“And if I don’t want to be so safe…?”

  The air whooshed out of him as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. Not a thing he could say to that one.

  28

  They’d flown together for four more hours, spent another three hanging out in airports, and were now rolling along in Paps’ truck as the sunset faded from the Oklahoma sky. John’s dad was an only slightly smaller version of his son.

  Connie couldn’t puzzle out two facts.

  First, why she’d said “yes” in the first place.

  And second, had she actually flirted with Staff Sergeant John Wallace?

  She’d done more than flirt.

  She’d kissed him at Fort Campbell. Really kissed him. Twice.

  He’d made her feel safe. Made her feel strong. Made her feel that she’d make it through another day.

  And then she’d kissed him.

  Interesting. About the stupidest thing she’d ever said to someone she’d just kissed. But it was.

  Never before had her knees gone liquid from a kiss, nor had her pulse pounded so loudly that she considered covering her ears so that John wouldn’t hear the sound leaking out. There’d been an electric charge, like the wrong end of a nine-volt battery. Only it hadn’t been the wrong end. Kissing John felt like leaning into the sweet heat rising off a fresh-baked apple pie.

  Now she was going home with a superior. This could go wrong in so many ways, starting with making it intolerable to remain on the same crew, ending with a court martial, and who knew what in between. Well, neither of them were commissioned officers, so maybe not a court martial, but it sure wouldn’t be pretty.

  She could always bail out. It wasn’t too late. Except maybe it was.

  They rolled through Muskogee and on into the night. John played tour guide in between catching up on family news with his dad.

  “The library’s over there. Never went there much, truth be told.”

  He looked like he was five years old, twisting and turning in the front seat to face her in the back every ten seconds to tell her something. She’d insisted that he ride up front with his dad. Men his size didn’t belong in back seats, not even of big, four-seater pickup trucks like this one.

  “Look, Connie. That’s the sub park. Too dark to see right now. Dad, are they having the festival there this year?” Sub park. Versus main park? A festival in a subsidiary park. No. That wasn’t right, but John didn’t slow down enough to explain.

  “Wouldn’t be Christmas without it.” John’s father was slow spoken, with a voice as deep and comforting as his son’s. “Your ma. She’s making her butter pecan pies. Debbie’s got her family churning out Christmas cookies by the boatload. Aunt Margaret is making her goddamn, sorry ’bout that, miss,” he half turned to project his voice back to Connie, “Jello mold.”

  “I’ve heard worse, sir.”

  He nodded easily in acknowledgment. No need to speak his reply.

  A quietness wrapped the air around John’s dad. Soft-spoken in comparison to his son. But other than that, and the hard weathering earned by working a farm, he and his son were much alike. Big men. Powerful. Trim from using their bodies without being lean. Shoulders so broad that between him and his son, they filled the front of the pickup’s stretch cab. She could only see out the side window.

  “Ataloa Lodge is right over there. Incredible museum if we have time and you want to go.”

  But what she found herself watching wasn’t John’s old elementary school or anything else out the side window, it was the two men. Their talk was an easy drift of stories about people she’d never heard of.

  John shifted in his father’s presence. In the air, he was pure business. On base, always larger than life, always with a personality big enough to fill his large frame, always the first with a story, a smile, a laugh.

  Now, he was smaller. Not diminished…perhaps more himself. As if he now somehow fit his own skin. At ease with his dad. Temporarily forgetting about her in the back seat. No longer on any stage, unaware of any audience. Big John was gone and had turned into a John-sized man.

  Connie had never filled her own skin. Her thoughts were the sole connections from her brain to the world. She sat somewhere inside her own skin yet watched that world at a safe distance. She’d first been aware of this at Fort Rucker’s day care.

  At five years old, she’d observed herself, as if a separate person, carefully drawing precise diagrams. Others grabbed crayons in fists and made flowers, houses, fighter planes dropping outsized bombs, or scribbled multi-hued swirls. She’d found colored pencils and constructed a scale drawing of her father’s Huey helicopter. Had drawn and erased, drawn again and erased again, until she captured the foreshortening of the twin-blade rotor that looked so oversized on the ground and so right during flight.

  Five-year-old Connie had learned that day that she was different. That her peers for the rest of her school years, and later in her career, would be simply avoiding her. They didn’t pick on her much, though she knew she was discussed behind her back. She’d been hurt for a while but then decided that not caring was a better use of her time. The few bullies who targeted her quickly experienced the fighting techniques her father had taught her.

  She also learned that adults always looked at her work with an abrupt silence and not much to say. Only her father would have shown her where her drawing didn’t quite follow the fuselage panel seams and then have given her one of the multitude of hugs he said he always stored up while away on missions.

  She knew her abilities, knew herself. And knew for a fact that she didn’t fill her body. If you were to look inside her, you would see an incomplete person, someone missing a piece she’d never been able to find. It had driven her into the Army and finally Special Operations Forces. It had stood her up through all the trials created to knock a woman down and out, driven her all the way to SOAR.

