by Owen Sheers
He took another step up the stairs, but then stopped. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He was in his neighbour’s house. He was late. He should go. If there had been an intruder, then they must have heard him already. Had he made a sound? Just now, when he’d caught that sense of Caroline? He didn’t know. It had been so sudden, like being hit from behind. Whatever, it no longer mattered. He should go. He should leave by the back door through which he’d entered and close it behind him.
But he could not. He could not walk backwards, not while the warmth of what he’d felt was still on him. Not when it might be felt again. He had to know where it had come from, that sensation. When it had happened it felt as if he’d walked into it, as if its source lay above him. So he must go forward, not back. That was the only way. He had to carry on.
Placing a foot on the next step, Michael began ascending the stairs once more. As he did he listened to the house. It was silent, still. As if he were moving through a photograph. As if he were alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON THE DAY Caroline was killed, Major Daniel McCullen woke early in his second-floor bedroom in Centennial Hills, a suburb in northwest Las Vegas. As he had every morning for weeks, he woke with his body damp, his heart racing. It had been the same dream again. Of the motorcyclist. Of the children playing soccer; that celebration after the goal. Except, as always, it had been worse than a dream, because it was a memory too, more real for him each time it returned.
He turned over. His wife, Cathy, was still asleep beside him, one bare shoulder showing from under the duvet. She was facing away from him and for a moment he just watched her breathe, trying to match the shallow rise and fall of his ribs to the steadier tempo of hers.
Daniel was still in love with his wife. From what he could tell, compared to a number of his colleagues in the air force, this was something of an achievement. For many, their marriages had been the first casualties of their service. Men who’d kept their heads under fire collapsing in the face of a relationship gone sour. Women flight officers volunteering for another tour, rather than slugging it out back home with a husband who no longer recognised them. But Daniel had always been determined. Cathy and the girls would come first. That’s what he’d promised Cathy when they’d married, and he’d tried to stay true to that promise ever since.
In the world in which they’d met it hadn’t seemed like such a difficult vow to keep. But back then, twelve years ago, everything had seemed possible. On the afternoon he’d first approached her, strolling across the lawn at his younger brother’s graduation, the years ahead of Daniel had looked like the skies into which he flew when he broke through a bank of cloud—open, rare. His. Just the year before, within months of his own graduation, Daniel had flown his first combat missions in Bosnia. Somewhere below him, in the wake of his jet’s roar, he’d taken his first lives. But—as their commanding officers had told them, and the newspapers, too—they’d saved many more. They’d done good with their might, and Daniel had returned a hero. So as he’d introduced himself to Cathy on the lawn that afternoon, as he’d made her laugh, and later, as he’d led her to the dance floor, he’d never suspected that one day the certainty of his life would become so fragile. That one day his sense that these years—even their wars—had been created for him might be turned on its head, until he’d feel like a plaything of the world, and not the other way round.
Wiping his palm on the sheet, Daniel reached out and laid a hand on Cathy’s shoulder. Her skin was smooth, warm under his touch. She didn’t stir. Judging from the light filtering through the shore pine outside their window it wasn’t even six o’clock yet. Daniel thought about waking her. Gently, with kisses, pressing himself against her from behind. Perhaps, after a night’s rest and with the girls still asleep, they’d be able to make love as they once had. He knew they needed it, to feel each other instinctively, without thought.
But he did nothing. The anxiety of his flashback was still active within him, its residue too unreliable, threatening like a faulty screen to flicker into life at any moment. So he just watched Cathy sleep instead, moving his hand up to stroke her hair where it flowed across the pillow.
Even with their recent troubles, this waking together still felt like a gift to Daniel. The knowledge that they’d be sharing the same bed that night, that they no longer had to worry about orders coming down the line, about watching the news with one eye on what it would mean for them in a couple months’ time. This was why they’d moved to Nevada. For this waking, this knowledge. To feel their future as firmly under their feet as their present. As soon as Daniel had learnt what they’d be doing at Creech, he’d put in for a transfer. He’d been on three tours since they’d got married. Two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. All three had been hard on Cathy and the girls. And, in a different way, on him, too. It was on those tours, in two-minute sat-phone conversations and jumpy Skype sessions, that Daniel had come to understand the value of his family. When he’d last returned from Afghanistan, Kayce, just six years old back then, had hugged him round the legs and asked him to promise he’d never leave like that again. Daniel told her he’d do what he could. Which, when he saw the email about Creech and the future reactivation of the 432nd, he did.
What they had planned for the 432nd at Creech seemed like the perfect answer to Kayce’s request: a chance for Daniel to have it all. To still be flying missions, to be doing his duty, but to be with his family too. To see his daughters grow, not across periods of months but over days, hours. To have this waking with Cathy, and know it wouldn’t be taken from them.
“Be careful what you ask for.” That’s what his mother used to say to him as a boy. When he’d wanted to play with his older brother’s football team. When he’d wanted a more powerful dirt bike. When he’d been picked for the college boxing squad. Maybe, if she’d been in Langley with him when he’d filed his transfer request to the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron, she’d have said the same again. And just as she had when he was a boy, she’d have been right to as well.
