Always and Forever (6 page)

“Sure.” He followed her back to the Teletype room. “When Mike and I were kids in Arizona, we had this tree house in this huge old sycamore in his backyard. A couple of days before Christmas, we'd go up there and make a Christmas tree and leave it in the tree house. You must have seen it when you stayed with the Taylors.”

“Mmm. Mike's mother told me how you two used to
spend hours playing in that old tree. The view from their home is breathtaking.” The surrounding country—the wide, flowing creek and pine forest—was a salve to her spirit when she visited there. Smiling wistfully, Gale straightened, handing him the mug. “That sycamore is still standing out back, you know.”

“It must be at least a hundred and fifty years old.” Thoughts of the tree brought back a wealth of good memories.

“What did you two do out there with that sycamore?”

Brightening, Kyle spotted an empty Teletype-paper box in the corner. “As I said, Mike and I would make a cardboard Christmas tree for our tree house every year. We'd sit up there with crayons, paper, glue and string for hours putting it together.” With a grin, he walked over and picked up the box. “And we're going to do that tonight. A good-luck charm to get Mike back home alive. Ready?”

Gale didn't have time to protest. With a small laugh, she nodded, walking back to the forecaster's desk with him. She watched as Kyle searched through several drawers until he found some colored felt-tip markers.

“Perfect,” he muttered, pulling up another swivel chair and motioning for her to sit beside him. “Come on, we've got a lot to do. Normally, this takes a whole day to do up right, and we only have seven hours left before your watch ends.”

Sitting down, Gale watched as he placed the markers and white paper in front of her. “You mean, you're planning on staying up all night with me?” Kyle had to be tired from the flight. She saw dark shadows beginning to form beneath his eyes.

“You've got to stay up all night,” he pointed out blandly.

“Well...that's different, I have the duty. Kyle, you've
got to be dead on your feet. Don't you think you ought to go over to the B.O.Q. and get some rest?”

He shook his head. “No way. I want to be here when you get that phone call telling you Mike's alive. I wouldn't miss that for the world, lady.”

Fighting the urge to throw her arms around his shoulders and hug him for his thoughtfulness, Gale didn't do anything. Instead, she muttered, “You're such a glutton for punishment.”

Kyle grinned lopsidedly. “Yeah, I know. Now, come on, you've got to help me here.”

“Do what?”

“Well,” Kyle murmured, picking up the box, “we used to make Christmas decorations of things we liked. You know, planes, cars and stuff like that. Whatever we made had to mean something important to us. Usually we made decorations of toys we
wanted
to get for Christmas.”

Laughing, Gale drowned in his amused look. “So, if I wanted Mike, I draw him—”

“And cut him out and put a string at the top of him and then hang him on the cardboard tree I'm going to make for us. Yeah, you've got the idea.”

Touched, Gale felt the intensity of Kyle's happiness. Suddenly, they were like two children rediscovering the joy of simple things like playing. “Okay,” she whispered, “that's my first decoration, Mike coming home safely to me. To us.”

Giving her a wink, Kyle said, “I've never given up on him being alive.”

“I—I haven't been as positive as you,” Gale hesitantly admitted. She began to make an outline of a man, her husband, on the white paper. As much as she wanted Mike to be alive, she just couldn't shake the awful feeling she was
a widow. Still, for the Taylors' and Kyle's sakes, she fought her pessimism.

“No one is going to go through five years without having a few bad days,” Kyle said gently. Whistling softly, he tussled with the box and cut off the top and bottom of it. Next, he opened it out and laid it flat on the desk. Glancing down at Gale, he saw her completely immersed in her first decoration.

“Hey, you ought to have been an artist. That really does look like Mike.”

Blushing, she managed a quirked smile. “Thank you.”

Taking a black pen, Kyle drew the main trunk of their “tree,” and then four smaller cardboard branches. “I can remember Mike and I laying on our bellies for hours up there in that tree house, making these decorations. Our moms used to call us down for dinner, but we never came, so they ended up bringing it up the ladder to us.”

“Mike mentioned that you two spent a lot of time up there.”

“Yeah, we used to talk for hours about what we were going to be and do.”

