3

LEARNING HOW TO be an American again came harder than Wells had expected.

His first shock came even before his flight landed in Hong Kong, as the Pakistan Airlines A-310 circled over the city’s lights. Wells hadn’t seen a functioning electrical grid in a long time. The tribal elders in his village had owned two diesel generators, loud stinking beasts that dribbled out enough power for bulbs and a few televisions. But nothing like the sea of yellow-orange lights that glowed below Wells’s window, the blinking red beacons that capped the radio towers on Hong Kong Island, the white shine of the skyscrapers. I’ve forgotten that humans can build as easily as destroy, Wells thought.

The jet landed, and around him passengers stood and grabbed their bags. He could not move, owned by an emotion he could not name, not fear or hope but a sense that time had unfrozen and he had aged a decade in an instant. He knew he should be happy. He was free. Only he wasn’t. He had only moved to a new battlefield, one with even higher stakes. Weariness overwhelmed him, and he sat motionless until the cabin emptied and a flight attendant tapped his shoulder.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Fine.” He shouldn’t call attention to himself. He took his bag and walked off.

Glossy billboards for Hyatt and Gucci and IBM and Cathay Pacific and a dozen other companies filled the air-conditioned arrival hall. Every woman in the ads was more beautiful than the next, and they all displayed enough skin to merit a whipping or worse in the North-West Frontier. Wells pulled his eyes from the billboards and looked around the hall’s polished floors. Women were all around him, Chinese and white and Indian and Filipina. They walked alone, no male escorts, with faces and arms and legs uncovered. Some even wore makeup. A beautiful Japanese teenager, her hair dyed a shocking red, hurried past him, and Wells swiveled his head to watch her. As he did he felt an unexpected irritation. Couldn’t these women be a bit more modest? They didn’t need to wear burqas, but they didn’t have to wear miniskirts either.

On a bench in the arrival hall outside a Starbucks, he puzzled over his reaction. After a decade of celibacy he should be thrilled at the feast of skin before his eyes. Nothing about the Taliban had troubled him more than the way they treated women. He supposed he had internalized the fundamentalist credos more deeply than he had realized. Or maybe he just needed to get laid. Sex had been nearly impossible in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the villagers weren’t interested in marrying their daughters to Qaeda’s guerrillas, much less an American. And sex outside marriage wasn’t worth the risk; the Talibs and Pashtuns were endlessly inventive in their punishments for prostitution and adultery. Wells had seen a man buried alive, and a half dozen others hanged. He had kept his libido locked down. He couldn’t even remember what a woman smelled like.

He would have to change that. Muslims were supposed to save sex for marriage, but Wells knew he couldn’t be chaste forever. He had decided that he would not pay for sex or look for a one-night stand, but if he found the right woman, someone he cared about, he would not wait for a wedding.

He looked at a tall blonde strutting by and hoped he would find the right woman soon.

 

 

HE SPENT THE next week at an anonymous hotel in Kowloon. To pass the time he walked Hong Kong’s teeming streets each morning, then spent afternoons at the city’s Central Library, a massive stone and glass building across from Victoria Park. He paged through newspapers and magazines to catch up on his lost years. Monica Lewinsky and Newt Gingrich. The Internet bubble. The euro. Britney Spears. The 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount. The years before September 11 were as calm as a Montana lake on a hot summer day.

Then the attack. In the yellowing newspapers from 2001 the shock was still palpable. Wells learned about the flyers that the families of the missing had plastered across New York, paper memorials more eloquent than any monument. And about Rudy Giuliani’s answer, that first day, when a reporter asked how many people had died: “More than we can bear.”

What about next time? Wells wondered. What will we have to bear then?

Meanwhile the United States had struck back, stomping into Afghanistan and Iraq, hoping to put its enemies on the defensive. America’s soldiers had punished the forces of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But Wells worried that the United States had stirred a generation of rage among a billion Muslims. Every time an American soldier stepped into a mosque, a jihadi was born. And now the United States seemed trapped in Iraq. Weighing the possibilities gave him a headache. Finally he returned to the safety of the sports pages, reveling as his Red Sox overcame the Yankees and won the World Series. Theo Epstein was a genius.