He and Cathy had tried talking about it a few nights before. They were sharing a drink on the deck while the girls did their homework, a bottle of Sonoma fumé blanc sweating crisply in the last of the sun.
“Not if you’re flying missions at the same time, Dan,” Cathy had said to him, looking down and shaking her head.
Daniel laughed, exasperated. He knew she was right, but he wasn’t going to admit it. Not after all they’d done to be here. Moving across the country, taking Kayce out of school. This was the best it could be, that’s what he wanted to say to her. She should be grateful, not resentful.
“C’mon,” he said. “Has it really been so bad?” He tried to keep his voice light. She looked up, as if she didn’t recognise him.
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s getting worse.”
He felt his chest tighten. He took a sip of his wine.
“You’re not sleeping,” she said. “And when you do, you talk, shout. And with the girls—”
“That was once,” Daniel snapped. He hadn’t meant to sound so sharp. “Once,” he said again, more softly.
―
There’d been a reason why he’d yelled at the girls like that. Why he’d done what he had to Kayce. There’d been a cause for his actions, but he hadn’t been able to tell Cathy what it was. He would never be able to tell her.
He’d just finished a shift at Creech. There’d been an engagement, one they’d been planning for weeks. The target was achieved, the missile had connected, but other aspects of the operation hadn’t gone well. At the last moment, with six seconds to impact, two boys riding a bicycle had come round the corner, one of them sitting on the handlebars, the other pedalling behind him.
Maria, his sensor operator, was sitting beside him. “Shit,” she’d said, when they’d come into view.
“Are those kids?” He’d heard his own question echo in his headphones. Elsewhere, in other darkened rooms in America, and 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan, other uniformed and
suited men heard him, too.
“It’s too late,” Maria said.
Up to six seconds to impact, and she could still steer the targeting laser on to their abort location. Daniel glanced at the counter in the corner of his screen as it descended through four, three, two. He and Maria watched as the visuals across the monitors wiped white.
When the smoke and dust had cleared, Daniel circled the Predator while Maria zoomed in. The target’s car was a twisted and blackened wreck, flames licking at its frame. Twenty feet away the boys’ bicycle was also screwed out of shape, its front wheel still spinning. A severed leg, wearing a sandal, was trapped under it.
Daniel had typed a chat message to the intelligence coordinator: Possible child fatalities?
The reply had come back at the speed of speech: Two possible teenagers confirmed. Male.
An hour after that reply, Daniel was back home, sitting on the decking, watching Kayce and Sarah play in the garden. The coordinator’s possible teenagers had both been about Kayce’s height. She was nine years old. As he watched the girls they’d begun arguing, each of them pulling at the handlebars of a red bicycle. Daniel hadn’t meant to scare them. He hadn’t meant to scare himself. But it had been too much, too soon. The spinning wheel. That sandal.
―
Cathy leant forward, her glass of wine catching the light. A peach-white star flexed on the decking between them. She took a deep breath and exhaled it as a sigh.
“Is this about Barbara?” Daniel asked her.
“No,” she replied, shaking her head again and biting her lip. “You know it isn’t about her. I told you. We agree to disagree. That’s it.”
Barbara was another teacher at Cathy’s school, a high-end primary school in the west of the city. A couple of months ago, along with other members of the Nevada Desert Experience, she’d been arrested outside Creech. Daniel had seen the demonstration when he’d arrived for his morning shift. A small crowd strung out along the perimeter fence, their homemade banners breathing in the breeze: Not in Our Name! Say No to Drones! U.S. Air Force—Killing by Remote!
If Daniel had known Barbra was among them he’d have got out and tried to speak with her. Not to give her hell, but just to set her straight. He understood the origins of the group. Subterranean nuclear tests cracking the earth upwind of your homes, your kids’ schools. He’d have probably joined those demonstrations himself. But this was different. This was a different kind of war, and what they were pioneering at Creech wasn’t threatening anyone who lived nearby. It was, though, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives elsewhere. Daniel was convinced of that. They had the figures, the projections, to prove it. And every month they received emails from grateful troops on the ground, thanking them for their work.
By the time Daniel drove home at the end of his shift, the demonstration had gone. Apparently it had only been there for a couple of hours before the police had arrived and made their arrests. But it had still got more attention than Daniel liked. He believed in what he was doing at Creech and he wanted Cathy to as well. So it made him uncomfortable to think of her going to work every day alongside Barbara and her talk.
―
Daniel leant back in his chair. The shadow of their garden fence was inching up the lawn towards them. “Good,” he said to Cathy. “Because Barbara doesn’t have the facts. She doesn’t understand.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cathy said. She sounded tired.
He let out a long sigh of his own. “So what do you want to do?” He looked out at the roofs of other houses beyond their garden, the sky towering above them, its blue darkening to indigo. “What do you think we should do?”
