Stranded. Alice Sharpe

before. He brought her right hand up to his face and laid her palm against his hairy cheek. His eyes sparkled with tears.

      “Alex?” she murmured, searching his face with a disbelieving intensity. “Oh, my God. Alex?”

      His nod was almost imperceptible. His tears moistened her fingertips. “Are you real or am I dreaming?” she mumbled.

      “If you’re dreaming, then so am I,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.

      She forgot to wonder how she would feel or react and just flung herself against him. Tears of relief filled her eyes as he held her. She finally pushed herself away. “How is this possible?” she asked. “Where have you been?”

      He pulled her back against him, burying his face against her neck, holding her tight as if he’d never let her go. “I crashed in the Bitterroots,” he said. “I’ve just been trying to stay alive until the snow melted so I could get back.”

      “I thought you were dead,” she said. “Or maybe even worse, that you...”

      She stopped short.

      “I can’t believe I’m holding you,” he whispered.

      She leaned back to gaze up at him, smoothing his hair away from his brow with trembling fingers, trying to find the man she married under the scars and hair. “Are you all right? You’re limping. And your poor face.” She searched his eyes for answers.

      Instead of providing them, he tugged her back to his chest, and this time his lips landed on hers. Even when times were tough between them, the physical connection had been quicksilver and so it still was, all the sweeter for the fact that until a few minutes before, she’d thought she’d never see him again.

      A woman’s voice cut in from the open doorway and they both turned to find the school’s principal, Silvia Greenspan. “I’m sorry to interrupt you guys,” she said. It appeared she knew Alex was at the school, had probably spoken to him when he came onto the campus. She smiled at them both fondly as she added, “There are tons of reporters outside. Alex, I think someone in the office got excited and alerted the local television channel that you’d reappeared here at the school. I don’t know how long we can hold them back.” She turned and left, her footsteps clicking in retreat as she hurried back down the hall.

      “How did you get to Blunt Falls?” Jessica asked.

      “Doris and Duke Booker brought me. They’re the people who more or less rescued me.”

      “Rescued you! Alex, what happened?”

      “Later, okay?” He looked at her longingly. “There’s so much I need to tell you.”

      “I know,” she said, her mind still grappling with his offhand comment about being rescued. “Me, too.”

      “I’m sorry about the fight we had before I left. It was my fault.”

      “Not now,” she said, straightening his collar. “You have to go talk to the press.”

      He shook his head. “No.”

      “What do you mean, no? Everyone is going to be so relieved to hear you’re home safe and sound.”

      “They can wait,” he said. He gestured at her cluttered desk. “Anything here need to go home with you?”

      “These tests,” she said, picking up the math papers she’d been grading. He retrieved her briefcase from the closet and held it open for her as she deposited the papers. “Why are we running away?”

      “Because,” he said, sounding like one of her students. “There’s a back way out of here through the gym, isn’t there?”

      “Yes, but—”

      “But nothing,” he interrupted as he took her jacket from her chair and draped it over her shoulders. “Where’s your purse?”

      “I’ll get it,” she said as she unlocked the desk drawer where she kept it during classes. “Why don’t you want to talk to the newspeople? What’s wrong?”

      “Nothing is wrong, not like that. I just think we have the right to reconnect before the blitz. Don’t you?”

      “Yes,” she said, nodding, suddenly realizing he was right. There were so many things she had to tell him about the past three months, things he needed to understand, things that would redefine what he thought he knew about the world, things she didn’t want him hearing from someone holding a camera on his face. And, she realized with a jolt of panic, there were things she needed to take care of, too. Things she didn’t want him to see.

      She followed him toward the door, his limp a visual reminder of the struggle he must have endured. “Hurry,” she added as they raced down the hall and out the back of the gym toward the baseball field, which they could circle to access the parking lot.

      It was a tremendous relief to slide behind the wheel of her car. “Duck your head,” she muttered, driving out of the lot. Their path led them past two or three television vans with satellite dishes on their roofs and a growing crowd of people milling about. Alex didn’t sit up again until they were half a mile away and she gave him the all clear. Their gazes met and he smiled but she knew it wouldn’t be long before reporters figured out they’d slipped away.

      And it wasn’t as though they’d be hard to find.

      * * *

      “NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED,” Alex said in wonder as he followed Jessica into the house and closed the front door behind them. It seemed surreal that for the past one hundred and three days he’d been living in the most primitive of conditions while his wife, his house, his job—his world—existed right here as it always had. At the time, emerged as he was in basic survival, all this had seemed like a distant fantasy he’d never live to revisit, but here it had been all along, chugging away without him, apparently none the worse for his absence.

      The same thing had happened when he’d been deployed in the army, only then he’d been shot at, as well. On the other hand, he hadn’t been alone and there was a lot to be said for companionship.

      The house was a newer one, built in a cluster of similar houses located in a small wooded area a few miles outside of Blunt Falls. They’d bought it with plans to fill the rooms upstairs with their children and had pictured them running through the trees and splashing in the shallow stream at the bottom of the gulch with the neighborhood kids as playmates. But that had never happened. Oh, the neighbors’ families grew all right, but theirs didn’t and now, in some ways, the houses all around them, strewn with tricycles and sandboxes, formed a painful reminder that things didn’t always work out the way you thought they would.

      Now the house welcomed him back with years of memories, and he stood by the big rock fireplace just trying to center himself. Meanwhile, Jessica closed the drapes and turned to face him. She’d deposited her purse and briefcase on the chair nearest the door, much as she always had and now stood looking up the stairs as though she wanted to dash up to their room.

      He reached for her hand. “We won’t have long before they track us down,” he said.

      She looked at him and nodded. “Good point.”

      “I’m a little beat,” he said with a smile. “Let’s go sit at the table like we used to. Let’s talk.”

      “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”

      He claimed the chair facing the living-room door and patted the one beside it. She entered the dining room behind him, her brown eyes velvety, enhanced by the oversize cream tunic she wore over slim black jeans.

      She looked good, her auburn hair longer than it had been in a while, combed straight back from her oval-shaped face which was devoid of makeup as it almost always was. He’d been afraid he’d find her worn-out and grief stricken, but instead she seemed almost luminescent. His disappearance didn’t seem to have hurt her.

      Well, why should it have? They’d been whisper