Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

Michael felt a chill at the back of his neck. He thought about calling out again, but if there was an intruder in the house he didn’t want to alert them to his presence. They’d have already heard him shout for Samantha and Josh from the door, but how much sound had he made since? Would they think he’d left when he got no answer? Or were they still waiting for him to leave now? Waiting to hear the back door close, so they might make their own escape?

He looked up the stairway towards where it turned, curving behind the wall. His pulse was beating in his temples. It was only right he should check the other floors of the house. To make sure.

As quietly as he could, Michael walked towards the stairs. As he climbed the first few steps, the carpet runner softening his tread, he stared intently at the turn above him, half expecting someone to appear around its corner. Which is when it happened.

A stab of recognition, so immediate Michael couldn’t say from where it had emanated. Whether it had been a taste, a scent, a touch, or a sound. All he knew, with a painful clarity, was that it was her, Caroline. As if, just for an instant, he’d woken beside her again and she was alive once more, as fully alive as he was.

Michael froze, stilling himself. He was breathing rapidly, his heart thumping in his ribs. All thoughts of an intruder flooded from him. He looked up towards the turn in the stairs again, his mind trying to gain a purchase on what had just happened. The strength of the sensation had been such that now the only person he expected to come down the stairs was no longer a burglar, but Caroline, miraculously brought back from the dead. First her feet, then her shins, her thighs, her waist, her hands, her arms, her breasts, her neck, and, at last, her face, all revealed in the tantalising fractions of her descent.

But Caroline did not appear. She did not come to him. There was just the stairway’s red runner disappearing around the corner, the dark banister tracing the same curve, and the blank whiteness of the wall.

Michael listened. The ice-cream van in the other street had stopped its tune. The fly in the front room buzzed, paused, then buzzed again. But from beyond the turn in the stairs there was no sound. He shook his head, as if to wake himself. He did not believe in ghosts. In all the months since her death, never once had he thought Caroline was still with him. Her absence had been the most certain thing he’d ever known.

But she had been. Just now. He’d felt her, with absolute experience. And he still could. It was fading, the resonance cooling, but it was there, as if he were slowly walking backwards from a fire, retreating into a cold night. But he did not want to walk away. He didn’t want to grow cold. For all its painfulness, he wanted to feel that warmth again. Like touching a bruise or a half-healed wound, he wanted the pain of feeling her again.

He took another step up the stairs, but then stopped. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He was in his neighbour’s house. He was late. He should go. If there had been an intruder, then they must have heard him already. Had he made a sound? Just now, when he’d caught that sense of Caroline? He didn’t know. It had been so sudden, like being hit from behind. Whatever, it no longer mattered. He should go. He should leave by the back door through which he’d entered and close it behind him.

But he could not. He could not walk backwards, not while the warmth of what he’d felt was still on him. Not when it might be felt again. He had to know where it had come from, that sensation. When it had happened it felt as if he’d walked into it, as if its source lay above him. So he must go forward, not back. That was the only way. He had to carry on.

Placing a foot on the next step, Michael began ascending the stairs once more. As he did he listened to the house. It was silent, still. As if he were moving through a photograph. As if he were alone.

ON THE DAY Caroline was killed, Major Daniel McCullen woke early in his second-floor bedroom in Centennial Hills, a suburb in northwest Las Vegas. As he had every morning for weeks, he woke with his body damp, his heart racing. It had been the same dream again. Of the motorcyclist. Of the children playing soccer; that celebration after the goal. Except, as always, it had been worse than a dream, because it was a memory too, more real for him each time it returned.

He turned over. His wife, Cathy, was still asleep beside him, one bare shoulder showing from under the duvet. She was facing away from him and for a moment he just watched her breathe, trying to match the shallow rise and fall of his ribs to the steadier tempo of hers.

Daniel was still in love with his wife. From what he could tell, compared to a number of his colleagues in the air force, this was something of an achievement. For many, their marriages had been the first casualties of their service. Men who’d kept their heads under fire collapsing in the face of a relationship gone sour. Women flight officers volunteering for another tour, rather than slugging it out back home with a husband who no longer recognised them. But Daniel had always been determined. Cathy and the girls would come first. That’s what he’d promised Cathy when they’d married, and he’d tried to stay true to that promise ever since.

In the world in which they’d met it hadn’t seemed like such a difficult vow to keep. But back then, twelve years ago, everything had seemed possible. On the afternoon he’d first approached her, strolling across the lawn at his younger brother’s graduation, the years ahead of Daniel had looked like the skies into which he flew when he broke through a bank of cloud — open, rare. His. Just the year before, within months of his own graduation, Daniel had flown his first combat missions in Bosnia. Somewhere below him, in the wake of his jet’s roar, he’d taken his first lives. But — as their commanding officers had told them, and the newspapers, too — they’d saved many more. They’d done good with their might, and Daniel had returned a hero. So as he’d introduced himself to Cathy on the lawn that afternoon, as he’d made her laugh, and later, as he’d led her to the dance floor, he’d never suspected that one day the certainty of his life would become so fragile. That one day his sense that these years — even their wars — had been created for him might be turned on its head, until he’d feel like a plaything of the world, and not the other way round.

Wiping his palm on the sheet, Daniel reached out and laid a hand on Cathy’s shoulder. Her skin was smooth, warm under his touch. She didn’t stir. Judging from the light filtering through the shore pine outside their window it wasn’t even six o’clock yet. Daniel thought about waking her. Gently, with kisses, pressing himself against her from behind. Perhaps, after a night’s rest and with the girls still asleep, they’d be able to make love as they once had. He knew they needed it, to feel each other instinctively, without thought.

But he did nothing. The anxiety of his flashback was still active within him, its residue too unreliable, threatening like a faulty screen to flicker into life at any moment. So he just watched Cathy sleep instead, moving his hand up to stroke her hair where it flowed across the pillow.

Even with their recent troubles, this waking together still felt like a gift to Daniel. The knowledge that they’d be sharing the same bed that night, that they no longer had to worry about orders coming down the line, about watching the news with one eye on what it would mean for them in a couple months’ time. This was why they’d moved to Nevada. For this waking, this knowledge. To feel their future as firmly under their feet as their present. As soon as Daniel had learnt what they’d be doing at Creech, he’d put in for a transfer. He’d been on three tours since they’d got married. Two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. All three had been hard on Cathy and the girls. And, in a different way, on him, too. It was on those tours, in two-minute sat-phone conversations and jumpy Skype sessions, that Daniel had come to understand the value of his family. When he’d last returned from Afghanistan, Kayce, just six years old back then, had hugged him round the legs and asked him to promise he’d never leave like that again. Daniel told her he’d do what he could. Which, when he saw the email about Creech and the future reactivation of the 432nd, he did.