“Of course, ma’am.”
The cabinet secretary smiles inscrutably and continues out the door, disappearing into the reception area. For a moment, Hayley Chill is left alone in the office where so much history has been made. The Secret Service agent was exactly right the day before. No matter how many times Hayley has ventured into this hallowed room, the Oval Office never ceases to instill awe in the young woman from West Virginia.
The vibration of her phone snaps Hayley out of her reverie. As she retrieves the device from a jacket pocket, her face reflects surprise. She can’t recall the last time her younger sister, Tammy, called.
* * *
SHE REQUESTS TIME off from both of her bosses, public and covert, to attend Jessica Cole’s funeral in Charleston. Kyle Rodgers tells Hayley to take as much time as she needs. Andrew Wilde is a more stringent taskmaster. He grants her only two days, barely enough time given the almost seven-hour drive. Hayley has not seen Jessica, her best friend growing up, since returning home for her mother’s funeral years earlier. They spoke a few times on the phone—desultory conversations that left Hayley somewhat depressed—but their shared, scarred history bound them in ways that can’t be said of many childhood friendships. Now Hayley is going back home for Jessica’s funeral, a disorienting event but not wholly unexpected.
Jessica never left Green Shoals, marrying a boy from their high school and becoming pregnant almost immediately. Two more babies followed, a burden too great for the young marriage to bear. Jessica’s husband lit out for California and a less demanding future. Like many in her situation, the young, single mother developed a dependence on opiates that left her incapable of performing parental duties. The children were raised by their grandmother as Jessica’s illness devolved into a harrowing heroin addiction. Her repeated overdoses were unremarkable except for the last one that claimed her life. A motorist found Jessica’s rail-thin corpse in the bathroom of a gas station.
Only seven other mourners attend the funeral service and interment. Drug addiction has so thoroughly ravaged the community that scenes like Jessica’s burial are sadly commonplace. Standing at the gravesite and staring intently at the coffin poised for burial, Hayley feels unconnected to the event. Rain threatens, a prospect that matches the ritual’s mood. In these circumstances and others, Hayley’s primary emotion is a pronounced lack of emotion. How strange, too, that she can’t recognize any of the faces encircling this black hole in the ground. Bearing witness to the ceremony’s dreary conclusion, Hayley reflects on her long absence from home and childhood friends, and is ashamedly grateful for it. Had she remained in West Virginia, would she have raced her friend to an even earlier grave?
She strolls through the pointless garden of gravestones, returning to her car in the cemetery parking lot. Hayley prefers remembering Jessica for the giddy, scrappy girl of her school years. For that reason, she avoids the requisite conversations with the bedraggled funeral-goers that would only corrupt those memories. Her youngest sister, Tammy, lives in Chapmanville. Hayley points the car for the drive south. In passing the speck of a town that was once her home, Hayley once again feels nothing. She barely glances at the bland structures that jut from the green landscape. Green Shoals represents a prior life that has no connection to the one she lives now. This whole trip, it occurs to her, is a continued exploration of emotional detachment. She came because that’s what people do. They attend the funeral of their best childhood friend. But there’s no guarantee you feel anything in the process, right?
Tammy answers the door, her girth enlarged with pregnancy in its eighth month. She is the only one of Hayley’s five siblings to have stayed local. Nineteen years old, Tammy married her high school boyfriend the day of their graduation. With a calm smile and freckled cheeks framed by long, straight red hair parted down the middle, she looks every bit the high school homecoming queen she once was. Hayley adores her little sister in a way possible only with siblings separated in age by nearly seven years. That adulation is mutual. Tammy never tires of telling friends her big sister works in the White House, rubbing elbows with the president and inhabiting a city that is a veritable Shangri-La in comparison to Chapmanville. The sisters hug with genuine affection. Hayley is relieved to feel a stirring within her heart. Finally! She feels something genuine. In an instant, she knows that thing is love.
Tammy’s husband, Jeff, is at work at a Walmart in Logan, giving the sisters plenty of time to visit. Hayley tells Tammy about her job as Kyle Rodgers’s chief of staff, about the travesty of her romantic life, and, surprisingly, even about meeting Sam McGovern. Having talked plenty enough about herself, only something a favorite sister could draw out of her, Hayley goes silent and listens. Tammy opens up and relays the details of a small life by comparison but, in most ways, good. Jeff is proving to be a better husband than one might have considered possible of someone so young and inexperienced. The expectant parents are thrilled about the prospect of starting a family. They’ve enthusiastically outfitted their small rental home with items from Walmart for the baby’s arrival. Sitting in a chair in the kitchen—the cherry tree outside the window having bloomed a month earlier but offering the ghost of a sweet scent even still—Hayley is flooded with emotion. These robust feelings are a welcome change to the existential void she’d experienced at Jessica’s gravesite. A valiant sun has broken up the storm clouds’ monopoly of the sky. Hayley decides her younger sister is an angel on earth.
Toward evening, Tammy retrieves a big cardboard box stuffed haphazardly with family photos. They are artifacts from a pre-smartphone era, and the two sisters delight in picking through the pile of random snapshots. So many photos of the six kids! The old photos incite more chatter between the sisters about their other siblings. Robert, second to the oldest, is stationed at Fort Benning, having washed out of Ranger School. Next is Harper, sickly like their mother was, who lives in Richmond and works at a Waffle House there. Sadie, a year younger, is shacked up with a biker dude in Florida. William, the youngest, hasn’t been heard from by anyone in more than a year. The unspoken truth is that, of the six siblings, Tammy and Hayley seem to be doing the best.
Near the bottom of the pile, Hayley unearths a photo of four Marines grouped in front of a shrapnel-pocked armored personnel carrier. The man at the far right she recognizes as her father, glaring sternly at the camera in a clear effort to look sufficiently badass. Hayley holds the borderless photograph with reverence as if it were a religious icon.
“Wow,” she says.
“Look at Daddy. Such a stud.”
“This could’ve been taken in Fallujah.”
“Is that where… is that the place where he was killed?” Tammy asks. His death in combat occurred when she was barely walking.
“Yeah. He’d been home just four months before. We had a party for him, down at the community center.”
“That must’ve been really something,” Tammy says, wistful.
Hayley continues to gaze at the picture, looking for answers. “I wonder who these other guys are.”
Four Marines. High and tight haircuts. Tall, lean, and muscled. Two white. One black. One brown. The men represent the great melting pot that is the US military. Except for any differences in skin color, they are interchangeable. They are men at war. Brothers. One of them was their father.