Thunder Running (10 page)

Chapter Nine

Chance woke long before the alarm set for five o'clock. He lay on his back, one arm behind his head, the other wrapped around his wife, and he watched the shadows that moved on the ceiling every time the wind rustled the tree outside.

This was the first time he hadn't been full of anxious excitement on the day he left for deployment. Usually he was full of nervous enthusiasm, eager to be on his way, ready to start the next adventure. Instead he was preoccupied and reluctant.

What if the car batteries died in the cold and Tara was stuck out here during a blizzard? What if she rebuffed some guy's advances during her shift and he waited outside for her to finish? What if someone figured out she was in the house by herself and attacked her in the middle of the night, confident no one would hear her scream?

He held her more tightly against his side, squeezing his eyes shut to banish those thoughts. Tara had taken care of herself for nearly thirty years. She could manage another six months.

Her fingers moved where they were splayed on his chest, and he looked down at the woman sleeping against his ribs. Even unconscious she looked determined, unyielding, her brows drawn together slightly, her mouth a serious line. She was the most frustrating, complicated woman he'd ever met. He couldn't imagine ever loving anyone else.

And although she still hadn't said it, he had to believe she loved him too. There'd been something different when they'd made love on the couch a few hours before, something newly intimate and emotional. He had to keep the faith that she wouldn't leave him, that it would be her smiling face he saw when the bus pulled up in six months' time. She'd find her way around to the words, like she found her way around to everything else.

Or so he hoped.

He thought about the phone call he'd had with his mother after dinner, the last conversation they'd have before he left the country. Her words were slurred and she was on the brink of tears through the whole thing, interrupting him to recall random anecdotes about his childhood, unwittingly repeating herself, telling him again and again to stay safe over there. He believed she loved him, and he believed she would worry about him, but he wondered how much of that call she'd remember in the morning.

Maybe he was being too harsh on Tara. From the sounds of things she'd had it even harder than he had—at least his mother had come home every night, and he never doubted that he'd be fed or sheltered. Maybe it was too much to ask her to make such an overt expression of commitment. Maybe her inability to say it didn't mean it wasn't how she felt. Maybe he expected too much, too soon.

But damn, he wanted to hear it.

The alarm squealed sooner than he expected, and he silenced it with the flat of his palm. Tara groaned and rolled into his chest, where the flutter of her eyelashes against his skin made his groin twitch. Good God, he was going to miss her.

Neither of them ate much of the scrambled eggs he made, Tara claiming it was too early as she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, his own stomach too busy doing nervous backflips to digest solid food. They both drank coffee like it was water. They drained the pre-set machine in minutes, and he had to brew two mugs of instant before either of them felt human enough to converse.

He showered quickly and crossed off the last few items on his checklist as he added them to his carry-on. Toothpaste, shampoo, comb, deodorant. Tara watched him draw ominous black lines on the paper with eyes just as dark, just as inscrutable. The final pull of the zipper echoed loudly in the silent room.

They piled his camouflage luggage into the trunk of the Challenger, their breath showing in vapored puffs as he drove through the heavy, pre-dawn darkness to the post. When he passed their IDs to the gate guard the young soldier gave him a needless and borderline inappropriate salute.

“Y'all be careful out there,” he urged before disappearing into the guard shack and raising the boom.

Tara hadn't said a word since they pulled out of the driveway, and when he parked the Challenger in the gymnasium lot and cut the engine her silence suddenly felt heavy, like a fully loaded field pack strapped onto his shoulders. He took the key out of the ignition, reached for her hand and dropped it in her palm.

“You'll be the third person, apart from me and Trey, ever to drive this car. Try not to crash it.”

If she caught the humor in his tone she gave no sign. She leaned down to drop the key in her purse, then straightened and stared through the windshield.

He cleared his throat. “It's fine if you don't want to go through the whole check-in thing with me, we can say goodbye—”

“Goddammit, Chance,” she shouted, turning on him with fury in her voice and tears in her eyes. She grabbed fistfuls of his uniform, pulling him across the gearshift and pushing him away all at once. “I love you, you stupid grunt. I love you like hell and you're going to come home to me in one piece, you hear?”

His throat tightened and his arms shook and he pulled her across the car into his lap, squeezing her so hard he thought he might crush her but unable to restrain himself. He'd never felt such elation, such soaring delight as those three words inspired. She sobbed into his shoulder, heavy, heart-wrenching, and he pressed his face into her hair and closed his eyes and tried to memorize everything about her, from the vanilla notes in her shampoo to the exact curve of her hips beneath his hands.

“I love you so much, Tara,” he rasped. “When I get home I'm gonna show you, just you wait.”

“Fuck that,” she muttered, pulling back to smile at him with tearstained cheeks. “Just come home. We'll deal with the rest when we get there.”

More cars were filling the lot on either side of them. Wordlessly they climbed out of the Challenger and unloaded his bags from the trunk. Tara trailed him into the brightly lit gymnasium, stood patiently at his side while he waited in line to check in, waited for his bags to be inspected, waited for them to be loaded onto an overfilled trolley and rolled away.

