Group 16: Open/13th floor office building/a toy soldier

Synopsis: A fourteen year old girl whose father has been deployed to Afghanistan indefinitely sits with her seven year old brother who has gone mysteriously mute.

The Waiting Room

I don't remember the last time I saw my father. I feel like I should.

But, my brother and I have been waiting for a long time, all through salted winters and honeyed summers, waiting for him to come home.

Now we sit patiently in a tiny room and take in the sea blue paint and dusty rose upholstered furniture, the kind all doctor’s offices seem to have, its wall of windows looking out on a parking lot. My brother stares into space and kicks his legs beneath his chair as consistent as a metronome. The room is not comforting. Whoever thought putting a counselor’s office on the thirteenth floor was a good idea really ought to have their head examined. Worse, the office building sits all but empty, hit hard by the economy, our footsteps echoing off the linoleum as though we were in a half step march with a line of boots behind us, only there’s no one there.

Jason doesn’t speak anymore. No one knows why. It’s not from any natural trauma that I can think of, but all he seems to do is grunt and be angry. All I am is angry too. I’m here. I’m waiting. We get emails. We get presents. Weird presents. Like the rusted knife Jason got for his sixth birthday. But, all I want is my dad’s smell. That spicy soapy smell from his shaving cream. Sometimes when Grammy is napping, I walk the sixteen blocks to Walgreens just to press the blue cap on Barbasol, the one with the green stripes, and brush the white foam against my neck to make sure he’s still alive. If it makes that smell, I tell myself it’s probably okay. I wonder if he has a beard now. If he still thinks it’s a capital crime to put skim milk in coffee. If he still doesn’t like the smell of bacon. If he’s told anyone he doesn’t eat bacon. Or maybe he does now. But, then I think, Muslim.

My dad is based in Kunar in eastern Afghanistan. He signed up when Moms was still alive. She was pretty. Pretty as a strawberry. Whole hearted with all of her seeds on the outside. Mama said Pops just knew. Knew she was the one for him. He walked across the street, a grey ribbon with bright yellow marks like a highlighter marking passages down the middle that she always wanted to read. “What were the words there?” She would whisper to me as she tucked me in. “What made him know to cross and stop just in front of me?

“Me,” I would whisper back, and she would smile.

Grammy tells me how it is now, that I should try to be happy. That hate bends a person backwards. But I wonder sometimes if that’s not true. Maybe I don’t hate enough. Nothing ever seems to change, or to bend my way.

I’m tired of proud men, men in neckties and blazers, spouting off about what I ought to believe.

Maybe I should believe in fairies. Maybe rap singers with their own diamond thoughts glinting across their fingers and deep dark sunglasses to hide their eyes, are the ones who are right, That we’re all fucked. That every moment of every day is a chance to say something worthwhile and hardly anyone ever does.

I want to change. I want to be happy. I think this at night as I blink myself to sleep. I think this as I rock until the stars are all poked out, and light from them blends into blue gray. I think this as my nightshirt sticks against my legs twisted as a lime, until I don’t wonder any more.

Something hard and plastic pushes against my wrist and I look down. It is Jason’s battle-weary toy soldier that he has with him always. He presses it into my skin like a cookie cutter, in concentration, and it makes a mark like an SOS. “What is it?” I ask him. I touch his soft black hair and he jerks away, moving out of reach taking his warrior with him. Sunlight spreads across the carpet like a pool of butter in a pan and warms my ankles. I wish he would talk, that he would share this loneliness with me. I want to stay true, to be strong for the people that need me. But I also want to run, to get out of this awful room, this awful town with its paint-peeled houses.

The first time I ran, I only made it thirty miles. I remember the promise of that blue pickup truck with rust skirting its wheel wells like irish lace. The smell of peaches as the man delivered them. I didn’t know how they could hold the heat of the day until I pressed one to my lips to stop them from trembling. The morse code across my wrist is already fading, but I know the trail of a stranger’s look can leave an indelible mark across your skin. Are we all dotted lines? I want to be whole, but I am not.

I stare at my legs in the dappled sunlight and wonder if I am white enough, black enough, red enough in my veins to make the moon shape the sky. I imagine that I am a colored star, too far away for anyone to tell the difference. Some massive churning thing with gravity that could exact some change, reckless and violent. Some pull, hardly noticeable at first but that builds and builds and builds until I suck in everything around me. Until I realign the stars, spread letters across constellations with a wave of my fingers, that my father might read, wherever he stands, a toy soldier on a basketball. In the speckled darkness, he would see my thoughts and wonder the same thing I do, why am I here?

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