Operation Oleander (9780547534213) Read online

  It works. Sort of.

  I settle into the passenger seat and buckle up. Cinching the strap tighter, I feel it like the presence of Mrs. Butler’s hand on my shoulder a few minutes ago.

  As we drive by the PX, I crane my neck. A crowd has gathered. A security car, lights flashing, parks near the entrance. Word must be getting out.

  I turn away. I don’t want to think about the paper oleander flowers in the dark closet at the PX. Or the larger-than-life photo of Warda on the poster.

  Mrs. Butler’s cell phone rings, and she answers. “Yes,” she says. And then, “No.” A pause. “I see. I’ll stop by.” Neutral words.

  After she says goodbye and cradles the phone in her lap, Mrs. Butler turns onto Monroe Street, the back way into the main housing area. In front of her a black car with government plates slows at the corner of Monroe and Madrid and flashes its turn signal.

  My street.

  It keeps going straight, though, as if changing its mind.

  Pressure lifts off my chest.

  “I should go see Meriwether.”

  Mrs. Butler turns at Madrid. “Home first,” she says. “Your mother’s worried about you.”

  I watch out the window as Mrs. Butler slows down at my house.

  A strange car’s parked out front. Not black, but navy blue with government tags. Two men in dress uniforms disappear into the front door.

  I check the street number. 306.

  My house.

  Mrs. Butler parks behind the government car. I sit there. She squeezes my arm.

  I force myself to get out.

  If Mrs. Butler or Sam is talking to me, I can’t hear either of them. The only thing I hear is the sound of my own pulse pounding in my ears. The way it would if I’d run all the way back. Just the boom-boom-boom of my heart and the strange swish of the sprinkler next door. A shush-shush followed by a metallic rat-a-tat-tat.

  Like firecrackers going off.

  Six

  MRS. JOHNSON waves us inside. She must have been looking out the curtains, waiting for us to arrive. Had Mrs. Johnson seen the officers when they got out of the car? Did she tell Mom? Or did she wait until they were at the door?

  “Girl, we were worried about you. Running out like that.” Mrs. Johnson squeezes my arm. Her grip is stiff and awkward. Her face is red and splotchy, as if she’s too hot. An unlit cigarette dangles from her lips. No one’s allowed to smoke in our house.

  “Mom?”

  “Not so loud, Jess,” Mrs. Johnson says. She nods over at the television. Cara’s cross-legged in front of the screen. Too close. Watching some cartoons. She looks up, grins, and waves a toy dolphin at me.

  “Come see,” she says.

  “I will, Cara. I just want to talk to Mom. Okay?” I speak to her gently, the way I would to someone I want to please.

  Cara nods, her whole body moving. She goes back to the cartoons, and I slip into the kitchen.

  Mom’s at the table, holding two sheets of paper. The two officers sit there too, flanking her. It seems odd, them sitting in the kitchen and not in the living room. My computer’s on one corner, unplugged in case of bad weather. Dad doesn’t trust surge protectors. Cara’s booster chair hangs on the wall where Dad installed a special shelf for it just Cara’s height.

  “It’s one of the services available,” one of the officers is saying.

  “Mom, what’s happening?”

  “Now, Jess,” Mrs. Johnson says, following me.

  “It’s okay, Libby.” Mom’s smile is tight, as if her skin is frozen.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Jess, they found him. Daddy’s alive,” she says. “I’m going to meet him in Landstuhl.”

  “Landstuhl?” Germany, right? Dad’s going to Germany from Afghanistan? Not to Florida?

  “Why doesn’t he just come home?” I ask.

  “Master Sergeant Westmark will be coming home, miss. You can be sure of that,” one of the officers says.

  “Then why—”

  “Not right away, Jess.” Mom reaches for my hand. Her fingers are frozen too, like her face.

  “What happened to Dad? How bad?” My voice rises at the edges the way Cara’s does before a meltdown.

  “Not so loud,” Mrs. Johnson says. “We don’t want to upset Cara.” She says “we” when she means me—that I shouldn’t upset my sister. She speaks in that tone that says I am just a kid barely older than Cara.