  Yet John had made the same climb. And he was complete in himself. More than that—filling any room he entered. What had made him stand up to all the tests and trials? Being a tower of strength wasn’t enough for Assessment Week. Being tough wasn’t enough for the Green Platoon. Being the best wasn’t enough for SOAR.

  Connie knew of the drive that had held her up through everything. And sitting here listening to John and his dad, maybe she could see the first piece of what drove John ahead. He loved the older man. Worshipped him. Would lay down his life for his father.

  Once again she watched John, wondering why she was here. She couldn’t imagine two people more different. He was big and loud and easy around anyone. Everyone liked John. And as far as she could tell, nobody liked her or ever had.

  But they had one more thing in common besides a passion for helicopter mechanics. The man she would have died to protect was her father. The man she’d die to bring back from a place where he was unremembered except in his daughter’s nightmares. Each of them would lay down their lives for the man whose blood they carried in their veins.

  She loved listening to John and his dad laugh as it filled the truck until it had to squeeze out the air vents to find more space.

  She smiled to herself in the quiet of the back seat, wrapped gently in their softening words. Of course, by the noises he was making, perhaps the true reason this man had turned soldier might be that he didn’t have enough bravery to face another one of Aunt Margaret’s goddamn Jello molds.

  29

  John’s home, which Connie’s imagination over the last few hours had built into a great, sprawling thing, wasn’t. Not a modern McFarm, ridiculous in its scale. It was an average, everyday farmhouse. Generations had been born here, grown up here, and raised families here.

  Stubbled cornfields ranged one way, and a series of large barns ranged in another, disappearing into the evening dark. There were a few livestock pens, but mostly equipment bays with tall wooden doors that could admit a truck or a harvester.

  The house was a modest two-story home painted a soft blue. The roof looked freshly replaced in the wash of headlights. A wide sunporch wrapped around the two sides she could see. An array of pickups was parked out front. How many people were here, anyway? They parked theirs and climbed down.

  “Like ya wanted, John.” His father led them through air cold enough to show their breath white in the porch lights. “I didn’t let anyone know you was coming back or the whole family would have rolled in.”

  “Tomorrow’s soon enough, Paps.”

  As if suddenly remembering his manners, John turned to Connie.

  Before he could speak, she shooed him ahead, an eager boy glad to be home, ready to run up the porch steps. He turned with one foot on the first step and checked in with her again. There was no one left alive to care about her feelings, so why did John?

  Without feelings, the requirements of performance would be much easier.

  Was she the best mechanic? Could she be trusted in a firefight? Would she have your back no matter what was coming down? Sure. Those bars were easy measures. But how she felt… not so much. No one would use how she felt as a measure of anything.

  But John kept breaking that rule. Kept caring. Once more she waved him on.

  This time he went, taking the five steps in two strides and crossing the deep sunporch in three more. If the door had been locked, he’d have blown it off its frame as he dove in.

  Breathless from the strength of his emotions, she stalled on the third step.

  John’s father stopped beside her. He stood and observed through the still-open door. A slash of light struck across the porch, ending inches from the toes of her boots. She shifted uncomfortably. A line she wasn’t sure how to cross.

  “He thinks a lot of you, you know?”

  She turned to study the man, but his eyes were hidden by the darkness. Her question must have stood clear on her face.

  “He doesn’t bring many Army buddies here.” He scraped a boot across the edge of a step as if checking for mud despite the near-frozen ground. “Especially not a woman.”

  “Not all that many women where I come from.” This time it was her turn to try and read the silence, but she couldn’t.

  Again that slow smile. “You’ll see what I mean. Give yourself some time.”

  He led her into the house before she could make sense of his comment.

  30

  Paps Wallace led Connie into mayhem.

  More and more people swirled around John, all talking at once. A tall, slender woman was tucked under each arm in a tight hug. One graying, the other his own age. If the family resemblance weren’t so strong, she’d feel jealous at how he held them and how they leaned their heads on his shoulders.

  A man only a few inches shorter than John was thumping him on the chest in greeting. Two kids, three, four swirled about their feet. She kept trying to count them but they moved too fast, clearly caught up in the excitement.

  An old man, gone lean and spare with age, sat where he clearly commanded the room, presiding from an old armchair that might match the years of the man it bore. Knitted pads of summer colors covered the arms. A small table by his elbow held a bottle of beer and a TV remote control. The screen flickered an old musical comedy and the sound had been muted.

  It was all so…comfortable. Deep couches, a low table with a board game scattered across the surface. Worn throw rugs spoke of a long past. Photos on the walls, mostly of the farm and people—a myriad of people.

  Connie had one small album with twenty-three photos of her mother and father, including eight with a toddler Connie on her father’s back. Another four of Ron Davis and his helicopters. Here the photos were scattered everywhere. Some went all the way back to terribly formal black-and-white portraits from generations past.

  A girl of maybe college age pounded down the stairs and threw herself at John’s back. He barely budged as the dark beauty landed there and wrapped her arms around his throat. She planted kisses on the side of his neck and squealed out, “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny!”

  He laughed and leaned his head sideways until they rested cheek-to-cheek.

