“What’s that for?” Sally asks. “His sleep apnea?”

  “No. Grinding his teeth,” Amanda says, and for a moment, he is alive and grinding his teeth and she can hear it.

  In those first hours after James died, the doorbell kept ringing as word spread. In came the casualty assistance officer. In came a pastor. In came neighbors with Swedish meatballs. In came a friend with her little boy, who fell down some stairs and cried and cried. More neighbors came, and more kids, and now into the commotion came Saskia Schumann, who had been called by one of those neighbors saying that James had been hurt.

  “Is he going to be okay?” she asked Amanda, not knowing, and as Amanda began crying, she did, too, because she was certain that Adam was dead as well.

  She and Amanda had met for the first time just a week before, but they had been e-mailing for a month, since James, at his own request, had transferred out of a desk job he hated at the brigade level and taken over Adam’s platoon. All of his new soldiers had been leery at first, especially Adam. Doster had never been in combat. Before his desk job, he had spent ten years as a recruiter. But he was so clearly happy to be among this group of soldiers that his enthusiasm rubbed off on them, and before long Adam and James were hanging out and Adam was thinking he might survive this war after all. As for what James thought: “They’re the most amazing group,” he told Amanda, sounding so happy that she got teary. “There’s one guy in particular,” he went on. “His name is Schumann, and he impressed me as soon as I met him.”

  So Amanda called the wife of the impressive Schumann, asking to get together. She told James how excited she was, and nervous, too, like butterflies before a date. Saskia wanted to meet her as well, because of how much better Adam was sounding. “Not at all what I pictured her to be,” she would say after she and Amanda met at a restaurant. “We were the same age, and she looked to be thirty-five.” But Amanda would say, “We just clicked. We just talked about everything,” and that’s what she told James when he called in the early hours of September 29.

  In Kansas, it was still September 28, late in the afternoon. Amanda was in the minivan with Kathryn and Grace when her cell phone rang, and she parked and stayed there for the next hour as the sun set on the last full day of her marriage. At one point, Grace climbed onto her lap as she was telling James that if the doorbell ever rang, she wouldn’t answer it. It wasn’t a premonition that caused her to say this, it was just the way conversations between a person in a war and a person in a minivan tended to go. Of course you would answer it, James said, all serious. They were supposed to talk again later in the day, this time through a video linkup that soldiers could sign up for from time to time. September 29 was to be James’s turn. But he was going to be home on leave in a few weeks, he told Amanda, and talking by video would mean staying on base and missing a mission, so he had given his slot to Schumann, who seemed in need of it.

  “Talk to you later,” he said.

  And that was how Adam, who always found the hidden bombs, stayed behind on September 29. Instead of going out, he talked by video to Saskia and remained on the base afterward while James went out and got blown into pieces by a bomb that no one saw. “None of this shit would have happened if you were there,” Adam got to hear soon after from a soldier who had watched James dying, and meanwhile Saskia was at Amanda’s, hugging her and thinking the same thought over and over: Adam was with James. Adam is dead, too. “Come home,” she begged him the next time they spoke, and a month later he did.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Amanda said at the airport.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Did he suffer?”

  “Were you there?”

  “It took Adam so long to put that together,” she says now to Sally, looking out at an elaborate wooden play set in the backyard. “On the instructions, it said it would take two moderately skilled adults sixty hours,” she says, and remembers how Adam did it by himself while she and Saskia drank mojitos and margaritas.

  So much for those days: for whatever reason, she and the Schumanns drifted apart, the play set has been sold to some neighbors who would be coming over soon with a truck, and everything else is being boxed. “Fifteen thousand pounds,” the foreman guesses at how much it will all weigh, which, if he’s right, would be almost double the poundage they had been expecting. “Maybe sixteen thousand.”

  Maybe so. The gun safe alone is six hundred pounds, the new bedroom furniture is solid wood, the entertainment center is so big and heavy that it will take four movers to get it off the ground, and then there are all of the other things that Amanda is sorting through.