At night he drank Cokes in the bar of the Peninsula Hotel, looking across Victoria Harbor at the lights of Hong Kong, eavesdropping on expats chattering on their cellphones. Everyone talked all the time, a hypercharged English Wells could barely follow.

“It better happen this week or it’s not going to happen at all—”

“Yeah, Bali this weekend, back here and then San Francisco—”

“These new Intel chips are unbelievable—”

He felt as though he was the only one in the entire city not having sex or making money. Or at least talking about it. For these people globalization was a promise, not a threat. They knew how to surf the world, and they didn’t get paid to notice the folks drowning in the undertow.

Nonetheless Hong Kong did him good. The city’s energy flowed into him, and he felt his own blood beginning to move. He found a dentist to fix his ruined molar. She frowned as she looked inside his mouth. “They don’t have toothbrushes in America?” He showered three times a day to make up for the weeks that had passed between baths in the North-West Frontier, and watched races at the Sha Tin track. He didn’t gamble, but he enjoyed the pageantry of the place, the billionaires walking beside women half their age, the sleek thoroughbreds nearly prancing as they approached the gate. And the roar of the crowd as the horses neared the finish.

One morning he found himself outside the American consulate on Garden Road and felt a pang of guilt. He should already have contacted the agency officials inside. But he couldn’t bring himself to give up his freedom so soon. As soon as he presented himself to the agency he would have a new set of minders. There would be weeks of debriefings, endless questions: Where have you been all these years? Why didn’t you contact us? What exactly have you been doing?

Underlying them all would be a deeper doubt: Why should we trust you anyway?

No. He wasn’t ready. He would report in when he got back to America. Nothing would happen before then anyway. He walked on, leaving the consulate behind.

 

HIS PASSAGE TO Frankfurt and then New York went smoothly. He felt none of the elation he expected when his Lufthansa 747 touched down at Kennedy, only the knowledge that he couldn’t escape his duty much longer.

The immigration officer hardly glanced at his passport, and he spent his first morning in Manhattan wandering as he had in Hong Kong. But he couldn’t help but see the city through Khadri’s eyes, as one big target: the tunnels, the bridges, the New York Stock Exchange, the Broadway theaters, the subways, the United Nations.

And Times Square, of course. When he’d last seen it, the square—really a bowtie-shaped intersection where Broadway meets Seventh Avenue—had been seedy and rundown. Now it matched its claim to be the world’s crossroads. At Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, he watched tourists and locals crawl over one another like ants at a messy picnic. Oversized neon advertisements glowed from the new office towers. News crawled endlessly on digital tickers, the world reduced to dueling strips of orange and green. Drivers leaned on their horns and street vendors tried to outshout them, hawking Statue of Liberty keychains and drawings of Tupac. A huge Toys ‘R’ Us store occupied the corner where he stood, proof that the place had become an all-ages attraction. Wells remembered what somebody—he didn’t know who—had supposedly once said about Times Square: “It must be beautiful if you can’t read.” Business got done here too. The headquarters of Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Viacom were within two hundred yards. Plus, you could drive a truck right through it. If the World Trade Center was Ground Zero, Times Square was Ground One.

Wells could feel a timer counting down somewhere. He headed into the subway and looked for a train to Queens. Eight hours later he was on a Greyhound bus headed for Charleston with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket. He’d stashed the other fifteen thousand in a safe-deposit box in Manhattan, just in case.

 

TWO DAYS LATER, Wells walked through the Minneapolis airport with a brand-new South Carolina driver’s license in his pocket, thanks to that state’s liberal rules for issuing licenses. He was headed for Boise, and from there through the Idaho backcountry to Missoula. He had two stops to make, three people to see: his mom, son, and ex-wife. His last errand before he reported in.

