“What’s up, Sar’nt Clifford?” said a voice over my shoulder. I turned to see one of the men from the other side of the bay, Staff Sergeant Houne, padding toward me in his shower slippers. Like me, his gray t-shirt had the word ARMY printed across the chest in waterproof, night-reflective lettering. Also like me, he’d been stuck in Texas for the past six days, patiently waiting for Big Army to cycle us through demobilization and fly us back home.
Houne looked down at what I held in my hands—the image of the little girl.
“Pretty,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Who’s she belong to?” Houne asked.
“I dunno, man. Found this on the bottom of my locker, against the back part, under the bottom shelf.”
“Snail mail,” Houne snickered, “that’s old-school, bro.”
And he was right. Very few of us, in 2015, actually mailed physical letters to home anymore. Not when e-mail, Google, and Skype made communication as quick as the push of a button. Oh, we’d send cards and notes for holidays and whatnot, but for everything else, the internet did the trick. Anywhere you could get wireless, home was within reach. Even overseas. Sometimes, in the most unlikely of places.
Which made me suspect that the envelope and the picture had been stuck in the bottom of my locker for a very long time.
I kept looking at the image of the little girl.
“Somebody’s daughter,” Houne said, taking the printout in his hands and gently running his fingers over the surface. “Is there an address on the envelope?”
“Not that I can see,” I said, flipping the envelope over in my hands several times.
“Open it, man,” Houne encouraged.
I tried to peel the tape, but it simply ripped the age-delicate paper. I flipped out my Gerber from my locker and used the small knife to slice the envelope down the edge. Inside were several yellowed and crinkly pages of what appeared to be ring-bound note paper. The handwriting was fairly messy, but it went on for several paragraphs. All of it addressed to the same name I’d seen on the front of the envelope.
I blushed when I realized whoever had written the letter was writing it as if it might be his last communication to the girl.
I showed it to Houne.
“Damn,” was all he said, turning serious. “I hope he made it back okay. Looks like this was written as he was heading over to the sandbox.”
“Yeah,” I said, carefully folding the pages back the way they’d been and replacing them in the envelope.
There’d been no date on anything. No last name.
I thought of my own kids and felt a little jolt of pain in my stomach. What if he—or she, if it was the mother—actually hadn’t made it home okay? How would anybody know?
I reached up into my locker where my waterproof folder for my important documents was stored and slipped the envelope and the picture inside.
“Somebody should have gotten that letter,” I said somberly.
“No way to know who,” Houne said. “So why keep it? Not your problem, man.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not my problem.”
But I wasn’t very good at convincing myself.
***
Ten days later, I was finally home. Sleeping in my own bed with my wife. For the first time in about a year. Having endured two prior deployments, our family was used to the routine. The first few days back were happy ones. But also awkward. The house had gotten used to not having me around, and I’d gotten used to not having the house around. Once the elation of the greeting at the airport had worn off, there’d been the inevitable jostling and bickering. About little, dumb stuff. Just because my wife Audrey had her way of doing things, and I had my way, and for twelve months never the twain had met. Now they were meeting in a rhetorical traffic jam, and I was doing my best to be patient. So was she. I hoped?
This too shall pass, I thought to myself, as I lay on my back. The ceiling fan over the master bed gently rotated above. Audrey was parked next to me, propped up against the headboard on some pillows, her Kindle perched on her knees while she read a book. I detected the slightest hint of perfume and noted that she’d worn something dark and satin to bed—two clues that the night had more in store for us both. But I couldn’t get my mind right for the occasion. So I kept silent and watched the fan turn.
Audrey could tell I wasn’t okay.
“I can hear you thinking,” she said to me, pausing to turn her head in my direction.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“We’ve been together sixteen years, and you still haven’t figured out that every time you lie and say to me oh, it’s nothing, that means it’s obviously something. Still trying to shake off the jet lag? Anything go on overseas that you couldn’t tell me about in e-mail?”
I sighed and sat up, then swung my feet over the edge of the bed.
“One sec,” I said, walking to the desk on the far wall. I pulled out the same waterproof folder where I kept my Army papers and fished around in the folder until I came up with the letter and the printout picture.
“I found these in Texas,” I said, bringing them back to the bed.
My wife examined them with a raised eyebrow, then pulled out the wrinkled letter and read the first two pages.
“God,” she said, “he’s saying goodbye to his child!”
“That’s how I took it, too,” I said.
She kept reading and only paused once to pluck a Kleenex from the box on the night stand, which she used to wipe her nose.
“Dave, this is beautiful. Did you read the whole thing?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t have the heart to. Seemed too private.”
“Who sent this?”
“You mean,” I said, “Who didn’t send it? I found that at the bottom of my locker a few days before we left. I have no idea how long the envelope or the picture were there. There’s just the first name, no last name. No address. No idea who the girl’s parents or relatives might be.”