  There is the box labeled “James had on him when he died,” and inside the box are the things found in the uniform that was stripped from him so the doctors and nurses could better pound on his chest: three photographs of the girls, his USAA credit card, a card with Arabic phrases, his knife, and a lighter.

  There is the gray T-shirt he was wearing his last night home, which reminds her of the beginning of their marriage, when she was eighteen years old and he told her that he liked his T-shirts folded a certain way, and she would practice whenever he left the house.

  There is a piece of wood with four hooks in it: “He built that. Gotta take that. I painted it. He was pissed off. I over-sprayed, and it got on the sidewalk. I didn’t account for the wind,” she says.

  There’s a bag with cheap tin dog tags that someone sent to her along with a note that said “Please accept these identification tags on behalf of a grateful nation,” which infuriated her then and makes her wonder now why she has saved them. There are the three handmade wooden boxes sent by someone from Canada who read of James in the paper, each made of walnut because he read that James liked walnut. Why would an article in Canada mention that a dead American soldier liked walnut, she wonders, but the boxes are beautiful and she’ll be taking those.

  There’s his Purple Heart, his Bronze Star certificate, the condolence letter from President Bush that says “We will forever honor his memory,” the flag she was flying outside the house when he died, the flag that was flown in his honor over the Arkansas capitol, and the condolence book in which his first wife, who couldn’t have known that his dying words were “I’m hit,” wrote “I’m sure his last thoughts were of his family.”

  There’s the autopsy report that begins, “The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished male,” and goes into detail about what happened to that body for six pages, and a copy of the initial army investigation into his death, with the sworn statement of a soldier who wrote, “myself and Golembe started cutting off all his gear and trying to talk to SFC Doster, he was still breathing but was unconscious.”

  Into his tool room now. The rider mower will go to the new house, she tells the movers. The four hammers. The three saws. The old boom box up on that shelf. The two chainsaws. The workbenches. The steel wool. The rusty nails. All of it, actually, every bit of it, even an old peanut butter jar filled with sawdust.

  On to the bookshelves. Yes to the brochure titled “101 Reasons to Own a Chainsaw,” yes to The Complete Book of Composting, yes to Military Widow: A Survival Guide, yes to Single Parenting That Works, yes to the rest.

  Into her kitchen, where the boxes of aluminum foil and plastic wrap have been lined up in a drawer so that the lettering faces the same way, and more than anything else in the house, the precise arrangement of these boxes explains why Amanda had to turn off the oven and make a list before she could hear that her husband was dead. If they’re not lined up that way, she feels off balance. It’s the same with her spice jars, and with her shoes, which are categorized by color, subcategorized by material, and sub-subcategorized by style. She is the daughter of a man she describes as an ill-tempered drinker who married and divorced her mother five times, and the daughter of a woman who five times married that man. She had an older brother who left home when he was fourteen and died in a car crash, and then when she was adrift and in need of order in her life, she met James, who was all about order and self-sufficiency. After the military, he wanted a life off the grid, as he put it, just him and Amanda and whatever children they had. They would grow their own food, dig their own well, be powered by solar. But he was also willing to compromise when Amanda said she wanted to be near a hospital for those children, and the compromise was three acres on a street called Liberty Circle and a house where at least the aluminum foil is under control.

  Outside now. She’ll need to move the flag, but will she need to take the bracket? She won’t be able to sleep in the new house if there’s not a flag flying, but does the new house have a bracket?

  Back inside, where James is propped up in one of the chairs. The movers are trained for these situations. Under contract to the army, they have their own perspective on the consequences of war. Just recently, they moved a soldier from Kansas to a rehab hospital in Texas, and as the soldier watched them pack his things, he kept crying because he had lost his legs in the war and was unable to help. That was bad enough, but they’ve come to learn that war widows are the hardest by far. Ask nothing about the dead, they are instructed, and so they don’t ask what happened to James or why he is in a chair. Instead, one of them asks, “Ma’am, do you want us to pack your mops?”

