Hope Street (32 page)

“She said her name was Helen Crawford,” Mona informed him, “and it was important and it was personal. She requested that you call her back. I stuck the message in the top drawer of your desk. I didn’t think it should be lying around on your blotter where someone might see it.”

“I don’t know anyone named Helen Crawford.”

“Whatever. I’m just passing the message along.” Mona hesi
tated. “Something’s going on with you, and to tell you the truth, I’d rather not know. But I don’t want to be taking these kinds of messages, okay? Tell her to call you directly.”

Mona could be a sweetheart. She could also be a prig. Right now, she was being a bitch. “I don’t know what
kind
of message this is. I’ve never heard of Helen Crawford. So stop implying things.”

“I’m not implying anything,” Mona said, sounding put-upon. “I’m just telling you I decided it was best not to leave this message lying on your desk in full view.”

“Thanks.” He flipped the phone shut, wondering whether she thought she deserved his gratitude for having insinuated that he’d gotten a phone call from…What? A girlfriend? A mistress? A customer who’d hired him for more than just landscaping?

Honest to God. Not only did he have fissures in his relationship with his wife and his daughter, but now the third most important woman in his life—his loyal officer manager—thought he was screwing around with someone named Helen Crawford, whoever the hell she was.

He’d figure it out later. His life was already a disaster, possibly beyond redemption. If his mystery caller wanted to mess things up even more, let her try.

But not now. He had to finish building a patio. He had to get one thing right in this long, hot, miserable day.

August 1971

B
Y THE TIME SHE FINALLY HEARD
from Bobby, she’d already received an official letter from a medical officer:

She’d had questions, tons of them. But when she’d dialed the phone number provided in the letter, the woman at the other end of the line had offered no answers. “I’m sure you’ll be kept informed about his condition,” the woman kept saying. “I’m honestly not sure about the extent of his injuries, but the doctors will be in touch.”

The doctors weren’t in touch. Joelle had no idea what had
happened to Bobby, how serious his injuries were—the words
stabilized
and
evacuated
scared the hell out of her—or what would happen next. She drifted through her days in a trance, feeding Claudia, changing her diapers, feeding her again, laundering her smelly little outfits, rocking her, singing to her and all the while wondering whether she would be a widow before she ever saw Bobby again.

He’d told her, when he’d offered to marry her, that if something happened to him, she could use her widow’s benefits to support herself and the baby. Now something had happened to him. She didn’t want benefits. She wanted
him.
She wanted him home. She wanted him well. She wanted him to be Bobby D, with a cocky smile and a swagger, lecturing her about his truck’s sticky clutch pedal and blasting his Doors albums. She wanted him to know she had a daughter—
they
had a daughter. Had his “routine patrol” occurred before he’d received her letter about Claudia’s birth?

At least that question was answered when a letter from him arrived a couple of weeks after the letter notifying her that he’d been wounded in action. He must have left his letter behind when he’d gone on his “routine patrol,” and someone had eventually found it and mailed it to her.

Like all Bobby’s letters, it was brief. Writing wasn’t his thing. He scribbled:

He didn’t sign his letter
Love, Bobby.
He never signed his letters with love. Neither did Joelle. She figured he was avoid
ing the word for a reason and she’d best avoid it, too. Maybe the idea of love scared him. Or maybe he just didn’t love her. She believed she loved him—but they’d spent less than twenty-four hours as a married couple before he’d left. Did she love
him
or did she love what he’d done for her? Did she love him as a friend, a husband or the father of her baby? Did definitions matter when she felt guilty for devoting more time to worrying about him than about Claudia?

She loved him. She felt so many things when she thought of him, but add them all together and they equaled love. She couldn’t expect Bobby to love her, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she loved him.

The weeks dragged. She fretted that she was a terrible mother, so tired all the time, her breasts leaky and aching, her eyes scratchy from fatigue. When she sang to Claudia, the lullabies were out of tune. When Claudia awakened in the middle of the night for a feeding, Joelle staggered to the crib she’d bought for fifteen dollars at the Goodwill thrift store, lifted Claudia out and plugged a breast into her mouth. She didn’t coo to her. She didn’t babble and nuzzle her daughter’s soft, sweet belly. She was too weary, too frazzled…too afraid of what Bobby would be like when he got home.
If
he came home.

Thank God the preschool where she worked gave her a maternity leave. She could barely manage her own child, let alone nine others. Her housemates spoke in murmurs and handled her chores when she neglected them. When day after day passed with no word from Bobby or his doctors, they hugged her and assured her that everything would be all right.

