Tim couldn’t believe the Christmas dinner he was treated to when he arrived in Vietnam. He was stationed at a scrubby base camp up in the hills in the middle of nowhere, and yet on Christmas day a giant double-rotor Chinook helicopter magically descended from the clouds to deliver full turkey dinners to all 120 boys at the camp. They had corn bread dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, shrimp cocktail … “Shrimp cocktails! Where the heck did they get shrimp cocktails?” Tim wrote.

And just as the recruitment sergeant had promised, there was Budweiser beer, all you could drink. Hell, they even had a bar right there on base, with Vietnamese girls in shiny long dresses and pigtails serving martinis. Scruffiest bunch of soldiers you could ever imagine, and their hooches nothing but falling-down shacks propped up with sandbags, but he wasn’t complaining, not yet. More than anything he was looking forward to getting out and seeing some of the countryside. As radio intelligence, his missions were strictly top secret, so he wasn’t allowed to say when and where he was going exactly, but he’d write me as often as he could. And where were the letters I promised him, by the way? I had his address now so there wasn’t any excuse.

“I keep thinking back on that night,” he wrote. “Hard to believe it was only a year ago. Already seems like ten. But when I close my eyes I can remember like it was yesterday. I see your white skin on the rug, and the firelight glow on your hair, and that soft look in your eye when you told me you love me. I swear, it’s the one thing that keeps me going. I’m sure glad I got you back home waiting for me. You’ll always be the number one girl for me, Laura Jenkins. Now write!”

That spring at Sacred Heart, meanwhile, I was finally beginning to feel myself more a part of the school. To be sure, I still had little in common with the well-bred Catholic girls who were my classmates. But over time people can adapt to almost anything, I suppose. Even prisoners begin to feel at home.

My fitting in had to do mainly with my work on The Beacon. I’d begun a series of profiles on SHA personalities called “Spotlight On … !” Kim gave me half the third page to write about whomever I wanted, and for the first time in my life I felt what it’s like to wield some power. Girls who had never before been nice to me now smiled and said hello in the hallways. Faculty took me aside to give me subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions about which teacher or student would be a good subject for my next profile. I hadn’t written about Principal Evelyn yet, Sister Agatha reminded me. She had a very interesting background. Why not interview her? Surely she deserved a profile.

But I ignored all their suggestions and turned instead to my truest allies at the school, the charity cases. Over lunch in the cafeteria, I interviewed Soo Chee Chong, the quietest girl on campus. Who ever knew that Soo spoke fluent Mandarin? Or that she had ended up in Baton Rouge, of all places, because her parents, both prominent university professors back in Beijing, had fled the Cultural Revolution to avoid being killed by the Red Guards? If they didn’t like you, Soo said, the soldiers would just walk up to you in the street and shoot you in the face. The whole family had made a lucky escape through Taiwan, smuggled across the strait in the bottom of a fishing boat, which was why to this day, Soo said, she couldn’t stand the smell of raw fish. Her name in Chinese, she told me, meant “the beautiful sound of jade.”

Anne Harding, after years of surgery and doctor’s visits, turned out to be an expert on scoliosis. The piece I wrote about her, “Profile in Courage,” dwelt on current medical treatments for curvature of the spine and what could be done to prevent it. Curvature, Anne explained, was measured in degrees of variance from the vertical. At eighteen degrees, hers was considered a mild curve and could be corrected with bracing in 90 percent of the cases. If left untreated, however, the deformity could worsen, twisting the chest until the ribs jutted to one side, the breasts and hips became uneven, and one shoulder tilted up high toward the ear. Every teenage girl should be checked annually for curvature of the spine, Anne said, which led to a rush on Nurse Palmer’s office the week the piece was printed.

And in my profile on Christy Lee, the near-invisible lone black student in our sophomore class, she revealed how she had managed to trace her family roots all the way back to the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a slave trader named Captain Burt Keenan who had sold her great-great-great-grandfather, branded and chained, to a plantation owner in Charleston for two thousand dollars—which, Christy pointed out, was actually a high price to pay for a man in those days. Christy provided the title herself for that piece: “Let Freedom Ring.”