  Yes to the mops. No to the firewood. No to the jacket that James hung on a hook when he came in from splitting the firewood and has been on that hook as long as that dental mold has been in that drawer. She’ll move the jacket, and not that they’re asking, but she’ll move him.

  They bought this house for $280,000. She sold it for $375,000. The new one cost $555,000, but money wasn’t really an issue because of life insurance policies and the army’s tax-free payment of $100,000, which it calls a “death gratuity.”

  “Blood money,” she calls it on her bad days.

  “Oops money,” she calls it on her better days.

  Whatever it’s called, it is allowing her to make this giant leap to a new life in a new house that is 2.8 miles away.

  To get there takes all of six minutes. After one last night on Liberty Circle that James spends in the living room, she drives along some dirt roads, turns onto a path that seems to be leading into the woods, and arrives at a brand-new house that dazzles even the well-trained movers.

  “Sweet, sweet, sweet,” one says.

  “House has like twelve bedrooms,” another says.

  It has six, actually, plus an exercise room that in a pinch could be a seventh. “This is my kind of kitchen, if I ever become a chef,” another says, all dreamy for a moment as he sees the marble counters and two dishwashers, and then he and the others return to their regular lives of unloading what turned out to be just under sixteen thousand pounds.

  “Ma’am, where do you want this?” one asks, carrying in a fan from the first of the trucks.

  “Exercise room,” she says.

  “Ma’am, this room here. This is what you’re calling the dining room?” another one asks, and when Amanda looks at him quizzically, he says, “I got confused because it’s so big.”

  “Ma’am, which one was the storage room again?”

  “It’s … it’s … I’ll just go down and show you.”

  “Ma’am, where do you want your doghouse?”

  “Ma’am, where do you want your camcorder?”

  “Ma’am, where are the girls’ rooms at?”

  “Okay,” she says, leading him upstairs.

  “Ma’am, where’s the safe go?”

  “The safe goes … in the safe room,” she says, and after going back downstairs and showing him the safe room, she ducks into one of the bedrooms and says, “Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am, ma’am. I don’t like being a ma’am. At twenty-eight, you should be a miss. Or a Mrs.” She closes her eyes. She takes deep breaths. She stands in the soft carpet. She is teary. She wishes Sally were here, but Sally had to go home to be with her husband and kids. She wants so much to remain in control. There’s a knock at the door.

  “Ma’am, can I use your restroom?”

  She shows him to one of the four bathrooms and then says to no one in particular, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “What do you want to do?” Grace says, who is sitting there eating a biscuit, and Amanda continues to stand where she is, wishing she had an answer. What does she want to do? Why doesn’t she know yet? Why isn’t he here to help her figure it out? Why is she still talking to him? Why is she still seeing him alive?

  What happened to him?

  Two years later, she is still asking the question she asked Adam at the airport. She had heard initially that James had lost all of his limbs except for his right arm, then that it was only his left leg, that he died immediately, then that he didn’t, that he was unconscious, then that he wasn’t. She had asked for the autopsy report, waited months for it, and, with Sally sitting next to her, read it from beginning to end. Shrapnel wounds to the pelvis. Left leg amputation, below the knee. Massive bleeding. Protruding viscera. Six pages of details. And still she wonders: What happened? Did he feel it? Did he really say, “I’m hit?” Did he say anything else? Were his last thoughts of his family? Did he understand that he was dying? So she went to the airport with Saskia, and instead of seeing a skeleton walking toward her, she saw her chance for answers.

  “Did he suffer?” she asked.

  “Were you there?” she asked.

  And Adam’s answer was to take out his wallet and hand her something he had been keeping since the day that James died, when he had picked up James’s body armor, taken it into a latrine, and tried to scrub it clean with some body wash and a toothbrush. It took him an hour because there was so much blood. The smell made him sick, but he kept at it, couldn’t stop, didn’t want to, he had loved James Doster, and at one point as he bore down, he felt something nick his hand. “What the fuck?” he’d said, and that was when he had found the sliver of metal that he handed to Amanda at the airport, and every so often since then she has taken this piece of the bomb that killed her husband and placed it in her palm and tightened her hand around it and kept squeezing until she bled.

