The Stranger

When I met Sheila for the first time she was wearing a crimson stocking cap, a silly looking thing that must have been knit by my mother-in-law. It had red balled tassels that hung down at her forehead like a head wound, obscuring her eyes. She refused to take it off. When Tamara tried, Sheila wailed as though wounded, waving her tiny fists in the air in the most obstinate show of anger that a five-month-old infant could possibly muster. My wife had told me in letters that Sheila had quite the temper, although she certainly didn’t inherit it from me. She would hold her breath until her little plump body turned purple, and then tighten her muscles in a sort of defiant rigor mortis. Sheila was throwing a fit at the airport the day I met her, and when I reached out to kiss her pale forehead, pushing aside the tassels of the hat, she was lying stiff as a board in her mother’s arms.

Tamara and I had been married for two years before I left for Iraq. At the time we were childless but still happy, and when the fat letter came with the inescapable date and time of my departure, we rationalized that it was as good a time as ever for me to go. We knew this would happen. She was the kind of strong military wife who sent DVDs and pop culture magazines to soldier-husbands overseas, to remind them what swimming pools and neon lights looked like while they were surrounded by an invariable sea of sandy grey. She could handle distance, and blood, and fear. When I finally returned, she threw a huge party—my in-laws and my father and my brother and their wives all came over, with hamburgers and smiles for grilling and Happy Family photographs. She kept the crepe paper and banner up for days after the party, and framed the picture of my father shaking my hand at the airport and placed it on the mantle, as if to remind me that I was home, and in case I forgot that he was proud.

My father, although never in the military himself, had been in the police academy with my commander, and had the same fierce pride of a military man. Lt. Col. Chessani and my father were both strong men with wide shoulders that passed time talking about artillery and hypothetical military strategy. When I was young, my father made it an annual tradition to take my two brothers and me to the Dayton Air Force Museum. We would speed North across the Ohio River in his cop car, and to give my brothers and me a thrill, my father would sometimes turn on his lights and zoom through intersections illegally. We made it to Dayton every year in record time. On the way home, giddy with testosterone and babbling in a militaristic lexicography, we would stop at the Wolf Creek Gun Club, and pretend to be marines, shooting down imaginary adversaries that popped wearily back up after every round of fire. Although I was the youngest of three boys, I always had the fastest and most accurate shot of us all. I imagined myself as a sharpshooter, and I think my father did too. He beamed when I brought home enlistment papers for the Marines after my senior year of high school.

When I left for Iraq, Tamara didn’t know that she was nearly two months pregnant. She told me the news shortly after, and I wasn’t there to hug her gently and kiss her forehead, like I wished I could have done. I was in a small tent where sand whipped between my cheek and the phone and got between my teeth when my jaw dropped at the word. I wanted to shout, and grin, and cry, and stamp my feet and dance, but Chessani was counting minutes and observing me, so I simply nodded slowly as if she could see me, and whispered that I would be home soon.

She decided to move back in with her parents when she found out that she was pregnant. The house we shared felt too small for her expanding belly. Every day she sat at her parents’ old kitchen table, counting days and counting stretch marks, and writing letters to tell me about the size of her stomach and the daily news. She watched television at dinner and read newspapers in the bathtub, and wrote me things about my own division—the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines—that even I didn’t know. Tamara’s letters read like an adventure novel, and she made crawling through dirt on my elbows and standing guard under the incessant sun sound heroic. But I didn’t want to read about my own life—I wanted to hear about her insatiable cravings for watermelon (the evidence of which was dribbled on the stationary) or listen to her complain about sewing elastic into her jeans. I saw round, barren hills explode before my eyes in Iraq, but I never felt my baby kick.

Tamara started to worry about me soon after I returned home from my deployment. She was afraid I wasn’t bonding with Sheila like I should, and that our only daughter would grow up with a stranger for a father. At night sometimes I would creep into Sheila’s nursery, and watch the flannel ducklings on her pajamas rise and fall with the steady rhythm of her breathing. The moonlight was spilling onto Sheila’s crib, casting her figure in a white, phosphoric glow. In the strange light her skin peeled away from her small frame and lay in disjointed shadows, sloughing off her fingers like gloves. When I went to pick up her segmented body I was surprised how pale she was. My brazen hand, callous and hardy from wind and metal rifles scorching in the sun enveloped her ashen cheek. We were not of the same flesh, she and I.

She woke at my touch and her wide black eyes stared past my own with no hint of recognition. She drew her thin lips into a ghastly frown, turning down the corners of her pleasantly plump cheeks. A cobweb of spittle stretched between her gums when she tilted her head back, filling her lungs with oxygen before the inevitable scream. Tamara came running when she heard shrieks, punctuating the silence like bullet holes, and took Sheila from my arms. She knelt by the crib making shooshing noises, and I crept outside to the porch.

After a few weeks, the colorful crepe paper and the banner came down. My father’s eyes in the photograph mocked me from the mantle as I sat in front of the television in the afternoon. Tamara stopped listening to the news at home. Her eyes begged to know what we, the 3/1, had done, if the reports were really true. Had soldiers from my unit really forced citizens from their blazing homes in the Jolan District, then butchered them with calculated precision on their doorsteps? No, Tamara, we did not. I was there, I saw it all.

While storming into Fallujah I fancied myself a hero, finally a true member of the “Thundering Third,” and when the Arab rushed at me from the door to his home, gun in hand, I aimed and shot with the same deadly precision as I had at old Wolf Creek. I was surrounded by my brothers as they rushed past, muttering curses and crying prayers through dirty masks.

The amount of blood surprised me. The Arab wobbled and fell back, like my limbless rubber enemies of old, but he didn’t stand back up. A red doppa grew from the crown of his head, oozing into a keffiyeh on the doorstep where he lay. Young children dragging toddlers by the forearm and women carrying infants were spewing from the entrance of the house, rushing over the Arab, over his expanding bloody cap, over his still, swollen chest. A little girl with bare feet tripped on his outstretched, empty hands, and knelt over his purple face shrieking “Abi!” until her mother came and swept the child out of her father’s blood. Fiery tongues flicking from the doorway to the house lapped at the puddle collecting on the doorstep.

The leaves on trees don’t change color in Fallujah, they just wave to the shamal in the summer and bow to the heavy rains in the winter. In early November, the palm trees were shaking off the dust of the dry season’s prevailing winds and preparing themselves for the torrential downpour of the next five months. In 2004, we set fire to the trees. Their tips glowed in sanguine reds, and sulfuric yellows, and burnt oranges. We brought them autumn, and we brought them freedom. That’s what Chessani told us.

Once home, I took to spending my evenings on the doorstep, picking out familiar sights in the landscape—the cracked concrete slabs in my neighbor’s driveway, the scattered glass of a broken beer bottle in the gutter, the fat, grooved tires of the cars lining the street. Barren tree limbs groped at smoky winter clouds and somewhere a siren wailed. I was comforted by the drone of an airplane above, and by the whimpering of a chained dog in a kennel nearby. Inside, a child wept.