by Holly Tubbs
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Someone was knocking on our doors in the summer of 2003. Although it wasn’t a person, really, any more than it was a thing. It was a feeling, and it demanded to be let in, like a gulp of air to a lung. Polluted air.
Dread pulsed through the base, slow and regular as the rotation of Marines at the gate. I saw it in line at the Commissary. I remembered it from school, in Mrs. Fretenborough’s unsteady hand at the white board. I heard it pass in sobs down the drain when Mom took her showers. Still, I didn’t expect to hear it on the Cavalier’s door any more than I hoped it would land on my own.
I rode bikes with Allie and Sophie Cavalier. We sat together in the backseat of our car going places, and in theirs coming back. We’d become friends in the natural order, before our mothers did, after our fathers deployed to Iraq. Allie was eleven and Sophie was nine, which meant I was in the middle, like a toenail stuck between polish and skin. Allie wore training bras and Sophie still sucked her thumbs into prunes whenever she was nervous. Their mother Barbara told Mom that I was a healthy buffer.
The three of us had been asleep upstairs in their shared bedroom when the knuckles of a skinny Lieutenant Colonel brought the news that every spouse in Yuma was dodging in waves of nausea. We woke just before midnight to the vibration of Barbara’s screams in our ears like radio static turned all the way up. Clumsily we found her, each of us in our own way, and saw the broken vessel leak red into her eye as she damned the Marine Corps to hell over and over again in the ready arms of a somber-looking chaplain. He and the Lieutenant Colonel wouldn’t leave until I phoned Mom across the street. She had to peel me off the staircase where I’d been holding tight to Sophie’s hands to keep her from gnawing them bloody. Allie stood beside us, dangling her arms helplessly over the banister as her mother sat moaning and running her nails through the carpet. I wasn’t able to stay the rest of that night, or any night after it, and Allie and Sophie moved before we could ride bikes again.
***
Leonard and Kristen Page moved into Allie and Sophie’s house six days after Mr. Cavalier was buried. It was just hours after the fourth of July, but it didn’t feel a bit like it with Dad gone. Mom never was one to light fireworks in the street and run back to the curb before they exploded, so the day had passed slowly, melting the red, white, and blue into a purplish bruise that still hurt to press.
I sat beside the window at the front of our house, watching dirt-stained men move box after box through the same front door I’d seen them drain of Cavalier things in weeks prior. They and their enormous truck were objects I’d watched before, or versions of them.
A woman with bright blonde hair emerged from the garage, humming a cool tune into the dry heat of the afternoon. She was tan like the Arizonans, only it was orange, like juice. Mom said it was fake, the way they did in Hollywood. The pearly license plate on the rear of their Jeep had California carved in cursive red letters, so I guessed that was true.
My eyes followed the bubbly figure as it rounded the corner to embrace a towering, bald-headed man inspecting the water hose. She rose to the tips of her toes and whispered something in his ear. Together they smiled and wandered back inside, her little left hand tangling itself in the great palm of his right. I was glad Mom hadn’t seen the two of them like that. It would’ve made her sad.
Mom yelled from the kitchen that we were going to the Commissary for the sweets to make Barbara Cavalier’s chewy chocolate chip cookies. They had a secret ingredient, and it was cream cheese. She said we were baking to welcome the orangey lady and her tall husband, as a gesture of neighborliness. Barbara brought us a Tupperware container full of those cookies when we moved in two years ago, and she kept the cream cheese bit to herself until she and Mom were tipsy off wine and the secret slipped out.
Before Dad left, we used to go to the Commissary on Sundays after late service at the Foothills Church of Christ. I knew as well as Mom that Dad never came along for Elmer Jay’s sermons, which were boring as a live reading of the Constitution. Dad went for the grocery shopping, since Sundays were the only day he could go. I didn’t mind, since I liked the Commissary best on Sundays. Everyone was bright as eggs on Easter in their church clothes, and it gave the eyes a break from the usual browns and greens.
Dad always sent me off on my own, hunting for a jar of hamburger pickles or two cans of great northern beans. I got a dollar bill for every one of them I could find, but the money never was mine to keep. I gave it to the bagger at the register on Dad’s orders, and I was usually glad to drop it in their tip can when they thanked me with a smile.
When it was only Mom, we went to the Commissary on Saturdays, or sometimes right after school, and she kept me tucked under her armpit like a second purse. There wasn’t any sense in fighting the Sunday crowd with Dad away. That’s what Mom said, but I knew it made her sick to see so many husbands at once with Dad’s same haircut.
