by Stephen Dau
A spokesman from the Department of Defense, Richard Dominick, refused to discuss the specifics of the case.
In an effort to get more information, she repeatedly contacted her congressional representatives. When she still didn’t hear anything, she formed a support group of other military families, many of whom have suffered lost, injured, or killed family members.
“At first it was small, just local. We have a lot of families in the service around here. But pretty soon we were being contacted by people from all over.”
The support group, which numbers over one hundred families, calls itself Military Families for Truth. And while they haven’t been able to get all the information they believe is available about the loss of Christopher, they have been able to help the families of other soldiers.
“Many of them were misclassified,” says Henderson. “Or there was some kind of other clerical error. We’re pretty good at getting them to go back and make sure they have told us everything they can, and often, when they look at it again, they realize they can tell us more than they have.”
She says that helping other families deal with the loss of their loved ones has helped her deal with her own loss. “He was my firstborn son,” says Henderson, who is divorced from Christopher’s father, and has two younger children who are now grown and live away from home. “The group has brought me up a little,” she says. “I was depressed for such a long time, and it helps to know that there are others in similar situations, and that I can help them.”
In the meantime, Rose Henderson is still looking for answers. “I don’t know if I’ll ever learn the whole truth,” she says. “But I’ve got to keep looking.”
53
It gets in there, this thought, this way of thinking. They try to plant it, for sure, tend to it so that it grows, foster it, but it is in there to begin with. You’re born with it, I suppose, and eventually life takes it out of you. The notion that you’re invincible. No fear, they said. They don’t want you to have any fear. Those other things, that invincibility, that aggression. They bring it out in you, show you how to do things, try to teach you how not to be stupid, how to protect each other. Protect each other. Be aggressive. Protect each other.
And then one day you find out what that really means.
54
If he has one complaint about Shakri, it is her tendency, in his view, occasionally, not always, but sometimes, to dominate him. At first, he finds it comforting, like a blanket or an old pair of jeans, and he submits himself to it willingly, even eagerly. It shows she cares about him.
She buys him a new shirt as a present, requesting that he wear it out that evening. She has a car, and insists on driving him everywhere—to class, to the store, to the park, to his friends’ apartments—even when he wants to walk. He suspects she wants to make sure he is where he says he is.
She says the sight of a cheeseburger makes her physically ill, asks him not to order it, then buys him dietary supplements the next day to compensate for the lost protein. She asks where they are going, purses her lips disapprovingly at his answer, and drives them someplace else.
She talks to him at length about his diet, particularly his drinking, his clothes, his study habits. Once, he comes to see her smelling of cigarette smoke, and she stands over him, hands flying wildly, talking for nearly an hour about cancer, while he tries in vain to tell her it was Trevor who was smoking.
55
The road to Johnstown is built from slabs of grooved cement, laid end-to-end with a small gap between them to accommodate the winter cycle of freezing and thawing. Subsidence tilts the slabs gently away from one another, and driving on the road is like driving over an endless series of roughly laid patios. As usual when he rides in a car, the motion nauseates Jonas, and he diligently regards the scenery to prevent himself from getting sick. The previous winter’s black cinders line the road, and a multitude of auto-body shops careen past as they drive, as does the brilliant red-and-yellow foliage of autumn.
“Can you believe we ended up here?” asks Shakri, her accent fluttering in a way that seems to imply she is talking more about herself than about Jonas. He shrugs. Snow flurried across the hills a few days before, but today is unseasonably warm, and he opens his window partway to let in some fresh air.
“I didn’t know this was a possibility,” he says.
“Could you put your window up?” she says. “I’m cold.”
They drive past strip malls and cornfields, churches and forests, low one-floor houses with long, straight driveways and properties well delineated from the surrounding tangle of overgrowth merely by the fact of being mowed, all of it a revelry in the American urge toward expansion. There do not seem to be towns or cities in the usual senses of those words, but only certain areas where there are more buildings and certain areas where there are fewer. Each family has staked out a large section of ground, built a house in the middle of it, and those sections string together, stretching from one built-up area to another, filling up everything, as though everyone everywhere is spreading out their arms in a vast display of ownership.
The hills steepen as they drive closer to Johnstown, and the trees have lost almost all of their leaves at the higher elevation. Piles of snow appear beside the road, which clacks along underneath them like a train track. The houses, white and pink and gray clapboard, crowd the hillside, along with the melting remnants of the unusually early snowfall. Jonas pulls from his pocket a slip of paper with Rose’s address and directions scrawled on it, and they exit the highway.
The neighborhood is large, full of large houses set back from the oak-lined streets, large lawns better cared-for than those at the majority of houses they have passed, and large cars sitting in the driveways. Shakri slows the car as they search the mailboxes on the odd-numbered side of the street for number forty-five.
The house sits on a small rise, and it looks perhaps taller than the earth-and-timber houses Jonas remembers from his youth, but of about the same overall area. A massive oak crowds the front yard, and from beside the front door a picture window looks out on the well-kept lawn. Jonas gets out of the car and is struck by how much cooler it is here than in the city.
