by Susan Wiggs
“She still looks fierce. I like her.”
Grabbing a ladder, he hoisted the carving high on the wall overlooking the workspace. “How’s this?”
“Perfect. My fabricators are gonna love it. We’re all about fierce women in this shop.”
“Right. It’s cool what you’re doing with the women’s group.”
“Thanks. I’m learning a lot from those ladies.” She gazed at him, her head tilted slightly to one side, and touched a finger to her lower lip, a gesture he remembered from way back when. Then she seemed to shift gears and turned away, but not before he saw her cheeks turn red.
Like a butterfly in a garden, she went from machine to machine, making adjustments and testing connections. “Life’s funny sometimes, isn’t it?” she said.
“Life’s funny all the time.” He found some hardware to mount the figurehead like a hunting trophy.
“True. I was thinking about how I ended up back here, the last place I thought I’d be. And it turns out, it’s probably exactly where I belong.”
“Are you sure about that? You’re not going to miss the city?” His thoughts shifted to Sierra, her frequent laments about Seattle and Portland.
“Don’t get me wrong—I love the city,” Caroline said. “But my life is where it makes the most sense. And right now that’s here.” She picked up a small half-finished garment—a jacket with lightning bolts and attached mittens—and studied it for several seconds. “I thought these kids were the end of my career. I thought it would be too much to juggle them and all the things I wanted to do with my designs.”
“And here you are, doing it. I’m surprised there was ever a doubt.”
“Ha. Two kids, remember. Now I realize that Flick and Addie aren’t in my way. They’re my inspiration. These days, it’s impossible to imagine my life without them.” She glanced over at him. “Yes, you’re hearing this from the original ‘I’m never going to settle down and have kids’ Caroline Shelby. They kind of grew on me. They kind of stole my heart.” She set aside the garment and started unpacking a box of tall spools of different-colored thread. Now he saw what the pegboard was for. She placed each spool carefully, organizing them by color.
He felt a rush of affection for her, embracing this new plan for the sake of two orphans. “That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad it worked out that way.” It was on the tip of his tongue to take the confession further. To say he thought Sierra would come around, too. That she’d embrace the small-town life and the idea of having a family. But as time went on, he was coming to realize that she might never get there. That was a discussion to have with Sierra, not Caroline. He knew better than to bring it up now. But there was this old connection with Caroline, something that had been present between them from the start. It was incredible that he could still feel it after all these years. It was as if the attraction had been slumbering underground, invisible but never gone.
“I always knew I’d end up here,” he said. “Just not so soon. I was planning on serving in the navy a lot longer.”
She paused in her sorting and turned to him. “I’m sorry about your accident.” Then she put a hand to her lips. “I shouldn’t bring it up. Sierra said you don’t talk about it.”
Sierra was right. He didn’t. “Actually, I should,” he said. “It’s supposed to be good for me to talk about it. Good for my mental health.”
“I’m good for your mental health, then,” she said with a grin. “Who knew?”
You’ve always been good for my mental health, he thought. She’d been the first person he’d told about losing his mother. His dad, teachers, and counselors had all tried to get him to talk about it, but he’d never said much until he met Caroline. He remembered that day so clearly—the bike ride, the sunshine, the waves erupting against the cliff. The funny girl who made him want to talk about the unspeakable.
“It was an extraction,” he said. “A hostage rescue operation.”
“Sierra told me that part. She said the hostages were aid workers.”
“Ever heard of Djibouti?” It was pronounced Jabooty. He grinned at her expression. “Don’t worry. No one has. I hadn’t either, until the call came for a mission there. It’s in Africa, between Ethiopia and Somalia. Not known as a hot spot of unrest, but some American aid workers were kidnapped there while in transit. A group called Al Shabab was holding them for ransom.”
That had been his last operation, though he hadn’t known it at the time. He’d attained the rank of lieutenant commander in the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, aka SEAL Team 6. In a split second, he’d become medically retired Lt. Cdr. (SEAL) Willem Jensen.
Caroline set aside her box of sorting. Her full, quiet attention felt like a gift, the way it had the first summer they’d met as kids, when he’d told her about losing his mom.
He remembered being in the team compound when the call came in. It was one of those you hate to hear—participation was voluntary, meaning extra risky. Nobody had opted out, though. It was precisely what they had trained for.
“To get them out, it had to be a quick insert. We’d go in by helo and fast rope, extract the hostages, and disappear. Usually there’d be plenty of rehearsals, only that night, the time window was almost nonexistent. We made a plan but there wasn’t time to test it.”
He remembered a new moon, a night of perfect darkness, ideal for the operation. “Thanks to an informant, we found the workers—two nurses and an aide. Two of them were in rough shape, dazed and sick with fever. The op went as planned—until the bandits opened fire, which we expected based on the intelligence.”
Caroline winced. “You got shot.”
“Not just then. So far the kidnappers were the only casualties. The team dropped nine of them in a matter of seconds.” He could still hear the staccato sound of the fight. Sometimes he heard it in his dreams. “The extraction went as planned. Until it didn’t.”
