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
