Читать книгу The Top Gun's Return - Kathleen Creighton - Страница 9

May, 1995—Near Athens, Georgia

The day Jessie Bauer’s life changed forever began like any other. She worked the day shift as a nurse’s aid at the hospital in Athens and came home looking forward to the same three things she always did after a long day on her feet: a glass of Momma’s sweet tea, a letter from Tristan and a quiet hour to sit with her feet up while she read it.

“Hey, Momma,” Jessie said as she stepped through the open back porch door and put her pocketbook on the kitchen table, “whatcha makin’?” So close to the first day of summer, the year’s longest day, the sun was still high in the sky. The house was warm and smelled of burned sugar and overripe fruit.

Her mother lifted damp hair off of her forehead with the back of a hand that held a long-handled wooden spoon. “Oh, I picked up some of those last-of-the-season strawberries Frank had on sale down at the produce stand. They were goin’ fast, so I thought I’d better get ’em put up while they still had some good in ’em.” Red-faced and sweaty, she flashed Jessie a smile.

“Let me get changed,” Jessie said. “I’ll help you.”

“Oh, heavens, I’m about done here—just these last few jars. Then I’m gonna put the kettles to soak and go in and catch Dan Rather. You go on and sit—there’s tea in the ’fridge.”

Jessie picked up her pocketbook and slung the strap over her shoulder. “Thanks, I will in a minute. Where’s Sammi June? Doing her homework?”

“Finished—at least, that’s what she told me. She and J.J. are off ramblin’ down by the creek somewhere.”

Jessie nodded. “I get a letter today?” She asked it in that way people do when they think they’re going to be disappointed.

Not this time, though. Her mother smiled and pointed with the spoon. “You did. It’s on the desk in the—”

And Jessie was already gone, her heart going thump-thump in time to the whapping of the swinging door behind her. In the hall, she let the pocketbook fall to the desktop as she picked up the familiar envelope and pressed it against the place where her heart was beating so fast, fighting the little shivers of joy inside her only because she knew if she wasn’t careful they’d turn into tears. When she had herself calmed down some she went back into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of tea. She carried the glass and the letter out to the front porch and sank into one of the white-painted rocking chairs that sat there in all kinds of weather.

For a while she rocked and held the letter close in her hands while she thought about how beautiful it was just now, with the day lilies blooming along the lane, and the front lawn dotted with yellow dandelions, and the air warm and smelling sweet from Momma’s roses rambling over the porch roof. Finally, having savored the moment about as long as she could stand to, she tore open the envelope and unfolded the single sheet of lined notepaper.

It took only a minute or two—never long enough—to read the words written there. Everyday words about the everyday things that made up Tristan’s life on board an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Persian Gulf: what they’d had to eat, the last movie they’d seen, something some buddy or other had done that made him laugh. Then a line or two about how much he missed Jess and Sammi June, but how glad he was to be where he was, doing something so important. The same words that nearly always ended his letters home.

I know I’m doing what I was meant to do. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be able to stand being away from you guys. But I do believe it, with my whole heart and soul, and I want you to, too. I need you to believe in me, honey. I love you and miss you always.

Inside the house she heard the TV turn on. Heard the introductory fanfare to the evening network news. Then Dan Rather’s familiar voice.

The screen door creaked open. From inside, her mother’s voice called, “Jessie, you need to come in here.” Jessie stopped rocking and turned halfway around in the chair, not quite understanding. She saw Momma standing there, holding the door.

“There’s been a plane shot down over the no-fly zone,” Momma said. “They’re saying the pilot’s missing. They won’t tell who it was until they notify—”

Somehow Jessie was on her feet, and she felt the screen door’s wooden frame under her hand. It’s not Tris. He’s not dead. I’d know if he were dead. I’d know. “It can’t be Tris,” she said. “I’d have heard something. They’d have told me…”

Over the sound of her own voice and the music of a commercial on television came the crunch of tires on gravel.

As Jessie turned, her world shifted into slow motion. Sounds faded. Floating in the silence, she watched a strange car come along the lane and pull to a gentle stop in front of the house. It was one she’d never seen before, a dark sedan with writing on the doors, but she knew it just the same.

