A Journal for Jordan Read online

  One

  Dear Jordan,

  If you are reading this book, it means that we got through the sorrowful years, somehow, and that you are old enough to understand all that I am about to tell you.

  You are just ten months old now, but I am writing this for the young man you will be. By then, you will know that your father was a highly decorated soldier who was killed in combat in October 2006, when a bomb exploded beneath his armored vehicle in Iraq. You were six months old.

  You will know that he left a journal for you, more than two hundred pages long, which he handwrote in neat block letters in that hot, terrifying place. What I want to tell you is how the journal came to be and what it leaves unsaid about your father and our abiding love.

  Before he kissed my swollen stomach and left for the war in December 2005, your father, U.S. Army First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, had been preparing for the promise of your new life and for the possible end of his own. Even before he boarded that plane headed for danger, I worried that he would be killed. So I gave him a journal. I hoped he would write a few messages, perhaps some words of encouragement to you, though you were not yet born, in case he died before you knew each other.

  We did a lot to prepare for the possibility that your father would miss out on your life, including finding out if you were a boy or a girl before he left; he was thrilled to have an image of you in his mind and kept your sonogram pictures in a pocket in his uniform the whole time he was in Iraq.

  And then there was the journal. Writing it would be a way for your dad to help guide you through life if he did not make it home to us. He wanted you to know to pick up the check on a date, to take plenty of pictures on vacations, to have a strong work ethic, and to pay your bills on time. He wanted to tell you how to deal with disappointment, to understand the difference between love and lust, to remember to get on your knees and pray every day. Most of all, he wanted you to know how much he loved us.

  So, late into the night in Iraq, after he had completed dangerous and often deadly missions, your dad returned hungry and exhausted to the relative calm of his room and wrote to you before he slept His grammar was not perfect and his handwriting at times suggested that he was tired or rushed. But he put so much thought into the beautiful messages he wrote, things like:

  Your father mailed the journal to me in July 2006, shortly after one of his young soldiers was killed in an explosion eerily similar to the one that would claim his own life. He was so shaken after pulling the young man’s body, piece by piece, out of a bombed tank that he sent the journal to me, unfinished. He had more to say, but that would have to wait until he came home on a two-week leave to meet you, six weeks before he died.

  I read the journal in the calm of night on the day it arrived, with you sleeping next to me, and fell in love with my gentle warrior all over again. He was the most honorable man I have ever known, and the most complex. I do not want to portray your dad as a saint whose example you could never live up to. He was not. He was gentle, benevolent, and loyal, but he could also be moody, stubborn, and withholding. He would brood for days over a perceived slight, like the time I spent my birthday with my sisters and girlfriends instead of with him. He put his military service ahead of his family.

  I also want you to understand me—an imperfect woman who deeply loved her man but struggled during our long courtship to accept him as he was. We were together for the better part of a decade, half of which he spent waiting for me to fall in love with him. Truth be told, every girl has an image of the man with whom she will walk down the aisle one day, and he was not the groom I had imagined. He was excruciatingly introverted, aprocrastinator, and got his news, God forgive him, from television instead of the New York Times, where I have worked as a journalist for more than eleven years.

  I am loquacious, assertive, and impatient, which mostly amused your father but sometimes annoyed him. I am also obstinate and impulsive. My weight fluctuates when I am stressed. I curse in traffic.

  I had a demanding career as a reporter when I met your father, while he was away for months at a time in the wilderness, training young men for battle. A former drill sergeant, he had a strong sense of duty. He was so devoted to his troops, many just out of high school, that he bailed them out of jail, taught them to balance their checkbooks, and even advised them about birth control. I learned to live with his long silences and ambivalence toward newspapers. But I struggled to understand what motivated the man who had for so long dreamed of your birth but chose to miss it because he believed his soldiers needed him more. He refused to take his leave from Iraq until all 105 of his men had gone home first

  Your father was bound to the military not only by a sense of duty, but because it had expanded his world. The soldiers he trained, and trained with, came from coal mining towns in West Virginia, the Bronx in New York City, seaside villages in Puerto Rico. He met former surfers, men who shared his love for the Bible, and women he revered for excelling in a male-dominated institution. He traveled through Europe while stationed in Germany. He practiced his Spanish while working with Cuban refugees at Guantanamo Bay. He wrote in the journal:

  But those were peacetime experiences. The military had also introduced Charles to killing and death. The sight of blood gave him flashbacks. Chemical sprays he received during the First Gulf War left permanent splotches on his arms. For years he was haunted by images of combat, unable to speak about them even to me.

  During his final tour of duty, he experienced loss of the worst kind. His goal was to bring every one of his men home alive; he even made that promise to many of their wives. It was a vow he could not keep. Still, he never questioned the Tightness of a single mission. For Charles, the war was not about “weapons of mass destruction” or an “axis of evil;” I never heard him speak those words. It was about leading the soldiers he had trained by example, about honor and dignity, and about protecting a country he loved from enemies real or imagined.

