Light Up the Night (13 page)

She was in the ground. That was all Bill could think to hold himself together. Constance Bruce was finally at rest.

He sat in the afternoon sun on the top of the three stone steps at the front of the Round Church in Richmond, Vermont, staring out across the broad, green field that stretched toward the Winooski River. Most of the town's four thousand people lived across the narrow, two-lane steel bridge, and it felt as if he'd met every single one. Even if it wasn't true, he was tired enough for it to be true.

People had come for the service. Not many, but enough. She'd made friends here. Ones who came up and shook his hand and said kind words about her.

Now she had died here.

There was so much he should be doing, but he didn't even know where to begin. He was baking in the warm sun, but couldn't find the energy to do more than loosen his tie. The jacket was far too much effort.

He closed his eyes and just focused on his breathing. Fresh mown grass, the air thick with the dusty smell of leaves turning their fall colors, the Vermont air reeking of autumn. Most of the flowers were gone, though he'd found some late-season black-eyed Susans to set on his mother's coffin. She'd have appreciated that. She'd always like the sunny yellow blooms.

That was it. As long as he remembered to keep breathing, he could get through this. Somehow.

Constance Bruce would have liked the ceremony, so everyone told him. And how proud she'd been of her only son. God, she'd deserved so much more, but he'd only been able to give her this.

She'd deserved a husband, not a folded flag. She'd deserved a comfortable life, not desperate poverty.

And she certainly didn't deserve to die alone at forty-eight from a cancer she'd never told him about. As if he could have done anything the doctors couldn't.

Well, that was over. Now he had to pack, sell, or give away her meager belongings. He had to be done with this and get out of here before he went any crazier.

He raised his head, though he was too weary to sit up. He wiped at his eyes as he did so and saw that he was not alone.

A lone figure stood in the center of the curving one-lane road that passed in front of the old church. Just clear of the shadows of the maple trees that lined the drive. A lone figure standing hipshot, with a duffel bag over one shoulder and hair that flamed the color of the maple trees in the bright sunlight of the last day of September.

“O'Malley. What the hell are you doing here?” He couldn't sit up, instead hung there in the balance with his elbows braced on his knees.

“Where are your friends? Where are your SEAL buddies? Aren't they supposed to be standing by a comrade-in-arms?”

“I didn't tell them.”

“About the funeral?” She crossed the road and came to a stop just a few steps in front of him.

“About my mother.” God, Trisha O'Malley was just about the best damn thing he'd ever seen. “Never told anyone about her, except you.”

“Oh.” She went quiet at that, still leaning against the weight of the duffel bag. Then she brightened. “That's why I'm here. I heard what happened and figured you needed someone beside you.”

“Squeezing the bullshit-o-meter there, O'Malley.” Didn't know why he said it, but it was true.

She winced, then shrugged merrily. “Can't get squat by you, can I? Won't deny it, but let it stand for now.” She relaxed a shoulder, dumping the duffel onto the grass, then stared up at the tall, white church behind him.

He was too tired to argue.

“It's not round.”

“What? Oh, the church. That's just its name.”

“It's got like sixteen sides or something. Not round. Hexadecahedron?”

“Hexadecagon unless it turned into a geodesic dome since I stepped out of it.”

She squinted up at it again, but he didn't have the energy to turn around and make sure it hadn't changed: two-story white church with sixteen sides, sloped roof, and center steeple. It wasn't a church anymore, just a historical landmark. He'd rented it for the ceremony because Constance Bruce had loved it so much. And it was pretty.

“Two hundred years old last year. Maybe the year before.”

“It's old.”

He didn't even have the energy to nod.

She came to sit beside him on the wide stone steps. Facing partly away from him into the westering sun, she closed her eyes and sighed.

“Man, this place is so serene it must be phony, like a stage set or something.”

He listened to the world around him. Late afternoon in the tiny town of Richmond, not a whole lot was going on. A single car rattling over the steel bridge a couple hundred yards away. A tractor in some field to the west turning the last of the year's hay to dry in the sun before baling.

