The Top Gun's Return

Fear shivered through her, and she stirred in his arms. They loosened instantly, though he kept her within their circle, his hands still transmitting minute tremors through the fabric of her sweater and deep into her body. That almost imperceptible shaking nearly undid her. She placed her palms on the front of his jumpsuit and tried to laugh. Then gave that up and sniffed loudly, brushing at her eyes. “Told myself I wouldn’t do this.”

Tristan had told himself the same thing. He’d been raised on the notion that real men don’t cry, although eight years in an Iraqi prison had cured him of that notion. He’d heard tougher, stronger men than himself cry like babies, and he wasn’t ashamed of the times he’d done so himself. But he wasn’t about to let himself cry in front of her. He’d learned a lot about self-control in that prison, too, and if it took every ounce he had, he wasn’t going to let Jess see him shed a tear.

He had his reasons for feeling that way, most of which he would have a hard time explaining in words. Some of it was plain old masculine pride, probably, normal guy stuff about wanting to stand tall in front of his woman, particularly when he was feeling anything but. Some of it was protective; he didn’t want Jess to ever have to try to sleep with the images that filled his nightmares. And maybe the biggest part was a combination of those two things. Partly pride, wanting to be for his woman the man he’d once been, the man she expected him to be—a strong man who believed absolutely in himself, and would never give in to weakness. Partly wanting to protect her from knowing about the man he was now—a man who, in the dark and secret places of his mind cringed and cowered in terror, a man who’d cried and screamed and suffered every imaginable kind of humiliation and degradation, and who wasn’t sure what he believed in anymore.

His thumb stroked a tear across her cheek, and his eyes followed it hungrily, as if the salty moisture were some rare and wonderful elixir that could cure everything that was wrong with him. “It’s incredible,” he said, his voice still hushed and disbelieving. “I was prepared—I told myself you wouldn’t, but you do—you look exactly the same.”

She laughed a shaky denial, while her hand fluttered self-consciously toward her face. It changed direction on the way there and touched his instead. He couldn’t control a wince—it had been too many years since he’d felt a gentle touch—and to cover it he caught her hand in his and held it there.

“You look—” she began, and he rushed to interrupt the lie.

“—like bloody hell. I know. I’m sorry, I wish—”

“You don’t.” She’d expected worse. And yet…she hadn’t really been prepared—how could she be?—for this gaunt and bony stranger. He’d always been strong and fit, all muscle and not an ounce of excess fat. Now his body felt hard and alien to her. “But you’re so thin,” she finished, with another shaky laugh.

His face formed a smile, a wry one, beneath her hand. “I guess maybe I have been missing that Georgia cooking. Get me some good ol’ Southern fried chicken, some of your momma’s biscuits and redeye gravy, and I’ll be filled out in no time.” Under her palm, the smile quivered and vanished. “You might have to be a little bit patient with me for a while, though, darlin’. They tell me I’ve picked up an intestinal bug or two, but they’re working on that. Once that’s cleared up, there’ll be no stopping me. Hey, you know, I used to dream about Colonel Sanders? And sweet corn drippin’ butter, and bacon and tomato sandwiches with those great big tomatoes—your momma still grow those in her garden?”

Grief and anger at what had been done to him overwhelmed her. Fighting it with all her might, she drew her hand from his grasp, touched his jaw and then the front of his jumpsuit. Frowning with the effort it took to force calm into her voice, she cleared her throat and carefully began, “Did they—”

“How’ve you been? How’s Sammi June?”

It was a hurried interruption, meant to keep her from asking the questions he didn’t want to answer. Wasn’t ready to answer, she realized, kicking herself, and vowed there and then not to ask again. He’d tell her when he wanted to, when he could, she told herself. If he could.

She answered him in the same false, bright tone, which nobody ever did better than a Southern woman. “Oh, we’ve been doin’ fine…just great. Momma’s fine…”

“Sammi June?”

“She wanted to come…she’s got midterms—”

He looked dazed. “Midterms…my God. She’s in college? I guess…she would be, wouldn’t she? I don’t know, I just keep thinking she’s still a little girl, you know? I guess…she’s pretty much all grown-up, isn’t she?”

