Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“My dad used to do that with me,” he said, barely exerting any effort, this forty-pound child still standing on his hands. Now he lifted her higher. “Can you get the ceiling?” he asked.

Ana reached, grunting, until she tapped it with her finger. “Down please,” she said, and he lowered her slowly, then dropped her in a heap on the couch and pretended to sit on her, trying to get comfortable as she shrieked gleefully below.

“You’re a great mom,” Jeremy said to Josie, still sitting on Ana. “I mean, in general, but especially because you let me do stuff like this. Not all parents do. But kids are beasts. They need to sweat and scream and wrestle.” Jeremy collected Ana in his arms and plunged his mouth into her stomach, making a loud wet raspberry. Ana’s eyes were charged, her hands like claws in front of her, waiting for the next attack. But instead Jeremy smoothed her shirt, patted her tummy and stood her up on the carpet, as if restoring a fallen statue.

“Thank you,” Josie said, overcome.

In return for Jeremy’s kindness and strength, all Josie had ever wanted was to tell him how much she felt he was the hope of the world. Is that all she did? No. She said more, and this is why she should not speak, ever again, and why she cherished every day when she spoke to no one but her two children. She knew that the color of the sky affected her moods, the sun changed her outlook and words, and if she took a brisk walk during lunch and saw something beautiful she was liable to say something exuberant, or be too full of happiness for an hour or so, and this was when she made mistakes. In her exuberance she would reveal too much about herself. She would overpraise, she would urge people into tasks they could not complete.

It happened two weeks after that night. She had come back from lunch and was feeling some joy the fall air had given her, and could hardly concentrate. She had three patients that afternoon, and all were subjected to her inane bliss. First there was Joanna Pasquesi, a Rubenesque high-school sophomore who revealed she was considering going out for the school musical. It was A Chorus Line that year, and with altogether too much zeal Josie urged her to try out, to make their selection of her beyond debate, and went on a bit about the need for body diversity on the stage, though in reality she was trying to score a very belated victory against the gatekeepers who had kept her out of her own high-school musical, Cabaret, for which Josie was not called back. So Joanna Pasquesi, who had actually checked her watch twice while Josie rambled on, left feeling inspired — she said so, at least — though she might have been simply stunned into submission.

And then Jeremy came in, and they talked for a time about her kids, Such cool kids, he said, and they laughed about their hyperactivity, their madness, their need to wrestle with him, touch ceilings with him, and then conversation turned to her, and the Peace Corps, and though she rarely was so exuberant about it, this time she told him it was the greatest experience of her life, that they had made such a difference there, that it was just after the country had taken ownership of the canal, that there was such optimism then, so many changes, and that being part of that transition, representing the U.S. in Panama, this crucial partner, at a crucial moment — she went on and on, and it was wildly convincing. Even Tania was listening.

And then, with his smooth young face and sincerity, Jeremy told her he wanted to enlist. He wanted to be a marine. He wanted to make a difference in Afghanistan, help open schools for Afghan girls, work on clean water projects, bring stability to a country on the verge of great things. Josie’s eyes filled and she squeezed his shoulder. She did not do what good people would have done, which would have been to say nothing. Enlisting during a war was such grave business that only an idiot would praise this notion. Josie should have been judicious enough to know that she could not, should not influence such a decision in any way — to recognize that this was between Jeremy and his parents. To know that she was nothing.

But she was a fool who knew no boundaries, and was not very sure about the state of the war — she was relatively certain it was winding down and would present little danger to Jeremy. So she told him that sounded wonderful. That he, as the hope of the world, a gentle soul, a formidable figure, could make such a difference. That the marines, that the region — that Afghanistan itself! — needed someone like him. Somehow she had confused her enthusiasm for Joanna Pasquesi’s musical ambitions with Jeremy’s nation-building hopes, and further had conflated her own time in Panama, the expression of American love through cisterns and the teaching of English by men and women in sandals and khakis (for the impulse did come from love, love of the world) with Jeremy’s expression of the same love, though in uniform and carrying an AK-47. It was not the same thing, and now he was dead and his parents hadn’t spoken to her since.

This has absolutely nothing to do with you, her friends said, bewildered that she would take any responsibility at all. But then why hadn’t his parents been back? Josie had heard, later, that they’d been against his enlisting from the start. And what they didn’t know, and she would never tell them, and had not told anyone, was that he had approached her, in the parking lot of her office one evening, at five — he knew when she’d be there, weeks after that visit where she squeezed his shoulder and said Wonderful —and told her that her support had been so important to him. That his parents had been unsure, they’d been worried, but they had respect for her, for Josie, his dentist, that her support had meant so much to them and him. He had enlisted and was killed six months later.

This is why she no longer offered advice, why she was happy to let go of her practice. Liberated. Thrilled. Away and free. This was why, outside her parenting duties, she had not left her bedroom most of January, her limbs unliftable and her face numb. No one had told her. Not the parents, none of their friends. The funeral had already happened. He’d been shot in some remote Afghani hillside and had bled for six hours before dying. He’d had time to write a note to his parents, which had been found on him, the contents of which Josie would never know. A boy of eighteen dying alone, bleeding alone, writing to his parents — how did all this happen? How was this allowed? Josie wanted no more of this. This idea of knowing people. Knowing people meant telling them what to do or not to do, providing advice, encouragement, guidance, wisdom, and all of these things brought misery and lonely death.

“Mom?” It was Paul.

Josie turned. Her son was in yesterday’s clothes, and had somehow gotten out of the Chateau, walked through the woods, across the parking lot and found her there, on the shore.

“We’re hungry,” he said.

—

They ate in the camp cafeteria, the eggs and sausage excellent and costing only fifty-five dollars before gratuity. The Norwegians ate nearby, waving again.

There was a television hanging from the ceiling, showing a loop of the park’s services — iceberg tours, glacier tours, whale watching, each excursion costing somewhere in the thousands per person — and every so often there was a public service announcement featuring Smokey the Bear. Josie had forgotten about his very existence, hadn’t seen him since her Girl Scout days, and between then and now something had happened: he’d been working out. The cuddly and round-bellied old Smokey was now a burly bear with a flat stomach and arms like bent steel. In the animated message, his friends were trying to give him a birthday party, and they carried out a cake full of lighted candles. Smokey didn’t like this. He gave them a disapproving posture, his huge arms on his waist, and Josie felt a stirring within her. Did she have a crush on this new Smokey?