And that’s who goes to see Adam, who pulls up to the airport terminal in Kansas City a few minutes after Michael arrives. “Let me get up,” Michael says to the attendant wheeling him through the airport when he sees Adam through the terminal window getting out of his car. “Stay in the chair,” the attendant tells him as he tries to stand up. “Stay in the chair. Stay in the chair.”

  The next morning, Adam knocks on Michael’s hotel door to take him to breakfast. He can hear Michael moving around inside. He knocks again. Eventually the door opens, and there’s Michael, dressed only in shorts.

  “Hungry?” Adam asks him.

  “Yeah. I gotta get dressed first,” Michael says, and it takes a moment for Adam to realize he needs help. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Nope,” Adam says. “How’s it work?”

  He comes into the hotel room, and Michael shows him one of his braces, next to his cane. It is the one to hold his useless left arm in place, like a sling of sorts. Michael sits in a chair. His hair is buzzed short, and chunks of it are missing where he is scarred. He has another scar on his neck from the tracheotomy and a rectangular lump on his back, inside of which is a pump that pushes out doses of a drug to help reduce his spasticity. Tentatively, Adam slides the brace up Michael’s arm and tightens its straps across his back, just under his shoulder blades. “Like that?”

  “Yeah,” Michael says.

  “How tight do you want it?”

  “Snug.”

  Adam tightens the straps more. “Goddamn, that’s gotta be uncomfortable all day.”

  “Yeah it is,” Michael says. “Make it a little tighter.”

  “Okay,” Adam says.

  Next, he kneels and straps the second brace around Michael’s lower leg. “Snug,” Michael says again, and Adam tightens that, too.

  He helps Michael into a T-shirt.

  He ties Michael’s shoes.

  He helps with the third brace, which has been designed to keep Michael’s fingers from curling into a claw. “Can you move your fingers?” he asks.

  “No,” Michael says, and then, reconsidering the mystery of who he has become, says, “If I yawn, they’ll move a bit. So that gives me hope. And when I ejaculate, my foot twitches.”

  Adam looks at that foot now, which he is glad to see is as steady as can be. Bit by bit, he is getting used to this man whose blood he still can taste. He straightens up. “Does one side of your dick not work?” he asks.

  “No, it works fine,” Michael says, laughing. He is getting used to Adam, too.

  The ride home from the airport had started awkwardly. “Well, the weather’s supposed to be pretty good this weekend,” Adam said once he got Michael in the car. “You hot? Cold?”

  “I’m all right,” Michael said.

  “This drive takes forever, it seems like,” Adam said after some silence. Ten minutes down at that point. Two hours to go until Junction City.

  But Michael hadn’t come all this way not to talk about what had happened, and soon he was saying, “My first deployment, I didn’t get a scratch on me. My second more than made up for it.” And Adam, who talks to no one—not Saskia, according to Saskia, not therapists, according to therapists—also wanted to talk.

  “Yeah, my first two were good. The third one broke me mentally,” he said.

  “I went through a suicidal stage,” Michael said. “At one point I tried to bite through my wrists.”

  “I heard about that. It made me sick. It made me sick. I feel like I’m responsible for that,” Adam said.

  “But you’re not.”

  “I know.”

  And it was at that point that Michael told Adam what he remembered of that day, that he kept saying, “My head hurts,” and Adam kept saying, “You’ll be all right,” and that once Adam got him down three flights of stairs and he had been placed on a litter, Adam tripped over something and nearly dropped him.

  Adam remembered that, too. He remembered all of it. He remembered that the gunshot seemed the loudest he had ever heard in his three deployments and thousand days of combat. He remembered running with his eighty pounds of gear up to the roof of the building. He remembered grabbing a corner of the litter Michael had been put on and that Michael kept rolling off of it as he went into and out of consciousness, making it impossible to maneuver him down the stairs. He remembered putting the litter down, stripping off his gear, and telling some other soldiers to hoist Michael onto his back. He remembered the sudden dead weight of this dying man. He remembered his mouth filling with blood and gulping for air as he moved down the stairs and his mouth filling again. He remembered the taste of the blood, the smell of the blood, the heat of the blood, and the wet of the blood as it spilled down his chin and onto his uniform and through his uniform and onto his skin. He remembered helping to lay Michael back on the litter at the bottom of the stairs and saying, “You’ll be all right.” He remembered picking up the end with Michael’s head, which was the slippery end, and his legs turning to jelly as he stepped through the door, and he remembered the rest of it, too: tripping over something unseen, Michael falling, the floor a few inches away, the coming crack, the coming thud, the coming death blow, the coming blame, and somehow he lunged and caught Michael in time and spent the rest of the day feeling ashamed.

  None of which he said to Michael. Just: “You were a big motherfucker, man. How much did you weigh? Two thirty?”

  “Two twenty-five,” Michael said.

  “Yeah, I almost didn’t recognize you. From then to now,” Adam said.

  “A lot has changed,” Michael said.

  Now, the next morning, after helping Michael get dressed, holding doors open for him, closing doors for him, getting him into and out of a car and into a restaurant booth, Adam listens as Michael makes a confession.