  Get ahold of yourself, Jess. Make me proud.

  Be calm. I’m counting on you.

  Dad’s words. I swallow and make myself nod. “Okay.”

  The two officers sit quietly at the table. Each one rests his hands on the surface, as if all the emotions in the room could be pressed as smooth as the wood.

  “Daddy’s injured, but he’s not dead. He’s going to be medically evacuated to Landstuhl.” With each word, Mom’s voice sounds a little stronger.

  “How bad is it?” It must be bad, for them to send him all the way to Germany.

  One of the officers speaks. “The reports aren’t all in.”

  “He was in the Humvee?”

  I remember the burned-out vehicle. No one could survive that.

  Mom answers. “No, no, they think he was standing outside it. On the other side of the courtyard. The wall partially shielded him from the worst of the shrapnel and firebombing. It saved his life.”

  “So he’s going to be okay?”

  The cheek of one of the officers jerks.

  “They’re doing everything they can,” Mom says.

  Does she believe it?

  “What does that mean?” I ask. “Doing everything” doesn’t mean he’ll be okay.

  “They don’t know the extent of his injuries. He’s been unconscious since the incident.” She calls it an incident. Not a bombing.

  The officers’ faces betray nothing.

  “We’ll be going, ma’am,” one of them says, and they both stand.

  “Thank you for coming,” Mom says, and pushes herself up from her chair. “I appreciate all the information. And the flight coupons.”

  “I can show you out,” Mrs. Johnson says.

  Count on her to act like this is her house.

  “That’s okay, ma’am. We’ll be fine showing ourselves out.”

  As the officers leave, I hear them greet Mrs. Butler.

  I whirl around. She waits in the hallway, between the living room and the kitchen, where she must have been since we arrived. Behind her stands Sam with his hands stiff at his sides, like a soldier in formation on a hot parade ground.

  Had they known?

  Mom smiles. “Thank you for bringing Jess home. For being so good to her.”

  “I was happy to do anything I could. Jess is one of Sam’s best friends. And we’re all one family here.” She says it like she means it. One family, regardless of whether officer or enlisted.

  Mrs. Johnson busies herself with the coffeepot. She pours more coffee and offers a cup to Mrs. Butler, who takes it.

  “Thank goodness he wasn’t in the Humvee,” Mrs. Johnson says.

  But someone else must have been in the Humvee. That’s what she means. “Who was in it?” I ask.

  “We shouldn’t be talking about that,” Mrs. Johnson says. She yanks on the faucet and rinses out the coffeepot. Water spatters onto the counter. “We shouldn’t speculate.” She sounds like Mrs. Butler. But she can’t stop there. She can’t help it. “I’m sure there’ll be an announcement.”

  And suddenly I know. Someone else was in the Humvee. No soldier could have gotten out of it alive. And what about the orphanage children? They were there too. “How about the children?”

  “Who?” Mrs. Johnson frowns.

  “From the orphanage? The girl in the photo?” The one you don’t want us to help?

  “No one’s said anything about them.”

  “Then who?”

  “Jess”—Mrs. Butler speaks softly, the way I talked to Cara—“they’re just telling the families
now.”

  Then I know. The phone call Mrs. Butler took on the drive home.

  “Tell me.”

  Mrs. Johnson starts toward me.

  “Don’t.” I hold out my hand like a stop sign. I look at Mrs. Butler. Before, she treated me like I was responsible.

  “I’ll tell you. You and Sam need to know,” Mrs. Butler says.

  Sam and I lock glances.

  “Commander Butler called me while we were in the car. Two soldiers have been killed. Private Davis was one of them.”

  A face comes to my mind. A thin man from Arkansas. He liked to sing country-and-western music at the top of his lungs. He came with his wife and two little boys to the cookout my dad had before deployment.

  Mrs. Butler continues. “Corporal Scott was the other casualty. She was killed while unloading the Humvee. It happened instantly.”

  She.

  Corporal Scott.

  The smoking frame of the Humvee in the distance on the television screen.

  My memory shatters like a faulty satellite picture. Pixels break up and re-form.

  The Humvee.

  Mrs. Scott.

  Meriwether’s mother.

