“Wait, who gave you the ride?” she asked as they climbed into her car. She’d changed into jeans that stretched to their limit against her rear, maybe a size too small, and a sky-blue top with spaghetti straps that exposed the tan of her shoulders and dual cream-white swimsuit lines from a day spent in the sun. Not that she had dressed up, but she looked fresh, and in his ratty beige cargo shorts and a long-sleeved gray baseball shirt (purposely pulled from drawers that morning to prove he didn’t care), Dan felt an ancient self-consciousness that dated back to morning bus rides. Agonizing over freckles and acne and the coils of red hair he couldn’t get to rest properly on his skull. Admittedly, he’d chosen to put in one contact rather than wear his glasses the way she’d encouraged him to back in the seventh grade.
“Bill Ashcraft, of all people.” And during the drive into town, he told her the story of running into Bill on the road, the visit to Rick’s grave, finding Hansen and Beaufort at the Lincoln, and how that all played out. She laughed, she cringed, she laughed some more.
“That’s a hell of a night. Not sure how much more adventure you can fit in.”
“Maybe a round with Vicky’s mechanical claw to see if I can win you a stuffed animal.”
“We’re not impressed when boys win us stuffed animals anymore.” A fractional tic of her mouth. Amusement and nostalgia in its becoming. “It’s 2013—we got the vote now.”
That was the moment it came over him. The sense of finally seeing her after all this time. It was a bullet going off in his chest. How hard he’d tried to forget that his heart had always been a loaded weapon with her.
After he and Hailey broke up and Dan was back in Baghdad, Greg Coyle decided he couldn’t do another tour. Yes, Greg did need the money. His mother was having health problems and wouldn’t be eligible for Medicare for another five years. She couldn’t work, she was living with his wife, and they had a mountain of medical bills. Dan was leaning toward re-upping even though he could feel a darkness following him around, keeping tabs, trying to decide if it should touch him.
They were back from patrol, stripping off their gear, when Coyle broke the news that he was getting out, that a buddy from home had promised him a job selling equipment for fire trucks. “He says they’ll have me the moment my boots hit American soil.”
Out came his earplugs. Off came gloves and boots. Dan needed a new pair.
“Fire truck equipment? You’ll pay your mom’s bills with that?”
“Shit, that’s probably a medical bankruptcy situation anyway.”
Off came his elbow pads, kneepads, throat protector, ammo mags. He felt like throwing his gear at Greg’s frosted-blond head, a piece at a time.
“It’s really Hanna,” he said. “I can’t be away again. I’m missing her whole childhood.”
Coyle had gone from the self-professed “biggest pussy slayer in the entire U.S. Army” to the most nerve-racked father of the institution. His bunk was wallpapered with pictures of Hanna. He’d taken to building toys out of wire and soda cans, little figurines to show her over Skype.
“I get you,” said Dan.
Off came his groin protector. Some guys didn’t wear it, until Badamier’s injury, and they heard he’d have to pee through a catheter the rest of his life.
“It’s just.” Greg removed his compression bandage and knife and now clutched each in a hand, staring at them. One to open a wound, the other to close it. “It’s just. Man. It’s like I get home and I hold her, and I feel everything. I swear I feel the weight of fucking eternity on me.”
They had that conversation roughly nine months into the deployment. They were close to going home.
Vicky’s looked like Vicky’s. Nothing within or without had changed since he’d last ordered a slice of pie there. The few patrons at this hour looked haggard, drawn down. The speckled red plastic material of one of the stools at the counter had burst and a puff of foam protruded. Clawmageddon was OUT OF ORDER. They took a seat in a far back booth, and when the waitress came by with menus they barely needed a glance.
Hailey asked, “Do you want to see a picture of her?”
He said of course, and she zipped it up on her iPhone.
“How old?”
“She just turned four a month ago.”
The little girl had a wide nose and slim eyes. A squashed infant’s face that resembled her father’s features, though the skin was much lighter, dosed with Hailey’s pallid Polish ancestry. Curly black hair pushed out from the edges of a tiger costume packaging her head, and she stared at her mother’s camera with slim-eyed mischief, mouth slightly agape as if to ask a question. Maybe all little kids looked sort of the same, but she reminded him of Hanna Coyle.
“You love it? Being a mom?”
She bobbed her head and some of the hair piled in a bun spilled; she went about cramming her dark blond back into the hair tie. “I do. I really do. Happened a bit more quickly than I’d planned, but once I was holding her… Things I always cared about or thought were important suddenly fell exactly into perspective. You get this feeling like…” She finished, snapping the hair tie into place, and puffed out her chest. “Emma Will Rule All of You One Day.”
“Emma,” he repeated. He handed the phone back. “She’s beautiful.”
Hailey’s thumb slid across the screen, toggling through a few more images. As if to remind herself.
“I know. She’s freaking unbelievable. Probably the smartest, most beautiful human being to ever live—and that’s not my opinion. That’s science.”
He turned his water glass in slow spirals, dug into himself in order to ask the next part. “My mom told me you’d gotten married. Then she told me you had a daughter. I never got the story, though—I mean, with Whitey.”
He didn’t know why he used the nickname. He didn’t mean it to be cruel, it just sort of slipped out. She rolled her eyes, annoyed but not offended. “Jesus, what is it with that? You know even his friends still call him that? Because he didn’t listen to DMX in high school?”
“Is that how it started?”
“Who knows. But Jonah or Kruger or someone starts calling him ‘Whitey,’ and now it’s a dozen years later, and even the other teachers call him that? I’ll see you in hell, all of you.” She hesitated, picked up the pepper and held it in her hand like a lucky talisman. “It’s not like anyone would ever accuse New Canaan of being this liberal, happy-go-lucky oasis, but I can feel people looking at us and Emma sometimes. And then my mom and dad…”
“I can’t imagine they’d have a problem? That doesn’t sound like them.”
“No it’s not—and they don’t. It’s just when we first started seeing each other, they sort of went out of their way to treat him well. Like they bent over backward to make it clear that they don’t care that he’s black, but sometimes they can be so, so awkward. Like they buy magazines if Michelle Obama is on the cover and leave them on the coffee table.”