Caroline stood looking at him, her face soft with wonder. She seemed to be listening with her whole body. “What happened?”
Here was the part he never talked about. The part that haunted him. “We had the hostages. I was bringing up the rear, running through the bush toward the helo. We thought all the bandits were down, but deep in the bush, I noticed a flare of movement in my night vision—never a good sign. I slowed down to try for some facial recognition. I had to check it out, because one guy with a big firearm could take us all out. And . . . there was this kid.”
“A kid—like a boy?”
Will could still picture the scene through his night-vision goggles: A little boy, peering through the parted grass. A little boy with an AK-47. His eyes were bright and vacant, probably from chewing khat, a kind of speed, his hands nervous on the trigger and the grip.
“A scared little kid. He was maybe ten years old, I thought. High on this stuff the natives chew. Draped in ammo and pointing an AK-47 at me.”
“Oh my God. I can’t even imagine what that was like,” she said.
“This is what a SEAL trains for. Months and years of practice drills every day—to confront and eliminate a threat without hesitation.”
“Let me guess,” she said softly. “You hesitated.”
Training and instinct had dictated that Will should eliminate the threat. But something deeper had stopped him—this was a child. A child.
Will nodded. “And he opened fire.”
The body armor had protected him from mortal wounds, but his goggles flew off on impact. When his face was hit, it felt as if half his head had been blown off.
“One of my team members took him out. I later learned the boy’s name was Hamza. He was fourteen years old.”
Caroline exhaled slowly and softly. She came around the side of the cutting table and stood in front of him, briefly touching his forearm and then taking her hand away. “I’m sorry that happened. What a horrible choice to have to make—to shoot a child or be shot. I understand why you hesitated.”
He’d faced a board of inquiry over the incid
ent. His team had vouched for him, thank God. He realized that other than responding to the inquiry, he’d never told anyone the details of the incident. Not his dad or his grandparents or even Sierra. Only Caroline, whom he’d met when they were kids, no older than Hamza, perched on a rocky outcropping above Cape Disappointment.
“Thanks. I’m . . . I guess it’ll always be with me,” he said.
“Now you’re a teacher,” she said. “I’m connecting the dots.”
He went back to work. “Not sure about connecting the dots. I’m not that deep. My life changed in a split second. I just did the next logical thing.”
“You know how the saying goes—life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans.”
The silence between them was a companionable one. Every now and then, Will would glance over at her and catch her looking at him. They’d immediately look away from each other. It was a tentative dance, reestablishing a friendship that had been dormant for years.
Although he tried to deny it, he felt drawn to her in a way that was absolutely and completely forbidden. It was impossible to lie to himself about this. But he could lie to everyone else. And he fully intended to do so.
“I wasn’t sure what to do with these storage boxes,” she said, startling him away from thoughts he shouldn’t be having.
“What’s that?”
“These boxes over here.” She indicated a few by the door. “I wasn’t sure what to do with them.”
“Let’s have a look.” There were bankers boxes crammed with receipts and records. Another box contained college textbooks. “I’ll ask Sierra about these,” he said. “During my last deployment, she was working on getting an MBA.” The box at the bottom was oblong and unexpectedly heavy, its once-glossy white surface covered in cobwebs and dust. He lifted the lid to reveal a cellophane window in an oval shape. “Damn. Haven’t seen that in a while.”
Caroline leaned forward to have a look. “Is this . . . ?”
“Sierra’s wedding dress. The one you made for her.”
“Wow. Never thought I’d see that again.”
He set the box with the others on a hand truck. He studied her with heightened awareness. She stood close enough for him to catch the herbal smell of her hair. The not-unpleasant scent of her sweat. He fixated on the damp bow of her lips. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Will—”
“I mean that, Caroline. We broke apart and here we are again. Sierra and I . . .”
“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
Part Five
Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
―Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Chapter 21
“I have news,” Caroline said to Sierra, ambushing her in the school parking lot after seventh period. “I’m freaking out.”
“Did Zane Hardy finally ask you to senior prom?” Sierra asked. “You shouldn’t have worried. I knew he would.”
“Screw the prom,” Caroline said. “That’s not what I’m talking about. We’ve got to go to my house. My mom said I got an important-looking envelope in the mail.”
“Ooh.” They hurried to Sierra’s car, a shiny daffodil-yellow Volkswagen bug. “Let’s go.”
College letters had been rolling in, and Sierra already had her options—UW in Seattle, Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, and UC San Diego. Her decision to go to San Diego was no coincidence. That was where Will Jensen had fast-tracked to his junior year. Her crush on him, dating back to the first summer they’d met, had continued unabated. Each subsequent summer, their romance had burned like a bonfire on the beach. Caroline had watched from the sidelines, trying not to remember that, for one crazy, magic, irretrievable, impossible moment, he’d been hers.
By now she knew it was silly. When you were fourteen, no one belonged to you, not even yourself. You were like a lump of unformed clay, still trying to figure out who you were or what you would become.
