“What are you talking about?”
“Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”
Kiernan unsnapped the sheath, holstered his pistol, and drew the Ka-Bar.
“One last thing,” Jack said. “You and your batshit-crazy friends have f**ked up our world, but you’ve also made me a better father, and you made me love my wife again, and for that I thank you.”
Jack stared down into the pool.
The ice melted and the water turned clear and the fountain began to rain. He looked up. The sky now a bright, almost painful blue. Midday in the square. A dozen people eating lunch in the blinding fall sunshine.
Jack sat with an iced coffee, ten minutes left on his lunch break.
She sat at that same table fifteen feet away, engrossed in a textbook, a tray of half-eaten salad pushed aside. Third day in a row she’d eaten lunch in the plaza. Third day in a row he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He’d walked up to strange women before and asked for a date. No big deal. He was good-looking and tall. Confident. But something about this girl put him off his game. She was gorgeous, sure, but it was more than that—maybe the white lab coat f**king with him (already fantasized about that), maybe the intensity with which she read—never moving except to turn the page or brush away a strand of loose, auburn hair that contained honest-to-God strands of gold.
Yesterday, he’d spent the whole hour building up the nerve. Finally he stood with five minutes left, shaky, his mouth completely dry as he approached, caught a whiff of something—shampoo or body wash—and he knew he’d only make a fool of himself. Walked right on past into the Wells Fargo bank and just stood watching her through the tinted glass until she finally packed her book into a tattered Eastpak and went on her way.
Now there were five minutes left in this hour. A repeat of yesterday. He’d f**ked around and put himself in the same position.
He stood quickly and started toward her table, trying to get there before he had the chance to talk himself out of it. He was three feet away from her, wholly uncommitted to any of this, when the tip of his sneaker caught on the lip of a concrete slap.
Jack went down hard and fast, and when he looked up from the ground he was staring at the rivulets of his iced coffee running down her leg and dripping off the hem of her lab coat.
“Oh my God,” he said, picking himself up. “Oh my God.” As he got back onto his feet, he saw that he’d somehow managed to dump his entire coffee on her book, her white coat, skirt, even in her hair—maximum damage inflicted with half a cup of iced coffee.
She glared up at him, possibly more shocked than he was, Jack mumbling, trying to string together a coherent sentence that finally came together as, “I’m a total idiot.”
The anger in her eyes melted away. She wiped the coffee from her face and looked down at her coat, and all Jack could think was that she was even more beautiful at point blank range.
“Let me pay for the book and the coat and—”
She waved him off.
“It’s okay. You all right? That looked bad.”
“Yeah.” He’d have a black bruise on his elbow by nightfall, but in this moment, he felt no pain. “I’ll live once I get passed the devastating humiliation.”
She laughed. Like nothing he’d ever heard. “Oh, come on, wasn’t that bad.”
“Actually, it was.”
“No, it—”
“I was coming over to ask you out.”
Her face went blank.
Longest moment of his life.
“Bullshit,” she finally said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re just having fun with me.”
Jack smiled. “Would you give me a do-over?”
“A what?”
“A do-over. Let me have another shot at this.”
He couldn’t tell for sure in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, but she might have blushed.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’ll be right back. It’ll go better, I promise.”
Jack walked to the fountain. His heart beating so fast he could barely breathe. He sat down and looked over at the table. She was watching him now and she’d taken her sunglasses off. He started toward her again, stopping at her table with his back to the sun, so she sat in his shadow.
“I’m Jack,” he said.
“Hi, Jack, I’m Deanna. Sorry about this mess. Some ass**le spilled his coffee all over me.”
And she smiled, and he looked into her eyes for the first time. Had never felt anything like it. Up until this moment, he thought he’d experienced pure attraction, but all those other times, other women, had been lust—he saw that now—and this wasn’t that. Not just that. There was an energy present, something combustive between them that hit him in the solar plexus. She had eyes that were dark blue but also luminescent, and later, when he thought about them, their color and clarity would remind him of a lake where he’d often camped with his father in Glacier, so deep but so clear the sunlight shot all the way down to the stones at the bottom and made the water glow.
But he barely noticed the intensity of her eyes in the moment. It was all electricity, a terrible current, like looking into the future, everything prefigured—a life together, a daughter, a mortgage, a son born two months premature, the death of Jack’s mother, an automobile wreck that would take Deanna’s parents on Thanksgiving night eight years from now, moments of indescribable happiness, long winters of depression, a slow drifting, a betrayal, fear, anger, compromise, stasis, but when it all lay stripped to the bone, whatever mysterious alchemy had been present in this moment, would be present always. Untouched by their failures. Everything changed, and nothing.
This is what he saw, what he sensed on some primal frequency, when he looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time on a fall day in the American west that was so perfect it would always break his heart to think of it. What he still felt, eighteen years later in the same city square, when his eyes met Dee’s again.
She looked unreal, moving among the dead like a ghost toward the fountain, emaciated, tears riding down her cheeks.
Kiernan must have seen the glitch in Jack’s attention, because he glanced back just as Dee raised an old revolver.
“What are you doing here, Kiernan?” she asked.
“Waiting for you, love.”
The gunshot reverberated between the buildings.
Kiernan stumbled back and sat down beside Jack.
He was still holding the knife, and Jack grabbed it and stood facing him.