He hadn’t told anyone he was coming. He wanted to surprise his ma, show up in Hamilton and sit in her kitchen while she brewed a pot of coffee and scrambled some eggs. He would kiss her cheek and tell her he was sorry he’d been gone so long. She’d forgive him as soon as she saw him. Mothers were like that. At least his was. As for Evan and Heather…he’d have to see.

He had two hours to kill before his flight to Boise, so he found a TGI Friday’s and sat at the bar to watch the NCAA men’s basketball final, Duke versus Texas. After a few minutes, the man at the next stool turned to look at him. Early forties, a faint tan, close-cropped hair, a thin gold chain around one wrist. “Duke or Texas?”

“Duke,” Wells said. He wasn’t keen to talk, but the guy looked harmless enough.

“Me too. Where you headed?”

Wells shrugged and looked up at the television. The guy didn’t take the hint.

“Me, I’m going to Tampa. I hate Northwest. I flew a hundred and twenty thousand miles last year. They didn’t even upgrade me out of Tampa. I couldn’t believe it. They owe me an upgrade.”

“Yeah,” Wells grunted. The guy must be a salesman. Not that he planned to ask.

“You married?” the guy said. “I’m married. Five kids.”

“Congratulations.”

“Hey, you don’t mind shooting the shit, do ya?”

Wells found himself unable to tell the guy to get lost. He seemed kind of sad, and Wells hadn’t had a casual conversation with another American in a long time. Call it field research.

The guy downed half his beer in a single gulp. “I better switch to shots. Lemme buy you a beer. Name’s Rich, by the way.”

“I don’t drink,” Wells said.

Rich looked at the bartender. “Double shot of Cuervo for me and a beer for my friend—”

“I told you I don’t drink.”

“Sorry, man. Just being friendly. A Coke then.” Rich nodded to the bartender. “You know, I never minded flying before 9/11. Since then I get hammered every time. Even still.”

Wells wondered again if he should leave. He didn’t feel like talking about September 11. He thought about it plenty on his own. But he supposed airports were a natural place for the topic.

“I think to myself, what would I do if somebody pulled out a box cutter?” Rich said. “Tell you what, I’d go down fighting. Be a hero, like those guys on flight 93.”

“Hero?” Wells couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice.

The bartender set a generous helping of Cuervo in front of Rich. “You don’t think those guys were heroes?” Rich looked insulted.

Wells didn’t know much about what had happened on flight 93, but he knew this: trying to save your own skin didn’t make you a hero. Everybody wants to live. You were a hero when you risked your life to save someone else. Usually. Sometimes you were just stupid. He had seen men throw their lives away just to prove they were tough.

Still, some famous battles were remembered for the courage of one side against overwhelming odds. Take Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the Confederates swarming Cemetery Hill against the Union Army. The attack had been a disaster, but the Rebs would always be known for their bravery. Were they heroes or fools? Did the fact that they were fighting for slavery change the answer?

But Wells didn’t feel like debating heroism with Rich the salesman. “Sure. They were heroes.”

Rich raised his shot to Wells. “Salud. Let’s roll. You know what’s weird?”

I’ll bet I’m about to find out, Wells thought. Rich tipped the Cuervo down his throat and pounded the glass against the bar. “My marriage is so messed up.”

Wells tried to look sympathetic.

“My wife, Barbara, she caught me screwing the maid. Consuelo. She’s so pissed. Barbara, that is. Consuelo doesn’t care much.”

Wells racked his brain for an appropriate response. He failed to find it. America seemed to have gotten a lot chattier in his absence. He vaguely remembered television talk shows like Jerry Springer. Now the whole country seemed to be auditioning for one of those reality programs. What kind of person told a total stranger that his wife had walked in on him with the maid?

Rich looked at him and pressed on. “I mean, Barb wasn’t supposed to be home. She comes in, she starts screaming, ‘Fuck you fuck you,’ really screaming—”

So much for being polite, Wells thought.

“You have any dignity?” Wells looked Rich in the eye, a stare that had frozen guys in places much tougher than this. “You even know what that word means? Telling some guy you never met about how you cheated on your wife and got caught. I don’t know you and I don’t want to. Thanks for the Coke.” Wells picked up his bag.