She watched, suspended in time and silence, as the doors opened and two men got out. Men she didn’t know. Tall, dignified men wearing dark-blue Navy dress uniforms, their white hats gleaming bright as moons in the evening sun.

Looking back on that day, Jess recalled that she’d stood alone on the wide front porch, watching those two men come toward her across the lawn with its happy polka-dot riot of yellow dandelions. She didn’t remember Momma coming to stand with her, putting her hands on her shoulders.

She remembered that she held out her hands when the men took off their hats and began to mount the wooden steps to the porch where she was. She held her hands with the palms out, as if she were going to try to hold them back. As if she were going to push them away. As if by keeping them away, she could keep them from saying to her what they’d come to say. As if keeping them from saying it would make it not be true.

She remembered thinking, How in the world am I gonna tell Sammi June?

But after that, she didn’t remember much of anything for a very long time.

Eight Years Later—Near Baghdad, Iraq

The bombs had stopped falling. He wondered if it was for keeps this time, but doubted it would be. The bombs had been falling on and off for six days. On the seventh day they rested?

Lying in the silent darkness he thought about the bombs. He was sure they were American bombs, and wondered if the next round would finally bring the ancient prison tumbling in on top of him. No telling what this place was disguised as, and no one had any idea he was here, anyway. He thought what irony it would be if it turned out it was the Americans who finally killed him.

“Missed again,” came a hoarse whisper from beyond the damp stone walls of his cell.

He grunted a reply. Rising stiffly from his pallet, he made his way to the heavy wooden door and leaned his back against it.

“You think they’re done for tonight?” the whisper came again. The whispering was from long habit; talking among prisoners wasn’t allowed.

He turned his head and addressed the small barred opening high in the door. Though it was invisible now in the darkness, he knew its position exactly; through it, for the past several weeks, at least, had come everything he depended on to stay alive. As well as everything he most feared. “Maybe. Seems early, though.” An unnamed tension gripped his muscles and his nerves quivered as he and the whisperer fell silent, listening to distant noises of chaos: shouts, small explosions and the rattle of gunfire.

“Listen—” It was a faint hiss, like spit in hot coals.

He’d heard the new sound, too. Footsteps.

Footsteps spoke a language all their own, one he’d learned well over the years. These were not the usual footsteps, firm with authority and menace, that set his nerves and muscles and sinews to vibrating with conditioned fear responses. These were furtive footsteps. A lot of them. Hurrying footsteps. Running, but not with thumps. Like…scuffles, rhythmic and purposeful.

A shiver crawled down his spine. He pressed it hard against the door, and with the drumming of his pulse in his ears he almost missed the voices. They were only intermittent mutters at first, and whether it was due to that or a self-protective refusal to believe, it was a while before it dawned on him they were speaking in English.

“…Clear!”

“Panther one, clear!”

“Move on three…”

“Roger that—go, go go!”

The footsteps were growing louder, now broken by pauses, thumps, brief explosions of gunfire that crashed like thunder against the stone walls. And in the dying echoes of the thunder, the voices came again.

“We got a live one here. Barely.”

“Ah, Jeez. Look at this. Poor bastards…”

“What do you want to do with ’em?”

“We got no choice. They’ll have to find their own way out. We’re here to get one guy.”

“We have to find him first. Jeez, there must be a hundred cells in this stinking hell-hole.”

There was a pause, and then a controlled shout: “Pearson! Cory Pearson—you in here? If you can hear me—”

“Here! I’m here!” It was the unseen companion’s voice, excited, not whispering, now. Cracking with excitement and hope.

“Okay, we hear you,” came the reply, calm by contrast. “Keep talking. We’re coming to get you.”

Huddled in the darkness with filthy stones against his back, he listened to the shouts and the footsteps coming nearer, until they seemed to be right outside his cell. An explosion thumped his eardrums, and he clapped his hands to the sides of his head and opened his mouth in a silent scream of pain. In the seconds that followed he realized he was shaking. His knees and head felt the way they did when he knew he was going to pass out.

Not now, he prayed, gritting his teeth together. Not…now.

