WE'RE HOPING ALL OUR FEARS ARE WRONG

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I am on the phone with Rosemary, my best friend since second grade. I used to talk to her on the old black phone in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. And she used to talk to me on the old black phone that sat on a table to the left of her front door.

"Want to come over?"

"I'll ask my mother."

Fifty-two years. At least a million conversations. This one is hard. They've all been hard since her son, Mark, left for Iraq.

I watched her nurse him when he was born. No one nursed. Formula was the thing then. And Playtex nursers. She nursed anyway.

She has pictures of his birth. "Pictures, Rose?" I asked back then. Pictures and natural childbirth and just 24 hours in the hospital when the usual stay was four days. Rose was always a step ahead of the times.

Mark went to Yale. He was in ROTC and stayed in the Reserve. He was trained to defend his country. But no one really believed he would have to.

He calls home when he can, and Rose says, "It's like he's the grown-up." He comforts her. He says he's fine, that everything is fine. "Don't worry, Mom." After she talks to him, she's OK for a while. But then days pass and she's not OK. She pretends. But there is only worry in her eyes.

"Did you get my package?" she asked him last week.

"Yes," he told her, but then he said that maybe she shouldn't send packages because it's a risk for someone to go to get them. "But the mail comes to Mosul and someone has to go there anyway, right?"

"Yes, but . . ."

But.

"So, I don't know if I'll be sending any more packages," she tells me.

A few weeks ago, she said that she had driven past a house in Newton that she and her husband almost bought when they were moving from Virginia back to Massachusetts. "It was strange. I hadn't seen that house in years. It was the house I wanted." It was close to public transportation, in a nice neighborhood, in a good school district, and it was affordable. Rose loved it. But she didn't buy it because the elementary school was more than a mile away and the boys were little and would have to walk there and cross streets, and what if something happened to them on the way?

"And now Mark is in Iraq," Rose said. And I said nothing, because what could I say?

I say nothing now, too, nothing that helps. Idle talk. How's your garden? What are you reading? Do you want to go to the beach this week? My grandson is sitting on the couch next to me. He's 2, and I have to put the phone down to get him some water and then again to move a glass bowl off the counter because suddenly he's standing up and the bowl is within reach. "I'm sorry, Rose," I say. Sorry I was distracted. Sorry that the world is messed up. Sorry that boys grow into men. Sorry that Mark isn't 2 again and within arm's reach.

"I worry about the children," I stupidly said the last time Rose visited. Adam was here then, too. And Lucy, who is 3. I was looking at them and thinking of all the children like them, small and vulnerable and new to this earth. And then I heard my words and wanted to take them back because Mark is Rosemary's child, her firstborn, and every man in combat is someone's son and every woman someone's daughter, and it doesn't matter that they're 5 or 6 feet tall and savvy enough to say they're fine when they're not.

"I feel like we're watching the beginning of World War III," Rose says. And I say, "I know. I feel the same way." "What can you do? What can anyone do?" she asks.

We make plans to go to the beach, both of us hoping and praying that we are overreacting, that the war in Iraq will end, that Hezbollah will retreat, that reason is stronger than rage, and that all of our fears are wrong.