  No.

  The look in Mr. Scott’s eyes, as if he knew. Before he could possibly have known.

  Cara thunders into the kitchen in her pink princess pajamas. The embossed Cinderella image on the front has faded from too many times through the washing machine. But she won’t wear anything else to sleep in. “Mom, come look. Mickey Mouse. Can we go?”

  Mrs. Butler moves first. “Why don’t you show me, Cara?” They walk out together, Cara tugging at Mrs. Butler’s hand.

  Meriwether’s mother. Right now, three blocks away, Meriwether’s world is coming apart. At the same time people exist whose lives go on and who are going to the Magic Kingdom.

  A sob escapes into the room, and I don’t know if it’s mine or someone else’s.

  Seven

  I FOLLOW MOM, Mrs. Butler, and Sam to the front door. Mrs. Butler exchanges phone numbers with Mom. Tells her whom to contact when she gets to Germany.

  “You didn’t know? Until just now?” I stand close to Sam. I have to know. Duty, honor, country. But duty is to your friends, too.

  “No, I didn’t know until you did.” His eyes had locked on mine when his mom said “Corporal Scott.”

  “I have to go to Meriwether’s,” I say. We said we’d know if something happened to our parents in Afghanistan. We knew we’d know, by instinct. Like waking up in the morning and knowing it had rained overnight before looking out the window at the crape myrtles drooping over the sidewalk.

  “Mom’s going there now.” Sam’s eyes are dark brown, like the burrowing owl we found injured on the beach a month ago. We borrowed his mom’s oven mitts to capture the bird so we could get it into a box and to an animal rescue organization. The owl hadn’t fought us, though. Its dark eyes blinked slowly as if to say it knew what we were doing. That it was resigned to whatever was coming. Sam’s eyes remind me of that owl’s. As if he could see through the darkness.

  But I don’t know if he can see what’s coming either.

  “I’ll call you later,” he says.

  “The orphanage. Find out what happened,” I tell him.

  “There’ll have been casualties there.”

  Not Warda. Please.

  “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe they were too far away.”

  “Jess, be real,” he says. “You saw the explosion.”

  Saw the explosion? I still see it. Whenever I close my eyes. When I blink. It’s as if the light has been imprinted on the surface of my eyeballs.

  Mrs. Butler turns to me before she leaves. “Jess, while your mom’s away, you’re family.”

  I smile and nod. I don’t trust myself to say anything. Not “Thank you” or “Don’t go” or “Can I go with you to Meriwether’s?”

  Sam follows his mother out to their car.

  Corporal Scott was carrying the boxes from the Humvee. The school supplies we’d packaged—me and Meriwether and, sometimes, Sam. Pencils with smiley faces and pink ponies on blue backgrounds. Pen sets in all different colors. The plastic sharpeners we stuffed in empty corners of the boxes. Everything must have melted like crayons in the heat of the bombing. All the colors of the world.

  As soon as the front door closes, Mom takes charge. It’s as if she’s woken from a month of sleeping. She has something to focus on. Something more to do than wait.

  “Jess, get the rolling suitcase from the storage room,” she says. “I need to pack. The plane’s leaving at three.”

  Mrs. Johnson says, “I can help you organize.”

  “I’ll do it,” I say. Mrs. Johnson and I glare at each other. But Mom’s already headed down the hallway. She misses our skirmish.

  Mrs. Johnson turns away first, throwing up her hands. “I’ll keep Cara out of mischief,” she says.

  I find the suitcase on top of the cooler that has my baby photos in it. Photos that belonged to me before I became a Westmark. I don’t know what my last name was then. Mom said they kept Jess, that Jess had been my first name always. When I want to know, I can find out my old last name, she said. If I want to.

  “Here, Mom. Here it is.” I roll the large bag into my parents’ bedroom. “What can I pack?”