Gale sat back, examining her handiwork. She had drawn Mike in his blue officer's uniform.

She sat back, watching Kyle fashion their tree. He took some tape and fastened the four branches to the trunk. With some extra cardboard, he shored up the bottom so the tree would stand—at a bit of an angle.

“There,” Kyle said proudly, studying his creation. “It looks a little naked right now, but when we start hanging the stuff on it, it'll look great.”

Stifling a giggle, Gale looked at the tree and then at Kyle. “Doesn't it look a little...scrawny?” As a matter of fact, it looked like a multiarmed scarecrow.

“Nah.” Kyle sat down, grabbing some paper and a red
marker. “Come on, Major, quit laughing at my artistic efforts and get to work.”

Giggling, Gale carefully cut out the drawing. “Now what?”

“You got any string around this place?”

Rummaging around in one of the lower desk drawers, she drew out a small ball of it. “Here you go.”

Taking the string, Kyle cut off a small piece. “Just take a bit of tape and put it on the back of Mike, and then hang him.”

“Hang him? Do you think Mike would like your choice of words?” She burst out laughing.

“He was always hanging around,” Kyle muttered good-naturedly as he showed Gale how to make a loop that could be slipped onto the branch of the tree.

“Mike said you were always on his heels,” Gale parried.

“It was the other way around.”

“You two were inseparable.”

“Yeah, we were shadows to one another, that's for sure.”

She surveyed Kyle's handiwork. “Nice. Now what?”

“Well,” Kyle said with great seriousness, “we always put what we wanted the
most
on the top limb, and then we'd put other decorations in descending order of importance. The lowest branch represented what we wanted least.”

Getting up, Gale gently put Mike on the uppermost limb on the right. “There,” she whispered, staring at it.

“Looks good,” Kyle said, giving her a game smile. He saw the tears in her eyes. “Come on, what's your second wish for Christmas? A fur coat? A new car?”

She smiled and sat down. “I'm not telling. I'm going to watch you for a minute. What's your first choice?”

Kyle saw flecks of gold in the depths of her green eyes.
Swallowing hard, he tore himself away from his own need of her. These next few days were for Mike and for her, not for himself.

“Kyle?”

Damn, he was staring at her, something he hadn't meant to do. “Uh...oh, I was going to draw Bell Rock, a red sandstone butte that sits out in the village of Oak Creek, near Sedona.” He got to work, carefully making an outline of the butte.

“You need to go home for a while.”

He shrugged. “Well, sometime.”

Gale read between the lines. “Sooner rather than later. Right?” She saw his mouth quirk. “Kyle Anderson...?”

“Sometime,” he hedged. If Mike was dead, he wanted to remain here with Gale, to help her adjust. She would need someone, since she had no close family. “I'll get there soon enough. Maybe in the spring. It's no big deal, Gale.” He looked at her serious features. “And quit looking like you're the Grinch that stole my Christmas. You didn't. I don't want to be anywhere else but here right now. Understand?”

She sat there for several minutes without saying anything and watched him painstakingly draw the red-orange butte. He'd cancelled his own holiday leave to be with her. There was so much sentimentality to Kyle, and so much he was sensitive about. Compressing her lips, Gale still refrained from saying anything, not wanting to spoil the liveliness of the mood he'd created for them. But someday, after Mike returned home, she was going to sit down and have a long, searching talk with Kyle, telling him how much she appreciated his care, his love, as a friend.

“Mike and I used to climb all over Bell Rock,” Kyle said quietly. “It's got skirts around it, kind of like a layer cake, smooth and easy to climb over.”

Gale relaxed in the chair, watching him begin to color the formation. “So, you were rock climbers, too.”

“Well now, Red Rock County is really hiking country. Bell is a hiking butte, not a true rock-climbing experience.”

Gale pulled another sheet of paper to her. “I did a little hiking when I was out there last year. I really liked it.”

Kyle picked up the scissors and cut out the butte. “So, what's your next decoration?”

“I'm going to draw my home in Medford, Oregon. I'll use a pear tree to symbolize it, though, because it's a huge valley with nothing but fruit orchards throughout it.”

