Eleven Days (15 page)

“But it’s not
my
birthday.”

“But I might not see you on your birthday,” she says.

After cake they sit outside. Admiring the stars, Jason says, “Not a great night for criminal activity.”

When Jason goes to bed, Sara stays on the porch. She can see some stars; perhaps they waited a bit too late tonight to shine quite as brightly. She remembers attending the Academy Ball in Jason’s last year there. A group of kids—eight boys and eight girls—had taken dancing lessons, and that night they put on a show for the parents and guests. As the crowd made a wide circle around them, the pairs performed a classic waltz. The boys wore black tie, and the girls wore white dresses. It was such a simple, old-fashioned image.

Around that same time Sara saw a documentary that someone she knew had worked on as an editor. In it, prominent physicists discuss the existence and history of black holes. One of them, asked to explain how we know that black holes exist, said, “Have you ever been to a debutante ball. Have you ever watched the young men dressed in their black tuxedos, and the girls in their white dresses, and the lights turned low.” He went on to say that we know the men are there because the girls are moving. We cannot see the men; they disappear. But the girls continue to hold our eye. “The girls,” the physicist put it, “are the ordinary stars. And the boys are the black holes. You can’t see a black hole any more than you can see the boy, but the girl going around gives convincing evidence that there must be something there, holding her in orbit.”

Sara had looked at those boys that night at Annapolis and thought of them disappearing. There was a war on, and so many of them would join it.
Their absence keeps us in orbit
, she thinks. And she makes a mental note to tell Jason this story in the morning.

But when she wakes up, her son is gone. He left a note on the table, secured by her running shoes, into which he’d threaded new laces:

DON’T WORRY. AND THAT’S AN ORDER. I LOVE YOU.

*

Jason drove through the night. He used to speed a lot, but more recently he often goes under the limit, an ironic gesture of defense against an invisible enemy. He listens to books on tape because radio requires too much effort, and while he’s working he never follows new bands anyhow. He likes listening to tapes because he
rarely makes time to read these days, and because being forced to listen keeps his mind off other things.

The last book he listened to from start to finish was a gift from Kipling, a collection of poems from the Great War compiled in the late sixties, read by actors who were famous at that time, all of them English and all of them active, public supporters of Americans protesting the war in Vietnam. And yet they had all agreed to donate any proceeds from the tape’s sales to veterans. “Do you think it’s strange,” Jason had asked Kipling, “that this is antiwar art, but the benefits will go to those who fought the war?” And Kipling had said, “It’s about the poems.” He also told Jason he had bought it on eBay for four dollars, so he doubted much benefit had accrued to the vets.

Should he have told his mother he was leaving? He had tried to sleep, but once in his bed, he started to feel anxious, like he was losing time. The bed didn’t quite fit right anymore. Was this place still his home? For how long? The choice quickly became simple: either drive now, or pray yourself to sleep, only to wake up too soon, eat some cereal, hate goodbye, and then take half a day driving. He decided it was better just to go. They had had their time together. She had seen that he was whole and unchanged. He had artfully avoided talking about anything too pressing. And he would be home for Christmas. He would be home to see the snow on the trees.

After Vanessa Redgrave reads Rupert Brooke, Jason ejects the CD. He sets the dial to cheap pop songs for the duration of the drive. The light is starting to come up.

DOWNTOWN WILMINGTON, DELAWARE,
MAY 11, 2011

If you blink on the drive to the train station, the landscape shifts, from horse country to suburbs. Blink again, and you’re in an inner city. In the tall buildings bankers signed contracts and insurance brokers parsed their actuarial tables, minding the arc of loss. Outside the station the men in navy suits walked very fast, but the smokers, forced into exile outside under law, lingered. It was an odd combination of rush and stray.