  “When I got out of my coma, I began having all these nightmares about your dropping me,” he says.

  Adam looks at him, stricken.

  “I’m fucking with you, man,” Michael says, laughing, and tells him the real dream he had. “I don’t know if it was your hand, DeLay’s hand, or Stern’s hand, but I had all these nightmares about a hand drenched in blood, and I would wake up screaming.”

  “I was covered in blood head-to-toe that day,” Adam says.

  “My psychologist said this might be good for both of us because the last time you saw me, you saw me at my worst,” Michael says.

  “All day, my guys kept asking me: ‘You think he’s gonna be all right?’ ” Adam says.

  “I look at it as shit happens. It wasn’t my time,” Michael says, and gives Adam some advice. “Don’t ever try to bite your wrist. That shit hurts.”

  He laughs again and digs into his breakfast. Lots of eggs. Lots of potatoes. Lots of ketchup on those potatoes.

  Adam watches. He’s not hungry. “Let’s go fishing, man,” he says after a while.

  In the car now, Michael holds out his right hand, the one he bit, toward Adam. He wishes he could have tried it on his left hand, he says, because he wouldn’t have felt his teeth and might have been able to finish, but the right one was the one he could lift to his mouth.

  Adam takes Michael’s hand.

  “I appreciate it,” Michael says.

  Adam’s eyes redden and fill with tears.

  “Somebody had to do it,” he says.

  The following morning, Adam is once again at Michael’s hotel room door.

  “Another damn day,” Michael says.

  “You got some shaving cream on your ear,” Adam says, coming into the room. Before Michael can ask, Adam cleans him and starts helping with his braces, and this time there isn’t a tentativeness to anything he is doing. Instead, there’s a tenderness that had begun when they were fishing the afternoon before.

  They had pulled up as close to the big lake as Adam could get his truck, but there was still a distance of ten yards or so to the water’s edge. Adam held on to Michael and guided him over the rocks and ran back to the truck for a folding chair. He helped Michael into the chair, baited a fishing pole, cast it, and put the pole into Michael’s right hand. “Want to reel it in?” he asked when nothing was happening. He held the pole while Michael worked the reel. He netted some baby shad and used one of them to re-bait the hook. “Want me to send it back out?” he asked, and then he stood next to Michael attentively, as if watching another man fish was the most interesting thing in the world.

  Saskia was there, too, watching from the front seat of the truck and trying to get her head around the way Adam was behaving. Was this the same man who smokes in her car? Who was too distracted last night to notice her suffering from a migraine? Who can’t even bring her a cheap chocolate bar from Walmart as a surprise? Who knew she was coming along and packed only one chair? She had no idea that he was still capable of such devotion. She wanted to like him better because of what she was seeing, but she couldn’t help it. Part of her felt hurt, and the other part felt petty for feeling hurt, and she wished there was a part left over for grieving but that didn’t seem to be the case. As for Michael, and his scarred head, and his slow way of moving, and his “I Took a Bullet in the Head for Mine” T-shirt, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him, except at one point when she typed a message to Christina on her cell phone.

  “This is so sad,” she wrote. “Makes you realize our husbands really need to suck it up. They have it pretty good.”

  She stayed in the truck until she heard Adam’s excited voice drift through the open window. “Ohh, I think you got one,” he was saying to Michael, and at that, she got out of the truck and balanced her way across the rocks. Michael tried to reel in the fish on his own by propping the pole between his legs and clamping it with his thighs, but Adam saw it wasn’t working and reached over to steady the pole. It was a nice-sized bass. Adam took it off the hook, handed it to Michael, took a photo, baited the line, recast, and handed the pole back to Michael, who immediately got another fish.

  “I can hold it up,” Saskia said when she saw the pole bend, hurrying over, and this time she was the one who helped.

  And so went an afternoon. At some point, Saskia took a seat on the rocks, ignoring the old beer cans and fish skeletons in the crevices. That night, they cooked some of the fish for dinner, and now, as Adam picks up Michael’s suitcase and helps him out of the hotel, Saskia is waiting in the car.

  Michael sits up front. Saskia sits behind Adam and can’t see him as he discreetly tucks some chewing tobacco in his mouth, but she can hear it when he quietly spits into a water bottle he’s holding, and that’s all it takes.

  “Do you have chew in your mouth?” she asks.

  “No,” he says.

  “Then why are you spitting in a bottle?”

  “I have a bad taste in my mouth.”

  “That’s disgusting,” she says. “Your teeth will fall out and you’ll get lung cancer.”

  “That’s what I’m going for,” he says, trying to not lose his temper.

  The first night Michael arrived, when it was just Michael and Adam at dinner, one of the things Adam had asked was what it was like to be divorced.

  “I kick myself every day. She’s the best woman I’ve ever been with. I’d run back to her in a second if I could,” Michael had answered, and suspecting the reason for the question, said, “Don’t give up on your wife.”

  So Adam takes the chew out of his mouth and says to Saskia, “I love you.”

  “I love you,” he says again.

  “Nothing?” he asks.