  I am proud of your dad’s honor and dignity—even of the way he died. Son, all of us will leave this world, but so few die a hero’s death.

  Still, the would-be wife and new mother in me are angry at times that he left us so early, at the age of forty-eight. Was it heroic or foolish that he volunteered for the mission that killed him?

  As the daughter of an army veteran, I grew up on or near military bases and after I left for college wanted no more of that life. So for years I resisted getting deeply involved with your father, and much of our long-distance romance involved him chasing me and me pushing him away. We dated other people at times, me out of a fear of committing to your father, him out of frustration with my dithering. Ultimately, it was his steadiness, his character, and his sureness about who he was and what he stood for that won me over, something you will get to know by reading the journal.

  Your dad wanted so badly for you to know him that he revealed himself in the journal in a way he rarely did in person. He told you things about himself that I never knew. He wrote that he wanted to see the Great Wall of China and to take guitar lessons. He went into detail about his love of art, his religious faith, and his childhood in Cleveland. I laughed as I pictured my soldier wearing stack-heeled shoes and bell-bottom pants in junior high school.

  Until I read the journal I did not know that your father sang in the youth choir at his multicultural Methodist church, was a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan, and had his first kiss in the eighth grade with a girl named Denise.

  Your dad was an extraordinarily disciplined man. He believed that sweating on a five-mile run was the best way to shake a cold. He picked the skin off chicken, would not drink more than one or two beers in a night, and did not allow himself to binge on the pastries he loved because he so closely watched his d
iet.

  Despite his regimented manner, there was so much depth to your father’s character. He had a mind for war strategy but drew angels bowed in prayer. He spent hours sculpting a taut body, even starting his days in Iraq in a gym at 5 a.m., but he loved my more-than-ample curves and had the softest skin I have ever touched. He gave away copies of his art to soldiers he respected but would shout his throat raw when they made mistakes in training that could cost them their lives in combat. “When he yelled, you moved,” one of the officers he served with said in a eulogy at his funeral. “Because he only yelled when there was good reason.”

  This tough guy was the same man who liked to feed me champagne, popcorn, and chocolate in bed. The man who loved you so dearly that during the two weeks he had with you that August—the only two weeks—he barely slept. He preferred to spend that too-brief time dancing around with you in his arms, taking you to the bookstore for story time, and simply watching you sleep. He rarely discussed his personal life at work, but after he died his soldiers said that they knew that when he was “working” in his office, he was often gazing at pictures of us.

  His imposing presence was really a mask for his shyness. Simple things brought him pleasure: drawing pictures of me, starting the day in prayer, summer rainstorms.

  I never knew the fierce warrior who led those troops, and I was sometimes a mystery to him, too. He thought I talked things to death. He read my newspaper stories if I asked him to, but he had no concept of how I could report and write about something momentous, a murder trial or a space shuttle explosion, in an afternoon. He also never understood how I could splurge on a diamond tennis bracelet but go to three stores to find the best price on mustard. He thought I sometimes expected too much of him, which perhaps I did.

  Still, we were in love. By the time he received his orders for Iraq in December 2004, we were finally ready to be a family. We decided to have you. At forty years old, I got pregnant in one passionate weekend when your father was on a break from training.

  Then, in the dusk of an early spring day nearly four months after he left for Iraq, I lay in a hospital bed giving birth to you, wracked by a pain so intense I did not think my body could endure it I could not know that only six months later I would fall to the floor screaming from a pain more wrenching than childbirth, when I learned that your father had been killed. That night I reached for your journal, and I have read it a hundred times since. I find new insights every time.

  Your father had waited a long time for a son and wanted to be the kind of father you could admire. He had tried to be a good father to Christina, his daughter from a marriage that had ended in divorce, and it had always pained him that he didn’t spend more time with her.

  Besides keeping the journal, Charles also wrote more than a dozen love letters to me while he was at war, and I want to share some of them with you as well. He wrote about the dangers he was facing and the things he missed: time to draw, home-cooked meals, the feel of my skin. And he wrote longingly about you:

  I still find myself talking about your dad in the present tense; my mind has not yet recalibrated itself. I take comfort in knowing that we left nothing unsaid and treasure mementos like the set of dog tags he left on my nightstand when he first left for the war. The cold aluminum on my chest and the clink of the tags make me feel as though he is making his presence known.

  I miss everything about your father and am so afraid I will forget the details that only I noticed: the way his ears turned red when I kissed them, the way he tilted his head back when he laughed, the scar on his right knee that I still trace in my mind.

  I miss the way he held you.

  I pray that by the time you read this book a scar will have formed over the gash in my heart But your father has only been gone four months now and I am still hurting and scared and sometimes even angry at him for dying. Most of all, I am thankful that you are too young to feel this agony, so raw that even breathing hurts.

  If I find the strength to be the mother I hope to be in the years ahead, you will savor life rather than simply survive it You will laugh loud and often. You will see the world and contribute to it If so, I will not be able to claim all the credit for shaping such a fine young man. Your father, though he left us before you knew him, will have helped.

