Burning
 

When Army Specialist Flip Murphy entered the auditorium on his crutches, he scanned the crowd for his wife, sure that she wouldn’t be there. But behind the stooped veterans with their baseball caps and the children jumping up and down waving their made-in-China American flags, he saw Helena’s long red hair, the turn of a pale cheek and squint of her blue eyes. Flip felt his cheeks blush hot with embarrassment; he kept his eyes on her hair and wouldn’t look around at anyone else, afraid another soldier would see how relieved he was to find someone waiting for him.

"You haven’t answered any of my e-mails; I wasn’t sure if you knew I’d be coming back," Flip said from the passenger seat of Helena’s rental car as she drove. He tried not to be upset that she hadn’t gotten his truck out of storage; he would have loved to have seen that black Ford waiting for him with the tires filled and the oil changed instead of this cramped Kia. And how much was a rental car costing them while his truck sat gathering dust?

"You know my parents don’t have a computer," Helena said, eyes on the road. "And I haven’t had a chance to go to the library in a while. But I had a friend of mine check my e-mails and read them to me over the phone."

"Then you could have given her a message to send me, just to let me know. I thought I’d be stranded; I worried about it the whole last month," Flip blinked his eyes; this wasn’t how he meant to start things off but he couldn’t help himself. All those days in Germany while they cut his left foot open again and again, the two weeks of observation at Walter Reed while some fat intern tried to show him how to get around on crutches, then the flight here from D.C., the whole right side of the plane filled with battered soldiers leaning forward with sweat on their foreheads, all of them wondering if their wives would be waiting, and if they were, then how long they would stick around when they saw the burn scars, the casts, the missing bits and pieces that no amount of Star Wars metal limbs could make up for.

"I’m here, aren’t I?" Helena asked softly, and she placed her right hand on his elbow, just a pat really, but that touch was everything he needed. Flip finally took a deep breath and realized that just being with Helena again meant he was home.

They pulled into a Holiday Inn parking lot.
"You didn’t find an apartment?" he asked.
Helena shook her head. "I just got here last night."

When they opened the hotel room door, Flip immediately noticed the two twin beds. He looked at Helena, who quickly sat down on the corner of one and smiled up at him.
"I thought two beds would be best for your foot," she said. "You know how I toss and turn. You wouldn’t want me to roll over on your cast in the middle of the night."
"Yes, I would." He sat down on the corner of the other bed and stared across a distance that seemed impossible; he just got back from Iraq, a year away and he had almost died, and his wife got a room with two beds. So Flip said the one thing he had sworn he would not say no matter what. "Are you going to leave me?"

Helena stood up, flipping that waterfall of strawberry blond hair over her shoulder the way she always did when she was nervous. "Let’s talk about that tomorrow," she whispered, biting her lip. "Let’s not ruin your first day back." Then she went into the small kitchenette and opened the fridge with a Vanna White motion of her arm, illuminating rows and rows of Flip’s favorite bottled beer. "Maybe we could order pizza."
Flip stared at his cast and said nothing.

They watched TV, ate their pizza, and Flip tried to drink enough Coors to not feel anything at all, wishing for whiskey. Helena told him about his friends at home, laughing a bit too much, how Jed Roark got a senior in high school pregnant and they married two days after she graduated, how Sunny Shay had another kid on the way. Flip didn’t bring up Iraq and he didn’t ask Helena why she was leaving him, he didn’t want to make her departure real; maybe he had misheard her, maybe she would change her mind. And he didn’t say anything when she went into the bathroom and changed into a baggy sweatshirt and sweatpants, came out with her face shiny-clean of make-up and her breath all minty, gave him a chaste kiss on his cheek and then climbed into her own bed.

But he woke up at three a.m., his foot throbbing with heat, and he imagined the skin swelling around the stitches, the blood and pus seeping out, and the sand that somehow still flecked around the edges of the wound as if Baghdad would not let him go. He thought about finding his bottle of Vicoden to help him get back to sleep but remembered how the doctor had said it was his last refill, from now on he’d have to make due with Tylenol, and he figured he had better save it.

