“Letters are the only thing that make it easier,” Miss Flowers said, and at that point, her eyes had been brimming as well. Miss Flowers’s fiancé, Rex Rothman, had been killed in the Tet Offensive the year before. Miss Flowers had taken a full week off from school and Jessie saw a photograph of her in the Boston Globe standing next to a casket draped with the American flag. But when the new school year started in September, a romance seemed to blossom between Miss Flowers and Eric Barstow, the gym teacher. Mr. Barstow was as muscle-bound as Jack LaLanne. The boys both hated and respected Mr. Barstow, and Jessie and the other girls at school had been wary of him—until he started dating Miss Flowers, when he suddenly became a romantic hero. That spring, they spotted him bringing Miss Flowers a delicate bouquet of lilies of the valley wrapped in a wet paper towel, and after school each day, he carried her books and files out to the parking lot. Jessie had seen them together by Miss Flowers’s Volkswagen Bug, which was painted the color of a Florida orange, Mr. Barstow leaning an elbow on the roof while they talked. She once saw them kissing as the school bus drove away.

Some people—Leslie, for example—are unhappy that Miss Flowers saw fit to replace her dead fiancé within a year. But Jessie understands how losing someone tragically leaves a vacuum, and as they learned in science class, nature abhors a vacuum. Jessie knows that after Wilder died, her mother had hired a lawyer to fight the insurance company’s claim that his death was a suicide; the lawyer argued that Wilder had been cleaning the Beretta in his garage workshop and it had discharged accidentally. This distinction was important not only for life insurance purposes but also for the peace of mind of Kate’s three young children—Blair had been eight, Kirby five, and Tiger only three.

The lawyer Kate hired—who was successful in convincing the court that the death was accidental—was none other than David Levin. Six months after the case was settled, Kate and David started dating. They got married, despite Exalta’s vehement objections, and a few short months after the courthouse wedding, Kate became pregnant with Jessie.

Jessie hadn’t wanted to talk to Miss Flowers about Tiger and Vietnam, so to change the subject, she said, “This tea is delicious.”

Miss Flowers nodded vaguely and dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief she kept tucked into the belt of her dress to offer her students (she was, after all, a guidance counselor for adolescents, and their hormones and feelings ran amok on an hourly basis). She said, “I just want you to know that if you have any dark thoughts during the school day, you can come to talk to me here.”

Jessie had glanced down into her cup. She knew she would never be able to take Miss Flowers up on this offer. How could Jessie talk about her dark thoughts regarding her brother—who was, as far as she knew, still alive—when Miss Flowers had actually lost Rex Rothman, her fiancé?

Jessie was tormented each night by thoughts of Tiger getting killed by mortar shells or grenades or being captured and marched a hundred miles through the jungle without any food or water, but she stayed away from Miss Flowers’s office. She managed to avoid seeing the guidance counselor alone until the last day of school, when Miss Flowers stopped Jessie on her way out the door and said in her ear, “When I see you in September, your brother will be home safe, and I’ll be engaged to Mr. Barstow.”

Jessie had nodded her head against the rough linen of Miss Flowers’s jumper and when she looked into Miss Flowers’s eyes, she saw that she truly believed those words—and for one sterling moment, Jessie believed them too.

June 7, 1969

Dear Messie,

I’m writing a letter now to make sure it reaches you in time for your birthday. They say it only takes a week for mail to reach the States but when I think about the distance it has to travel, I figured better safe than sorry.

Happy birthday, Messie!

Thirteen years old, I can’t believe it. I remember when you were born. Actually, all I remember is Gramps taking us for ice cream at Brigham’s. I got a double scoop of butter brickle in a sugar cone and the damn thing fell over and Gramps said, Aw, hell, then got me another one. I don’t know how much you remember about Gramps, you were pretty young when he croaked, but he was a hell of a guy. Before I shipped over, Nonny gave me his class ring from Harvard, but we aren’t allowed to wear rings, so I keep it in the front pocket of my flak jacket, which isn’t that smart because if I get blown to bits, the ring will be lost forever, but I like to have it next to my heart. It makes me feel safe somehow, which may sound corny but Messie, you would not believe what counts for a good-luck charm around here—some guys wear crosses or Stars of David, some carry rabbit feet, one dude has the key to his girlfriend’s bicycle lock, another guy has an ace of spades that won him a big hand of poker the night before he shipped out. And I have Gramps’s class ring from Harvard, which I don’t advertise because the guys might think I’m trying to boast about my pedigree. But what I guess I’m trying to tell you is that the guys carry things they think have magic powers or things that remind them why they might like to stay alive.

There are a few of us who have proven to be natural-born survivors, which is good because our company has been dropped right into the action. I’ve made two real friends here in Charlie Company—Frog and Puppy (properly Francis and John). The other guys call us the Zoo because we all have animal nicknames but they’re jealous of how tough we are. The three of us have stupid contests, like who can do the most pull-ups on a tree branch and who can learn the most curse words in Vietnamese and who can smoke an entire cigarette without taking the damn thing out of his mouth the fastest. Frog is a Negro (gasp—what would Nonny think?) from Mississippi, and Puppy is so blond and pale he’s nearly albino. We should have called him Casper or Ghost, but those nicknames were already taken by other guys in our regiment, and since he’s the youngest in the platoon, he’s Puppy. Puppy is from Lynden, Washington, all the way up by the Canadian border—raspberry country, he says, bushes as far as you can see, all of them growing fat, juicy raspberries. Puppy misses those raspberries and Frog misses his mama’s vinegar coleslaw and I miss Brigham’s butter brickle. So we are a mixed bag, a cross-section of our great country, if you will. I love these guys with all my heart, even though I’ve known them only a few weeks. The three of us feel invincible, we feel strong—and Messie, I hate to say it, but I know I’m the strongest of the three of us. At first, I thought that was because of Coach Bevilacqua making the team do so many wind sprints and climb all the stairs in the stadium, but that only makes you tough on the outside, and to survive here, you also have to be tough on the inside. When it’s your turn to take point when you’re charging a position, you have to be brave, and I mean brave, because chances are good you’re going to be the first one to encounter Charlie. If you meet up with enemy fire, you’re taking the bullet. The first time I led my company, we were headed down this jungle path, the mosquitoes were roaring like lions, it was the dead of night, and a group of VC sneaked up behind us and slit the throat of Ricci, who was bringing up the rear. We engaged in a firefight and a couple others were shot, Acosta and Keltz. I made it out with nothing but two dozen mosquito bites.