Birds, he hadn't noticed how many birds were chattering away. Blue ones, red ones, black ones that flew by with their yellow-and-red armbands of rank, the master sergeants of the air. They always looked so proper and serious compared to the little ones that flitted madly about like nattering privates. And cows, he heard them mooing to be milked somewhere off to the south-southwest.

“You're right. This place can't be real. How did you find me?”

“How many people named Bruce had a memorial service in this town today?”

“Okay.” He didn't have any words left. The few he'd had were used up at the memorial service when he spoke of the mother they knew, not the one he knew. Carefully editing his few words for her friends.

“Is she buried?” O'Malley's voice was so soft that he barely heard it over the call of some overeager private-first-class chickadee.

He nodded.

“Can I see where?”

“Not yet.” He opened his eyes and looked at her questioning gaze. “Not because of you. For me. Can't go back there yet.”

“Okay.” Her nod was slow and easy. Not moving at Trisha speed, but rather more in sync with the town, or perhaps with his degree of shock.

“Come on, sailor.” She stood before him, though he hadn't seen her rise. The sun had shifted the shadows around her duffel where it still rested on the grass. “Let's get you out of here.”

He stood and bent down to pick up her duffel, but she grabbed it first.

“Is the car yours?” She nodded toward the white Toyota parked under the maples. The next closest vehicle was a tractor parked in the field beyond the trees.

He nodded.

“Keys.” She held out her hand.

He dug them out and dropped them in her palm. “Where are we going?”

“Just climb aboard and lie back, sailor.” She got behind the wheel, shifting the seat way forward.

Past the ability to do more, he collapsed into the passenger seat and shifted it way back.

***

Trisha drove past the small pizzeria in the tiny row of brick stores that was obviously the center of this nowhere little town. The town looked as idyllic as the churchyard. Probably be a sucky place to grow up, unless you were into farming or something, but otherwise it looked okay. She actually kind of liked the feel of being nowhere at the moment, but she expected that Billy needed to be elsewhere. Her stomach growled, which was a terribly impolite thing to do under the circumstances, so she ignored it.

Billy looked like he'd been shot. He just lay there with his eyes closed, dark circles under them.

Well, you took control, O'Malley. So what comes next?
She had no idea. At first, she just let the road take her where it wanted. Then she saw signs for Burlington. It was the closest thing Vermont had to a city, just ten miles away. That's when she knew she had to get him out of Richmond.

Twenty minutes later, the road ended where it ran into Lake Champlain on the far side of Burlington. She turned right along the shore and passed another pizzeria. This one looked old and worn, like it had a lot of good years under its belt, like maybe it was built by the last of the French fur trappers or something and would have more good years to come. They didn't need a campus place or a tourist hangout. They needed a local's pizza pie.

She parked and then shook Billy.

“What?” He jerked upright in the seat.

“You look pretty as a picture, sleeping there, sailor. But you'll wake up a cripple if you nap in that seat much longer. C'mon. Pizza.”

“No,” his voice was still slurred. “Don't want food.”

She punched his arm, as hard as she could sitting beside him in bucket seats. “I'm not talking food. I'm talking pizza. Now dig deep, sailor, and move your ass.”

He clawed his way out of the seat and looked a little better when he got his head out into the breeze off the lake. The painful brightness, blue sky hazed soft with windblown dust even out to sea, and sweaty heat of the Gulf had been replaced by a cool fall evening and a blue sky so rich it looked polished. The dark waters of Lake Champlain spread before them in stark contrast to the turquoise tropical waters of the Gulf.

It was going to get cold, especially for her Persian Gulf–acclimatized blood. But if she took him inside, he'd be asleep in minutes due to the restaurant's warmth. A quick poke through their duffel bags in the trunk and she came up with a jacket for each of them, then led him to an outside table and a pair of steel chairs where they could see Lake Champlain and the setting sun shining off its surface. No one else was stupid enough to sit outside in the crisp fall air.

