Макс Коллинз - Road to Paradise

At the round kitchen table in the modern white-and-yellow kitchen with its travertine surfaces and floors, she had an iced tea and (you’ve come a long way, baby) shook a cigarette from her pack of Virginia Slims and lighted up with a Bic.

She had quit the vile habit many times over the years, but with a husband who worked for those employers of his, and a son in Vietnam, she felt she had every reason to risk her own life any way she chose.

Still, she had promised Michael that when Mike came home from Nam, safe and sound, she would indeed quit. Finally. Once and for all.

“Gonna hold you to that,” he’d said, shaking a finger, but smiling the half-smile she loved so much.

With the war over and her son safe now, Pat was in a position to indulge herself in concern over her daughter.

With no real sense of hypocrisy — though the teenage life her daughter was living was a slightly updated version of her own — Pat wished her daughter, a senior at Incline Village High, would not obsess over such unimportant things as getting the lead in the chorus’s spring musical (she always did), being chosen prom queen (the girl had already been homecoming queen), and maintaining her four-point average (Patsy Ann O’Hara had been valedictorian of her class, and so what?). Even worse, Pat was certain Anna was getting serious with her boyfriend, Gary Grace.

Sighing smoke, the mother knew she was being a hypocrite. She and Michael had become intimate — all right , started screwing in the backseat of the O’Hara family Buick — back in high school. But that had been prom night, and they’d become engaged, and eventually married, and...

Pat had not meant to find the birth control pills (actually, she’d been looking for her daughter’s diary); but there they were. How had the child managed it, without parental consent? Or could a girl these days get the pill when she was just seventeen, like Anna?

Well, things had changed, the Sexual Revolution and all that, but that didn’t make Pat feel any the more comfortable about her high school daughter fucking the Boy Most Likely to Succeed (which he certainly had). And she didn’t dare tell Michael, who adored the girl, because he might explode. She knew the world thought Michael was one cool customer, but she had seen him lose his temper, and it wasn’t pretty.

For almost a week, Pat had been struggling with this — how to confront Anna? Better still, how to talk to her while taking the “confrontation” aspect out of the equation; but when Anna learned her mother had been snooping in her bedroom, how could it be anything but confrontational?

By the time Pat had finished mowing the backyard and started on the front, she had held the conversation with her daughter thirteen times — baker’s dozen. It would always start out as a rational, reasonable speech, a kind, understanding motherly discourse, until she was screaming at her daughter in her mind, and her daughter was screaming back...

What was it Anna was saying these days?

Yow .

Yow indeed...

She was leaning on the Lawn Boy when the Chevelle rolled up at the curb. The car was dark green, nondescript, and did not immediately come to mind as anything anyone she knew drove.

Tentatively, she started down the long, gently sloping lawn, to cautiously greet her unknown caller...

...who stepped from the car to reveal his crisp green Class-A uniform with cap shadowing his face, a slender young soldier about five ten.

Her heart leaped with joy — just as she’d predicted, her son had surprised them, showing up unannounced. Wasn’t that like him! She was within five feet of him when she realized it wasn’t Mike at all, but another young soldier, whose face was serious even for a military man.

And she stumbled to a stop, her brain making the connections quickly, because any mother of a boy in service knew that when a soldier came around who was not her child, the only possible news was...

Patricia Ann Satariano said, “Oh God, oh my God,” and tripped and fell to the freshly cut grass, and — mercifully — passed out.

When she woke in their darkened bedroom, her mouth was thick with sleep and sedation; somehow she’d gotten into her nightclothes, and she pushed up unsteadily on her elbow.

Michael was sitting on the edge of the bed. The room was dark. The world, outside the windows of the bedroom, was dark. Suddenly it wasn’t afternoon anymore.

Then she shook her head and said, “Oh, Michael... I just had the worst dream... the most terrible dream...”

He clicked on the nightstand lamp, to a subdued setting that nonetheless washed the room in more light than either of them might desire.

“Not a dream,” Michael said.

But she already knew that, just looking at him. He was in a white shirt, from work, collar open, no tie, the sleeves rolled up, and his face was pale, his hair askew, and his eyes red.

“Our son... our son can’t be dead,” she said. “Oh, Michael, tell me he’s not dead!”

“We don’t know, Pat. We don’t know.” He moved next to her and put his arm around her; they half-sat, supported by the headboard of the four-poster. “There is hope. Some hope.”

“Some...?”

Michael sighed, swallowed, nodded. “Mike has been declared missing in action.”

And hope did spring within her, desperation-tinged. “So... he could be alive?”

“He could. But we have to be honest with ourselves. The odds... Well, we have to be honest with ourselves.”

She didn’t want to talk there, and he got her her blue silk robe, and walked her to the kitchen, where he had coffee waiting, and served her up. As they sat — where a lifetime ago she’d had a smoke and contemplated problems about her daughter that seemed so small now — she had several long drinks of coffee, as if hoping the hot liquid might rejuvenate her.

Then she said, “Anna? Does she know?”

He shook his head. “She’s still at Sound of Music rehearsal. I’ll tell her. I’ll handle it.”

She touched his hand. “How is this possible? Michael, the war is over... All the boys are coming home.”

He sighed again. “Not all... Not right now, anyway.”

“What did they tell you?”

The young soldier had been a staff sergeant from the Reno recruiting office — where in fact Mike had enlisted — and he had carried the unconscious Pat Satariano into the house. Down the street, her friend Trudy had been out in her yard, watering some flowers, and saw Pat collapse and ran over and helped. And had called Michael over at Cal-Neva.

“Mike is officially listed MIA,” Michael said. “We’ve been left a document that details what happened, anyway what’s known.”

“But Michael... the war is over ... How...?”

“This happened in January.”

“And we’re being told now ?”

Michael shrugged and sighed. “Apparently some kind of negotiations were under way, to try to determine if Mike and some other boys had been taken prisoner. To ascertain, at least, that they were alive... or...”

“No,” she said bitterly. “I’ll tell you what this is about — god-damnit! This is something secret, isn’t it? And they didn’t want it getting out! Because of the cease-fire and...”

Her anger choked off the words.

Michael said, “Do you want me to tell you about it? Or do you want to read what the staff sergeant left us...?”

She swallowed thickly; she felt numb. She shook her head. “Tell me, Michael. Just tell me.”

“Well, putting it simply, Mike’s position was attacked by communist forces — troops and tanks, they were invaded, literally. This was in a place called Tanh Canh Base Camp, Kontum Province... South Vietnam. He was in a water tower observation post and got the warning out, saved a lot of lives. Right away they started what are called E & E operations — evacuate and evade — and a group of perhaps fifty men tried to get away from hundreds.”