Letter to My Daughter (8 page)

But no, he was right on schedule. He’d been at basic training nine weeks, seventeen weeks at advanced. Only thing was, he told me, they weren’t giving him any leave time. His unit had special orders to ship out ASAP, direct from the base.

“I don’t want to go. I miss you so much. Honey, honey. Where you been?”

“Oh—I miss you, too. When do you have to go?”

“Tomorrow. I went out and got something for you. I did it for you.”

“What’d you do?”

“It’s right … Ouch.” There was a clunk, like he’d dropped the phone. “Got it right here,” he resumed. “‘Laura.’ It’s all bloody and shit now. Not supposed to look at it.”

“What?”

“Tattoo.”

“Oh, no. Oh, Tim. No.”

“Yep. Got it right here. Inside my rifle arm. Every time I turn it up to shoot, I can see your name.”

“What’d you go and do something like that for?”

“For you! I did it for you. You don’t like it?”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“But I love you. I love you, Laura. Do you love me?”

“Oh, honey. Of course I do. You know I do.”

“It’s permanent. Won’t ever come off. Won’t ever have to.”

“Oh, Tim.”

“I won’t ever forget you.”

“I won’t ever forget you, either.”

“Laura, Laura. You’re gonna wait for me come home?”

“Of course I will.”

“Say you’ll wait for me.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

A beeping noise sounded through the line. “Shit. I don’t have no more change. Laura!”

“I’ll write you.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. Tim—!”

And then there was silence: black silence, that in the moments as I gripped the phone seemed to grow deeper and deeper until it was black as the dark spaces between stars.

The carrot cake is done and sitting in the center of the table, waiting for you.

I finally spoke to Missy DeSalle about an hour ago. It turns out she and her friends haven’t left for Florida yet; they’re going tomorrow morning. And yes, she says, you talked about joining them, but she hasn’t heard from you since yesterday. “Don’t worry, Laura, I’m sure Liz’ll be just fine,” Missy said before we hung up. “She probably just wants some time to herself. Be patient.”

“When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it, you dumb little tramp,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. I don’t trust that girl. I bet she knows more than she’s letting on. She sounds like an expert in making up stories for parents, thoughtlessly babbling lies as she fluffs her hair before going out for the night in that extravagant little Mercedes of hers. No wonder she’s so popular.

I couldn’t sit still anymore, so I took a break from writing and went for a walk around the neighborhood. The local kids, delirious with the start of a whole week of spring vacation, were out playing tag in the street before dinnertime, running across yards and sidewalks, shouting and laughing, heedless of everything. I resented their joy. It seemed like an affront to all my worry. How could they run and shout like that when you’re missing? I bit my lip and walked on, shutting out the thought of an end too painful to allow.

I turned my attention down to the ground. I began studying the crabgrass overtaking the edge of the sidewalk, and peered into the weeds and black water sloughing in a ditch beside the road, imagining that, like some TV detective, I might find a clue that would tell me where you’ve gone—a scarf, maybe, or a scrap of paper, a plastic hair barrette. I tried to tally up all the evidence that could explain your disappearance. The hushed phone conversations on the back porch, for instance, or that boy’s jeep parked in front of the house, or the tears I thought I saw as you came running in one night over the Christmas holiday …

I spotted something glinting in the weeds. Stepping down into the ditch, I sifted through the overgrown grass until I found a Coke can. But then standing there on the slope of the ditch, one foot up, the other foot down, staring at the dirty can in my hand, I stopped myself. A Coke can. What was I doing? This was crazy. I dropped the can back into the ditch, brushed off my hands, and resumed walking.

Rounding the corner up on Hyacinth, I fell to reminiscing. You probably don’t remember when we first moved here thirteen years ago. You were only two then, just beginning to talk. It suddenly struck me that this neighborhood will be the place you’ll remember forever as home. When people ask you thirty years from now “Where are you from?” this is what you’ll think of. Right here, this is your world. It was on this very street where you learned to ride your first bike. I remember you liked this stretch of pavement because it was flat and easy with grass on either side. And the house up there on the left: that was where the Fields’ pet terrier got out one Halloween night and chased you screaming back to your daddy’s arms. And here, nearer our home, was the very place on the sidewalk where you slipped on a patch of ice one freezing winter day and had to get three stitches in the back of your head. You were more upset about bleeding all over your new Christmas coat than you were about the cut. How old were you then? Five? Six? Not that long ago, really.