“You don’t understand,” Rich said. “I’m under so much pressure. You know what it’s like trying to pay for two houses and three cars? I can’t remember the last time I slept with my wife. I just needed to touch someone. My life sucks—”

“You know what sucks?” Wells said. “Stepping on a land mine and getting your legs blown off. And you’re four years old. Riding around in a Humvee waiting to get torched by a bomb you can’t even see, like our guys are doing in Baghdad right now.”

“I know—”

“You don’t know shit. You don’t have a clue. You can’t imagine how most people in this world live. And most of ’em have never in their lives bitched as much as you did in the last five minutes. Divorce your wife. Quit screwing the maid. I couldn’t care less.”

“What the fuck do you know about how tough the world is?” Rich said. “You’re sitting here watching TV just like me.”

“Not anymore,” Wells said. He slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar for his Coke and headed for his gate.

 

WELLS SAT OUTSIDE gate C-13 furious with himself. What if the guy had swung at him? So much for keeping a low profile then. But Wells didn’t understand his countrymen anymore. They owe me an upgrade, Rich had said. No. They don’t owe you anything.

Wells knew he needed to relax. Rich the salesman was an alcoholic with a lousy marriage. He would get his act together. Or not. It wasn’t Wells’s business. Yet as Wells looked around the bright, clean airport he wondered whether he would ever belong in America.

 

BUT WHEN HE woke the next morning in Boise he felt almost elated. He hadn’t imagined he would ever see Montana or his ma again. He could have flown straight to Missoula, but he’d wanted to drive, to be alone in the Rockies. He remembered driving down with his dad over Lost Trail Pass for weekends fishing. They’d go to Boise to watch the Hawks, the Class A minor-league baseball team, and buy his mom a present from the jewelry store downtown. “Don’t tell,” his dad always said. “It’s a surprise.”

His dad had been a surgeon at the hospital in Hamilton, south of Missoula. His mom was a teacher. His father had wanted a big family, Wells knew. But his mother had almost died when Wells was born—she’d been hospitalized in Missoula for a month—and her doctors said she could never get pregnant again. So they were three: Herbert, Mona, and John.

Wells had respected his dad, a gruff taciturn man whose skills as a surgeon were renowned across western Montana. Most days, Herbert exhausted his energy in the operating room; when he got home, he would sit in his high-backed leather chair in their living room, sipping a glass of whiskey and reading the Missoula paper. He was never mean, and he wasn’t exactly distant either. He always cheered for Wells at football games. But Herbert had rules, in and out of the operating room, and he expected those rules to be followed.

Now his mom, she was something special. Just about every kid Mona taught fell half in love with her. She was tall and beautiful and always smiling. She’d grown up in Missoula, the product of a crazy love match. In 1936, Wells’s granddad Andrew had been a sailor in the navy. On shore leave in Beirut, Andrew had fallen for Noor, the daughter of a Lebanese trader. Somehow Andrew had convinced Noor—and her family—that she belonged with him in Montana. Noor was the reason for Wells’s dark hair and complexion. And the reason he had known about Islam long before he studied the religion at Dartmouth. He was one-quarter Muslim by birth. Noor had given up her faith when she came to the United States, but she had taught Wells enough for it to intrigue him.

Not that he had much chance to see Islam in action growing up. Hamilton had been a country town when Wells was a kid, a few blocks long. He had loved growing up there, riding his bike everywhere, learning to handle a horse and build a fire. Things had changed about the time he hit puberty. MTV came along to show him and his friends what hicks they were. A lot of kids stopped feeling self-reliant and started feeling bored. Drugs crept from Seattle to Spokane to Missoula and then down U.S. 93 to the Sinclair gas station on the edge of town. He feared that the infestation had only worsened since he left.