***
The Commissary always smelt like a giant refrigerator that had been left open overnight. I’d recently gotten my own ID; a rite of passage on my tenth birthday. It became a most dignifying privilege to flash it at the woman in the rolling chair who checked them at the entrance. I didn’t really have to show anything, since Mom’s ID was enough, but I didn’t see any point in having one if I kept it hidden like a police badge.
Mom and I traipsed the aisles for ages looking for whatever it was that went in those cookies. A woman with a tight brown bun knotted to the top of her head was standing in front of the yellow bags of chocolate morsels. The sleeves of her uniform were rolled so tightly on her arms that the veins bulged in her hands. I watched her closely, wondering how Mom would feel if I became a woman Marine. Dad said I was strong enough to do it, but I brushed him off since I could hardly do two pull-ups in a row. I knew he meant my head was strong enough, but I didn’t believe it.
Hardly anyone was in line when we came to the black seatbelt-looking ribbons that formed a winding maze for us to stand between. A Commissary worker in a blue vest hollered for us to move to register number four. They always hollered, even if you were close enough to have a conversation.
The lady behind register number four had blue eyes and dark purple eyeshadow peeking from behind rusty glasses. She caught me staring at her face and asked if I’d had a good summer vacation. I said I missed school, and that my favorite subject was social studies. They always wanted to know what your favorite subject was, as if it gave them insight into who you’d be.
“They teachin’ anything new about Arizona?” She peered curiously into my face and scanned the silver box of cream cheese until it beeped. I didn’t know what she meant by new, and I didn’t feel much like figuring it out, so I said no.
“That’s the problem with schools nowadays,” The lady turned her attention to Mom. “They quit teaching anything new after Barry Goldwater.”
“We learned about Sandrada O’Connor,” I remembered Mrs. Fretenborough being from the same town as her or something.
“Sandra Day O’Connor,” Mom said, smiling at the lady and shaking her head.
“Listen here,” the purple eyelids narrowed in on me “you do somethin’ special, and get Yuma in them history books” The lady winked at me and I didn’t bother telling her that if I did something special, the history books wouldn’t say I was from Yuma. They wouldn’t say I was from anywhere.
***
We carried the cookies, more than a dozen of them chewy with cream cheese, across the street the next day. I watched the moving truck leave that morning, and it seemed the blonde lady was the only one home when we came to the door. She said her name was Kristen Page and that she was glad to meet us.
“We’re just there, across the street,” Mom pointed to our house, a spitting image of the others. All the houses on base looked the same, with three windows on the top and two on the bottom. Each of them were shells of white stucco, with three beige beams holding up the front porches. The trees looked unnatural in the yards, barely standing three feet high in a soil of white stones.
“I’m so happy you came by,” Kristen smiled a big, white-toothed grin. She looked like something out of a magazine with the tan and shiny hair and watermelon-looking breasts. “Yuma isn’t much to look at, huh?”
Mom sighed and conceded with a nod “Where’re y’all coming from?”
“San Clemente,” Kristen answered “Camp Pendleton.”
Mom’s eyes lit up like matches “Oh, I know it well. We were there years ago.”
“I miss it already,” Kristen brushed a strand of hair from her forehead and Mom smiled understandingly.
“Well, if you like I can point you toward the best Mexican food this side of the border,” Mom tried to cheer Kristen into feeling better about trading the golden sand of southern California for Yuma’s dirt. It must’ve worked, since they talked about all the places they ought to try, and by the time we left, I thought Kristen’s shoulders sat a little higher than before.
***
The Pages had a son they called Lenny Jr. I met him four days after we delivered the cookies. He and Kristen dropped by to return our Tupperware, and while the grown-ups talked cream cheese and public school, Lenny and I each got a good look at the other. He was taller than I was, but barely, and his hair was cut short like his dad’s. It was as white-blonde as Kristen’s, only he had the freckles of a ginger. Even his lips were freckled.
We didn’t say much then, but I saw him that same weekend hitting rocks down the street with a baseball bat, and I went out to ask him why he didn’t use a real baseball.
“They’re all packed up in one of the garage boxes,” He seemed irritated, but not the kind triggered by my talking to him, which pleased me. Mom always unpacked the garage last, too. She said it didn’t matter much what the garage looked like, so long as the inside was presentable.
“I’ve got some, if you wanna borrow them.” They were still wrapped up in plastic on a shelf in my bedroom. Dad always meant to throw them with me. I thought Lenny might like someone to play with, so I ran to get them before he could decide it was lame to play ball with a girl who wore shoes with chalk-stained laces.
***
Lenny was twelve and a half, but he told everyone he was thirteen. The only reason I knew he was twelve, was because I asked what year he was born.
