Kit nodded and chewed the inside of her lower lip. Broker didn’t especially like the way she was
Seven was too young to have a game face.
Holly’s knees creaked when he kneeled down and said goodbye to Kit. When he got up, his pale ghost-eyes cut Broker fast. “We’ll be close, but not in the town.”
“How close?” Broker asked.
Again, the fast, cool eyes. Impatient with being challenged by a civilian, Holly said firmly, “We got it in hand, okay? Now, I advise you two to get out of here, pronto.”
Special ops. The manner of their leaving made a New York minute seem like overtime.
Broker sat on the bed and held his daughter in his lap. Sensing his anxiety, she made an effort to reassure him. He listened, amazed as she flipped roles with him:
“In Italy, when the dads went away, the kids and the moms just sit and wait. Like now.”
Broker noticed she was chewing at the corner of her thumbnail as she spoke. He moved her fingers away from her mouth and saw that several fingers were worried almost raw.
Kit went on. “When a dad doesn’t come back, the mom gets a flag. And, um, the chaplain comes and talks.”
“Chaplain?”
Kit furrowed her brow. “You know. They talk about God. How when something bad happens, it’s his will.”
Broker cocked his head at his daughter as a thought occurred. “Did you and Mom ever go to church over there?”
Kit shook her head. “Nah. Mom told me you said if God was really there, he wouldn’t live inside a house. He’d live outside.”
“Your mom said that, huh?”
Kit nodded. Then she sniffed-chlorine from the pool, or allergies maybe. Not tears. She rubbed her nose with her forearm. Scrunched her forehead, thinking. “Sometimes I go outside and look up.”
“We never talked a whole lot about God, did we?” Broker said.
“Mom says we did but I was little so she’d remind me.”
“So what’d you come up with?”
“I don’t know. Some kids believe in Santa Claus and some kids believe in Jesus. In America, you get to believe what you want. That’s Mom’s job.”
“What?”
“You know, keeping it so people can believe what they want.”
Broker stared at his child.
After a moment, she said, “So now we gotta go home and wait?”
Broker continued to stare. He pictured them traveling back to Minnesota, to the house on the point overlooking Lake Superior. Saw himself pacing. Making breakfast, lunch, dinner. Waiting for Nina to walk down the road to Broker’s Beach.
Or the chaplain with a flag.
When Broker didn’t answer right away, Kit chose her next words carefully, “I can’t stay, can I?”
“No. You’re going back to Grandma and Grandpa tomorrow.”
“Are we gonna drive?”
“You’re going to fly. They’ve got an airport here, I drove past it. I’m going to call Grandma and arrange for a plane.”
She considered this for several seconds. Broker could almost hear the thoughts churning behind her broad forehead. She kept the tears out of her eyes but not entirely out of her voice.
“Dad, are we gonna leave Mom here all alone?”
“No.”
He swabbed some of the Bag Balm on Kit’s chewed fingers and ordered her to keep them out of her mouth. Then he called his mother. Two hours of phone tag followed, with Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for accompaniment on the TV. Finally they arranged to have a reliable local pilot, Doc Harris, fly in with Lyle Torgeson, a Cook County deputy, and pick up Kit at the Langdon airstrip. Torgeson’s wife, Lottie, ran a preschool back home that Kit had attended three years ago. Kit would be comfortable traveling with Uncle Lyle. The Torgesons were extended family. They just had to nail down the time. As he waited for the call with an ETA for tomorrow, he took Kit on a walk around the corner from the motel and down the main street.
After window-shopping, they went into a store and bought a locally sewn quilt. Kit picked it out, calling the tight pattern of grays, maroons, and blues “Grandma’s colors.”
Irene Broker, who dabbled in astrology and melancholia, was Norwegian.
They went back on the street. Looking up, Broker saw that the clouds matched the brooding colors of the quilt. The barometric pressure throbbed in his wounded hand like mercury, marking heavy time.
They had an early supper at a restaurant next to City Hall. Kit had macaroni and cheese. In elliptical snatches, mixed in with a forced game of “I Spy,” she told him about going to first grade at the military school on the Aviano Air Base. Then about Ria, her tutor in Lucca.
Lucca was a town out of a history book, located in Tuscany, between Pisa and Florence. “It’s got a big wall around it. You could walk or ride your bike,” Kit said.
Broker nodded along with her conversation, chewing his rib-eye (hold the potato, double veggies). After hot fudge sundaes-strictly a no no for the Atkins Aware-Kit said she wanted to swing. She explained that Jane had taken her to a playground near the swimming pool, so they took the quilt back to their room and then walked toward the city park.
They passed by old houses double shaded by trees and the solid clouds. The late-afternoon breeze heaved, thick with humidity, slow tidal air pressing in. Holding Kit’s hand, sensitive to the gentle pressure of the pulse in her moist palm, Broker was nudged by eddies of foreboding.
He accepted clinical depression as a condition for other people, but not for himself. He had never been incapacitated by his dark thoughts. But he had never been free of them, either. They ran non-stop in the back of his mind like a cable TV package of channels from Hell.
Knowing they were there didn’t mean he had to watch them.
He was watching them now.
So he tried his tricks. Broker was adept at walling off his life into compartments, only allowing enough fear and doubt to percolate to the surface to add a streak of afterburner to his adrenaline. Everything else he kept strictly locked up.
Repressed? You bet.
They came to the elementary school and Kit dashed through the gate for the playground equipment. Broker hung back, dug in the hip pocket of his jeans for a Backwoods Sweet cigar. He took out one of the rough wraps, put it in his mouth, and flicked his plastic lighter.
Smoking was another trick, a method of fear management.
He walked down the block, not wanting the smoke to drift into the playground, and came to the corner of the school.
Down the street the Spartan missile stood against the gray sky like a stark black-and-white exclamation point.
He glanced back at the playground, where Kit and a boy her age were monkey-walking up the slide, holding on to the sides. They were still intact, he realized: forty years of Cold War reflexes. Clenched guts, every day, as whole populations went to work, loved, hated, propagated, and always they carried in their hearts the same blank fear when they looked up at the threat suspended in the sky.
Did we really think we’d drawn a pass because one government collapsed? Because a wall had come down?