 

ON HIS WAY out of Boise, Wells had seen clouds covering the mountains. Still, he’d decided to take the shortest route home, through the mountains on Idaho 21. Now he headed northeast past Boise’s scattered suburbs, the subdivisions packed tight on the open prairie, like cows clustered against an approaching storm. The road turned north and rose toward the clouds beside a fast-running creek. The scrubby ponderosa pines thickened, and snow began to fall. As Wells crested the Mores Creek pass at 6,100 feet, fog swirled over the road. Dead trees clotted the hillsides; Wells remembered vaguely that a huge fire had devastated the area decades earlier. Even now the forest had hardly recovered. The fog grew so thick that he could no longer tell the road from the hills. He did not usually think himself superstitious, but suddenly he felt that he was passing through a netherworld, and nothing on the other side would be the same. Still, he had come too far to turn back. He eased off the gas until his Dodge was hardly moving and crept down the mountain to Lowman. Four hours to drive sixty miles.

After Lowman the weather eased. The road turned east and followed the Payette River along a valley thick with firs. Wells shook his head at his moment of weakness. Since when had the weather dictated his moods? To the south the Sawtooth Mountains cut through the clouds, fierce and broken and looking uncannily like, yes, a hacksaw’s teeth. We westerners are literal-minded, Wells thought. With land as beautiful as this there’s no need to embellish.

At Stanley he swung onto Idaho 75, alongside the Salmon River. The day brightened as the sun tore apart the clouds. Crumbling red sandstone hills gave way to mountains covered with yellow scrub grass that glowed in the light. Beside the road, men in waders cast lures into the river, hoping for steelhead. Wells felt his heart swell. He hadn’t felt so free since he’d joined the agency a decade before. He nearly pulled over and asked to borrow a line for a few minutes, but instead pressed on toward Hamilton.

But by the time he reached Salmon, the last decent-sized town before Hamilton, the sun had set. Wells stopped at the Stagecoach Inn and rented a room for forty-two dollars. He was still nearly three hours from Hamilton, and he didn’t want to wake his mother in the dark.

Salmon was a flyspeck western town, its main street a low row of battered brick buildings. Wells found himself at the Supper Club and Lounge, a dank bar with a karaoke machine and cattle skulls nailed to the walls.

“What can I get you?” the bartender said.

Wells felt his mouth water at the rich greasy smell of meat on the grill.

“A burger,” he said. The meat surely wasn’t halal—slaughtered under Koranic rules, which required the draining of all blood from the animal—but Wells found himself unable to care. He couldn’t remember the last hamburger he had eaten, and suddenly that missing memory seemed to symbolize everything else he had left behind during his decade of war.

The burger came fast. He chewed slowly, making each bite last, and listened to a forty-something woman two stools over joke with an old man in a Minnesota Timberwolves cap. “Fishing’s almost better than skydiving,” she said. “And that’s a hell of a lot better than sex, ’specially when you’re my age.” She laughed, and Wells found himself smiling. She caught him looking and raised her eyebrows. She had streaked blond hair and a wide pretty smile. She slid over and held out her hand. “Evelyn.”

“John.”

“Do you sing, John?”

“No, ma’am,” Wells said, a touch of country slipping into his voice.

“Don’t tell me you don’t sing, handsome.”

“My voice is terrible.”

She patted his hand and turned to the bartender. “Come on, punch up ‘You Are So Beautiful.’”

He had no intention of singing for this woman. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. Instead Evelyn belted out the song, her voice sliding across the notes like a car on an icy road. What she lacked in skill she made up in spectacle, shaking her hips as she leaned toward him, ending with the microphone cradled in both hands. “You—are—so—beautiful—to—me…” The half dozen barflies in the place cheered when she was done, and Wells felt a broad grin crease his face, his first real smile in far too long. She bowed to him and walked back to his stool.

“You were great,” he said.

“You’re up next.”

He shook his head.

“Maybe later, then,” she said, waving the subject aside. “What brings you to Salmon?”

“Passing through,” Wells said. “On my way to Missoula.”

“Where you from?”

This was what he’d feared. Maybe she was just being friendly, or maybe she was bored and looking for fun on a Tuesday night. He shouldn’t feel so skittish. It would be easy enough to lie, and maybe even go home with this woman. But he didn’t want to lie. Not the night before he saw his family.

