“Pardon?” says Jason. He’s thinking about the White House. He’s thinking about his godfather. He went to the White House when he was little. He shook Reagan’s hand.
“No one thought those VCs would have followed us home with weapons of mass destruction.”
“No one thought you could take down a commercial airplane with a knife and a box cutter.”
“I’m only saying that the price of leaving then was a bit—different. You got in and you counted the nights until you left. Six months until transfer to a desk job? A year? And then you could say, ‘I left,’ and people understood. Leaving now is different.”
“You can’t compare—”
“We still haven’t got the guys we need to get. There’re still too many dirty rooms. Leaving now is like—is like leaving the woods when the deer is dancing right into your sights.”
Jason disagrees. “Respectfully, it’s never a good time,” he says. “The deer’s always right there. Or it’s the ninth inning. It’s always the time where commitment is most crucial.”
“You don’t hunt.” The platoon chief leans back on his elbows, looking over the room. He has never been to visit Jason like this before. He’s never stayed this long.
“I get the idea. Only the deer is not just one deer. There are too many deer. I see deer in my sleep at night.” And then, after what feels like a while, he adds, “I am my mother’s only son.”
“Right. You could be the one to take out the world’s most wanted criminal, but to her you’ll always be the only one responsible for providing the grandkids.”
“Something like that,” Jason says.
As they talk, the platoon chief picks up one of Jason’s knives and flips it open and shut, casually. They talk about their last trip, the increased attention given now to where they are, what they think about the quality of the platoon. They talk about an article that ran recently in a military journal about the Israeli raid on Entebbe, and about that mission’s place in the history of terrorist acts and hostage rescues. They talk about the Mossad, and a guy who came through the base recently who is apparently now working with the Sayeret Matkal out of Beirut.
“Entebbe. That was a work of art of an op,” the platoon chief says.
“July Fourth.”
“Yep. Independence Day. I’ve heard it’s beautiful there.”
“Uganda?” says Jason.
“Israel.” They laugh. And the platoon chief continues:
“Look, just don’t drop out now because you’re
tired
, all right? Or because you feel guilty about other … responsibilities. You have a gift for this. And God doesn’t give a lot of gifts. Men raised by single mothers tend to think really highly of themselves. They also tend to be really vulnerable when pressed to a place where
they don’t feel protected. I expected you to be lazy. Fancy parents, private schools.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming?”
“But you’re not like that. That’s all. That’s what’s ‘but.’ ”
“My parents weren’t fancy,” Jason says.
“I am simply saying.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your mother will be fine. Want me to call her?” And nodding his head in the direction of a framed photograph of Sara on the desk he says, “Please, can I call her?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Other jobs aren’t going anywhere either. Girls aren’t going anywhere. Girls. Fishes in the sea, Priest. And you can swim faster than all the other predators.”
“This may be true.”
“Glass half full,” the platoon chief says again, as he stands to leave.
In October, Jason plans a short leave and a return home. He will surprise his mother for her birthday. She deserves it, and he needs it. As he thinks seriously about the next year, and about whether or not he will move forward with any concrete exit plans, he knows his first advice should come from Sara. Her birthday is October 3, so he decides to drive north that morning, to arrive at the house in the early afternoon in time to catch the magic light off the porch, the light that almost always hangs around for an Indian summer in that part of the world. If he had to guess, he would say that at that hour she would be up in her office, staring at the screen while dreaming about something other than the words she was working on. When he asked her once how she could rape and pillage an article so quickly with so much red ink, she responded, after objecting to the uses of
rape
and
pillage
, that when reading something for the first time, she didn’t read for “macro ideas”; she simply read for misplaced semicolons. “The grammar line of battle,” she called the first read. “The front line.”
