Page 8 of The Jackal

When I bring one home—when the work is done and the man's been returned to his people—I see them. After. In the gray country between waking and sleep, on the long flights out of whatever hell I pulled them from. Not as horror. Not the way I found them. Whole. The way they were before. The way their mothers would know them.

I gave up trying to decide whether it's real or whether it's only the kindest thing a tired mind does for a man who spends his days the way I spend mine. The question stopped mattering a long time ago. Either way, it's true. Either way, I get to stand with them one more time, at the door, and see them through it, and tell them the thing nobody got the chance to tell them at the end. That they were found. That they weren't left. That somebody came.

A last farewell. The only one most of them get from someone who isn't grieving too hard to hear it.

It's the perk of the job, if a job like mine has perks. The other half of the gift the threshold handed me. Take the fear, give back the company of the dead. I came out ahead on the trade. I've always believed I came out ahead.

The thought put something back into me that the long night had taken out. It always does. By the time I reached the bottom of the airstair, the tiredness had turned into something close to looking forward to it—a man at the end of a hard day who knows a good conversation is waiting. I was looking forward to Leonard. I had things to tell him. Lincoln, and the lacrosse he gave up, and the people who'd be standing on a runway in a few days to receive him with their own hands. I wanted him to know they were coming.

If the living understood even a little of what there is to learn from the dead, they'd be less afraid of both.

I went up the steps. The cabin was dark and warm and empty, one light burning low, a single seat turned out like it had been waiting on me. I dropped my pack. I sat. And somewhere ahead of me in the dark, a destination existed that no one alive would name.

I didn't care. I was grateful—the way I am most nights, the way the threshold taught me to be—for the strange life I get to lead. For the dead I get to carry. For the souls I get to walk to the door.

I closed my eyes, and I went looking for Leonard Beasley.

5

MAGNOLIA

Max came to the front of his kennel on a Thursday.

I'd been sitting my vigil for weeks by then—same spot, same half-turned shoulder, same bag of terrible bacon I'd started buying in such quantity that the woman at the diner had stopped asking and just started adding it to my coffee order with a look.

I'd stopped expecting anything from it. That's the secret nobody tells you about hope in this work: you have to set it down before the dog will pick it up. They can't carry yours and theirs both.

So, I wasn't watching him when it happened. I was looking at my phone, at nothing. And I felt him before I saw him—that prickle along the side of your face when something large and silent has moved close.

I turned my head slow, the way you turn it for a deer, and there he was. At the gate. Not waiting on the door for once. Waiting on me. His nose was working the air between the chain-link and my shoulder, and his eyes, which had been flat and far away, were here. In the room. On my face.

"Hey,” I whispered. "There you are."

He didn't come through when I opened the gate. That would've been a different kind of miracle and I didn't need a different kind. He just stood there and let me be near him without a barrier between us for the first time, his ribs going in and out, his whole body a held breath.

After a minute, he leaned. Just leaned, the side of his big skull coming to rest against my knee with the gravity of a falling building. I sat very still and let a dog who had decided the entire world was a closed door choose, for one minute, to lean on me as if I were a thing that would hold.

I held. That's the only trick I've got. I held, and I didn't cry where he could feel it. Somewhere behind me, Walt had come to stand in the aisle. When I finally looked back at him over Max's head, the old Marine had taken off his readers and was cleaning them on his shirt with great concentration and not a thing wrong with his eyes at all, no sir.

"Took you long enough," he said to the dog, voice rough, and went back to his office before either of us could say anything about it.

I drove home that night feeling cracked open in a good way and a dangerous way at once, because that's the thing about prying a door loose. You can't tell it which way to swing. You get it moving and then everything that was leaning against it comes through.

Dani had texted me three times during the drive. The first said GET BACK ON THE APPS. The second said I'm serious there's a guy at my gym. The third was just a photo of the guy at her gym, who was very handsome and very twelve years old in the eyes. Exactly the kind of man you date to feel younger and end up feeling older.

I didn't answer any of them. I sat in my driveway with the engine ticking and the dogs already losing their minds at the front window, three shepherd faces stacked in the glass like a totem pole of need. I thought about the difference between wanting someone and wanting not to be alone.

Because the honest thing, the thing I'd been holding at arm's length since Dani pulled the cork on it, was that I didn't want a guy from a gym. I didn't want to be fixed. There was exactly one person the wanting kept circling back to, and he lived two states up the coast in a life I'd convinced myself had no room in it for me. Not to mention, I had spent six months in a new city building a wall around his name so I wouldn't say it, even to myself.

I went inside, fed the chaos, and got the box down from the closet.

It was the last one. Six months in Charleston and I'd unpacked my whole life except for this single carton, taped shut, shoved onto the high shelf where I wouldn't have to look at the word I'd written on the side in marker: VA BEACH—MISC. The grief drawer of the move. Everybody's got one. The box you don't open because you already know it's not really full of stuff.

I cut the tape and went through it on the living room floor with a dog draped over each leg and the third—Max's opposite, my anxious Beans—pressed to my back. A lanyard from a fundraiser. A coffee mug from a kennel I'd loved. Photographs I'd printed in the brief season I thought I was the kind of person who printed photographs. And at the bottom, wrapped in a sock because I'm an adult who handles precious things with great care, a coin.

A challenge coin. Heavy, the way they're made to be, the size of a silver dollar but dense as a secret, the edges worn smooth on one side from a thumb. Mine. From all the times I'd run it over with my own thumb in the dark without deciding to.

He'd given it to me at the end of a long, ordinary day, in a parking lot, with the salt wind coming off the water and the streetlights just coming on. I'd spent it the way I spent most of them then—with the families, a hall full of restless kids and worn-out spouses under a WELCOME HOME banner for a homecoming the Navy had pushed back twice, doing the work of holding people together while somebody upstairs decided when to give them their men back.