Kaely’s War
A novel. One chapter a day.
EIGHT Elaine had been at the desk for over an hour, scrolling through old emails from Kaely, looking for some kind of clue to ease her mind or better define her concern over the weeklong blackout from her niece. A cup of cold coffee, a days old glass of water with a floppy, paper straw drooping over the edge, an open bottle of red wine, and a hi-ball glass half-filled with light brown liquid cluttered the area around the computer screen. A note stuck at the upper left edge of the monitor read, STRESSED, EL? The stickie was from Jeff. He’d been at the house to give their old cat his afternoon diabetes medicine, which he was doing while Elaine’s unpredictable work/mother-care schedule continued. He was a master at reading his wife’s clutter: Unfinished drinks on the desk were a sure sign Elaine was wobbling on the rails. She loved that he knew that.
It had been almost a year since Jeff moved into his own place about a half mile away. They would talk, periodically, about what had happened between them before that decision was made, but they never felt comfortable settling on one particular thing. Living separately just seemed like a better idea. Life together had become predictably grumpy and occasionally vicious. If you asked Elaine about the most frequent source of conflict between them, she’d say it was her family. If you asked Jeff, he’d agree but add: “El’s too busy with the world of DonnerLand to have time to think about working on something new with me.”
“Something new” was the running conversation that always became contentious — the one about having children. Elaine was a busy legal advocate for environmental agencies. She loved her work and couldn’t imagine ever giving that up. That’s how the discussion typically started. Jeff would respond with his long-standing belief that modern women didn’t give up their careers when they became mothers, they worked out childcare/career sharing arrangements with their spouses. At this juncture, the conversation could go several non-production directions. The most recent between Jeff and Elaine had gone like this:
“Sure,” Elaine said. “You’re a political speech writer. A jet is always waiting for you at DFW.”
“Just because your father was only home for holidays and birthdays doesn’t mean I’ll be that kind of father.”
“He was not that kind of father.”
“He absolutely was, El.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not ready for my own kids, Jeff. I have my hands full enough with Kaely.”
Most of their talks about children found a way to Kaely. At that point, Jeff would sigh and resign from the conversation. Then Elaine would soften her beautiful green eyes and say, “I love you madly and I want to have a litter of babies with you someday.”
“You know I’m talking about humans and not kittens, right?”
Each year that passed, Jeff knew was another year closer to a completely locked door on the subject. His wife was 38. He was tired of begging.
He rented his place before he even mentioned it to Elaine — and when he did finally tell her he was leaving, she didn’t seem too surprised.
“We’re not breaking up, are we?”
“I don’t think so. Just taking a breather.”
Neither of them seemed interested in looking elsewhere for companionship or sex. They simply preferred — for now — living apart. It was working.
Elaine had gone back ten months in her inbox — to the beginning of Kaely’s deployment in Afghanistan. Reading the words now, in light of Kaely’s phone call home a week ago and her disappearance since then, Elaine was spinning between frustration, anger, and fear. The old email that pitched her up from the desk and into circles of pacing was the first one she’d received from Afghanistan:
Auntie El,
Big surprise! The army didn’t tell me the whole truth about my business over here. Day One, CO shows up at the hooch with an M24. Tells me one of his snipers “went home in a box” and until a new one shows, I have a spotting partner and will have most of my duty in the tower for a while. Ha! So I have another “Baby” by my side and I guess I’ll be taking pictures of mosquito wings doing push-ups here at the FOB for a while since I’m not likely to get off base. I know that makes you happy!
Elaine reread the email every time her walking panic circle took her past the monitor. It wasn’t “home in a box” or “M24” that pushed every alarm button inside Elaine as she studied Kaely’s recounting of her beginnings in Afghanistan…it was mosquito wings.
Elaine had managed to wrestle words from her older sister in stages over the 6 days that had passed since Kaely’s call.
“Hurt?” she would go over and over again, back to the word hurt.
“Not that bad, is what she said.” Julie would answer. Until she remembered what Kaely had actually said was, “not dead or anything.”
“By men on base? What does that mean?”
“Well,” Julie reasoned very calmly, “Obviously it means either A — some of the bad guys got on base, which I highly doubt since the place is surrounded by people like Kaely who can kill someone in the blink of an eye…or B — Kaely got a little too flirty with someone and then regretted it and probably got pushed around a bit.”
“I think I’d rather go with A than B, Jules…” Elaine could not believe the way Julie talked about her own daughter sometimes. “Surely you don’t like the idea of Kaely being sexually harassed or assaulted.”
