The lights went off, and then I heard a click. And suddenly there was a face. It was a big face on the wall behind where Mother had been standing before the lights went out. The face was turned to the right and you could only see the left cheek. It looked like a rotten tomato with a white nose sticking out of it. The cheek was really red and there was a hole in it and the edges of the hole were black. Inside the hole looked only a little less red than the cheek. Then there was another click and that face was gone and a body took its place. The body was a woman. I could tell that because it was naked. It was a naked woman’s chest. But it wasn’t something that Exley or anyone else would ever whistle at. The chest was white, and there was a hole in it, too. But the hole was much bigger, like it had been dug, and I couldn’t see the bottom of it, and the skin around the hole was blacker, not like it was rotten, but like it had been burned. Someone groaned in the room, and I could hear footsteps running and the door opened and light blasted into the room, and then the door closed and it was dark again. Then another click. And another picture. This one of just a neck. The neck was black. I mean, it was a black person’s neck. You couldn’t see the person’s face or the body. Just a neck that was cut open. The picture was from the side. Like I said, you couldn’t see the head, but it looked like someone outside the picture had tipped the head back and opened the person’s neck. I don’t know how else to describe it. There was a V-shaped space in the neck, and there was dried blood all around it. “For Christ’s sake,” I heard someone say. It had to be Exley. It was a man’s voice. But it sounded so far away. Then another click, and another picture. Of a woman’s arm with a bone sticking right out of the skin near the elbow. Of a woman’s mouth with broken teeth and missing teeth. Of a woman with one eye completely shut and swollen over and the other wide open and blue and looking at the camera like the camera had done it. Another of a woman whose ear was missing. I mean, it was totally gone and there was a hole in the woman’s head where the ear had been. There were no names with the pictures. But I could tell these were all women because of their jewelry, or their haircuts, or their body parts. But I didn’t know whether the women were alive or dead. I don’t know how long this went on. Forever, it seemed like. When the lights finally came on, people blinked for a while and then looked around at one another, like they had no idea where they were or how they’d gotten there. I looked next to me, at where Exley had been standing before the lights went down, but he wasn’t there anymore. I looked at the front of the room. Mother was still standing there. She was still standing a few feet away from the chair, not saying anything, but I wasn’t embarrassed about that anymore. I needed Mother too much to be embarrassed. I needed her to tell me whether the women were dead or alive. Some people really can’t stand waiting to find out what happens at the end of a book. I wasn’t one of those people, maybe because I read the books so fast that I didn’t have to wait very long. But I was like that now, with the women in the pictures. I wanted to know what had happened to them. Even the woman with the cut throat. She seemed like she had to be dead. But I wanted to know for sure. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I thought I would do with the information once I had it.
“Those were all pictures of women,” Mother said. Her voice was like an alarm clock. When she spoke, a couple of people shook their heads, like they’d just been woken up. “The pictures were all taken within the last three years. Some of the women were soldiers who were wounded or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the women were civilians who were wounded or killed by their husbands or boyfriends or sons who were soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And some of the women were soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who were wounded or killed by their husbands or boyfriends or sons who were also soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they were wounded or killed back home.”
Mother paused for a second. She looked calmly around the room.
“Does it matter how it happened?” Mother finally asked. “Does it matter whether the women were wounded or killed in combat or at home?”
This was a rhetorical question. Anyone who had ever heard one would have recognized it. The answer was yes.
“No,” Exley’s voice said. I tracked it and found him standing toward the front of the room, off to the left. Everyone’s head swiveled. He was standing with his hands in his pockets. He had big eyes. I wasn’t sure if he was looking at Mother or at the wall where the pictures had been.
“No?” Mother said. She looked blankly in Exley’s direction, which was a little bit of a relief. Mother clearly didn’t recognize him. “No? No, there is no difference between a woman volunteering to serve in a war in which she knows she might be wounded or killed, and a woman getting wounded or killed by her boyfriend?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Exley said. “What’s the difference? No matter what or where, what happened to them is. ” Exley stopped and closed his eyes. It was like he was looking for something in his head.
“Wrong?” Mother said.
Exley opened his eyes. “Cha damn right they’re wrong,” he said.
“Are you saying it’s wrong for a woman to join the army?”
I could see Exley think about this. His eyes went to his shoes. He looked like he needed help, which was too bad. Because I couldn’t help him, just like I couldn’t help my dad when he was arguing with Mother. Because my dad was always trying to tell Mother, in so many words, You think me being like Exley is a bad thing, but it’s not. Exley is not a bad guy and neither am I. And I’m going to prove that by showing you that M. doesn’t think I’m a bad guy and so you shouldn’t, either. Just like how Exley was trying to tell Mother, I know you think I’m a bad guy, but I’m not. I know you think, since I thought about hurting women in my book, that makes me the same as the guys who actually did hurt the women in the pictures you showed us. But I’m not the same, and I’m going to prove that by saying what I think you want to hear tonight in front of all these people. When my dad looked at me during these arguments, I could never figure out whether he wanted me to say that all men weren’t as bad as Mother seemed to think they were, or that he wasn’t as bad as all other men. What he never seemed to understand was that Mother wasn’t talking about all other men: she was talking about him. And what Exley didn’t seem to understand was that she wasn’t talking about him: she was talking about the women who’d been hurt by all these other guys. Anyway, I couldn’t ever help my dad, and I couldn’t help Exley, either.
“C’mon, friend,” Exley finally said. “All I’m sayin’. ”
“I know what you’re saying, friend,” Mother said. Now it was Exley who was embarrassing me. Stop talking like that, I wanted to tell him. “You’re saying, friend, that no matter how a woman gets hurt, no matter who hurts her, it’s wrong. That she’s a victim. Right?”