Breach, p.21
Breach, page 21
“Jace isn’t here, Gurley.”
“I know, ma’am.”
“What’s wrong? Is it Angela?” The fiancée.
“No, ma’am.” His breath was minty on her face. Mouthwash or harsh gum. That was always Jace’s first giveaway these days, a super minty mouth.
“Jace isn’t here,” she repeated.
“Um, I know. That’s why I’m here,” he said. The big guy swerved in his boots. Marleigh had never seen any of them tipsy in uniform. They always changed into street clothes first.
“What happened?”
“We just saw his bike. On the highway.”
She dropped to the concrete stoop, only realizing what she’d done when her butt hit concrete. “Ow!” The left side of her throat closed. “What do you mean? Where’s Jace?”
“They took him. One of us needed to get here before the police. To tell you.” The boy slumped over and started sobbing. His cries broke like waves across his wide back.
“What are you telling me, Gurley?”
“I’m sure it was over real quick. That’s what the EMTs said.”
Marleigh stood up. “No,” she said, “You fucking liar.” She kicked Gurley in the ribs. “Get away from my house.”
A shiny, jacked-up Jeep swerved into the parking lot.
“Take me to him,” she told Harbich. “Take me to the hospital.”
“He’s not in the hospital, Marleigh.” She flashed back to what the EMT told her about Pops. They don’t bring dead people to the hospital.
She battered his chest and the three of them cried together. Silence from the baby monitor she clutched so hard in her hands that the antenna had bent. “No. He was done. He was getting better. Everything was better.”
Harbich wiped tears and snot off his face. “The police are on their way. They’ll take you to identify his body.”
“No.”
A police cruiser parked beside Harbich’s Jeep. “Mrs. Holt?”
When her older sons awoke from their naps, Marleigh had to explain that their father was dead. Max would only know her as a single mother.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Jace’s death made the newspaper. Motorcycle crash kills one, injures three and cripples I-264. Twice, then, he’d been in the Virginian-Pilot. The photo beneath the bolded headline showed chunks of neon-green plastic, one rear tire, the bike’s tailpipe. Wreckage from the cars that crashed when trying to swerve out of the way. The front of Jace’s motorcycle smashed into the concrete median separating east and westbound traffic. There were no skid marks left on the highway. By the time the photo was taken, Jace’s body had been removed from the opposite side of the highway. Flares ignited and the area blocked off. “Traffic was re-routed for a one-mile stretch between Tidewater Drive and Military Highway yesterday afternoon. Excessive speed and alcohol were factors in the crash.” Marleigh wouldn’t cut out that article. The photo of Jace, Jason, and her, happy and young, was still up on the counter. That was less than three years ago.
Marleigh called Donna first. They had only spoken a handful of times since she and Jace married. Ed and Jace refused to apologize to one another after the bar brawl in Scottsbluff, and both women were caught in the middle. Still, she had to know. She called three times before she left a message asking Donna to call her. Jace’s DD 214 listed Trish as his next of kin. He’d never bothered to update it, just as he never sought the appeal to improve his general discharge to an honorable one. Trish and Guylene had to know by now, but she called Trish, anyway.
Trish’s voice was thick with tears after Marleigh said hello. “Oh, Marleigh,” she said. “It’s so horrible. I’m so sorry.”
It was horrible. Jace was so much more than his last year. She knew that, but would her boys? Or would they only ever know the scorched earth their father left behind.
“Yeah,” was all Marleigh could say.
“How are the boys?” Trish had never met them. They had all talked of visits, but they never happened. No one booked the flights or made the drive. There was always next summer, next year.
“Max is coming home from the hospital soon. He won’t—” He would never know his father. “He’s doing better, getting stronger. Jason and Nicky.” She stopped to breathe away the tears. “Nicky doesn’t understand. He’s waiting for his dad to come home again like he always does. Jason is so quiet, it’s scary.”
