“Sir, what if I want to go?” Mike didn’t flinch. It wasn’t a matter of hiding his fear. He simply had none. His copilot was single, a guy everyone called CJ. The two of them were legend in wartime missions. Legend getting in and out of situations like the one the colonel had just described.
They would handle the mission better than anyone.
“At this point, we want someone else. You and Ceej are my ace crew. The best we’ve got.” Colonel Whalin pinched his cigarette between his second and third fingers and brought it down to desk level. “Give it some thought. We want the insurgents gone before the next Iraqi election.”
“January, sir?”
“Yes. January.” The colonel checked a document on his desk. Outside the wind howled against the tent. “December 12.” His tone was flat. “That’s D-Day.” He took another drag and held it. After a few seconds he brushed his hand out in front of him. The smoke curled up from his lips. “Get back to your quarters. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The colonel dismissed him, and two minutes later Mike was back in his tent, sitting on the edge of his cot. He linked his fingers at the base of his neck and stared at his boots.
Someone dispensable?
He went down the list. Joe and Sage and Larry and Gumbo were the two crews with the least experience, and eleven children between them. Tito and Fossie were fresh off their honeymoons. Andy and Stoker, and Jimbo and Junior all had kids on the way. He worked his fingers into the muscles at the base of his neck and turned his head first one way, then the other.
All five of the other crews were made up of men with a reason to live.
But what about him and CJ? No wives, no family. Nothing to lose. It was part of what made the two of them such good chopper pilots. They took risks other pilots wouldn’t, but they always came out on top. No fear, no failure. Wasn’t that what they told each other?
The fact that he and Ceej had more experience didn’t make them less dispensable. It made them more likely to come out alive. If anyone could handle the mission, they could. With CJ by his side, he could hover a chopper twenty minutes if he had to. They would spot an insurgent with an RPG and duck out for a few minutes if they had to. They could have the gunner fire on anyone aiming anything in their direction. Never mind the odds; they could handle the mission better than any of the crews. With CJ, Mike could take the cockpit and fly with nerves of steel, no reservations, nothing in his rearview mirror.
He reached under his cot and felt the worn brown paper sack.
Nothing but this.
M
ike scanned the rest of the cots in his tent—the men spread out, snoring beneath their dusty sheets. A single light hung above him, bright enough to see the contents of the bag if he wanted to. And tonight he did. He slid it out and stared at it. It wasn’t much, the bag. Just a little bigger than an average lunch sack. The top was scrunched closed and worn around the edges, proof that Mike had carried it with him for eleven years. Wherever his cot was set up, the bag was beneath it.
He opened the mouth of the bag, and with careful hands he took out the contents. He spread them on his sheet and looked at the items one at a time. There was a photo of Hannah in his arms when she was an infant, and another taken three years later that showed the two of them building a sandcastle on the beach. Scattered among the items were the broken clay pieces of a miniature playhouse she’d made for him with modeling clay she’d gotten for her third birthday.
“You and me, Daddy.”
Her little girl singsong voice sounded in his heart every time he saw the broken pieces.
“This’ll be our house someday.”
Funny how even back then she hadn’t mentioned her mother. Daddy and me this, and daddy and me that. Hannah had liked her mother, but Carol had been more of a kindhearted roommate than a caring, involved parent.
“She needs you,” Mike could hear himself telling Carol. “Spend a little time with her, why don’t you?”
“I already told you.” Carol would toss her brown hair and scowl at him. “I wasn’t ready to be a mother. That sort of thing doesn’t just happen when the baby comes. It takes time.”
Lots of things didn’t happen when the baby came. He had convinced her to have Hannah in the first place, and once that part was decided, he’d done his best to make them both happy. Three years later, when she hinted at leaving, he brought home a wedding ring and asked her to be his wife. But by then she had school and careers on her mind. “We can get married later,” she told him.
Mike moved his fingers over the broken clay pieces from the bag. His eyes fell on something else—a folded piece of lined paper. The creases were yellowed from age; a few of them had worn through the page, leaving long, narrow slits in the paper. He opened it and felt himself smile, the way he always smiled when he looked at the crayoned drawing.
