By day, Jean kept the lamp off in his room, and asked that the curtains be drawn back to let in the sunlight. When the nurse pulled back the heavy drapes to let in cool morning light, he felt something unlock in his chest, every time, and didn't have to fake the gratitude in his voice when he thanked her. Sky and daylight were things he'd never thought he might miss, now that he couldn't go out on his own, and yet he did. The open windows bought him a few hours of clean natural light, but in the evening the sun's slanting rays seemed to trap themselves in the glass, banking the light gradually until the shadows grew so deep he had to put the light back on.
Fortunately, evenings were when Breda came to see him, bearing coffee, contraband cigarettes, and . . . .
"Magazines," Breda said as he dropped the paper bag on the edge of the bed. His face split into his smirky I-know-something-you-don't grin. (Not uncommon. That was the way it had worked: Breda figured stuff out, and Jean did the heavy lifting. Well, that was how it had worked.) "Thought you could use some reading material."
Jean tugged the bag into his lap. First he pulled out the carton of cigarettes and weighed a pack in his hand, then tapped out a cigarette. Without even being prompted, Breda nudged the door shut with his foot and then reached up to perform the ritual of sabotaging the smoke alarm. "Beats the hell out of exercise equipment," Jean said.
"Hey, the way you've been putting away chips and cookies, you're gonna get fat." Breda took his habitual seat next to the bed as Jean went through the reverent procedure of settling the cigarette between his lips, striking a match, lighting up and drawing that first tasting breath. Mmm. Breda propped his feet on the room's small table. "Just looking out for your best interests. Somebody's gotta."
Jean exhaled a gust of blissful smoke. He waved his cigarette at Breda's belly. "People who live in glass houses shouldn't comment on the eating habits of others, o doughnut king."
"Lemme alone, I just brought you stuff."
"Oh," Jean said. "Right." He reached into the bag again, riffling his thumb down slim magazine spines and pulling out a handful of . . . .
He squinted, not sure whether to believe what he saw. The light from the bedside lamp shone dully on the glossy covers of week-old news mags, month-old financial times, and stock report bulletins. It was as though Breda had for some unfathomable reason decided to bring him a dental office's castoffs. "Heymans?" he said, magazines in hand.
"Yeah?"
"The fuck?"
Breda blinked innocently.
Jean took a drag of his cigarette and let the magazines fall back into the bag. He arched an eyebrow. "You preparing me for my new job as an economic advisor or something?"
Breda chortled outright. "If what I brought you prepares you for your future career, my friend, I envy you."
Jean gave him another long look and then started digging. Beneath the camouflaging strata of boring suitable-for-all-ages magazines: Jackpot!
More glossy magazines, but this time the lamplight reflected off a much prettier picture. Girls with plunging necklines, skirts coyly tucked up. The mysterious shadow of cleavage, the soft perfect line from breast to waist to hip, the tantalizing glimpse of creamy thigh. H e pulled one out and flipped through. Saw bright eyes, soft hair, sweet wicked smiles, acres of skin flattered by the half-sweet half-sultry cut of their dresses.
Breda was very suddenly his hero.
"I think I'm going to like my new career," Jean said. The bag contained a veritable embarrassment of riches, a wealth of blondes, brunettes, redheads . . . . "A lot."
"Keep digging."
Jean arched an eyebrow and dug deeper into the bag. At the very bottom: two magazines of the kind that came in plain brown wrappers, where the curvy and sweetly-smiling girls were, mysteriously, wearing nothing at all.
"I think I want to hug you," Jean said. Well, no, he really wanted to hug any one of the pinup girls, but gratitude was gratitude.
"Little reading material and you get all sentimental on me, man." But Breda bounced a little on his heels, looking enormously smug and satisfied with his gift's reception.
Sciezka dropped a nervous and obviously-habitual bow as soon as she got in the door, and very nearly spilled her double armload of books on the floor as she did. Jean was a little surprised to see her—he didn't really know her well, though he'd seen her around the office a few times. She looked different out of uniform, maybe a little softer, but then didn't everyone? "Lieutenant," she began, and then blanched and said, "Er, I mean—Mister —"
"Jean," he said around his cigarette. "Jean is fine."
"Okay," she said, and smiled. She jigged her armload of books up a bit to keep from dropping them. "Anyway, um, Officer Falman said you might be able to use some entertainment, so . . . ."
Actually, he was up to his eyeballs in books, magazines, crosswords, phonograph records, and puzzles, but it was nice to know that people were still thinking about him. He watched her stagger over to the table near his bed and drop the books thunderously, rattling the poor, not-very-sturdy piece of furniture in the process. "Thank you," he said, craning his neck to get a good look at the titles on the spines.