His heart doesn’t start beating quickly until he is walking up to the front door, past the carefully tended shrubs and a light in the front yard made to look like an old-fashioned street lamp. Shakri follows along behind, for once waiting as he makes the first move. He thinks about turning around, getting back in the car, and having her drive him home. But she is a presence behind him, and he realizes that the odds of convincing her to leave are remote. Then he sees the curtain in the large window move, and knows that he has been seen. He walks up to the door, takes a deep breath, and rings the bell.
56
He hears Rose’s voice almost before he sees her, the door swinging open and there she is, a tiny woman with a flash of red hair and blue eyes and a sort of sideways smile, not forced, but perhaps strained.
“You must be Jonas,” she says, and when he hears her voice he is slightly stunned, both by its volume—such a large sound from such a small person—but also because it is as if he is hearing the original voice for the first time, the accent stronger, a distant echo of the voice he heard long before, high up on a mountain.
“Yes,” he says, “Jonas,” pitching his own voice almost unnaturally lower, as though doing so will somehow force Rose to adopt a quieter tone, an effort which seems to have the opposite effect.
“Such a nice name!” she booms across the neighborhood, and then she steps out onto the porch and hugs him awkwardly, during which time his arms hang, useless and pinned to his body by her embrace. “And who’s this?”
“This is Shakri,” he says, watching as Shakri extends her arm to shake hands, only to go wide-eyed and limp during another long embrace.
“Well, that’s a pretty name, too!” says Rose, stepping back to look her over. “Fits such a pretty girl. Well, why don’tcha come on in.” And she steps aside to let them
into the house.
The house is as well cared for inside as the yard is outside, with dark, polished furniture and cream carpets and a tall, ornate grandfather clock in the corner, all of it lit by soft sunlight diffused through thin muslin curtains. The windows are open to the gentle breeze, and when he walks into the living room, Jonas catches his breath.
Over the fireplace is a portrait that dominates the room, nearly the size of the fireplace itself. It is him. The face is so familiar but also different, younger and less worn than he remembers it. The crow’s-feet have not yet developed around his eyes, and the hair is freshly shorn. He wears a dress blue uniform, and the American flag behind him is so crisp that Jonas can almost see it waving in the cool breeze that puffs in through the open windows. The face looks out at them from its place over the mantel as though presiding over a court.
“Can I get you something to drink?” asks Rose, already on her way to the kitchen to retrieve it. “Water or pop or something?”
“Just some water,” says Shakri, but Jonas doesn’t say anything. He can’t take his eyes off the picture over the mantel. In it, Christopher looks as though he has just graduated from school, maybe in his late teens. It is him, but it’s not him at the same time, not Jonas’s version of him. It’s not the way he remembers him. It’s a memory of him, but only one facet, the reality of the picture forcing itself onto everyone’s perception, the way it dominates the room. This is not him, Jonas wants to say.
He can’t stop looking at it.
When Rose comes back from the kitchen, she carries a plate of cookies and two tall glasses of juice, which she sets down on the coffee table, her hands trembling ever so slightly. Jonas notices that she also has something else. Tucked under her arm is a thick manila envelope.
“When your counselor called to tell me you were coming,” she says, “I made this up to give to you.” She holds the packet toward him, almost reluctantly. “I don’t like to read them anymore, or look at the photos, but they might mean something to you.”
Jonas takes the envelope from her and opens it, begins to look through it, sees that it is full of photocopied press clippings and photographs, but Rose stops him, pushing it closed in his hands. “I’d prefer if you would look at it somewhere else,” she says, and she is gentle about it, but firm, so he closes the packet and tucks it under his arm.
At some point Rose notices that Jonas keeps glancing at the portrait over the mantel.
“I practically begged him not to go,” she says. “As a mother, you’re not supposed to say this, but as soon as he told me, I knew he wasn’t coming back.” Jonas senses a certain comfort she takes in telling them this, in thinking of it all as preordained. “But that’s the way things work out sometimes. Everything happens for a reason. Don’t you think so, Jonas?”
They’re sitting down now, he and Shakri on the sofa and Rose in a chair across from them, a glass-topped table between.
“I don’t know,” he says, hesitating as he reluctantly turns his attention away from the picture. “Sometimes I do.”
Rose smiles, and it’s the most subtle gesture she has made since they arrived. “Tell me,” she says, “your counselor, what’s his name?”
“Paul.”
“Right, Paul. He didn’t really give me a lot of detail. I’m—he may have told you—I’m always looking for information. The military is often not too forthcoming.”
Jonas is staring at the portrait again, but now he sees that Rose notices, that she recognizes how intently he looks at it, at him, at the portrait of her son, and there is a flash of recognition. She rounds on Jonas, focused. And then she seems to catch herself; not wanting to spook him, easily as she can, she says, gently but firmly, as though handling shards of glass, “Tell me, Jonas”—her voice catches in her throat—“did you know my Christopher?”
The room is bathed in a diffuse glow, the early-afternoon breeze, the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner. Rose’s face has been forced into a mask, fixed in place by an endless cycle of yearning and disappointment, a calm exterior laid over a mix of curiosity and something else. Hope.
