us like a fist, bringing with it the smell of french fries and ketchup.

“So,” Cassie said. She dropped her eyes to her hands. “There’s something else you probably should know about.”

“About the photo?”

“After the photo. A week after. Something worse.”

When she was little she had a funny grimace she made whenever she was nervous. Getting ready for a Christmas pageant, having to make a speech in class, even standing at the plate in softball. Her eyebrows, thin already, tightened into invisibility. Her mouth became tiny, her lips started trembling, she would suck in her cheeks. By high school she had outgrown that look— but here it was back.

“So, Cassie’s shy, right?”

“You’re better than you used to be.”

She shook her head. “Cassie Savino is shy, right? She likes time alone. Great move, huh? Join the U.S. Army and get all the privacy you want.”

I couldn’t see where this was going.

“It must be hard on you,” I said.

She shrugged the way people do when they’re trying to shed words that don’t count, grasp better ones just beneath.

“It was all so weird. Everywhere you looked and all the time, not just once and a while like at home. There were prisoners with no hands because they had been cut off for stealing before we got there, and no one thought that was unusual except me. No one thought the screaming was a big deal either. Little things got so they bothered you even more, until they became big things, way big.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Lightbulbs, right? At home they’re white, end of story. In the prison they were blue, these frosted Iraqi lightbulbs that hardly give off any light. The frosting was all cracked and peeling, so they looked like bad Easter eggs poked in the ceiling just above your bunk. I wanted to smash one, just to break apart the knot I felt inside all the time. After a while I realized smashing one wouldn’t be enough, that I needed to smash at least a dozen to feel better. I dreamed about that, taking a baseball bat running down the hall smashing the ugly blue lights, and not just dozens either, but every last bulb in prison. That scared me, wanting to do that so badly. But that’s not really what I need to explain.”

The air-conditioning, as if listening, suddenly went still.

“So, I’m over there trying not to smash lightbulbs, and meanwhile every woman in the brigade is hooking up with someone. A boyfriend, a girlfriend. Doesn’t matter which, but you better find someone to watch your ass, or else you’re going to catch all kinds of shit from the tough ones. But I’m not doing it, Cassie’s not playing along, and sure enough I start getting shit. A snot they called me. Barbie. Little Miss Virgin. I’m getting this morning, noon and night. It’s like I either have to immediately hook up with someone or show them I can be as bad a dick as they are.”

She looked up at me now—and, seeing her eyes, I wish she hadn’t.

“There’s a prisoner on the hard site named Rassoul or some weird Iraqi name. Truck had a friend called Nascar, he was so crazy about racing. Nascar was civilian but he was harder than any MI dude. He told us that Rassoul wasted three soldiers from 24th Brigade and raped one after she was already dead. They were trying to soften him up to get some high value intelligence but he was hanging pretty tough. They kept trying to scare him with all these stories about what would happen if he didn’t play along. One of the stories was about the Ice Princess—about how the Ice Princess was going to come into his cell and make the things they had already done to him seem like kid stuff. She was going to cut off his balls for starters. The only problem was, it was only a story, the Ice Princess didn’t really exist, it was just this crazy thing Nascar dreamed up.”

Cassie reached her hand to the net between us, pressed it down with her fingers.

“I’d been volunteering in the kennel, the dogs had learned to trust me, and now Nascar’s telling me I won’t be allowed to anymore if I don’t help them out by pretending to be the Ice Princess. They thought it would break him, having a girl come to his cell. That’s all I was supposed to do, just duck my head in. It’s eight at night, I’m just coming off shift, I go down there and they tell me to go into his cell and stare down at him like I was icy and mean. Yeah, roger that Staff Sergeant. No problem. I guess Rassoul believed their stories, because the moment I go in he cowers back in the corner and puts his hands in front of his balls. He had all kinds of gross cuts on his arms, they had interrogated him pretty good. I stared down at him for a few seconds then left, that’s all it was at first.”

“At first?” Never had my mouth been so dry.

