Chapter 20 #2
Rebecca laughed once, quiet, against my shoulder—half nervous, half delighted, the laugh of a woman who'd put her trust in a man and was finding out, by feel, what that purchase had bought her.
I cupped the back of her head.
"Watch your head, baby."
I helped her duck into the car.
The leather sighed under her. I went around the other side. Got in. Nodded once at the driver. The door closed.
The limo eased away from the curb.
She didn't reach for the blindfold.
That was the thing that got me, sitting next to her in the soft dark with the harbor going past the windows on her side and the city lights sliding across the windows on mine.
She didn't reach. She kept her hands in her lap.
She trusted me to take it off her when I was ready, and that was a thing about her I had not expected to find tonight on top of the other things.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Not far."
"Tommy?"
"Mm."
"Is it dangerous?"
"No, sweetheart. Not tonight."
I took her hand. Squeezed it once. She squeezed back.
The limo took us two miles north.
I'd picked the field on the map before I'd called Lucas. A clear stretch of grass behind the marina, owned by Dominion Hall, used for things that needed to happen close to the water without happening on the water. The driver eased the limo up onto the access road and stopped.
I helped her out.
The night air moved her hair. The blindfold rode dark across her eyes. The smell of the harbor was right there—salt and creosote and the cold of January over open water. Somewhere off in the dark, I could hear the low rumble of a turbine winding up.
I turned her gently to face the field.
I untied the silk.
I let it slip down into my hand.
She blinked. Her eyes adjusted to the dark.
There was a single helicopter on the grass, lit underneath by its own running lights.
Sleek, black, ours. A Bell I recognized from a different life, of a model Dominion Hall apparently kept in the kind of quiet readiness.
The pilot was in the left seat with his hand on the cyclic, watching me through the canopy, waiting for the nod.
Rebecca made a small sound.
"Tommy?"
"Yeah."
"Is that—"
"Yeah."
"For us?"
"For us."
She stood there. Her hand had found mine again somewhere in the last second and squeezed.
"I want to show you something I love," I said. "Something about my life I've never shared with anyone."
She turned and looked at me.
She didn't speak.
I watched her work it out. Watched her run an inventory of her own fears—heights, small spaces, the dark, the unknown—and weigh them against me and against the silk that had been around her eyes a minute ago and the yes she'd given me, and watched her decide.
She nodded.
She squeezed my hand harder.
"Okay," she said.
I nodded once at the pilot. He flicked something on the panel. The turbine wound up.
I led her across the grass.
We climbed in. She greeted the pilot with a polite hello, sir, leaning forward enough to peek at the lit-up controls, the curiosity briefly outpacing the nerves, and I loved her for that, just exactly, in real time, the way she found her interest faster than her fear.
I belted her in. Showed her the headphones. Slid mine on. Tested the channel.
"You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Good."
I gave the pilot the go.
The Bell lifted off the grass slow and steady. Rebecca's hand tightened in mine—hard, then easing as we cleared the trees, then almost not at all by the time we were a hundred feet up. Her eyes had already gone to the window and stayed there.
The pilot banked us east toward the coast.
Charleston spread out underneath us. Gas lanterns in the historic district.
The dark line of the Battery seawall. The harbor going dark blue under us with the lights of Mount Pleasant on the far side and the bridges strung between them like jewelry.
Beyond it, the Atlantic was a wide, flat darkness with a single shipping lane lit way out.
I keyed my mic.
"After my daddy disappeared," I said, "I was lost."
I'd never said those words out loud to another person.
They came out the way real things came out when you finally let them—dry. Plain.
She didn't turn to me. She kept her eyes on the window. That was a kindness. That was Rebecca Lynn kindness—she knew, the way she knew most things, that some confessions wanted to be made into the open air and not into another person's face.
"My brothers handled it different," I said.
"Some of them got mean. Some of them got quiet.
I—I went the other way. I got funnier. I got the easiest to be around.
I made my mama laugh in the kitchen and I made my brothers laugh in the bunkhouse and I built the version of me everybody could lean on when nobody else was leaning. It worked. Most days, I believed it."
"Tommy?"
"Mm."
"Keep going."
"I joined the Army when I was eighteen. Maybe because my daddy had served. Maybe because I'd run out of reasons to stay home. Probably because I needed to be looking at something bigger than my own family for a minute, and the Army gave me that."
The Bell settled into its cruise. The engine sound under the headset went to a steady, predictable hum.
"It worked," I said. "Mostly. The work was the work.
The work I was good at. But the peace—the actual peace, the kind that gets under your sternum and stays there—I didn't find that until one night in Southeast Asia.
Place I shouldn't have been. I was on a roof at three in the morning waiting for something that didn't end up needing me, and there was a city below me lit up the way cities are lit up in places where the power's unreliable but the people aren't. The moon came up over the river, and I sat there and breathed. "
The coast was sliding under us.
I keyed the channel to the pilot. Take us out over the water. He banked right. The line of the shore peeled away under us and the Atlantic opened up under the moon.
The moonlight broke on the water in a long silver path that ran from us to the horizon.
Rebecca made a small sound.
"That," I said. "Right there. That's what I wanted to show you."
She didn't say anything for a long moment.
She kept looking out the window.
When she finally turned to me, her eyes were bright and her face was open and she looked at me the way she'd looked at me in the bathtub this morning, but bigger. Cleaner. Just her and me and a window between us and the moon.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you for showing me a part of your life."
It came out quiet.
She turned back to the window.
I sat there with my hand in hers.
I thought, sudden and clean, of something my mother had said once.
I'd been a boy, maybe ten, maybe eleven.
She'd been on the porch the night after one of my father's longer absences, hands cupped around a coffee cup that had gone cold on her, looking out at the Texas dark with the kind of stillness she got when she was deciding to forgive a man one more time.
She'd said it like she was talking to herself.
Love isn't a finite thing, baby. The more we give, the more we're given. And it can come fast, or it can come slow. Don't waste your time judging which. Just enjoy.
I'd been a boy.
I hadn't known what she'd meant.
I knew now.
Rebecca Lynn was looking at the moon on the ocean, and her hand was warm in mine, and the Bell was holding its altitude steady, and somewhere a couple miles back behind us in Charleston Dominic Craine was still sitting on whatever Dominic Craine was sitting on, and somewhere in Marfa my mother was forgetting another word, and somewhere in this same plane of existence I'd been a man who'd never said a word about my father out loud to anybody.
I'd been a man who would never have predicted, in a thousand attempts, that I'd be in a helicopter over the Atlantic, watching a girl in a thrift-store top and her grandmother's earrings look at the moon.
I loved her.
That was the math.
It didn't matter how long I'd known her.
It didn't matter that I had no business loving anyone right now.
It didn't matter what anyone else thought about it.
Anyone included me, three days ago. Anyone included Lucas, who would tell me with a straight face that this kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen this fast and that men who'd lost their heads in this line of work tended to get other people killed.
Anyone included whatever sane, careful, prudent ghost of Tommy Dane I'd been carrying around in my back pocket since I'd put on a uniform.
Let anyone be damned.
I loved this woman.
I was going to love her in the open, fast and slow, the way my mother had said, and I wasn't going to waste a second of it judging the speed.
Rebecca turned her head to me. She caught me looking. Her mouth turned up.
"What?" she asked, soft, into the headset.
"Nothing, sweetheart."
"Liar."
"Maybe."
She squeezed my hand once.
She turned back to the window.
And the moon held its silver path across the water all the way to the horizon, and the Bell flew us steady, and I sat there with the woman I had no business loving, and loved her, anyway.