Chapter 119
We got stuck at a table with the Jenkinses and had to listen to Mary Lou tell a very long story about her son, Chris, who had just gone to homecoming.
“I wish I could have been there to help him pick out a corsage and take pictures, you know?” she said, and I thought of my own mother, who had laughed so hard she’d nearly choked when Lenny had worn a pair of waders and a bow tie to homecoming his sophomore year.
My mother still talked about it, which made me feel a little sad for Mary Lou.
She was the command’s biggest cheerleader, but the job did not come without sacrifices.
After dinner a steward came in to set up the projector.
“What are we watching?” Laura asked him, and when he turned over the canister and read Planet of the Apes, all the wives groaned.
“What?” he said.
“Does anyone even care that we’re here?” said Beverly to the room at large.
“I do,” said Tim, and he made a kissy-face at her.
“If that were the case, you wouldn’t subject us to two hours of talking apes.”
While the steward threaded the film through the projector’s sprockets, the wives scrambled to swap seats. Only Mary Lou and the XO’s wife, Patricia, remained where they were.
“Anyone want more coffee?” asked J.R.
“No,” said Rita, who was thirty-six weeks pregnant and leaving for Naples as soon as her mother showed up to watch her kids. “But if there’s more of that carrot cake in the galley, will you nab us some?”
A new girl named Janet Kingry asked what everyone was doing for Thanksgiving, but all anyone wanted to talk about was the flyers that had gone up all over town.
“Is it really true that three babies on the island have been born with this skull thing?” asked a girl named Meredith Green, who had a toddler at home and was actively trying for her second.
“You all have got to start reading the papers,” said Bev.
“They’re in Italian,” said Laura defensively.
“That’s no excuse,” Bev said. “There was a huge article in La Spedizione a couple of weeks ago. By Eileen’s friend.”
I thought I detected the raise of Bev’s eyebrow on the word friend, but I ignored it.
“Scott says it’s just a coincidence,” said Meredith. “A statistical anomaly.”
“That’s what Bobby says, too,” said Laura.
“What do I say?” Bobby shouted from two tables away.
Laura craned her neck to get a look at him. “That I’m the most gorgeous creature you’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“True enough.”
“Are you worried about all this stuff?” Meredith asked Rita with a nod toward her ever-expanding stomach. Rita shook her head but then admitted that she’d been drinking nothing but bottled water ever since finding out she was pregnant.
“That’s most of us, though, right?” said Meredith. “We’re not supposed to drink the water.”
“No, definitely not,” said Bev.
Janet announced she’d just found out she was pregnant, which elicited a round of congratulations. “Now I’m wondering if I should go home and live with my parents until I give birth.”
“That’s a long time to leave your husband to his own devices,” said Laura, which was a biting comment that made me wonder if her problem was not so much with Janet leaving her husband as with Janet being pregnant in the first place.
“What do you think about all this, Eileen?” Meredith asked, and I froze because I didn’t want to be put on the spot, particularly with Paul in the room.
“About what?”
“These babies. With the missing skulls. You don’t really think the subs have anything to do with them, right?”
“Oh,” I said, slowly. “I don’t know.”
“Make note of the fact that she is not pregnant,” said Beverly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Laura.
“Just that Eileen’s husband is an attractive guy, and if she thought this whole birth-defect thing was no big deal, she’d probably be procreating with him.”
Laura was pretty wrung out, what with the bomb Janet had dropped, so she couldn’t just let a comment like that go. “For all you know, she is trying.”
“I’m not,” I told the group in a low voice. “I mean we’re not. Trying.”
“Because you think there’s stuff in the water?” asked Janet.
I looked at her, then over at Rita. “Well… we know there’s stuff in the water.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts. For real. Manganese-54 and cobalt-60 are two nuclear by-products, and they’re showing up in water samples. There’s a whole research team here tracking it. They’re giving talks and writing papers, although the papers have a funny way of disappearing.”
I swear, from across the room, I heard Paul clear his throat. I recalibrated. “The question isn’t whether I think there’s stuff in the water. It’s whether the stuff in the water has any effect on health outcomes.”
“And so does it?” asked Janet.
The movie was still playing, but the whole room had otherwise gone quiet. Even the guys at Paul’s table had stopped talking. I glanced at Paul, who was running a finger along the rim of his water glass. It was hard to tell if he was listening, but I thought he probably was.
“God, Janet,” I said, “I don’t think right now there’s any way to know.”