Through each summer, the three of them had been inseparable, coming of age in the golden sunshine. Will got his license first, being a year older, and he drove around in his granddad’s old Grand Marquis, sometimes getting the unwieldy sedan stuck in the soft sand at the entrance to the beach, other times making it to the hard-packed tidal flats for illicit drag racing. He usually won the races, not because the car was so awesome, but because he knew how to handle it. Together they had won and lost kite-flying competitions, dominated at Ultimate Frisbee, tried their first weed, and gotten drunk for the first time.
Caroline was always the sidekick, the funny friend, tagging along on their summer adventures, sometimes with a boy who liked her, sometimes not. Sierra and Will were nuts for each other, the golden couple, the kind that gave teenagers a good name. When people saw them in church together, looking deceptively clean-cut and well-behaved, they nodded approval, never knowing the pair had probably been humping in the deserted parsonage the night before. Caroline made her peace with the situation. Will Jensen had never been hers, not even for a moment. Well, maybe just for a moment—a vanished slice of time. That first kiss. The only kiss. He’d never mentioned it. He’d probably forgotten.
Sierra parked at the Shelby house and they raced inside, finding the stack of mail her mom had left on the kitchen counter. She grabbed a business-size envelope with the return address she’d been waiting for ever since sending in her portfolio and samples last winter. She was picturing a fat packet of information, like the one she’d received from the Art Institute of Seattle, her backup school. A simple letter was a bad sign.
“Wait,” said Sierra before Caroline ripped into it. “We need to do the laying on of hands.” It was a ritual they went through for good luck. Sierra’s dad would probably scold their pagan ways, but the girls did it anyway, just in case it worked. They pressed their hands on the envelope and closed their eyes.
“I wish I may, I wish I might,” Caroline murmured. Then she opened the envelope and slid the pages out. “I can’t look,” she said, shrinking away as a feeling of dread knotted her stomach. “This letter is going to make me or break me, and I’m scared to know. I can’t look,” she repeated.
“Yes, you can. Caroline, you have to. You have to.”
She made herself look. And there it was, on FIT letterhead, in black and white: Dear Caroline, Congratulations! You’ve been . . . She let out a scream. “I’m in!”
“You’re in!” Sierra grabbed her hands and they danced around the room.
Caroline’s heart nearly burst with happiness. This was it. The dream. The goal. The start of the life she’d always wanted—New York City, studying design at one of the best schools in the country. When she stopped hyperventilating, she read the rest of the letter and discovered that she had been accepted early, a privilege extended only to students who showed exceptional promise. “I can’t believe it,” she said.
“I can.” Sierra beamed at her. “When it comes to making clothes, you’re amazing. You totally deserve this, Caroline. You totally earned it. Let’s go find your mom.”
The school year dragged on, and among Caroline and her friends, rampant senioritis took over. No one wanted to sit through class, no one wanted to study for exams. Everyone was eager for their lives beyond high school to begin.
As Sierra had predicted, Zane asked Caroline to prom. Sierra’s date was Bucky O’Malley, who was gay and easily the best dancer in the senior class. Caroline designed and made their dresses, and they were the envy of the school.
Summer came at last, and so did Will Jensen, all big shoulders, blond hair, and blue eyes. Sometimes when Caroline looked at him, she could still see that skinny kid, dripping wet with his mask and snorkel. His flashing grin never changed. When the three of them met up at their favorite beach spot, he gave her and Sierra each a friendly hug, tho
ugh he kept hold of Sierra longer—as expected.
“Hey, strangers,” he said to them.
“Hey, yourself,” Caroline said.
“I’ve missed you like crazy,” Sierra told him. “How long can you stay?”
“This is probably my last full summer here. I have to start classes the minute summer’s over. I’m fast-tracking in order to finish my degree early.”
Caroline suspected his dad wanted him to finish early. She didn’t ask, though. Will and his father were complicated. He wanted a career in the navy, like his dad. He’d been in ROTC in high school and now college. Yet no matter what he achieved, it never seemed to be enough for his father.
“What about you two?” he asked.
Caroline would be working full time at Lindy Bloom’s shop, saving every penny she could for New York. Sierra had a part-time gig at the visitors bureau, greeting tourists and helping organize community events. She was amazing at it—pretty and personable, the face of Long Beach Peninsula. Last spring, she’d won a statewide scholarship pageant. The program had sent her to the famed Dallas Apparel & Accessories Market to explore the world of modeling. She’d returned even more stylish and polished than ever.
“Do you have a summer job?” Caroline asked Will.
“Sort of. I’m training with the county surf rescue team down in Seaview.”
“Ooh, the Jet Ski guys,” said Sierra. “Yikes, they go out in anything. Promise you won’t drown.”
He flashed his trademark grin. “Drowning is not an option.”
“It looks really scary,” Caroline said.
“It is scary,” he said. “Surf rescue, technical and cliff rescue—that’s why you train for it.”
“No, you train for it.” Sierra shuddered. “I worry about you.”
“It’s good preparation for BUD/S training,” he said.
“You’re starting to speak in acronyms like a navy guy,” Caroline said. “Translation, please.”