I stopped off at the Banards’ next door to let them know what’s happened. They haven’t seen anything, of course, but they promised to keep an eye out. And just now, after I got in, your father went out with the car again, “Just to have a look.” We agreed that one of us should stay at home in case you call. I’ve got the TV back on, listening to the early evening news.

We’re grabbing at straws here, Elizabeth. Your dad driving around in the Buick, me writing this interminably long letter. But what else can we do? There’s nothing we can do. I keep going back to a line from that poem by your namesake, about “my old griefs” and “my childhood’s faith.” Waiting for you, writing this letter, I feel like I’m teetering between those two sentiments, a pessimism born of experience and a desperate hope born of helplessness. In dredging up all these old griefs from my past, I cling to the thought that this act itself will somehow create a better future for both of us, that with these words I’ll weave a charm that will spell our reconciliation and draw you home.

For times of doubt and trouble, the nuns at Sacred Heart prescribed prayer. We even had special rosary services before important exam dates. God, we were told, would always hear and answer our prayers, no matter how big or small they were. There was a caveat, however, a kind of special exemption that the nuns told us about, one that always infuriated me, and that never failed to put my childhood’s faith to the test. And this was that, yes, God would always answer our prayers, but maybe not in the ways we expected or even wanted.

Well. I want to finish this letter before you get home. And then we’ll have dinner and cake, and things will begin to get better for us, you’ll see. I promise.

Tim couldn’t believe the Christmas dinner he was treated to when he arrived in Vietnam. He was stationed at a scrubby base camp up in the hills in the middle of nowhere, and yet on Christmas day a giant double-rotor Chinook helicopter magically descended from the clouds to deliver full turkey dinners to all 120 boys at the camp. They had corn bread dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, shrimp cocktail … “Shrimp cocktails! Where the heck did they get shrimp cocktails?” Tim wrote.

And just as the recruitment sergeant had promised, there was Budweiser beer, all you could drink. Hell, they even had a bar right there on base, with Vietnamese girls in shiny long dresses and pigtails serving martinis. Scruffiest bunch of soldiers you could ever imagine, and their hooches nothing but falling-down shacks propped up with sandbags, but he wasn’t complaining, not yet. More than anything he was looking forward to getting out and seeing some of the countryside. As radio intelligence, his missions were strictly top secret, so he wasn’t allowed to say when and where he was going exactly, but he’d write me as often as he could. And where were the letters I promised him, by the way? I had his address now so there wasn’t any excuse.

“I keep thinking back on that night,” he wrote. “Hard to believe it was only a year ago. Already seems like ten. But when I close my eyes I can remember like it was yesterday. I see your white skin on the rug, and the firelight glow on your hair, and that soft look in your eye when you told me you love me. I swear, it’s the one thing that keeps me going. I’m sure glad I got you back home waiting for me. You’ll always be the number one girl for me, Laura Jenkins. Now write!”

That spring at Sacred Heart, meanwhile, I was finally beginning to feel myself more a part of the school. To be sure, I still had little in common with the well-bred Catholic girls who were my classmates. But over time people can adapt to almost anything, I suppose. Even prisoners begin to feel at home.

My fitting in had to do mainly with my work on
The Beacon
. I’d begun a series of profiles on SHA personalities called “Spotlight On … !” Kim gave me half the third page to write about whomever I wanted, and for the first time in my life I felt what it’s like to wield some power. Girls who had never before been nice to me now smiled and said hello in the hallways. Faculty took me aside to give me subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions about which teacher or student would be a good subject for my next profile. I hadn’t written about Principal Evelyn yet, Sister Agatha reminded me. She had a very interesting background. Why not interview her? Surely she deserved a profile.