The night after she identified Jace’s body, she told her boys that Daddy wasn’t coming home. “Dada?” Nicky asked. “Dada! Dada! Dada! Work?” He only had a few words at his disposal: Dada, Mama, Brudder, baby. One he never needed again. It was so tempting to tell them he’d been deployed. She was a lot of things, but Marleigh wasn’t cruel.
“Not at work, honey. He’s gone.” Jason set his soft little jaw, put one chubby arm around his mother, and one around his little brother. He became the man of the house, again.
Trish had no problem crying over the phone. “He seemed so much better with you. I hoped—” She gulped. “I hoped it would always be good for you.”
“He didn’t slow down,” Marleigh said. “He sped right into that concrete wall.”
“He’s been chasing death a long time,” Trish said.
“I don’t know what to do,” Marleigh said.
“We’ll have a small service here,” Trish said. “You do whatever feels right.”
Marleigh meant she didn’t know what to do about anything, about her life. None of this felt right. She needed to have him cremated; there was so little left to bury. Trish explained how sharply downhill Donna had gone when Ed died. Trish was caring now for both Donna and Guylene. Donna had been improving, Trish told her. But she didn’t think Guylene had much time left, and now they’d all lost Jace, too. “I’m terrified. Jace was discharged. We’re completely on our own. Once you’re out, you’re out.”
“I wish I could be more help,” Trish said.
Me, too, Marleigh thought. “I understand. Bye, Trish.”
···
Marleigh brought Jace’s ashes to Ocean View beach, a handful of blocks from the old boxing gym where they had met. She wore Max across her chest. Jason held Nicky’s hand as they walked down the beach to the foamy edge of the Chesapeake Bay. Gurley and Harbich were down at the water’s edge, their fiancées, too, arms wrapped around one another against the mid-October wind. Jace had loved the water, the way the sun set over the Bay after rising above the Atlantic. This was the beach where they had decided to risk themselves on one another. A pod of dolphins swam back and forth, surfacing and submerging.
Marleigh waded in knee deep and took the lid off the box, unwrapping the twist tie from the plastic baggie inside, scattering Jace into the lap of the waves, knowing Jason and Nicky watched from the shore. Gurley’s fiancée held on to Nicky’s hand. Jason stood stalwart, unwittingly at attention. Marleigh was exhausted. And angry. And devastated. She felt a century old. She felt cheated. She felt so fucking sad.
Part of her wanted to walk all the way into the water, give into the grief that would pull her out and under. Max’s little feet kicked gently at her ribs. If she kept walking, his tiny-socked feet would be underwater, too.
“Goodbye, asshole,” she said through a mouth thick with tears. “We loved you so much.”
Marleigh gave the box a final shake and turned back to the shore, with Max squirming against her chest. Jason and Nicky ran to her, tugging on her skirt, holding onto her sopping wet legs. They walked to the top of the beach access, heading to the car. Jason stopped suddenly and turned back to the beach. Jason waved to the water, to his father, and gave him the quick salute they’d practiced for all those times waiting on the pier for Jace to come home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The baby was boogery and warm—too warm. Max tugged on his ears and drooled and drooled. Let it be teething; let it be teething; let it be teething, Marleigh wished over and over. In the six months since Jace died, both Jason and Nicky had occasionally spiked fevers, worrying her, and then the next tooth would inevitably erupt. Their mouths dried up and their skin cooled. They quieted, comfortable and back to themselves. She couldn’t waste a sick visit to the pediatrician on teething, or a cold, something that wouldn’t merit antibiotics, something the doctors would wave away saying “push rest and fluids” after taking her twenty-five-dollar copay. Max was the only one of them with insurance. It was shitty, but she knew if she let it lapse, she could never cover him again. She tattooed and bartended every shift she could get.
Max’s unlicensed daycare turned him away or called her back to get him if he had a fever. Hopefully she could buy herself a whole shift worth of hours if she gave him both a little ibuprofen and Tylenol. If he was going to need antibiotics, she was going to need to find a way to pay for them.