The doctors told him that his foot wasn’t healing, that even after thirteen surgeries they might have to amputate. He hadn’t told Helena he might lose the foot and still she was planning on leaving. But she had come to the hangar, she had been there when he got back. Right now she was sleeping in the bed next to him making that cooing sound she made when she was in a really deep sleep, her red hair hanging off the pillow and catching the green light of the alarm clock. He had forgotten about that sound, he had forgotten how much he missed it.

There had been so much he had missed in a year, and so much of it was wrapped around Helena, the way she made his life clean and neat, even here, in this anonymous hotel room, she had put all her things away and somehow mana-ged to stack the empty pizza box and beer bottles prettily on the table next to the television, sticking a pink petunia from the window box into one of the bottle necks. She had always been clever at fixing things like that. Before he left for Iraq, she made due on his pay and always had a hot dinner waiting for him when he came in from work, cloth napkins on the table and fruit in a bowl as a centerpiece; she was able to work with what she had and make something good come out of it. Which was why everyone always said she’d make a great mother.

And she probably would have. She had been pregnant when he deployed. A lot of wives had been as if every soldier started trying to procreate when they got their orders for Baghdad, tried to imprint themselves in a desperate scramble for immortality before ending up in the unknown. She claimed that she was showing when he left but her belly looked just as sweet to him as it always had, a little round maybe but he liked that, liked that her body was so soft compared to his. But the baby had died, some sort of heart problem, and by the time he got back for mid-tour leave, she seemed unfazed by the miscarriage and wouldn’t give him any details. Though she was careful to take her birth control pills for the fourteen days that Flip was back, and she told him that she wanted to move home with her folks, to take classes at the community college there, be near their high school friends and work at the restaurant she used to work at, Grits to Gravy, and Flip didn’t object, he even helped put all their stuff in storage. He liked the idea of her home with her momma, she seemed safer there and he thought they’d try to have another baby as soon as he was home. But now it seemed like he would never know what kind of mother she would be, and he couldn’t help but wonder if she had met someone else, a waiter from Grits, a manager at the local K-Mart, her little brother’s baseball coach, someone who wouldn’t leave her for a year at a time.

Flip sat in the bed and felt around on the bedside table for the TV remote. When Helena made that pigeon noise there was no waking her up, so he turned the TV on and didn’t turn the volume down, glancing at her every few minutes or so, wanting her to roll over and blink those eyes open, wanting her to smile at him and ask him what was wrong so he could talk to her. But she slept on and Flip watched cheetahs hunting on PBS, the twist and summersault as they brought an antelope down and then tore it into bloody bits. If Helena was awake, she would have made him change the channel, animals killing animals always made her cry. Flip fell asleep just as dawn started to filter through the gaps under the hotel curtains, and the light of the television flashed over both of them in the separate beds, unheeded like a lightning storm.

They went to a diner for breakfast and Helena drove the rental car, Flip sullen and yawning in the passenger seat.
"We can get your truck out of storage today," she said brightly, but he just shrugged.

In the diner they both looked at the menus instead of each other. After he told the waitress what he wanted, and he knew he ordered too much, he stared at his wife as she added creamer and sugar to her coffee and would not meet his eyes.

My wife, he thought, and outrage struck his chest like heartburn. "Who is it?" he finally asked, angry at himself for being angry instead of trying to win her back.
She glanced up. "Who what?"
"There’s someone else, right?"
She moved her hand to touch his wrist but he quickly lifted his own coffee cup to get out of reach, the black liquid scalding the inside of his mouth.

"There’s no one," she whispered. "That’s not it." And Flip could hear that breaking sound in her voice, he knew she was going to start crying at any moment, and he looked down at his placemat.

"Look at me," she said and this time she managed to put her hand on his and he didn’t pull away but he still couldn’t look at her. He was afraid she would be smiling with her eyes filled with tears and he would see that freckle under her left eye. She was so pretty with her old-fashioned name and long hair, always had been, class secretary and softball team short-stop, while he was only the third-string pitcher on the baseball team. She was much better looking than he was too, but that funny freckle under her eye, dark and lopsided, looked like a speck of make-up gone awry, like her mascara was smeared, and it was because of that freckle, that tiny flaw, that gave him the courage to first ask her out senior year.

"I love you," she said, and then the waitress came and put down their sunny-side up eggs and buttered toast and his side of sausage and bacon and pancakes. When the waitress left Helena leaned forward again. "I love you but I can’t take this life anymore; I can’t take the Army. I want to be home. I like my college classes, I need to be near my family."

