She sat down in the kitchen with her coffee and played with her new phone. It was late enough in Florida to call her mother, so she did. Her mother’s number rang a few times, and she decided she must be too early. Her mother’s phone was still turned off. That was the way she left it for the night because it made noises while she was trying to sleep. She sent her mother a text to tell her she’d try again later.
She thought about Dick now, and as always thinking about him seemed to release strong feelings of affection. The response still surprised her, but it also pleased her. She hoped it meant that the direction her life had taken was right. She wasn’t quite ready to formulate a more confident statement for herself. That would be too close to saying the words aloud. Once people said things aloud, what they said tended to become sure and settled.
Not much was sure or settled. The reason she had become a bomb technician was not that she was cocky or had no fear of death. It was the opposite.
She wanted to live to be old and had always worked hard to deserve to be alive. A person who risked his life every day for others and who worked to gain the knowledge and skills to do it well must have a claim to living. She had not been overconfident, but she had been optimistic — until the evening after the car bomb in the Valley. That night, she had lost that feeling.
The new captain, the middle-aged man who had come from nowhere that day to stand in for the fourteen men who’d been murdered — an absurdity in itself — had behaved as though the substitution were natural. He had stepped in and taken charge. He had begun to study the booby-trapped car at once. He looked at the car as a single explosive device and saw the device in three dimensions and all its complexity, approaching it from above, below, all sides. He had picked up alterations and signs she hadn’t seen at first, and provided ways around the traps that she didn’t know.
She had realized within fifteen or twenty minutes that her only chance of making it to the end of watch that night was to do what he asked and to make herself be what he wanted. She had to see with her perfect vision into a dim space and extract the component he wanted out, reach into the hell-made contraption farther because her hands and arms were smaller and thinner, remove the component more gently because her tactile sense was keener and her fingers were less callused. She had concentrated on seeing exactly what he saw and thinking what he thought. Sometimes she watched his eyes to see what they were focusing on.
By the time they had worked their way down to the heart of the contraption — the shaped charge so big it was intended to blow a crater into the pavement and set off the gasoline tanks — she was practically an extension of his mind. It made perfect sense to her that he would strap the charge to his chest and take the long, lonely walk into the concrete riverbed. She was fully aware that carrying the charge was crazy, even suicidal. But taking it below street level was the most effective way to render the bomb harmless, and he was the only one who had enough experience to have a chance of doing it successfully.
At the end of that day, after she was safe and clean and sitting in her apartment alone, she had felt lost. She was relieved and afraid at the same time. She knew that what had saved them — saved her — was that he’d been able to practically read the bomb maker’s mind. She had seen how he did it, followed his steps, but was positive she could not have initiated them. If she came upon a similar device tomorrow, she would probably die.
She’d had an urge to talk to somebody, but nobody who hadn’t been there could understand or have anything useful to tell her. What did she need to know? What was she supposed to expect, to look for, to fear, to do? She realized that what she wanted to know was the future. She knew there was no place to find it, but she also knew the idea wasn’t idle, because there was one person who knew so many other things that he was closer to the future than anyone else. And he had probably learned things dismantling that bomb during the day. She knew he had. Of course she was drawn to him.
She had gotten ready — perfume, pretty underwear, the skirt and blouse she had been saving. She took a great deal of care with her hair and makeup. She thought clearly about why she was choosing to put forward this version of herself, when she could instead put on a clean, pressed uniform. It was because she needed to look as appealing as she could, and she needed to make it clear that her visit wasn’t an official errand that should have been handled at work.
She had admitted to herself just as she arrived outside his building that part of the attraction all along had been sexual. She had brought the bottle of Scotch thinking it was an afterthought, but it had really been premeditated. She had thought of it twice in the hour before she left home in the hope that it would set a nonbusiness tone. But the tone was one in which sex would be more likely. In the end she had insisted on the sex — thrown herself at him because sex was the opposite of death, and death might win in a day or so, and because she needed to be as close to him tonight as she could be.
During the next few feverish days while they fought the bomb maker every day and spent every night in each other’s arms, she felt as though she were living a whole life in an accelerated form. It had been like riding a runaway horse. She was not in charge at all, rather clinging to the horse and trying not to fall.
Boom. That was the instant everything had changed completely. She woke up six weeks later, on the far side of a chasm. All the unself-conscious abandon and lust and hero worship were knocked into a pile back there with those six days.
Her limber, athletic animal self was gone. She wondered if she would ever walk right, whether her hearing would ever fully return. Whenever she moved to test for pain, she always found it. The notion of sexual attraction was as far from her mind as it could be. She thought about the discomfort of breathing with so many broken ribs, of regaining the full extension of her limbs.
She had told Dick she remembered everything that happened between them. She knew that to him it meant she remembered and didn’t regret any of it. What she felt was probably worse. She mourned those times, yet hadn’t found a path back to the way she felt the first week with him.
One of the things that had made the relationship happen was her confidence that it would be temporary, a few days of madness that would end with the death of one or both of them. Two days ago Dick had felt hurt when she called it a fling, so she promised she wouldn’t.
But keeping her promise was hard. She didn’t know what would happen now. She didn’t know what could. As the days went on, she had been wanting time to stop so she could catch up with her lost forty-two days. But every day Dick did more to help her and protect her and support her while she recovered. She felt as though she were running up a debt to him.
She knew she should be leaving him right now and taking a plane to Florida to be with her mother. But the things that made her want to leave were the same things that made her want to stay. He was a better person than she had thought. He cared about her. At the moment she didn’t have anything to offer him in return. She knew much more about him now, and felt closer to him, but it was all so different and so inferior to the way they had started.