“I’ve heard Lia call them ‘operators,’ I think,” Hannah told him. “Operators for hire. Steb, I know, does his thing for gangsters and smugglers and such, for a lot of money. As you can see. Riley said he likes to have people around to help him celebrate when he finishes a job. So they’re sort of like Lia, I guess… to varying degrees.”
“Riiight,” Graves said. “Widely varying, I’d say. If a dozen of those clowns in there are worth one Lia, I’ll eat my fine new hat.”
Hannah nodded her agreement and looked back out at the becalmed view. “Still, it’s good of them to help us out.”
“That it is, sister, that it is,” Graves agreed. “So. What kinda history’s she got with this ‘Stub’ creature, anyhow?”
“It’s Steb, Dexter, and she dumped him, if that’s what you’re wondering. Three years back.”
“Won’t say it hadn’t crossed my mind,” Graves confessed. He supposed he was doing a piss-poor job of concealing his envy. “You’ve known her for quite a little while there yourself, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Since she was about sixteen or so, yeah. Going on… god, almost ten years now, I guess.”
“Wow,” Graves said, genuinely impressed. “Don’t think I ever knew anybody for a full ten years, ’cept for some of the guys I was in the service with. How’d you two, y’know, link up?”
“That’s a story too,” Hannah said.
“I’m all, well, not ears,” Graves said, touching the side of his skull. “Sound holes, maybe. Words still go in there, though.”
Hannah smiled. “Actually, Lia was already living there when I bought the Yard,” she said. “It’d been empty for a long while before I took it over. Many years. Lia’d gotten into that old bomb shelter all by herself, somehow, and the place was so overgrown that I didn’t even know it was there. She was growing vegetables for food and marijuana for pocket money. She wasn’t ambitious about it, she was just… there. Doing her thing in that little back corner. She actually hid from me for almost a year while I was getting the place ready to open, thinking I’d throw her out if I knew.”
“Reasonable worry,” Graves said. “Guess I didn’t realize that place was yours.”
“Oh yes, all mine,” Hannah said, turning wistful. “I–I had a husband once, Dexter,” she explained. “His name was Warren, and he was good to me. He had insurance. A lot of it. After he was, you know, gone, I wanted to do something different. Warren was a software developer, and I’d been a project manager at the company he founded right from the very beginning. It was our life together, and after twenty years I needed something that was just opposite, I guess. Something that would be healing and soothing, so the Yard’s what I bought with all that money. Plants, life, earthiness, you know? Roots.”
Graves nodded. He didn’t know what ‘soft wear’ was (like maybe they’d had a lingerie business was the way he interpreted it, that they’d been involved in the garment trade in some fashion), but he didn’t want to interrupt her to clarify.
“Anyway,” Hannah continued, “going into my first full winter there, Lia got very sick. I found her one morning passed out near the spigot behind the office. That old shack off the parking lot, you know? Laying there curled up on the bags of potting soil. I guess at some other point in my life I would’ve called whoever it is you’re supposed to call when you find unconscious teenage squatters on your property, but I didn’t. For whatever reason, I just didn’t. I think maybe I needed to take care as much as Lia needed to receive it. Does that make any sense?”
“Sure it does.”
Hannah nodded. “I’m pretty sure it was just a bad flu, for all that,” she said. “But the fever gave her nightmares and awful hallucinations, and I know she thought she was dying. I fed her soup and kept her warm, nothing much more than that, and when she was better she said her name was Camellia Flores, but I know it’s one she chose. Flores was the name of a foster family she liked when she was younger, before someone had medical complications and she ran away rather than go back into the system. She told me that story once and I could never get her to talk about it again, like it’s gotten hard for her to recall. I don’t know if she even remembers who she was, originally.”
“I grew up kinda the same way,” Graves said quietly, thinking back on it for the first time in a long time. “Joined the Navy soon as they’d let me, just to get the hell outta there.”
Hannah tipped her head, empathizing. “Looking back,” she said, “I think maybe that time was when Lia started to be, well, what she is now. A witch, I guess. An ‘operator.’ And I also think that maybe, for some reason, maybe just because I was there, that I’m a part of that for her. That I mean something to her, beyond being the lady she works for.”
“I know you do,” Graves said. “She’d knock the sun out of the sky rather than see you hurt.”
“She already did nail down the moon.” Hannah’s eyes crinkled with pride and pleasure as she smiled about it.
Graves laughed softly and nodded. He took out his lighter and played with it idly, clicking open the lid and closing it again, as was his habit.
“I guess that’s got to have a story behind it too, doesn’t it?” Hannah asked, tipping her chin at the Zippo. “You came back from the grave to get it, after all.”
Graves considered the old lighter. It glinted, caught there in the frail net of bones that was all that remained of his right hand. “Well, yeah,” he said, “I suppose it does at that. I’m not in the habit of boring nice ladies with old war stories, though.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Hannah said. “I’d like to know.”
Graves looked her in the eye. He hesitated. He’d never told this story to anyone before, nice lady or otherwise, and when he started to speak he found he had to look down at the lighter, instead of at Hannah herself.
“Well…” he began. “A kid named Dave Normoyle tracked me down and gave it to me after the war. Davey. Guess I pulled him outta the water on Easter Morning of 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. That’s what he told me later on, anyway. I wouldn’t have remembered the date, myself.”
He paused, gathering his memories before going on.
“I can’t even describe to you what those days were like, Miss Hannah. The Japanese were using a tactic they called the ‘wind of the spirits,’ the kami-kaze…”
“Their airplanes,” Hannah said softly.
“Yeah, exactly right, their airplanes, crashin’em into the ships, plane after plane after plane. I still say they must’ve gone through thousands, even though I know that sounds like I gotta be exaggerating. Still, though, it’s what I remember. One of ’em hit a deck I was standin’ on, not fifteen feet behind me. Piece of its engine caught me in the ribs and knocked me into the drink before I knew what was going on.”
He looked away toward downtown, feeling troubled by the recollections.
“I remember that, and I remember the dawn,” he said in a voice pitched barely above a whisper. Hannah leaned in close to hear him. “That sunrise, well, it was about as gorgeous as any sunrise I’ve ever seen. Which I guess was sorta the worst part of that morning, in a way.”
He glanced up.
“You see,” he continued, averting his eyesockets before Hannah could ask him for clarification. “It, well… it hurt me, frankly, to think about how things like the dawn go on being beautiful for reasons all their own, even when you’re right in the middle of learning firsthand the ugly truth about how easily people can, you know… get themselves broken.”
Hannah nodded, thinking back to a thunderstorm she’d once watched from a hospital room window, now more than a dozen years in her past-a fact she could scarcely believe. Lightning bolts had forked and clashed all night long. She’d had little to do but watch them sear the sky while she sat there helplessly, feigning calm and waiting hour by hour as a cancer crushed the final drops of life from the wasted remnant of her husband, her Warren, whom she’d married in the spring of 1980 and had truly loved every day thereafter with every last ounce of her soul.