"I’ll get out," he said, and it was the first time since he had asked her if she was leaving that he felt hope. "I’ll work at the lumberyard; my brother’s always telling me he’ll give me a job. I’ve got only six months left of my commitment, you can wait that long, can’t you? You can stay at home, I don’t care. I’ll get out."

But Helena pushed her fork across her plate, piercing a yolk and watching it bleed across her hash browns. "You have to stay in until your foot is better," she said softly. "You’d never be able to pay all the bills."

Flip sat back in the booth. He had forgotten about his foot. "I won’t deploy again," he said frantically, his voice picking up speed. "They’ll have to give me some cushy office job. I’ll get time off for physical training and doctor’s appointments. I’ll only be working from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., it will almost be like a regular civilian job. I’ll be home for dinner every night."
"I haven’t been happy for a really long time, but I’m happy with my life now," Helena said, shaking her head. "I don’t want to come back here."
"Happy in a life without me?" Flip wanted to throw up on all the food in front of him, the eggs getting cold and hard with a film of grey grease on top.

She ignored him and lifted a folded envelope out of her purse. He heard her take a deep breath to steady herself. "I talked to a lawyer." Her voice was thick and messy now and Flip looked over his shoulder to see if he recognized any of the guys in the booths behind him. "These are the papers for a legal separation. If we separate and don’t divorce, you’ll still get your housing allowance and marriage pay, but you can move into the barracks and save up. I’m making enough money of my own so you don’t need to worry about me."

"Don’t do this," Flip said. "You don’t really want to do this."
"I do," she sobbed, rubbing her paper napkin across her eyes. "Yes, I do."

She told him that her flight home was the following morning. When they got back to the hotel Flip called up some of his single buddies.
"Who’s up for a day of drinking?" he asked and arranged for them to pick him up.
He left Helena sitting on her bed, her arms crossed over her chest.
"Don’t you want to get your truck?" she asked. "And your things out of storage? I wanted to help you get yourself set up before I left—"

But Flip ignored her, rifling through his duffel bag for that last bottle of Vicoden, swallowing three without any water. He didn’t take his crutches and he slammed the hotel room door behind him.

They went to a cowboy bar his buddies knew. It had been a biker bar before Flip was deployed but had changed hands. Flip’s brigade had been back from Iraq for about a month while he was stuck at Walter Reed, and his friends had been coming here since the first night they got off the plane. There were still Harley Davidson signs tacked to the walls, but now there was a mechanical bull in the corner. Cowboy hats or baseball caps of the guys who had fallen off were nailed to the ceiling, country music playing from a jukebox.

"Isn’t your wife here?" Luce asked, buying a round of tequila shots and canned Miller Lite to start.
"She’s a bitch," Flip replied and reached for the small glass of tequila and the yellow oblivion it promised.
"To ditching bitches," Luce toasted and the three guys swallowed the tequila and slammed the shot glasses on the bar and Flip winced at the taste in his mouth, foul from cheap tequila and calling his wife a name she didn’t deserve.

But after two months of hospitals and strangers, sitting with Carberry and Luce, drinking beer after not getting any booze in Iraq or Germany, felt like the best thing in the world. And they wanted to hear about his foot, all the gory details of his surgeries, the pain he was in, and most of all how many Vicoden he had left and what their value might be in the barracks.

It was Carberry who had ripped Flip out of the humvee after the IED went off, the IED that turned the entire undercarriage of the truck into a fiery wall that consumed the five men inside. Flip’s platoon sergeant, Sergeant Schieffel, had been sitting next to him and caught most of the molten explosion. His body threw Flip against the side of the humvee and somehow, miraculously, shielded him from the flame until Carberry, from the truck behind them, grabbed Flip by the right arm and pulled him out. Flip had escaped with his foot shattered, almost every single bone pulverized, and burns on his face and hands; Schieffel had not survived, and Carberry told Flip about the funeral he had missed.

"To Sergeant Schieffel," they toasted for round number three, four, and five. The sun was setting outside, the fluorescent lights in the bar starting to glow in the dusk, a few bleached blonds in cowboy hats and short denim skirts were two-stepping near the juke box, and Flip felt the floor shifting underneath him.