Cathy shrugged, watching the star of light thrown by her wine. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
Daniel looked at her, trying to read her expression. A frown was creasing the skin between her eyebrows. He didn’t understand when their conversations had become like this. So stilted, guarded. There’d been a time when they’d told each other everything, however difficult the truth. He waited for her to look back at him, but she didn’t. He wanted to say so much. About how much he loved her. About the terrors of the world. About how he wanted to protect her and the girls from them. About how, without her, he couldn’t do any of it. And he wanted to say sorry, too. They’d come to Las Vegas to remove the wars from their lives. But now Cathy came home to it every day. Not because he was away on tour, but because he wasn’t. Because in staying away from the war, he’d become it. But Daniel said none of this. It was as if his throat was blocked. As if to speak those words would shake their foundations and bring everything down. This was as good as it could be. That’s what he’d told himself. If he questioned it, where would they go? What would they do?
“It’s just…” Cathy began.
Daniel leant towards her. As he did she finally looked up at him. There were tears in her eyes, lensing the blue of her irises. She smiled at him despite them, like she did when trying to explain something to the girls. Something grown up, something difficult.
―
The sound of the bedroom door brushing across the carpet made Daniel turn in their bed.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, his voice still raw with sleep. “What’s up?”
Sarah, their youngest, stood in the doorway, her favourite picture book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, fanning from her hand.
“Is it morning yet?” she asked. She wore a pair of Disney pyjamas, a blonde princess crowned across her belly.
“I guess it is, honey,” Daniel whispered. Rising on his elbows, he sat on the edge of the bed and slipped on a T-shirt.
“What say we let Mommy sleep, eh?” he said, going to Sarah and picking her up. As he carried her out of their bedroom and down the landing, her picture book tapping against his hip, Sarah put her thumb in her mouth and leant her head against her father’s shoulder. Daniel inhaled the scent of her hair. It smelt of a child’s sleep, of dreams, not memories. And, Daniel thought, as they entered her room and he sat her on the edge of her bed, reason enough for everything he was doing, and for everything he’d done.
―
In 2007 Centennial Hills was one of the newest suburbs of Las Vegas. Sometimes in the weeks after they’d first moved there, as he’d reversed their Toyota Camry out the driveway, Daniel was sure he could still smell the paint drying on its fences, the tarmac off-gassing from its streets. The local hospital was half under scaffolding, and all the houses, theirs included, had a model suburban hacienda look, as yet unworn by the lives of their inhabitants. Even the desert trees and shrubs lining the bald streets and cul-de-sacs were older than the houses they shaded, brought in by the developers to lend the neighbourhood a strangely youthful maturity. At his last posting, in Langley, Virginia, once the shell of Walmarts and gas stations had been broken, you could still find evidence of the men and women who’d first settled towns like Smithfield and Suffolk. Their names were on the street signs, their descendents on the council, and their fingerprints dried into the stoops and wooden sills of the older houses. In Centennial Hills the only fingerprints left in the paintwork were those of the Mexican labourers hired by the contractors to finish the job. The street signs, from what Daniel could tell—Rockridge Peak Avenue, Danskin Drive—had been chosen by a downtown city planner, and he didn’t even know if a local council had been formed.
As a counter to their immaturity, the streets of Centennial Hills, positioned as they were on the edge of the city, framed an ancient view. It was this view that greeted Daniel as he began his drive to Creech that morning: the Charleston range, its ragged peaks rising through a milky light to the summit of Mount Charleston itself. A bare, pleated mountain looking over the sprawl of Las Vegas like an implacable god.
In recent weeks, as he’d driven down his street towards this view, Daniel had found himself giving the mountain a silent salute. As if there was some luck, or maybe wisdom, to be mined from its craggy slopes that would still be there long after the city had been extingui
shed by the sands on which it was built. Despite their proximity, Daniel had never been into the range. His mountain bike was unpacked but unused in the garage, and his hiking boots sat expectantly in the utility room. So as he reached the end of his street that day and turned left, slipping the mountains from his windscreen into the passenger window, the Charleston range still remained unknown to him. They were his daily view but not yet his landscape, a feature of his geography but not yet his territory. Unlike those other mountains, 8,000 miles away.
Those mountains Daniel knew intimately. He’d never climbed in them, either, but he was still familiar with the villages silted into their folds, the shadows their peaks threw at evening and the habits of the shepherds marshalling their flocks along their lower slopes. Recently he’d even been able to anticipate, given the right weather conditions, at what time the clouds would come misting down the higher peaks into the ravines of the valleys. Over the last few months he’d begun to feel an ownership over them. Were they not as much his workplace as that of those shepherds? For the troops operating in the area they were simply elevation, exhaustion, fear. They were hostile territory. But for Daniel they were his hunting ground, and as such it was his job not just to know them but to learn them, too. To love them, even, so that from the darkness of his control station in Creech, he might be able to move through their altitudes as naturally as the eagles who’d ridden their thermals for centuries.
As he swung into an intersection, Daniel’s phone began to ring. Glancing at the screen, he slipped the hands-free over his ear.
“Hi, honey.”
“It’s Kayce’s soccer tonight,” Cathy said. “I forgot.”
Her voice sounded tight. Daniel guessed Sarah was still playing up over her breakfast.