The darkness around him filled with images, the same well-loved faces that had kept him sane and clinging to life for so long. Well-remembered voices spoke to him, as they had so many times before. He concentrated on the faces and felt his head clear and his breathing quiet. Drawing on reserves of strength he’d forgotten he had, he drew himself slowly erect, and his chest filled and his shoulders lifted.

“Wait! There’s another one!” The unseen companion’s voice came again, trembling with emotion. “You can’t leave him—”

“Another one—in here? What, you mean, another American?”

“Yeah, he’s—”

“That’s impossible. We weren’t briefed—”

“Look, I’m not leaving him behind.”

Someone swore impatiently. “You sure? Where is he? In here?” The same voice rose to a shout. “Hey, buddy, can you hear me? If you can hear me—”

“Yeah, I hear you.” It felt odd to him to be talking so loudly, but he thought his voice sounded okay. Calm. Normal. Not even shaking. Much.

More swearing—startled this time. “I’ll be damned—uh…okay, buddy, listen, we’re gonna get you outa there. I want you to take cover, you understand? I’m gonna blow the door.”

“Ready when you are.”

He pressed himself into the corner of his cell to one side of the door and covered his head with his arms. The explosion that came then seemed almost an anticlimax, and in its aftermath he turned and drew himself once more erect.

For some reason he’d expected light, but in the rectangle where the door had been there was only the thin gray of starlight and the flickering glow from burning bombsites leaking through the high, narrow windows of the ancient fortress. His rescuers were darker shapes, anonymous and alien in their gear, like something out of science fiction.

“Are you guys SEALS?” he asked. For some reason he knew they would be.

“That’s right. Who the hell are you?”

Realizing they’d be able to see him with their night-vision goggles, he gave them the best salute he could. “Lt. Tristan Bauer, United States Navy.”

There was a stunned silence. Then one of the shapes said, “You’re Navy?” just as another said, “That’s not possible.”

That one, the nonbeliever, pushed past his comrade and into the cell, cradling his weapon across his chest as if he needed the comfort of it. “Lt. Bauer’s dead. My brother served with him on the Teddy Roosevelt. He was shot down in ’95. That’s…” His voice wavered. “Jeez, that’d be eight years.”

Tris grinned, stretching muscles he hadn’t used in a very long time. “Yeah, so, what the hell took you guys so long?”

Early April, New York City, USA

Jessie and her sister, Joy Lynn, were arguing about where to have lunch, as usual.

“Not Thai again, please,” Jessie said with a shudder as she lengthened her stride in a vain attempt to keep up with her older and considerably shorter sister. Joy Lynn had been a New Yorker for going on ten years, since before her second divorce became final, and had evidently forgotten that GRITS, as in, Girls Raised in the South, never walk if they can help it.

“And don’t even think about suggesting Indian,” she warned as the suggestive tinkle of temple bells floated from a nearby doorway. “Last time you took me to an Indian restaurant I had to go find a hotdog vendor afterward just to put my stomach right. Whatever happened to good old American?” It was a rhetorical question, asked plaintively of the weeping sky, and had less to do with her food preferences than it did the serious second thoughts she was having about visiting her New-York-dwelling sister in the springtime when the air back home in Georgia was warm and sweet and the countryside aflame with azaleas. “What’s wrong with KFC?” she whined, hugging her borrowed raincoat close across her chest. “Bojangles with cole slaw an’ biscuits?”

Unperturbed, Joy Lynn said, “Don’t be such a hick,” as she whipped her trilling cell phone out of a raincoat pocket. She glanced at the caller ID, said, “Huh,” in a wondering way and put the phone to her ear. “Hey, Momma, what’s up?”

“Momma!” Jessie exclaimed. “Why would she be callin’?”

Joy Lynn’s pace had slowed. She flicked a glance sideways at Jessie and said, “Uh-huh.”

Jessie’s belly quivered. “She wantin’ me?” An alarm had gone off in her head. Sammi June.

“Uh-huh,” said Joy Lynn again, but not to her, holding up a silencing finger. Then she said, “Okay. Hold on a sec—” She grabbed Jessie by the sleeve of the raincoat and hauled her through a warm doorway that smelled strongly of garlic.

“It’s Italian, for God’s sake,” she hissed at Jessie, who was muttering, “But—but—” and dragging back against the tow. Jessie had nothing against Italian, but butterflies were flopping earnestly in her belly now, and she no longer had any interest whatsoever in eating.