But I ignored all their suggestions and turned instead to my truest allies at the school, the charity cases. Over lunch in the cafeteria, I interviewed Soo Chee Chong, the quietest girl on campus. Who ever knew that Soo spoke fluent Mandarin? Or that she had ended up in Baton Rouge, of all places, because her parents, both prominent university professors back in Beijing, had fled the Cultural Revolution to avoid being killed by the Red Guards? If they didn’t like you, Soo said, the soldiers would just walk up to you in the street and shoot you in the face. The whole family had made a lucky escape through Taiwan, smuggled across the strait in the bottom of a fishing boat, which was why to this day, Soo said, she couldn’t stand the smell of raw fish. Her name in Chinese, she told me, meant “the beautiful sound of jade.”

Anne Harding, after years of surgery and doctor’s visits, turned out to be an expert on scoliosis. The piece I wrote about her, “Profile in Courage,” dwelt on current medical treatments for curvature of the spine and what could be done to prevent it. Curvature, Anne explained, was measured in degrees of variance from the vertical. At eighteen degrees, hers was considered a mild curve and could be corrected with bracing in 90 percent of the cases. If left untreated, however, the deformity could worsen, twisting the chest until the ribs jutted to one side, the breasts and hips became uneven, and one shoulder tilted up high toward the ear. Every teenage girl should be checked annually for curvature of the spine, Anne said, which led to a rush on Nurse Palmer’s office the week the piece was printed.

And in my profile on Christy Lee, the near-invisible lone black student in our sophomore class, she revealed how she had managed to trace her family roots all the way back to the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a slave trader named Captain Burt Keenan who had sold her great-great-great-grandfather, branded and chained, to a plantation owner in Charleston for two thousand dollars—which, Christy pointed out, was actually a high price to pay for a man in those days. Christy provided the title herself for that piece: “Let Freedom Ring.”

The charity cases seemed to become a little less shy after their articles were published, a little less bitter. Girls would stop at our lunch table to get Soo Chee Chong to write their names in Chinese characters on the front of their notebooks. From time to time I even saw Anne Harding laughing aloud in the hallway, her chin bobbling against her neck brace. The journalism students at LSU had been right. There was power in writing. Words held magic that could transform people.

That spring, too, Chip Benton started to become a regular at our tiny newspaper staff office. He was always dropping off photos of CHS events we might use, or offering us extra bottles of toner solution. We had our own school photographers, of course, but Chip was such a good-natured fellow, and his curly helmet of hair was so cute—and he was a boy, after all, which was such a weird novelty at SHA—that we were always happy to have him around.

And true to his word, he gave me signed prints of the photos he took of me that night at the Italian restaurant. He’d blown them up and developed and cropped them in such a way that they looked moody and evocative, like stills from a 1950s black-and-white movie, or celebrity nightclub photos from an era more glamorous and richly lived than our own. They were gorgeous, really—funny and profound, silly and tender all at once. I kept them in a desk drawer in my dorm room. I didn’t dare put them up on the walls—they seemed too intimate, somehow—but from time to time I took them out to admire them.

I was adapting so well to life at Sacred Heart that year, in fact, that I hated to return to Zachary for the summer. But once the school year ended and the dorm shut down, we boarders had no choice. I packed all my belongings into boxes again and moved back home, where a kind of silent truce prevailed between me and my parents. I’d decided that as long as I had to live with them I would be polite, nothing more. My personal life was my own business from now on; I wasn’t going to risk sharing anything with them ever again. When they asked how things were going at school, I’d say, “Fine.” At dinner, it was “Pass the butter, please” and “Thank you.” My father hardly seemed to notice this dearth of communication. My mother, though, more attuned, would stop by my room after dinner.

“Is everything all right, Laura?”

“Yes.”

“Are you enjoying your summer?”

“Yes.”

“Well …” She watched me a moment longer from the doorway, her dark eyes twitching in their sockets. “Nice to have you back. Good night.”

“Night.”

Listening to her steps creaking down the hallway from my room, I could feel the distance between us growing, and I wondered if this distance would grow so great that eventually, passing through opposite doors of the parlor or brushing shoulders on the way to and from the bathroom, we might be no more familiar to one another than strangers at a bus station, bound for different destinations.

Every week or so, I went alone to Jack Prejean’s shop to check for mail from Tim. That was our arrangement: during the school year, Tim would write to me at SHA, and during the summer, he’d write care of his dad’s shop in town.