The charity cases seemed to become a little less shy after their articles were published, a little less bitter. Girls would stop at our lunch table to get Soo Chee Chong to write their names in Chinese characters on the front of their notebooks. From time to time I even saw Anne Harding laughing aloud in the hallway, her chin bobbling against her neck brace. The journalism students at LSU had been right. There was power in writing. Words held magic that could transform people.

That spring, too, Chip Benton started to become a regular at our tiny newspaper staff office. He was always dropping off photos of CHS events we might use, or offering us extra bottles of toner solution. We had our own school photographers, of course, but Chip was such a good-natured fellow, and his curly helmet of hair was so cute—and he was a boy, after all, which was such a weird novelty at SHA—that we were always happy to have him around.

And true to his word, he gave me signed prints of the photos he took of me that night at the Italian restaurant. He’d blown them up and developed and cropped them in such a way that they looked moody and evocative, like stills from a 1950s black-and-white movie, or celebrity nightclub photos from an era more glamorous and richly lived than our own. They were gorgeous, really—funny and profound, silly and tender all at once. I kept them in a desk drawer in my dorm room. I didn’t dare put them up on the walls—they seemed too intimate, somehow—but from time to time I took them out to admire them.

I was adapting so well to life at Sacred Heart that year, in fact, that I hated to return to Zachary for the summer. But once the school year ended and the dorm shut down, we boarders had no choice. I packed all my belongings into boxes again and moved back home, where a kind of silent truce prevailed between me and my parents. I’d decided that as long as I had to live with them I would be polite, nothing more. My personal life was my own business from now on; I wasn’t going to risk sharing anything with them ever again. When they asked how things were going at school, I’d say, “Fine.” At dinner, it was “Pass the butter, please” and “Thank you.” My father hardly seemed to notice this dearth of communication. My mother, though, more attuned, would stop by my room after dinner.

“Is everything all right, Laura?”

“Yes.”

“Are you enjoying your summer?”

“Yes.”

“Well …” She watched me a moment longer from the doorway, her dark eyes twitching in their sockets. “Nice to have you back. Good night.”

“Night.”

Listening to her steps creaking down the hallway from my room, I could feel the distance between us growing, and I wondered if this distance would grow so great that eventually, passing through opposite doors of the parlor or brushing shoulders on the way to and from the bathroom, we might be no more familiar to one another than strangers at a bus station, bound for different destinations.

Every week or so, I went alone to Jack Prejean’s shop to check for mail from Tim. That was our arrangement: during the school year, Tim would write to me at SHA, and during the summer, he’d write care of his dad’s shop in town.

“Got one right here,” Jack would say, turning around to pick up a letter from his desk behind the counter. I could tell he looked forward to my visits. While I sat in a chair to read Tim’s news, Jack leaned on the counter watching me, the sun angling in through the junked TVs and radios piled on shelves against the shop window. If I laughed aloud or otherwise reacted in some way, he snapped up his eyebrows. “What? What’d he say?” Then we would share what we knew of Tim and his life in Vietnam, which, in the letters that came that first summer, still sounded like one big Boy Scout adventure.

He’d been assigned to an airmobile radio research team, Tim wrote. He figured he wasn’t revealing any army secrets to tell us his job basically entailed him and another guy driving out into a field with a radio mounted on a jeep to try and locate enemy transmitters. “Translate that to me sitting hunched over the receiver all day while Patterson, a guy who’s got one more patch on his shirt than me, lies in the hammock strumming his guitar and getting a suntan.” While they were out snooping on the North Vietnamese Army, they lived off Coca-Cola and C rations, which weren’t so bad really after you heated them up on the exhaust manifold of the jeep. Franks and beans for dinner, bananas cooked in their skins with Hershey chocolate for dessert. Sleeping out under the stars—just like camping out. Most times it was hard to believe there was even a war on. Everywhere you looked it was just farms and fields and dirt roads, with little kids who followed you around like ducks, and everything quiet as a Sunday afternoon in Zachary. Only difference was, in Zachary you didn’t have choppers flying overhead, or military convoys tearing past, or fire-fights that boomed and lit up the night sky over the hills like thunder and lightning before a hurricane. Lucky for him he never had to get too close to the fighting; they just hung back and diddled with their radios. He hadn’t even fired his rifle yet, which was just fine with him, Tim wrote, because then he’d have to take it apart and clean it, which was a real pain in the A.