"I didn't know what you'd like, she said. He felt a pang of empathy as he recognized loquaciousness born of nerves, though he had no earthly clue what was making her so anxious. He certainly wasn't intimidating, flat on his back and eating potato chips. "So I brought some of everything," she went on. "I can summarize for you if you want?"
"Shoot," he said. She began to rattle off titles and topics at speed.
She hadn't been exaggerating. Fiction and nonfiction, memoir to mystery, pot-boiler and great work of classic literature—a slim volume of poetry and a fat illustrated cookbook, humorous short stories and tragic plays, enough variety to make his head spin. By the time she finished, she was out of breath and Jean was completely overwhelmed by options.
"So," she finished, folding her hands and dropping another little bow, "if you tell me which ones you like, I can bring more like them, I have so many books I'm sure I can match your tastes, and if you want the company we could talk about what you read, you know, to pass the time . . . ?" She looked suddenly hopeful. It was kind of cute. She was actually kind of cute. And that would have been a bad-idea thought a few weeks before, but now, hell, he wasn't military anymore.
He dragged his mind back to the topic at hand. "You've read 'em all?"
"Oh yeah," she said, waving her hand at the pile, "a while ago, but I remember everything I read, you know, so I could still talk about it." Yes, definitely kind of cute, even when flustered.
He tilted his head and stubbed out his cigarette, belated good manners. "I think I'd like that."
The light outside his window was a hot, demanding orange. It made him feel restless. Had he been able to, he would have jiggled his leg; instead, his fingers beat the rhythm on his bed's steel rail.
Hawkeye seemed unperturbed by his restlessness. She'd asked just enough but not too much about how he was doing, as though aware in her own scary Hawkeye way that he was getting extremely tired of rehashing the 'yes, my wounds are healing up fine; no, I still can't feel a damn thing in my legs' conversation every ten minutes.
"The colonel hasn't been able to get away yet," she said. He thought he could read concern in the hard set of her mouth, but maybe he was imagining it. "But he sends his good wishes."
"Tell him thank you." The colonel . . . thinking about Mustang always made him feel weird. Simultaneously grateful that someone believed in his recovery and afraid that he would fail. He wanted so much to live up to the colonel's expectation that he would catch up, that the idea of disappointing near to terrified him.
"Looks as though you've got plenty of reading material," Hawkeye went on, "but I brought some more, just in case." (Mystery novels! Broken-spined, too, and with her name printed efficiently on the inside cover, so probably from her own collection; he'd had no idea, it was a glimpse of her personal life valuable for its very rarity.) She began going over paperwork, sitting in silent company and leaving him in peace to decide whether he wanted to try one of the books Sciezka had left, work another crossword, or try to slip one of the pinup mags inside the cover of a respectable-looking news magazine. (Even though they both knew that Hawkeye had long since figured him out.)
The mention of Mustang got him thinking, though, and he couldn't focus on the book he finally chose from the stack. It wasn't as though he could just wish himself better—and what if he never . . . ? His fingertips began to rattle on the bed frame. He didn't even notice he was doing it until Hawkeye looked up, an eyebrow cocked in silent concern.
"Sorry," he said. "It's the waiting. It's driving me crazy." In some ways it was easier to say something like that to Hawkeye than to Breda because Breda was his friend. He'd feel obliged to make Jean felt better, somehow, which was awkward for both of them.
But Hawkeye—Riza? No, definitely still Hawkeye—just smiled. "The colonel could make anyone feel anxious, I think."
"See, I knew you were telepathic."
She smiled, just a little. "No offense meant, Havoc, but you're not that hard to read."
"Ouch. But fair cop."
She smiled again. "The colonel wants so badly for you to be well that he expects it, and he has always operated by impressing his expectations on the rest of us and trusting that we will meet and exceed them. But he . . . is not always objective about the people he cares about." Just as they weren't objective about him, Jean realized, none of them; his office's loyalty went well beyond respect for the command structure. "Recovery takes time," she continued. "Give yourself that time."
Before the months of immobility, he would have found the wheelchair hopelessly unwieldy. He'd struggled at first, in fact, in his clumsy attempt to get into it, relying on a nurse for balance as he leveraged his way in. But now it was like a revelation: he could get his hands around the wheels and move, under his own power, feeling the flex of his arms, his shoulders, propelling himself across the floor.
Even banging into the doorframe three times while trying to get out into the hall wasn't enough to sour his mood.
