I REMAINED a zombie for two days, even though Dad talked to Mr. Scott, and Mrs. Scott, and quite possibly to people who weren’t supposed to talk to him at the Mayo Clinic. Landon’s prognosis was good, the infection already responding to antibiotics.
But my phone remained stubbornly silent. No texts. No calls. In the evening, Dad stayed with me in the den. I pecked out my homework and tried to think distracting thoughts, tried to put everything I knew and felt about Landon into some kind of box, the way my mom did with me. I filled in the blanks on worksheets without really thinking, but I kept at it. When I faltered, I thought: Charlie Mike.
Thursday night, the desktop went crazy. It pinged and pinged. I’d been so focused on my essay for English, I yelped and Dad came running.
“What’s wrong with it?”
Dad frowned. His lower lip jutted out and I was pretty sure he was about to punch the monitor when a smile creased his face.
“I think,” he said, pressing a few keys. “Someone wants to talk to you on Skype.”
Landon, looking almost as green as his hospital gown, came into view. I stood there like an idiot, mouth hanging open, so the first words he said weren’t to me, but Dad.
“Hey, sir.”
“Hey, it’s good to see you. Feeling better?” Dad asked.
Landon waved away the question as if the whole rush to the Mayo Clinic thing bored him. “Can MacKenna talk?”
Dad gestured toward me.
“No, really. Can she talk?” Landon shook his head. “Cuz it doesn’t look like she can.”
Dad laughed, took me by the shoulders and planted me in the desk chair. “I’ll just.” He picked up his laptop and pointed to the other part of the house. “Be somewhere else.”
“So,” Landon said. “Alone at last.”
I snorted something between a laugh and a cry.
“I need your help,” he said.
“Do you want me to drive down and rescue you?”
He closed his eyes. “If only that would work.” He opened them, and despite our lousy monitor and the green of his gown, I swore they looked blue. “I need your help to stay in Black Earth.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Not if I can help it. My dad wants to hire a private tutor to finish out the school year,” Landon said, with that edge that made him sound just like his dad. “And boarding school in the fall.” He shook his head. “I’m not going. And finally.” Here, he looked toward the ceiling and I got a screen-full of his vulnerable neck. It was all I could do not to kiss the monitor.
“My mom agrees.”
“But?”
“I got to pass junior year.”
I didn’t need much more than that to take on this mission as my own. Landon hadn’t missed that much school and might even make it back to class for the last week or two. On Friday, I’d made a circuit of his class schedule, although the barely contained eye rolls told me I wasn’t the first girl to ask for Landon’s missing work. Only Patti took the situation as seriously as I did, and not only loaded me down with all his regular assignments, but piled on the extra-credit projects as well.
She gave a little shrug at this. “What else is he going to do?”
Other than Skype with me? I shrugged back.
And when she piled the study guides and teacher notes into my outstretched hands, it was just as good as a cup of coffee.
How the conversation started, I never quite knew. Maybe it was the way I raced through the house on Saturday afternoon, braids still damp from swim practice. I didn’t even stop at the fridge, but went straight for the computer and Landon on Skype.
I didn’t even know how long Landon had been looking at me with that odd expression on his face. For the past few days, I measured time not by the clock, but by the nurses’ rounds.
“What?” I said after his afternoon nurse left for the last time.
“You guys are still swimming, right?”
I swallowed hard and nodded. We were swimming, but mostly conditioning laps—water bottles balanced on our stomachs, length after length of ballet legs—all in the strange quiet of water splashing against the pool sides. Josh didn’t have the heart to cue up one of Landon’s playlists. We didn’t have the heart to listen. We swam lengths underwater and at the end of each, I’d grip the pool edge and inhale a long, shuddering breath—the kind you take after a hard cry.
“Okay,” Landon said, “but what about the show?”
This time, I only swallowed hard. “Everyone misses you,” I said. I couldn’t get the actual words from my mouth. At last, I managed, “No one wants to do the show without you.”
“That’s crazy. What are you going to do instead?”
“Patti was talking about doing an exhibition with some of our strongest numbers, like the senior class routine, and maybe my duet with Constance.”
“But no show?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t explain how awful it was to swim without him there. It wasn’t just me. I saw it every time a girl glanced toward the empty platform stage. Guilt. Misery. Both looked the same when they washed across someone’s face.
“Whatever happened to the show must go on?”
I shook my head.
“You guys really aren’t doing the show? Come on, that’s bullshit. You’ve worked too hard not to.”
“It just doesn’t seem—”
He held up a hand. “Stop. Right there. I’m fixing this now.” His gaze was focused on something other than the webcam, his long calf lashes brushing his cheekbones. “I’m emailing Patti, Kayla, Constance, and Brad Stanley.”
“Brad?”
“He’ll host at the last minute. He’s just the kind of upstanding guy who will.”
“You have his email?” Oh, what was I saying? No doubt Landon had everyone’s email.
Landon waved this away. “And I’m attaching my script. That’s all he needs.”
A moment later, my email pinged. I sent a questioning look into the webcam on my end.
“Oh, and maybe I bcc’d you as well. In case there’s some amusing drama.”