“I gotta go,” he said.

“Hey, I don’t bite.” She winked and put her hand on his arm. “And I like sex better than skydiving any day.” Wells felt himself flush and stir simultaneously. He had forgotten how shameless American women could be.

“I have to get up real early tomorrow.”

“Whatever.” She turned away. Wells took a last bite of his burger and drove the three blocks to the Stagecoach. In the motel’s parking lot he very nearly turned back to the bar. He could not forget the feeling of Evelyn’s hand on his arm. His skin seemed to burn where she’d touched him. He turned off the engine and trudged up to his room. He had waited a long time for a woman, and he supposed he could wait longer. But not forever.

 

THE PHONE RANG precisely at six A.M., knocking him out of a dreamless sleep. He showered, then quickly dressed and prayed, bowing his head to the floor and reciting the first verse of the Koran. “Bismallah rahmani rahim al hamdulillah rabbi lalamin…” Outside the sun rose and the stars disappeared as the sky turned from black to blue.

Wells had the highway to himself as he headed north toward Lost Trail Pass, the border of Idaho and Montana. Lewis and Clark had followed this route on their way to the Pacific, and the mountains had hardly changed since. At the top of the pass, Wells got out of the Dodge and stood in the quiet air, looking down at the Montana hills ahead. They seemed softer and rounder than those behind.

He reached Hamilton an hour later. The town was bigger than he remembered, and new supermarkets and fast-food restaurants—a Taco Bell, a Pizza Hut—stretched along 93. He turned left on Ravalli Street. There it was. 420 South Fourth. The big gray house on the corner of Ravalli and Fourth.

Except the house wasn’t gray anymore. It was blue. And there was a tricycle in the front yard.

He walked to the door. “Ma?” he shouted. No one answered. He rang the bell.

“May I help you?” A man’s voice.

“It’s John.”

“John who?”

Wells wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere. He wouldn’t have minded if the earth itself had opened and swallowed him whole.

“John Wells. I’m looking for my mother.”

The door opened a notch to reveal Ken Fredrick, who’d been two years ahead of Wells in high school. Penny Kenny, the nastier kids called him, because his family was always flat broke. He and Wells had been something like friends. Kenny was football manager during Wells’s first two years on the team, and he had taken a lot of abuse, especially on the long bus rides to away games. The worst moment came one Friday night near the end of Wells’s first season. Three linemen opened the emergency exit and held Kenny out, his face a few inches above the asphalt of Interstate 90 as the bus hurtled along. Wells could still remember Kenny screaming, maybe the first time he’d heard real panic. After that, Wells invited Kenny to sit with him. Even in ninth grade Wells had been starting middle linebacker and running back, so Kenny got picked on less after that.

“John Wells? Bonecrusher?” Wells hadn’t heard that name in a long time. He had gotten the name because of the way he hit, jaw-dropping tackles that popped off helmets and left guys flat on the field. Running backs and wide receivers hated coming over the middle on him. Wells wasn’t especially big, but he was fast and he knew the secret, the one that coaches couldn’t teach: Don’t slow down. Most defenders pulled up—just a bit—before they made a tackle. They got nervous. It was only natural. Wells never slowed down.

“Man, it’s good to see you,” Kenny said. “Been a long time.” Penny Kenny opened the door and offered up his hand.

“What are you doing here?” Wells unwilling to admit the truth to himself even now.

“I live here, John,” Kenny said. “My wife and I bought the place from your mom years ago. I’m a vice president, at the Ravalli County Bank. People call me Ken now.” The pride in his voice was unmistakable.

“Where’s my ma?”

Kenny swallowed hard. “You didn’t know? She passed on, John. Breast cancer.”

Wells found himself staring at Kenny’s perfect teeth, which had been twisted and uneven when they were kids. You could be in a Crest ad, Wells thought. No Afghan dentists for you. And what are you doing in my house?

