The Medal My Brother Never Wore

I left my father standing in the hallway of that funeral home and didn’t look back.

The card the officer gave me was still in my jacket pocket, bent at one corner where I’d been squeezing it without realizing.

An address in Virginia, handwritten in blue ink.

No name.

No phone number.

Just a road and a number and a zip code.

I got in my car at ten minutes past midnight and pointed it south and east.

Six hours of highway.

Six hours of nothing but headlights and the radio turned down low and my own voice in my head asking why I was doing this.

The truth is I didn’t have an answer.

I only had the sound of my father’s hand on my arm and his words looping over and over.

He may not come back with you.

I pulled off the interstate outside of a town so small the welcome sign looked hand-painted.

The road narrowed.

The trees closed in.

Gravel replaced asphalt.

Around four in the morning, I found it.

Not a house.

A compound.

A long stretch of chain-link fence topped with wire, running along a ridge above a single silver mailbox planted at the end of a dirt driveway.

I parked a quarter mile down the road and walked the rest of the way, staying low behind the guardrail where the shoulder dropped off into a ditch.

The sky was just starting to gray up behind the trees.

I could see a light on in one of the buildings inside the fence.

I waited.

I don’t know how long.

Long enough for my legs to go numb from crouching.

Long enough for the birds to start up.

Then a door opened.

A man came out.

Civilian jacket, gray hood pulled up, walking slow, the way men walk when their knees hurt.

He carried a stack of envelopes in one hand.

He walked to the mailbox and lifted the little red flag and I saw his face for the first time in more than six years.

Older.

Thinner.

A scar that ran from his left eyebrow up into his hairline like somebody had drawn a line on him with a knife and left it there.

But it was him.

It was Danny.

I stood up from behind the guardrail.

My legs almost gave out.

I stepped onto the gravel and my boot made a sound that carried further than I wanted it to.

He looked up.

He didn’t drop the envelopes.

He didn’t reach for anything.

He just stood there, one hand still on the mailbox door, and looked at me the way you look at a ghost you weren’t expecting to see in daylight.

“Danny,” I said.

My voice cracked on the second syllable.

I didn’t care.

He closed the mailbox.

He looked past me, up and down the road, checking.

Making sure I was alone.

Then he looked at me again, and something in his face closed up like a door.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.