The Medal My Brother Never Wore

I grabbed my father by the arm and pulled him into a side room off the funeral home hallway.

The room was small, maybe a supply closet with a couple of folding chairs.

Fluorescent light.

A smell of old carpet and lilies.

“What did that officer mean?”

I said.

“Danny isn’t dead?”

My father wouldn’t look at me.

He just stood there in Danny’s old olive work shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, his hands shaking at his sides.

“Dad.

Look at me.”

He lifted his head.

His eyes were wet and red, but it wasn’t grief I saw in them.

It was shame.

“I’m sorry, Frank,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

He sat down on one of the folding chairs and put his face in his hands.

I’d never seen my father cry.

Not at my mother’s funeral.

Not when the casualty officer came to the door six years ago.

Not once.

Now he was sobbing like a child.

“Danny survived the blast,” he said.

“He didn’t die in Kandahar.”

I stood over him with my fists clenched.

My ears were ringing.

I couldn’t feel my legs.

“That was six years ago,” I said.

“Six years.

You let me believe my brother was dead for six years.”

“I was ordered to.”

“Ordered?

By who?”

“By the people who came to the house three days after the IED,” he said.

“Two men.

No uniforms.

They told me Danny was alive but that if anyone found out — anyone, including you — he’d be killed.

They made me sign a form.”

“And you signed it.”

“I signed it to keep him alive.”

I turned away from him.

I couldn’t look at the olive shirt anymore.

That shirt had hung in my mother’s closet for two years after she died, and then it had moved to Danny’s apartment, and then somehow it came back to my father.

Danny wore that shirt when he got back from his first deployment.

I remember it.

He was standing in the driveway, lean and sunburned, and my father was hugging him and laughing and saying, look at my son, look at my soldier.

I was sixteen then.

I wanted to be him.

“Say something, Frank,” my father said.

“What do you want me to say?”

I said.

“Thank you?”

He didn’t answer.

I asked him if the officer who saluted was one of the two men who came to the house, and he said no, but he was from the same office.

He said he’d been checking on him ever since.

“How did you know I’d be here tonight?”

“He called me this morning,” my father said.

“He told me you’d come.

He told me to let you go.”

I laughed.

It came out wrong, more like a cough.

“Let me go where?”

He stood up.

He grabbed my arm, and his grip was still strong, the way I remembered it from when I was a kid and he was dragging me out of trouble.

“Go tonight,” he said.

“Drive to Virginia.

The officer gave you the address, didn’t he?”

He had.

I had the card in my pocket.

“You should have told me,” I said.

“I know.”

“I would have gone with you.

I would’ve done anything.”

“I know that too,” he said.

“That’s why they didn’t want you to know.”

He let go of my arm.

His hand hung in the air between us, and then he lowered it.

“Go tonight,” he said again.

“But if you go, he may not come back with you.”