Read Online Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter - Free Book Online Page B

about in this way only reminded her how little she had seen of him through these past nine years, and how desperately she misses him. Sam keeps talking. “He was—”
    “Can you say ‘is’ please?”
    “Yes, of course. I’m just thinking back to Coronado. It feels like a long time ago. Like we were just kids. It all felt so serious. I remember saying to my mother, ‘I’m not going to USC. I’m joining the navy.’ ”
    “After nine eleven.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did she say?”
    “She thought for sixteen years I’d be a surf rat.”
    “So she was happy.”
    “She was happy. She saw it as a calling. She’s—she’s very religious. She felt that this was my calling.”
    “Did you see it that way?”
    “Well, they beat that out of you pretty quickly. Pretense. Any idea that—”
    “Nobility?”
    “Nobility,” Sam says, laughing. “Nobility doesn’t place a gun in the fight.” And then he says, “On my last leave, I went to the Imperial War Museum in London. I’d never been there.”
    “I should go,” says Sara.
    “They have a diorama in one room of the World War I trenches. You could see, you know, the ‘front line,’ and you could see all these tiny little toy soldiers stuck in the trenches. And then you could walk through a real life-size trench they had constructed. When you’re in the trench, they have noises playing, like shots ringing out, people screaming. And they’ve got little scenes recreated, guys in anterooms within the trenches doing things like smoking a pipe or writing a letter or sleeping—like little luxury suites set up within the eye of the storm of war. Within that eye, people are still living and talking and laughing. And I remember thinking, well, of course they can do this in trench warfare because it’s all so … orderly. I couldn’t get over how neat—and how brutal—that trench system was. And then I got back to the base, and Jason was there with, of course, his total history of trench warfare on call, at his fingertips—‘abridged for you, dude,’ he would have said. He said the difference between waiting in the trenches and doing what we do is the difference between begging for a bullet and learning how to precision fire. Defense versus offense. He said the statistics for quick death were in our favor, even if the enemy was less prone to play by the rules.”
    “Quick death?”
    “I’m not sure whether he stayed up all night online, reading about all these things, or whether he learned about them beforehe arrived, but he knew so much about so much. We should have called him Encyclopedia.”
    “What did you call him?” asks Sara.
    “We called him Priest.”
    “Priest?”
    Sara smiles at the irony: here was a boy with a lapsed Jewish father and an agnostic mother who grows up to be called Priest. David really would have loved that.
    “I think I’ll go rest for a while,” she says.
    “Do you mind the music?”
    “I love it. Please don’t ever turn it off.” And she wanted to add,
And please don’t leave me
, but she didn’t.
    *
    Upstairs, she goes to the window in the little office space between her room and Jason’s. Looking out, she can see the crowd gathered at the end of the driveway.
I should sell lemonade
, she thinks darkly.
Who are all these people
. But she knows many of them are good people, people who only want to help her, or who want to help her to tell the story of her son. There are two news trucks now, and she can see the blond jailbait on-air reporter circling one of them, adjusting her collar and licking her lips. Perhaps she’s the award-winning war correspondent, just back from Iraq, Sara thinks. She decides that the girl has had a life far more interesting than her own: she has traveled, she has seen the world, she has met with heads of state and warlords, and she has her own show on in prime time, viewed by millions. She’s an “unqualified” success, and she will wait awhile before having children because she