“Got one right here,” Jack would say, turning around to pick up a letter from his desk behind the counter. I could tell he looked forward to my visits. While I sat in a chair to read Tim’s news, Jack leaned on the counter watching me, the sun angling in through the junked TVs and radios piled on shelves against the shop window. If I laughed aloud or otherwise reacted in some way, he snapped up his eyebrows. “What? What’d he say?” Then we would share what we knew of Tim and his life in Vietnam, which, in the letters that came that first summer, still sounded like one big Boy Scout adventure.

He’d been assigned to an airmobile radio research team, Tim wrote. He figured he wasn’t revealing any army secrets to tell us his job basically entailed him and another guy driving out into a field with a radio mounted on a jeep to try and locate enemy transmitters. “Translate that to me sitting hunched over the receiver all day while Patterson, a guy who’s got one more patch on his shirt than me, lies in the hammock strumming his guitar and getting a suntan.” While they were out snooping on the North Vietnamese Army, they lived off Coca-Cola and C rations, which weren’t so bad really after you heated them up on the exhaust manifold of the jeep. Franks and beans for dinner, bananas cooked in their skins with Hershey chocolate for dessert. Sleeping out under the stars—just like camping out. Most times it was hard to believe there was even a war on. Everywhere you looked it was just farms and fields and dirt roads, with little kids who followed you around like ducks, and everything quiet as a Sunday afternoon in Zachary. Only difference was, in Zachary you didn’t have choppers flying overhead, or military convoys tearing past, or fire-fights that boomed and lit up the night sky over the hills like thunder and lightning before a hurricane. Lucky for him he never had to get too close to the fighting; they just hung back and diddled with their radios. He hadn’t even fired his rifle yet, which was just fine with him, Tim wrote, because then he’d have to take it apart and clean it, which was a real pain in the A.

Jack chuckled, shaking his head. “Man oh man. Army life sure seems to suit the boy, doesn’t it?”

Sometimes Jack and I scribbled responses to Tim on the back of a repair order form, trading wisecracks in writing. “You better get on home. Your girl’s got a dozen beaux circling her!” Jack wrote.

“Don’t listen to Jack,” I wrote below that. “Your girl doesn’t have any beaux circling her. But she does miss you and wish you were here. Be safe.”

At times like these I felt closer to the Prejeans than to my own family, and was reminded of why I fell in love with Tim in the first place. His life seemed so honest and simple that a girl couldn’t help but want to be a part of it.

•   •   •

The big surprise that summer, though, had nothing to do with Tim and the war in Vietnam. It was a phone call. One sleepy afternoon my mother hollered for me to come quick to the kitchen.

“It’s a boy,” she said when I came through the doorway, her face a screwed-up look of expectancy and sourness. After I took the phone, she stood there watching.

“Laura?”

“Who’s this?”

“Chip.”

I glared at my mother until she left the kitchen. Then I turned toward the wall so I could talk, my heart beating a little faster than it should have been.

Chip had run into Kim Cortney in town the day before and thought he’d give me a call. A bunch of them from school were planning to get together at his house that Friday night, he said—no big deal, shoot some pool, hang out, maybe go swimming. He knew it was a long drive from Zachary, but hey, if I was in town …

He gave me directions. A big white house right on LSU lake, easy to find. Didn’t matter if I couldn’t play pool, he said. He’d teach me. No charge.

That’d be great, I told him. Wow. Okay. Sure. I just had to ask my parents first.

“Okay, so … great. See you Friday,” he said.

“See you Friday.”

“Great.”

“Great!”

I had never been invited to a party in Baton Rouge, much less to a party involving swimming and billiards. I pictured the evening as a scene out of
Gone with the Wind
, with plantation-sized houses and elegant Southern girls sweeping down curved stairways in green gowns, while the men-Chip looking debonair in a gray tailcoat—leaned against the mantel in the billiard room sipping bourbon. With this one phone call, Chip had reached down his hand to snatch me up into a world of privilege and ease, a universe away from the dull family farms and bleak trailer parks of Zachary. I felt a little like Cinderella, or whatever the Southern version of her would be. At dinner that night I asked my parents if I could go.