  The journal is now tucked away, and I have no answer when people ask me when I will show it to you.

  Some nights, as I stand over your crib watching you sleep, I am overcome with the pain of losing your dad. Yet even then, I know that the war did not steal him from us entirely. It could not steal that precious journal, written so lovingly, from my soldier to my son.

  Two

  Dear Jordan,

  The first time I saw Charles Monroe King, he was standing in the living room of the gray stone ranch house where I grew up on a cul-de-sac in Radcliff, Kentucky, an outpost of Fort Knox army base. It was Father’s Day weekend, 1998, and I was visiting my dad out of obligation as much as affection. My father, a former drill sergeant who in his day looked like a shorter version of Muhammad Ali, had warned me since I was a teenager that I would one day regret not being a more dutiful daughter. “You aren’t going to appreciate me until I’m dead and gone,” he would say.

  So I tried, honestly I did, to be the girl he thought I should be. The trouble was, it meant almost complete obedience. For a time growing up we kids weren’t allowed to use the dishwasher because he felt it encouraged laziness. Some evenings he would find smudges on drinking glasses, a speck of food in a bowl, or water spots on a fork. “Look at these dishes. They aren’t clean,” he would bark at us if he didn’t like what he saw. It was understood that we had to rewash them. Being a good girl also meant not challenging his views, even when he thundered about being the breadwinner who made our lives possible and belittled my mother’s contributions. It meant pretending along with her not to notice when he took my younger brother and three sisters to visit his lover in the town’s public housing development. My father expected us to follow his commands without hesitation, and we seldom risked crossing him.

  I was the oldest child and headstrong, though. In my bravest moments, I was the one—the only one, my mother included— who dared stand up to him. It was always with great trepidation, but it became part of my role in our family. One time during my freshman year in college, I was home for the weekend and my dad wanted to drive my car—to visit his mistress, I knew. I had worked all summer serving burgers at a fast-food restaurant to pay for the used silver Datsun 260Z and did not want him to take it. So when he headed out of the dining room toward the front door with my keys, I followed him.

  “You are not driving my car to visit that woman,” I said, my legs shaking but not buckling.

  He threw the keys on the floor, told me I was disrespectful, and brushed past me. It was not until the door slammed behind him and I heard him start the engine of his aging blue van that I exhaled and picked up my keys.

  For me, what growing up as one of TJ. and Penny Canedy’s five children mostly meant was marking the years, then the months, and finally the days until I graduated from high school and could leave for good. But for good never came. I always joked that my family put the funk in dysfunction, but still we loved one another. I admired my father’s physical strength (my siblings and I tookturns sitting on his back when he did push ups) and his work ethic. He left the house before dawn to put his trainees through their drills. He drove a cab at night and dished popcorn at a movie theater on weekends. (We looked forward to digging in to the commercial-size trash bags full of leftover popcorn he would bring home.) I also learned from him that a father never ate all of the food on his plate; he saved some for whichever child might still be hungry after the pot of chili or butter beans ran out.

  Above all, I learned about discipline from my father, for he could be as strict with himself as he was with us. When I was fourteen, he quit drinking and smoking cigarettes cold turkey. It was a conversation with my sister Kim that sparked it. He had always called her
a “junk-food junkie” because she ate so much candy. “If you stop eating candy for a week, I’ll stop smoking,” he told her one day, stowing his Salem Menthols in a drawer. Not long after that, he realized that he probably ought to stop drinking, too. From that day forward, there would be no more Pabst Blue Ribbon or Smirnoff in the house. And my sister stopped eating sweets.

  My mother was a tall, slim woman with the biggest brown eyes I had ever seen, and the smoothest maple-brown skin. She always looked ten years younger than her age, and more than one of my boyfriends remarked on how “fine” my older sister was. She had a youthful spirit, too, and loved to dance—fingers popping and hips gyrating—to anything soulful when she was not suffering from bouts of depression that silenced her laugh and left her unable to comb her hair.

  Even on her worst days, my mother contributed more to our family than my father acknowledged. She made the best Halloween costumes—a hobo from sheets, a robot from an appliance box. When we found some abandoned baby rabbits in our backyard, she helped us try to raise them. I loved the feel of her hands rubbing Vicks on my chest when I was home from school with the flu. I savored having her all to myself.

  But after she nursed me back to health, time alone with my mother would be elusive. She was not comfortable showing affection, perhaps because, as a child, she had been sexually abused by several relatives. All I knew was that she rarely held or kissed me, even when I got my heart broken.

  My mom was a PTA president and led a Girl Scout troop, but she also rarely talked to me about drugs or sex or dating and had no interest in fashion and makeup. Trying to find my way alone caused embarrassing moments in high school. How was I to know that bright orange bell-bottoms were out of style and frosted blue was not the best shade of eye shadow for a brown-eyed black girl?