Sometimes when a sniper gets a target in his sights, before he shoots, he still needs to press another button on the barrel, the one that links a signal home, sometimes even to the White House, for final approval. It occurs to Jason that his mother’s work has a
similar shape to this: while not about life and death, her work is service in support of Other People’s Ideas. She is like a shooter, never credited. Yet if he made this observation to her, she would mock it. For all her heart, she takes her work at once deeply seriously and not seriously at all. Upon realizing it is the perfect hour for raspberries, she can walk away from editing an op-ed calling for regime change in sub-Saharan Africa, on deadline. She will drop her red pencils and go gather the new berries from the backyard bush, being careful not to bruise them in case they wreck her recipes.
Focus, restraint; focus, restraint; focus, restraint
. Her mind is not unlike her son’s in its nimbleness—and its depth. It is also like his in its inveterate optimism. She spends a lot of time reading about wrongs in the world, but she still gets up most mornings feeling calm and hopeful.
This particular skill speaks to her resilience—of mind, of spirit, of character. It is the gene that makes Jason think he can take or leave his current work. When the time comes, he will commit. Pulling into the driveway, he is thinking that marriage may be even harder for Sara to face than his time in the military. In marriage, there is more chance—and more chaos.
A son is your son until he takes a wife—
Sara’s car is there, with the windows open.
There’s that optimism again
, Jason thinks. She doesn’t count the clouds. He can tell from the angle at which the truck is parked, and the way the front door is positioned on its hinge: she’s home.
He smiles to see the flag, still in the same place, even after he encouraged her to affix it to the house itself rather than leave it poled in the ground by the oak trees. Most houses in the neighborhood have flags now, the locals having separated their politics from their views about the troops. He thinks about the flag sitting on the floor of his bedroom in Virginia Beach, not yet hung, and
about the girl who rolled off his bed onto it. “How many stars tall am I?” she’d asked, stretching her arms above her head. “And how many stripes wide?”
He parks his car down the driveway, by the shed that used to be a refuge for old scooters but that as far as he knows now is a palace for rats. Closer to the house, she might hear his engine cut. He enters the house quietly. On a small table in the small foyer, there are the day’s newspapers:
New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Wilmington News Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer
. It’s Sunday, and he knows she saves the papers to read at night, in bed. He walks up the stairs, very careful to make no noise. He can see that the door to her office—too old and uneven to ever close quite properly—is wide open. “Hey,” he says.
She looks up from her desk to see the son she hasn’t seen since spring. He is wearing jeans and the cable-knit sweater she gave him years ago that remains her favorite thing to see him in, as he knows. He looks like a kid who wouldn’t hurt a fly; there’s just something preternaturally gentle about his physical presence. She still sometimes thinks that when he leaves, he’s leaving to teach kindergarten in Norfolk, not to save lives in Sana’a or Aqaba. He could pass for a teacher; he could pass for anything. She takes a long look at him before the hug. “You look skinny,” she says.
“Don’t ever tell a guy he looks skinny, Ma. It’s not cool.”
“What should I tell him?”
“Tell him he looks—tell him he looks handsome.”
“I haven’t seen you this handsome since high school.”
She holds his face in her hands and takes a deep breath. “Christ,” she said. “Why didn’t you call?”
“Element of surprise,” he says. “And managing expectations. I
wasn’t sure what my schedule was like. I have to drive back in the morning. Maybe even tonight.”
“Well, what do you want to do? Sleep?”
“You know what I’d love to do? Have you run today?”
“Nope,” she says. “Let’s do that. And then I’ll check the icebox. A boy as handsome as you needs a real supper.”
“Let me change,” he says.
“I’ll meet you by the flag.”
On his bed is a pile of laundry that was probably placed there the last time he was home—jeans, sweaters, some extra shirts. He chooses one that does not belong to him, but he knows its origin. After David died, Sara had dated someone on the board of the Langley School; things got somewhat serious, and then she’d pulled away. Jason later liked teasing his mother, when she wore it, that she “survived a great relationship and all she got was this lousy T-shirt.”