Then, at last, he phoned. The call came at 10:00 p.m. She’d already bathed Claudia, dressed her in one of the terry-cloth sleepers she’d stocked up on at Woolworth’s and was trying to
get her to nurse before bed when Lenore hollered up the stairs, “Joelle! Hurry! Bobby’s on the phone!”

Joelle nearly tripped racing down the stairs. Bouncing against her shoulder, Claudia fussed and whimpered. They skidded into the kitchen, where Lenore held the receiver of the wall phone while Suzanne pulled a chair from the table closer to the wall so Joelle could sit while she talked. She grabbed the phone from Lenore, settled Claudia into the crook of her arm and drew in a deep breath. “Hello?”

“Jo?” He sounded faint. But he was alive. He knew who she was. Whatever his injuries, they hadn’t affected his mind.

“Bobby.” She said his name just to taste it, to savor the fact that he was connected to her. She wanted to chant it over and over, to croon it, to cheer it—but that would waste precious time. “Where are you?”

“Hawaii.”

“You’re still in the hospital?”

“Yeah. I can’t talk long. A nurse rigged this call. I just…” Claudia began to fuss again, mewing like a kitten. “Oh, God,” he said. “Is that her?”

“That’s Claudia.” Joelle’s cheeks were as damp as Claudia’s, but she laughed, too. “That’s our baby.”

“Oh, God,” he said again, softly, like a prayer.

“How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“What happened to you?”

“I can’t…” Long-distance static filled the line. Then he spoke. “I’m okay. Making progress.”

“Did you—” she couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask “—did you lose anything?” She watched the news and read the news
paper. Lots of soldiers arrived home missing limbs, in wheelchairs, paralyzed, damaged beyond description.

“A body part? No.”

She started breathing again.

“My leg is f—screwed up,” he said, considerately editing out the obscenity. “I had surgery. They put me back together again. They’re gonna send me home once I’m vertical.”

“Vertical?”

“Walking. Or crutching, I don’t know. You’ll have to find us a place to live with no stairs. I’ve got to do rehab before I can deal with stairs.”

“All right.”

“Call Fort Dix. Someone there’ll help you with housing.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

“It’s not too bad.” He chuckled. “They give me drugs.”

She was desperate to know more. What did “screwed up” mean in regard to his leg? What kind of rehab would he need? What drugs was he taking?

If he’d wanted to go into detail, he would have. Clearly, he didn’t wish to. “Should I contact your father?”

The laughter left his voice. “And tell him what?”

“That you were hurt?”

“No.” His tone was gentler when he added, “I’m okay, Jo. I’m gonna make it, and I’m gonna come home. All right?”

“Come home,” she said. Claudia was sobbing now. So was Joelle. She didn’t care if Bobby could hear her tears in her voice. “Just come home.”

“I’ve gotta go. Give Claudia a kiss for me. I’ll see you soon.” She heard a click, and then dead air.

She should have told him she loved him. Maybe he didn’t love
her, maybe he didn’t want to think about love, but she should have said what was in her heart.

O
VER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS
, Bobby sent her a few short, cryptic notes:
They’ve got me doing some exercises. The dizziness is gone.

What dizziness? she wondered.

My hearing’s starting to come back.

His hearing? He’d been deaf? If so, how had he been able to talk to her on the phone?

Guy in the next bed is in really bad shape. I’m so lucky, Jo.

How lucky could he be if he’d had to spend months in a hospital, dizzy and deaf and horizontal? When would he be vertical? When would he get home?

He would get home in early September. She spent most of August searching for a first-floor apartment she and Bobby could afford, signing a lease and furnishing the place on pennies and ingenuity. Her housemates helped. She couldn’t imagine how she would have coped without them, and she was reassured when Suzanne was able to find a college student arriving in September who could take over Joelle’s room and her share of the expenses.

Anxiety unraveled Joelle’s nerves as Bobby’s arrival date drew near. Renee had urged her to buy some sexy underwear for the occasion, but she was still breastfeeding Claudia, and while she’d lost her pregnancy weight, her breasts were fat and the skin of her tummy was still loose and puckered. She hoped Bobby wouldn’t be repulsed by the sight. She also hoped she wouldn’t be repulsed by the sight of him. What if he was scarred? How could she be fretting about her bloated breasts and baggy tummy after what he’d been through?

How could she be worrying about appearances, at all? When
he’d left her, nearly a year ago, he’d been her best friend. Now…she didn’t know. He’d fought in a war and she’d become a mother. Would they even recognize each other?

