Shahla's Daughter

The phone rang again, probably another telemarketer. If his girlfriend weren't half a world away in Iraq, Mike would have disconnected the damn thing. Ignore it, he told himself, trying to keep in his head that spring morning almost two centuries ago: the untrained militia, led by Colonel Electus Backus, waiting tensely behind trees, behind earth berms, huddling in ditches. The British were about to invade Sackett's Harbor. The phone kept ringing as Mike tried to listen with his inner ear for the voice of his main character. What was Backus thinking? What did he tell his men, as the Red Coats, their bayonets fixed, waded toward them across the shallows from Horse Island to the mainland?

His impatient fingers hovered just over the keyboard. If he didn't turn in a manuscript soon, he would lose the new agent it had taken him so long to find. After the seventh ring, he heard his own voice. Then a real voice, a voice Mike knew, startled him. "This is Brad Bowen at the high school," the voice said. "I have Tissa in my office."

The invasion scene ceased to be, as if the power had been cut. In its place, he pictured Tissa sitting sullenly in a chair across from the principal's desk, arms crossed, looking anywhere but at Bowen. Mike had lived with Shahla and her daughter for three years. The mother he thought he knew, but the teenager grew more and more inscrutable. He snatched up the phone. "What did she do this time?"

"Her T-shirt advocates impeaching the President," Bowen said.

"It's just a T-shirt," Mike said, lighting a cigarette. "Can't she wear her jacket over it?"

Bowen's voice became testy, saying the message was inappropriate and offensive, and going on about the need for unity now that the country was at war. Mike half-listened, God knows he wasn't a leftist anymore—after all, his girlfriend was a Major in the Third Infantry. But this fuss over a T-shirt seemed excessive. Tissa had been an honor student since 7th grade. Last year, when she moved up to high school, she began to change. She affected a punk look. She swore. She had few friends: half her classmates were children of soldiers and officers who lived on the base nearby. Her teachers were no good, she complained, she hated Bowen. Each time Tissa got in trouble, her mother had intervened, keeping her in check. But then, after Shahla's unit was flown out of Fort Drum two months ago, the changes suddenly gained momentum.

"The three of us have to reach an understanding," the principal said.

The phone tucked into his shoulder, Mike parted the curtains of his upstairs study and looked out the window of their over-priced condominium. Wind whipped the leaves across the drilling field toward the old brick Union Barracks. Mike would need to bring Tissa an acceptable change of clothing, Bowen was telling him. "All right," Mike said, "I'll be there in half an hour."

He hung up and stood by the window for a minute or two. This view was what had inspired his historical novel: On the left was a cannon, its barrel turned green over the years, pointing toward Lake Ontario; next to it the old granite water tower; then the drilling field where a few seagulls pecked at the grass; and finally the brick barracks with their wide, blackened chimneys standing at attention like shabby old veterans at a funeral. He inhaled the view and shut his eyes, trying to imagine the barracks when they were new, as if he were Electus Backus. But it didn't work. He was only himself, Mike Daugherty, whose first two novels had flared brightly after publication, dimmed, and then gone out. In the first one, the protagonist, a draft-dodger who fled to Toronto, was too much like Mike himself. The second, about a Korean War veteran, was an attempt to imagine the father who had run away before Mike got to know him. They were angry, cynical books. And now...