His grin broadened. “Want me to draw the partridge for it?”

She laughed long and deeply, wiping the tears from her eyes. “You have a great sense of humor.”

“Thanks. I like the fact you have the good taste to appreciate it.” Kyle pointed to the tree she was drawing. “Is that what you want to do? Go back home?” He knew her parents were dead, but that the house was still there, empty and in her name.

Hesitating, Gale looked at the tree with white blossoms. “My enlistment's up in four months. I—I've given a lot of thought to it, Kyle. I'm going to leave the service.”

He frowned. “But you've go a lot of time built up toward a twenty-year retirement pension. Why blow it now?”

She shrugged. “I guess I want to have a home...a family.”

“Oh.”

She met his dark blue eyes. “I'm tired, Kyle. Tired in a way I can't even begin to describe. I need time to get back to basics, back to things that give to me, not take.”

“A home and children?” In his opinion, Gale would make a wonderful mother, a spectacular wife.

“Yes. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Sure. Haven't you thought about having a family and kids someday?”

He nodded, trying to contain the pain that mushroomed unexpectedly in his chest. His dreams had been of Gale, of what might have been but would never be. “Yeah...I suppose.” And then he made light of it. “You know me, career-oriented all the way. I'll wait until I get my mandatory twenty in, and then hog-tie some good-looking woman who's willing put up with me and my eccentricities.”

Gale looked at the clock. It was time to plot the weather map. Rising, she gave him a serious look. “You're far better marriage material than you think you are, Anderson.”

Laughing, Kyle sat there, watching her move to the plotting desk. Pulling another piece of paper to him, he glanced at his watch. Time was moving slowly. Didn't it always when something important was about to take place?

December 26, 1978

“How much longer?” Gale asked in a whisper, the question breaking the strained silence. She stood at the window of her base-housing home and stared out at the rainy morning. It was nearly 1000, and still no word from the Pentagon. In the distance, she could hear a bomber taking off, the jet engines creating man-made thunder that reverberated through the overcast sky. Her fingers tightened against the kitchen sink.

“We'll hear soon,” Kyle said, sitting at the table. There was a deathly waiting stillness in her home since he'd arrived from the B.O.Q. two hours ago. The tension in Gale's body was apparent.

Slowly, she turned around. Kyle was dressed in a long-sleeved blue-plaid shirt that made his eyes look even
darker. Although he was sprawled out on the chair, nursing his third cup of coffee, his long legs stretched out beneath the cherry table, he didn't look relaxed. Searching his composed features, she asked, “Do you think it means bad news if it's taking this long, Kyle?”

He sighed. “They were bringing fifteen bodies back along with twelve POWs. I'm sure they're not releasing any word to the families of the survivors or the dead until they're absolutely sure of identification of everyone,” he muttered. “That can take time. They don't want any mistakes.”

Gale bowed her head and wrapped her arms around herself because she was cold and shaking inside. “That makes sense.” Gale forced a smile, fighting valiantly to look less worried. “They said if Mike was alive, they'd be calling me....”

Gale and Kyle both knew that if Mike was dead, two Air Force officers would come to her house and give her the news in person. It was lousy duty telling the wife and children of a serviceman that he was dead.

The urge to get up, to go over and hold Gale was excruciating, but Kyle fought it. So far, she'd rallied and held her own—until now. “We've got the tree in your front room,” he said quietly. He tried hard to keep his tone light, but found it nearly impossible.

She lifted her head. “Does that guarantee a phone call instead of those guys coming to my door?”

“That's a roger.”

Turning to the sink, Gale began washing breakfast dishes. Kyle had eaten enough for two men; she hadn't been able to eat at all. The warm, soapy water took away some of the coldness that had been with her since she'd awakened that morning. There was such fear and anxiety
pressing in on her, she couldn't shake it—not even with Kyle's caring presence.

Needing something—anything—to do, Kyle got up, collecting the garbage and putting it into a sack. Why the hell were those bastards waiting so long to call her? Why couldn't they let her know the instant the plane had landed if Mike was alive? Was he ill, badly injured? In the hospital? Dammit, they ought to be telling Gale instead of letting her twist in the wind like this!