The Grays Read Free Page B

if—”
    “I know it’s urgent. Obviously it’s urgent.”
    “I’m Lewis Crew,” he said. “If you don’t mind, please do not mention the appointment to anybody, or my name.”
    “Okay,” she said. “Will you tell me what happened to my dad?”
    He gave her a long look, long enough to be disquieting. He was evaluating her. But why? She had no clearance, she was a lowly procurement officer, she had not cared to follow her dad into Air Force Intelligence.
    “Will you?” she asked again.
    “I’m so sorry to have to ask you to come in on a day like this.”
    “So am I.” She walked away from him then, passing among the neat lines of identical military graves into which the Air Force had poured so many lives, in so many steel coffins, most of them too young, too innocent, too good to die the sorts of improbable and terrible deaths the Air Force had to offer.
    It was duty that had taken them. Duty, always, her dad’s breath andblood. “The oath, Lauren, never forget the oath. It might take you to your death, and if it does, that’s where you have to go.”
    She’d thought,
If some stupid president sends me to some dumb country where we shouldn’t even be, is it my duty to die there?
    She’d known the answer.
    Had Dad died a useless death? She hoped not, she hoped that the missing-man formation was more than just a passing honor.
    Her life with her dad had not been perfect. Eamon Glass could be demanding, and he had not been happy with the way her career was unfolding. “You need to push yourself, Lauren, Air-Force style. Be ready when it matters, be willing when it counts.”
    Boy, was he out of it. He was part of another Air Force, as far as she was concerned. In her Air Force, the main issues were things like padded bills and missing laptops, not duty and dying amid huts and palm trees.
    “Who were you, Dad? Why did this happen?”
    Dad had nightmares. God, did he have nightmares, screaming cyclones of terror from which he could not awaken. And you couldn’t get near him. He’d belt you and then in the morning be so upset by what he had done that he’d be in a funk for days.
    Often, he would ask if he’d said anything in his sleep. It worried him, obviously, worried him a lot.
    She’d listened for some meaning in the screams, but never found any.
    She got in her car and started it, eager for the heater to drive out the deep Canadian cold that was sweeping down the vast plains from the north, shivering the naked trees and the stubble-filled fields.
    She drove home across the great, gray base to their apartment. She stood in the living room thinking how anonymous it all seemed, the inevitable landscape on the wall, the not-too-challenging books on the shelves, the oldish TV. And his chair, big and comfortable, and beside it the magazine rack filled with
Time
and the
National Review
and
National Geographic
.
    All so ordinary, and yet so filled with him that every step deeper into the place was a step through more memory and greater loneliness.
    She made coffee, and was drinking it when she realized that it was Dad’s mug in her hand. That did it: she cried again. These, she knew, were the anguished tears of the bereaved, that belong both to grief and defeat.
    She had a last confession of love that must remain frozen in her forever. Most importantly, there was the conversation that had been their life together, that could never now be brought to rest.
    A whole career, and there had only been five people at his funeral. But it hadn’t been announced in any way. So his unit was not large, obviously. A colonel, looked about fifty, with the name tag Wilkes. A younger one, Lieutenant Colonel Langford. Maybe thirty-eight. Then a civilian, dumpy, wearing an ill-fitting suit. He’d cried, the civilian had, silent tears that he had flicked away as if they had been gnats landing on his face. And then Mr. Crew, tall, no way to tell the age, looking a little like the Swedish actor Max von Sydow. Great suit, and