  “Not today,” she says.

  “Tomorrow?” he asks.

  “We’ll see,” she says.

  They are on the highway now, a carful of wounds with a long way to go till the airport. “You all be good to each other,” Michael will say when they get to the airport. “We will,” Saskia will say. “Be easy on him,” Michael will say to her. “Yeah, I’m broke,” Adam will say, laughing.

  For now, though, everyone in the car is silent, uncomfortably so, until Adam sees a truck pulling a boat on a trailer.

  “That’s like my old boat,” he says, more to himself than anyone in the car, but Michael, who hears him, and who knows better than anyone what a man sounds like when he is so lonely that he could bite his own wrist, tries to swivel to see it without losing his balance.

  “Where?” he asks.

  Eleven days later. Another fight. This one begins on the drive home from the VA hospital, when Adam mentions the PTSD program, the one that Tausolo Aieti had gone through. Maybe it would help, he says. Maybe it would, Saskia agrees, but it would mean seven weeks of no work and no pay. That’s two missed house payments. Car payments, too. Electricity. Gas. Phone. Groceries. She reminds him that they have no savings. She imagines the graduation speech: “Congratulations for conquering PTSD. And now you’re fucked.” And it escalates from there until they are home and she is telling Adam to move out and his mind is whirling and his thoughts are out of control and he is throwing some things in a duffel bag and she is digging through the duffel bag to see what he has packed.

  Some clothing.

  His helmet.

  His dog tags.

  Doster’s dog tags.

  Their handgun.

  “What the hell do you need that for?” she says, holding up the gun.

  “If I need money, I can sell it,” he says.

  She stands with the gun, shaking her head no. It is the middle of the afternoon. Jaxson is a few feet away, in his room, napping. Zoe is at a friend’s. Adam disappears into the master bedroom, and when he comes out he is holding a loaded shotgun against his forehead.

  “Pull the fucking trigger,” he says, walking toward her, thrusting the butt of the gun at her, now pushing it into her stomach, trying to goad her. “Pull the fucking trigger,” he yells, and what surprises her is how much she wants to do it. She wants to pull the fucking trigger and end his life and end her misery and clean the walls afterward and be done with it, all of it. The years have caught up at last. “Pull the fucking trigger,” he says, and she wants to pull it, reload if she has to and pull it again, but instead she spins and walks away from him. “Be a man” is all she can think of to say, and then she goes onto the front porch, slams the door behind her, and stands with her back to him so he can’t see her shaking and trying to catch her breath.

  She remains outside.

  He remains inside.

  They were fighting more and more now, every day it seemed, at home, in the car, in front of the kids, even in text messages when Adam was at work. “Look at our life! Not only have we had to start completely over but our marriage is failing in the process. We have nothing and cant even count on each other 4 support,” she had texted him a few weeks before. “If you honestly see this workin I stay, if not I go.”

  “Well what would u like to do, i’ll try anything at this point, so tell me what u want and i’ll do it,” he had written back.

  “I just wish u would show me some emotion and that you really do love me and think bout how I feel,” she had written.

  “Well, u know I love u, if not then maybe we do need to split …”

  That fight was bad, but as Saskia stands on the porch shaking, she knows that this one feels different. Scarier. Worse. She gathers herself and goes back inside.

  Adam is nowhere in sight. The duffel bag is still there. So is the handgun. The shotgun is gone. She looks in the bedroom. He’s not there. He’s not in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom, or Jax’s room. He’s not in the backyard. She opens the door leading to the basement and starts down the stairs.

  She hates it down there. Twelve creaking steps, and at the bottom is a hallway that leads to the laundry room, a bathroom, and finally Zoe’s room, a little room with a low doorway and a couple of small basement windows that allow in smudges of daylight. For her next birthday, Zoe wants to paint one half of the room pink and the other half black and arrange everything in the room accordingly. Her pink toys will go on the pink side and her black toys will go on the black side. The bed she has been wetting now for three weeks in a row will go on the pink side and the spiders she finds sometimes will go on the black side. The space heater that keeps the room warm in the winter will go on the pink side and the TV that accompanies her to sleep will go on the black side. Still to be figured out is what she will do with the flimsy wall made of louvered doors that Adam put up to separate her room from the rest of the furnace room it had originally been part of. That room, the furnace room, is the worst room in the house, and Saskia goes there now.

  It’s a room of dimness and shadows. The bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling is unlit, and what little light is leaking into the room feels gray and dirty. Adam is in the middle of the room, seated on a folding chair. He is faced away from her and holding the shotgun against the underside of his chin. His thumb is on the trigger. The safety is off. To his right is the furnace. To his left are shelves filled with old appliances and the letters he and Saskia wrote to each other when he was in Iraq. In front of him is a taxidermy stand with a faded fish skin on it, onto which he recently had glued a realistic-looking rubber eye.

  So this is where he will die, then. Not in a Humvee like James Doster. Not in the war, but here in the furnace room, next to the room his daughter wants him to paint, under the room where his son is asleep, and a few inches from his terrified wife.

  She asks him to put the gun down.