“Hold on, man. Lie still. Let Doc work on you. You’re fine,” said Dan.
Laymon shoved Dan out of the way so he could start on the—(On what? His leg? His guts falling out?)—damage. Coyle was still trying to get a look. He’d thrown up on himself. Bits of eggs from an MRE that morning peppered his stubble. Dan held his trembling shoulders down, but Coyle was surprisingly strong. He managed to crane his neck up far enough.
“Oh fuck,” he said. It sounded like he’d just taken a look at his taillight after a fender bender.
Dan shushed him. “Just lie still, dude. You’ll be fine, man. You’re going home.”
Several Bradleys and MRAPs from another patrol had surrounded them, and their squad came hustling over, edging in around Laymon. Lieutenant Holt called in a medevac. They all told Coyle lies because they knew that’s what they would want to hear.
“You’re good, dude,” said Cleary.
“It hurts like hell, I know, but you’re heading home,” said Wong.
“You’re gonna see your family. Hero time,” said Della Terza.
“Fuck,” said Coyle, staring at the sky, tears and blood in his eyes. “Fuck.”
Slowly their palms came in. Dan gripped Coyle’s good right hand, his fingers fierce and alive, and he put his other hand on Coyle’s vest, over his heart. Della Terza’s hand came to his midriff. Wong’s to the other side of his chest. Cleary put a palm on his forehead like his mother checking his temperature. Other hands, from the rest of the unit, found him, encouraged him.
“We love you, Coyle.”
“We’re right here, Greg.”
“You got this, dude. You got this.”
“Fuck,” Coyle hissed. Blood streamed from his ear.
They gripped him. Tried to hold his soul to the earth. He blinked tears; his whole body trembled uncontrollably, his eyes filled with panic.
“You’re going to be with her,” Dan said. “You’re going home, bud.”
Their hands spiraled around him like the spokes of a wheel. They held Greg until well after he was dead.
Dan wrote letters to Coyle’s family that night, one to his wife and mother and another to Hanna. The superstition about the short-timer dying made them all crazy, but everyone who died had a daughter, a son, a wife, a husband, brothers, sisters, parents. Everyone was about to get out. Everyone was on his or her way home. He thought about the moment when a soldier is dead but his family doesn’t know. They’re going about their lives while this awful information exists, but they don’t have to live with it yet.
Their last month ground on. A few days later, Della Terza got an e-mail from Coyle’s wife saying she wanted a chance to talk to some of the guys from Greg’s unit. They gathered around a laptop, Danny, DT, Cleary, Wong, Laymon, Drake, and Melody Coyle appeared to them on the janky video call, freezing and pixelating at various moments throughout the conversation. Dan had seen her before. When Coyle would call, he’d sometimes lift his computer and have them say hi to each other. She looked rail-thin, like she hadn’t been eating. Her cheeks were sunken, her elbows knobby. Hanna, the daughter, bobbed on her lap, smacking and drooling on a Thomas the Train. Seeing them, Dan wanted to hurl grenades at the continent of the sky until it all shattered and came crashing down.
“Say hi, Hanna!” Melody waved Hanna’s pudgy arm, and the oblivious baby gargled happily. “Say hi to Daddy’s friends.” She smiled at them. “I just wanted to catch y’all in the same place at the same time just to say—you know, to say.” Melody dragged that last word out in her Kentucky drawl and then hesitated. She was no longer the beautiful girl Coyle had met at the Cat West, who danced like a wild woman to dirty music and hooked up with him the first night they met in the backseat of her car. That girl had been dragged through motherhood and the loss of her husband. She looked exhausted.
“How you doing?” Della Terza interrupted. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Greg’s parents have been great. It’s hard being out in California, so far from home for this, but—but the reason I wanted to talk to y’all is I thought it was important to let you know how highly Greg spoke of you. He really loved you guys. He loved working with you, living with you, being friends with you. He just raved when he was home about how he’d met the very best people of his life over there. I thought it was important I got in touch and told y’all that.”
Melody managed to say this with dry eyes, while it hit them each in the solar plexus. Dan let a breath escape his chest, somewhere between a sob and a sigh, and he could feel his friends do the same.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be like this.” Melody took her index finger and tapped a single tear under her eye. It melted away. “I’ve already done all my crying. I’m exhausted by it. But me and Hanna just had to call and let you know how much Greg loved you.” Dan had been standing behind DT and Cleary, peering over their shoulders. “Danny?” When Melody said his name, they all looked back at him.
“Yeah?” He wiped his eyes. He could not bear to look at her.
“Greg left you something.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. His surfboard.”
Dan laughed. “I’m from Ohio. We don’t have an ocean or a wave for a thousand miles.”
“He left a note with it.” She picked up a scrap of notebook paper on the desk in front of her, and Hanna tried to slap at it. She read, “ ‘Danny, just in case, I leave to you my most prized possession. Get some sun and get your nose out of the books. The Phay-stoss disc, bro, that’s aliens. It’s solved. I told you.’ ” Dan burst out laughing. They all did. Their lives took place in such a claustrophobic sliver of space between suffering and laughter. “Whatever that means,” said Melody.
