Dear Jordan,
On December 31, 1999, the taste of champagne still on our lips, your father and I stood in Times Square and kissed through the change of the year, the decade, the century, the millennium. I could never have imagined that, in the year to come, I would find myself in Florida in the middle of the unprecedented election melee that ultimately put George W. Bush in the White House; that September 11 would follow so swiftly; and that the man I dreamed of spending the rest of my life with would one day be sent to Iraq to help fight “the war on terror.”
There we were that New Year’s Eve, in each other’s arms, confetti streaming around us—such a wildly romantic beginning of the end.
The Times published the race series in the summer of 2000, and in the fall I was promoted to national bureau chief in charge of news coverage for the state of Florida—a reward for my work on the project. That meant moving to Miami, a great news town and not a bad city to hang out in for a few years, I thought. True, Florida was farther from Kansas, where your father was still stationed, but by then we were used to jetting back and forth.
The plan was for me to move on Election Day 2000 and spend a week or so settling in before I began my new assignment. Charles would visit as soon as I got my bearings. Those plans changed just hours after my plane touched down in Miami on November 7. I watched the seesawing Florida vote count from my hotel room in disbelief. By the time I went to sleep well after midnight, this peculiar election was still not over. It was the story of a lifetime, and I knew that there would be no phasing into my new job.
Day broke with a glorious streak of sherbet-orange sunlight stretched across the Atlantic. I longed to walk on the beach and savor it, but there was no time: the Times was flying in a team of political reporters from the Washington bureau. I sent an intern to my new apartment to meet the movers and went about trying to assess the magnitude of the election meltdown.
It was apparent within hours that the problems were widespread and that no one was in control. Ballots were missing in several cities, registered voters were turned away at the polls in some precincts, and there were claims of rigged results in others. The story I filed that day was the first of dozens of dispatches I wrote from around the state.
The pace of the work was grueling; I ran from news conferences to court hearings to voter protests. Elections officials in one county would halt ballot recounts only to be ordered by a judge to resume. Another county would proclaim its counting complete and then discover more uncounted ballots.
There was nothing like having a front-row seat while history was being made. I was nearly trampled outside the Miami County Board of Elections office when someone mistakenly thought a Democratic official had slipped a ballot into his pocket and dozens of Republican operatives and Democratic strategists began shoving one another. Less dramatic but far more troubling were the young people I spent a day interviewing. They had voted for the first time and now wondered whether their ballots had been counted. I felt so sad for them that their first experience at the polls had been marked by doubt and confusion rather than the pride I had felt when I voted for the first time.
My colleagues and I put our personal lives on hold. About three weeks into the recount, some of us discovered that we had run out of clean clothes and stopped into a store to buy socks and underwear. My boxes were still packed, and on the rare evening I was home before ten I had neither the time nor the energy to rip them open in search of my microwave oven or pots and pans to cook. Over dinner at a restaurant late one night, a reporter from Chicago said he had tried to call home for his messages and discovered that his phone had been disconnected because he had not had time to pay his bills. One of my colleagues had run out of prescription medication and decided to do without it until the story ended. Another was driving with an out-of-state license that had just expired.
We all worked well past midnight every day and did not stop until, five weeks after Election Day, the United States Supreme Court declared President George W. Bush the winner.
“Well, you said you wanted a challenge,” Charles reminded me in one of our few conversations during those hectic days.
I told him that I could not believe I was bearing witness to events that our grandchildren would one day be studying in history class.
“I mean that metaphorically,” I added quickly, “not that we’re necessarily going to have grandchildren together.”
“I know what you meant,” he said.
By the spring of 2001, not only had I survived the Florida recount, but the race project had been chosen as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. I flew to New York that April to stand among my colleagues when the judges announced the winners. As we waited in the Times newsroom, I struggled to contain my emotions. There was a time when someone who looked like me—black and a woman—would have only been in that spot if she were emptying a wastebasket I thought about my grandmother, Everlener Canedy, who was forced to drop out of school in the seventh grade and work as a domestic in order to support her brothers and sisters after her father died and her mother became gravely ill. She could read little more than birthday cards and traffic signs, but she could recognize my name, and she loved to see my byline.
