Chapter 4 - The Hand on the Left Flank
The bedroom was dark.
The blinds were drawn—heavy, white vinyl slats that had been taped to the aluminum window casing with black duct tape around the edges, cutting off every sliver of the afternoon sun. The only illumination came from a sixty-watt nightlight plugged into an outlet near the closet floor, casting an ugly, yellow triangular wash across the baseboards.
The heat in the room was suffocating. It smelled of menthol ointment, dry skin, and human sweat that had dried and been re-sweated into the same cotton sheets over three weeks of unventilated humidity.
In the center of the room sat a queen-sized bed with an unpainted pine headboard.
A mound lay under a thick, dark blue polyester comforter—the kind you buy at an interstate truck stop for thirty dollars, heavy and non-breathable. The blanket was pulled up to the bridge of the nose, leaving only a forehead, a hairline of matted, dark blonde strands, and two eyes visible above the hem.
The eyes were open.
They did not blink when the light from the hallway hit the wall.
“Abby?” I whispered.
The mound did not shift. The eyes merely tracked four inches to the left, finding my face, finding the silver eagles on my collar tabs, finding the two gold overseas stripes on my right cuff.
A sound came out from beneath the polyester.
It was not a word. It was a long, dry rattle of air, like an old bellows being opened in an empty smithy.
“Mom,” the voice croaked.
It was not the voice of my twenty-six-year-old daughter who had run the four-hundred-meter hurdles. It was the voice of a seventy-year-old woman with fluid in her pleura.
I crossed the room in three strides. I dropped to my knees on the gray carpet beside the mattress. The wool of my dress trousers pressed into something wet and sticky on the floorboards—a washcloth that had dried into a stiff, gray knot—but I did not look down.
I reached out. I took her right hand.
The skin was cold. Not cool—cold, like the surface of an apple pulled out of a root cellar in November. The fingernails were blue at the lunula, the small half-moons at the base of the nail bed, indicating an oxygen saturation that had dropped far below ninety percent.
“Baby,” I said. My voice was shaking. I could not stop it. The discipline of thirty-one years—the voice that had read execution orders, the voice that had commanded field hospitals during the spring offensive—cracked down the center like dry pine. “Look at me. Look at Mom.”
Her left hand—the one under the blanket—gripped the polyester hem with a desperate, white-knuckled fury.
“Mom,” she whispered again, her dry lips sticking together with small, pink threads of mucus. “You... you can't be here.”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m right here. We’re going to get you some water. We’re going to get the windows open.”
“No.” She pulled her right hand back from mine with a sudden, spastic jerk that rattled the pine headboard against the plaster. “No, Mom. Don't look. Please. If you look... Travis says... he says the baby will be taken. He says the county will take it because I’m unstable.”
From the doorway, Glenda’s voice arrived like a handful of gravel thrown against a windowpane.
“She’s having an episode, Colonel! Step away from that bed! You are exciting her, and Dr. Keene specifically said—”
“Dr. Keene?” I said, not turning my head. “Travis is a loan officer, Glenda.”
“His uncle is an internist in Kokomo!” Glenda shouted, stepping into the room. She was no longer smiling. Her little gray curls were trembling with rage, her purple tracksuit rustling like dry corn husks as she came up on the opposite side of the mattress. “And he knows what is best for this family! She fell down the breezeway steps three weeks ago because she wasn't watching her feet! We have been nursing her night and day! We haven't had four hours of sleep between us!”
“Abby,” I said, leaning my chest against the mattress. “Did you fall?”
Abby’s eyes did not move toward Glenda. They stayed fixed on the two silver eagles on my shoulders.
“Mommy,” she whispered.
She had not called me that since she was six years old, sitting on the radiator cover in our quarters at Fort Lewis, waiting for the moving van to arrive from Georgia.
“Don't let him do the bathroom thing again,” she said.
My ribs went cold.
“What bathroom thing, Abby?”
Travis appeared in the door behind his mother. He had put on a pair of running shoes, but he hadn't tied the laces. He had a glass of tap water in his hand, and the water was splashing over the rim, wetting his knuckles.
“Ma'am,” he said, his voice dropping into a desperate, pleading whine that was more terrifying than Glenda’s screeching. “Don't touch that comforter. She... she has skin sensitivities from the pregnancy. She has a rash. She doesn't want anyone to see her like this. She’s embarrassed.”
“Pull the blanket back, Abby,” I said.
“She can't!” Glenda screamed, lunging across the mattress, her fingers—short, thick, with bitten-down nails—reaching for the polyester hem. “You have no right! This is my son’s wife! You were never here for her! You were off playing soldier while other women raised their daughters!”
I did not use my fist.
In the military police tactical manual, section four, paragraph twelve, there is an instruction for the redirection of hostile non-combatants using open-handed lateral momentum.
My left forearm came up. I caught Glenda Keene beneath the angle of her jaw with three inches of my radius bone, carrying sixty pounds of forward leverage.
She did not hit the floor; she flew sideways into the hollow-core door of the master bathroom, her purple tracksuit tearing against the brass latch as she went down in a heap among three empty bottles of laundry detergent.
Travis dropped the glass of water. It did not break; it bounced twice on the carpet, soaking into the gray fibers with a dull, wet hiss.
“You hit my mother!” he screamed.
I took the edge of the blue polyester comforter with both hands.
I did not hesitate. I pulled it back to the foot of the bed in one long, smooth, unhurried motion.
The sound that left my mouth was not an order.
It was an animal sound—the high, thin, tearing shriek of a mare that finds her foal dead in the wire after a spring blizzard.
My daughter was wearing an old, gray Western Kentucky University t-shirt that had been cut down the center seam with shears to accommodate her belly.
Her skin was the color of a turnip that had spent five months in an unheated root cellar: yellow-white, waxy, translucent enough to see the blue, venous mapping across her ribcage.
Her arms were covered in hematomas—not the small, round bruises of an accidental bump, but long, circumferential bands of dark purple and sick green that ran from her wrists to her armpits, where someone had held her arms above her head while she was lying flat.
Her legs were mottled with yellow-brown crusts where the skin had split over the tibia and never been cleaned.
And on the left side of her abdomen—stretched tight over the five-month curve where my grandchild was moving beneath the skin—was an imprint.
It was four inches across.
A purple, swollen palm print. Four distinct finger impressions running along the lower margin of her ribs, and a thumb mark pressed two inches deep into the soft, vascular curve of her flank, right above the iliac crest.
The hand had been driven into her flesh with enough force to burst the capillary beds three layers deep.
“Colonel,” Travis whispered. He had backed up into the hallway until his shoulder blades were flat against the drywall. His hands were raised at shoulder height, palms forward, trembling like leaves in a propeller wash. “She... she got hysterical about her father. She was trying to hit herself. I had to restrain her. I swear to God, Colonel, I had to hold her down or she would have hurt the baby!”
I stood up from the bed.
I did not feel the floor beneath my shoes. I did not feel the weight of my service cap.
May you like
I reached up with both hands, unbuttoned the top button of my dress uniform blouse, and pulled the gold tie clip from my collar.
And then, down in the parking lot, three stories below, the first sound of heavy leather combat boots began to take the wooden stairs three at a time.