The quaver of wistfulness and bewilderment in his voice, in his face, once again was almost more than Jessie could bear. “Oh, she sure is that,” she said, and her voice, still bright, was thinner now, squeezed past the ache in her throat. “She’s taller than I am, if you can believe that. Oh, here, I brought some pictures—” she snatched up the little album she’d left lying on the couch and thrust it at him “—so it won’t be such a shock when you see her.”

He took the album from her, then simply held it, staring down at it as if he had no idea what it was, as if he’d never seen such a thing before. A shiver rippled through her. There was something in his look, a kind of darkness, that frightened her. As if he’d gone away someplace and left her behind. Someplace terrible.

She realized she was babbling—about Sammi June’s classes, the women’s soccer team she was on—just to fill up that silence.

Tristan slowly lifted his head, then looked around as if noticing his surroundings for the first time. “Is there someplace we could go?” Jessie’s heart gave a queer little lurch and she was about to tell him about the room upstairs, the one with the enormous bed in the middle of it, when he abruptly bent down and picked up his cane, then used it to point toward the windows. “For a walk, I mean. Outside. It’s a pretty nice day, looks like.” He looked at her and gave her a smile of apology—that crooked smile she was learning to expect, so different from the old one that showed his beautiful, even teeth and made comma-shaped creases in his cheeks and fans at the corners of his eyes. “I’ve been indoors way too much lately.”

A laugh burst from her that was still frighteningly close to a sob. It was partly relief, she knew; relief that he’d come back from that dark place in his mind. And partly a girlish eagerness to please him that made her think of those first giddy days…weeks, when she was eighteen and newly, wildly in love.

“Sure,” she said, “I don’t see why not. Except—” She’d almost asked him if he felt up to such a stroll, if he was strong enough. Even weak as he obviously was, she knew he’d hate that, and was glad she’d stopped herself in time. Instead she aimed her doubtful look at the windows. “Did you see any media people out there? There weren’t when I got here, but I figure it’s only a matter of time before they find us.”

He gave a snort, and the wry smile flickered on again. “Yeah, your mom said they were camped out on her lawn.”

“You talked to her?”

“First call I made.” His gaze brushed her and he spoke in a diffident, offhand way that seemed almost shy—so unlike Tristan. “It was the only number I was pretty certain would still be the same. I didn’t know if you were—if you’d—hey, I mean I’d understand if you did. As far as you knew, I was dead, right? I mean, legally, even if I was just MIA, after eight years—”

His floundering voice stabbed at her. “Tris, I’m not. Married, I mean, I haven’t—”

“I know that. Your mom told me—well, actually, they did. The Navy, I mean. First thing they did was fill me in on the vital statistics, what information they had.” He paused, and again touched her face with that shy, uncertain glance as he said almost belligerently, “Not being remarried isn’t the same thing as not having someone, though, is it?”

“I don’t,” Jess said gently, and caught the heartbreaking flash of hope that brightened his eyes before he jerked his eyes away. His light, ironic laugh came to her as they moved side by side toward the door that opened onto a patio where guests could sit at outdoor tables when the weather was fine. Beyond that was a wooded area, and a paved bicycle and pedestrian path.

“So, I guess we’re still married, then?”

He didn’t know what made him ask it, like probing a sore tooth with his tongue. We’re still married, then? He didn’t feel like her husband. He felt like a barbarian invader, bringing pain, ugliness and horror into her soft and lovely, civilized life. Everything about her—her hair, her sweater, her skin—was so beautiful, so soft. She smelled so clean. He didn’t feel clean, and sometimes wondered if he ever would again. Until he did, he knew he’d never be able to touch her without thinking that he was soiling her, somehow.

We’re still married, then? What he really wanted to know was, Do you still love me? But that was something he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

Bleakly, he drew a breath and forced a smile. “Your momma seems just the same,” he said as he crossed the brick-paved patio, using the cane in what he hoped was a dashing sort of way rather than leaning on it like an invalid. He considered the pain in his knee only an annoyance—he’d grown accustomed to much worse—but the doctors had told him to keep his weight off of the knee as much as possible. And since his dreams of ever flying again lay pretty much in their hands, he was willing to do what they told him.

Jess gave a light laugh as she came beside him, fitting her stride to his uneven gait. “Did she cry?”