Through a fog I heard these words: ‘The prize for public service goes to the New York Times, for ‘How Race Is Lived in America/”
Someone handed me a glass of champagne. There was hugging, shouting, more champagne. The executive editor made a speech I did not hear as I picked up a phone and left a message for Charles.
“Sweetie, we won!” I shouted into the receiver. “I wish you were here.”
When I finally reached Charles late that night, I reminded him that the Pulitzer project was a team effort, but that was picking nits to him.
The times we saw each other were blessed respites from our exhausting work lives. Charles spent long weekends with me in Florida, since his living arrangements tended to be sparse and he liked escaping to Miami. We danced salsa, or tried to, at Latin clubs on Ocean Drive, watched elderly Cuban men in guayaberas roll cigars in Little Havana, and awoke to see dolphins splashing in the bay outside my bedroom window.
We also took cruises to the Caribbean and made love in cabins with tiny beds, turquoise water flashing through the porthole. Charles would stretch out in a deck chair and sip rum punch to the sounds of a calypso band. In Puerto Rico, we kissed greedily at sunset on the beach. Once, on a ship with a rink, I convinced Charles to go rollerblading—the only thing besides dancing that he was bad at
At each port your father insisted on sticking a camera in my face, and each time I protested that the camera added ten pounds and asked him to stop. He would smile and keep snapping.
As much as we cherished those interludes, Charles and I were old enough to realize that real love could not survive on picnics in a kayak and weekend getaways to the Florida Keys. There would come a time when we would finally live together and contend with each other’s laundry and bouts of flu. I wondered how we would handle the change.
Then came September 11.
I was in Miami covering a campaign appearance that dreadful day. Janet Reno, the attorney general during the Clinton administration, was running for governor in her home state against incumbent Jeb Bush. Ms. Reno was appearing at a senior citizens center and was running late, which was unusual for her. She finally arrived, looking grave—also unusual for a woman who enjoyed campaigning so much that she traveled the state in a red pickup truck to meet voters. Two planes had just struck the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon was on fire, Ms. Reno announced. The United States was under attack. I stood there writing what she was saying in a notebook and then abruptly stopped. I was worried about my colleagues and friends in New York. And Janet Reno’s campaign was no longer news.
I ran to my car and turned on the radio. A commercial plane was in pieces in a Pennsylvania field. I called Charles in Kansas and told him to turn on his television. The cable news stations were broadcasting an almost continuous loop of footage of a plane slicing into one of the towers.
“Oh, man,” Charles said. Then he spoke the words I was afraid to say aloud. “We’re going to war with somebody.”
I drove back to the office with the radio on, listening in horror as the towers, one after another, collapsed. I was terrified of this unknown enemy who hated America so fiercely. I thought of all the people who had probably just died in the attacks and said a silent prayer for their souls.
We’re going to war with somebody. I dismissed a nagging thought about whether your father might eventually be called upon to respond to the attacks. My immediate concern was for the people I loved in New York, especially my colleagues at the paper. I knew that many of them had likely headed into danger to report the news.
The thing about journalists is that we often live life backwards. We fly into hurricanes, arrive at buildings that are being evacuated, race to crime scenes while bullets are still flying. It can be grim work, but most of us consider it a calling. Now I needed to know whether my colleagues were safe, but all telephone circuits into New York City were busy. Instead, I reached several of my fellow bureau chiefs in cities across the country. We had a conference call to discuss how we could best help with the coverage. I set about tracking down local and state officials to assess the situation in my state. What was Miami doing to secure its ports? Had Disney World and other theme parks been evacuated? Had the governor heard from his brother, the president, who had been in the state reading to schoolchildren when he heard that the country was under attack?
My contribution to the next day’s newspaper was minimal, but I would soon have much more responsibility. Within days, federal law enforcement officials announced that the terrorists had trained at flight schools in Florida. It was time to dig in for my second big assignment in just over a year.
