a finger at Cory for emphasis, “Okay, but just so you know, the minute we get to Zamboanga, it’s the brews first, then the buzz. I mean it, man. The whole story. Or you can find yourself another cameraman. Swear to God.”
Cory put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
He wasn’t worried about losing his photographer. In addition to being a close personal friend, Tony’d have to be comatose and chained to a bunker before he’d miss this assignment. But he was right—the three of them were going to be depending on each other for a lot during the next week or so, including, possibly, their lives. They were a team, for better or worse. Tony deserved to know about his history with the third member of the team—some of it, anyway.
Definitely not everything.
God, how it all came back to him, the way things had been with Sam and him. Every laugh, every tear, every heart-thumping, gut-twisting, sweaty detail. The chemistry—the fireworks—had been there from the first moment for both of them, although he’d done a pretty good job—heroic, he thought, considering what he was up against—of holding it at bay for as long as he had.
There’d been the age thing, of course, but Sam hadn’t wanted to hear about that. Far as she was concerned she was a grown-up woman of legal consenting age, and that was that. Didn’t help matters, either, that her mother had been the same age when she’d met and fallen in love with her dad.
Then there’d been Cory’s friendship with Tristan, forged during those hellish days spent together in an Iraqi prison. Tris hadn’t been happy when his baby girl, the daughter he still remembered as a ponytailed tomboy, had declared her intention of dating a thirty-two-year-old friend of her father’s. Cory had been fighting a strong sense of guilt about that the weekend he’d gone to visit Tris, Jessie and Sam at the lake house. Memorial Day weekend, it had been. Lord, how well he remembered that terrible day….
It’s been a beautiful day. Last night’s thunderstorms have moved on, and the skies have cleared to a typically hot, hazy, sun-shiny summer afternoon. The lake is crowded with boats of all kinds, shapes and sizes: pontoons loaded with partying lake-dwellers waving to neighbors on their docks, flat-bottomed bass boats with solitary fishermen stoically riding out the chop in quiet coves, lots of other ski-boats, and of course the Wave Runners and Jet Skis, zipping illegally in and out amongst them all.
In the midst of all the chaos, Sam is determined to teach me to water-ski. I’ve never considered myself particularly talented when it comes to sports, but she’s patient—or stubborn—and it seems as if I might be getting the hang of it, finally. I’ve gotten up—again—and this time it feels like I might stay here awhile. Tris is driving the boat, while Jess sits watching me from the spotter’s seat in the rear, and Sam rides beside me on her knee board. Above the hiss of the water’s spray I can hear her shouting encouragement and praise.
He remembered the feel of the goofy grin on his face, the breathless exhilaration when he successfully jumped the wake.
He remembered the two kids on the Jet Ski, a boy and a girl riding tandem, cutting in close…too close.
I hit the water with that stinging thump that’s become all too familiar to me this day, and I hear Sam’s yell and Jessie’s whoop, and the sound of the boat’s motor throttling down, then circling slowly back to me. Jess leans over the back of the boat, calling to me, asking if I’m ready to call it quits.
That’s when it happens.
I don’t see the accident, none of us do, except maybe Tristan. But we all hear it—that terrible grinding crunch. I hear Tris shout as he guns the boat, and then he’s heading away from me toward the mouth of a nearby cove. Far off across the roiling surface of the water I can see the teenagers’ Jet Ski floating at a crazy angle next to a capsized bass boat.
Then I’m swimming, swimming toward the wreck, swimming as hard as I’ve ever swum in my life before, and my heart feels like it’s on fire in my chest.
I hear Jessie screaming at Tris, and the sound of a splash as Tris hits the water. And after what seems an eternity, I see Tris’s head reappear, and next to it that of the unconscious fisherman. I feel an awful jolt of adrenaline shoot through me a moment later when I see both Tris and the fisherman slowly sink back beneath the surface of that muddy water.
A thought flashes through my mind: No! No way he survived eight years in an Iraqi prison to die in this godforsaken pond. No way!
That’s when I haul in air and dive.
Things become confused…I’m operating on instinct.
I’m underwater, I feel something…I grab hold of it. It’s Tris, and I grab hold of him and try to fight my way back to the surface. And I realize I’m fighting a losing battle because Tris still has a death grip on the bass fisherman and isn’t about to let go.
I think, God help us, we’re all going to drown.
And then…my head’s above water, and I see Sam, plowing toward us through the water on her knee board, digging hard with both arms and yelling and cussing like a maniac, and she’s shoving life preservers at me, and her strong hands are everywhere, helping me, lifting Tris, pulling them both up out of the water.
There’s a lot of yelling and thrashing around, and everything is gasping, coughing, choking, sobbing pandemonium….
In spite of the confusion, some images stayed clear in his mind: Sam treading water while breathing into the fisherman’s mouth. Jess doing the same for the teenaged boy in the bottom of the boat while she sobbed and swore furiously at Tris between breaths. Tris clinging to the side of the boat, gasping for breath and glancing over at Cory with haunted eyes.
Later that evening, after paramedics had flown the three accident victims off to the hospital in a medevac chopper, after Tris and Jess, Sam and Cory had all showered and eaten and calm had been restored, Sam and Cory took the boat and went out again onto the now-serene and all but deserted lake. To watch the sunset, Sam said, but Cory had known her real reason for wanting to get out of the house was to give her mom and dad some privacy. They’d been having a rough time of it since Tris’s return from the dead, Cory knew. It was Jess’s concern about her husband that had led her to call Cory, to ask for help from the one person she felt might understand what Tris was going through.
How well he remembered that night, too, and what a strange contradiction there seemed to be between the peace and quiet of tranquil water reflecting sunset clouds…the first and brightest star of evening…and the sense inside himself that something profound had happened to him this day. That being here with this woman, a milestone had been passed in his life, one equal in import and magnitude to his parents’ death and his sojourn in Iraq, one that would change the direction of his life irrevocably.
“Look,” Sam says, “there’s the Wishing Star.”
She tells me, then, how she wished on that star when she was a little girl, and she tells me the poem and we recite it together: “Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight…”
“What did you wish for?” I ask her, smiling, thinking how very young she is.
“Uh-uh. You’re not supposed to tell. Otherwise, it won’t come true.” And she smiles and tilts her face up to mine.
It was then, in that moment, that he’d forgotten any thoughts he’d ever had about how young she was. He’d remembered instead her strength and her courage. He’d remembered her intelligence