Neither of the other two ever had trouble with their ears, but Max was always catching something. More than his heart and lungs were underdeveloped, no matter what the nurses said. “He’ll overcome this. He won’t believe it when you tell him stories later.” She just wanted to rush him to health, see if he could catch up to his brothers, get him old enough to join them at the church school. She was adamant about keeping them in the church preschool with its small class sizes and growing endowment fund. When she looked at the early-start programs and free preschools, it looked like just where she’d come from; she wanted better for them than that. Otherwise, what had everything meant?
Marleigh was outnumbered by boys, three-to-one, and they were all hungry. Hunger she could understand; she could harness it. She was (again) a boxer cutting weight. Self-denial was control and power. It didn’t work that way for little boys, boys who grew overnight as they slept, who outgrew shoes from one day to the next. Thank God her milk kept up and Max was such a good nurser.
“I don’t wanna,” Jason told her as she put on his too-tight Sketchers, showing with her fingers how to scrunch up his toes.
“You need them for school today,” she said.
“They hurt, Mom.”
“It’s just for today.”
“You said that yesterday.” She cut into the front seam and dug out extra space for his toes.
She probably had said that. When Nicky or the baby outgrew something, they had their brothers’ clothes and shoes and pajamas to move into. Jason’s had to be purchased. And if she bought something new, it might last long enough for the other boys to use it. Thrift store clothes had already been passed down again and again, all the boys’ pants thin and discolored at the knees. New was so expensive, even at Walmart and Target, where so many women shopped for recreation, eagerly awaiting the new seasonal colors and accessories. Marleigh didn’t care about having new things for herself; she wore the same items over and over anyway. She always had.
But she knew how important it was to have the right characters on the boys’ T-shirts and how many colors of Swoosh their friends had on their shorts and shirts. It was part of their just like every other kid camouflage. Just like newish backpacks filled with all of the requisite colored pencils and dry-erase markers were at the beginning of the new school year. The teachers said none of that was mandatory. Jason was only carrying papers and crafts and lunch back and forth to school. He only needed a lunchbox, but Marleigh remembered the exacting difference between the teachers’ lists and the students’. She had drawn a navy rectangle on the heel of her white sneakers so they looked enough like Keds from a distance to fool her peers. And by high school she could mimic the Adidas stripes and logo. Her friends paid her to draw theirs.
Marleigh told the boys how stuff didn’t matter, how none of it made you any better on the inside where it counted, but she would do everything she could to help them fit in just enough. Best to be invisible.
She gave Max a squirt of ibuprofen and dropped the older boys at school and him at daycare. She had to shop, and she had to work. Marleigh had a process for shopping. When she was alone, she picked strip malls with bargain grocery store chains and dollar stores. She started at Family Dollar for all the household goods—so much cheaper than grocery stores—and lunch box items and snacks. She always had plenty of shelf-stable foods for them to use at the end of the month when fresh was no longer an option. When she had the boys with her, she shopped at Harris Teeter. Their prices were higher, but almost every aisle held free samples. Ham and cheese on toothpicks, orange wedges. Jason liked the California rolls offered between the sushi shelf and the dairy. Each boy left the store with sugar crystals on his hand from the free cookies offered to every child. She saved her WIC money for Harris Teeter. It didn’t go far on purchases, but a few handfuls of samples each could see them through most of the day.
And Marleigh taught her kids how to barter. The contents of Jason’s lunch box were objects of interest at school, different from the carefully curated bento boxes many of the other parents packed, full of vegetables and hormone-free dairy products. “He’s so generous with the other kids,” a teacher remarked. “He’s always willing to trade a pudding cup for a banana or an orange.” Of course he was. You could store those puddings in the trunk on a summer day and they’d be just as you left them. A piece of fresh fruit was never guaranteed.