“Oh, come on El,” Julie put dramatic accent on “come on” and then locked her eyes on her sister’s. “You and I both know what it’s like to work in a man’s world. There’s just a lot of that shit you have to put up with.”
Elaine wanted to bang her fists on her sister’s chest and scream something…anything…right into her face. Instead, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, along with her words. Between clenched teeth she said, “I’ve never been hurt by anyone in my office, Julie.”
Elaine straightened and cleared her throat because she wanted to be sure she was heard. She took one slow blink and delivered as stern a look as she had in her repertoire before she said, deliberately, one word — clear and loud — at a time. “And neither have you.”
Julie was taken aback, but not particularly deterred by Elaine’s unusual nastiness. She cocked her head and said, “I’m not sure how you’d know that, your highness.”
Because you are a drama queen and enjoy, almost more than anything, walking through life as a victim — particularly of men….that’s how. Elaine thought it. She said this instead:
“I guess what I’m saying,” her intensity intentionally modified, “is we have no idea what could happen with the kinds of people there are in Kaely’s work situation…we have no idea what could happen, Jules.”
“The kinds of people?” Julie seemed personally insulted. “I get the feeling you’re saying all our boys in the army are barbarians, El.” Julie immediately began to retreat from the fight and started to pick at her nails. She didn’t really want to entertain any of Elaine’s thoughts on war and war fighters, but she would do it for a minute, she thought, if it meant putting the Kaely issue to rest. “Is that what you’re saying? Because I’m going to have to take exception to that if you are.” She looked up from her hands and gave Elaine something between a smirk and a smile.
It was familiar political ideology and was the Donner way to talk about Elaine’s pacifism. If you didn’t approve of war, you didn’t support the children who were fighting them. Damnit. Elaine bit the insides of her cheeks until they almost bled. Her sister’s comment was both distraction from what she was trying to talk about and bait to make her angry at politicians and generals instead of Julie. She knew exactly how this conversation was going to go and it was going nowhere near Elaine’s concerns, which at the moment were for Kaely, not the pathetic state of the world at large. She knew she could walk away without saying another word to Julie, and that would be the end of it. But she was determined to open her sister’s eyes to the potential danger her daughter was in. Finally, she let the grip on the inside of her mouth ease and said, as calmly as she could muster, “I’m just worried about her, that’s all. Let’s not fight.”
Julie’s shrug said, Close enough to an apology.
“Well, you’re a good aunt, and I know Kaely has always counted on you to see things her way.”
Her way, Elaine thought. Never the right way, of course.
“So, did she say who the men were?” Elaine had asked the question at least a dozen times already. Julie had always said no, I don’t think so. Elaine felt defeated just by the fact that she was asking again. But Julie had something new this time.
“Mosquito wings. She said a couple of mosquito wings. And a hard stripe. She didn’t take names.” The last four words were delivered with mocking sarcasm, as if Julie was making fun of Kaely. Elaine was horrified. Why wouldn’t a mother be repulsed and enraged by those words?
“Mosquito wings?” Elaine jumped on the new information. “What are mosquito wings? Is that someone in the army or do you think it’s slang for Afghans or what?” Even after referring to other soldiers on Kaely’s base as “those kind of people” Elaine would not let herself imagine three or four of them would gang up on one little enlisted girl.
“No idea,” Julie said, slapping her hands together and standing to walk to a mirror where she poked aimlessly at her tangle of long, over-processed hair. “We’d have heard something by now if it was a big deal, El. Let it go.”
The ringing phone was the final bell of their emotional boxing match. It was Didi with a quick twelve word message: “She’s back! Mama is sitting up and making jokes. Come over here!”
Beverly — the Sleeping Beauty, as her doctor was now calling his formerly comatose patient — had rallied just before dinner time. She opened her eyes, asked for a martini, chuckled at the delight and horror on her oldest daughter’s face, then said, “Well then, sit me up and bring me some water…in a martini glass.”
Within minutes, Didi, Julie, Elaine, and Frances were standing in Beverly’s bedroom laughing at their mother’s silliness, answering her calls for buttered toast, tea, and make up, and running for “those slippers in the closet that I got at Barney’s last year.”
When Beverly came back, she came all the way back.
Dr. Henry, an old family friend who’d bent many an elbow at the Donner family bar, was there, and stood beside Beverly’s daughters awestruck at the moving, mouthy wonder before him. “It appears your mother knows more about her condition than I do,” he said. “So, I say listen to your Mama. Other than the usual meds prescribed before she lapsed into this latest episode, she can have whatever she wants. She can do whatever she wants.”