Sam had driven fast, so fast that Sara was sure they’d be pulled over. He navigated her city’s streets with the confidence of a native, although he’d never been there; she had a vague impression he was watching the GPS more than he was watching the road, opting for back streets and quick diversions away from upcoming red lights—driving intelligently, as opposed to simply following the road, which was what most people did, certainly what she did. She looked at his hands. He held his left on the wheel and moved his right back and forth between the gearshift and her keys, twisting them around his finger. She was afraid he might rip them right out of the ignition but didn’t want to say so. She didn’t want to say anything.

Her keychain was a gold orb, the size of a golf ball. Engraved with a world map, it had two tiny stones, almost imperceptibly
tiny diamonds; one marking Mecca, and one marking Rome. It was a gift from David not long before he’d disappeared, one whose meaning she’d never cared to ask after. She simply loved it because it was so unusual, and so precious. Jason had played with it as a child, displacing it from its chain and rolling it along the floor, like a die.

“Eleven eleven,” Sara says.

“Eleven eleven?” asks Sam.

“Eleven eleven: that’s the number of my train,” she says.

“Eleven eleven eleven, like the Armistice,” Sam says.

“Right. The side car armistice.”

“Side car?”

“The French forced the Germans to sign in the forest, in the railway car. Was it … the Fôret Compiègne?”

“Can’t say I remember,” Sam says, and he laughs.

“Yes, well, it was eleven a.m.
Paris
time, that was the third eleven in ‘eleven eleven eleven.’ And the French forced the surrender—”

“Not technically a surrender.”

“Well, right, but they forced the Germans to sign the agreement in the railcar, in the forest.”

“I remember the car, but not the forest.”

“Well, the forest was famous. It was a place for Napoleon’s formal hunting parties. Napoleon I.”

“What’s a formal hunting party?”

“You know, linens on the tables and beaters for the birds.”

“Better guns,” Sam says.

“Yes, better guns.”

They pull into the parking lot in the station, and Sara tries to protest, asking Sam to let her out at the curb, and leave her, but he insists on coming inside. He wants to walk her onto the train, be
sure she has a seat. They get her ticket, but they still have awhile to wait. He buys her a coffee in the shop, where Mother’s Day cards are on sale for half price. They find a place to sit and Sara leans back in the small plastic chair, pulling her knees into her chest for a stretch. She’s anxious not to get upset in front of him before she says goodbye. The train is delayed.

“Yes,” she says, “formal hunting parties. The kings then even had a position on their staff, something like
le grand veneur—
”

“I failed French.”

“Well, it was like chief of hunting. It was basically a cabinet-level position, with better pay.”

“Just to run the hunts?”

“Just to run the hunts. And, you know, coordinate the army of staff required to run them well. And the best hunts were in that forest.”

“And then they caught the Germans there.”

“They didn’t catch them. They invited them. To sign.”

“Invited—like to a party.”

“Yes. But the Germans got their revenge,” Sara says.

“How was that?”

“With another party. The
second
armistice at Compiègne. Nineteen forty. Hitler forced the French to return to the same spot. He sat in Foch’s chair. That’s when they turned over their freedom; after that, the Germans held northern France.”

“And the car?”

“Hitler brought it home, showed it off in his garden as a trophy. He had the entire rest of the Armistice site destroyed.”

“Wow.”

“Yes, he didn’t fool around.”

“Well, I guess that was his choice. But after the war—”

“After the war the French made a new carriage, returned it to the forest, and rebuilt the site as a kind of shrine.”

“Have you been there?”

“No. But I—we had a picture of that railcar in our house at one point, a gift from a German friend. I can’t even remember the circumstances, exactly. There was some celebration happening there. We’d been invited—or Jason’s father had been invited, and I was given the chance to tag along. But didn’t.” She looks around the station; she used to take this train once a week. She used to know the porters’ names, and they’d save seats for her when she ran late. “You know the Armistice—the first one—went into effect at eleven a.m., but they’d signed it earlier that morning. They must have been up all night.”

“Yeah?” Sam says, looping the orb’s long chain into a knot, then untying it—with one hand.

“Interesting only insofar as there wasn’t much art in the agreement. It was basically a wholesale destruction of the German forces—and economy.”