“We kept a box of supplies at the end of the cell block. We called it the crap box because that’s what was in it, random crap, including these green light sticks, the kind we played with as kids. Don’t ask me what they were there for. Halloween parties or the Fourth of July or something . . . I go right over to the box and take out a light stick, go and find Nascar, have him take me back to Rassoul’s cell. He holds him down from behind. I break the light stick in two and jab at it with my knife until I pierce the plastic skin. There’s phosphorous in there, I knew that from fooling around with them as a kid. I cup the stick in my hands upside down so it won’t leak. Nascar holds Rassoul’s arm. It’s like Jesus’s arm—I remember thinking that with his beard and cuts he looked like he’d been pulled off a crucifix or something. I focused on the deepest cut and dribbled phosphorous down on it like a milky kind of soap. He screamed—right away he screamed. That surprised me because they told me he wasn’t a screamer, no matter what they did to him.”

Her eyes had never left mine, all the time she talked.

“It was over pretty fast. They pulled me out of the cell and I heard the door slam. I went up to my tier, changed my clothes, went to the kennel to play with the dogs.”

Never left mine, not once all the while she talked.

“That’s what I did, Mom.”

She leaned closer to the net, but just when her forehead almost touched it she snapped herself back and sat at attention. Say something, her posture said. Ask me questions, shout at me, scream. But I only had one question that first second, one that hammered me. And then? And then? And then? Finish the suspense for me. And then I’m just kidding. And then I made it all up. And then I so had you, Mom, you actually thought I was telling the truth.

She must have seen that in my expression, my need for her to say she was just horribly kidding, but she only shook her head. We sat there in silence, waiting for life to get past this unbearable moment to whatever barely bearable moment came next.

That was the first second. The next one is harder to describe, since my thoughts came faster than I ever believed possible. I felt an overwhelming feeling of negligence, the kind that makes parents want to slap their foreheads again and again. All the things we had told her over the years, all the warnings and cautions we rained down on her—they broke over me in a wave, every last one of them in a detailed list. Don’t forget to brush your teeth. Don’t swim right after lunch. Don’t jaywalk. Don’t accept rides from strangers. Don’t smoke. Don’t do drugs. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t have sex before you’re ready. All the standard don’ts, all that vigilance to keep her safe, and it was bullshit, it was crap, because while I spent nineteen years trying to think of every bad thing that could possible happen, I missed the real danger by a million miles. Don’t torture anyone, I should have said, starting when she was seven. Whatever else you do in life, don’t torture.

At the same time I tried sheltering under the same savage decision I briefly made during her court martial. Not my daughter. At the trial it had been my desperate attempt to renounce her, a trick that hadn’t fooled my emotions for even a second. Now it came to me differently. Not my daughter—but it wasn’t me saying that, it was the actual sense of life separating us, severing everything that held us close. And that feeling, of all the feelings I ever experienced, was by far the most terrible.

“It was just once,” Cassie mumbled.

As painful as it was, that first breaking wave of emotion finished with me fast. I could feel it sweep on past my shoulders toward whatever blind, unsuspecting parents waited next on line.

“I felt numb afterwards,” Cassie said. She pressed her knees together, twisted sideways on the stool. She didn’t stare at me anymore—she already understood I could say nothing to put it right.

“You felt numb?”

She nodded. “Big time.”

“How did your prisoner feel?”

Now she looked at me.

“Rassoul?”

“How did he feel?”

“I don’t know. Frightened I guess.”

“How old is he?”

“How old? I don’t know. Twenty something. He had a beard. We called him Gilligan.”

“Does he have a wife? Does he have kids? What town is he from?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“Does he have a mother? A father?”

“I don’t—”

“For God’s sake, Cassie!”

“Mom—”

“You tortured him!”

I yelled this loud as I could, as loud as I ever yelled anything. And that broke Cassie more than my words. Her face dissolved in tears—always before I thought that was just a cliché, but that’s what happened, to the point where it made no sense as a face anymore, it was just this runny wet blob sloshing crazily from side to side.