“A martini?” Beverly asked, looking like a 5-year old trying to get a cookie out of the jar just before dinner time.
“Bev,” the doctor said, “If you want a martini and these girls can stand to see their mother drink one, then have a martini.”
“Really, Mama…” Didi started after glaring at the doctor. Her tightly squeezed face said, We did not go through months of heart wrenching rehab to let her stagger in a stupor toward death. Julie quickly read the signs and elbowed her older sister in a teasing way before saying, “Let’s see if you can walk and talk for 24 hours before we start stirring up martinis, Mama. How ‘bout that?”
Beverly smiled at her number two daughter. “Julia Donner, did you ever live a minute on this earth that you didn’t speak your mind?” There was a millisecond of breath-holding tightness in the room before Bev laughed and said, “Okay, let’s all have a cup of tea, then.” As the collective breath of relief emerged from woman to woman, Beverly turned toward Didi with a bit of an eye roll, and under her breath she said, “And Didi…ease up. I was kidding.”
Didi leaned in to kiss her mother on the forehead and whispered, “It’s my job. I’m the oldest.”
The evening that followed was nothing short of a Broadway level production of colliding roles and their players. Didi was determined to reorganize the spreadsheet of schedules she had put in place to make sure Beverly was watched and attended by at least one daughter ‘round the clock. Now meals and baths would need to be incorporated into the plan. It was time for dinner, and she wanted to make sure everyone had a square meal. “As long as we’re here, we might as well get some takeout, right?” But no one wanted food, really. Even so, food was ordered.
Julie was busy ignoring Didi in every possible way, including the making of that martini 24 hours ahead of schedule, which she delivered to Beverly’s side but ended up drinking herself when her mother shook her head and wagged her finger with a sideways naughty-child glance at Didi. Elaine was smoothing blankets and fluffing pillows and watching for the usual sister landmines that she would have to throw her body on top of to protect Beverly from sensing her condition had caused the girls any stress. Frances had taken a seat in the only real chair in Bev’s bedroom, had kicked her Oscar de la Renta shoes off, and located the spotlight on the evening’s stage where she regaled her mother with the news of every concerned person who had stopped by or called or emailed over the week Beverly had been, as Fran said it, “Lights out, nobody home.” They played their parts like the pros they were: The Controller, The Distracter, The Peacemaker, The Baby. Beverly couldn’t have been more delighted with the show.
It had been a monumental 18 hours for the Donner women. And now, home at her desk, Elaine was hoping for just one more miracle. A clue. A new avenue to her niece. Something. Anything.
And there it was. In the first Afghanistan email from Kaely. The words mosquito wings. She had clearly used it to refer to people on base. Elaine was furious. “I can’t think,” she said aloud, throwing her head hard onto her desk, as if some brilliance would fall out if she hit with enough force. “What should I do? What can I do?” She searched the internet for a definition of mosquito wing: “A slang term for an Army Private’s stripes.” She paced the floor some more and pounded her fists into the ribs of a high backed leather chair. She picked up the phone to call Julia and put it down. Four times. Finally, Elaine emailed Kaely again, this time with more pointed questions than she had asked before. Instead of generic “I’m worried about you, honey” and “I hope you are alright” Elaine wrote “I’m out of my mind” and “I believe you were trying to tell your mother you were assaulted by a person in your unit.” And then in all caps: “PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE ANSWER THIS EMAIL. I LOVE YOU.” Elaine hit send and began circling the room again, practically at a run. “Oh my God!” she shouted. Then again, at the top of her lungs, “OH MY GOD!” She almost threw herself at her desk, crying as she imagined Kaely alone in that God-forsaken country, longing for the comfort and healing of an embrace from someone who loved her. She grabbed her favorite photo of Soldier Kaely, surrounded by young Afghan boys, all crowding in to get a look at the picture she has just taken of one of them. Elaine had printed and framed the picture the day Kaely emailed it to her. She couldn’t help but smile at the obvious delight on the scarf circled faces of the boys, and in the twinkling eyes of her niece. It was cold when the picture was taken, that was obvious. The children were lined with fatigue and hunger and age beyond their years. That was also obvious. The smiling, uniformed American was, Elaine would bet, the gentlest thing the boys had encountered in their lives. She hugged the photo to her chest. Pleading prayers were swinging in and out of her wild internal rocking between clarity and rage. She turned back to the computer and addressed a second email to Kaely.
She typed 322 days. And then added or sooner. Please call or write. PLEASE. I want to help.
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KAELY’S WAR — CHAPTER 7 (if you need to go back)
