Instead, she says, “We’ll be your family.”
“We’ll make beautiful milk-chocolate babies.”
“Uncle Boudreaux will gladly give you away.”
And he replies, “Yeah! The old BB is just dying to give me away. But you know, men aren’t given away. We run shit.”
She says, “You wish. You know what I mean.”
And he does, not that she ever utters the M-word, nothing closer than that Morse code, the double dashes that appear after, lost in concentration, she bites her lower lip. No, no M-word. Instead, she claps at cans clattering behind cars. Near bridal shops, her purposeful steps shorten to a saunter. And whenever a home makeover or newlywed show comes on, she yells, “Hurry honey, come here.”
He says, “Will those chocolate babies be yummy or bittersweet?”
“Will they be solid or hollow?”
“I can’t even spell marriage.”
Her laughter, ignited by a snort of disbelief, is explosive. She commands him to be serious!
“I am,” he says. He really can’t spell marriage, that’s not his name. And he leans in to taste her smile, biting at her lips, as red and ripe as plums, marking them with two short dashes of his own.
And slowly, like an incantation, she says, “IDC, IDC, IDC, Ines Delesseppes Conroy.”
Ines Delesseppes Conroy! Mrs. D would like that even less than A-sheel. “Not to worry,” she said. Her mom would come around. “I promise you that.”
PART 3. SUMMER 2005
CHAPTER 13
FOR OVER SIX MONTHS, ACHILLES HEARD NO NEWS OF TROY. THEN, LATE one evening, while in bed with Ines watching a home decorating show, he answered his cell phone to hear Kevin Wexler say, without even a hello, “I saw Troy.”
Hearing Wexler’s voice, he went out onto the balcony, which stretched across the length of the condo and overlooked the Mississippi. Once outside, with both French doors safely shut behind him, he asked, “Are you still in Atlanta?”
“Yes.”
“At your sister’s?” asked Achilles.
“Yes.”
“You sure?” asked Achilles.
“When I called his name, he ran.”
Achilles snapped his phone shut just as Ines turned on the bedroom light, something he constantly asked her not to do when the heavy drapes were open. One night, he’d even marched her down to the street below their balcony to prove how much a burglar, or rapist, or any other psychopath would see through those sheer curtains she so adored. He stressed that any criminal of opportunity recessed in the darkness could see them, case the condo, or take a potshot. Achilles shook his head as she crossed the room, the hem of her T-shirt caught in her underwear. He moved to the dark end of the balcony.
A bellowing air horn drew his attention to the Mississippi. He heard the waters shouldering their banks, but what he could see of the river under the full moon was nearly flat, a field of shallow black bowls with silver brims. He leaned against the rail and ran his fingers across the balusters while a black tugboat with a shiny hull and one broad, chalky stripe glided by, the dark water betraying little hint of its passing, only a few silver rims of water wriggling into ribbons. The tug was headed toward Algiers, the twinkling lamps across the river. In the moonlight, the coiled chain on the aft deck was a glistening black wreath and the anchor at the rear of the boat a wink of light. Achilles spun on his heels and went back into the condo, past the waist-high vases of dried larkspur and emerald hydrangeas in the living room, past Ines’s favorite print, a life-size rendering of Kali, and stopped at the bedroom. Everything was as he’d left it. The light was off. Ines was in bed looking at television, and even Ricky, the stuffed koala, stood balanced between her feet. Achilles pointed to the phone in his hand as if it were a witness and began, “A guy from my unit … a funeral.”
“Oh no. Who?” asked Ines, turning down the volume on the TV.
He thought about it for a moment before answering, “Kevin Wexler.”
“Were you close? What was he like?” asked Ines.
“He was fine. I told you. We don’t have a pack of secrets about some crazy mission where we slaughtered a village of retarded babies or something and ran around with their heads on pitchforks. We don’t know all the secrets the news doesn’t tell you or the government keeps away from you.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Ines, turning the volume back up.
“I don’t mean that you did. I’m sorry.” Achilles sat beside her on the bed, taking her hands in his. They’d never had a major argument, and he wouldn’t be able to leave if he thought she was upset with him. All the stares she got. What might she do for revenge? “We got a shitty hand. It’s like you said about your three months in Kabul. ‘The crazy thing about a war isn’t that none of the stereotypes are true, it’s that all of them are.’”
“I understand.”
Achilles patted her hand, but knew she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was the most intelligent person he knew, and it was true she had, in her words, a heart the size of the Hindenburg. That had taken some research to confirm, but he knew it to be true. Nonetheless, volunteering in the ghetto wasn’t the same as being from the ghetto. Volunteering in Goddamnistan wasn’t the same as being posted there. What would she say if he told her about Jackson, or that Afghan kid defiant to the end, smiling as he hit the ground clutching his neck, or Merriweather, putting his blade away without even wiping it off, as casually as zipping up? Would she think he had deserved to lose his foot? What about Wexler running into a minefield, and Troy going after him?
He was on the road within an hour. He carried little: the carry-on Ines had loaned him for the suit he’d almost forgotten, a rucksack he kept stuffed with a few pairs of underwear, and the black hooded sweatshirt he wore as urban camouflage. Ines had packed almond butter and honey sandwiches, pomegranate juice, a gift for Sammy the Stargazer — whom she foisted on Achilles whenever Sammy came home for a three-day weekend — and a card addressed to Naomi Wexler in perfect script, the letters as fluid as water, cursive that belonged on the Constitution.
He was on the twin spans, just beyond the New Orleans city limits, when the rain struck, sudden and vengeful like a prophecy, and he hydroplaned. He drove slower after that. He had promised Ines he would drive carefully and call her when he arrived, no matter the time. And before that, that he didn’t scare easily, and after that, that he wouldn’t fuck other women. His father had made him promise to look out for his younger brother. And before that, that he wouldn’t cry when he was lost, and before that, that he would take a punch from someone else before kicking himself for running away. His mother had made him promise to return alive, at all costs, telling him squarely, “Son, don’t be a hero.” And before that, “Never go into Pennsylvania without an adult.” And before that, “Hold his hand and look both ways.” And after that, the army made him promise to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies; to bear true faith and allegiance, etcetera, etcetera; to obey the orders of the president, etcetera, etcetera, et-fucking-cetera. He had promised Wages to deliver a package to his mother and Bethany, if circumstances warrant. And after that, after Merriweather overdosed on crunch, Achilles, Wages, and Wexler stood in the ratty linoleum hallway of Walter Reed Memorial Hospital, somber as pallbearers, and declared that if any of them saw any one of the others going down the slippery slope of addiction, they were to forcibly intervene, no questions asked. Their hands clasped, his arm one of the three spokes in that wheel, itself a silent promise. They hadn’t survived all that shit just to come home and get hooked on this shit. Still, Achilles felt odd about showing up at Wexler’s house at four a.m. Surely Wexler had expected this when he called, but during the drive from New Orleans to Atlanta, Achilles’s fear that he wouldn’t find Troy, now missing for almost a year, was slowly eclipsed by the fear that he would.