“No wonder they wanted to—”

“Make the French pay.”

“Yes.”

“The symbolism of it all is …”

“Is what?”

“It seems like such a different time.”

“There’s still a lot of symbolism in diplomacy.”

“Railcars?”

“I can’t think of the contemporary equivalent of railcars off the top of my head, but I’ll give it some thought.”

When her train is called, Sara again asks Sam not to escort her to the platform, but again he insists. He has his arm around her, and he wants to walk the length of the train to find a car that looks
quiet, a tall order when boarding an Acela (the fast train, the only train with open seats at this time) on the Northeast Corridor at rush hour. They find space in the car closest to the café, and Sam walks onto the train, still holding on to her.

“Please, you’ll get stuck here,” she says.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?”

“You don’t have a ticket,” she says.

And he gives her a look that says,
Not the biggest problem I’ve ever solved
. “Are you sure you have your ticket?” he asks.

“I have it.”

“Passport?”

“Yes.”

“And—”

“Sam, I’m more pulled together than I look. Slightly, but still.”

“Are you sure?”

“I promise.”

“Bring him home.”

“I will.”

“I’ll be here.”

“I’ll call you.”

Sam looks like he has something to say, but he does not move.

“Sam. You okay.” She opens her arms for a hug. She wants him to believe that she believes.

“Facebook,” he says into her ear.

“What,” she says, and laughs.

“The contemporary equivalent of railway cars. Facebook.” And just as the conductor moves toward them, Sam slips away and doesn’t pause on the platform. He’s off down the stairs and disappears.

The train is hot; the air conditioning tends to work sporadically this time of year, so a space of three hot days can make the
cars compress with stale air. Sara used to like to walk the length of the train during these trips, moving between cars and catching the change in temperature in the spaces where each connects to each. That change was especially bracing in winter. Afraid she might fall asleep, she moves to the café car to get another coffee. This is where she sees the Marines.

There are five of them. They’re large, six feet three at least, to a man. They’re drinking beers—Heineken, in bottles. She empties half her coffee cup in the trash and fills the rest with milk. And then she stands by the window and eavesdrops. They are talking about girls and about their plans for their holiday.

“The critical aspect of armistice is that no one surrenders,” David had said, after that invitation had arrived in the mail. “Armistice is not surrender. Armistice is simply a cessation of hostilities. From the Latin
arma
, meaning weapons, and
stadium
—stopping. Stopping arms.” And he told Sara the story of the couple giving the party, two people who had fallen in love, then fallen out of love, then fallen back in again. He was French and she was German, hence the tiny brass railcars they would hand out as favors, one of which David brought back for Jason, who’d added it to his arsenal. He taught the boy to say “armistice,” which sounded like “I miss this” in toddlerese. “Mommy’s going to sign my armistice agreement,” he’d said to their son, lying on her floor, pushing the toy back and forth.

Sara moves back through the cars and finds her seat, although it doesn’t really matter where she sits back down. Everyone else on the train looks highly occupied, phones and laptops plugged into side sockets. She has her phone but no computer, nothing to read, not even a paper. She closes her eyes and considers sleep, but her mind won’t comply. Her mind wants to remain on high alert,
while her heart wants the entire system to shut down until she can open her eyes and hold her boy.

Out the window, the light changes to the kind of bright dark you can get in late spring and early summer, still light enough to drive around without lights but not quite light enough for reading without assistance. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington: having lived in such close proximity to these places, it sometimes amazed her how little she knew them. At the station in D.C., she thought, she would stop and get something to eat. There was never anything edible on airplanes, and she knew they were in for a long flight, perhaps several flights. She would buy something to eat and something to read. She had the same feeling in her stomach she’d had each time she knew Jason was about to come home; the feeling of anticipation and relief that before long she would be laughing with him as they had always done together, and hearing what was new in his life. It was the feeling that coupled the ease of being with family with the comfort of no longer being alone.