I tracked down flight instructors who had trained the attackers and neighbors who had had no idea who they really were. I stood in the hotel room where two of the hijackers had stayed the night before the attacks. The remains of a boxed Indian meal were in the wastebasket; the checkout date on their hotel registration card was September n. I visited the restaurant where a bartender told me that two of the hijackers drank vodka and rum for three straight hours the night before the attacks and then seemed reluctant to pay their forty-eight-dollar tab.
For months I was under tremendous pressure to report new developments—a daunting task because every major newspaper and television network was aggressively covering the story. Being relatively new to the city, I also did not have many sources in the police department and the local FBI office to leak me information. I managed to hold my own, but the story was much harder to cover than the election had been.
At about this time, your father was hand-selected by the Defense Department for a new assignment reserved for the military’s most elite personnel. He moved to Fort Irwin, California, in January 2002 to be part of a team that evaluated troops for combat readiness at the army’s National Training Center. The military had built a billion-dollar simulated Iraq deep in the Mojave Desert, complete with mock operating bases and Iraqi villages, in which Iraq’s exiles acted as civilians and insurgents. Charles’s job was to observe recruits as they conducted simulated assaults and gauge their proficiency with weapons and familiarity with combat rules of engagement. The exercises kept him in the field for more than a month at a time, but Charles saw it as a grave responsibility: The training might one day save the life of a young man or woman who less than a year earlier had been taking their sweetheart to the prom, or that of a career soldier close to retirement.
This marked the second time since I had arrived in Florida that your father and I were forced to put our jobs before our relationship. This time, the long stints apart were taking a toll on us. Our conversations had become brief and perfunctory. We sometimes forgot to say we loved each other when we hung up. I considered asking for a transfer to the Los Angeles bureau to be closer to Charles. Then I realized that he might simply get orders for a new posting after I relocated. So we made do with whatever time we could find to be together.
Just before Charles began his job in Fort Irwin, we decided to spend two weeks reconnecting on a cruise from Miami to the Caribbean. We set sail on a sunny Thursday evening and woke up the next morning in Key West I ate conch fritters for brunch and Charles drank coconut milk from a shell. On the second day I suggested we test our skills on the ship’s two-story rock climbing wall. Big mistake. I only made it halfway up the wall and then could not raise my arms above my chest for three days.
The day after our rock climbing expedition, the cruise director made an announcement about diamond wholesalers at the next port, in Cozumel. Charles suggested that we visit them to look at rings. He had told me years earlier that my reaction when he asked me to be his girlfriend hurt him so much that he would never attempt a surprise marriage proposal. Sol suspected that this was his way of trying to determine how receptive I was to the idea of becoming his wife.
“Are you suggesting we get engaged?” I asked.
He admitted that he had been thinking about it He said he had been lonely lately and wanted to have a family again. I was glad to know that he still loved me so much after our lengthy separation and agreed to go to the jeweler, but hastily added that we should not feel pressured to buy a diamond, duty-free or not
The diamond district was a glitzy strip of shops offering complimentary champagne and a free setting with every stone. We walked into a store and a salesman congratulated us heartily. I wanted to say that we hadn’t yet decided anything, but that seemed rude. I perched on a stool, with Charles beside me, while the salesman laid out a black velvet tray. He asked what size stone we were looking for. Charles was silent.
“I, we don’t know,” I stammered.
The truth was, I felt unprepared for marriage. And why make it official now? We could scarcely find time to be together. Since my job enabled me to move back to New York when I wanted, my hope was that Charles would eventually be the one to arrange for a transfer, perhaps to a base near the city. We could make the decision then. There was just so much that we had never discussed, like the fact that marrying him would mean giving up any hopes of someday becoming a foreign correspondent and moving to a different part of the world. Charles had been through one divorce already, and I had seen how it had torn him up. I did not want someday to be the cause of such heartache.
Now here I was sliding rings on my finger and holding them up to the light. Charles watched and adjusted his baseball cap. I could not read his expression. Was he thinking the stones were too big or was he sorry that he had suggested the trip to the jeweler in the first place?
“They’re all beautiful, but I need some air,” I said, returning a ring to the tray and grabbing Charles’s hand. As soon as we had made our escape, I hugged him, kissed his cheek, and whispered, “I love you so much, but let’s not do this today.”