“So. We’re swimming,” I said.
“Are we?” Something in his tone had changed. I leaned forward, closer to the monitor as if that would dissolve the miles between us.
“Can you tell me something?” he asked, his question quiet. “Would you swim without me?”
It hit me that this suddenly wasn’t about swimming. It was about something bigger than that, maybe the biggest thing of all.
“I would,” I said, my words just as quiet. “If it came to that.”
His gaze never left my face. What was it about those hazel eyes? I couldn’t deny him anything, especially the truth.
“But it would hurt,” I added. “It would hurt a lot.”
“But you’d do it, right?” he asked.
I nodded, once.
His smile stole my breath with a full on dimple that I longed to touch. “That’s all I needed to hear.”
Black Earth, Minnesota has two cemeteries, so my chances of picking the right one were fifty-fifty. A foggy memory of rolling hills and huge elms with branches like ancient, gnarled arms helped. Once upon a time, I’d walked a winding path through gravestones, my hand in Grandma Adele’s.
I’d been maybe four, old enough to remember, but too young for school. I never told anyone about this trip, not Landon or Nissa. Even back then, I knew enough not to tell Dad. But the hills, the grass just high enough to tickle my ankles, gray headstones, and flowers that looked too pretty to be sad stayed with me. I don’t remember seeing my mom’s grave that day, but the words Grandma Adele spoke seared into my mind.
It was a Humvee accident.
And since I was my father’s daughter, she didn’t need to explain what a Humvee was.
I told Landon all this, later that Saturday night.
“It’s almost like a dream,” I said after the swing-shift nurse had left. “I mean, I’m pretty sure it happened and I’m pretty sure my mom is here in Black Earth. Is it crazy that I never asked?”
“You probably did.” He shifted in the hospital bed, so for a moment, he went off kilter and all I saw were the monitors behind him. “That’s why you remember your grandma taking you.”
“Do you think I can find her?”
“Without asking anyone?”
I nodded. Asking Grandma Adele, Dad—anyone really, since Patti might know—shot not just fear, but failure through me. It would only bring them more hurt. I needed to do this on my own.
Landon grinned at me. “I know you can.”
Sunday morning, I made Dad a full pot of coffee. Next to his cup on the kitchen table, I placed Mom’s journal. My eyes were drawn back to the pages. It was, quite possibly, the last time I’d ever see it. Part of me yearned to hold it tight, keep it a secret. But the time for secrets was over. They ambushed you, their attacks large and small, but in the end, they did far more damage than the truth ever could.
Besides, I didn’t need the poems to know how much my mom had loved me. But Dad? Maybe her words would help him put things back together.
In the Jeep, I pulled out a map of Black Earth and did a quick terrain analysis. Hills and elms. Simple. I pulled from the driveway and turned toward the older part of town and the bluffs by the river.
At the cemetery, the sun was just peeking over the steepest hill, effectively blinding me. I walked on instinct, tried to think back to those landmarks my four-year-old mind might have registered. And I sent up a prayer to my mom:
Let me find you.
I did, at last, near the crest of another hill, one I only climbed because the old elms looked like they were taking the rest I so desperately needed after an hour of searching. Grandpa Frank’s grave caught my eye first. I stumbled past and sank to the earth beneath an elm. Both graves were well tended, so much so, I wondered if Grandma Adele visited on a regular basis. I placed the bouquet I’d bought in a vase on one side of the grave, and stuck a small American flag into the ground on the other. Then I sat and studied the inscription:
ELIZABETH M GREY
1st LT US ARMY
PERSIAN GULF
JUL 19 1965
MAR 26 1991
MOTHER WIFE DAUGHTER
SOLDIER
I stared at the grave, willing something from it, anything at all.
“Can you miss someone you never knew?”
Could you? Did you fill that void with something else or was it permanently empty, a hole for ghosts.
“Because I miss you.”
I remembered back in preschool, how moms scanned the room when they first walked in. I watched them, watched their faces light up when they spotted their child. How they held out their arms, and how the little boy or girl running to them would hold out theirs.
Sometimes I’d try that. I’d stand in the middle of the living room, hold out my arms, and wait. Grandma Adele or Dad would walk by, pick me up, hug me. But when they set me down, I’d go back to holding my arms out until my muscles trembled. Then, I’d fold them tight against my chest.
“And then,” I said out loud. “It was like I didn’t know what to do with them.”
I sat, hugging my legs, resting my chin on my knees. For how long, I couldn’t say. Maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe an hour. I sat until the sun warmed the back of my neck and the hard ground made my hips ache. I sat until tears blurred my vision and I could no longer see the words on the headstone.
Dad was sitting on the porch steps when I got home. He leaned back on the cement, legs crossed. The scent of freshly cut grass hung in the air and our lawn had a checkerboard pattern. But Dad looked cool, like he’d been lounging all morning, not a single grass stain on his shirt or jeans. He scooted when I reached the steps and I sank down next to him, tired from my trek through the cemetery and still a little shell-shocked.
“I was thinking about joining you.” He nodded toward the Blazer. “It’s been a while since I’ve been there. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
Neither did I.
