“Danny.” Her steps picked up and she tossed the clipboard at the desk where it barely caught the ledge and rattled to rest.
“Hey, pal.” Which immediately felt like a stupid way to address her.
Her arms fell around him, and he tried to let himself just be there, standing with her, but there were too many vast unspooling histories. The three nurses watched.
He waited for her to let go. When she did, she needed to wipe tears from her eyes with symmetrical swipes of her index fingers. “Sorry,” she said, more to the other nurses than to him. “I haven’t seen this guy in a long time.” She laughed at herself. “You look so good!”
“You look so good.”
“Hey. I know I’m fat, you lying shit. I’m working on it.”
“Shut up, you look great. You—” He forgot what he was about to say. “I worried I was late. I left my cell phone in my car, and then I ran into—” He stopped because the night was a long, strange story that might take a minute. “I got a ride here.”
She waved this away. “You’re fine. I’m just getting off. You still want to get dinner?”
“Of course.”
“Want to see her first, though?”
“That was the idea.”
She looked to the nurses, who were studying them with a smokescreen of indifference. He wondered how much they knew about him. She told them she was taking him to see a patient.
“You shouldn’t wake her,” one of the nurses said.
“She told me to,” Hailey said, some kind of ice between the two.
He followed her down the halls where he could hear the television sets mix with snoring, snorting, and mumbled dream speech. They were both silent, and he could feel the flux of miles and years and other measurements.
“Is this awkward?” she asked.
He looked at her. “No. Of course not.”
“It is. What do people even talk about? It suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea what people talk about at all ever.”
“Movies?”
“Danny, I haven’t seen a movie in like four years.”
“World events?”
“How about Dora the Explorer? Do you keep up with Dora?”
“Can’t say I do.”
She couldn’t stop watching him. Dan knew she was looking at his eye. He kept her on his left, as he always did when he walked beside people so he could see them, and he could feel her leaning to glimpse it. “You really do look good. I like your hair longer…”
“I’m just bad at remembering to get it cut without someone barking at me to do it.”
She slipped her arm through his.
He followed Hailey into the room. Dark except for a bedside lamp with the adjustable bulb pointed at the ground, the room was a jungle of ferns and other potted plants and flowers. There was also an enormous stack of books that centipeded up alongside the dresser, reminding him of his own Titusville apartment. The woman in the bed appeared to be dozing, but when Hailey put a hand on her arm her eyes slid open immediately.
“Mrs. Bingham,” she said. “Look who I brought.”
A misremembered dream from the night before rose, unbidden, some scenario where his captain was begging him to shave, but employing that dream logic where the electric clippers wouldn’t turn on. Then in the dream, he looked up, and he was alone, back in the frigid winter of the Hindu Kush. A land unchanged since Alexander the Great’s armies had forged across the same terrain. There were flurries coming down from a gray sky, little stars of snow that melted on his tongue. He could see for a hundred miles in every direction, from the burlap plains to the peaks and ridges that looked like bones breaking through the skin of the earth.
Afghanistan, deployment #3, made Iraq look like a trip to Cedar Point amusement park. Afghanistan was an ugly, cruel divot in brutal mountains. During a major operation in Marjah, he found the bones of a toddler in a field. They were wrapped in a shawl, not buried, but very old. Like the body had been out there all winter. They looked like seashells. He couldn’t figure out why these people hadn’t buried their dead. Maybe they didn’t get a chance. Maybe the child was alive when someone put her out there. He’d get in arguments with this Evangelical kid from Georgia, Specialist Brody Van Maanen, who wanted him to leave Team Catholic. They talked a lot about God, about the morality of war. Dan asked him what he would do with the farmer who told them the Taliban had forced him to plant an IED they’d found. The Taliban threatened to kill his whole family if he didn’t do it. “What do you do with that? Where’s the moral true north on that one?”
Brody looked at him like he was an idiot. “Well, the farmer’s not a Christian, dumbass.”
That night, trying to kill some tedium, he watched Rudy sketch by the light of a small reading lamp. He remembered it was a full moon because the moon had never looked bigger than it did in Afghanistan. So big you could see the ruins on the surface.
Rudy drew comic book sketches, one-image stories with no dialogue and no title. Black-and-white drawings of Titusville, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. He would soon do an impressive rendering of Vicky’s Diner after he visited, and his sketch of the train tracks running over Oil Creek in Titusville captured that minor view of the world down to the riverside grit.
“If only you had some stories to tell,” Dan said.
Rudy scrubbed a pencil eraser furiously against his notepad, getting that gunky buildup of graphite and rubber strands. Dan was so bored. His mom had sent him a crop of new books, but he was burned out on reading. Instead, he threw rocks into a pot he’d set between their bunks.
“That’s the idea, though. The whole story’s in the one image.”
“I realized the other day,” said Dan. “That I stopped praying. I haven’t prayed in like a year.”
Rudy flicked some eraser gunk from his sketch with the back of his hand. “You been at this too long, Sergeant. Prayer’s not like an active thing. It doesn’t work like you check it off like a duty. My mom says prayer is, you know, ambient. The spiritual are always doing it.” He looked up at Dan. “Why? You feel like you need to pray for something? You jerking off too much?”
He wanted to tell him about Hailey. He wanted to tell him about Greg Coyle and Iraq. That panic wasn’t urgent but it was there. Like when a phone rings and rings and no one moves to pick it up.
Finally, he said, “Brody really is obnoxious, isn’t he.”
Rudy continued shading in a mountain. “I’ll say this: I’m definitely jerking off too much.”
After he got out of the army for good, Hailey tried to get in touch with him. She sent bombardments of e-mails and Facebook messages. She asked if he needed help because of the injury. When he didn’t reply she eventually gave up. Then she wrote to tell him that she’d gotten a new patient at Eastern Star. A stroke and other accumulating health problems had convinced Mrs. Bingham’s four children that it was time. Dan couldn’t figure why he responded to this message and not the others, but he sent back his best wishes. Mrs. Bingham wasn’t all there anymore, Hailey replied, but she’d asked after him a few times. Out of her nearly fifty years of teaching, she still remembered Dan Eaton as one of her favorite students. He should come visit her, Hailey said. She’d get such a thrill out of it. Dan told her maybe the next time he was in town. Another message arrived. Again, Hailey said Mrs. Bingham would love to see him. And I’d love to see you too, she wrote. He ignored it. It wasn’t until she wrote that Bingham didn’t have that much time left that she hit that central cortex of guilt and grief and nostalgia that commands people to face the things they’d rather not. So with most of the muscle fibers of his being protesting about walking among these graves and ghosts, he did it anyway.