Bye, Mr. Ex! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Man He Pulled Out

Her new commander is Captain Swafford, the man Colby claims he saved, and Colby arrives to hug him and threatens Sadie in a whisper.

Bravo Company formed up at zero six hundred on a concrete pad in front of three olive-drab helicopters.

I stood at the end of the second rank in uniform for the first time in five years.

The patch on my shoulder was still stiff and the boots were still not broken in.

Darden had driven me in without a word except, at the gate, "Don't salute the sergeant major. He hates it."

Now she walked the line.

"Four hundred hours without a lost patient, people," she said. "I'd like to keep that number boring."

A captain stepped out of the hangar door and every back in the company straightened an inch.

He was tall, with dark hair cut close and a burn scar that climbed the back of his left forearm and disappeared under his sleeve.

He did not look at me.

"Morning," Captain Swafford said. "Sergeant Pickens joins us today."

"Treat her like any medic who can start a line in the dark."

He said it to the formation, and then he said nothing else to me for forty minutes.

At seven he called me into his office.

It was bare, with a desk, a laptop and a framed photograph of a helicopter in a dust storm.

There was a chair for me, and he did not offer it.

I stood at parade rest.

"You were at the awards dinner," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"You were engaged to Sergeant First Class Reece."

"I'm not engaged to anyone, sir."

He waited, and I did not fill the silence.

"I'm not asking for gossip," he said. "I'm asking whether this is going to follow you onto my flight line."

"It won't."

"It already did. Half my company watched a ring go into a champagne glass on somebody's phone."

"That was a long time coming, sir."

Something moved in his face, close to a smile, and was put away.

"Your file shows a seven-year flight medic with a Syria rotation," he said. "Which detachment?"

"It was disbanded, sir."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the answer I have."

He looked at me for a long moment.

I knew that look.

I had seen it on trauma surgeons before they asked which of us had been breathing for the patient.

"You said something in the hallway Saturday night," he said.

"I was talking to myself."

"I know what you said. I'm asking where you learned to say it."

"Everybody who does this job counts, sir."

"Not like that."

I kept my eyes on the picture of the helicopter.

"Dismissed, Sergeant," he said finally.

As I reached the door he added, quietly, "I sleep badly."

"There's a voice in my head, a woman counting. I've never been sure I made it up."

I did not turn around.

"Yes, sir," I said, and I walked out with my knees locked so they wouldn't buckle.

At ten o'clock a black truck pulled up to the flight line, and Colby stepped out.

He wore the dress uniform with the Silver Star pinned over his heart and carried two boxes of doughnuts, one in each hand.

"Captain!" he called.

Jonas came out of the hangar with the face of a man seeing an old friend.

I had seen that face in every thank-you letter that had come to our house for seven years.

"Colby."

They hugged.

It was a real hug, hard, with back slaps.

Colby took it.

"You didn't have to come, you know."

"I felt bad about Saturday. The Colonel's daughter shouldn't have to see a thing like that." Colby smiled around the compound.

Then he saw me.

I stood at attention in the second rank with a clipboard in my hand and my face as blank as a wall.

"Sergeant Pickens," Jonas said, "come meet someone."

I walked over and stopped two steps away.

"Sergeant First Class Reece of the Third Group," Jonas said. "He is the man who pulled me out of a burning truck in Syria."

"Sergeant Reece," I said.

"Sergeant Pickens." Colby shook my hand.

His palm was warm, dry and hard around my fingers, the way he used to hold them in a car on the way to nowhere.

"Good to meet you," he said, and he winked at me over Jonas's shoulder where Jonas could not see.

Jonas laughed at something one of the pilots said and turned to find a pen.

For a few seconds there was nobody else at the ramp but the two of us.

Colby leaned in until his mouth was beside my ear.

"Say one word about the truck to anyone," he whispered, "and the Colonel decides whether your re-up sticks."

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