The word
Langley
had meaning for both of them. It still stood as code for the start of Sara’s relationship with David, an apt code for something that had been soldered in secrecy. Jason was sure the shirt having been placed on his bed meant his mother was giving it to him. It had never really fit her properly anyhow, and she had lost even more weight since he left home the last time. It was a classic baseball shirt, the kind with bracelet sleeves and a C-shaped hem. It was royal blue and white, with
THE LANGLEY SCHOOL LEOPARDS
spelled out across the chest.
“That’s for you,” she said. “It doesn’t really fit me anymore.”
“You can take my old Academy tops as a trade. As luck would have it”—and he flexes a muscle—“they don’t really fit me anymore.”
They run slowly and talk. She asks about how things are going,
respectfully keeping her questions vague and letting him guide the level of specificity of things. She asks about the leadership of his current platoon and whether he has been able to ask any of the men he looks up to for advice about his future. She knows he always had a rule—“five deployments, maximum”—in his mind when he started, but she also knows that nothing is fixed in life, and that things change; circumstances shift. She’s been as ready for her son to say he’s staying in the Teams as a freshman who prepares for her breakup with a senior in advance of graduation.
When they arrive at the main road, he looks both ways before crossing and then remembers that the chances of encountering a car, on a Sunday, at this hour, are about the same as the chances of encountering a Playboy bunny in the jungle.
“God, it’s so isolated here,” he says.
“Haven’t you noticed,” she says.
“Are you sure—don’t you ever think about leaving? What about moving back to D.C.?”
“I don’t have the pulse for that anymore.”
“I just worry.”
“
You
worry?”
“You don’t have to worry about me anymore,” he says. “You vastly overestimate the risk in what I do, I think. Or maybe you vastly underestimate my level of skill at what I do.”
At home, there is a white square box sitting on the front porch. Sara opens it; it’s a cake. A beautiful chocolate cake, with a tiny paper American flag affixed to a toothpick stuck into its top. There’s a card; Jason takes it and reads it. “ ‘Happy Birthday, From the CS Office.’ What’s the CS office?”
“County sheriff.”
“How’s the county sheriff know it’s your birthday?”
“I had a little incident out here a few weeks ago, and they helped me out.”
“Incident?”
“Yeah, not a big deal.”
“Come on.”
“Someone broke into the house. I don’t know who it was, and I don’t know what they wanted, but—they left. They came and prowled around a bit, and they left.”
“Jesus.”
“The cops were here right away. The birthday thing came up as the cops were joking about the stars being out that night.”
“And?”
“And they were saying that starry nights weren’t good for criminals, so clearly this guy was a novice. We were talking about stars, and we started talking about signs. And one of the guys said that a disproportionate number of criminals were Tauruses, to which of course I took objection. Then they thought Taurus was my sign, and then I said, ‘No, I’m a Libra.’ Et cetera.”
“Et cetera? Was he flirting with you?”
“It wasn’t a he, it was a they, and I don’t know. I don’t care. Anyhow, they wanted to reinforce the locks on the house, and I told them, you know, about you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them a little bit about what you do. I was trying to imply that I’m well protected.”
“But I’m not here anymore.”
“But you’re—well, I guess you’re right. You’re not here anymore.”
Sara takes the cake out of its box, licking the caught frosting from her fingers. She places it on a plate in the little kitchen. She
thinks about what else she can cook that night, in an effort not to think about the fact that her son is leaving within a few hours. In fact, he has already left. The mood has shifted from one of arrival and happiness to one of leaving. It is always like this. And it never gets easier.
“I think I’ll just shower,” Jason says. And he doesn’t move.
“Go on, shower and rest. I will root around for something to make for us that goes with cake.”
At dinner, Sara’s still careful not to ask any questions that might make him feel pressure. “No pressure,” she always said when he was trying to decide whether to come home or not. “No pressure,” she always wrote at the end of her letters. She was adamant that she would appreciate the upsides: the fact that he’d elected to surprise her. The fact that he looked well. The fact that he seemed happy. She finds candles in the cupboard and places twenty-seven of them carefully around the little flag. When she places the cake on the table, it takes her son about six seconds to count the candles.