It’s Sammi June—oh God, it must be. Why else would Momma be calling me unless something awful’s happened to Sammi June?

Numb with foreboding, she let Joy Lynn haul her to a table next to a heavily textured wall that was painted dark green with spiderwebs of white plaster showing through. Her sister tugged a chair out with a thump, pushed Jessie down on it, then wedged herself into the one opposite. “Okay, she’s sittin’ down,” she said into the phone, breathless and pink in the cheeks. She went silent, listening. Then breathed, “Oh, my Lord.”

Something’s happened to Sammi June, was the only thought in Jessie’s head. She had begun to tremble uncontrollably. Panic washed over her; she couldn’t breathe. No. I can’t bear it. I can’t. I can’t.

She’d felt like this only one other time in her life. That day came back to her so vividly now…Dan Rather’s voice on the television, the screech of the screen door…her mother saying, “Jessie, you need to come in here.” The crunch of tires on gravel, the dark-blue sedan, and two tall men coming toward her across a polka-dot lawn. The way the world had gone silent. The way she’d held out her hands to keep those men from coming on up the steps, the same way she was holding out her hands right now, as if she could push away that phone Joy Lynn was trying to give to her. As if by keeping it away she could keep herself from ever having to hear the words Momma was about to say to her. As if by not hearing them she could make them not be true.

“Sammi June—” The words burst from her, exploding like a sneeze past the icy fear, the trembling.

“No, hon’, it’s not Sammi June.” Joy Lynn’s voice was gentle, and so was her hand as she took Jessie’s and held on to it. Her fingers felt warm, wrapped around Jessie’s icy ones. “Sammi June’s fine. Everybody’s just fine.”

Then what…? Dazed, Jess could only give her head an uncomprehending shake.

“Jessie, honey, you need to take this.” Joy Lynn pressed the cell phone into Jessie’s hand and folded her stiff fingers around it. “Momma’s got somethin’ to tell you. It’s okay,” she added when Jessie just went on looking at her, dumb and frozen with anguish. Trying her best to smile though there were tears in her eyes, she said, “It’s okay, I promise.”

Drained and shell-shocked, still trembling, Jessie lifted the phone to her ear. “Momma? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, honey.” But Momma’s voice sounded way too calm, the way it only did when she was about to deliver some painful news. It had sounded like that, Jessie remembered, when she’d told Sammi June and J.J. the old hounddog, General, had been bitten by a copperhead and had to be put to sleep. “But…this is gonna be hard to hear.”

Jessie’s heart was beating so fast she wondered if there was something seriously wrong with it. She pressed a hand against her chest to hold it still and whispered, “Okay.”

“Jessie…honey.” There was a single high musical note of laughter or perhaps a sob. “Honey, it’s Tristan. They found him. In Baghdad. Oh, sweet child. He’s alive.”

April, Landstuhl, Germany

Jessica Ann Starr couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t loved Tristan Bauer, so it always came as something of a shock to her to realize he’d actually been present in her life for so few of her thirty-six years. Now, sitting in the back seat of a car speeding sedately along a German autobahn, memories of those few, those golden moments…hours…days, seemed to fill her whole existence. Her mind flipped through them like the photographs in the album she’d assembled to share with Joy Lynn and now held in her lap, clutched in nerveless fingers.

She’d been in high school when they’d met, vacationing on a Florida beach with friends, spring break her senior year. Almost exactly eighteen years ago—half her life—though it shamed her to admit she couldn’t recall the exact date. He’d seemed to her unattainable as a movie star, impossibly handsome, wonderfully tall—always a plus for a girl who’d hit her current height of five feet ten inches in seventh grade. His thick black hair, brown eyes and olive skin had seemed thrillingly exotic to her, since she was sunshine-blond and wholesome as grits.

There on the beach that morning she’d listened to the lies that came floating out of her own mouth, effortlessly as blowing smoke from a forbidden cigarette, tacking on a couple of years to her age and some mythical college experience to get past his grown man’s scruples about dating a high school girl, and hadn’t even cared if she went to Hell because of them.