Then it was time to go.

The room around them was full of the sounds of sniffling as wives and mothers bit back their sorrow, tried on the brave faces they would wear for the next six months at least. Only Tara stood stiff and strong, her eyes clear, her smile genuine. That's when he knew he'd underestimated her, doubted the depth of the reserves that ran all the way to her soul. That's when he knew she was the perfect woman for him.

“I guess I'll see you when I see you.” She beamed up at him.

“I guess so.”

“Don't do anything crazy.”

“Crazy's all I know.”

“Not anymore.” She took his hands in hers, pushed up on tiptoe to kiss him square on the mouth. “Have fun out there. Call me if you need me.”

“I surely will. I love you, sugar.”

“I love you too, Sergeant. Travel safe.”

He inclined his head in farewell and shouldered his pack, then set off across the room to join the line of soldiers readying to board the buses. In a few minutes he'd be on his way to the airfield; in a little over an hour he'd be on a plane headed for some of the most hostile, dangerous territory in the world.

He couldn't stop grinning.

As he filed out of the gymnasium he took one last look at Tara, his wife, the love he'd always wanted and never dared believe he could handle. She smiled, nodding encouragingly. He winked. She rolled her eyes playfully.

He turned his smile back toward the neck of the soldier in front of him. He couldn't wait to leave. The sooner he got off the ground, the sooner he could start counting down the days until he came home. Because for the first time in his life, there was someone waiting for him.

He recalled that fateful roulette spin almost a year ago. It must've been nearing six o'clock in the morning, and the casino was practically empty, the slot machines beeping and blinking unheeded. They staggered and weaved between the unoccupied poker tables until he backed into the roulette wheel, earning a dark look from the croupier. She maintained her bored expression as Tara cajoled him to make a bet, opening her wallet to see how much she had left to put down.

He plucked it from her hand and dropped it back in the bag. “Those aren't the kind of stakes I'm interested in.”

She arched a challenging brow. “What did you have in mind?”

He put the five-dollar minimum bet on the table, his eyes never leaving hers. “Let's make a bet, sugar. If this lands on green, we get married.”

The humor drained from her face. She stood straighter, lifting her chin. She nodded.

“You're on.”

The croupier spun. The background noise seemed to die away, the electronic music and murmured conversations and a distant vacuum cleaner all gave way to the resonant click, click, click as the wheel slowed. Click, red. Click, black. Click…

He loved his job. He loved his wife. Life had never been better.

Leaving the warm gymnasium behind him, he stepped out onto the blacktop in the endless, freezing-cold darkness.

Epilogue

Tara shifted from foot to foot, trying and failing not to inventory the outfits of the wives waiting alongside her in the echoing, stars-and-stripes-bedecked gymnasium. It was unseasonably warm for mid-May and she'd opted for a short, breezy baby-blue sundress and flip-flops. As she looked around she realized she was the only one not wearing heels—and the only one with a hem above her knees.

Not that it mattered, she reminded herself sternly. By now she knew most of these women, and they were all so kind and welcoming that she'd long given up wondering whether they whispered about her behind her back.

In fact it was Chance's commanding officer's wife who'd pointed her toward the community college in Meridian, where she'd just finished the first semester in her nursing degree. She'd taken to it much more quickly than she expected, and was most surprised by her instructors' praise for her fledging bedside manner. Turned out that more than ten years serving belligerent drunks made even the most irritable patients seem impeccably genteel.

Just last week she'd handed in her notice at the bar downtown, and yesterday was her final shift. Now she had two weeks until she started her new job as an administrative coordinator for Mia's PTSD-therapy program at Fort Preston, which had recently won an eighteen-month grant.

Tara smiled as she thought about the housewarming dinner Mia and Ethan had hosted two nights ago. Laurel had turned up wearing a brand-new diamond engagement ring, but whenever Tara tried to ask about the wedding planning she shrugged it off, turning the conversation to Chance's imminent return.

“Wedding planning will take the rest of the year, but your husband will only come home once. You must be so excited,” Laurel had exclaimed. “What time does he land?”

“They're supposed to get to post at ten o'clock on Monday night, but in army time that could be midnight or later.”

“We're all counting on you to convince him to stay put for at least the next year.” Ethan gave her one of his characteristically quiet, encouraging smiles.

She grinned. “I barely had to say a thing. He's already talking to the chain of command about starting a pre-med degree. It'll probably take a while, but one of these days we may be addressing him as Dr. McKinley.”

“God help us.” Grady's wink undermined his words.

“Remind him to speak to me when he decides to pick an orthopedic specialty,” Laurel joked.

“Or psychiatric,” Mia added.

Grady and Ethan locked eyes across the table, then dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.

“What's so funny?” Tara asked when they finally got hold of themselves.

“The idea of that crazy son of bitch helping people achieve mental stability,” Grady managed, wiping a tear from his eye.

“He'd prescribe every patient an army contract,” Ethan said, and the two of them were gone again.

She smiled to herself in the gymnasium. These last six months of Chance's deployment had been some of the hardest in her life, but they would've been impossible without the support of this new group of friends.

