In the Cafeteria at Walter Reed, 2009
by Andria Williams
What if we had? What if we had done? What if we?
The air here was poisoned with regret. We had said “yes” to these boys, you can go do this, if you really want to; for not getting to the hospital fast enough when they were evaced, gravely injured, though we had all sprinted to be by their sides. We were somehow worst of all, for not having been enough to keep them here, to have been a good enough mother, sibling, lover that they wouldn’t want to have gone at all. All of us there in the cafeteria, trying to eat, though that poisoned air smelled like bleach and refrigerant, hydroflourocarbons, reconstituted eggs in a steaming pan. We sipped ice water, trying not to cry. The woman over there poking at her toast, sitting across from a husband whose face looked as if he were utterly bereft. The nineteen-year-old wife at the far table who’d gotten married days before her husband went to Iraq. The sister of the burn victim who now lay wrapped in bandages because almost no part of his skin could be exposed to air. We were there, trying to be human, trying to be civil, trying to be optimistic. Trying to be. We thought the power of our love would save the people around us, because it was the biggest thing anyone could give, and it was horrifying to learn that this wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. We felt like failures, joined by our grieving.
And still we chastised ourselves. We had lost Tommy and we might be losing Miles. Miles’s mom and I tried to smile over our coffee. But I knew the refrain ringing in our heads like a gong: what if we had, what if we had, what if we had?
“This is a brief excerpt from my work-in-progress, a novel called The Book of Unsent Letters. It is about a pair of childhood friends, Miles and Leah, growing up in northern California in the 1990s, and how their lives are eventually shaped by the criminal war in Iraq. While the war is a central part of the story, what’s most important to me is their friendship, and the way that they show up for each other in different ways, over decades, throughout the course of their lives.” —Andria Williams
Andria Williams is the author of the novel The Longest Night (Random House, 2016), about the United States’ only fatal nuclear accident in Idaho Falls, Idaho. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Wrath-Bearing Tree literary magazine, and founding editor of The Military Spouse Book Review. She received her bachelor’s degree from UC-Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.