Hannah had made it for him two weeks before he left for basic training. It was a little girl consisting of a big head, short stick legs, and round blue eyes. Stick arms stuck out straight on either side, and one appeared to be attached to an equally straight stick arm belonging to a man. Both of them had oversized U-shaped smiles, and a not-quite-round yellow sun took up the left side of the sky above them. On the right side she had written her first sentence:
Hannah loves Daddy.
That was it—all he had to remember her by, all he had to push him on the days when he thought he’d never leave the desert alive. Whenever he felt himself getting down, he checked the bag. The clay pieces and photographs, the folded drawing, were enough to remind him of the most important thing:
He had to come home alive so he could find her.
Back when they all lived together in his father’s house a block from the beach, Mike had felt things falling apart. Carol came from money. At first she found Mike and his simple existence refreshing and daring, but eventually the novelty wore off. By the time Hannah was two, Carol complained about their living conditions.
“Lifeguards are drifters, Mike.” She would put her hands on her hips. “I love you, but I need more than this. There must be something else you can do.”
He hadn’t known what, but one day he heard two of the other guards talking about the Air Force. Four years. Free education and career training. Maybe something like that would make Carol happy. He went with his buddies to the recruiting office and smiled big at the man behind the desk.
“I want to be a pilot, sir. Is this the right place?”
The man sized him up. “You got a four-year degree, son?”
Mike felt his shoulders slump a little. “No, sir. I figured I’d get that in the Air Force—while I was learning how to fly planes.”
“Right.” The man smiled. “It doesn’t work that way in the Air Force, son. But I tell you what. You go next door and go through a door marked ‘Army,’ and you can sign up to be a chopper pilot.” He smiled again. “How’s that sound?”
A chopper pilot? Mike took only a few seconds to mull over the idea. Flying choppers wouldn’t be bad. He remembered a comment Carol had made—that she’d always figured she’d marry a politician or an officer, someone of stature. He cleared his throat. “Could I be an officer if I flew choppers in the Army?”
“Definitely.” The man gave a firm nod. He pointed to the door. “You learn how to fly a chopper and you’ll be an Army warrant officer, son.”
Doubt flashed in his mind. “How long, sir? How long for training?” Carol would only be patient so long.
“Eight weeks for basic,” the man stroked his chin. “Maybe another eight to twelve weeks for tech training. Then you’d be off to a base where you’d spend the next eighteen months learning to fly choppers.”
Eight weeks of basic and another eight plus weeks of tech training? Mike did the math in his head. That meant at least four months away from Carol and Hannah. But after that they could be together on the base while he went to pilot school. A surge of ambition welled up within him. The plan was all he had, the only way he could become the sort of man Carol wanted him to be.
He nodded at the man behind the desk. “Thank you, sir.” He gave a quick salute and a smile. “I’ll be heading next door now.”
In a matter of hours he was no longer a carefree surfer, a lifeguard at the beach. He was an Army man, a person with a potential and a future. When Carol came home from school that night, Mike was ready with the news. He grinned at her and held up the Army folder. “I figured everything out,” he told her. “Wait’ll you hear.”
Carol waited, but she had one foot out the door almost before he was finished with the details. “Army? Mike, are you crazy?” She huffed and tossed her designer bag on the scuffed tabletop. “I don’t want to marry an Army man! I wanna be the wife of a lawyer or a professor or a politician. Something … ” She waved her hands about in front of her face, frustrated. “Something with a little class and prestige.”
“I’ll be an officer, Carol. That has to count for something.”
“An Army officer, Mike? Are you serious?”
Her words were like bullets, ripping holes in the fragile plans he’d laid out for himself. Training would take him away for sixteen weeks, but it took only days to figure out Carol’s course of action.
“I need time, Mike. I need to be with my parents.”
“It’s not like I’m leaving you, Carol.” He clenched his jaw. “I’ll be gone four months, that’s all.”
