Early Warning

Arthur had pulled a string, and would be driving out to Andrews AFB to watch them bring the casket. He was taking Dean. Debbie, who had already left for Mount Holyoke, would be home for the funeral. Tina had been in her room for twenty-four hours, working on a memorial painting. As Lillian stared at the letter, she had to put both her hands on the table to prevent herself from passing out and falling out of her chair. The letter was addressed to her — that’s what he had done since heading off to boot camp, address letters to her, not Arthur, knowing that she would read them aloud. She and Arthur had discussed this quirk, and they agreed that addressing the letters to her let Tim more easily reassure everyone that he was fine, that he had simply embarked upon a classic masculine adventure. Letters to his father might have consisted of only the fewest words—“Okay here. The colonel is an asshole. Shot two Cong yesterday.”

It was dated a week previously.

Dear Mom,

It’s been raining again, pretty hard. It’s such a swamp here, I don’t know how they stand it. Thanks for the books. I started the one Cat’s Cradle. It is pretty good. I loaned the one Dune to another guy in my hootch who was reading Atlas Shrugged so many times that his book fell apart, but when he started reading Dune, he finally shut up about it. I bought this Vietnamese guitar. It is pretty bad, and because of the rain, even worse, but I can get some sound out of it. I play it with one of the other guys who is from North Carolina and really good. His guitar is better than mine. Another guy, who is from Austin, Texas, plays the drum, which is really a mermite can, but he gets great sounds out of it. If I had a band again, I would definitely include a mermite can or two. Also thanks for the cookies. I think I had one. As soon as the guys saw them, they passed them around and they were gone. Captain Bloom says, “More more more.” I suppose you could say that that’s an order, Mom. Otherwise, things are pretty quiet, I guess the infantry is doing their job, which is called Operation Byrd, though I call it Operation The Byrds just for a joke. I guess we talk a lot about music here, because Billy Copps was in a band, too, before he came here. Austin, Texas, sounds like a pretty neat town.

Okay, well, I am going to wind this up, because I have to do some stuff for Captain Bloom. Don’t worry. Nobody gets killed anymore around here. The civilians always smile at us. Love to Dad and the kids. A message for Dean: Bite me.

Love, Tim

Lillian left the letter open on the table. She didn’t think she was going to be able to read it aloud. After a moment, she got up from the chair and walked out the French door to the pool, where she picked up the skimmer and walked around, removing leaves and unrecognizable bits from the surface of the water. She looked out, down the hillside, toward the tree line. She had the strongest feeling that she had foreseen this, that a voice had spoken to her in the night, three nights ago, and said, It’s time. But she knew that this feeling was wrong, that nothing of the sort had happened. If it had happened like that, then all of this would be part of a pattern. But it wasn’t. Tim had vanished; that was all. He had escaped her long ago — as soon as they moved to this house. It was not that she had seen him more and more intermittently (at first a few times a day, then every few days, then every few weeks, then every few months, then hardly at all); it was that he had gotten less and less corporeal, at first visible from time to time, then almost always invisible, only manifesting very rarely in unexpected spots — at the bottom of the pool, in her shower, in the attic looking for something. It was quite likely, she thought, that he would manifest again. But this conviction was not something she planned to confide to Arthur.

1967

THEY WERE NAKED on his fold-out couch. The treatment room was warm enough (he turned up the heat to eighty) so that they required no covers, even though the windows were uncurtained and the weather outside was frigid. Andy remained positioned as he had instructed her, on her back, her arms above her head, her hands beneath her neck, her knees bent, and her feet flat on the mattress. Dr. Smith was sitting up. His body was much hairier than Frank’s — the first time, she had stared. The hair was gray over his shoulders and got darker over his chest. His very thick pubic hair was black. Andy said, “You told me you worked with shell-shocked soldiers in the war. Did you notice a connection?”

“Between…” said Dr. Smith.

“Between, I don’t know, between being a little wild and being a casualty? Frank came home without a mark on him, and he was over there the whole time — North Africa, Italy, Germany. He didn’t even get a hangnail.”

“He was—”

“He was a sniper. Why didn’t you serve, again?”