“I…think she might have, yeah, but you know how she is. She’d about die before she’d let you see her shed a tear.”

She did a quick scan for reporters, then moved across the strip of grass that separated the guest house from the path. “Yeah, Momma doesn’t change much,” she said, lifting her face to the sweet spring breeze.

The breeze lifted the hair from her shoulders gently, like the fanning of a butterfly’s wings, and the slanting sunlight shone golden through the fine strands. It seemed to Tristan the loveliest sight he’d ever seen.

“Things around her keep changing, but she stays the same. She’s like, I don’t know…our family’s anchor, or something. Our compass. You know—true north?”

He did know. He wanted to tell her how she and Sammi June had been that for him, all that and more—his anchor, his compass, the beacon light on the shore, his sword, his shield, his armor. But that seemed too big a burden of expectation to lay on one person.

“I guess there’ve been a lot of changes, though,” he said.

She threw him a smile. “Yeah, there have. Mostly good ones. Lots of babies. There’s a whole new crop of nieces and nephews for you to meet. Jimmy Joe and Mirabella—you remember Mirabella’s little girl, Amy Jo? Jimmy Joe delivered her in the cab of his rig on a snowbound interstate in Texas on Christmas Day? Anyway, they have a little boy, now, too, and by the way, J.J.’s a senior in high school, if you can believe that. Then my brother Troy and his wife Charly, they have two little girls. And…let’s see. Oh—oh my God, you’ll never guess. You know my little brother, C.J.?”

“You mean, Calvin? The one that dropped out of high school, and everybody’d pretty much given up on?” How good it felt to talk like this, of ordinary, everyday things. Home…family.

“Excepting Momma, of course—Momma never gives up on any of her kids.” Laughter bubbled up, and he drank the happiness in that sound like water from a healing fountain. “Yup, that’s the one. Well, would you believe he’s a lawyer now?”

“A lawyer? Good Lord.”

“I know, isn’t it wild? He just passed the bar this last March. And guess what else? He’s married. No babies yet, but he and his wife—her name’s Caitlyn, she’s from Iowa, and he met her when she hijacked his rig, and then she got shot and was blind for a while—oh, God, it’s a long story—but anyway, they’ve adopted a little girl. Her name is Emma—she’s a doll. And…let’s see, who else?”

“What about your other brother—what was his name—Roy?” Tris prompted. “Did he ever get married?”

Jessie sighed. “Not yet. That makes him the last holdout in the marriage department. He’s down in Florida, someplace. On the gulf. Captains a charter fishing boat.”

“Sounds like a tough life,” Tristan said dryly.

“Doesn’t it, though. Okay, so who does that leave? Oh, yeah, my oldest sister, Tracy, of course—she’s still married to Al, the cop, and they still live in Augusta and still have four kids. And then there’s Joy Lynn—”

She broke off while he took her arm and guided her out of the path of a pair of joggers who were overtaking them on the pedestrian side of the pathway. And he thought how easily such a thing came back to him. Sometimes, in fact, it was hard for him to get his mind around how some things, small, everyday things that had been absent from his life for so long, slipped back into it almost as naturally as—well, smiles and laughter, which were two more things he’d been without for a long, long time. If only, he thought, everything could be that easy.

“Joy—how is she? She and her second husband—what was his name?—ever have any kids?”

Jess threw him a look, too quickly. He became conscious once again of the soft fabric of her sweater, warming beneath his fingers, and the tensed muscle of her arm under that. He let go of it and felt her body relax.

“Fred.” She bit off the word. “She divorced him—with good reason, by the way. And she swears she’s never getting married again. Given her lousy taste in men, it’s probably just as well. Anyway, she lives in New York, now. She’s working on a novel, but she has a job at a magazine publisher’s to pay the bills.” She gave Tristan another side-long look. “I was up there visiting her when I got the call. That’s why I wasn’t home—”

“I know,” he said softly. “Your mom told me.” After a long moment he added, “She said you’re a nurse now.”

“Yeah,” she said, watching her feet, “I got my degree four years ago. I work in the NICU—the Neonatal Intensive Care—”

“I remember. You always wanted to do that, after Sammi June. That’s great.”

