She glared up at him, possibly more shocked than he was, Jack mumbling, trying to string together a coherent sentence that finally came together as, “I’m a total idiot.”
The anger in her eyes melted away. She wiped the coffee from her face and looked down at her coat, and all Jack could think was that she was even more beautiful at point blank range.
“Let me pay for the book and the coat and—”
She waved him off.
“It’s okay. You all right? That looked bad.”
“Yeah.” He’d have a black bruise on his elbow by nightfall, but in this moment, he felt no pain. “I’ll live once I get passed the devastating humiliation.”
She laughed. Like nothing he’d ever heard. “Oh, come on, wasn’t that bad.”
“Actually, it was.”
“No, it—”
“I was coming over to ask you out.”
Her face went blank.
Longest moment of his life.
“Bullshit,” she finally said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re just having fun with me.”
Jack smiled. “Would you give me a do-over?”
“A what?”
“A do-over. Let me have another shot at this.”
He couldn’t tell for sure in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, but she might have blushed.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’ll be right back. It’ll go better, I promise.”
Jack walked to the fountain. His heart beating so fast he could barely breathe. He sat down and looked over at the table. She was watching him now and she’d taken her sunglasses off. He started toward her again, stopping at her table with his back to the sun, so she sat in his shadow.
“I’m Jack,” he said.
“Hi, Jack, I’m Deanna. Sorry about this mess. Some asshole spilled his coffee all over me.”
And she smiled, and he looked into her eyes for the first time. Had never felt anything like it. Up until this moment, he thought he’d experienced pure attraction, but all those other times, other women, had been lust—he saw that now—and this wasn’t that. Not just that. There was an energy present, something combustive between them that hit him in the solar plexus. She had eyes that were dark blue but also luminescent, and later, when he thought about them, their color and clarity would remind him of a lake where he’d often camped with his father in Glacier, so deep but so clear the sunlight shot all the way down to the stones at the bottom and made the water glow.
But he barely noticed the intensity of her eyes in the moment. It was all electricity, a terrible current, like looking into the future, everything prefigured—a life together, a daughter, a mortgage, a son born two months premature, the death of Jack’s mother, an automobile wreck that would take Deanna’s parents on Thanksgiving night eight years from now, moments of indescribable happiness, long winters of depression, a slow drifting, a betrayal, fear, anger, compromise, stasis, but when it all lay stripped to the bone, whatever mysterious alchemy had been present in this moment, would be present always. Untouched by their failures. Everything changed, and nothing.
This is what he saw, what he sensed on some primal frequency, when he looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time on a fall day in the American west that was so perfect it would always break his heart to think of it. What he still felt, eighteen years later in the same city square, when his eyes met Dee’s again.
She looked unreal, moving among the dead like a ghost toward the fountain, emaciated, tears riding down her cheeks.
Kiernan must have seen the glitch in Jack’s attention, because he glanced back just as Dee raised an old revolver.
“What are you doing here, Kiernan?” she asked.
“Waiting for you, love.”
The gunshot reverberated between the buildings.
Kiernan stumbled back and sat down beside Jack.
He was still holding the knife, and Jack grabbed it and stood facing him.
Blood ran down the man’s face out of a hole through his left eye.
The blade of the Ka-Bar passed through his chestplate with no effort and Jack buried it to the hilt. Kiernan toppled back into the icy pool, a cloud of murky red surrounding him, the weight of his boots and fatigues pulling him under as the one good eye blinked frantically.
Jack turned around and Dee was there. He pulled her down into the snow and he was on top of her, kissing her, like drinking water again, like breathing, and they came apart only to breathe, both crying like babies. He held her face in his hands and wouldn’t let go for fear she would vanish or he’d wake up and realize it was him dying in the fountain and these were his last thoughts.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” he said, and he kept saying it, and she kept telling him that she was, and that she was real. He couldn’t take his hands off her, and he couldn’t believe this was happening.
“You didn’t have any problems getting Cole into the city?” Jack asked. They were walking up 3rd Street North toward the library, each holding two machineguns taken off the dead men in the square like a pair of bad action-flick heroes. “It was on lockdown when I got here several days ago. They weren’t letting any of the affected in, but I told them you might be passing through with a boy who was.”
“We drove in last night,” Dee said. “The barricade had been destroyed. We almost didn’t make it, Jack. Bombs going off everywhere. Gunfights on almost every block. A couple of really close calls. It’s a full-scale war on the east side of town. Thousands dead. Easily.”
They passed a law office that had been hit with a mortar shell. Wet pleadings plastered all over the sidewalk.
“How did you know to come to the square?”
Dee smiled. “How did you?”
“I’d gone to the shelter looking for you. Nobody had seen you or the kids. I drove downtown, out of gas, desperate, and then the headlights shone on the Davidson Building. Today was my third in the square. I didn’t know if you’d try to come here or just get the kids across the border. For all I knew, you were dead.”
“When I saw the mileage sign for Great Falls, I knew if you were alive, if you had any strength left in your body, you’d come to this place.”
“So you have a car?”
“Yeah.”
“You should’ve tried to cross the border without me.”
“Don’t say that. You wouldn’t have.”
Machineguns chattered a dozen blocks away.
“I came here this morning,” Dee said, “but it was crawling with soldiers.”
“You saw what I wrote on the side of the car?”
“I started crying when I saw it. Lost it. I hid until the soldiers left, but then Kiernan came back to kill you. I watched him chase you into the bank. I thought. . . . . .” She shook off the wave of emotion. “You were in there so long.”
“I can’t believe you came here, Dee.”
She stopped and kissed him.
Half a mile away, a bomb exploded.
“Come on,” she said. “We better run.”
Jack knelt down beside the sofa in the historical archive room of the Great Falls Public Library. Dee shined a flashlight on the ceiling, and in the refracted light Jack looked down at his children, sleeping head-to-toe. Touched his hand to Cole’s back.
“Hey, buddy. Daddy’s here.”
Cole stirred, eyes fluttering. They opened, got so wide Jack knew the boy had given him up for dead.
“Is it you?” the boy said.
“It’s me.”
Cole seemed to think things over for a minute.
“I dream about you every night and you talk to me just like this, but every time I wake up, you’re gone.”
“You’re awake, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be gone again.”
He drew the boy into his arms.