That night he’d kissed her, and she knew it had all been worth the risk. He’d kissed her outside her motel room door, pressing her up against the hard stucco wall so that she’d felt the whole sinewy length of him all up and down her front, and everywhere he’d touched her she’d felt her body tingle and burn as if a million stars were exploding inside her. Or as if millions and millions of cells in her body had waited for that moment to wake up and burst into exuberant life. That was the way it had seemed to her, as if she’d only been partly alive until Tristan, and after that night she’d known she would never again be completely alive without him.

She’d told him the truth about her age before she’d left him to go back home, though, because by that time she’d known she was going to marry him one day. She hadn’t known, then, that less than three weeks after her high school graduation she’d be Mrs. Tristan Bauer, wife of a naval aviator, and already well on her way to being someone’s mother.

“Ma’am?” The gray-haired, bespectacled naval officer in the front passenger seat broke his respectful silence, turning his head and leaning slightly in order to make eye contact. “We’ll be taking you directly to the residence, which is adjacent to the medical center where your husband is receiving treatment. After you’ve checked in, I can take you to see him there, or you can wait for him in the residence, if you like. Lieutenant Bauer should be cleared to join you shortly. Whichever you prefer.”

His manner was deferential to the point of awe, which Jessie found disconcerting. “Thank you, Lieutenant Commander—” She searched her befuddled memory for her casualty assistance officer’s name and came up empty. Exhausted by the effort, she was about to fall gratefully back into the cocoon of her own musings when the expectant look on the officer’s face registered on her consciousness. He was waiting for her decision. Her forehead tightened as she struggled with it; any logical, reasoning thought was hard work for her today. And this—whether to meet her husband, returned from the dead after eight years, for the first time in the cold antiseptic environment of a hospital room with doctors and nurses all around, or confront him alone in privacy, this man she’d loved and given up for lost long, long ago, now a stranger to her—seemed utterly impossible. Which was better? Or worse?

For better or worse…in sickness and in health.

She tried to smile for Lieutenant Commander—Rees, she remembered now. Rees-with-two-es, he’d told her. “How are these things usually handled?” She thought of the return of the captives taken during Desert Storm, of television pictures of gaunt men in flight suits engulfed in loved ones’ embraces while flags waved and bands played “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree.” She’d been active in the wives’ support group on the base at the time and had worn a bracelet with a POW’s name engraved on it.

The Lieutenant Commander’s military bearing melted into a smile of pure irony. “Ma’am, there isn’t any precedent for what happened to your husband. As far as the Navy’s concerned, you can have this just about anyway you want it.”

Jessie nodded, too distracted to return the smile. The representative of the Defense Department who’d taken charge of her in New York had said much the same thing: There was no protocol for resurrection. There’d been no yellow ribbons or POW bracelets for Tristan. No support groups or letter-writing campaigns petitioning for his release. For all intents and purposes he’d been abandoned, forgotten, given up for dead, and the country he’d served and sacrificed eight years of his life for now seemed eager—almost desperate—to make amends.

Which was no doubt why Tristan’s somewhat unusual request to stay in Germany for part of his treatment and recovery period rather than being sent home to the States as soon as he was deemed fit to travel had immediately been granted. So had his request that his wife be allowed to join him, rather than wait at home for his return. Jessie had been given the choice of waiting in New York for Tristan’s phone call or taking the next flight to Germany. She’d chosen the flight, and had been whisked off to the airport by her DOD assistance officer, one jump ahead of the media stampede.

It had been decided that Sammi June would stay and wait with her grandma Betty and the rest of the family back home in Georgia. Jessie wasn’t sure who had made that decision, but she knew it was the right one. She’d been told Tristan was still very weak and sick, and she knew he wouldn’t want Sammi June to see him like that. Not to mention that she was mightily glad not to have Sammi June’s emotional baggage to deal with right now. Her own was burden enough.

Morning was only beginning to thin the darkness when Sammi June slipped out of bed. She made little effort to be silent; her roommate slept like the dead and was snoring peacefully, as always, an arm’s reach away in the tiny University of Georgia dorm room they’d shared since last September. Sammi June hadn’t slept at all, peacefully or otherwise, since Gramma Betty’s phone call yesterday afternoon.

Baby girl, your daddy’s alive.

