By the time Daniel drove home at the end of his shift, the demonstration had gone. Apparently it had only been there for a couple of hours before the police had arrived and made their arrests. But it had still got more attention than Daniel liked. He believed in what he was doing at Creech and he wanted Cathy to as well. So it made him uncomfortable to think of her going to work every day alongside Barbara and her talk.
―
Daniel leant back in his chair. The shadow of their garden fence was inching up the lawn towards them. “Good,” he said to Cathy. “Because Barbara doesn’t have the facts. She doesn’t understand.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cathy said. She sounded tired.
He let out a long sigh of his own. “So what do you want to do?” He looked out at the roofs of other houses beyond their garden, the sky towering above them, its blue darkening to indigo. “What do you think we should do?”
Cathy shrugged, watching the star of light thrown by her wine. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
Daniel looked at her, trying to read her expression. A frown was creasing the skin between her eyebrows. He didn’t understand when their conversations had become like this. So stilted, guarded. There’d been a time when they’d told each other everything, however difficult the truth. He waited for her to look back at him, but she didn’t. He wanted to say so much. About how much he loved her. About the terrors of the world. About how he wanted to protect her and the girls from them. About how, without her, he couldn’t do any of it. And he wanted to say sorry, too. They’d come to Las Vegas to remove the wars from their lives. But now Cathy came home to it every day. Not because he was away on tour, but because he wasn’t. Because in staying away from the war, he’d become it. But Daniel said none of this. It was as if his throat was blocked. As if to speak those words would shake their foundations and bring everything down. This was as good as it could be. That’s what he’d told himself. If he questioned it, where would they go? What would they do?
“It’s just…” Cathy began.
Daniel leant towards her. As he did she finally looked up at him. There were tears in her eyes, lensing the blue of her irises. She smiled at him despite them, like she did when trying to explain something to the girls. Something grown up, something difficult.
―
The sound of the bedroom door brushing across the carpet made Daniel turn in their bed.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, his voice still raw with sleep. “What’s up?”
Sarah, their youngest, stood in the doorway, her favourite picture book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, fanning from her hand.
“Is it morning yet?” she asked. She wore a pair of Disney pyjamas, a blonde princess crowned across her belly.
“I guess it is, honey,” Daniel whispered. Rising on his elbows, he sat on the edge of the bed and slipped on a T-shirt.
“What say we let Mommy sleep, eh?” he said, going to Sarah and picking her up. As he carried her out of their bedroom and down the landing, her picture book tapping against his hip, Sarah put her thumb in her mouth and leant her head against her father’s shoulder. Daniel inhaled the scent of her hair. It smelt of a child’s sleep, of dreams, not memories. And, Daniel thought, as they entered her room and he sat her on the edge of her bed, reason enough for everything he was doing, and for everything he’d done.
―
In 2007 Centennial Hills was one of the newest suburbs of Las Vegas. Sometimes in the weeks after they’d first moved there, as he’d reversed their Toyota Camry out the driveway, Daniel was sure he could still smell the paint drying on its fences, the tarmac off-gassing from its streets. The local hospital was half under scaffolding, and all the houses, theirs included, had a model suburban hacienda look, as yet unworn by the lives of their inhabitants. Even the desert trees and shrubs lining the bald streets and cul-de-sacs were older than the houses they shaded, brought in by the developers to lend the neighbourhood a strangely youthful maturity. At his last posting, in Langley, Virginia, once the shell of Walmarts and gas stations had been broken, you could still find evidence of the men and women who’d first settled towns like Smithfield and Suffolk. Their names were on the street signs, their descendents on the council, and their fingerprints dried into the stoops and wooden sills of the older houses. In Centennial Hills the only fingerprints left in the paintwork were those of the Mexican labourers hired by the contractors to finish the job. The street signs, from what Daniel could tell—Rockridge Peak Avenue, Danskin Drive—had been chosen by a downtown city planner, and he didn’t even know if a local council had been formed.
As a counter to their immaturity, the streets of Centennial Hills, positioned as they were on the edge of the city, framed an ancient view. It was this view that greeted Daniel as he began his drive to Creech that morning: the Charleston range, its ragged peaks rising through a milky light to the summit of Mount Charleston itself. A bare, pleated mountain looking over the sprawl of Las Vegas like an implacable god.
In recent weeks, as he’d driven down his street towards this view, Daniel had found himself giving the mountain a silent salute. As if there was some luck, or maybe wisdom, to be mined from its craggy slopes that would still be there long after the city had been extinguished by the sands on which it was built. Despite their proximity, Daniel had never been into the range. His mountain bike was unpacked but unused in the garage, and his hiking boots sat expectantly in the utility room. So as he reached the end of his street that day and turned left, slipping the mountains from his windscreen into the passenger window, the Charleston range still remained unknown to him. They were his daily view but not yet his landscape, a feature of his geography but not yet his territory. Unlike those other mountains, 8,000 miles away.
Those mountains Daniel knew intimately. He’d never climbed in them, either, but he was still familiar with the villages silted into their folds, the shadows their peaks threw at evening and the habits of the shepherds marshalling their flocks along their lower slopes. Recently he’d even been able to anticipate, given the right weather conditions, at what time the clouds would come misting down the higher peaks into the ravines of the valleys. Over the last few months he’d begun to feel an ownership over them. Were they not as much his workplace as that of those shepherds? For the troops operating in the area they were simply elevation, exhaustion, fear. They were hostile territory. But for Daniel they were his hunting ground, and as such it was his job not just to know them but to learn them, too. To love them, even, so that from the darkness of his control station in Creech, he might be able to move through their altitudes as naturally as the eagles who’d ridden their thermals for centuries.
As he swung into an intersection, Daniel’s phone began to ring. Glancing at the screen, he slipped the hands-free over his ear.
“Hi, honey.”
“It’s Kayce’s soccer tonight,” Cathy said. “I forgot.”
Her voice sounded tight. Daniel guessed Sarah was still playing up over her breakfast.