Kathleen Creighton - The Top Gun's Return

She heard his deep, quiet voice, and a thrill rushed through her. "I just want to thank you all, and let you know I'll try to answer your questions in due time. I believe the base's public affairs officer is planning a press conference before I leave for the states, if you-"

"Lieutenant Bauer, just one question," someone shouted. "How does it feel to be back from the dead?"

Again she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. "It feels…great." She knew from his voice that he had to be grinning, and that it could only be one of those great big honest-to-God old-fashioned Tristan grins she loved so much. Her eyes filled with tears.

A reporter shouted, "Mrs. Bauer, would you mind if we asked you a few questions?"

She hadn't expected that. Not sure what she should do, she tilted her head back and glanced up at Tristan. He gave her a nod and his skewed half smile, but the tiredness in his eyes seemed bottomless. She put her hand over his where it rested on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. "Why don't you go on?" she murmured for his ears only. "I don't mind stayin' a minute."

He hesitated, then murmured back, "If you're sure…"

"I'll be fine. Go on- go. " She turned back to the crowd of reporters with a determined smile. A moment later she felt him leave her, and there was a tingling coldness on her shoulders where his hands had been.

"Mrs. Bauer-when did you find out your husband was alive?"

"Mrs. Bauer, Mrs. Bauer-what's it been like to have your husband come back from the dead?"

"How is he feeling, Mrs. Bauer?"

"When do you plan to-"

"First of all," Jessie began in a loud voice, holding up her hands, "y'all have to understand, this has been happenin' awfully fast. I don't think it's really hit me yet." There was a ripple of sympathetic laughter. Somewhere behind her she heard the guest house door open and close. She paused, and the crowd grew hushed, listening as she went quietly on. "All I know is, my husband is alive, he's here with me, and very soon now he's gonna be back home where he belongs. It might have taken a while longer than I'd have liked for it to, but the good Lord has answered an awful lot of prayers."

In the genteel stillness of the guest house lobby, Tristan paused to listen to the rise and fall of Jessie's voice…the occasional rustle of reporters' laughter. Jess's voice. It was hers, yes…the one he remembered but different, somehow. Quietly confident, matter-of-fact. It came to him suddenly, what it reminded him of: the voices he heard every day at the hospital, voices of strength and comfort and encouragement. The cheerful, no-nonsense, reassuring voices of the nurses.

Instead of heading for the elevator, he turned as if drawn by a magnet to one of the multipaned windows that overlooked the front walk. From there, hidden from view by the curtains, he watched his wife face the crowd of reporters alone. And maybe it was seeing her from a distance like that, and hearing her voice that was so much the same and yet so different, but something in his perception suddenly shifted-like one of those optical illusions where one moment you're looking at a face right side up, and the next second it's upside down. She has changed. She's not the same Jessie I left behind.

He hadn't really thought she would be…had he? He'd prepared himself, or thought he had, for her to have gotten older…even to have found someone else. Then he'd found her looking just the way he'd pictured her in his mind, still slim, sunshine blond and beautiful, still a little bit awkward and eager to please him. Just the way he remembered her. Now he knew he'd been kidding himself. Of course she'd changed-in eight years, how could she not? But she hadn't gotten older; what she'd done was matured. And she hadn't found someone else. She'd found herself.

Watching the tall, self-assured woman-a stranger to him-out there on the guest house steps, he felt a stabbing sense of loss. His chest filled with the pressure of grief-for the young, accommodating girl he'd left behind and remembered so well…grief, too, for the impossible dream he'd clung to like a life preserver and that had kept him alive for so long.

Then, as he watched the beautiful, confident woman on the steps, her hair haloed by the television crews' spotlights, he felt something new come and take root in the empty place those losses had left inside him, and slowly begin to grow. Respect. Admiration. And the pressure in his chest was no longer grief. It was pride.

When Jessie slipped quietly into her room sometime later, she was hoping Tris might have gone to sleep. Instead she found him sitting in a straight-backed chair beside the table. A tissue spread on the tabletop near his elbow held a neat pile of orange and banana peels. The TV was tuned to a soccer game.

"Everybody gone?" he asked as he turned off the television set, stifling a yawn.

She dropped her pocketbook beside the dresser and nodded. "I think so. For now, anyway. I imagine they'll be back in the mornin'." Still flushed and, if she wanted to be entirely truthful, just a wee bit exhilarated, she took a deep breath and lifted her fingers to rake them through her hair. "Whoo-hope I don't have to do that again. That was somethin' else."

"I think you'd better get used to it," Tristan said dryly. "I wouldn't worry about it, though-you handled it beautifully." There was something in the way he looked at her…something soft and golden in his eyes…that made her pulse quicken.

She went toward him, wishing she could just walk right up to him and put her arms around him, and that he would put his arms around her and pull her into the vee of his legs and nestle his face against her breasts. Once, long ago, it would have been a natural, easy thing.

"You don't look very comfortable," she said, reaching out a hand to touch his hair, lightly nudging it off his forehead with a finger while her throat ached with longing. "Don't you want to lie down? Put your feet up, rest your knee awhile?"

"Naw…if I do that I'm afraid I'll fall asleep. I need to call Al…have him come get me. Just wanted to make sure the crowd was gone." His voice sounded gravelly. His eyes searched her face as if she were someone he'd just met and he was trying to commit her face to memory.

Her mouth went dry and her tongue thickened. The words slurred as she said, "Tris, you're so tired. Why don't you stay here tonight?"

"You know I can't do that."

"No, I do not know that." Primed with new confidence and resolve, she grabbed the second chair, turned it around and sat in it, facing him with her knees almost but not quite touching his. "I know you tell me you can't, because of some fear you have in your mind that you might do something that's gonna shock me or hurt me or…I don't know, drive me screamin' from the room. Which, if you want to know the truth, I think is just plain ridiculous."

"Jess-"

"No. You listen to me. In the first place, in case you've forgotten, I am a nurse, and while I might work in a NICU now, I've done rotations in psych wards. I've handled episodes of PTSD before. Believe me, there's nothin' you could do that's gonna shock me. But Tris-" she reached for his hands and enfolded them, stiff and resisting, in hers "-what's more important is, I'm your wife. You understand me? I am your wife. That is for better or worse and sickness and health, in case you don't remember the vows we said to one another. You don't get to protect me from this. This has happened to both of us, dammit. You are not allowed to shut me out."

Something dripped from her nose. She dashed it furiously away, then stared down at the moisture on the back of her hand. She couldn't imagine how it had come to be there. She hadn't known she was crying.