Wells wanted to live up to his nickname. His fist clenched as he looked at Kenny and Kenny’s white teeth. But none of this was Kenny’s fault. Kenny was a nice kid.

“She’s at Lone Pine,” Kenny said. “With your dad.”

“I know where my family’s buried, Kenny. Ken.”

“I’m sorry, John,” Kenny said. “I don’t know what else to say. Can I invite you in? Get you some coffee?”

But Wells had already turned away.

 

TEARS ROLLED SILENTLY down his face as he drove south on 93 to the Lone Pine Cemetery in Darby. Wells couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried, or even when he’d wanted to, but he was crying now. He hadn’t allowed himself to think that his ma might have…passed on. Died. Gone to the Great Prairie in the Sky. Ha. Good one, John.

She couldn’t have died. He’d gone to the end of the world and he hadn’t died. All she had to do was play bridge with her friends and tend the flowers outside her big old house. She couldn’t have died. But she had, and the proof was in the granite gravestone that stared up at Wells near the back of the cemetery. Mona Kesey Wells, 1938–2004. Loving wife, cherished mother, honored teacher. A cross engraved in the stone. His father lay beside her, Herbert Gerald Wells, 1930–1999. Wells knelt before them and closed his eyes, hoping to feel their presence, to feel anything at all. He murmured the eighty-second sura of the Koran, an invocation of Judgment Day:

 

When the sky is torn

When the stars are scattered

When the seas poured forth

And the tombs burst open

Then a soul will know what it has given and what left behind…

 

But all he heard was the traffic rolling by on 93 and the graveyard’s American flag flapping in the morning breeze. Wells knew he ought not to blame God for the loneliness he felt, but he couldn’t help himself. God, Allah—whatever His name, He was gone at this moment when Wells needed Him most.

Wells walked to the cemetery’s edge. No fence marked its border. The graves simply stopped a few feet before the ground sloped down to a set of railroad tracks. He looked east into the sun until his eyes burned. He could almost see his faith coming loose, pouring out and floating away in the wind. In the distance a locomotive whistle sounded. Wells waited, but no train came. He walked back to his car. He had never felt so empty.

 

HE DROVE INTO Missoula slowly, trying to escape the feeling that he ought to give up this foolish journey and head for Washington. Missoula had grown even faster than Hamilton. Subdivisions crawled up the hills where Wells and his family had ridden horses. His ma had loved to ride. His ma. Again he felt tears coming, but this time he choked them back. He had sacrificed those years for a reason. No one in Qaeda would have trusted him if he had come back to the United States on his own. His mother had never questioned his decision to become a soldier. Now he needed to control his emotions and do what he needed to do. He didn’t know how else to honor her.

He edged his way into town. At least he knew Heather wasn’t dead—he had called her from New York. He’d hung up when she answered, feeling slightly dirty.

He parked outside Heather’s house, a nice white two-story. As he looked at the place he felt sure he wouldn’t be welcome. He walked slowly to the front door and rang the bell. A little boy opened the door. “Is your mom here?” Wells asked.

“Mom!” The boy ran off.

He heard Heather’s small feet padding toward the door.

“Yes?” She slipped the chain and opened the door. She was as beautiful as he remembered, a country girl with honey-blond hair and deep brown eyes, tiny and perfect. He towered over her, and he had loved to pick her up and carry her to their bed. They had been wild together. But there had always been part of him that she couldn’t reach, and they had drifted apart after he joined the agency. When he said he was going underground and couldn’t promise when he’d be back, she gave him an ultimatum: the job or me. The job or Evan, who at the time had just turned two. She told him she wouldn’t wait. And she didn’t. He couldn’t blame her.

When she saw him her eyes opened wide and a low sound—half-sigh, half-grunt—came from her throat. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it.

He reached out for her. She hesitated, then gave him half a hug, holding her hips back so they wouldn’t touch him.

“John,” she said.

“Can I come in?”

She motioned him in. The living room was nicely furnished, Wells saw. A handful of children’s books lay on the coffee table. Nineteenth-century drawings of men in robes and wigs hung on the walls. A life that had no intersection with his own. He bit his cheek and tried to think of something to say.

