Coyle’s wife never messaged him that night. After patrol the next day he learned about his daughter in an e-mail. Two weeks later, Wiman would be killed in a traffic accident. His driver saw a dead dog in the middle of Route Omaha and decided to go a different way. They’d all heard of insurgents hiding the bang in those rotting carcasses that flecked the Iraqi roads like spittle, but in this case, the driver ended up flipping their Humvee off an embankment.
If Dan let his mind idle for any amount of time, even mid-conversation, he’d see them again. Coyle. Wunderlich. Wiman. Rudy doing a pencil sketch of the small sliver of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush that made up their whole horizon. When they pulled Elias Wiman out, there was no solidity left to his pulverized bones. He flopped onto the stretcher like a sack of sawdust.
Dan tried letting Wiman lay as he drove over the dips and rises of the Allegheny hills. Finally the oblate plane of Northeast Ohio came into repose. Down through the Mahoning Valley and a tinderbox summer, he passed his father’s hometown, the city shimmering in the hazy sun as if it might vanish. Once over the hump of Youngstown, it was nothing but the rippling green spears of cornstalks, the trembling soy leaves awaiting the sweatless industrial harvest. The mile markers fell and the telephone poles bled tar. The sky went from a deep orange to a bruise of purple and blue, the clouds carved by shafts of biblical sunlight—here lighting a patch of cud-stuffed cows, there illuminating a fallen barn with Ohio’s bicentennial logo flaking paint.
He avoided driving long distances as often as possible. His peripheral vision compromised and still, a year after the enucleation, having to focus extremely hard when judging depth, heavy highway traffic made Dan uncomfortable. And yet this excuse for why he so rarely went home sounded thin even to him. Now he had to at least cop to the beauty of it. The sky over the place you were born has a familiarity beyond how the clouds roll in or how the stars wink at you at night. The sky over your home behaves like that moment when, as a parachutist, you pull the rip cord and the heavens snatch you back. Even if you’ve traveled the world and seen better sunsets, better dawns, better storms—when you get that remembered glimpse of the fields and forests and rises and rivers of your home meeting the horizon, your jaw will tighten. The rip cord will yank you back from the descent.
The radio shuffled between talk and song and ad. To avoid thinking of Wiman and the others, he instead termited the details of his seventh-grade Ohio history class with Mrs. Bingham—this being where he first got to know Hailey. Seventh-grade boys have an insolent, smarm-soaked attitude about everything, but they all shut up for Bingham, the oldest teacher in the middle school. She had the physique of a snowman, capped with hair just as white, as grandma as it comes. She was utterly shameless in using Ohio’s savage frontier history to hold their attention.
The first day she didn’t even take roll. She just launched into a story of a Shawnee council of women called the Miseekwaaweekwakee, who, when they captured prisoners, might touch a certain white man, “To reserve him.” The Miseekwaaweekwakee women would strip the prisoner naked and bind him to a pyre.
“And they’d roast him alive and cannibalize him,” said Mrs. Bingham. She had a mellifluous voice, almost singsong in its lilt. Later she told them how women of her day had gone to elocution school, and her voice was particular in the way of that word: el-o-cue-shun.
Dan felt that hot panic of enjoying that class, of loving its lucid, gory stories yet wanting to remain totally anonymous and unremarkable to his peers. He was always conscious of Hailey, a simmering presence to his right, embedded in his awareness like a pleasant splinter. He hadn’t known her at Elmwood because she’d been in a different class, with his buddy Lisa Han. Now sitting near her once a day every day, well, he chewed pencils into gnawed, pocked kindling.
“You should take it easy,” was the first thing Hailey ever said to him. “You’ll give yourself lead poisoning.” He spent days puzzling out if this was disgust, teasing, or an overture. Assessing himself in the bathroom mirror, he decided—despite his hatred of touching his own eyeballs—to begin wearing contacts as often as he could stand.
Mrs. Bingham assigned them each a character from Ohio history that they had to live with for the whole year, leading to a grade-defining presentation. It had the aura of being the popular class, and it was where a short, shy kid, who couldn’t help but raise his hand, learned to fit in. Dan got a reputation for knowing everything about history even though he was just reading the textbook like everyone else. He found it a page-turner. Because of this reputation, Hailey asked for his help with her historical figure; to Dan, it felt like some combination of winning the lottery and being punched in the gut. Tina Ross was widely regarded by the boys as the hottest girl in their class, but his crush on Hailey was a brushfire gone wild. On the bus she usually sat in the very last seat in the back with Lisa and Kaylyn Lynn where they hunched into one another and shared whatever peculiar secrets girls always traded. He lived for the days he ended up across from her so he could hoard stolen glances. When Hailey asked him for help on her presentation, he ended up reading every book with even the scantest mention of Simon Girty, this gritty, larger-than-life product of the Ohio frontier. His mom was driving him to the New Canaan Public Library every other day.
What began with her coming over after school so he could feed her details from his Simon Girty reading continued even after her presentation. They’d shoot baskets at the hoop above his garage or watch Total Request Live and root for their preferred videos to top the list (Hailey had a passion for Korn’s “Freak on a Leash”). They’d sit at opposite armrests, as far as his living room couch would allow, but he could still feel her like a source of heat. One time his mom came in and snapped a picture of them (“I’ve got to finish out this roll—smile, guys!”), and that picture explained everything about the distance of memory. He remembered thinking Hailey extremely chic, hip, always dressed like a tomboy model, usually in her favorite Sheryl Swoopes USA jersey. But in that photo, she was just a dorky seventh grader with a ponytail, red-faced, a missing baby tooth in her embarrassed smile, jeans, and a black tank top a size too big. Gripping the armrest like he’s afraid of this girl was a pale, scrawny kid with his dad’s ginger hair, freckles like a bomb of cinnamon went off on his nose, and a big zit on his lip. Before he deployed, Dan took that photo from his desk and stuck it in the book he was reading at the time.
One day Hailey found his Calvin and Hobbes comic books, and he kicked himself for leaving them out. He still felt so much like a little kid, clinging to all the things he loved about childhood, while his peers, especially Kruger, Jarecki, and Hansen, were growing facial and armpit hair, stretching ever taller, their voices dropping through the basement. When Hailey picked up the comic, he wanted to snatch it out of her hands and run.
“I’ve heard of this,” she said. “Is it funny?”
His shrug took his shoulders nearly to the top of his head. “No, not really. I mean, I got them for Christmas a while back.”
“Can I borrow one?”
She did, and she ended up borrowing them all. They’d sit on the bus and pore over their favorite strips, cackling at Calvin’s limitless imagination and capacity for trouble. In Hailey’s favorite, Calvin was hammering nails into the coffee table when his mom comes running in screaming, “Calvin! What are you doing to the coffee table?!?” He quizzically looks at his work and asks, “Is this some sort of trick question, or what?”