  I lift the bag onto the bed and unzip it. I run my fingers along the inside pocket and scoop out grains of sand. Tucked in one corner I find a folded bandanna the color of the gulf. I used the bag when Meriwether and I went to oceanography camp last summer. I can smell the warm salt air of our cabin, feet from the gulf. Hear Meriwether in the bottom bunk after I drew the short straw, her telling ghost stories after lights out. If I call her now, will she remember camp the way I do? Exactly down to the way we plopped a pat of soft butter into the middle of our bowl of grits in the canteen at breakfast? Suddenly, it matters that we have the same memories, that we remember the same scrunch of sand under our feet.

  “Jess, are you listening?” Mom says.

  “Sorry—”

  “Pay attention,” she says. “Try to find the deodorant samples. The new ones we just picked up. Check under the sink. Then I need you to get a piece of paper and write some things down.”

  I dash into Mom and Dad’s bathroom and fling open the cabinet. Plastic bins hold mountains of mini bottles of shampoo and conditioner, travel-size tubes of toothpaste.

  I pack Mom’s toiletries and zip the bag shut.

  “Okay, what else?”

  Mom stands in front of Dad’s side of their closet. She runs her hands along a few of his shirts.

  “I’ll need those cotton pants, and the hooded jacket. Airplanes are always too cold.”

  “I know where they are.” Mom stores extra clothes in the hall closet, tiny as it is. She manages to get our cold-weather things into it. Not that we need them often.

  I roll the pants and set them next to the suitcase. I leave the hoodie out for her carry-on bag.

  “Get some notepaper, Jess.”

  I run to the kitchen and grab a notebook and a pen. When I fly through the living room, I hear Mrs. Johnson reading Cara’s favorite storybook about the caribou.

  Mom’s rolling her pajamas when I get back to the bedroom.

  “How long?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know. I’m planning for two weeks. It could be longer.”

  “Why don’t I go with you?” I could help out. Stay with Dad while she gets some sleep.

  Mom tries on a pair of loafers, then pitches them back into the closet.

  “I could help,” I repeat.

  She stuffs a pair of sandals into a liner pocket of the suitcase. “I need you to stay here.”

  She had heard me.

  “With Cara,” she says. “She needs you here. I need you here. You’re the big sister.”

  “But—”

  Mom reaches over and puts her hand on mine. “I’m counting on you. Just like your dad is.”

  I nod.
r />   “Jess, you take notes. I’ll get the last things out of the cabinet.” She disappears into the bathroom. The cabinet door creaks open again. “Okay. One, you have to watch Cara every time you go to the pool with her. You know she isn’t afraid of anything. I warned Libby, but you need to keep an eye out.”

  She wants me to write that down?

  “But, Mom—”

  “Two. No chocolate for Cara. She gets sick.”

  And cranky. “I know.”

  “Are you writing this down?”

  I scrawl out the directions so far. “Yes.”

  “The bills. I think they’re paid up. But I need you to look for them. Get the mail every day and open anything that looks official. If anything is due soon, let Mrs. Johnson know. We’ll figure out what to do if I’m not back soon enough.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’m sure the army will help.”

  “They don’t pay the bills, Jess.” Mom throws a few more things into the suitcase and rips the zipper closed. “Heaven knows they don’t do that.” She lifts the bag upright onto the floor.

  “I want you to keep up your routine, Jess. Go to the beach. Go to the pool. Get ready for camp.” But nothing’s routine, I want to tell her. I do those things with Meriwether.

  I open my mouth to say something, but Mom’s still talking.

  “Chores, too. You do your own laundry. Help Mrs. Johnson with the housework.”

  I hold the pencil in midair. “Mrs. Johnson?”

  Mom makes a funny look with her mouth.

  “I asked Libby to stay with you while I’m gone.”

  My mouth drops open. “But why does she have to stay here?”

  I don’t want her hovering over me. She already feels too much at home here. What will she do next? Sleep in my parents’ bedroom?

  “Come on, Jess. You can’t stay here alone with Cara.”

  “I—” Before I can say anything else, Cara bursts into the room and jumps onto Mom’s bed. Into the things she’s set aside to go into her carry-on.

  “Cara!” I wrestle her off the bed, and her face goes pink, then red. Big tears loom on the edges of her lashes.

  “There you are.” Mrs. Johnson stands at the bedroom door. “I know a little princess who wants a treat.” She holds a package of Popsicles in her hands.