It was weird to be chaperoned on his way out, like a teenage girl on her way to a country dance, but he understood why. With his current lack of skill with the chair, he might run himself into a gutter, and he'd need a spare pair of hands to right himself. But when he got the front door open and wheeled himself out, felt the breeze on his face, the contrasting warmth of direct sunlight and the cool of wind, it almost made up for jamming his fingers in the chair's spokes in his distraction.
Sciezka came back with another armload a books a few days later. They were more specifically targeted now. (He'd sent Fuery back with the intel that he'd enjoyed The Wreck of the Eumenides, a probably-sensationalized based-on-a-true-story novel, and had also enjoyed The Xerxes Caper, a completely improbable potboiler.)
"If you liked Xerxes Caper, there's a bunch more that Mick Tyrone wrote along the same lines," Sciezka said, much more relaxed this time—and obviously in her native element, sorting books for him on the table. "I like The Curse of the Crystal Key, but it's pretty over-the-top. If you like the more realistic-ish hard-boiled stuff there's Hired Gun, and he also did an alchemical thriller called The Gardner Theorem that's pretty good, though not very accurate. Of course there's also the Jones Spillane series, which I think has more actual literary merit but at the cost of some of the enjoyment." She trailed off, adjusting her glasses and fixing him with a hopeful look that made him feel protective.
He tried to think of something interesting to say. (Usually this was not his end of the problem. Usually his problem was getting women to talk to him at all.) "Thank you. Hawkeye left me with some other kinds of mysteries I wanted to ask you about. They were really different. I think they were thought out better but they were less fast-paced." He reached for one of the potboilers, and was surprised and pleased when she put it straight into his hand, and more surprised and more pleased when she let her fingers linger just for a second against his. He was sure he wasn't imagining things.
"Oh, yes," Sciezka said. "Lieutenant Hawkeye likes country-house murder mysteries, which are a completely different genre—I really like them, but they're definitely different. She likes them because they're like a puzzle, if they're written well you can figure out who did the deed before you get to the end. Of course a lot of them are written badly, but I lent her the Miss Hazel series and they're very well-done. If you'd like I can bring them next time, she's got her own copies now."
"Hawkeye borrows books from you?"
Sciezka blinked behind her glasses. "Well, sort of. I mean, I saw her reading one in the cafeteria and I offered. Do you think that's inappropriate? I mean it's not like I lent her Mithouse's poetry or something personal like that."
. . . Funny thing: she had lent him a volume of Mithouse's poetry. Maybe he ought to give that a closer read. "I think you're fine."
She actually blushed. "So," she said, "would you like me to bring some of the country-house mysteries? I'd be happy to."
He was about to say that, no, these were more than plenty to keep him occupied, more books than he could get through in a month even with nothing to do but read. But he found himself wanting to see her again sooner than that, and if that meant his room filling up with paperbacks, well, small price to pay. "Sure," he said. "Pick me out some of your favorites."
She beamed at him, bright as sunrise. "Will do."
The cafe down the street wasn't far to go, but it made him happy to go out to see Breda rather than receiving visitors as if to a sickbed. The pangs in his stomach warned him against pushing himself too hard—stomach pains were notoriously slow and finicky to heal, or so said his doctor—but he couldn't, couldn't, couldn't regret it, sitting outside under an awning and tipping his head back to get a good view of the sky.
"Coffee?" Breda slouched into the seat opposite him. "Couldn't you have found a bar within wheeling distance?"
"Gimme some credit, I know better than to drink and drive." Jean leaned back, letting the sunlight slant through the fringe of the awning and dapple on his face, warm as a touch.
"You just say that so I'll keep bringing you beer."
"Damn straight I do. I know a good thing when I see it."
"That's like four cases you owe me." Breda leaned back, one arm looped over the back of the chair, very much like old times.
Jean flashed him a grin around the cig in his mouth. (Another nice thing about going out: no one to harass him about his smoking habit.) "That's why they pay you the big bucks, right?"
Breda's look said I'd-flip-you-off-if-we-weren't-in-public, and then the waitress interrupted to take their orders—pretty girl, but not quite his type. Anyway, he was distracted thinking about . . . .
"You're thinking about that girl, eh?" Breda said. "Don't hold out on me, man, spill, you can't pick up a chick at all normally and then you're trapped in a hospital and suddenly you've got one? Explain."
"I—she's just—oh, hell. All right. Maybe."
"Sciezka? She's cute for sure. Not what I would have pegged as your type, though, seeing as you usually like the type that needs an industrial-strength bra."
"Well, she's different."
"Ooh, mushy."
"No, I mean it. She talks to me about books. She talks to me. She wants to know what I think of them. That's never happened before."
