You Know When the Men Are Gone Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE

  CAMP LIBERTY

  REMISSION

  INSIDE THE BREAK

  THE LAST STAND

  LEAVE

  YOU SURVIVED THE WAR, NOW SURVIVE THE HOMECOMING

  GOLD STAR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AMY EINHORN BOOKS

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Siobhan Fallon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted

  materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  “Amy Einhorn Books” and the “ae” logo are registered trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Some of these stories have been published previously, in slightly different form:

  “The Last Stand” (as “Burning”) appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, Spring 2008.

  “Camp Liberty” (as “Getting Out”) appeared in Roanoke Review, Summer 2008.

  “Gold Star” (as “Sacrifice”) appeared in Salamander, December 2008.

  “You Know When the Men Are Gone” (as “Waiting”) appeared in Salamander, May 2009.

  “Inside the Break” appeared in New Letters, Spring 2010.

  Excerpts from Book XXIII “The Trunk of the Olive Tree” from The Odyssey by Homer, translated

  by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1961, 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright renewed 1989 by

  Benedict R. C. Fitzgerald, on behalf of the Fitzgerald children.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fallon, Siobhan.

  You know when the men are gone / Siobhan Fallon.

  p. cm.

  “Amy Einhorn books.”

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48614-6

  1. Military spouses—Fiction. 2. Families of military personnel—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.A45Y

  813’6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of

  the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses

  at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors,

  or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and

  does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To KC:

  Best friend, husband, father, soldier,

  you are always worth the wait.

  She turned to descend the stair, her heart in tumult. Had she better keep her distance and question him, her husband? Should she run up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?

  ... And she, for a long time, sat deathly still in wonderment—for sometimes as she gazed she found him—yes, clearly—like her husband, but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.

  —Penelope upon recognizing Odysseus, The Odyssey

  YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE

  In Fort Hood housing, like all army housing, you get used to hearing through the walls. You learn your neighbors’ routines: when and if they gargle and brush their teeth; how often they go to the bathroom or shower; whether they snore or cry themselves to sleep. You learn too much. And you learn to move quietly through your own small domain.

  You also know when the men are gone. No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and, best of all, no more front doors slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts to the windows above to throw down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.

  At least things were muted until a new family moved into apartment 12A. Meg Brady from 11A could hear the rip and tear of boxes, chairs scraping against the floor, cabinets opening and closing, the weighed-down tread of the movers reminiscent of the soldiers far away.

  Carla Wolenski from 6B knocked on Meg’s door around noon, slipping into Meg’s living room as soon as she cracked opened the door.

  “Natalya Torres is your new neighbor!” Carla whispered, swinging her baby from one hip to the other. When Meg didn’t show the enthusiasm or dread Carla expected, she held her baby close as if shielding it from the ignorance of the world. “You haven’t heard anything about her?”

  Meg shook her head. Carla lifted tweezed eyebrows into small parentheses of dismay. She whacked the baby on the back, who promptly burped a milky chunk onto her shoulder. “Trust me, you’ll hear it all soon enough,” Carla said, flicking the spit-up onto Meg’s carpet. When Carla left, Meg followed her out onto the landing, ostensibly to walk her friend back to her own apartment, but she hesitated outside the Torreses’ open door, trying to see inside.

  The next morning, Meg was woken by a thunderous noise. She reared up, breathless, her heart a wild creature in her chest. Her alarm clock read 5:47 A.M. The noise continued, a mournful, doomed desire, and Meg realized that it was a half howl, half bark, from a dog on the other side of the wall she shared with the Torreses’ master bedroom.

  She slapped her headboard, which made the barking louder, as if the dog were jubilant that he had roused her. She heard him jump, his nails scratching, trying to dig through to her, the otherness of new territory and scent.

  Unable to fall back asleep with the foraging a few inches from her pillow, Meg crawled out from her sheets, made a pot of coffee, and checked the Internet for news of Iraq. She scanned the stories about roadside bombs and soldiers dead, making sure the First Cavalry Division and her husband’s battalion, 1-7 Cav, were unscathed, at least for today. When the sun rose and the caffeine kicked in, she grabbed her keys and went to the community mailbox on the landing outside, eager for news. She imagined a postcard, like the one Jeremy had sent her a few weeks ago of a flowering Tigris River; she longed for something he had kept in the breast pocket of his uniform, scrawled and hesitated over during a quiet moment while training Iraqi troops. She wanted something she could hold.