“So maybe I spend that time back at home, and then we can talk.”
“Talk, Carol?”
“Yes.” Her voice was frantic, anxious. She exhaled and made an obvious attempt to calm herself. “Talk about whether we’ll still have a reason to be together.”
Mike could tell by looking at her that she was going to leave. There was nothing he could do to stop her. “What about Hannah?”
“You can see her. With or without me.” Carol touched his shoulder, her eyes more tender than before. “Get through training and then you can look us up.”
Mike should’ve known better, should’ve realized the dangerous situation he was in when it came to Hannah. But even in his most uncharitable moments, he never once imagined that Carol would leave with his daughter, disappear without a trace or a trail. It never occurred to him that he would spend the next eleven years searching for the dark-haired little girl who had worked her way into the fabric of his soul.
He started his training and convinced himself Carol would move to the base, that she’d marry him and they could live together while he was in pilot training. Surely she would realize his potential and jump at the chance for the three of them to be a family again. They talked three times in the early weeks before she and Hannah left for her parents’ house.
“I’ll go for a month, that’s all. Don’t call me, Mike. I’ll call you.” Carol told him before she moved. “My parents need time to adjust.”
Carol called him once from her parents’ house. At the end of the call she put Hannah on the line.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, sugar.” Mike’s heart beat so hard he expected it to burst through his chest and bounce around on the floor. “I miss you.”
“Miss you, too.” Her singsong voice sounded sad, flat. “Come home, Daddy. Mommy doesn’t read to me.”
“Where is home, baby?” Mike wasn’t testing her. He only wondered what Carol had told her.
“I’m with Grandmother and Grandfather.” Hannah thought for a moment. “But home is where you are, Daddy. So come, okay?”
Mike could barely speak by the time Hannah handed the phone back to Carol. After that the phone calls stopped. When he finished training, the only information he had for her wound up being a bad address and a wrong phone number.
At first Mike drove himself crazy looking for her.
He checked phonebooks and called schools and churches in the Virginia and Washington, D.C, area, desperate to find her. He was sure he’d find them in a matter of weeks. His little Hannah needed him, and Carol had promised. She wouldn’t keep him from her.
But the weeks slipped into months as his training continued. Every chance he had he looked for them, and even when five years became seven and then nine he held out hope. She was out there somewhere. Carol had married, of course. That was the reason he couldn’t find anyone by her last name. But still they were somewhere.
It wasn’t until his recent deployment, the past year in the desert that his hope began to erode. She would be fifteen now, far too old to remember him even if he could find her. If he survived Iraq, it was time to move on, to find another life. Time to let go of the one he’d imagined in his heart and mind every time he climbed into a fighter jet.
He looked at the scattered remains of the dream, the broken pottery and aging artifacts. One at a time he placed them back in the bag and crumpled the neck closed again. He would always keep the bag, but only as a reminder of what used to be. His fingers tightened around the bag and he held his breath.
It was over. The hoping and searching and believing that he’d find his Hannah again … all of it was over. It had been over a lot longer than he cared to admit. No wonder he could look his commander in the face and tell him the truth straight up. The mission belonged to him. He was perfect for the job. Not so much because of his experience, but because of his lack of connection. He had no family, no wife, no dark-haired daughter to come home to. No one to grieve his loss if he never made it out alive. CJ was no different.
He clenched his jaw and slid the bag back beneath his bed. His commander was right. Maybe some men were dispensable.
And if that were true, maybe he was one of them.
T
he house was dark like always.
Hannah stepped out of the Town Car, waved good-bye to Buddy Bingo, and crept through the front door. The lights were off, same as outside. A chill ran down Hannah’s arms, a combination of the quiet darkness and a draft that always marked the entryway of their home.
“Grandmother?”
There was no answer, and Hannah frowned. Sometimes she went days without seeing her grandmother, since the older woman went to bed early and woke up late. It was more like living alone all the time. She sighed and the sound rattled in the foyer. She closed the door behind her and dropped her gym bag. Cheerleading had been brutal and she had only half an hour until dance.