Breda looked ready to cackle. "You want someone to love you for your mind, not just your body?"
Fortunately, Jean was spared thinking of an adequate response for that, because the waitress returned with their drinks and pastries. Afterwards, Breda changed the subject: "You really going back east to work the family store?"
"I think so."
His look turned skeptical. "All that way?"
"C'mon, it's not like I'm from the Drachma steppes, it's just a day by train. City boy."
"Still. With your pension, you could—"
"I could live off it, but I couldn't live off it, you know? It'd drive me crazy to be sitting around doing nothing."
"There is that, I guess." Breda poked him in the chest with a fingertip. "But you will call or write or something. No dropping off the face of the earth."
"See, you think you're being all pushy and crap," Jean said, poking him back, "but actually you're just trying to hide what a big softie you actually are."
This time, Breda didn't let the public place restrain him, but as he flipped Jean off, he was laughing.
"You're going to the East soon?" Sciezka asked, her eyebrows clearing the top rim of her glasses. "I mean, I knew you were moving back there eventually, but I didn't think so soon."
She was going to miss him. Jean disliked himself a little for how happy that made him. Of course, it was tempered by the realization that he was going to miss her, too. Rather a lot. Pretty girl who came to see him, sure, but more than that: pretty girl who came to see him who talked to him like she wanted to be talking to him, who didn't treat him like an interchangeable soldier-boy or an idiot, and how often did that happen in his life? Ever?
"I haven't finished The Cretan Kestrel," he said slowly. "I probably won't have time to finish it before I go, let alone Murder Knocks Twice."
It was a tremendous good sign, he knew by now, that she straightened her spine and said firmly, "You can take it with you. I trust you to send it back when you're done."
"Better yet," he said, feeling impulsive, generous, reckless. He was putting his life back together, slow but sure, and why not? "Come see me and I'll give it back to you then. I mean, it's not like I live in a great tourist town or anything, but we've got beautiful scenery and it's very restful, and —"
"I'd love to," she said, quick enough that it made her blush, and that made him blush too, and laugh.
Hawkeye asked him to meet her in the park, which he did—which meant crossing three streets, no small feat, and which made him feel inordinately proud of himself once he arrived at the wrought-iron fence surrounding Lamplighter Park. Hawkeye was sitting on a bench next to the duckpond, dressed in civilian clothes and reading the Central Times. When he wheeled up next to her, he felt a thrill of excitement, as if he were on a covert mission rather than being simply a retired officer visiting with a friend.
But maybe he'd been more right than he knew, because after he returned a stack of her novels to her and thanked her for the paper cup of tea she'd brought him, she'd said, "Things are moving fast now, Havoc. I don't have time to fill you in entirely, especially since I'm not completely sure we're safe even here, but I'll see if I can have Falman —"
"Whoa, whoa," Jean said, "remember me? No longer on payroll? Security clearance out the window?"
"I'm hardly going to leave you completely in the dark," she said crisply. "It'd be too hard to catch you up when you come back." Her voice dropped. "At any rate, this has gone well beyond security clearances and official lines of command."
"Mmf," he said, sipping his tea. "Fair enough."
"They're splitting us up," she went on, and his head came up with a snap. "Falman's going to North in just a few days, Breda's being sent west, I'm sure he'll be by to tell you soon, we all found out today—and Fuery's being sent to Southern."
Jean's stomach dropped. "Southern. There's a lot of tension there." He set his cup of tea down on the bench next to Hawkeye. "What about you?"
"I'm being reassigned to the Fuhrer," she said.
"Right under his nose."
"Exactly." She looked straight at Jean, then, her gaze unflinching. "But you're the one of us who's not on the military rolls. You're honorably discharged. Even the Chiefs of Staff can't order you hither and yon, or at least not directly."
That was an interesting idea, that she considered him one of them, still. It made him feel warm, even though the conversation was sobering indeed. "So I can —"
"You're the one of us left with freedom to operate." She was watching him carefully, now. Oh, boy, that was ironic, that the injury that had crippled him had left him more able to—ha—move than any of the rest of them. "Can we rely on you?"
"Do you even have to ask?"
She smiled. "I didn't think so, but it would be improper to assume. Are you still planning to head east?"
He thought about it. "It would be kind of obvious if I suddenly changed my mind, wouldn't it?"
"True."
"If you need me," he said slowly, "you could always send a telegram to my—cousin. Her name is Jacqueline." He felt a thrill wind his way up through his chest. Apart but not left behind, not left behind, he couldn't walk but he could move.
Hawkeye smiled sipped her own tea. "I'll remember that."
"What I want to know," Breda said, "is how you managed to con us into helping you pack. You've still got three days, you could do this yourself."