“Come on, you crazy woman,” he said, good-naturedly— which surprised me, given the risk that he had taken in bringing me to that store. “Let’s go to the beach.”
At dinner that night, I told Charles that I didn’t want us to be one of those couples that rush into marriage because of the grief of 9/11. We had so much time, I told him.
“You’ve been an independent woman a long time,” he said. “Are you sure you want to get married at all?”
“Charles, listen to me,” I said, taking his hands in mine. “I love you and I do want to marry you, eventually. But we’ve never even lived in the same city. Doesn’t that concern you?”
“No, I know you, Dana.”
“But, Charles, we haven’t really discussed what we expect from marriage.”
He said he did not expect much. “I just want to be your king and make you my queen.”
“That sounds nice,” I said, “but what does that mean? Would you expect me to come home from work every day and cook you dinner? Would you care if I didn’t take your last name?”
“I don’t care about you cooking or what name you call yourself,” he said.
It was a good start—but, to my mind, only a beginning.
We turned our attention to our food and I convinced Charles to try escargots. To his surprise, he liked them and ate the entire appetizer. The gentle swaying of the ship soothed me and I wanted to be in his arms. We finished our dinner and went to the lido deck to indulge in a late-night chocolate buffet and music under the stars. We danced slow and close in the moonlight and breathed in the sea air between kisses.
Then all too soon our two weeks together were over. Except for an occasional weekend getaway, we spent the rest of winter and most of the spring apart, as his number of combat-readiness missions suddenly increased. He never complained, but I knew he was tired of being in the desert and sleeping alone. He said when the temperature dipped at night, he imagined my warm body next to his.
I was simply grateful that, as a troop instructor, Charles could not be deployed to Afghanistan. It might be scorching by day and cold at night in the California desert, but at least he was not atop a mountain in the Middle East searching in the darkness for Osama bin Laden. There were times when Charles hinted that he felt uneasy being involved in mock battles when so many soldiers were fighting the real fight. I reminded him that he had already served several combat missions and that the training he was overseeing was vital.
One day in late spring, Charles told me that he was going to take a few days off so that we could spend our birthdays together. But with so many soldiers he knew being deployed to Afghanistan, he was in no mood for grand getaways. We would spend our time in Miami, but I was determined to make it as festive as possible. I spent a week searching for a gift for him before settling on a handsome set of Italian leather luggage. The only suitcases he owned looked as though they were held together with duct tape, but I knew that it would not occur to him to replace them.
The day he arrived, I left the office early and came home carrying a large box wrapped in bright gift paper. He met me at the door, smiling. I set down the box and he wrapped me in a long embrace.
“I missed you,” he said.
I felt like a little girl ready to blow out candles and hand out party favors. I couldn’t wait to see his face when he unwrapped my gift, and I have to admit that I couldn’t wait to see what he had chosen for me. But as soon as he noticed my box, he looked panic-stricken.
“Let’s open our gifts now,” I said excitedly. He stammered and continued to eye the box nervously as I handed it to him.
“Do you like it?” I asked, beaming, when he tore off the tissue paper covering the black leather and pulled out one of the pieces.
“Wow,” he said, looking stunned. He studied each piece of luggage before slowly returning them to the box. Then he got up and paced nervously. He seemed to be stalling.
“I have something for you, too,” he finally said. “But it’s not much.”
He handed me something the size of a small book, and I tore off the wrapping paper. It was a paperback novel. I wrinkled my forehead in confusion.
“I know how much you like to read,” he said, weakly.
“Charles, don’t try that,” I snapped. “You forgot to get me a gift, didn’t you? I’m not stupid. You picked this up in the airport.”
“Look, honey, I’ve been busy. I’m sorry. I just wanted to make the flight.”
I was fuming, and we barely spoke that evening or before I left for work the next morning. When I got home that evening, there was a tiny jewelry box on the coffee table. Charles was nervous, I could see, as I ripped off the pretty paper and opened the box. Inside was a delicate pair of gold hoop earrings. There was a problem, though. Try as I might, I could not fasten them around my earlobes.