He was laughing so hard, crying at the same time, Melody had to call for his attention.
“Dan. Greg said he’d never met anyone as smart and stand-up as you. He really considered you one of the best friends of his life.”
That was the night Dan knew he’d absolutely re-up. He’d let Coyle down, but he wouldn’t let that happen again, not to anybody he loved. And it came back to him: He could feel his friend’s blood on his ACU, his hands, his face, the chaplain washing him with Catholic comfort, and he knew he’d be back. Until they kicked him out or carried him out, he’d be back.
* * *
The car seat in the back of Hailey’s Camry was coated in Cheerio dust. She started the car but didn’t put it in gear. She stared at the steering wheel like it had poetry written on the plastic.
“I told Eric I’d be home late anyway.”
“H-O-R-S-E?” Dan suggested.
“And embarrass you for the millionth time? Wanna just drive for a while?”
He picked at his thumbnail and almost said no. “Of course.”
Pulling out into the square, she took Main Street past the Cattawa. As they neared the river, the streets were deserted except for a lone figure stalking away from the bridge. He had his hands tucked in the pockets of a hoodie, baggy jeans, and a head exploding with crazed dreadlocks. The kind of figure that made you glad you were cruising by instead of walking past during an abandoned hour of night. But when just enough of the headlights spilled over him, Dan recognized the face and wished he hadn’t. He forgot the name, but he was a kid from their high school, a couple of grades older. What he recalled most acutely was that he used to come to school in hand-me-downs and Goodwill clothing onto which someone—probably his mother—had attempted to stitch an A+F logo, Abercrombie and Fitch. Dan remembered this distinctly because once, at lunch, Kaylyn had dared Hailey to go over and compliment him about his “fresh threads.” And Hailey had done it. After that, the two of them never let it go. They sniggered about this lonely skateboarder, who never bothered anyone, for a full year. It reminded him of the entire period in high school when she was dating Curtis, when the maintenance of her status seemed to be all that mattered to her. They blew past this kid, now a man, and he vanished into the gloom.
Headlights setting the course, Hailey glanced over at him. “We should go out to the Brew. For nostalgia’s sake.”
He felt that suggestion in the pit of his stomach. “Sounds like a plan.”
They drove with the radio loud, beneath the satellites that delivered the beat, hawked insurance, and carried the cellular signals that ran the world.
* * *
The clouds had parted, and the road angled with the river. The trees hung over the Cattawa, lurching across the water like old men with curved spines. During floods, the river could rise halfway to the treetops, and it would run muddy and viscous on its way to Lake Erie. The Brew used to be a stretch of weeds overlooking a dirt cliff face. A handful of teenagers generations before them figured out you could maneuver a car down an old hunting trail and park in the grass, which quickly became dirt or mud as more people discovered the spot. After a drunk couple drove into the river, the county put up a knee-high guardrail and called it the Cattawa Scenic Overlook. Kids never stopped calling it the Brew, likely named for the way the water foams as it comes around a bend (or maybe after all the beer drank there). It was supposed to be the place the country songs were written about, but from what Dan had heard in the last few years it had become a sewer of pills, pipes, and needles. Hailey crept them up to the rail, flipped the lights off, and killed the engine. The slice of moon sparkled off the water and gave the leaves on the tops of the trees an incandescent sheen, like all the thousands of wandering fireflies had been mashed into a paint and spread across each tiny canvas. The outline of the woods, wet and stark against night’s blue-black pool. Stars and moon all swimming out there in the infinite. It made him think that if he could stretch his vision far enough, he could see to the end of it all, where the universe simply trickled back to God’s eye.
They listened to the throaty voice of the river below. The ticking of the cooling engine.
Finally, Hailey said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” He wondered if this was true.
“I had to lure you with Mrs. Bingham.”
Her eyes had the shimmer of an ocean at dawn. Time and memory surged. Brilliant and violent.
“Why don’t you ever come back?”
He didn’t know how to answer this. He stammered about how even coming back for a night—less than a night—he’d run into too many people they’d grown up with.
“It’s so hard. Just. To not look back,” he tried to explain, feeling numb, feeling dumb. “I’m doing my best to keep moving forward, to keep happy. That’s hard when I’m here.”
Hailey’s brow crumpled into agony, an expression he remembered from when her mother was diagnosed. Or when he told her he might re-up.
“You left,” she said softly. “And you took my heart with you, you fucker.”
He stared at his hands, laced together over bare, bony knees.
“You’re never ever far from my thoughts,” she went on. “And I hate that.”
A contour of starlight put her profile in repose. He wasn’t sure how old you have to be before you know what you feel is not infatuation, that you are not merely dreaming up an idyllic thing; you understand the world differently because of this other consciousness bound to yours. He’d mourned her every moment he’d known her.
“You know,” Dan said, “I think we live these costume pageants with very little control and then fool ourselves into believing we have agency. That’s how I feel about us. Mostly, it was out of our control.”
“Danny.” His name seethed through her teeth. “Maybe you need help. From what your mom says . . . Maybe you’re not okay.”