"Take it easy," Luce said when Flip stumbled up to the bar to order another round. "We’ve had two months to get our tolerance back. The first week I was home I would get drunk just twisting the cap off a bottle of Jack."

"I’m OK," Flip said, pushing his friend away and reaching for his wallet. He wanted to call the hotel, to make sure Helena was still there, but he ordered tequila instead.

He looked over and saw Carberry trying to chat up the blonds. They were smoking their cigarettes and ignoring him the way most girls ignored guys with Army haircuts, but Carberry waved the smoke aside and tried to two-step next to the tallest girl. Then he made a motion toward the mechanical bull that had been hibernating all afternoon. The girls turned toward him with lifted eyebrows and shrugged, then followed him over to where the hats covered the ceiling.
"Let’s ride that bull," Flip said, the warmth of agave in his stomach almost quelling his nausea.
"Flip, don’t be an idiot, you’re in a cast." Luce finished his beer.
"Trust me, I don’t feel a thing."

Flip watched Carberry and then the blonds, in quick succession, get tossed from the bull, each of them having to donate something to the sacrificial ceiling: the girls losing their cowboy hats, Carberry leaving his button up shirt dangling from a light bulb, thin and suddenly shier around the ladies in his white wife-beater.

Something’s got to go right for me, Flip thought, asse-ssing the headless, legless saddled minotaur. His grandfather used to have a sullen old mare that would rather bite a hand then take the sugar, and when Flip was nine and his parents were splitting up, he spent the summer in Texas. Every day his grandfather would take him out to a cactus-laden field and put him bareback on that mare. And before she had a chance to sink her teeth into Flip’s thigh, his granddad would hit her hard on the rump and she would gallop as fast as those old legs let her. Flip would hold on to that matted mane, his heels tight in her belly, and it felt like flying. If he could ride that mare, he could ride this metal thing, and maybe it’d help him get lucky with the blond girl who had flashed him her light blue panties when she did a somersault off the bull. That would show Helena.

The guy manning the mechanical bull looked at Flip’s foot. "You sign the release form?"
Flip nodded and he let him through.

He got up on the contraption carefully, getting his good foot through the stirrup and pushing the toe of his cast into the other. He grabbed the horn in the center of the saddle and just to act jaunty he lifted his left hand up over his head, rodeo-style. He heard Carberry and Luce cheer wildly, and even a hoot or two from the now hatless blonds.

The bull started to move, slow at first, letting Flip get the hang of it. But it seemed to get easier for him the faster it went. And it was like his granddad’s nag, that rhythm, he could almost hear her hooves against rock and dirt below, the wind in his ears, that perfect, beautiful motion of being aligned with another creature, mindless with adrenaline and the pounding. God he loved this, why didn’t he ride more often? What could beat this feeling? Damn, he could do it, he would do it, Blue Panties was his.

Then the bull lurched and started moving in a new direction and the tenuous hold of his cast in the stirrup came loose. He felt himself pitching forward and if he had been more sober he would have tried to tuck and roll like he learned in Airborne School, but instead he landed hard and the pain that shot up his left foot into his spine forced tears out of his eyes. He stayed like that, flat on his back, until both Luce and Carberry came running over and helped him up, his leg dangling uselessly behind.

They had to carry him into the hotel room. Helena opened the door, her eyes swollen with sleep or tears Flip didn’t know which, wearing one of his Army grey T-shirts over a pair of sweatpants.

They put him on his bed.
"You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?" Carberry asked for Helena’s benefit and Flip shook his head.
They left, heads bowed, and Helena closed the door behind them.
"You smell like you’ll have a headache tomorrow," she said, going to the kitchenette sink and pouring him a plastic cup of water.
Flip drank, and when she filled the cup again, he drank that too.

"I was worried about you," she said.

Flip crushed the plastic cup and tossed it at the wastebasket, missing. "Well, after tomorrow you won’t need to worry any more, will you?"
"I guess not." She turned off the light and he heard the springs of her bed creak. "Is your foot OK?"
"No. It’s never going to be OK. I couldn’t fuck it up any more tonight than it already is." His eyes started to get used to the darkness and he could make out her outline by the alarm clock’s light, how she sat at the edge of her bed.

