When Mom Is Over There

At 19, he joined the Air Force and saw the world, and now he is back beneath the dripping Spanish moss that shrouded our childhoods. His house is in a subdivision near the Alafia River in eastern Hillsborough County. The river is tannic and winding and beautiful but surrounded by subdivisions that keep hatching and expanding, beige on beige. One day I'm returning home with the girls and I pull into what I believe is our driveway. My nieces inform me that their house is in fact three doors down. "Do these houses all look alike?" I ask.

"Our light is different," my younger niece says.

My brother loves the stability and sameness of these communities, a clue that he has not forgotten everything from our childhood. In Oklahoma they lived on Altus Air Force Base in a windswept brick ranch house with brown carpet, and every night an anemic bugle would sound taps over loudspeakers. During a bad plains drought, my brother torched his and a neighbor's lawns during a barbecue mishap. Three Halloweens ago in Virginia, in a neighborhood of Special Forces, Navy and Air Force members, I remember all the children flying around the cul-de-sac in vampire and Shrek costumes as their dads prepared for the invasion of Iraq. The night was starry and perfect, for these children.

Now, Angela is there. Patience, President Bush says on the news, patience. Stay the course. His twin daughters are about the same age that Angela was when she was working at the Stouffer's frozen-food factory and decided to enlist because good jobs were scarce in Gaffney, S.C. Now, Angela is high in a tower over the northern desert of Iraq, watching the red trails of rockets flare off in the distance. Patience, Angela, patience.

It is nearly bedtime. My brother turns off the TV. The sliding glass door is open and he pulls it closed, the small click of a lock echoing between us. One last time for the night, he goes to the computer to see if there is any news from Angela.

* * *

"Hey, baby," my brother shouts into the phone on my last Saturday afternoon. Knowing it's their mother, the girls come running.

"Mama," Chrislyn says, "I got a new bear."

Jourdan shares with her mother a dark tale from "Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul." It has come to Angela's attention, through more digital photos, that Jourdan is wearing blue eye shadow to school, and a mother-daughter conversation follows.

My brother gets back on the line, and the kids start arguing. He cups his hand over the phone and yells at them sharply, drawing a rebuke from Angela.

"Dammit, Ang," Jim says, "I'm here with them 24-7 and you're in the peace and quiet."

We have to laugh at that one.

We decide to take a walk on the nature trail around the subdivision. Frogs grunt from the sludge of the creek, like kettledrums sounding off from the depths of the soupy algae. Jim tells the girls to stay on the paved trail. I whisper to him, "When we were kids, we played hopscotch over rattlesnake nests."

The sky is obscured by palms and oaks; it feels as if we are alone in Florida's last forest, until we hear the rush of the nearby interstate, cleverly hidden by landscaping. The girls race ahead. I have told them to bring their swimming suits. The subdivision has a pool, and though it is unheated, the gate is unlocked. We change into our suits. No one is saying the obvious, that the water is cold and that Angela would never allow this. But Angela is not here. We leap into the pool, cannonballs and jackknives. With chattering teeth, we make a pact never to tell Angela we went swimming in December.

We are warm and dry by the time we eat dinner. The girls sit at the kitchen table to write letters to their mother. Chrislyn picks up a pencil and stares out the window. A dreamer and sensitive soul, like her father when he was a boy. She looks down at her blank paper and begins. Dear Mom : If you read this carefully, you might actually hear my voice.

Since the war began I have read the U.S. casualty lists published in newspapers. When the photos of the dead are published in newspapers, I study the faces that are laid out like yearbook photos filling the pages of an endless year. Every picture has its own story but no future. The brim of an olive cap shields the impish eyes of a young Marine, now gone. Why do the names of their home towns seem so poetic? Mineral Bluff, Ga. Spooner, Wis. Angelina, Tex. Mechanicsville, Iowa. Zanesville, Ohio. Evening Shade, Ark. Valentine, Neb. When I see these photos, I imagine the knock on the door.

My brother never reads these lists. He never looks at the photos. Seeking out memorials is for those of us who live around the edges. Instead, Jim stands over his girls as they say their bedtime prayers, the same singsong prayers they have repeated since they could talk, about grandmas, papas, Todd their cat and baby Jesus, with one new addendum to their pajama pleadings. "Please keep Mama safe."