Baby girl. Nobody had called her that in years, not since her dad had gone away to fly F-16’s over Iraqi deserts, eight years ago. Daddy had still called her his “baby girl,” then, even though she’d been ten years old at the time. Would he still call her that now, she wondered, even though she was no baby, hardly even a girl? She was eighteen, an adult in the eyes of the law, old enough to vote and get married without permission and be responsible for her own choices. A grown woman.

Although she didn’t feel the least bit like one at the moment.

Uncaring of the morning chill, wearing only the boxer shorts and tank top that served her as pajamas in all seasons, she slumped into the hard-backed chair at her study desk beside the window and fingered apart the blinds. Out there on the still-slumbering campus the other buildings were dark shapes, street and yard lights blurred and haloed by a thin gauze of fog. Flowering trees were beginning to take lacy form among the darker grays of azaleas and new-leafed trees. Stars were few, pale pinpricks in the lavender sky. Search as she might she couldn’t locate the Evening Star, the one she’d wished on so many times, all those years ago.

Starlight, star bright,

First star I’ve seen tonight,

I wish I may, I wish I might…

Anger surged unexpectedly, trembling through her, stinging behind her nose and eyes. I wish my daddy would come home. How many times had she wished that when she was little? Wished it so hard sometimes it felt as if all the cells in her brain were vibrating, as if her head might explode. And…nothing.

Instead one day they’d told her her dad was dead, that he wasn’t ever coming home again. She hadn’t believed them. She’d begun to wish on the Evening Star again, a different wish this time. I wish my daddy would be alive. And still nothing. For eight years.

Nothing. How angry she’d been, deep down inside where nobody could see it, angry with her dad for leaving her, for not being there when she needed him to see her in her class play, to cheer at her soccer games, congratulate her after speech tournament victories, walk her across the field when she was elected Junior Homecoming Princess. To comfort her when she had to get braces, and when she’d missed being selected for the freshman cheerleading squad. How angry she’d been, though she’d never let anybody see it, not even Momma.

And now? Now that she was practically grown-up and didn’t really need parents anymore, it seemed all those pathetic little-girl wishes had finally been granted. Her dad was alive. He was coming home. Was God playing a joke on her? She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel.

The blinds clanked softly as they slipped back into place, and a tear left its silky track down Sammi June’s cheek.

Jessie’s fingertips stroked the image in the snapshot album she held in her lap—Sammi June, in her ball gown, head held high and tiara gleaming, radiantly smiling against the backdrop of an indigo sky. So lovely, so grown-up at not quite seventeen, and in her high heels already almost as tall as her escort, her uncle Jimmy Joe. And, Jessie remembered, she’d even managed to look graceful during that walk across the football field, in spite of high heels that kept punching into the damp turf.

A young woman. Would Tris even know his daughter? She’d been a knobby-kneed tomboy in ponytails when he’d seen her last.

The image blurred and wavered inside its protective plastic envelope, and Jessie hurriedly blotted her eyes with the sleeve of her heather-gray blazer. Her hand lingered there, lightly pressing her cheekbone…her temple, smoothing back wisps of hair. There was gray in those wisps now, that hadn’t been there eight years ago. She’d changed a lot—lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth…her neck. Her breasts weren’t as firm, her belly a bit more rounded. I’ve changed. Will he know me?

Lieutenant Commander Rees was waiting politely for her reply.

“I think—” Her voice shook and she drew a breath to steady it. An image rose in her memory of the only other time she’d ever seen Tris in a hospital bed, pale and groggy after the surgery to set the fractured leg that had grounded him during Desert Storm. It was the only time she’d ever seen him vulnerable and helpless. He wouldn’t want her to see him like that again. “I think Tristan would rather I waited for him at the residence. He’s never been crazy about hospitals.”

She struggled to produce a smile for the officer before turning to gaze, unseeing, upon the German countryside.

He’s been like that—vulnerable and helpless—for eight years, the man I knew and loved for his strength, his pride, and yes, even his arrogance. What did they do to him? How did he survive, all those years? How could he survive, without being irrevocably changed? Will I know him?

Butterflies danced and shivered inside her, and she thought, Yes. That’s where the biggest changes will be, in both of us. There, deep inside.