Not that they hadn't been without their share of ugly, breathtakingly painful moments. Like her lonely decision to accept her aunt's invitation to visit over the holidays, which she regretted less than ten minutes into the drive to Arkansas. She spent hours enduring her cousins' skeptical glances, her uncle's diatribe on the evils of the military-industrial complex, and her father's increasingly slurred barbs until she stood up from her post-meal position on the sofa and volunteered to drive him home. He didn't stop talking through that twenty-minute journey, accusing her of abandoning him, demanding she help pay for his groceries and utilities, finally dissolving into barely comprehensible whimpers about how much he'd always loved her. She dropped him off in front of the trailer and hightailed it to a motel, where she spent Christmas Eve watching TV and twisting the wedding ring on her finger.

Or like the time a strange number came up on her phone and she had to leave the bar to take the call. She frowned at the sidewalk on Main Street as Chance's captain explained that a patrol had been ambushed and he was one of three soldiers still unaccounted for. She moved through the rest of her shift like a zombie, refusing her boss's offer to go home early, shaking cocktails and pulling draught beers and handing them over with a smile while her mind was thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, praying her husband was alive. When she couldn't work any later she went home, where she paced and cried and wrung her hands until her phone rang again, and she answered with her heart not daring to beat. It was the captain again, breathlessly relaying how Chance had turned up to the outpost wall, hypothermic, his radio crushed, hauling another soldier over his shoulders. She sobbed with relief, barely able to thank the officer for his call, and when her phone rang two hours later it was Chance's Gulf-Coast drawl on the other end, the first thing out of his mouth a joke about how the army would probably charge him for the broken radio.

There had been mornings she'd skipped class and called in sick to work, too depressed to get up, dozing until midafternoon and then hating herself for being weak and wasting the day. There had been nights she couldn't get to sleep, certain she heard an intruder creeping through the grass, jumping at every subsequent creak and shift in the old house until she gave up and switched on the light, reading book after book until dawn. There had been moments she was certain she couldn't survive another hour without him, times she wanted to call some imaginary army headquarters and say she gave up, she couldn't do it anymore and they had to bring him home.

But she endured. She treasured every second of their phone and Skype calls, and found ways to keep breathing through the hours between them. The six months never really got easier, but they did get shorter. And now here she was, only minutes from the end.

“I see a bus!” someone shouted near the entrance. An excited hush fell over the room as people gathered wandering children, unfolded handmade signs, readied cameras and gave their makeup a final onceover. Tara backed up against the nearest bleacher, afraid her legs wouldn't hold her if she tried to scramble onto one of the higher ones for a better view.

People started to cheer as the sound of a bus hissing to a halt was audible from outside. So many of the wives seemed to have brought friends or family members to take photos, and she briefly wondered whether she should've asked Laurel or Mia to be here with her.

She discarded that idea almost as soon as she'd had it. She and Chance had spent their lives facing off against the world. Now they had each other, and they didn't need anyone else.

Suddenly the double doors on the far well banged open and the cheering escalated to a fever pitch as the 13th Infantry's Alpha Company marched in, then halted in formation.

Tara's heart beat so loudly in her ears that she could hardly make out what the commander said in his brief speech. She caught something about service and bravery but she was busy scanning the group of people in identical camouflage uniforms, searching for the one who was coming home to her.

“And we remember those still in harm's way, and pray for their safe return.” The commander stood back from the podium as the first notes of the Star-Spangled Banner came over the loudspeaker.

She saw him.

The next few minutes sped by so quickly she could barely process what happened. The song finished, the troops were released from duty, and the room became a melee of bodies looking and finding and colliding in reunion. She lost sight of Chance behind a big family and when she rounded them he was gone. She drifted aimlessly through the crowd, craning her neck, furrowing her brow, worried he'd gone out to the parking lot when he couldn't find her when a hand touched her shoulder.

“Hey, sugar, you want to make a bet?”

She turned around and burst into tears. He was gaunt and pale and alive and she threw her arms around his neck, squeezing so hard, not sure she could ever bring herself to let go. He hoisted her up off her feet and she wrapped her legs around his waist, not caring what the other wives thought, not caring how her skirt rode up her thighs, losing herself in the heat of his body and the bony hardness of his shoulders and the irrepressible scent of honeysuckle slicing through the old-rubber smell of the gymnasium.

“You're here,” she gasped when she could pull enough air into her lungs to speak. “You're home.”

“Of course I am, sugar. This soldier's life means I'll never stop leaving, but I promise I'll always come home to you.”

“And I'll always be here waiting.”

As Tara took in his devil-may-care grin, his mischievous green eyes, the absolute commitment she knew sat safe and stalwart in his heart, she realized just how much she'd won when the roulette ball hit on green. She had a man who understood her, who cherished her, who blazed through life with her same ferocious heat and loved her for it. And she knew without a doubt that no matter what tried to pull them apart, from money to family to wars on foreign soil, they would always snap back, staggering toward each other, collapsing together. Two sticks blackening and fusing in a bonfire, the flame roaring up into the sky.