  This house then: it is nineteen thousand pounds of shrapnel that is continuing to explode, and late at night, after the movers have gone, the furniture has been arranged, the kitchen has been organized, the beds have been made, and the house seems presentable, Amanda goes back to Liberty Circle.

  “James,” she says.

  There he is, on a counter. He is the last thing left.

  She places him in the car, buckles him in, leaves their house forever, and drives him to her new home.

  3

  I don’t know if everyone knows your story, but you all are fortunate—because this is a hero,” a woman is saying about Tausolo Aieti, who, back in the war, was in the same unit as Adam Schumann and James Doster. The woman, a psychologist, is standing with Tausolo in front of a few dozen people, all on folding chairs that have been set up in a little, out-of-the-way room at the Topeka VA hospital. She is smiling, and when she turns to Tausolo and says, “You define what a hero is,” he resists the urge to turn away. This is progress. He knows it. When he was admitted seven weeks ago to Topeka’s inpatient PTSD program, he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Now, on his graduation day, the only one he can’t look in the eye is himself.

  Three other men are graduating with him, all of them old Vietnam guys still trying to recover forty years later. One has the collapsed face of a drunk used to sleeping it off in the sun, and another has the posture of a man who lived for a time under a bridge. “Thank you ever so much,” one of them says to the hospital workers, family members, and the program’s twenty other patients gathered in this room. “I look at myself in the mirror each morning and tell myself, ‘You’re worth something.’ ” Another stands with his wife, who says they’ve been married forty years and for thirty of them he’s been ill, so she’ll see.

  Tausolo is the youngest by far, the only one of the four still in the army, and the one whose wife has decided not to come. He is twenty-six and from American Samoa, and the stunned look on his face this day is the same as it was on the sunny afternoon that he was covered in soot and blood and he asked another soldier if Pfc. James Jacob Harrelson was okay.

  Tausolo Aieti, moments after the explosion

  “And a hero isn’t someone who doesn’t feel fear, they’re someone who in spite of their fear does the right thing and really risks their own safety,” the psychologist continues. “You did that.”

  The theory of this program: Return to the traumatizing event. Remember it in detail. Think about it through therapy and by writing about it. Keep at it until you are thinking about what you did do instead of what you didn’t. Learn that truth is relative, and that there is the moment of trauma, and then the moment following the trauma of your first reaction, when shame and guilt can take hold. Healing is an act of persuasion—this is what Tausolo has been trying to learn for seven weeks. “As we were going down the route, I saw some palm trees,” he wrote. “Harrelson was playing a nice, relaxing country music song. I looked at those palm trees, and it reminded me of back home in American Samoa. It reminded me of the coconut trees back home and when I was a little kid playing and picking the coconuts that fell off. Everything was right and boom it happened so fast.”

  “And I hope you hold on to that as you leave here, because you have an opportunity to go back and to your family be a hero every day,” the psychologist continues. “To feel fear but do the right thing anyway. We’ve seen you do that here.”

  Here is Building Two, second floor, mental health. Here is where no one knows he is. Or almost no one. His wife, Theresa, knows, and so does Adam Schumann, though in his case it’s only by accident. There had been another fight with Saskia. He had hit the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen so hard it had flown off its hinges and crashed to the floor. He had gone into the bedroom and punched the headboard and begun to cry. He had calmed down, come out to the living room, held Jaxson, given him a bottle, nuzzled his baby hair, watched Zoe in her PJs eating grapes, and put the door back on its hinges. The next morning, he had quietly said “I love you” to Saskia, who was folding laundry and whose face was still puffy, and had driven without her to a doctor’s appointment in Topeka. “Hey, there’s Aieti,” he’d said, getting out of the car and looking across the parking lot. He hadn’t seen Tausolo since the day he’d left the war, but he recognized his slow, limping walk in an instant. He waved, but Tausolo was too far away to see him, and as Tausolo went across the lawn into Building Two, Adam headed left toward the main hospital, wishing that he could go into Building Two with him.