As I’m walking out to my car, bone tired and ready for bed, Lucy runs out after me. I must have forgotten something.
“Wait! Kim’s baby, I just heard!”
“What about him?”
Lucy is beaming, glowing with happiness. “He’s immune! They just did the test. He didn’t have any symptoms after twenty-four hours so we did a blood test to make sure. He’s immune!”
I burst into tears and Lucy hugs me. We hold each other tight on this dark Edinburgh night. Two women brought to tears by the news that one baby will survive.
“He’s gorgeous,” Lucy says. “Absolutely gorgeous.”
FAITH
An unnamed military base, United States of America
Day 299
What are the chances that I’ll be thrown in jail if I punch Susan in the face? Pros: punching Susan in the face, brief sense of satisfaction, Susan will leave me alone. Cons: could break my hand, Susan would never stop going on about it, I don’t have kids and Susan does so I’d get thrown in jail and it wouldn’t matter because I have no dependents.
I sigh. It always comes back to kids. I try to tune my brain back in to whatever nonsense Susan is babbling on about now. It doesn’t even make sense for her to be here. She didn’t like me when we were army wives and she sure as hell doesn’t like me more now that we’re army widows.
“So.” She looks so excited. She must have gossip. Here we go. “The army’s introducing a draft and we’re going to be drafted first!”
“You and I?” I ask stupidly. I don’t understand. Susan rolls her eyes and raises an unplucked eyebrow.
“No, stupid. Army spouses. We’re already on base, and we have ‘an understanding of what the job involves,’” she says, in air quotes as though this is ludicrous. “Isn’t it outrageous!” She’s looking at me expectantly. In the old days, before Daniel died, I would have gone, “Yes, outrageous. Wow,” and played along, but I can’t be bothered now. Daniel’s dead. It doesn’t matter to him or the other men in his unit if Susan and I get on. And I never gave a shit.
“I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”
Susan purses her lips and cocks her head to the side as though I’m a toddler who just peed on the floor.
“What’s going to happen to my kids, huh? There’s no one to look after them, and after all we’ve been through, why would they pick on us like this?” She pauses to catch her breath. “It’s not the same for you. You childless wives, it won’t affect you.”
I don’t snap or lose my temper. I know exactly what I’m about to do and I’m not proud of it. It’s not going to be my finest moment, or actually, maybe it is. If I’m being really honest, Susan is lucky I don’t punch her repeatedly in the mouth. I get up from the table, take her coffee cup out of her hand, and pour the glass of water I’ve been drinking over her head in such gloriously slow motion I can see her expression shift from bland surprise at the absence of her coffee to disbelief to total horror at the cold and the wet.
“Go fuck yourself, Susan, and, while you’re at it, get the fuck out of my house.” The joy of saying those words I’ve cradled at the back of my tongue for years is particularly sweet.
Susan gapes at me, scraping her chair back. Her badly dyed hair is plastered against her cheeks. “You’re insane! I always said you were crazy, I warned everyone: That lady’s about to crack.”
“I said out, Susan. Now.”
Susan’s still blathering as she makes her way out of my house and slams the door behind her. Good riddance, to Susan and to part of my identity. Calming, pleasing, careful, placating army wife. My husband and I met in a nightclub in Madison, Alabama, which is possibly the tackiest way in the world to meet the love of your life. I didn’t know it then, but when you marry someone in the military it’s not just a partnership. It’s an identity, and one I’ve always rebelled against. Whenever he was deployed, I would leave the base and go home to Maine for a fortnight and, if he was away for over a year, I would move in with my parents and transfer to a hospital there. He never seemed to have the kind of deployments that meant a wife could move too. He was sent to dangerous places, faraway places, terrifying places. So I did my best to survive without him and I worked and stayed away from the base. It was too hard to see the other wives waiting for a man to come back in the way we all feared.