same thing had happened when he’d been deployed in the army, only then he’d been shot at, as well. On the other hand, he hadn’t been alone and there was a lot to be said for companionship.
The house was a newer one, built in a cluster of similar houses located in a small wooded area a few miles outside of Blunt Falls. They’d bought it with plans to fill the rooms upstairs with their children and had pictured them running through the trees and splashing in the shallow stream at the bottom of the gulch with the neighborhood kids as playmates. But that had never happened. Oh, the neighbors’ families grew all right, but theirs didn’t and now, in some ways, the houses all around them, strewn with tricycles and sandboxes, formed a painful reminder that things didn’t always work out the way you thought they would.
Now the house welcomed him back with years of memories, and he stood by the big rock fireplace just trying to center himself. Meanwhile, Jessica closed the drapes and turned to face him. She’d deposited her purse and briefcase on the chair nearest the door, much as she always had and now stood looking up the stairs as though she wanted to dash up to their room.
He reached for her hand. “We won’t have long before they track us down,” he said.
She looked at him and nodded. “Good point.”
“I’m a little beat,” he said with a smile. “Let’s go sit at the table like we used to. Let’s talk.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”
He claimed the chair facing the living-room door and patted the one beside it. She entered the dining room behind him, her brown eyes velvety, enhanced by the oversize cream tunic she wore over slim black jeans.
She looked good, her auburn hair longer than it had been in a while, combed straight back from her oval-shaped face which was devoid of makeup as it almost always was. He’d been afraid he’d find her worn-out and grief stricken, but instead she seemed almost luminescent. His disappearance didn’t seem to have hurt her.
Well, why should it have? They’d been whisper close to a separation for most of the past year, so caught up in their different lives that they’d become like that old saying, “Ships passing in the night.” In fact, for the past three months his greatest fear had been that she would be relieved he’d vanished. No more fights, no more disappointments, no stress. Just over. And who was to say that that isn’t what happened? Maybe she’d moved on, maybe she’d even found someone else.
Maybe he should stop borrowing trouble....
“Are you hungry?” she asked, standing behind the chair he’d patted. It provided a good view of the garden and he’d already noticed the plethora of bushes and flowers that bloomed with an intensity he didn’t remember ever seeing before. Some plants were absolutely covered with buds, promising radiant blossoms in the weeks to come. She must have spent hours out there tending that garden, loving it.
“The Bookers stuffed me,” he said, a bit distracted by the beauty sweeping across the yard toward the doors. He pulled his attention back to her. “They grow or hunt just about everything they eat. My poor digestive tract is probably struggling to cope after existing on three-plus months of pretty much nothing but fish.”
She slid a basket of clothes across the table and started folding them. He got the distinct impression she was keeping her hands busy. Either that, or she was creating a barrier by positioning the basket between them. “Where did you meet these people?” she asked.
“I literally stumbled into their garden and collapsed in their asparagus patch.”
She stopped folding a lacy bra and stared at him. He tore his gaze away from the undergarment and all the memories it provoked as she said, “You’re not making any sense. Where have you been for three months? What exactly happened to you?”
He told her about the storm and the dead engine, ending with the crash far off his reported route and the immediate sinking of the plane. He touched on his nightmare crawl across the lake to the relative safety of the shore and how he’d managed to live through the first night by digging out a trench around the base of a tree and covering it over with evergreen boughs.
“I can’t believe you survived,” she said when he paused. “Did you ever see a search plane?”
“Once,” he said, all but wincing at the memory. “I woke up to the sound of an engine and scrambled out of my hole like a crippled badger.”
“When was this?”
“Two days after the crash. I had to grab the makeshift crutches to get out into the clear where they could see me. The emergency beacon I carried went down with the Cessna.”
She almost rolled her eyes and he smiled. “I know, I know. You asked me to update my equipment a hundred times.”
“Two hundred,” she said.
“Well, you were obviously right. Anyway, by the time I got out from under the trees, they were gone and they didn’t come back.”
“That must have been horrible,” she said, visibly shuddering. “How is your leg now?”
“Pretty good. I’ll probably limp for the rest of my life, but considering everything, that’s not so bad.”
She nodded. “Okay, now tell me how you ended up in an asparagus patch.”
He shrugged as though it was all no big deal. The actuality of it was a whole different matter. “I waited until the snow started to melt, smoked a bunch of fish, broke camp and stared downhill, following a stream that fed from the lake. After a few days, I ran into tended land, though I didn’t see a house. There was this big, tall fence surrounding some seedlings so I went through the gate to see if anything was mature enough to eat yet. I found a few strawberries, gobbled them up and must have passed out or fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, an older woman was shaking me awake. She told me her name was Doris and that she and her husband, Duke, had built themselves a place just over the rise. They nursed me for a day or so and then they insisted on driving me home and that took another two days.”
“Thank heavens she found you,” Jessica said. “You should see a doctor about your leg.”
“I will. Right now, it’s enough just to be sitting here.” He ran a hand across his hairy chin and added, “I need a shave and my own clothes. Duke lent me these.”
“They sound like incredibly kind people. But, Alex, why didn’t you phone me?”
“They don’t have a phone,” he said. “No television, no internet, no electricity. They’re the back-to-nature type. I did call my parents on the way, though.”
“But not me.”
Did that bother her? Was she thinking that in the months before he disappeared he’d often not reported in as often as he should because it always seemed to come with an argument or apathy, either one of them hard to take? “I didn’t want you to find out about me over a phone,” he said gently. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to look in your eyes, to know if it mattered to you that I was alive.”
“Of course it matters to me,” she said, brow furling. “What a terrible thing to say.”
“You know what I mean, Jess.”
She