Jack chuckled, shaking his head. “Man oh man. Army life sure seems to suit the boy, doesn’t it?”

Sometimes Jack and I scribbled responses to Tim on the back of a repair order form, trading wisecracks in writing. “You better get on home. Your girl’s got a dozen beaux circling her!” Jack wrote.

“Don’t listen to Jack,” I wrote below that. “Your girl doesn’t have any beaux circling her. But she does miss you and wish you were here. Be safe.”

At times like these I felt closer to the Prejeans than to my own family, and was reminded of why I fell in love with Tim in the first place. His life seemed so honest and simple that a girl couldn’t help but want to be a part of it.

•   •   •

The big surprise that summer, though, had nothing to do with Tim and the war in Vietnam. It was a phone call. One sleepy afternoon my mother hollered for me to come quick to the kitchen.

“It’s a boy,” she said when I came through the doorway, her face a screwed-up look of expectancy and sourness. After I took the phone, she stood there watching.

“Laura?”

“Who’s this?”

“Chip.”

I glared at my mother until she left the kitchen. Then I turned toward the wall so I could talk, my heart beating a little faster than it should have been.

Chip had run into Kim Cortney in town the day before and thought he’d give me a call. A bunch of them from school were planning to get together at his house that Friday night, he said—no big deal, shoot some pool, hang out, maybe go swimming. He knew it was a long drive from Zachary, but hey, if I was in town …

He gave me directions. A big white house right on LSU lake, easy to find. Didn’t matter if I couldn’t play pool, he said. He’d teach me. No charge.

That’d be great, I told him. Wow. Okay. Sure. I just had to ask my parents first.

“Okay, so … great. See you Friday,” he said.

“See you Friday.”

“Great.”

“Great!”

I had never been invited to a party in Baton Rouge, much less to a party involving swimming and billiards. I pictured the evening as a scene out of Gone with the Wind, with plantation-sized houses and elegant Southern girls sweeping down curved stairways in green gowns, while the men-Chip looking debonair in a gray tailcoat—leaned against the mantel in the billiard room sipping bourbon. With this one phone call, Chip had reached down his hand to snatch me up into a world of privilege and ease, a universe away from the dull family farms and bleak trailer parks of Zachary. I felt a little like Cinderella, or whatever the Southern version of her would be. At dinner that night I asked my parents if I could go.

“See what your father thinks,” my mother said.

“You want to what?” my father asked, barely looking up from his fried liver and onions.

“Borrow the car to drive to Baton Rouge for a party.”

“Don’t think so,” he said, and went back to eating.

“Mom?” I pleaded.

She shrugged. “If your father says no—”

I stared at her, this pinch-faced stranger sitting a hundred miles away at the end of the table who nonetheless wielded absolute power over me, who with a word could send me to a convent school in another city or deny me the chance to attend the most important party I’d ever been invited to, one that had the potential to change my life forever.

I couldn’t contain myself. “You’re useless. You know that?” I cried. “Useless! What good are you as a mother? You’re nothing. You don’t do anything. You just sit there and agree with whatever he says. You don’t help me, you don’t care, you don’t … I never get to go to parties! I never go anywhere!” I threw down my napkin and left the table.

“You come back here and apologize, young lady!” my father shouted, his mouth full of potatoes.

“I hate living in this house!” I yelled, slamming my bedroom door.

•   •   •

Sound familiar, Liz? It does to me. In fact, I’m ashamed at how familiar it sounds. I didn’t curse my parents and steal their car and leave, but I sure wanted to.

