Stranded. Alice Sharpe

one blinding moment, she thought she’d dreamed Alex coming home. No, there on the chair was the corduroy shirt he’d borrowed from Duke Booker.

      She got out of bed and shrugged on her robe, then went looking for him. The house was dark and silent and though she switched on enough lights to see where she was going, she couldn’t find him anywhere. The garage still held his truck, which had been sitting in the same spot since she’d reclaimed it from the airport parking lot a few days after he vanished. That left only one place she could think of.

      She didn’t turn on the outside light. Closing the glass patio door behind her, she called his name into the dark and he responded at once. “Over here,” he said, his voice coming from way back in the yard where it was deeply shadowed despite the moon overhead. However, she’d spent the past several restless weeks wandering around the garden at all times of the day and night and had no trouble finding her way.

      Moonlight shone off the white roses that had just started to bloom. Some of the lilacs were still in flower, as well, and they added a deep, rich perfume to the night air.

      Even though it was late May, temperatures dropped at night in Blunt Falls, and Jessica shivered in her thin robe. She used his voice as a guide until her vision adjusted to the dark, and then she could see him sitting on the rock wall that surrounded the pond where every spring, mallards raised their families.

      “What are you doing out here at 3:00 a.m.?” she asked, but she knew. All evening she’d watched him pace the living room, turning away from his image on the television news, perusing the bookcase without touching a book, staring out the windows like a trapped animal. He’d taken a long walk after a supper he barely touched and, though he hadn’t asked her not to come, she could tell he wanted to be alone. She’d determined to come clean with him right after the news conference, but his remote demeanor had kept her lips sealed.

      She knew all the revelations she’d had to tell him in such a hurry weighed heavily on his mind, especially when he hadn’t been able to reach Nate. But what else could she do? He had to know what had happened in his absence and it wasn’t as if the rest of the world would give him a chance to recover from his ordeal before telling him all the gory details. After switching the phone back on, their evening had consisted of one call after the other until they finally turned it off again.

      She’d gone to bed before him, worn-out from the day and exhausted trying to figure out where they went from here. He’d changed so much over the years and the horrible thing was that she wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened. It was easy to blame their problems on not being able to have a child, but plenty of marriages thrived through much worse.

      She knew things had gone downhill after the mall shooting in Shatterhorn where he and Nate had been involved in trying to stop a teenage gunman. He’d come home shaken to the core but he wouldn’t talk to her about it. She’d seen the pictures in the newspaper, though—the broken glass, the blood spatters, the candlelight vigils.... No one came away from something like that without scars. But it had hurt her that he couldn’t trust her with his feelings. Impatient with him, she’d allowed him to retreat even further into his work and his world.

      But maybe it was even before that, even before the fertility doctors had told them to set their sights on something besides a big family unless they were open to adoption. Alex had refused to even entertain the thought of adoption and that had cut her as deep as her body’s inability to conceive a child.

      With nothing to say to one another and with each nursing their own disappointments, it had been easier to let go than hold on. There had been times while he was missing that she felt almost at peace with things and that now shamed her down to her toes.

      “I couldn’t sleep,” he said softly.

      She sat down on the rocks beside him, brushing aside the tulips and the forsythia. “It’s hard being back, isn’t it?”

      He laughed under his breath. “It’s all I wanted for months, to escape the snow and the outdoors and quiet—things I now miss in some ways.” He put his hand over hers. “But don’t think I’d rather be there than here. You know that, right?”

      “Right,” she said softly.

      “We’ll work things out,” he said as if he’d been thinking about the same things she’d been thinking about.

      “I hope we can,” she said.

      There was a moment of silence as they both folded their hands in their own laps and stared into the night. “You’ve really kept the yard up nice,” he finally said.

      “You can see it in the dark?” she teased.

      “Almost. It seems to glow. But really, I noticed it earlier today. I’ve never seen anything like it. How did you manage it all by yourself?

      “I didn’t,” she admitted. “Do you remember Billy Summers?”

      “The kid who does odd jobs at the airfield? What about him?”

      “After you...didn’t come home...he showed up on the doorstep. I hadn’t seen him since he graduated from high school and that has to be at least three years ago now. He’d heard about your plane disappearing and he wanted to know if he could help me. I refused at first, but he kept coming back and offering. I started giving him odd jobs. He proved to be very reliable, especially when it came to the yard.”

      “I would never have guessed that of Billy Summers.”

      “I know. He was a surprise. I told him about how I always bought flowers for the veterans’ graves on Memorial Day and he offered to plant some if I would tell him how. He brought me some little index cards and I wrote the directions down for him in simple words. I saw him checking the instructions all the time, but I don’t really think they were necessary. He seems to have a way with plants. Anyway, we owe the flowers to Billy.”

      “And we’ll be able to skip the last-minute dash to the big-box store to order flowers for Memorial Day,” Alex said.

      She nodded and bit her lip. She’d been about to tell Alex that all last week she’d planned to honor his memory and years of service, as well. He didn’t need to hear that. “Alex, I have something to tell you,” she said.

      “Your tone of voice worries me.”

      “It’s nothing bad. It’s about that ‘virus’ I was fighting in February.” She took another deep breath. “Do you remember that big fight we had in January?”

      “Yeah,” he said, “I do. I can’t remember what it was about, though.”

      “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, but she could have enlightened him. He’d been working extra shifts, coming home late and grumpy. Talk about water under the bridge. “What’s important is how we made up the next day,” she added.

      She could feel him staring at her. Was he remembering that night? They’d made love with a vengeance, downstairs in front of a blazing fire and slept there all night. “I’ve been trying to tell you this since you got home,” she said. “I was wrong about the cause of my nausea. Brace yourself. I’m about four months pregnant.”

      She could see the whites of his eyes widen. “Say that again,” he whispered.

      “We’re going to have a baby,” she said, wishing she had waited until morning to tell him so she could see the expression on his face.

      “I can’t believe this,” he said, springing to his feet. “Four months? Are you okay, shouldn’t you be lying down or something?”

      “No. The doctor said if it’s going to stick, it’s going to stick.”

      “You shouldn’t be working every day, should you?” he asked, and she could hear the panic in his voice. She understood how he felt, how amazing this must seem to him. It was the same to her, the difference being that she’d had months to get used to the idea, she’d spoken to the doctor, she knew what was going on.

      “Summer vacation is coming