“I can’t hear you,” I said, trying to make my voice gentle. She struggled to say something through the tears, but it took a long time before the words were strong enough to make sense. She was sorry at f*cking up so bad, making us ashamed. She would leave the army and all that went with it, she was applying to veterinarian school, she had been saving this to tell me since she wanted to make us proud. She sobbed this out, and the sobs broke me just like my scream had broke her, and all I could do about it was reach my hand toward the net that separated us, the wire ping-pong net, and rest it there until she touched the other side.

“That’s wonderful, Cassie,” I said. “I’ll tell Dad. No, that’s wonderful news.”

I kept my voice soft and eventually the sobbing stopped. A buzzer went off in the ceiling which meant our time was over. She stood up, smiled or at least tried. When she turned away to the door I saw fresh scratches on the back of her neck extending up past her uniform collar, the kind of bloody scratches that come when someone digs their fingernails as deep into their own flesh as they can possibly go, then rakes them savagely upwards.

Dad had taken a taxi to the entrance gate and waited for me there. As usual, he had made an instant buddy, the soldier on guard duty, and the two of them shook hands before he hurried over to the car.

“How was your museum?” I asked—simple words, but it was all I could do to get them out.

“Those were the days all right. Jitterbug music, K-rations, Rosie the Riveter. It’s really well done.”

“Do you mind driving?”

“Sure.”

He didn’t say much more than that, and even the obvious question was a long time coming.

“How’s Cassie?”

“Fine. She misses her phone.”

I said it too quickly—he noticed, but said nothing. Both of us needed coffee so we stopped at the first rest area we came to. While Dan waited on line, I found a quiet corner and made my call.

“Pam? This is Vera Savino. We had coffee together yesterday.”

“Of course. How are you?”

“I know you’re flying out later, and we are, too, but I wonder if we could get a few minutes to talk?”

“Flying out of Tulsa? We could meet at my gate. Let’s see, I’ve got my boarding pass right here . . . Gate twenty-seven at five-thirty. Would that work?”

“I’ll see you there.”

The drive took longer than we thought, there was the usual hassle checking in, and by the time we got through security it was already past four. “Be right back,” I said, once we got to our gate. Dan glanced over his shoulder toward the rest rooms and nodded.

If Pam looked tired and harried yesterday, she looked even more so today, despite the crisp linen neatness of her skirt and blouse. She had her laptop open and was typing away while she talked on her phone, but she stopped the moment she caught sight of me through the crowd. We shook hands, but that wasn’t enough for her, and she gave me a big hug.

“We don’t have much time,” she said, frowning.

At the counter was the sign saying where the flight was going—Vancouver, which surprised me. Right above us was the TV monitor, but Pam gave it the finger and moved us to a quieter spot.

Before, when I wrote about my visit with Cassie, I left something out. After she told me what she had done, after she cried, I asked her one question. Does anyone else know? She said no. Nascar of course and Sergeant Mendoza, but no one higher up than that. Good, I remember thinking. Good! She was safe, no one would find out about it, she wouldn’t be charged with an extra crime. This is what I needed to explain to Pam, my shame at being glad, but how could I ever find the right way to begin?

She sensed my hesitation. “How was your visit with your daughter?”

“Difficult.”

She nodded. “I know about difficult. Before Jimmy shipped out that last time, we talked about whether to try and have a baby. It wasn’t about whether we wanted one, of course we wanted one, but whether or not the timing would work. It was all logistics, whether he would be home to help between deployments, whether or not his mom could come down from Chicago, whether I could get maternity leave. We even talked about whether it would be better to have a baby in the spring or fall, and we decided on spring, but the timing wasn’t right for that, so—” She pressed her palms together. “No baby.”

I took my deep breath. “Cassie and I had a game we played when she was little, something we did when we went out to eat. Watch the people coming in, I told her. Watch—”

That’s as far as I got with my explanation. Pre-boarding was announced for her flight, and the line formed on our toes.

“You’re flying to Canada?”

She nodded, ruefully nodded, and made a dismissive motion with her hand.

“The other members of the committee think I need a break. They might be right, too. What I’ve learned during our campaign is that most people can only be courageous in brief little flashes, that’s all the vast majority of them can manage. One act of courage, one moment of heroic goodness, then poof—their capacity for doing it is gone forever, either that or they never get another chance.”