“If you were born November twentieth, nineteen ninety-one, how come you’re thirteen?” I badgered him in our third conversation after we’d become something like friends. He only shrugged and said it was because he was born on the east coast.
“Why’d you wanna be thirteen so bad?” We were sitting on the grassy knoll behind the culd-dee-sac on our street. We’d been going there in the evenings before supper to throw the hot pink baseballs I’d forgotten were hot pink.
“Means you’re not a kid anymore.” Lenny looked out at the faded blue color of the sky, sweat dripping from his hairline.
“You still look like a kid,” I said back teasingly and he narrowed his eyebrows at me.
“You know what you look like?” He reached beside him to pluck something from the grass. I shook my head and he tossed a pink sphere at my shoulder “Like somebody who can’t catch a baseball.”
***
Mom didn’t care that Lenny was a boy. I thought she might, but she cared less about everything the longer Dad was gone. She and Kristen were practically as good of friend as Mom and Barbara had been. They sat around together outside on our back porch and talked about the state of things. Once I found a cigarette snubbed out in the pavement where I liked to draw with chalk. I disposed of it by tossing it over our fence. I wondered if that was how Mom had chosen to cope, or if it was only Kristen coming to our house for an escape.
Another man who lived on our street went missing out there where Dad was. Mom said she saw his wife through an open window, lighting a candle and blowing it out over and over. I nearly told her I preferred candles to cigarettes, but I didn’t want her to ground me from playing with Lenny.
Lenny was a different kind of friend than Allie or Sophie had been. I felt a sort of duty to the Cavalier’s, like they wouldn’t have made it without me. Lenny didn’t need me, so I felt easier about hanging around him. He was the kind of boy that Allie would’ve whispered to me about once Sophie had gone to bed. She’d have been oblivious to the fact that he could never like a girl who only wore training bras to have the strap show through her shirt. Lenny wasn’t curious about the things people did to grab his attention. That’s another reason I liked to be around him.
We rode bikes only once, and I tried to peddle without holding onto the handle bars. I thought I ought to prove that I deserved the time he gave me. I fell and tore the skin clean off my knee. All he did was smirk and say that clumsy people die sooner, but he still came out to see if I was alive the next day.
There were some days when Lenny didn’t want to come outside and he’d leave me standing on the porch, nursing a strange new feeling of rejection. On those days, it was awkward to see his eyes divided by a sadness that I didn’t understand, and that he wouldn’t explain. Mostly it made me angry. His father was home, while mine was in Iraq, and Mr. Cavalier was dead. I saw no reason for Lenny to be sad, and it burnt me up on the inside. There was an afternoon in August when it burnt me up so completely that I came tearing through our front door crying like I’d broken a bone.
“What is it?” Mom asked when I melted into the living room floor. A wrinkle that lived to deepen was creased in her forehead.
“Lenny” I sniffled, agitated by the water trickling down my cheeks. “He won’t ever tell me what’s the matter with him.”
Mom’s face darkened, then faded into a peculiar nervousness. “His parents have a lot going on.”
I wiped my nose across my arm and stared at her blankly. “Like what?” She looked down at her hands and the top of her lip trembled. I thought she might cry.
“Is it Mr. Page?” I asked “Is he going to deploy like Daddy?” Mom shook her head and at once a tear fell.
“Momma don’t cry,” I said, feeling my own stream of tears thicken. “Just tell me what it is so you don’t have to know it by yourself.”
She looked at my face and twirled a strand of sandy hair that had fallen from my ponytail in her fingers. “Kristen is very sick.” Mom was practically whispering, barely opening her mouth to say it, “She has a brain tumor that the doctors can’t get to in surgery.”
I looked at my feet. I thought the socks peeking out from my purple Chuck Taylor’s might be the same greenish ones I’d been wearing when the skinny Lieutenant Colonel asked me to phone Mom from the Cavalier’s house. I felt shrunken, as though a cruel audience were watching me and laughing.
“Is she gonna to die?” I looked at Mom and hoped that her face wouldn’t look the way it did. I was ashamed at my thoughts, how they were pressing me to ask if the cigarette I’d found was Kristen’s. If she’d taken up smoking as a second death wish, or if it was Mom asking for a first.
“They don’t know.”
***
Lenny asked me one time how I felt about Dad being deployed.
“Sometimes I forget he’s gone,” I admitted “But then I look at Mom, and I have to remember.” Lenny watched me for a long time after I said that. I started to wonder if he was ever going to say anything again.