“That’s not how I remember your mom. We were only together a short time, but I still have days when I forget she isn’t alive.” He stared straight ahead. “That sounds crazy, I know. But the worst part? Even now, I start to tell her about you, then remember that I can’t.”
“Dad—”
He hushed me, then pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “When you were little, you used to play with this. I guess in the same way other little girls take their mothers’ purses.” Dad gave a soft laugh. “You’d try to stick it in your pocket, but of course it wouldn’t fit.”
He shook his head at the memory, laughter relaxing his features. “Then you’d take everything out, inspect it, then put it all back in, or try to.”
Dad opened the wallet. The plastic photo insert unfurled. There I was, a photo for every year—even the heinous middle school ones—each tucked carefully in its own panel. At the very back was another picture.
My breath caught. Maybe, at one time, I’d rifled through Dad’s wallet, but I had no memory of this. He eased the photo from the holder and held it up by one corner.
“I don’t know why I keep this one in here,” he said. It was my mom, in uniform, an official portrait without a trace of a smile on her very young face. “Your mom never really liked it, but I did.” He considered the photo. “Maybe because the first time I saw her, she was in uniform.”
He sighed, the sound heavy, full of regret and longing and an ache that would never go away. “There’s a part of the story you don’t know.”
I clenched my fists and held my breath. I nodded to let him know I was listening, but otherwise, didn’t dare move.
“Right before we went forward, into Iraq, I did the unforgivable.”
I’d puzzled over what had sent my mom running. What, exactly, did Dad do? What had he done when he saw the ROTC brochure? Did he set the desert on fire?
“I told her she couldn’t be a soldier,” he said. “Worse, I wanted her to ask the battalion commander to assign her to Log Base Echo, in Saudi Arabia.”
I thought about the list and my mom’s reaction when she thought her name wasn’t on it. Even knowing the outcome, I wasn’t sure I could deny her that. Being a soldier was part of who she was. She was the original warrior princess.
“For years, I thought if I hadn’t said a word, hadn’t stormed off like a sixteen-year-old, your mom might still be alive today. She wouldn’t have been tempted to come see me, wouldn’t have been on that particular road on that particular day.”
He slipped the photo back into its home, then pulled something else from one of the leather slots. The aluminum was dull; it didn’t catch the sunlight. Dad handed it to me and I felt the raised lettering of my mom’s name, her service number, her blood type, all beneath my fingertips.
Her dog tag.
“I finally had to stop wearing the wedding band. People would ask me about my wife.” Dad rubbed his left ring finger. “After a while the pity got old. So I took the ring off. And well, you’ve seen the other photos.” He gave me a sidelong glance.
“Yeah.” I knew he meant the drawer, with the silver-framed photographs. “I showed Landon a few weeks back.”
He took the dog tag and held it in his palm. “I liked having something of hers close, always with me.”
As a reminder, or to make sure he never forgave himself? For something so small and light, that dog tag carried tremendous weight. By the time I pulled the words together to ask him, Dad had returned the dog tag and removed one last item, a folded piece of paper.
The paper was creased, well-worn, like it had been folded and unfolded many times, over many years. Dad opened it slowly, with care, to reveal a crayon drawing. Stick people holding hands, one incredibly tall, the other tiny, with a triangle for a dress. Below the drawing was a short note, in Grandma Adele’s precise handwriting.
According to MacKenna, this is the two of you. In this picture, you are home and taking her to the park.
“Adele sent this to me when I was in Somalia.” Dad shut his eyes and his lips compressed into a hard line. “This is difficult to explain, princess, but there was a time when I thought it might be better if I simply didn’t come home from there.”
I shifted to stare at him. I’m sure shock registered on my face, because I nearly choked on it. I wanted to ask: not come home, or come home in a flag-draped coffin? But I didn’t dare.
“I thought with the insurance money, you’d be set for life. Without your mom, I thought I was a lousy father. I thought, maybe, this was penance for her death.”
“But—”
He put his arm around me and held me tight. “Then, Adele sent me your drawing. To this day, I wonder: did she know? Of course, this is your grandmother we’re talking about.” Here, Dad managed a curt laugh.
Yeah, Grandma Adele had great timing.
“I realized that back in the world, there was a little girl who loved me,” Dad said. “I had one of those flashes, like when I first saw your mom and knew, that someday, I was going to marry her.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “When I saw your drawing, I knew: I was put on this earth to be your dad.”
He folded the paper slowly and tucked it back in his wallet. “I put it in my pocket right before we went out, right before everything went to shit. It brought me home. And every time I switch wallets, it goes in first. And, yeah, I’ve fucked up the dad part more times than I’m sure we both want to count.” He planted a gentle kiss against my hair. “But you’re the reason I have a life. You’re the reason it’s worth living.”
My throat closed off. I tried to suck in a breath, but got nothing. My body shook with the effort. I held Dad tight and felt the hot sting of tears against my cheeks.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
“I love you,” I said.
“Oh, princess, I love you.”
We didn’t speak. I was without words, but not empty, not any longer. That void, the one where ghosts resided, now held a few concrete items: a photograph, a dog tag, a crayon drawing of a little girl and her daddy, and the very real life of a woman I never knew.