“You’ve done lots of good.”

“My little flash? Maybe. But they’re right about my needing a vacation. What I worry about, really worry about, is how I’m going to be standing behind a microphone lecturing people who already agree with me that war is wrong, delivering my standard speech, and then I’m going to remember Jimmy and my anger gets the best of me and I blurt it out right in front of the cameras. ‘I hate America! I hate America!’ I’m going to yell that out and in one moment of weakness all the good work we’ve done comes crashing down in flames.”

They were announcing her flight now, she began gathering up her things.

“Anyway, it’s not a vacation, it’s a reconnaissance. Apartment hunting. I’m thinking of moving there. I want to live in a country that doesn’t bully. If I’m ever lucky enough to have a girl like yours that’s where I want to bring her up.”

“I’m going to call you,” I said.

“My co-chair is a wonderful man named Hank Clarkson. He lost a son in Afghanistan. Here, I’ll write down his number. We badly need new blood.”

I took the card, nodded. “You better hurry.”

“Love it or leave it, right? . . . You’re a good listener. Cassie’s lucky to have you.”

I took the card out on my first day here, taped it to the refrigerator where I would see it every morning. Pam Cord had crossed out her name, written in Hank Clarkson’s, the wonderful man, the man who lost his son in Afghanistan. But it’s her I want to call. I want to volunteer when I finish here, though I need to ask how exactly I can help. Will I actually have the nerve? I think Pam is right, that most people find courage only in sudden flashes. Here at the end I’m remembering Beth’s story, and how her husband Alan, so weak and manipulated, plunged into an icy river to try and save a man he hated. I can picture it so clearly, that brief moment standing on the bank before he made his decision. I will dive in, I picture him thinking. I will dive in. I will.

There’s lots more work left of course. Jeannie’s wallpaper, the rolls she picked out, waits in the parlor for me to hang. I must take my time with this, learn to use these new tools correctly. Brushes, yardsticks, trim knives, straight edges, seam rollers— tools not for ripping and tearing, but smoothing, pasting, prettying up. The paper is peach colored and gently Victorian, with a pattern that should be easy to match. Papering over won’t take nearly as long as stripping off, and then the walls will be far too beautiful not to like. The paper will hang here for fifty, sixty, maybe even a hundred years, so our stories will sleep on the walls for the rest of this century, or at least until Cassie is an old woman and what happened in Iraq is a line in a history book, nothing more.

There’s only a little space left before my words hit the edge of the wall and drop toward the floor. You who have found this will need to stoop to read the rest. But there’s so much left to confess, here in these last few inches where I can still confess anything. I stole paperclips from my teacher’s desk when I was seven and hid them in my closet in a silver horde. I hated saying prayers when I was little and by eleven decided there was no God. I resented Jeannie when she was born, how she stole my mother’s attention. I gave a girl named Judy Popp a quarter to be my friend. The two of us took ribbons from the fabric store and once I stole buttons entirely on my own. I smoked a cigarette behind Munten’s supermarket when I was twelve. I was boy crazy in school, a terrible flirt. I cheated on a history test in seventh grade. I necked with Zack Reese on our living room sofa when I was supposed to be babysitting. I smoked pot when I was a sophomore, hardly ever did homework. I waitressed in summers and never reported tips on my taxes. Dan on our honeymoon made love to me behind the wall in Washington in the middle of the day. For many years I drove without my seatbelt fastened. I always tell Dan I’m voting for one candidate, then go into the booth and vote for the other. As a young mother I was a failure at breast feeding. Five years ago at a convention in Phoenix I danced with a handsome teacher from Pennsylvania and let him tug me back to his room. I don’t read as much as I should. I color my hair to hide the gray. I’m ten pounds overweight. My daughter is a torturer.

That’s what you should know about me when it comes to truth. As for this country, our world, these times that to you will seem ancient. It’s not much different than it’s ever been. For the lucky ones, ease and prosperity. For the rest, war, nothing but war, nothing ever but war, war all the time now, war only war.