“Great, Charles. First you forget my gift altogether, and now you’ve managed to get me something that makes me feel like even my ears are fat!” I chided, only half-joking.
He was crestfallen. We drove back to the store together to return the earrings, Charles rubbing his temples, me huffing. I explained the problem to the sales clerk as Charles leaned on the counter, looking wounded.
“Ma’am,” the salesman said, “these earrings are for babies.”
Charles and I burst out laughing.
With all that had been going on in the world, it felt good to laugh about a fight over something as frivolous as birthday presents. I was glad, too, that Charles and I had reached a point in our relationship in which it could withstand a feud or two—and, believe me, we had them. I finally trusted him to stay.
I could be myself with Charles because he saw me as the woman I hoped to be instead of the one who was easily agitated, occasionally hypercritical, and always obsessing over a few extra pounds. I recalled how moved I had been by his devotion when he accompanied me to the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention in Orlando the summer before. While I attended workshops and interviewed potential Times applicants, Charles sat by the pool drawing and catching up on his rest.
I had been asked to deliver a speech at the closing night banquet, and I rehearsed it every evening in our hotel room. Each time I made it to the end, Charles clapped and proclaimed the speech perfect. But I was nervous. I did not tell him that my anxiety had nothing to do with the speech but instead with the fact that my ex-boyfriend, Greg, and his new wife would be in the audience.
Charles did not want to put on a suit and make small talk with strangers while I sat on the dais, and I did not protest: by now I understood his shyness, and when he said he would rather stay behind and work on a drawing, I didn’t mind. He was so grateful that he offered to iron my outfit. I chose a lavender blouse and a snug gray skirt—then changed my mind when I saw it on.
“It’s too plain, and my hips look huge.”
He pulled my red suit out of the closet.
“Too hot,” I protested.
He ironed a silk fuchsia blouse with three-quarter-length sleeves for me to wear with a floor-length black satin skirt. I put it on and was doing a slow turn in the mirror when Charles walked up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. He rubbed my back and then slowly turned me to face him.
“Dana,” he said, “you’re not Greg’s girl anymore. You’re a woman with a woman’s body. You look beautiful. Now go give your speech.”
I was astonished. How had he known?
I lowered my eyes in embarrassment. I had never felt so loved.
“I’m sorry,” I said, just above a whisper. I kissed him deeply, reapplied my lipstick, and walked out feeling more confident than I had in a long while. And though I caught sight of Greg in the ballroom moments before I walked to the podium, the only man I was interested in impressing was my own.
Whether Charles was giving me a pep talk about facing my former boyfriend or laughing off my silliness about a birthday gift, he always made it clear that he was with me for the long haul. But we were living in a season of seismic shifts that kept shaking our foundation.
On the evening of March 19, 2003, President Bush addressed the nation and announced that the United States was declaring war on Iraq. “My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger,” the president said.
I would soon have a part in chronicling the war. After two and a half years as bureau chief, I was promoted to assignment editor for national news and moved back to New York. My job included assigning national reporters to track relatives of some of the soldiers in combat. The national desk was also responsible for periodic stories intended to gauge Americans’ support of the war. When the military approached the terrible milestone of one thousand U.S. soldier deaths in 2004, I sent a team of reporters to cover some of the funerals and put names and faces to the “casualties of war,” a term I hated. Those soldiers had mothers and children and names like Taylor and Diego—and Charles.
Charles and I did not discuss in any depth whether we thought the invasion and occupation of Iraq was right or wrong. We had our reasons: after 9/11, he would not have questioned his commander in chief, and, as a journalist for one of the world’s most prominent newspapers, I was used to maintaining a posture of neutrality. Then, too, I suppressed what frightened me most— that he could be sent into combat. So I simply avoided talking about it.
Charles was promoted to the rank of first sergeant in June 2004 and reassigned to Fort Hood, Texas. There he was put in charge of an entire company, comprising more than one hundred soldiers. It was a great honor, but I did not meet the news with the same excitement that he did. It meant that he could now be deployed.
Less than six months into his new assignment, Charles called me with the news I had dreaded.
“Honey,” he said softly, “I got orders for Iraq.”