Hannah tipped her head, empathizing. “Looking back,” she said, “I think maybe that time was when Lia started to be, well, what she is now. A witch, I guess. An ‘operator.’ And I also think that maybe, for some reason, maybe just because I was there, that I’m a part of that for her. That I mean something to her, beyond being the lady she works for.”
“I know you do,” Graves said. “She’d knock the sun out of the sky rather than see you hurt.”
“She already did nail down the moon.” Hannah’s eyes crinkled with pride and pleasure as she smiled about it.
Graves laughed softly and nodded. He took out his lighter and played with it idly, clicking open the lid and closing it again, as was his habit.
“I guess that’s got to have a story behind it too, doesn’t it?” Hannah asked, tipping her chin at the Zippo. “You came back from the grave to get it, after all.”
Graves considered the old lighter. It glinted, caught there in the frail net of bones that was all that remained of his right hand. “Well, yeah,” he said, “I suppose it does at that. I’m not in the habit of boring nice ladies with old war stories, though.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Hannah said. “I’d like to know.”
Graves looked her in the eye. He hesitated. He’d never told this story to anyone before, nice lady or otherwise, and when he started to speak he found he had to look down at the lighter, instead of at Hannah herself.
“Well…” he began. “A kid named Dave Normoyle tracked me down and gave it to me after the war. Davey. Guess I pulled him outta the water on Easter Morning of 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. That’s what he told me later on, anyway. I wouldn’t have remembered the date, myself.”
He paused, gathering his memories before going on.
“I can’t even describe to you what those days were like, Miss Hannah. The Japanese were using a tactic they called the ‘wind of the spirits,’ the
“Their airplanes,” Hannah said softly.
“Yeah, exactly right, their airplanes, crashin’em into the ships, plane after plane after plane. I still say they must’ve gone through thousands, even though I know that sounds like I gotta be exaggerating. Still, though, it’s what I remember. One of ’em hit a deck I was standin’ on, not fifteen feet behind me. Piece of its engine caught me in the ribs and knocked me into the drink before I knew what was going on.”
He looked away toward downtown, feeling troubled by the recollections.
“I remember that, and I remember the dawn,” he said in a voice pitched barely above a whisper. Hannah leaned in close to hear him. “That sunrise, well, it was about as gorgeous as any sunrise I’ve ever seen. Which I guess was sorta the worst part of that morning, in a way.”
He glanced up.
“You see,” he continued, averting his eyesockets before Hannah could ask him for clarification. “It, well… it hurt me, frankly, to think about how things like the dawn go on being beautiful for reasons all their own, even when you’re right in the middle of learning firsthand the ugly truth about how easily people can, you know… get themselves broken.”
Hannah nodded, thinking back to a thunderstorm she’d once watched from a hospital room window, now more than a dozen years in her past-a fact she could scarcely believe. Lightning bolts had forked and clashed all night long. She’d had little to do but watch them sear the sky while she sat there helplessly, feigning calm and waiting hour by hour as a cancer crushed the final drops of life from the wasted remnant of her husband, her Warren, whom she’d married in the spring of 1980 and had truly loved every day thereafter with every last ounce of her soul.
The memory of that spectacular storm hurt worse than the bandaged bulletgroove in her side. She thought she understood what Dex was saying.
“Things like the dawn don’t care how messy and painful and scary it gets when people break,” he said, directing his words toward his lighter. “I remember thinking, while I was floatin’ in the blue, half- drowned and losing blood and dumb-lucky to’ve grabbed hold of a liferaft myself, that that old sun comin’ up on the far horizon there wouldn’t mind if I bucked convention and did something a little bit different that morning, like saving one little life. Hell, why not, I figured. As if it could matter anyway, one life, when so many others were comin’ to bad ends all around me, but Davey Normoyle was the closest body still twitching in the water, so he got hauled aboard. And then I don’t remember so much after that, for a time.”
When Graves chanced a look up at Hannah she was rapt, her eyes full of gentle sympathy. Almost more than he could bear. He turned away again, looking out over the view, although he barely registered it by now. The eye of memory was doing all his seeing for him.
“Wasn’t till a few years after that he finally tracked me down,” Graves said. “I didn’t really know the kid. I was in the intelligence service, moving all around the Pacific theater during the war, so he wasn’t on my ship or anything like that. But I guess I must’ve told him my name at some point, ’cause he found me later on through a buddy of mine. Charlie Lurp, up here in Los Angeles. Just a couple of months before I, y’know, died. Davey by then had a missus and a baby girl and a life he was glad to be living, which I guess he thought he owed to me instead of to a shellshocked whim that happened to hit me one weird morning. But he was serious about it. Said an angel or some such shit came in a dream and told him that really, he’d been slated to buy it in the surf that day, and his life had been returned to him for the sole purpose of giving this particular lighter to
Graves shrugged, examining the thing. It looked old, but otherwise unremarkable.
“He came up from San Diego to do it, even. Begged me to take the damn thing. Said the angel told him that if I didn’t then he
“Yeah,” Hannah said. “Just like, I’d think.”
She took and squeezed Graves’ bony hand. He squeezed back, kind of hard, but she held on.
She felt sure that she could trust this man (or whatever he was), this Dexter Graves, to watch out for her Lia, come what may.
He knew the true value of things.
“So, there’s the tale, anyhow,” Graves said, feeling a little awkward by the time he was ready to let Miss Hannah take her hand back. “What it means to me. Wouldn’t have guessed it’d be enough to drag a dead man outta the dirt, but hey, like the poet once said: I guess there’s more between heaven’n earth.”
“Hey, uh… guys?” Riley said from behind them.
They both looked over, their moment gone. Graves put the lighter away.
“Not to interrupt the sharing, which I think is really sweet, but-”
Graves stood up. “Is she awake?”
“No, not yet,” Riley said. “But her cellphone keeps ringing.”
Chapter Thirty
Lia had a sense of something happening nearby, something her friends were concerned with, something that probably could’ve used her attention, but the pull of deep sleep was too strong for her to keep an eye on it properly. She drifted off instead, despite her efforts, sinking away from conscious awareness and down into the deep psychic