There was a simple wood cross hanging from the rearview mirror. It dangled from a piece of fraying twine. He reached out and rubbed the smooth grain between his fingers.
“I’m not PTSDed, if that’s what you’re asking. I have nightmares sometimes.” How solid the cross felt. How he ached for its conclusions. “But I’m over checking the roadside for bombs. I can sit through a fireworks display. Mostly . . .” He hesitated then tried on a smile. “Mostly my heart’s just broken. But that happens to the best of us.”
“Danny.” She shifted, took his face in her hands. Her fingers ran over the scar by his eye, and she looked into his prosthetic like it could possibly see her. A barb uncoiled in his throat, and he felt tears push at the edges of his eye. Something so deep and so awful tried to rise up then. He felt it battering from below, screaming, and he let go of the cross. It bounced and twirled on the twine. He had to get out. Like the Humvee on its side, fire clawing in the box, he had to get out.
Hailey called after him as he threw open the passenger door and practically fell out of his seat, scraping his hand against the gravel as he caught himself. She called again.
He walked to the rail at the edge of the overlook. He heard the driver’s side open. He gazed into the water, wondered about the fall.
“Danny!” Hailey screamed. “Stop.”
He stood hovering at the edge, looking at the cluster of dark rocks over the drop. The Cattawa murmured by in its river’s whisper. Hailey snatched his wrist and pulled him to her. “Stop it. I’m sorry.” She wrapped herself around him, tight enough that he could feel her heart thundering against her breastbone.
Then the cool of her fingertips grazed his cheek. She pushed him back on the hood and in doing so broke some dense spell. She slipped her tongue into his mouth, climbed onto him, fumbled at the belt until his shorts dropped to his ankles, clattering in the dirt, and the summer night wasn’t nearly as warm. There was the contrast between the skin and the core. She gripped his shoulders, his hair, the muscles of his chest, her hands with memory. He bit the salt of her nipples. She was sweet, slick, sorrowful, and he thought of how time folded in on itself when that bomb erupted beneath him or that bullet connected with his armor. How everlasting those moments could feel. As if he’d lived them billions of years before when the oceans first rolled and lightning first raged and the course of all life was plotted in the murk. Of course, you only ever get a moment, and what lingers after is nothing but threnody, a chilly song for the dead.
When he came, it all returned: the hard give of the Toyota’s hood at his back, the stickiness of their sweat, the bugs flying in and out of his ears and nostrils, mistaking these warm, wet places for home.
She lay back on the hood for a moment, touched herself. She gathered his semen onto two fingers and then tasted it the way she had when they were young.
They dressed in silence. Then they were back sitting on the hood, watching the night again. Hailey sat cross-legged. Her jeans had a smear of dirt on the knee from when she’d kicked them to the ground. She held his palm in both of hers, and her thumb absently caressed the back of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked at him like he was stupid. “Why? I’m not.”
“Your family.”
“Is still my family. This doesn’t change that.” She traced a finger along his palm. “If you had any idea how much I’ve missed you . . .You have to understand that, right? I just don’t see how you couldn’t.”
“You gotta walk on with it.” He thought of how to say this. “Every mistake. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you knew. If you knew what I’ve seen and done . . .” She closed her eyes. A tear crawled to the corner of her nose, where it hung. “You wouldn’t be here right now. And you wouldn’t have just done that with me.”
“Stop. Just. Please stop.” She gripped his hand in both of hers, wedding band and engagement ring grinding into his knuckle. “You don’t think we all carry something that makes us less than we were? That we’d do anything to take ba
ck?”
“No. I don’t.” He pulled his hand away, hugged his own knees in, and thought of those he’d killed, the ones who’d deserved it and the ones who hadn’t.
He thought of the sudden pressure in his eardrums when the bomb went off beneath the wheels. The screaming pain in his skull and how the world abruptly went half-dark. Three tours. He gave his youth to the dust of those theaters. An eye, some skin, blood, and hair, and his ability to walk more than a few miles without a crippling pain in his knees and an ache in his spine that made him feel seventy years old. On tour #3, the day before the incident on Highway 1, he was reading about Ohio’s place in the Civil War and came across a quote about a Union general: At the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of a lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.
“You hold the goddamned war over my head just like you did when you came home the first time,” said Hailey. “You hold it over my head like I’m a child. Like I don’t know what it’s like to have ruined something. You’re not the only one.”
“Please.” He felt the heat rise to his cheeks and forehead; an angry sweat bloomed from the pores. For some reason wanting to scream at her about Curtis Moretti, some dead pillhead who would never stop making him feel like a fourteen-year-old bed wetter. How the hell could all this still be so fresh and painful? They were children when any of it last mattered.
“Fuck you, Danny. I’ll tell you something.” She looked away from him. Back toward the Cattawa. A lock of dirty blond had escaped and now hung over the high expanse of her forehead. “What I said about not seeing Kaylyn. That’s not true. I’ve seen her plenty.”
He waited. She bit into a fingernail, and then began peeling it off. She’d always had the nails of a boy, chewed and ragged. When he watched her come out of the game in the brief minutes her coach could afford, her backup would turn the ball over and clank shots while she took apart the cuticle of every finger.
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