  A door opened and a black dog bounded out and ran straight at her, a solid bear-rug of muscle. Pizza flyers fluttered to the tile. She closed her eyes and wondered if army doctors would be able to reconstruct her face before Jeremy came home.

  “Boris, down!” someone shouted just as Meg felt the nails of the dog hit her stomach, knocking the air and any ability to scream out of her. She heard the rattle of a chain and then the dog’s weight was lifted. Meg took a half-furious, half-relieved-to-be-alive breath, and opened her eyes. The woman at the other end of the leash was tall and blond, wore an odd patchwork coat that reached to her ankles, its metallic thread catching the early light. She tugged the leash savagely for good measure, muttered, “Down!” again as the dog smiled at Meg, his purple tongue lolling happily from his mouth.

  “I am apologize,” the woman said, her accent as thick and clunky as the chain around her dog’s neck. “Boris, bad! Very bad.”

  Meg felt her cheeks redden as she touched her own shoulder-length brown hair, hoping she’d brushed it before leaving her apartment. She glanced at her sweatpants and slippers. This woman’s beauty was an affront, her yellow hair piled up on top of her head, her long neck, glossy red mouth, and the gold and silver squares of material in her coat. She seemed to have stepped out of a Gustav Klimt painting. Who would wear such a coat, a coat made for cocktails and cool autumn nights, while walking a dog? It was barely eight in the morning and April but already the Texas sun had started to burn over the horizon, that thick and sandy wind of Fort Hood flinging its heat around.

  “Please refrain from military police,” the woman continued over the dog’s
panting. Meg noticed that the woman’s apartment door was open. Two small children peered out of it, both as blondly anemic as their mother. “Boris always have many complaints. My husband would break his heart if Boris gone. Please, I am apologize very much.”

  “It’s all right,” Meg said.

  “I am Natalya.” She held her left hand out, her nails filed into perfect ovals.

  Meg wiped her palm on her sweatpants, introduced herself, and they shook.

  Boris the Impaler tried to jump her again.

  “Meg, you must promise refrain from military police, okay?” Natalya asked, not releasing her hand, her forced smile revealing a row of ever-so-slightly-crooked bottom teeth. “Please promise.”

  Meg pulled her hand free and glanced back at the children hiding in the shadow of the door. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Natalya,” she said as calmly as possible, her stomach throbbing from Boris’s impact. She left the junk mail on the floor and hurried back to her apartment.

  When the fridge was empty except for two cans of Diet Coke and a depleted bag of baby carrots, Meg drove out to the Warrior Way Commissary. She hated grocery shopping, she hated cooking without a man to satiate; the only pleasure in her trip was picking out the food she would send Jeremy in a weekly package—beef jerky, Twizzlers and lollipops, hand wipes and magazines, things that could get crushed, exposed to high temperatures, sit in a box for over a month, and still manage to be consumed by home-desperate soldiers.

  She walked the meat aisle, passing her husband’s favorites: baby back ribs, pork chops, bacon-wrapped filet mignons. She reached out, touching the cold, bloody meat through the plastic. The raw flesh both horrified and mesmerized, and she wondered if a human being would look the same if packaged by a butcher, the striations of fat, the white bone protruding, the blood thin like water in the folds of the wrap. She wondered if wounds looked like this, purple and livid, but with shrapnel sticking out, dust clinging to the edges, blood in the sand. She quickly put the packaged beef down, telling herself that she would not think such things after Jeremy was home.

  But tonight she would get a frozen dinner. A vegetarian one.

  As she turned down the next aisle, she noticed a woman rocking her cart back and forth with two children inside. Meg squinted; only one person could have a coat like that.

  “Natalya?” she called out.

  Natalya stared at her without the faintest recognition, still pushing the cart back and forth as if she were rocking babies. She looked up at the shelves and said softly, “There is so much, I cannot ever decide.”

  Meg glanced at Natalya’s cart. It was full of potatoes and onions and cabbage. “Are these favorites from your home country?” But Natalya did not nod or even seem to understand. Meg played with her wedding ring and spoke slower. “What do you like to cook?”

  Natalya picked up a box of Uncle Ben’s rice. “I am not good cook. My mother killed when I was girl. No one teach me.”

  Meg swallowed her grin and stood absolutely still, all words erased from her mind. “Rice is easy,” she finally whispered. “And I could teach you how to cook.”

  “Yes, rice. With flavor. My English reading is very bad. I do not understand but maybe some have pictures?”

