I DON’T REMEMBER what woke me the night the second Iraq war started. The volume on the television barely reached the threshold of the den. How I heard it in my room is anyone’s guess. But something—a vibration in the air, maybe—woke me and led me to Dad.
He stood in the middle of the room like a man on sentry, a silent vigil for the nearly silent battle on the screen. Explosions lit the angles of his face, the stripe in his plaid pajama bottoms, the yellow Ranger emblem on his T-shirt.
I don’t know how long I stood there. My feet ached, and I was vaguely aware we’d slipped from late night into early morning. I needed to go back to bed, to sleep—a pop quiz in algebra was inevitable.
But leaving him alone? With nothing but the flashing light and endless brown expanse on the television? With nothing I really recognized in his face?
I knew so little about his time in the First Gulf War, except that he came home and my mom didn’t. We never talked about the war. We never talked about my mom. I don’t remember ever asking how she died, but I could hear Grandma Adele’s words, her voice a soft, sad echo in my head.
It was a Humvee accident.
For years, the phrase remained a mystery, a secret only Dad and Grandma Adele knew. I pieced together what I could. Location: Kuwait. Date: Sometime in March, Year: 1991. I never dared ask for more. Seeing my dad now, I understood why I never did.
A line of tanks and Humvees rolled across the screen. Dad had the heat cranked. I felt weighed down by it, my lips dry, my skin hot.
“I should be there,” he said.
I jumped, startled by the sound of his voice, startled that he wasn’t speaking to me, that he didn’t even know I was there.
He blinked several times, swiped his fingers across his eyes, and left a damp trail across his cheek. I’m not sure I understood what the Army had meant to Dad, how big a piece of him it was. But in watching him now, it was like there was a piece of him missing. I’d always known things weren’t quite right, especially during March, but I didn’t know how … fragile Dad was—how wanting something so badly could stretch your soul so thin it threatened to snap.
“Dad?” I said at last.
Nothing. Wherever he was, my voice couldn’t reach him.
“Daddy?”
He jerked. All I could see were the angles and planes of his face, lit by explosions. He didn’t say a word.
“Can we watch cartoons?”
“Sure, princess.” He blinked a few more times, as if he was coming back from somewhere far away. Then he shook his head, like he was shaking water—or possibly sand—from his ears. “Sure.”
It’d been a while since I’d called him Daddy. But then, it’d been a while since we’d watched endless cartoons together. Cartoons, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Hercules, and my favorite, Xena. Back then, I was MacKenna, Warrior Princess. If I’d learned anything over the years, it was this: Warrior princesses didn’t cry.
Dad aimed the remote and the Road Runner filled the screen where a tank had been. Oddly, things looked almost the same—harsh sun, endless desert, occasional explosions.
I remember thinking to myself that if Dad couldn’t go then someday I would. I’d pick up where he left off. Sons did that all the time. Why couldn’t daughters? On the screen, the Road Runner zipped by. Then the coyote was falling, falling, falling.
I don’t remember if he ever hit bottom.