Come Landfall: A Novel

Ten: Counting the Days

ten Counting the Days Waiting. In her apartment on the third floor of a Georgetown apartment building. Waiting, as she watched the capital turn to soldiers everywhere , guards doing rounds by the White House, the Washington Monument, the Pentagon. Waiting, gazing out the window, pouring a glass of red wine into the silver goblet that she’d given Rosey and that he’d drunk from the night before leaving, the feeling of blessed sleep enclosing her like a narcotic. Waking early always, with the sun hammering the pillow just like it had that morning, checking to make sure that his shoes she’d polished had no veil of dust over them—polish, buff, snap!—or his shirts, which she’d washed and ironed and hung deep in the closet, were not odorous of mothballs. Dunk, lather, wring! Keep everything just as it was. Waiting. “Why don’t you come stay with us?” her mother had asked, down to Virginia, where the Atlantic swept onto the beach and the sound of it rocked her to sleep, not like the Mississippi Sound with its sonorous rising and falling of tides and where her granddaughter, bless her heart, rose and fell with the days, the weeks, that her groom was away. “We are praying for him every day.” The landlady downstairs in the basement apartment, the Polish storekeeper on the corner, her boss at Kress’s, where she took a job after four months, and at the Red Cross, where she volunteered after work, all praying. What could she say in her prayers that she offered, looking out the window as she looked now, over the parking lot of the apartment build- 148 Roy Hoffman ing beyond the Mississippi oaks with their moss like the shawls of widows lumbering their way toward the barren Sound? No, not Mississippi , where Angela had put up a map of the Middle East on the kitchen wall like a hurricane tracking chart and marked it with Frank’s movements from Kuwait to Baghdad to a forward operating base north of Baghdad, where the time was 1943 not 2004 like the calendar lied, and where she knew what prayer to offer: “Dearest Lord, Watch over my husband who suffers in this war. Keep him safe in captivity, and keep his heart and mind free even if his body should be imprisoned. Let Rosey come back to me safely. And watch out for all the other soldiers, so many, and keep them from harm, and give peace to all of those who wait for them. Amen.” Had the radio, with its news of her and Rosey’s war, been better than the television, with its news of Angela’s and Frank’s? When the images played over and again of prisoners kneeling before hooded terrorists who threatened to behead them and often did? The screen showed the violent extremists speaking their impossible language, the English subtitles telling their political demands. How could she have gone on if she had been able to see Rosey, brought low by his captors, rolling out in footage for all the world to see? But how had she gone on seeing nothing? Knowing nothing? Only hearing of the men shrunk to skin and bones in the prison camps, of the early morning darkness raids to liberate when remotely possible, of the violations of the POW codes of conduct, as though any sane conduct could be expected in the insanity of war? She heard music out the window. The carousel. She had read her letters from Rosey at a bench near those slowly spinning horses, the National Mall spread out around her in fairyland green, the reflecting pool in its tranquility belying the turbulence of the world beyond. “Lovesick beneath the moon,” she had repeated aloud, laughing, imagining him penning that before flying out from San Francisco. The letters. Where were they? Oh, yes, in the teakwood box. Weren’t they under the bed at her house by the Sound? In them she had the whorls of Rosey’s handwriting , testaments of his presence in a way all the cell phone calls be- come l andfall 149 tween Frank and Angela, the fleeting “instant messages” on Angela’s computer, could never match. She peered out to the Mississippi sidewalk. An ice cream truck. Its recorded music played “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” so that she started humming it, thinking...