“I get that,” He said at last. I wanted to ask what it was that he got, but I couldn’t. He didn’t know that I knew about his mother’s tumor, and I guessed he wanted it to stay that way. Lenny cleared his throat. “It’s not fair, is it?”
“What’s not?”
“Having to live this way.” Lenny’s face turned a light shade of pink, like his body was fighting off the mist in his eyes. I knew what he meant. There was a wrongness that spread out from the armpit of our community. It was like a smell of death that always hung around, and not everybody wanted it, or approved of it. Even Dad said war was the devil’s playground, but I wondered where Mr. Cavalier fit into that sort of game, and if it meant he lost.
“People die where your dad is, you know that?” Lenny’s words sliced. They forced themselves between us, like a papercut to the bone. All of a sudden, a thought pricked at my brain that he only saw me as a kid who didn’t understand loss the way he did. I felt my jaw tighten. He never saw the skinny Lieutenant Colonel or the chaplain holding down Barbara Cavalier. I saw them, and I remembered them better than my own grandparents.
“You ever feel like your mom, or whoever, would be better off without having to worry about you?” Lenny spoke slowly, carefully. I stared at his face and clenched my hand into a fist. I was going to punch him when he turned to look at me. “Like if you ran off or got killed in an accident, she’d be relieved once she got done being upset?” His eyes cut to me and they had that dark sadness that I hated to see, but couldn’t look away from. I released my fist. I thought I felt the way he described, or something akin to it. I got a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach, like some tiny person had swung from my rib cage and landed in the pit whenever Mom cried on the phone to her sisters in Texas or held extra tight to my hand before dropping me in the loop at school. There’d be less to cry about, and less to hold onto if I were strong like Dad, or even thirteen instead of ten.
All I said was I felt it sometimes, and Lenny dug his thumb into his palm.
***
A week before school was set to start again, I came in through the back door with chalk dust on my knees. I heard the volume of Mom’s voice go soft, like singers in a serious choir. I padded on the balls of my feet to the kitchen and flattened my back on the wall that gave way to the living room.
“He wasn’t supposed to” Kristen’s voice carried shakily from the furthest corner of the room.
“They never keep their word” Mom said back. I bet she was shaking her head. She’d resorted to shaking her head anytime she talked about the Marine Corps.
“Lenny’ll be devastated.” Kristen sighed.
“By now the kids are used to them being gone,” Mom said gently “and they’re more resilient than we are.” I flinched at that.
“I don’t know how I’ll tell him we’re not staying once Leonard deploys.” I felt my chest fill with an oblong weight. They’d only just gotten to Yuma, and Lenny hadn’t even started school yet. “Dr. Warren said this oncologist in DC is the best chance I’ve got – the only chance.”
“He’ll understand.” Mom said firmly “He’ll have to.”
***
There was a knock on the door that woke me at six the morning. It was urgent, like a siren in a fire. I rolled to my side, looking at the wall beside my bed. The pounding continued. I sat up, thinking suddenly of Barbara Cavalier. In the blackness of my mind, I pictured her drowning in the vessel her own screams had burst in the white of her eye. I thought of Allie and Sophie, and the smell of their room as we’d come running out of it. It smelt sweet like the dust on stuffed animals. Wasted.
Mom’s footsteps descended wearily from the second floor, and I willed my limbs to carry me to the top of the staircase in great, heavy movements. She shouldn’t have to know it alone. Whoever it was, whatever they had to say.
I saw Mom standing in front of the door. The shadow of a large figure could be seen on the other side of it. The figure of a man. Mom paused to inhale deeply and press her forehead against the cold metal, as if whispering some final, desperate prayer.
She clicked the latch to unlock the deadbolt and peeked with just her nose and eyes to see who was standing outside. I saw her upper body droop in relief as she opened the door wider to reveal Mr. Page standing on our porch with frantic, bushy eyebrows and his sleeves bunched up around his elbows.
“Leonard? Leonard?” Mom tried to penetrate the blankness of his face. It seemed he couldn’t hear a thing. My eyes adjusted to the brightness, and just behind Mr. Page, lights faded in whistling circles from the roof of two black and white police cars driving away. They were sparks of red and white and blue, like an American flag exploded into fireworks against the pale sky.
“Leonard?” Mom repeated “Is it Kristen?” At his wife’s name, his eyes found Mom’s face in the new daylight and his forehead scrunched tight like he’d only just realized that he was standing in our doorway and that Mom was talking to him. Mr. Page shook his head slowly and definitely. I caught a familiar sadness in his eyes as they rose to meet my own, and at once, I understood.
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Holly Tubbs is currently a third-year law student in Louisiana.
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