“Why didn’t you ever write me or the kids something like this?” Audrey accused, her back now straight and her eyes watching me over the tops of her glasses.
I coughed nervously into my pillow and stared at her, marveling at the fact that I’d been fortunate enough to find a woman who could put up with a guy like me.
“You know I don’t think about worst-case outcomes,” I said. “My plan is to always come home, and for three different rodeos now, I’ve always stuck to my plan.”
“I know, but . . . the bad guys get a vote in whether or not your plan works out, Dave. Hell, stormy weather and aircraft malfunctions and appendicitis get a vote, too.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling sheepish.
“Well, anyway, what are you going to do with these things?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I was going to throw them away, but something stopped me. That letter . . . that’s a precious thing. I couldn’t just toss it out.”
“But you have no idea who it was intended for, and no way of getting it to them,” Audrey said, carefully putting the letter back into its envelope, then putting the picture into the envelope too.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And that’s bugging you,” Audrey said, with the emphasis quite clear.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling even more sheepish.
“And what do we always talk about, when you come home? How you can’t go back in time and fix things that can’t be fixed. Dave, I think it’s sweet that you kept this. I agree, it is precious. But there’s nothing you can do about it. And you’re certainly not doing either one of us any favors if you lie there and let it eat at you all night. I’ve been wondering why you seem distracted, even more than when you came back from Afghanistan in oh-twelve. Now I know why. Honey, you have to let it go.”
“Yeah,” I said, for the third time.
She popped me in the shoulder, good enough to leave a mark.
“Hey!” I protested, rubbing at my deltoid.
“Come
on,” she said. “We’ve got more important business to take care of. You’ve been home three nights. And this now the fourth. You’ve got a duty to do, Sergeant First Class David Gregory Clifford. No more shirking. And that’s an order, understand?”
Before I could respond, she slid deftly under the blankets until she was straddling my midsection. The smell of her perfume was now strong. The power of her lips on mine was even stronger. And for a little while at least, there wasn’t any worrying about the past, nor the future. There was only the present. The beautiful, hungry present.
***
One week later, and I was pulling into the driveway after my first day back at work. Half the guys at the plant—where I was an electrician—had done some form of military service. Active, or Guard, or Reserve. I’d spent more time telling them stories from my latest excursion to the Middle East than I did getting real work done. They knew the score. Even the ones who’d gotten out before 9/11. Heck, some of those guys had gone back in after 9/11, and been deployed like me. There are things you can talk about among people who’ve walked in the same or similar boots that you just can’t talk about with anybody else.
It had been a good day.
Inside the house, my kids mobbed me at the door to the garage—the older son, the younger son, and the toddler girl, who was turning three years old in a month. I let myself be squeezed like a tube of toothpaste for several seconds, then deposited my jacket on one of the wooden hanging pegs arrayed on the wall of the mud room, across from the clothes washer and dryer. It would be an hour yet before Audrey got home from going out on errands, and my oldest son—Brant, age fifteen, and taller than I was—had been holding down the fort.
“How’s homework?” I asked him, as was my dutiful habit.
“Fine,” he said.
I smiled, thinking of my wife’s dig from the night I showed her the mysterious farewell letter to the unknown little girl.
“When you say ‘fine’ I get this feeling down the back of my neck,” I said. “Are you really working on homework? Or have you been playing Xbox since you got home from school?”
“No, really, Dad,” Brant, said, pointing his finger back into the kitchen. “Come look.”
I kicked off my work shoes in the mud room beneath my jacket and strolled over to where the boy had the family laptop open. He used the wireless mouse to minimize several windows filled with text, until I was staring at the open web browser.
“I’ve been working on a history report for the Civil War period. Mister Bartell gave us a few days to work on it. But it’s kind of a detective story too, because all he gave us were some old black-and-white photographs to choose from.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
My son pulled up a piece of paper from class. On it, several dozen small images had been printed. Different people and different faces, some of them dressed in uniforms of the North, and some of them dressed in uniforms of the South. I knew my Civil War history as well as any Army National Guardsman should, considering the fact that so much Army history and heraldry traced back to that period.
I noticed that none of the images came with names or dates.
“We have to go out and search for these,” my oldest said.
“How can you search for something if you don’t even know a name?” I said.
“It’s like this,” Brant said, pulling out his cell phone. He used the little camera on the back to snap a photograph of one of the printed photos on the paper. Then he used his fingers to send the image from his phone to the family e-mail account and from e-mail to the hard drive. Then Brant cropped the image—a photo of a photo—and re-saved it as a brand new file. Which he then uploaded to a search engine, except he was using a portion of the search engine I’d never seen before.
“What’s this?” I said, pointing my finger at the laptop screen.
“Image searches. The search compares the image I’m uploading against resident images on the web. I think it compares pixels, or something? Watch . . .”