  Meg began to look at the boxes of instant rice, handing Spicy Jambalaya and Roasted Chicken to the little boy, who began to shake a box wildly in each fist.

  Natalya put one of her long-fingered hands on Meg’s wrist and asked abruptly, “May I borrow money?”

  Meg stared. This was taboo. If a wife was in need there were rules; you were supposed to call the rear detachment commander and he could approve an official Army Emergency Relief loan. Or, if you didn’t want your husband or his command to find out, there were the shifty money shops on Rancier Avenue that let you borrow, at interest, until the next paycheck came through.

  “Please,” Natalya continued, smiling harder, her lipstick cracking a bit at the sides of her mouth. “Please. Only forty dollars. Very urgency.”

  Meg looked around to see if she recognized anyone in the aisle, and then, flustered, reached into her purse, pulling out three twenties.

  Natalya counted quickly, her cheeks softening at the extra bill.

  “Soon I repay, yes?” she said, and immediately pushed her cart away, the boy still shaking the rice. Meg took a deep breath, watching that coat turn a corner and disappear.

  Meg looked for Natalya at the Family Readiness Group meeting the following week, the omnipotent “FRG” with its updates from the front, dispelling the fear invoked by CNN with facts and names, always offering ambiguous but hopeful news of return. The FRG Meg belonged to represented 1-7 Cav, an infantry battalion that was exclusively made up of men, which meant that the spouses were all wives. When the husbands were away, the women met regularly and were the closest thing Meg had to a family. It was the closest thing any of them had to family, this simulacrum of friendship, women suddenly thrown together in a time of duress, with no one to depend on but each other, all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas, walled in by strip malls, chain restaurants, and highways that led to better places. Most of them had gotten used to making a life for themselves without a husband, finding doctors and dentists and playgrounds, filling their cell phone with numbers and their calendars with playdates, and then the husbands would return and the army would toss them all at some other base in the middle of nowhere to begin again.

  The wives in Meg’s FRG depended on each other for babysitting, barbecue cookouts, pep talks. They brought casseroles when a woman returned to a husbandless house with a newborn, and they remembered each other’s birthdays when the men overseas did not. They lived close together on base and they minded each other’s business. In a world where it is normal for a thousand men to pack their bags, meet on a parade field, and then disappear for an entire year, the women of deployed soldiers stuck together. Mingling too often with the civilian world, so full of couples, of men nonchalantly paying bills, planning vacations, and picking kids up after ball games, those constant reminders of what life could be, would drive an army spouse crazy.

  The FRG leader, Bonnie McCormick, looked every bit the battalion commander’s wife: smooth, shoulder-length hair, very little makeup but a perfectly lipsticked smile, conservative blouse with khaki capris, a body that could keep up with the men during their early morning runs.

  “Ladies, it is important that you get this information out to the wives who aren’t here,” Bonnie said, looking around the room. Some wives nodded; most waited to see what was coming next. “You know who they are.” She opened the notebook on her lap and began talking about potential return dates for the men, just two months out, and Meg quickly started writing it all down.

  Carla leaned into Meg’s shoulder and asked, “Did you meet Natalya Torres yet?” Meg nodded, keeping her eyes on Bonnie McCormick. Carla, raising her whispered voice ever so slightly so the wives around them could listen in, continued. “Well, I finally saw her in the laundry room and told her about this meeting but she just shrugged. Her husband’s been gone ten months and she hasn’t been to one meeting yet.” Meg felt something hit her in the neck and looked at Carla’s drooling baby, who was waving around a one-pound dumbbell.

  “Isn’t Mimi strong?” Carla asked, immediately thrusting the baby at Meg. “Whenever I try to take it away she screams bloody murder.” Meg would have liked to say, “Please get that Churchill-headed creature away from me,” but of course she just took Mimi and jiggled her and made the noises adults make when babies drool all over them. The wives were always throwing their offspring at her as if they thought that the more she got spit up on, the more she’d want one of her own.

  “So Sandy from 5C? Her husband used to work with Natalya’s in the Green Zone?” Carla spoke with the wonder of an archaeologist newly returned from discovering the eighth ancient wonder of the world. “She told me all sorts of wild things.” Meg let Mimi’s wet and sticky hand tug on her ear and she gave up trying to take notes. Listening to Carla, she learned that Natalya was Serbian, that she met her husband five years ago when he was stationed in Kosovo and she was cutting hair at his base. He’d been married at the time but quickly divorced the wife who waited patiently for him at home. He brought his new, non-English-speaking bride back to the States when his tour was up.