That was the night when, crying furiously in my room, I promised myself I would never treat my daughter the way my mother treated me. No, that would never happen. Because my daughter and I, I swore, would be best friends. We’d laugh and gossip. I’d give her advice about boys, and she’d tell me when my clothes were beginning to look frumpy and old-fashioned. When her father said no, I’d take her aside, slip a few dollars into her hand, and tell her not to worry, she should go ahead and enjoy herself.

As it turns out, Liz, we talk about as little as my mother and I did, don’t we? You huff and frown whenever I ask you to take out your earphones, and if I dare try to broach personal matters with you, you groan like I’m hurting you. Just like I did, you keep your private life locked up tight in a cupboard, hiding it from the one person who most wants to help you.

Am I really that bad? As bad as my own mother? I don’t feel like a villain, and yet you probably see me that way: a mean old witch whose only aim is to keep you from having any fun in life. But as hard as it may be to believe, your father and I really do have your best interests at heart. We might screw up now and then—we’re only human, after all—but we don’t set out to be cruel. I don’t think any parent does.

If I could speak now to my teenage self, I might tell her to be more forgiving of her parents. Maybe they were doing the best they could. It’s possible. If adulthood has taught me anything, it’s that even grown-ups are fallible. We’re not a whole lot smarter than we were when we were teenagers. We still feel the same stir of emotions, the same awkward human needs and doubts we felt then. Only the shell grows thicker; the inside, the more tender parts, remains surprisingly unchanged. Often—and this is a secret that not many parents will tell their children—often, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. And so we yell, we shout, we slap our children.

We still make mistakes, daughter. Oh yes, all the time.

“Avoid sentimentality at all costs,” Sister Mary Margaret used to warn us.

An odd rule coming from her, I always thought, considering Sister M&M was about the most sentimental nun you could imagine, welling up any time she read two lines of poetry aloud to us. But it was a good rule, I suppose, for a classroom full of teenage girls whose confused emotions always churned just below the surface of their thin skin, threatening to spill over at the least agitation.

Back at school my junior year, I stopped by the library one Friday afternoon late in the fall semester and found a letter in the usual place, volume 1 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I remember standing between the shelves, my satchel on my shoulder, as I opened the thin airmail letter and began reading.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to learn that Tim had decided to stay on for another tour of duty in Vietnam. He explained how the extra combat pay plus cost-of-living allowance would add up to a nice savings. The army had him one way or the other for the next two years, he wrote, so he might as well take advantage of it. To sweeten the deal—and this was the big news he wanted to tell me—he had just been awarded a lateral promotion to corporal. For the first time in his life, people were saluting him and calling him “sir.” “Don’t worry, I won’t make you salute me when I get home,” he joked.

But most important, he finally felt he was doing something useful with his life, helping the South Vietnamese defeat the Communists. Pull out now, he said, and the whole thing would fall apart. No matter what the protestors back home said, and no matter all the horror stories you heard on the news, he knew that what they were doing in Vietnam was for the better….

When I finished reading, I stuffed Tim’s letter in my satchel, not quite wanting to think about it yet, and hurried to the gym, where preparations were under way for the Winter Formal. I was on the planning committee and was supposed to be overseeing decorations. The other girls were already there, putting up the backdrop for the souvenir photos and weaving crepe paper streamers. I dropped my satchel and threw myself into the work. Our theme that year was “Winter Nights,” and so the inside of the school gym was supposed to somehow look like, well, a winter night.

“The stars?” a freshman named Amy asked, holding out a stack they’d finished wrapping with aluminum foil. I showed her how we’d hang them from the ceiling with fishing line, assuring her that with the distance and the dim light her cardboard stars would look twinkling and gorgeous, not at all stupid. We rolled out the giant gym ladder and peered up into the rafters, wondering how we’d go about it—

And yet despite all the busyness and chatter around me, I couldn’t help but think of Tim. I was reminded of a dance two years ago at Zachary High, when I was a freshman and he was a senior. It seemed like half a lifetime ago already.