The day before his homecoming, she drove his truck through a car wash and filled it with gas—he’d warned her never to let the needle drop too close to empty. At the grocery store, she splurged on a porterhouse steak and fresh strawberries and Suzanne bought her a bottle of red table wine because Joelle was still too young to buy that herself. The morning he was due, she made the bed with brand-new sheets, gave Claudia a bath and dressed her in her prettiest outfit—a pink dress and matching pink socks that Joelle’s mother had sent from Ohio. Despite her swollen breasts, Joelle was able to fit into a sundress she’d sewn last year, a simple sheath hemmed several inches above her knees.

Swallowing her nerves, she drove to McGuire, the air force base adjacent to Fort Dix. A dozen soldiers were scheduled to arrive on the same plane, and an officer corralled Joelle and the other waiting relatives into a fenced-in area near the tarmac. The sun beat down on Claudia in her stroller, and Joelle lowered its canopy to protect her.

The other waiting relatives all seemed joyous. None of them appeared to be wrestling with dread the way she was. But then, the other young wives had probably been married for longer than a day before their husbands had left—and they probably were safe in the knowledge that their husbands loved them.

The plane landed on a distant runway, then taxied over. Someone wheeled a stairway to the door. A woman in uniform opened it and the soldiers emerged, clad in their dress uniforms, many of them with medal ribbons pinned to their shirts. Next to Claudia’s stroller, a boy of about five waved an American flag. A few people snapped photographs.

The last soldier to emerge was Bobby. She absorbed the sight of him, framed by the plane’s doorway. He was standing. His hair was longer than she’d expected, but she supposed he hadn’t needed a buzz cut while he’d been in the hospital. He handed a pair of crutches to the soldier in front of him, who headed down the stairs, leaving Bobby to maneuver the descent alone, his hands gripping the railings for support. His left leg was strapped into a metal brace that resembled a medieval torture device. He extended that leg in front of him and hopped down the stairs on his right foot. At the bottom of the steps, he took back the crutches, said something to the soldier who’d been holding them and then gazed at the fence. At Joelle.

All the other soldiers ran once they spotted their loved ones. Bobby couldn’t run. Joelle wished she could run to him, but the relatives had been ordered to stay behind the fence. So she only watched him as he made his laborious way across the asphalt.

As he neared, she searched his face. No obvious scars, but his appearance had changed. His eyes were darker, more wary. His easy smile was nowhere in evidence. Maybe he wasn’t happy to see her.

He passed through the gate and hobbled over to her. The bone slid in his neck as he swallowed. “Bobby,” she murmured, then mustered her courage and rose on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“Jo.” He didn’t kiss her back. His gaze was on the stroller. “Pick her up,” he said.

She folded back the canopy, unstrapped Claudia and lifted her so Bobby could see her. He stared at her and his eyes grew misty. She stared right back, then reached out and tried to grab his nose.

He allowed himself a smile as he ducked his head, evading her pudgy little hand. “Hey, there,” he whispered. “Hey, little girl. You know who I am?”

Claudia issued a cheerful gurgling sound.

“I’m your daddy,” Bobby said. “I’m your dad.” He bowed and brushed her cheek with his, then leaned back and met Joelle’s eyes. His smile didn’t completely disappear, thank God. He’d saved a little of it for her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

Someone lugged Bobby’s duffel to the truck. Someone else folded the stroller and put it in the flatbed while Joelle strapped Claudia into her baby carrier. The truck’s front seat would be crowded with all three of them crammed in—especially since Bobby had his crutches and couldn’t bend his leg. She supposed that was what a family was: everyone crowded together.

The drive back to the apartment passed in silence, and Joelle’s nerves frayed until they were nothing but ragged threads. When she glanced at Bobby, she saw him gazing out the window, his face blank. Maybe viewing New Jersey’s suburban sprawl was a shock to him after Vietnam and more than two months in a hospital. Or maybe she and Bobby just didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore.

His expression remained inscrutable as she led him into the apartment. It wasn’t grand, but she’d knocked herself out to make it as pretty as she could on a budget of zero. She’d picked daisies growing along a roadway and stuck them in an empty Coke bottle to create a centerpiece for the coffee table in the living room. She’d sewn curtains for the windows and throw pillows for the couch. She’d bought a small black-and-white TV with a rabbit-ear antenna at the St. Vincent de Paul store. She’d set up a corner of the bedroom as a nursery area, squeezing in Claudia’s crib and the changing table she’d created out of an old kitchen table and a colorful plastic pad. When Claudia had been born, the women at the house had bought her a mobile of butterflies, which Joelle had fastened to the crib railing so the colorful butterflies floated above her when she slept.