They walked on in silence, moving slowly, overcome all at once by the enormity of what had happened to their lives, the catastrophic changes of the past few days. The sun went down, and the air turned cooler. Tristan, who had sometimes doubted he’d ever be completely warm again, couldn’t repress a shiver.

Jessie glanced at him but didn’t ask if he wanted to turn back. Probably trying not to smother him, he thought, hating how weak he felt. He wondered if he’d ever have any stamina again.

After a while she said, “Granny Calhoun passed away.”

He nodded his acceptance of that inevitability; the old lady, his mother-in-law’s mother, had been at least ninety and frail as a twig last time he’d seen her, though still sharp as a tack mentally.

They paced another dozen quiet steps, and he was thinking he was going to have to turn around pretty soon, unless he wanted to humiliate himself by having to call somebody to come and get him and carry him back. Then he looked over and saw that she was crying. Soundlessly, with tears making glistening trails down her cheeks. Only when she felt his gaze did she lift her hand and try to stanch their flow with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Jess,” he said, his voice raspy with emotions long and deeply buried.

When she didn’t reply he uncertainly touched her elbow. That was all it took to bring her to him, sobbing.

He stood and held her as close as he dared, staring over her head with eyes dry and face aching, hard little muscles clenching and unclenching in his jaws. Joggers and bicyclists hurried past, uncurious, their whirring wheels and labored pants making breathing rhythms in the dusk. A plump woman in a bright-blue coat, hurrying in the wake of an overweight poodle straining at its leash, gave them a glance, then politely averted her eyes.

Chapter 3

Why am I crying? Jessie wondered. Why now, of all times?

Not for Granny Calhoun, although there hadn’t been a day in the years since her grandmother had passed on that Jessie didn’t miss her. Granny had gone the way most everybody would like to, suddenly and peacefully at an advanced age, in her own home surrounded by her loved ones. Thinking about her brought Jessie only a warm and gentle sadness.

But this… Oh Lord, this grief had come up in her like a geyser, hot, violent, wrenching. This pain was searing…shocking, the pain of a loss so unjust, so unspeakable, it felt as though her entire body was turning itself inside out trying to reject it. These tears were unstoppable; like the grief and the pain, they’d been held back too long, buried beneath the serene, accepting surface of her everyday existence. They were Tristan’s tears, she realized. The ones she’d never shed for him, not then, when she’d lost him, nor in all the years since.

Why hadn’t she cried for him? Because she’d had to be strong, she’d told herself. For Sammi June, for Momma and the rest of her family and friends who were so worried about her. For Tristan’s family and especially his military friends and colleagues, who’d expected her to keep a stiff upper lip, be brave. And for herself. Especially for herself.

“There was a memorial service,” she said, pulling back from him to mop at her streaming nose with her sleeve. She didn’t mean Granny Calhoun, but she was sure, somehow, he’d know that. “They gave me a flag….” She closed her eyes, once more helpless to stop the tears flooding down her cheeks.

She felt her husband’s arms fold around her. She felt his bony, rock-hard chest deflate with a sigh. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as if he didn’t know what else to say. He kept saying it, standing there in the growing chill of evening. “I’m sorry…I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad I got that out of my system, aren’t you?” Jessie said. But her laugh sounded phony, even to her own ears.

When Tristan didn’t answer right away, she gathered her courage and looked up at him. But his face was a shadow against the pale sky, and his profile seemed stark and closed.

They were walking back toward the residence, more slowly now than when they’d left it, close together but not touching. It seemed to her that Tristan was leaning more heavily on his cane, and even without touching him she was aware of the tremors that seized him from time to time. She felt a squeezing sensation around her heart.

“I don’t know where that came from,” she said, rushed and breathless with guilt, “I really don’t. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t—” His voice sounded almost angry. Softening it took an effort even she could see. “God—don’t apologize. For anything. Ever.” He drew a breath, then said stiffly, “I know this must be difficult for you.”

The understatement left her at a loss for a reply. She looked up at him, lips parted but speechless. He looked back at her, and after a long moment she saw his face relax with his smile. The new, wry smile that was half irony, half apology. “Sorry, that was—”

She touched two fingers to his lips, stopping him there. “Don’t apologize,” she said, mimicking him in a voice that quavered. “About anything. Ever.” And he laughed and lightly touched her fingertips to his lips before wrapping them in his hand. “I didn’t…know how I was going to handle this,” she went on, haltingly. “I haven’t known what to do. What to say.”