Within a few seconds, hundreds of thumbnail-sized pictures were on the computer. Some of them didn’t match Brant’s uploaded picture at all. But a few did. He clicked on one of the matches, and it took him directly to a Wikipedia page about the man in question—one of the lesser-known Union generals, of which there had been hundreds during the period.
“I’m using these articles to research my paper,” Brant said with a smile.
“No copying word-for-word,” I cautioned him.
“I know, Dad, I know,” he said.
I smiled and put my fist into his shoulder, just enough to nudge him. Then I stopped and stared intently at the computer for a few seconds.
“Dad?” Brant said. I’d gone ramrod stiff.
“Hang on,” I said, and ran as fast as I could up the stairs to the second floor, then ran back down with the yellowed, crinkly envelope in my hands.
“Can you do what you just did, with this?” I said, pulling out the photo of the little girl.
“Who is she?” Brant asked.
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know. But I am trying to find out. Can you do it?”
“Sure,” Brant said, and took the picture from me. After so much handling, some of the toner was beginning to flake away.
“Careful,” I said.
“I know,” Brant said with a mild tone of annoyance; it was standard teenager sound.
He snapped a picture of the picture with his phone, then sent the image over to the laptop, then had the image cropped and uploaded into the search engine.
I held my breath as we waited for the search results to display.
What I got was a morass of different images, some of which weren’t even pictures of people. I scanned the faces and kept telling Brant to scroll down. But nothing seemed to match. None of the people seemed to be the same girl in the printed image.
I sighed and ran my hand over my almost-buzzed-to-the-skin scalp.
“No luck,” Brant said.
“I guess not,” I said, frustrated.
“What’s this about anyway?” Brant said, giving the picture back to me. I tucked it into the envelope and turned to walk the envelope back upstairs.
“I’ve got a mystery of my own to solve,” I said over my shoulder. “For a moment, I thought you’d discovered a shortcut. Too bad.”
***
At dinner, Brant related the details of his Civil War report to both Audrey and myself. Including my quick ad hoc search for the mysterious little girl named Kasheena.
Audrey scowled at me.
“Dave,” she said, the tone of her voice reprimanding.
I held my hands up, palms out toward her.
“I just wanted to see what might happen,” I said. “It seemed like it would be worth a shot.”
“And what if you had found a match?” Audrey asked. “What were you going to do then?”
My wife and all three of my kids stared at me, each child stopped in mid-bite. That was a damned good question. And I hated to admit that I didn’t have a good answer.
I finally said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’d have gotten a name or an e-mail; something I could use to get a physical mailing address. Make sure that picture and that letter get to whomever they ultimately belong. Lord knows I’d want somebody to do it for me, if it was my letter to one of you. That man who wrote that . . . he swore the same oath I did. ‘To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ That’s a promise that goes way beyond the flag, or even the job. In a way, we’re making a promise to ourselves as well—that we’ll take care of one another, even during times when we can’t be there.”
My kids all seemed to consider this seriously.
Kelly, the middle son, said, “Sometimes that image search thing doesn’t work right.”
“Yeah,” Brant said. “What we should do is put it on a scanner and scan it at high-resolution, then see what happens when we upload.”
“A project for after we eat?” I said
.
All three kids agreed heartily, even my little daughter.
Audrey kept looking at me, shook her head a couple of times, and we went back to finishing the pasta and salad I’d made.
When the meal was over, all three of my kids clustered around the old desktop workstation in the front room, where Audrey and I tended to let the paperwork of the house accumulate. The flatbed scanner made a mechanical whining sound as it warmed up, then we had to wait for several minutes as Brant fiddled his way through the antiquated software, got the scanner to actually scan the image, then sent the high-resolution image over the house wireless network to the laptop on the kitchen table.
Back at the kitchen table, my wife joined us as we watched Brant put the fresh image—much better this time, compared to the one he’d gotten with his phone—into the search engine.
Like before, most of the results didn’t match. Brant scrolled and scrolled, and kept scrolling. My wife’s hand squeezed my shoulder sympathetically—she could feel my disappointment. Then I practically shouted for Brant to stop scrolling, as my arm shot out and my index finger aimed at one small thumbnail.
“There she is,” I said.
“It does look like her,” Kelly said.
“Kasheena! Kasheena!” my daughter Piper declared, and then began to dance around the kitchen table, repeating the name several more times.
Brant clicked the image, which took us directly to a page on one of the social media sites. I only knew the site because Audrey was on there, and so were the boys. I myself hadn’t bothered with that stuff much. Seemed like a great way to waste time. But in this instance, I marveled at the fact that we were now viewing the compiled photo album of a woman named Kasheena Johnson, current residence Chicago. She looked like she was in her early twenties. Some of the current photos showed adult friends clustered around her, at what I guessed to be a university or college classroom, judging by the desks in the background.
“Well,” Audrey said, “isn’t that extraordinary.”
“Send her a message for me,” I said to Brant. “I’m not logged onto this thing, but you are.”
Freedom's Light: Short Stories Page 16