Flip tried to arrange the pillows behind his head. He would just have to wait until Helena fell asleep and then he could put on the TV. He knew, with the pain, that he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.

"Let me do that," Helena whispered and stood. He lifted himself up and she arranged the pillows under his shoulders, the Army T-shirt brushing Flip’s face, and he could smell her skin, the damp, baby powder smell of it, her fruity shampoo and the cheap vanilla drug store perfume she liked to put on her wrists. He put his hand out, he couldn’t help it, and touched the ends of her hair. She hesitated, hovering over him, and then he felt the bed shift and suddenly she was next to him, breathing on his throat in the dark.

"Is this my consolation prize?" Flip asked, feeling an electric surge of cruelty rush through him so strong his hands began to tingle. "You want to make yourself feel better by giving the cripple one last lay before you leave him?"
"You’re not a cripple," she whispered and put her lips on his.

Afterwards, just when Flip was falling asleep, Helena’s head on his chest, her voice nudged him awake.
"You never asked me about the baby."
He blinked. "I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it."

She didn’t say anything for awhile, and he was almost asleep again when she continued speaking. "It was a boy. The doctor showed me the sonogram. That’s when they noticed that his heart wasn’t developing."

Flip played with her hair, running his fingers through its length, not sure what to say.
"I knew when he died," Helena continued and Flip felt a drip of hot water on his bare chest. "There was such stillness and all of a sudden I just knew. I went to the hospital and they told me I had to wait three more days before they could induce the birth. So for three days I had our dead baby inside, just held him, feeling his tiny weight."

"My God, I didn’t know," Flip whispered, and she nodded against his ribs. "Helena, I’m so sorry." Then, in the dark, he almost told her about Schieffel, how the sergeant’s body had pinned him down, his arms outstretched over him like some Old Testament angel. How Flip could smell Schieffel burning and he thought it was his own flesh. And he had cried in that humvee, hearing his friends screaming in the smoke, every intake of breath stinging his throat and lungs. He had cried and he tried to pray but he couldn’t, just cried like a child, helpless, until Carberry got him out.

But he couldn’t tell her. And he couldn’t tell her about his foot either—how he knew he was going to lose it, how he would become one of those guys people glance at with a jolt of pity, trying not to stare. When they fixed him up with a metal limb he would be out of the infantry, and he needed Helena to know that without her, without the Army, he would have nothing. But instead of speaking, Flip kissed the top of her head and kept playing with her hair until she fell asleep against him and, exhausted, body aching, half-drunk, Flip fell asleep too.

He woke up when she opened the dusty hotel blinds and let the sun into the room. Flip put his hand over his eyes and then winced, every muscle of his body hurt from a combination of being thrown by a bull and thrown by tequila.

Helena turned toward him, dressed in dark jeans and a tank top, her hands on her hips, and smiled. "I should have made you drink more water."

Flip glanced around the room and saw her suitcase packed and ready on her unmade bed. He saw his crutches leaning against the far wall.

"Should I leave you the rental car?" Helena continued quickly, checking under her bed. "I could take a cab. But the rental place is at the airport so it’s really best if I drop it off now. Maybe one of your friends can drive you to the storage unit for your truck?"

Flip tried to sit and an agony of pain blossomed up his left foot. "You’re not still leaving—"
"I got you a bagel and cream cheese and some Gatorade, that should help with the hangover."
"Helena, sit down, talk to me."
"I really need to go; you know how security is at airports nowadays. Call my Mom’s house when you get your cell phone reactivated." She reached for her suitcase. "The room is paid until tomorrow; I didn’t know when you’d want to checkout." She took a step toward the door.

Flip leaned over the bedside table and used it to help him stand up, sucking in his breath. "Wait."

But the door was open and Helena stood in the shaft of bright light, looking at him over her shoulder, her hair lit up like flame, her hand on the knob.
"We’ll talk soon, Flip," she said, that breaking sound in her voice again. "I promise."

And Flip made a move toward the door, throwing himself at it, hoping something would catch him before he hit the ground, a bureau, a chair, anything that would get him out that door, anything that would get him near Helena so he could touch her again, kiss that freckle under her eye and put his arms around her and he would not let her go. But the door shut behind her and there was nothing for Flip to hold on to, nothing to break his fall, and as his knees buckled beneath him he knew with certainty that Helena, that everything, was gone.