One day, Nicky came home, his face sticky and orange. He wouldn’t let Marleigh wipe it off. “Emily had mango in her lunch today,” he said. “Mango, Mom. She hates it, but it’s her sister’s favorite, so her mom packs it anyway.”
Marleigh smiled at him. “Yum,” she said.
“Can we buy some too?”
“Maybe next month,” she said. They both knew what that meant.
Marleigh asked at the school office about scholarships or tuition discounts. She was desperate to keep the boys together at a school that would keep them safe and give them a life so much better than hers.
“Only the Catholics give big family discounts, and they are phasing that out,” the office manager said. “The school is the one money-maker for the church.”
“I understand,” Marleigh said, turning to leave.
“Regularly attending members of the church do get fifteen percent off tuition,” the woman said.
“Where do I sign up?” Marleigh asked.
“Church Sunday. Fill out the newcomer card and turn it in at the fellowship luncheon afterwards,” she said. The woman gestured for Marleigh to lean in close. She whispered, “And, you know, with everything you’ve been through, I can knock off another ten percent. Just don’t tell anyone.” She winked at Marleigh like they were in this together.
School tuition was three grand per boy. Aftercare hours were extra. She and Jace had prepaid the year, but re-enrollment was right around the corner.
Marleigh had to hold her children back that first Sunday at the luncheon. They stuffed their faces with tuna sandwiches and Goldfish crackers and ran around with their friends from school. Marleigh watched husbands and wives roll their eyes at one another conspiratorially as their children misbehaved, and she wondered what that felt like. She was all tightly held secrets and worries. What would it feel like to share a word of that with someone else? To exhale and let her shoulders fall if just for a moment? A one-bedroom apartment had opened in their building, and Marleigh had downsized their rent. There were so many of them piled together in bed that she felt like the mother of puppies, but also profoundly alone in every adult way.
She grabbed Nicky’s hand. “No more today,” she said.
His eyes flooded and his chin wobbled. “But—” he began, quickly stopping.
She wouldn’t be cruel enough to suggest a big meal later. They both knew it would be a lie. There was an art to staying invisible.
Marleigh liked church coffee hours the best because all the children and the adults ate like they hadn’t seen food in days. Soup kitchens were dead ends. Church coffees were hopeful beginnings. Little girls wearing giant hair bows and intricately smocked dresses—some of the dresses were themed, fairy tales or seasons and holidays, occasionally alma maters—sloshed pink lemonade and licked orange cheez-ball residue off their fingers before plunging their hands into the bowl of pretzels. Sunday mornings were the one time each of them could eat until they were overfull. They could do more than just take the edge off their hunger, and Marleigh didn’t have to ration food between the boys, determine whose needs were greatest. The adults socialized some, but it was disinterested, distracted chatter. Nearly all eyes scanned the hall, awaiting the minister’s appearance so the attendees could shake his hand, make sure their presence was noted. The choristers came in just before the minister, looking only vaguely recognizable outside of their matching robes. Max stayed in the church nursery, gulped down a bottle and some Cheerios.
Marleigh’s kids fit right in. All the boys in attendance wore pants just a little too short or two long. They all wiggled inside of their tucked in shirts and belts. The little boys’ hair looked fresh from sleep with the wet-palmed attempt to flatten and smooth.
“Enjoy,” she told them. “But chew slowly. And be sure to thank the host family.” A white-haired woman at every church always announced that Sunday’s host family. Beyond that, Marleigh only had one rule for the children—they each had to fill a plate with only fruits and vegetables, and they had to eat every bite. After that, they could have all the brownies and tortilla chips they wanted. One woman complimented Marleigh on what healthy eaters her sons were. “Mine just beelines to the sweets,” the woman said. “How do you do it?”
“I starve them until we get here,” Marleigh said. “They’ll eat anything at that point.”
The woman trilled a light “ha ha” and touched Marleigh on the inside of the elbow. Hunger was one of the most powerful tools of all.