  Connie eased a step back. Then another. Headed for the door, but it was shut. Before the pressure could push her back against it, Paps placed a hand on her arm.

  “Whoa there, girl.”

  His voice had been soft, but it plunged the room into sudden silence as they all turned to face her. A brother with John’s shoulders, a mother with his eyes, two sisters with his handsome features transmuted to beauty, and an old man whose gaze missed nothing. Three young kids, there were three of them, gone suddenly quiet.

  “This…” John partly extricated himself from the women who clung to him and the brother who’d come to rest with a hand on John’s shoulder. The girl slid off his back to glare at Connie over his shoulder, her arms still about his neck and shoulders clearly saying, “Mine.” A toddler, barely taller than John’s knee, clung with arms and legs wrapped around one of John’s legs.

  “This is my crewmate, Connie. I asked her to come stay with us for leave.”

  They all turned in silence from facing her to John, then back. Then in a rush of welcome they stormed her until she bumped hard against the door.

  “I’m Betsy, that big lummox’s mother. And you, Paul,” she aimed a finger at Paps’ chest in accusation, “could have come up with something better than that lame-ass story about needing to run into town right before dinner. I knew something was up. I hoped.” Then she smiled at Connie. “And that’s why I made my fried chicken. The boy has a real weak spot for it. You can call me Bee, everyone else does. This here’s Janice, my middle child. Two of these little hellions are hers and live down the road a piece, the other one is come a-visitin’, and that’s Lawrence—”

  “Larry. You fly? Like John does?” John’s brother put in.

  “—the younger brother.” Bee rolled on as if he hadn’t spoken. “The three of them in three years. If you ever think you’ve done something deeply and truly stupid, you now know for sure that someone on the planet has done something stupider.” She tapped the center of her chest.

  Connie was so off balance that she couldn’t remember any of their names, which wasn’t like her at all.

  “You’ve met my Paul. That’s Grumps.”

  The old man nodded from his chair, looking serious and patriarchal. But his eyes brightened as if he were laughing at an inner joke.

  “And that one back there is Noreen. A late gift to my life and a constant challenge to my patience.”

  Clearly the great beauty of a handsome family, with not one bit of friendly in her gaze.

  “Now you come into the kitchen before you catch your death. Johnny, you can double-up with Lawrence unless he has some new girl stashed under the bed. Put Connie in John’s room. Paps, you bring in their bags.”

  Connie raised her black duffel with its I’m-just-a-civilian swoosh logo on the side in defense against the storm of words.

  “Is that all you have? Mercy, child, how can you travel like that?”

  Connie looked at John, helpless. He slung his arm around Larry’s neck in a tight headlock and was scrubbing his knuckles across the man’s scalp. Larry was as handsome as his big brother. The two Wallace boys must cut a serious swath among the ladies.

  31

  Connie slipped out after dinner was over. She’d not managed a single word edgewise since stepping into the house. John had answered questions for her when it was clear she wasn’t going to speak. Couldn’t speak.

  She stepped off the back porch and was assaulted by a thousand smells she could only guess at. A few were obvious. The fried chicken dinner on her lips and the woodsmoke drifting from the chimney that led to the wood stove warming the large and crowded living room where the whole family gathered now. The cold night air carried something different.

  Afghanistan’s night air had been tainted with mint and cooking lamb. The Muskogee night tasted equally foreign. Hinted at memories she couldn’t place, couldn’t find.

  The stars themselves were foreign. For most of her military service, the distant heavens had been bounded, held clear of the ground by the high silhouettes of the Hindu Kush to one side and the central Himalayans to another. At Bati camp, predawn there and returning from a mission, the star horizon was held higher by the ever-present rim of the concrete soccer stadium that had become their home. Here the stars flowed down flush to the horizon, a flatness that ranged forever away from her.

  “Have you had sex yet?” The sharp, staccato words rapid-fired at her back. Connie took a quick step for more distance before she turned to face her attacker. Noreen stood three steps away. The light through the window built into the kitchen door silhouetted her against the house. No, silhouetted her against her home.

  “No.”

  Noreen’s arms were crossed in front of her. “You trying to get him in the sack?”

  “John deserves better than that.” And he did. A man who cared so much about family.

  Noreen grunted once. Her voice softened. “He keeps picking up these brain-damaged women. Sex and marriage seem to be the only topics they ever want to talk about. Most girls he brings home don’t get that he’s special. Like their heads don’t work right or something, 2-D heads in a 3-D world. You one of those?”

  Connie considered the question. She knew what she wanted. And it wasn’t about family. She wasn’t trying to find a man like her father. She flew with SOAR because she’d earned it. It had taken her half a decade of study to reach SOAR, and John was reluctantly admitting that she might be seriously good at what she did.

  Was she here with John to be healed? Not likely. She was here with John because he’d asked. Because she’d imagined a quiet Christmas together with his mother and father. Because the last person she wanted to be alone with for Christmas was herself.

  “No,” she answered Noreen. “I fly with John. I know enough to truly appreciate his skills. Having nowhere else to go, I appreciate his kindness in inviting me.”