Jonas hesitates. His mind is a whirl of images and half-remembered events, and he is aware mostly of the necessity of choosing his words carefully, of the importance of the next few moments, of the unbearable weight of both lies and truth. He gathers together his will. Once he begins, he unwinds a story that is, like all stories, a mix of memory and impression. But he does his best to be mindful of his audience, to make it a sensitive story, an appropriate story, and for the hour he takes to tell it, his voice never quavers once.
“Your son saved my life,” begins Jonas. And that, at least in part, is the truth.
1
Something had happened. Something awful.
He remembers the cool night air flowing in through the open window, the thin woolen blanket keeping the warmth close to his body. He was young enough that he still shared a room with his sister, Miriam. But she was not there. Something had happened.
He remembers armed men running down the street in front of the house, and his mother wailing. He had been sent to bed early, told to stay there. And from his pallet on the floor he listened to low voices, his father and brother, occasional shouts in the street, the arrivals and departures of visitors.
He must have fallen asleep, and it was quiet when he woke. The cool night air flowed in through the open window, carrying with it the strangely bright light from a crescent moon. Under the woolen blanket, Younis turned on his side, trying to get comfortable.
He remembers thinking that the next year, or perhaps the year after, when his brother had moved out to start his own family, he would sleep in his own room, now his brother’s room, toward the front of the house. But for now he shared a room, a children’s room, with his sister, who was not there. Their soft rugs lay against opposite walls, and he felt the cool autumn air streaming in through the window, even as the blanket held close his warmth.
His body warm, his face pleasantly cool, he smelled the faint, lingering scent of woodsmoke high on the air, and then he became aware of an increasingly urgent pressure on his bladder. At first he tried to deny it, and for a moment he contemplated rolling over, pulling the blanket around him, and trying to go back to sleep. Somewhere in the distance a rooster cleared its throat. He wanted to stay in bed, go back to sleep, because he knew that if he got out of bed and into the cold, sleep would have even more difficulty overtaking him when he returned. But then he found the urge was too great to ignore. He braced himself, then pulled back the blanket and allowed the cool air to envelop him, raising gooseflesh on his arms.
He stood up and tugged on his shalwar and kamiz. In the moonlight, he spotted his long, woolen wrap lying in a bundle against the wall, and thought about pulling it over his shoulders for warmth, then reconsidered. He would be gone only minutes, after all, because he was paying only a brief visit to the low earthen hut in the backyard. He strapped on his sandals and walked groggily out through the kitchen, opening the heavy wooden back door as silently as he could manage.
Dew covered the yard’s cool grass, and wet his feet as he crossed, taking practiced steps toward the small outbuilding at the far end of the wall. It was a clear night, with a thin sliver of moon low in the sky, and off to the east the horizon showed the first faint signs of the coming dawn. He wished absently that he weren’t so tired, so that he might linger, appreciate it all awhile longer. He entered the outhouse, of habit holding his breath against the acrid smell, pulled the kamiz down slightly, and released his bladder. The rooster crowed again in the distance, and Younis was nearly finished when he heard the noise.
It cut sharply through the clear night, louder and louder. He will never be able to describe it adequately. It sounded like a lot of things: like paper ripping, amplified a hundred times, and overlaying that was the sound of a flag cracking rapidly in a strong wind, and some kind of engine noise, like a scooter with a broken tailpipe, and underneath it all was a low, lon
g whistle, sounding for all the world like the whistle his father made when he called the sheep in from the far pasture. The entire cacophony grew louder and louder, but at the same time, in his memory, extended on until forever.
And then, at the far end of forever was an explosion. But to simply call it an explosion would be like calling the sun a light: literally true but grossly insufficient. It was the crossing of a barrier, a rending of reality. It was light brighter than he had ever seen, and then he was blind; it was louder than imagination, and then he was deaf. He was slammed against the back wall of the outhouse, and then there was nothing.
2
He woke to shouts and more explosions, kept distant by a ringing sound in his right ear. He was still in the outhouse, the walls of which jumped with shadows cast by nearby firelight, distorted flickers on the wall. He got to his knees and peered out, trying to stretch his arm to support himself, but was stopped short by a stab of pain from his wrist to his shoulder. It felt as though his arm were slowly being torn in two. He clutched at his arm to find that it was wet, and this confused him. He curled the arm to his stomach and pushed himself up to kneel on the earthen floor. He stood weakly and looked down to see large wet patches covering the front of his clothes. His sleeve was ripped almost from the wrist to the elbow, and he moved his arm tentatively, stopping when pain ran up to his shoulder and into his chest. He stumbled out of the outbuilding.
The crescent moon still hung over the horizon, and the eastern sky was not much brighter than it was the last time he looked at it, but everything else was different. His house was gone, in its place a pile of broken stone and burning timbers, the air filled with the charred, pungent smell of smoldering plastic. Flames roared through empty windows in the shattered wall. He considered running back in, took a step forward, then another, but with each step the heat grew exponentially, burning his skin and drying his eyes, until he was barely able even to look at it. He realized he was yelling.