“What’s with them?” He pointed to the drawings. Then, feeling as though he’d already stumbled, he tried to make the question less hostile. “They’re neat, is all I mean.”

“Howard’s a lawyer.”

“Howard?”

“My husband.” She pointed to a picture: Heather, a handsome paunchy man who must be Howard, Evan, and two young children, a boy and a girl. “That’s George, and Victoria. Howard has a thing for English royalty.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. It wasn’t an answer to his question. “I figured you must be dead when you didn’t come to Mona’s funeral.”

“No such luck.”

“She missed you, John. She thought you’d come back.”

“I didn’t know.”

“They didn’t tell you on super-spy radio or something? Give you the bat signal so you could come home?”

Wells tried not to think of his mother in her hospital bed, waiting and dying. Then just dying.

“I’m sorry, John. I didn’t mean that. You always were a mama’s boy, that’s all. I figured if you were anywhere on the planet you’d be back.”

“I never thought of myself as a mama’s boy.” But he couldn’t deny that some of his fondest memories growing up were of Mona baking in their kitchen, while Herbert worked at the hospital or read in his study. Wells smiled. “Maybe I was. So this is your life?”

A look he couldn’t read crossed her face. “This is my life. Married. Three kids. Boring.”

“Heather—”

“Whatever you’re gonna say, just don’t.”

“Can I see Evan?”

“He’s at Little League practice at the YMCA.”

“He plays baseball?”

“Third base. He doesn’t even know who you are, John.”

Wells felt as though she’d slapped him. “Tell you what. Stay here a year, be his dad, you can see him. Heck, you can teach him all that spy stuff.”

“Heather—”

“Six months?” Pause. “A month? Is your son worth a month to you, John?”

Wells was silent. She was right. He couldn’t begin to tell his son what he’d done, where he’d been. And what if the boy accepted him and then he disappeared again? What then?

Heather’s face softened as she saw him nod.

“What do you tell him?”

“That you’re a soldier. That you’re fighting a war that we have to win. The truth.”

She smiled as she said the last two words, and he wondered if she still loved him. Not that it mattered. “Do you remember—” she started to say. She broke off as the phone rang, an electric trill that went six rings and then stopped.

“No answering machine?” he said.

“Voice mail.”

Huh. Voice mail had been much less popular when he’d left. A meaningless glimmer of a thought, but for a moment it pulled his mind from this miserable day. “What were you going to ask me?” he said.

But her smile had disappeared, and he knew she wouldn’t say. The phone had pulled her back to her life now, and she had no place for him in it.

“You should go, John.”

He looked around the room, trying to imprint it in his mind so he would have something of her to remember. Suddenly she cocked her head, a tic he knew well. “Why’d you come home?”

“What?”

“You’re still working for the agency.” It wasn’t a question. He wondered if she’d been asked, or told, to call in if she saw him. “So why are you here? Why now?”

“You know I can’t say.”

“Do they know that you’re here? In America?”

“Of course.”

But he had never been able to lie to her, and he could see she knew he was lying now. Her face showed her uncertainty. He wished he could explain, tell her how he had ended up here without a person in the world he could trust. Instead he walked to the door. As he stepped through, he felt his hand on her arm. He turned, and she hugged him, for real this time. He closed his eyes and hugged her even harder.

Then she let him go.

 

WELLS SAT IN his rented Dodge and tried to burn his son’s picture into his mind. Finally he slipped the car into gear and rolled off, driving slowly toward the YMCA. But when he reached the fields he didn’t recognize Evan.

 

HEATHER WATCHED HIM leave. When the Dodge had disappeared, she pulled a business card from her wallet and picked up her phone to make a call that would push the United States closer to the deadliest terrorist attack in history. She punched in the numbers. The phone rang twice.

“Is this Jennifer Exley?” Heather said. She paused. “Jennifer? It’s Heather Murray…. Yes. John Wells’s ex-wife.”