“But soon you’ll graduate and I’ll be home and we can finally settle down,” he’d written in his letter to me. “Maybe next time you’re back in Zachary you can begin looking at neighborhoods you like.” He’d put his daddy to work, too, checking out home prices. Wasn’t any reason we couldn’t take out a loan and move into someplace nice. Other fellas threw all their paychecks away on fancy cars and what have you, but Tim was saving all his for me and him together. Heck, with the money he earned he might be able to turn around his daddy’s shop yet, expand it to home stereo sales. That’s where the real business opportunities were—

“Sound check!” Christy Lee shouted from the wings of the stage, and all at once the gym filled with loud, lush music. Christy ran out from behind the curtains and slid to a stop in the center of the basketball court. She began miming the song.

I say to myself, “You’re such a lucky guy.”
To have a girl like her is truly a dream come true.

The other girls clapped and cheered her on. Then Christy ran over and tugged my arm. I protested—I was busy, I didn’t know the song, she should get somebody else.

“Come on!” she said, and dragged me out onto the floor. I reluctantly fell into step beside her for a silly Jackson 5 dance routine. She called the moves: slide, kick, turn, and back.

But it was just my imagination
Running away with me …

“Boy in the house!” someone shouted, and then I saw, over Christy’s shoulder, Chip Benton. He was standing in the door of the gym, grinning. He raised his camera and slinked toward us, snapping off pictures.

“SHA girls seen busily preparing for the annual Winter Formal,” he narrated. “Here they are practicing dance steps, hoping to impress boys. SHA student council secretary Laura Jenkins shows off her funky moves.”

“Out! Out!” the girls yelled, throwing crepe paper at him. Christy, laughing, spun me in his direction. He held his camera aside as I thumped into his chest. “Oof.”

“If you insist,” Chip said. He lowered his camera, took my hands, and began to dance with me. My classmates cheered and oohed.

“You dance divinely,” Chip said.

“You’re crushing my fingers,” I answered. Luckily, the record was reaching its end. “Oops, sorry,” I said. “Song’s over. Too bad.”

But Chip held tight, because Christy had disappeared behind the stage curtains and restarted the record.

“Oops, too bad. It’s playing again,” Chip said. “It’d be very rude to leave me now.”

Then Christy threw the switch that cut the overhead flood lamps, and suddenly we were at the Winter Formal, the gym floor bathed in blue and silver lights. As the song played again, the other girls paired up and turned in couples around us, singing along in their high, hopeful voices beneath the cut-out stars and artificial moonlight:

Ooh-hoo-hoo-hooh,
Soon we’ll be married
And raise a family …

“You really do dance well,” Chip said. “I’m not kidding.”

“I guess you do, too,” I said. His right hand rested sure but easy in the middle of my back, his left hand cupped warmly around mine. He pulled me closer and rested his chin on top of my head while the Temptations sang about building a little home out in the country with two or three children, just like a dream come true. Chip asked near my ear, “Are you going to the winter dance already? Do you have a date?”

The tears came on unexpectedly, bubbling up from inside my chest. Chip leaned back and looked at me. “Whoa. Hey. What’s wrong?” His eyes were sincere, his cheeks remarkably pink below that halo of blond hair.

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“What’d I say? Laura?” When he lifted a finger to wipe my face, I stopped him.

“No, don’t. I’m just … I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

I pulled away, and as I ran out of the gym I heard the other girls whispering behind my back, “What happened? What’s wrong with her?”

•   •   •

Well. You can probably guess what the problem was.

As much as I loved Tim, I had only seen him once in the last two years—in high school time, that was like one day out of twenty years. And the four semesters I’d been at SHA, I had to admit, had changed me, just like my parents had hoped. It’s the good and bad of education: as the world grows bigger the more you learn about it, so the neighborhood you came from seems to grow smaller. Now all of Tim’s talk about shopping for homes and settling down began to make me nervous. I was only seventeen years old, after all, still just a girl. Maybe in Zachary, Tim’s plans wouldn’t have seemed out of place, but here at SHA none of my classmates got married and had babies right after they graduated. They went to college, got jobs, dated, had fun. What was his hurry, after all?