"Noble comrades in arms," Jean intoned, "aiding a fallen soldier —"
"Fallen my ass, you're going on dates."
"Still," Fuery broke in as he put a stack of well-worn t-shirts in a box, "it's only friendly."
"See?" Jean said, elbowing Breda. "Fuery's still got a heart."
Falman stood over a cardboard box, books in his hands. "Do you want these alphabetized by author then title, or subject then author then title?"
"— Er —" Jean said.
"Both systems have their merits," he went on. "I find it easiest to cross-reference by subject, but if you want all the works by a particular author together regardless of genre —"
"How about whatever you think is best, huh?"
Fuery finished with the shirts. "I'll start on the magazines."
Jean's eyes widened. "How about you let me handle that, huh, you've done plenty," he said, as Breda sniggered.
His newfound mobility meant that he could go out to see Sciezka one more time before leaving. Out to a casual restaurant that faced the park, to dine al fresco in the soft early-evening air.
It was almost like a date.
(Wait, no, scratch that. Dates meant bad news for Jean, always had. Dates were disastrous. This wasn't disastrous, this was just . . . nice, and maybe if it was not-a-date it could stay nice. Maybe he could just go on liking her.)
Funny thing, though. She'd gone all nervous again, like the first time she'd visited him, blushing and dropping things.
"Your hometown," she said, "is it nice?"
"I like it. Quiet, though, s'part of why I enlisted, to see more action." He studied her a moment, the soft lines of her face, pretty and sweet-looking, but for her eyes as intent as if she were memorizing everything. He realized he was staring and cleared his throat. "But quiet sounds pretty good for now. For a little while, anyway."
"I like quiet," she said. "Plenty of time to read, to get your bearings, to think. Is it pretty? The countryside, I mean."
"Yeah." Pretty as you, he thought, instinctive: a mental attempt at a Mustang-line. But no, this wasn't that kind of thing at all, this wasn't a silly flowershop girl. She'd see right through that, and probably not be impressed. "Right now it's kind of a mudpit, actually, since it's the rainy season, but in about a month the grass will come up and the yellowtips will bloom. Sunset over a yellowtip meadow, prettier than anything you've ever seen."
"Maybe I'll come see you then," she said, tilting her head a little in question.
"Sounds good to me." Greatly daring, he edged his chair closer—it was so good to be able to do that—and covered her hand on the table with his own. Her hand was small beneath his, soft-skinned, and for a moment he held his breath.
Then she smiled, as lovely as that sunset. She turned her hand over beneath his palm, and twisted her fingers with his.
The colonel made it to see him once more before he left—but barely, only barely. He eyed Breda's offering on the side table. "Barbells?"
"Breda."
Mustang made an approving noise. "Good. Can't fall too far behind."
Now the twin weights—fear and disappointment, buoyancy of hope—tipped in the scales toward hope He could do this. He could move, one way and another, and someday he'd join them again, if it took a thousand laborious steps to get there.
"Yes, sir," he said.
The colonel saluted. "I'll be in touch," he said.
Evening dropped slowly over the city. Jean abandoned the last of his packing and maneuvered to the window. Outside, the clouds hung low and pearl-grey, lit from behind by sunlight. Though he couldn't see the sun he could see the clear yellow light shining through the thick veil of mist. He thought of asking for help, but—no. He would do this. He could do this. His arms were strong, and he spared a thought of thanks for Breda and his damn barbells.
Jean settled one hand on the arm of the wheelchair, the other on the windowseat, and shifted his weight. The muscles of his arms flexed and pulled, drawing his body smoothly from chair to seat, and for a moment he supported himself, arms shoulders chest stomach substituting for legs as he drew himself onto the windowseat. Then it was done, and he grinned at himself in the window's reflection. Something so small, yet something that, just weeks before, would have been out of his reach.
He flipped the window's latch and pushed it open. The cool, dry breeze brought the smell of geraniums from the bed outside, and more distantly the smell of brick, woodsmoke, clouds. He fished one of his pinup magazines out of the box on the seat next to him, but kept it in his lap and didn't open it just yet, just as he didn't yet pull a cigarette from the pack in his back pocket. Outside, the pale yellow light bathing the clouds gradually changed, streaked the clouds with rust, daffodil-yellow, blood-red and purple. Shadows deepened along the clouds, slowly turning navy, blueblack, black. He thought of sunsets at home, yellowtips, a visitor to see him by train.
He watched the hidden sunset until there was nothing more to see, just the dark of night, and then he smiled in the tawny lamplight, lit his cigarette, and opened his magazine.