When the waiter showed up, she ordered a large pizza with everything on it and a pitcher of stout. Billy looked at her questioningly.

“Neither of us is getting called up in the next twenty-four hours. We get to have a drink.”

Together they watched a ferry come in. Lake Champlain was ten miles across and ran forever in each direction with Vermont on one shore and New York on the other. This far north there was nothing in New York except farms and towns almost too tiny to deserve names. There wasn't that much more here in Vermont, but someone ran a ferry back and forth anyway.

“Last run of the year,” the waiter informed them. At her look he continued, “Only runs through September. Tomorrow is October. Until next May you have to drive around the south or up to Grand Isle crossing. I like it. Gets quieter.”

Trisha tried to imagine this place any quieter, but just couldn't come up with it. Compared to Boston or Fort Campbell, where the Screaming Eagles and SOAR were both based, most things were quieter, but this place was ridiculous.

By the time she poured Billy his second beer, he appeared to have mellowed and woken up a bit. She was barely through half of her first, but she wasn't used to drinking and could already feel it. SOAR pilots were on twenty-four hour call even when they were on vacation. And they followed a twenty-four-hour bottle-to-throttle rule, which didn't make for much opportunity to build up a tolerance for alcohol. As a Screaming Eagle, she generally knew when she'd be off shift for a while, and those parties had been serious. Though even at those, she'd rarely drunk past comfortable. SOAR fliers pretty much didn't drink because of the on-call rule. Family leave was one exception. And her current circumstances were another.

“Why here?” Trisha asked him. Again up to her to carry the conversation, because Billy sure wasn't up to it. “Was your mom from here?”

Billy set his beer down on the ironwork table and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, though it was still unzipped. Hers was already zipped to her chin, and she wished she had a sweater rather than a T-shirt underneath it. He gazed out at the lake. New York State was just a hazy shadow in the evening light.

“Right after they married, my folks took a drive through here. Their one and only road trip. They were always dirt-poor. No surviving relations to help out, either. She loved that old round church. Spoke of it often. Turns out there's a good chance that I was conceived in the woods not far from there. After five more years of everything getting worse, he joined the Army. I was eight when he died. They never made it back here, though he'd kept promising her.”

The pizza arrived and Trisha dug in, relishing the heat that singed her fingers and scorched the roof of her mouth.

Billy took a bite and worked on it slowly. “On my eighteenth birthday, I took my signing bonus, bought her a bus ticket, and rented her an apartment just in town across the bridge from the church. Sent home most of every paycheck in the twelve years since.”

“Holy crap, Lieutenant. You weren't kidding when you said you were a straight arrow.”

He smiled softly at that, then offered one of those expressive shrugs of his.

“I blew my signing bonus on one last good drunk,” she informed him, which had been lousy. “And a new iPod.” Which had been great. “You make me feel like a total loser.”

“Loser? Queen of SOAR doesn't get to call herself a loser.”

He couldn't have landed that punch more solidly if he'd tried.

***

“You're white.”

Trisha had gone paper white, even compared to how fair-skinned she normally was.

“You okay?” Billy leaned in to inspect her more carefully.

She had a slice of pizza clamped between her teeth, but wasn't biting it off or chewing on it.

He thumped her back sharply and she nearly tumbled out of the chair, choking a bit as she did so. He prepared to thump her again, ready to move around for a Heimlich if necessary, when she waved him off.

“You don't need to beat on me. I'm fine. Just fine.”

He eyed her uncertainly, but her color slowly came back. She slugged back the rest of her beer hard, and her color came back a bit more. He went to refill her glass, but she blocked the gesture.

“No, I'm driving. Rest of that pitcher is yours.”

“You trying to get me drunk, girl?”

“Maybe so, sailor. Maybe so. Girl can always hope she'll get lucky, can't she?”

He winked at her and then took another slice.

He tried to remember the last time he'd so enjoyed just sitting with a woman, or with anyone.