Come Landfall: A Novel

Thirteen: Nightwatch

thirteen Nightwatch How long the night was she waited. She went on the Internet and looked up Balad Air Base Hospital. Frank was being stabilized there. She had the picture of a tent hospital set up among concrete barricades. The Air Force website said that insurgents, next to civilians, next to servicemen, received treatment there. Ten p.m., eleven, midnight in Mississippi: dawn, giving way to early morning, in Iraq. She had another image in her mind that would not let go: Frank, with his head bandaged, his eyes closed, on a stretcher, but there was no blood. His face was smooth, his color was good, then he opened his eyes and looked at her and she fell into those brown eyes as she had looked into them at the casino, as she had when he turned to her in the glider and said, “I love you.” And she kept falling, feeling the fall, as though she had been pitched out of that glider and was plummeting, spread eagle, the hot wind scouring her face, the gulls she had watched from the Ship Island ferry now watching her, the ground rising faster and the wind streaming around her, “Frank, oh, Frank,” but he could not respond, locked away in the base hospital as she was here, falling. Awake, asleep, 2 a.m., 2:30, what to do, she did not know, and when she heard Nana padding about her room—“Where am I?”—she answered, “Oh, Nana, go back to bed.” “What’s wrong? Is something wrong? It’s about Rosey!” come l andfall 183 “No, Nana.” “They said he’d been hurt, wounded.” “No, Nana.” “Rosey . . .” “No! Nana! Not Rosey! You know it’s not about Rosey.” “He’s okay, then?” “Everything’s not about Rosey. My husband is dying, Nana, and I’m here, in Biloxi, Mississippi, stuck here in this apartment with you.” Nana sat hard on the edge of the bed and her face crumpled up like a little girl’s. “I’m so much trouble to you.” “No, Nana,” Angela said, sitting next to her. “You’re not trouble, you’re my Nana, and I’ll do whatever I can, but . . .” Nana’s body began to shake with sobs. Falling, the two of them, Nana in the small room in Georgetown, where the word had come that Rosey was missing and all she had was the card from the Imperial Japanese Army saying, “I am well, I send my love to my family,” Angela in the small room in Biloxi, where word had come that Frank had taken a hit to the leg and the head, and she clutched one of his last e-mails, from what now felt like a very long-ago Christmas morning, “I knelt and prayed, I thanked God,” and felt the floor giving way. Throughout it all, Nana held his head, Rosey’s full lips, the dark almond eyes, the wavy black hair, as she saw him gone from the prison camp to parts unknown, a prison ship some said, but what did it look like? A prison on a ship, or a floating jail? Or maybe he had not been moved there at all but had escaped and, uncounted for, was hiding out in the Philippine forests crouched down, repeating in silence his Hebrew prayers asking for deliverance like his family had read aloud in the Passover seder that first and only spring together. It was not Jerusalem but America he prayed for, and at the end of the trek he dreamed it was her own face, as she waited for him and waited still, knowing he could somehow make his way between the gulf of night and the coast of dawn. 184 Roy Hoffman And as Frank lay against Angela, his head pressed against her shoulder , she comforted him, stroking his brow, running her palm over the contours of his face, cradling his head—“His leg and his head!” Big Frank’s voice kept repeating—leaning down and kissing his forehead, cheek, neck, lips. “Oh, Frank.” She came to, drifted off, opened her eyes to see first light edging through the blinds. Where she’d fallen asleep, Nana lay curled against her, nose against her shoulder. She felt Nana’s warm steady breath, felt her twitch in sleep. Was she dreaming old fox-trots to the champagne swirl of a big band? Or the card from...