And the truth was, most of our relationship had been through letters, hadn’t it? Letters that, in spite of all their sweet words, had an air of make-believe precisely because they were only words on paper. They were abstractions, barely real. If a letter got lost in the mail, the world inside its envelope might as well have never existed. Or if you left a letter in the rain, the ink would blur and wash right off, carrying with it any evidence of the reality the words had ever represented.

But all this was mere justification, I knew, for the troubling realization that as my life at Sacred Heart Academy began to feel brighter and more hopeful, the life of Tim’s letters began to feel that much more dim and complicated. It was the giddy teenage world of Winter Formals with aluminum foil stars and dream dates, pitted against the frighteningly adult world of tours of duty in Vietnam and down payments on aluminum-sided homes on muddy suburban lots in small-town Zachary.

And honestly, which do you think a seventeen-year-old girl would choose? Which would you choose, Liz?

The choice became all the more difficult when around this same time, Tim’s letters began to undergo a change. I barely registered it at first. Tim was such a naturally optimistic person that it would have been hard to recognize anything like despair creeping into his words. And the story only appeared in bits and pieces, never all at once—just a fragment here, a sidelong reference there. But as the weeks went on, it became apparent that something awful had happened to Tim, something that cut a deep and lasting scar on his soul.

The story, as I was able to piece it together, turned around an incident that happened when he and his buddy were out on a surveillance mission. By his accounts, everything was done by the book. For three or four weeks they had been monitoring suspicious activity in a village in a neighboring valley. There were trucks rolling in and out of the village at night, fluctuations in the population, new huts being erected around the perimeter. Radio transmissions eventually confirmed that the village was a transport hub for the Viet Cong.

So one morning after getting the go-ahead, Tim called in the coordinates for an air strike. Twenty minutes later a single F-4 Phantom jet screamed over their heads and dropped a neat load of ordnance: two missilelike Hammer bombs that tore straight through the palm trees toward the village, followed by one stumpy-looking napalm canister that tumbled end over end as it fell, like something accidentally dropped from the back of the plane. Explosions rumbled like thunder up from the valley floor. The jet veered off to the left and disappeared over the hills, leaving clouds of dense black smoke and fire pluming in the valley. An eerie quiet settled on the mountaintop. All the birds had fallen silent. Mission accomplished.

This was when Tim and his buddy usually packed up their gear and headed back to base. But, oddly, radio transmissions continued to issue from the bombed village. Since they were the only troops in the vicinity, Tim and his partner were ordered in to “have a look-see.”

“I normally have nothing to do with this kind of thing, you understand,” Tim explained in one of the letters. “We do our radio business and get out of there.” But orders were orders. They hiked down from their camp on the ridge, helmets on, rifles out, just two skinny radio geeks in boots and camouflage clomping and slipping down the mountainside. They came out onto the dirt road leading to the village. Black smoke continued to billow over the palm trees ahead, a good sign that they’d hit a weapons cache.

The first thing was the sound, Tim wrote. They heard it as they approached the village, a high, spooky wail, something stuck halfway between animal and human. And then the smell—a smell that Tim had never encountered before, but one that his body instinctively recognized and recoiled from, causing him to buckle and vomit, right there on the trail.

•   •   •

That was as far as Tim ever got in the story in his letters to me that year. But over the weeks he kept coming back again and again to those same details: how he was just doing his job, calling in the coordinates; the eerie silence on the mountaintop after the jet dropped its load; then he and his buddy hiking down the hill and seeing the black smoke above the trees. And at last, that strange keening noise, followed by the gut-wrenching smell as they entered the village …

Well. I had seen only snippets of the war on TV, but even in those brief color-washed flashes there were horrors enough to haunt a lifetime. So I had an idea of what Tim had seen but could not tell. The wonder of it was that he had been spared for so long. Because what Tim had seen at last when they entered the village that day, I knew, was only the manifest consequence of his radio work, numbered coordinates revealed as flesh-and-blood people.

What he had finally seen was the truth of war, which is death: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, slaughtered.