And yet it was her nature to comfort and nurture, and the urge to go to him and offer what solace she could was all but overwhelming. Or…maybe after all it would be better if she just turned and walked away and left him his privacy and solitude.
How long she stood there in breathless indecision she didn’t know, but in the end he looked up and saw her, and the choice wasn’t hers to make.
“Well,” he said in a cracked-sounding voice, “we meet again.”
Jane mumbled something equally inane and was rewarded with his crooked smile, which seemed to her even more heartbreakingly poignant than usual in that context.
“Are you-” he gestured toward the scrap of paper on which she’d written down the coordinates for Jimmy’s name “-looking for someone?”
“What? Oh, well, yes, sort of. Just a…” The guilt flooded her, filling her cheeks with warmth. She shook her head, erasing that self-conscious denigration, and said firmly, “A friend. He’s officially MIA.”
“His name’ll be here,” Tom said, his tone dry, the curve of his lips becoming even more ironic. “It’ll just have a little cross after it.”
“Yes, that’s what… And then, I guess, if they’re ever found, they just chip out the rest.” Jane watched her finger trace the diamond after a name and was astonished that her hand could appear so steady when she felt so jangled inside.
With that same soft irony, Tom drawled, “I don’t think they’re gonna be doing much more of that, do you?”
Uncertain what he meant, Jane glanced at him, but was unable to see anything at all of his eyes, just her own reflection in the sunglasses. She looked away again, down at the paper in her hand, and muttered distractedly, “I think…it should be somewhere near here.”
They weren’t the words she’d meant to say. Where were those words, the words of motherly comfort and sympathy she’d meant to offer a wounded and grieving stranger? They seemed impossible to utter now. He didn’t seem at all wounded, and she felt not the least bit maternal. What she felt most like was a girt-a very young girl, shy and awkward and out of her depth.
He took the paper from her, slipping it from between her nerveless fingers, asking permission with a quirk of his eyebrows. Silently she watched him as he moved along the walkway, scanning the list of names. She could see him reflected in the polished granite, along with the other visitors, a small V of American flags and the Washington Monument.
“Here,” he said, pointing to a spot about two feet from the base of the wall. “Is that the one?”
Jane nodded. Lowering herself to one knee, she slowly traced the letters with her fingertips.
From behind her, his voice came, dry as the sands that blew day and night across the California deserts of her childhood. “Was he somebody close to you?”
She looked up, startled by the gruffness and by the unmistakable compassion in the voice, to find a face as unreadable as stone, the lenses of the sunglasses that gazed back at her as opaque as the face of the wall itself.
She shook her head, surprised to find that her throat was tight, and that for those few moments, at least, the denial she was about to utter was a lie. “No,” she murmured. “Just somebody I went to school with. A long time ago.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet you remember his face.” Tom’s smile twitched off center as he held out his hand to help her up.
He saw it come, then, that
“Yes-yes, I do. How did you know?”
He shrugged and felt her hand warm his as he steadied her to her feet. The sun struck reddish highlights into her dark hair and tipped her lashes with gold. For the first time he noticed the faded ghosts of freckles across the tops of her cheeks and on the bridge of her nose.
She took a deep breath as she brushed off her slacks and looked sort of sideways at him, and he knew it was coming. He braced himself, but she said it so softly, so gently, that the question didn’t seem an assault at all. “And you…the name you were touching…he was someone close to you?”
He tried to take some of the pressure off his chest by releasing air in a short little laugh. It didn’t help much, and neither did the deep breath that followed. “Yeah, you could say that,” he said finally, focusing his gaze somewhere above her head, on the white puffy clouds racing across the blue spring sky. How had it got to be so beautiful, he wondered irrelevantly, after such a crappy day yesterday?
“A friend?” she persisted. “Or…”
“My father.”
He could see that she was startled, that it was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. He didn’t know if it was that or the genuine compassion in her eyes that made him explain, in a drawl that tried hard to be casual. “Yeah, he was a naval aviator-a commander at the time of his death, promoted posthumously to captain, which I guess made a difference to someone-my mother, maybe. He was stationed on a carrier in the South China Sea. Flew one too many missions, I guess you could say. And…” he could feel his face cramp with his attempt at a smile as he touched the name he’d located for her, and the MIA cross that followed it “…I guess you could say we were one of the lucky ones. We got a body to bury- It’s over there-” he made a gesture with his hand “-in Arlington.”
He could feel her eyes on him, hear even the tiny throat-clearing sound she made before she said, “That must have been very hard for you.” And then, again so gently he didn’t even notice that she was chip-chipping away at his carefully constructed barricades, “How old were you when it happened?”
And again he was mildly surprised when he heard himself answer. “I was sixteen.”
“A difficult.age.”
He shrugged. “I guess. It was for me, anyway.”
They were strolling along the paved walkway now, close together but nowhere near touching. In spite of that, he was aware of everything about her, the clothes she wore-same slacks and blazer as yesterday, but a different turtleneck, teal blue this time-every movement she made, no matter how slight. Aware that once again she’d turned her head to look at him. He wondered what she saw when she gazed at him like that, so thoughtful and silent. Wondered why it made him so uneasy. And why he allowed it.
“I was pretty difficult at all ages, if you want to know the truth,” he said, taking a breath. “My dad was gone a lot, and I didn’t get along with my mom. Hell, nobody did-including my dad, which was probably why he was gone a lot.” He glanced sideways at Jane to see if she’d smiled at his poor attempt at humor, and was inordinately pleased to see the laugh lines deepening at the corners of her mouth and eyes. He found himself relaxing, at ease with her in a way he couldn’t remember being with anyone in many, many years.
“Anyway, I was already mad at my dad for going to ‘Nam-he’d volunteered for the duty, he didn’t have to go. And I was mad at my mother, blaming her for making him so miserable he’d rather be in that hellhole than home with his family. After he was shot down, well…I was one pretty angry, messed-up kid. Truth is, I don’t know what might have happened if it hadn’t been for-” He stopped, quivering with shock at what he’d almost said.
She glanced at him and, instead of pursuing it, asked, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“A brother.” He said it on an exhalation, relaxing again, with a chuckle that was more fond than ironic. “Jack. He’s navy, too, a real chip off the old block-lives somewhere in Texas, at the moment. Has a wife and three…no, four kids.” His mouth twisted in a way that was familiar to him; afraid of what his companion might read in that expression, he looked over at her and turned it into a grin. “As you’ve probably gathered, we don’t see a lot of each other.”
For a moment, those thoughtful, compassionate eyes seemed to bore right into his, though he knew they were safely hidden behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. But she didn’t say anything, and he shrugged and went on, “Jack was pretty much the only one who could get along with Mother, so of course he always took her side. He was at the academy when Dad died. Naturally he came right home-we were living here in Washington then. And needless to say, that didn’t help my attitude any. Like I said, I don’t know what I would have done…” he took a deep breath and this time let himself finish it “…if it hadn’t been for…a friend of mine.”
“A friend?” The prompt was so soft it seemed almost to come from inside his own mind.
