The Colonel Came Home With Her Chapter 08
Mrs. Miller sat in her seat and didn’t move. Everyone else had left. She stayed a long while.
Captain Reyes took a couple of men and drove to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center to find me.
Mrs. Coleman walked to the far end of the inpatient corridor and called for me.
I was pushing a hospital bed around a corner at the time. The wheels squeaked. A monitor alarm was going off nonstop on a bed nearby.
Mrs. Coleman had to call twice before I heard her.
I handed the bed off to Susan, pulled off my gloves, and walked down the corridor. I’d just changed a set of sheets — my fingers still smelled like antiseptic.
Captain Reyes was standing at the bottom of the front steps outside the main entrance. Three soldiers I didn’t recognize stood behind him.
They were in ACUs, standing straight. Probably just detached from the battalion.
Captain Reyes handed me an envelope.
I took it, pulled out the letter, and glanced at it.
Chaplain Harding, in his own hand.
Header: In memory of Sgt. Michael Doyle. The body wasn’t long — it said the battalion had committed serious failures in the handling of Ms. Lily Carter’s placement, resulting in misunderstanding and injury to a family member, that the battalion accepted full responsibility, and that a Silver Star citation had been submitted on Sergeant Doyle’s behalf. May he rest.
I read it, folded it back into the envelope, handed it back to Captain Reyes.
“Nora, you’re not coming back with us?”
“I’m not off shift yet.”
Captain Reyes blinked.
He glanced at the military vehicle parked at the curb, then at the hulking inpatient tower behind me, and rubbed his hands together.
“Nora, if you don’t want to come back, that’s your call. I just came down to let you know — Chaplain laid the whole story out at the battalion assembly this morning, in front of everyone. Mrs. Miller was there. She went white.”
I stopped and nodded, letting him know I’d heard.
Captain Reyes pulled another envelope out of his pocket.
This one wasn’t official. It was from Mrs. Miller. No header. Just a signature.
Three lines, uneven, some of the words scratched out and rewritten.
It said —
Nora, honey. I don’t know how to say this. Today at the battalion assembly I heard about Sergeant Doyle, and I finally understood the baby wasn’t the Colonel’s.
I’m sorry. I don’t ask you to forgive me. I just wanted to say it.
If you’d come back, I’d get down on my knees to you.
The handwriting slanted worse toward the end. Like her hand had been shaking the whole way through.
I folded the letter and tucked it into my pocket.
“Tell her she doesn’t need to kneel. Just — next time, get her facts straight before she starts running her mouth.”
That night I went back to Fort Bragg alone.
Not to move back. To collect the last of my things.
I packed the last few items in the room into a cardboard box.
A heavy winter coat. Two pairs of shoes. A photo album.
The last page of the album was a family photo from just before Ethan deployed — the three of us on the porch. Sam a half-head shorter than he was now, riding on Ethan’s shoulders, laughing with two front teeth missing.
I was standing next to Ethan, straightening the brim of his cap. My lips were moving, probably saying —
Come home safe.
On my way out I ran straight into Mrs. Miller.
She was wearing an old cardigan, holding a kitchen trash bag — coming out to dump the leftovers, probably.
She saw me carrying the cardboard box and froze in place, the bag swinging in her hand, almost slipping loose.
“Honey.”
I nodded at her and walked past.
“Honey, you can stay tonight, at least — it’s so late, where are you going? If you don’t want to see me I’ll leave right now, I’ll go back to my own place, you take your old house — “
I turned to look at her.
“Mrs. Miller. I’m not leaving because of you. I’m leaving because I don’t want to live here anymore. I’m not angry at you. I’m not angry at anyone. I just don’t want to live here.”
Mrs. Miller stood under the porch light, still holding the trash bag.
Her mouth opened and closed. In the end she set the bag down and wiped her hands on her apron, over and over, just standing there.
I carried the box to the gate. Captain Reyes’s vehicle was still waiting.
Sam was slumped against my leg, asleep.
I looked back through the rear window.
The lights of the Fort Bragg family housing area shrank smaller and smaller until they were a single point.
I gently pushed Sam’s tilted head back against my chest.
His hair was soft. It brushed my chin and tickled.
Captain Reyes asked me where to.
“Downtown Fayetteville. Across from the hospital.”
He was quiet a long while. Then he asked:
“Nora — are you still angry at the Colonel?”
I thought about it a long time.
Angry, sure. Of course I was angry.
But at a certain point, being angry stopped being interesting.
Like an old piece of clothing. Still on your body, but you don’t feel it scratching anymore. Maybe you’ve just gotten used to the rough weave of it.
“It’s not anger. I’m tired. I don’t want to keep guessing how many things he still hasn’t told me.”
I rolled the window down a crack. The night wind poured in — cold, but not the kind of cold that made you hunch your neck.
The moon was hanging outside the window, a piece bitten out of it, but bright.
I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes. I wasn’t thinking about anything.
I just listened to an old song on the radio and the hum of the tires over the highway gravel.
Very quiet.
And that was good.