“There’s too much to say,” he agreed, nodding as they walked on. “Makes it hard to know how to start. It’s like what the doctors have been telling me, I guess. Be patient. Take it slow. One step at a time.”

“Well,” Jessie said with a breathy laugh, “we’ve made it through the first step. That’s the hard part, right? From here on it should get easier.”

He gave her hand a squeeze before he released it to open the guest house door for her. She waited for him to say what they both knew to be true, which was that the hardest parts were almost certainly still to come. He didn’t say it, but even in the warm and welcoming lobby, she felt him shiver.

“You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to,” Jess said.

Tristan looked up at her with a guilty start. It occurred to him that he’d been staring down at his plate for a good bit longer than was polite. Not that there was anything wrong with the food. She’d made a point of ordering some of his favorites—fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and fresh green beans, peach cobbler with thick cream for dessert—and the house staff had gone out of their way to oblige, even serving them dinner privately in their room. It was just that it still came as a shock to him to see so much food in one place, all at one time. More food than he could possibly eat, even after several days of such bounty.

“It looks…fantastic,” he said, meaning it. It seemed as if he was always hungry; sometimes he even dreamed about food. Right now he felt light-headed from hunger; he just wished his stomach didn’t always feel so queasy.

He picked up a piece of chicken—the drumstick; she’d even remembered he liked them best—and bit into it. The juice exploded in his mouth, and the rich, greasy flavors nearly made him lose the tenuous hold he’d been keeping on his self-control.

“Tris? Are you okay?”

He heard alarm in her voice and managed to smile for her as he nodded, swallowed, then said softly, “Culture shock. Things hit me every once in a while.”

He wiped his mouth with the napkin he’d been given without realizing at first what he was doing. Then he caught himself and looked down at it, almost in wonder. “This, for example. You have no idea how strange this feels…” His voice trailed off while he watched his fingertips rubbing and stroking the crisp, clean white linen.

After a moment he laughed, quietly and painfully. “When I got to the carrier, they gave me some things…a little bag of toiletries—you know, a toothbrush and tooth-paste…a razor…some other stuff. It felt…sort of, I don’t know, overwhelming, to have so much stuff. I didn’t want to let go of it. I carried that damn bag around with me for three days.” He stopped and stared hard at his plateful of food. Those admissions, like the tears he’d shed in prison, embarrassed him.

“So,” she said, when he’d been silent too long, “what’s going to happen next?”

He looked up and saw that she was wearing her bright, brave smile, not the one he loved, the one that made her nose wrinkle and her eyes dance and a little fan of lines spray out from their corners. Right now her eyes, that amazing amber brown with thick sable lashes that made so striking a contrast with her blond hair, were wide-open and luminous. They looked fragile as blown glass, as if they’d shatter if she blinked.

His own eyes felt hot, and he looked quickly down at his plate again and concentrated on the task of picking up his fork and loading it with mashed potatoes and gravy. Looking at her was like trying to look at a bright light after being in darkness. It had been like that the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her, he remembered, that day on the beach in Florida. With her golden hair and tawny eyes, she’d seemed to him like a broken-off piece of the sun.

“What happens next?” His hand went reflexively to the little album of photographs lying on the table beside his plate; like that bag of toiletries, he couldn’t bring himself to let it out of his reach.

It had occurred to him that Jess would probably like to go through it with him, sitting beside him and telling him the story behind each picture. He’d barely glanced at it, but that had been enough to tell him he wouldn’t be able to handle doing that—not now, not yet. He was going to have to do this by slow degrees and in a very private place. It was going to take time to absorb this new reality into who he was now. Time and some emotions he’d rather not have anyone see and wasn’t strong enough, yet, to control. He shifted the album slightly, nudging it furtively back under his forearm as he took another bite of mashed potatoes.

“For the next few days I expect there’s going to be some more tests. I know the head doctors aren’t done with me yet, and then they’d like to get these intestinal bugs under control before they turn me loose.” He glanced up and tried to smile. “Sorry—I know that’s not a nice topic of conversation for the dinner table.”