Page 75 of The Maverick
The Bell lifted off the grass slow and steady. Rebecca's hand tightened in mine—hard, then easing as we cleared the trees, then almost not at all by the time we were a hundred feet up. Her eyes had already gone to the window and stayed there.
The pilot banked us east toward the coast.
Charleston spread out underneath us. Gas lanterns in the historic district. The dark line of the Battery seawall. The harbor going dark blue under us with the lights of Mount Pleasant on the far side and the bridges strung between them like jewelry. Beyond it, the Atlantic was a wide, flat darkness with a single shipping lane lit way out.
I keyed my mic.
"After my daddy disappeared," I said, "I was lost."
I'd never said those words out loud to another person.
They came out the way real things came out when you finally let them—dry. Plain.
She didn't turn to me. She kept her eyes on the window. That was a kindness. That was Rebecca Lynn kindness—she knew, the way she knew most things, that some confessions wanted to be made into the open air and not into another person's face.
"My brothers handled it different," I said. "Some of them got mean. Some of them got quiet. I—I went the other way. I gotfunnier.I got the easiest to be around. I made my mama laugh in the kitchen and I made my brothers laugh in the bunkhouse andI built the version of me everybody could lean on when nobody else was leaning. It worked. Most days, I believed it."
"Tommy?"
"Mm."
"Keep going."
"I joined the Army when I was eighteen. Maybe because my daddy had served. Maybe because I'd run out of reasons to stay home. Probably because I needed to be looking at something bigger than my own family for a minute, and the Army gave me that."
The Bell settled into its cruise. The engine sound under the headset went to a steady, predictable hum.
"It worked," I said. "Mostly. The work was the work. The work I was good at. But the peace—the actual peace, the kind that getsunderyour sternum and stays there—I didn't find that until one night in Southeast Asia. Place I shouldn't have been. I was on a roof at three in the morning waiting for something that didn't end up needing me, and there was a city below me lit up the way cities are lit up in places where the power's unreliable but the people aren't. The moon came up over the river, and I sat there and breathed."
The coast was sliding under us.
I keyed the channel to the pilot.Take us out over the water.He banked right. The line of the shore peeled away under us and the Atlantic opened up under the moon.
The moonlight broke on the water in a long silver path that ran from us to the horizon.
Rebecca made a small sound.
"That," I said. "Right there. That's what I wanted to show you."
She didn't say anything for a long moment.
She kept looking out the window.
When she finally turned to me, her eyes were bright and her face was open and she looked at me the way she'd looked at me in the bathtub this morning, but bigger. Cleaner. Just her and me and a window between us and the moon.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you for showing me a part of your life."
It came out quiet.
She turned back to the window.
I sat there with my hand in hers.
I thought, sudden and clean, of something my mother had said once. I'd been a boy, maybe ten, maybe eleven. She'd been on the porch the night after one of my father's longer absences, hands cupped around a coffee cup that had gone cold on her, looking out at the Texas dark with the kind of stillness she got when she was deciding to forgive a man one more time.
She'd said it like she was talking to herself.
Love isn't a finite thing, baby. The more we give, the more we're given. And it can come fast, or it can come slow. Don't waste your time judging which. Just enjoy.
