But for all his failures, Buck was a formidable fighter. He’d outrun, outjumped, outshot, and outsmarted every man in the platoon during training on two continents. He and Cal had been deployed to different places after Fort Benning, but they’d been reunited months ago in England, as the land, sea, and air assault neared.
Though their appearance was as different as their personalities—Buck short and compact, Cal tall and lanky—they’d become unlikely friends, Cal’s calm and rational demeanor a mitigating influence on Buck’s impassioned impulses.
As they waited for the jump light to turn green, Cal yelled over his shoulder, “See you down there!” He tried to infuse enthusiasm into the words, though he knew Buck wouldn’t be able to hear them over the cacophony of sound thundering around them. Perhaps sensing the sentiment, Buck smacked his helmet and let out a war cry.
Lieutenant Reid’s face turned tense as he leaned over to glance out the jump door again. A muscle worked in his jaw. He leaned toward the cockpit and yelled into the receiver again. When he turned back to the paratroopers after a brief exchange, his expression was set and Cal knew why. The engines were racing, their pitch higher than normal, which indicated excessive speed for a jump. And he could only assume that the stomach-turning dives they’d taken to evade German fire had brought them dangerously low.
As the C-47 lurched to the right, the soldiers reached for anything they could grab to steady themselves. The plane banked and dove again, then righted itself. Now Cal could hear stutters interrupting the engines’ roar.
Reid gripped the handle next to the jump door with white knuckles. There was a thin trail of blood running from his hairline to his jaw.
The light turned green, and he pushed several bundles of gear and provisions out the door, then pressed the button that released more bundles hanging from the bottom of the plane, making it jolt upward as their weight fell off.
All seventeen paratroopers plus Reid had ten seconds to be out the door, but another burst of anti-aircraft fire erupted off the left wing as Cal’s turn came to jump. It made the plane jerk to the right, launching him forward. In a flash, he found himself pinned across the jump door, his body on the outside, legs bouncing against the fuselage, while his right arm and shoulder were still inside the plane. The power of the 140-mile-per-hour wind anchored him there as his ankle packs tore off and the men who had been standing behind him jumped past in quick succession.
With his neck bent at a painful angle and his chin pressing into his chest, Cal could see some details below him. A structure burned off to the east. Canons fired. Small lights attached to equipment bundles floated down around him. And somewhere in the distance—too far in the distance for him to see—Cal knew Drop Zone C lay out of reach.
It all crossed his mind in a fraction of a second. The fear. The assessment. The resignation. With the ground too close, landing would be treacherous at best—that’s if he survived the artillery fire arcing into the sky.
A plane plunged by, its wing on fire, its tail severed. The heat coming off it brought Cal back to reality. As dangerous as the jump was, staying with his plane was much more of a risk. Summoning every ounce of strength he could muster, he used his body as a pendulum, swinging up and out, gaining just enough rotation to pull his arm free. Then the prop blast caught him and he was falling. His chute deployed, released by the static line, and pulled him up hard.
Cal looked down, forcing his mind off the flak exploding above him, trying to see something—anything—that looked like a safe place to land.
He could see nothing but fog and indistinct terrain as he drifted sideways, the green silk of the canopy above him miraculously intact. The few lights he’d spotted while hanging from the jump door were out of sight now and the ground was coming up fast.
He grabbed a handful of the webbing connected to the parachute’s shroud lines and tried to turn himself around, knowing on an instinctive level that the next few seconds would make the difference between life and death. The maneuver failed, hampered by velocity and lack of time.
Cal was vaguely aware of skimming a rooftop. His head jerked back as his helmet connected with something solid. There was only one name in his mind before the world went dark. He said it out loud.
“Claire.”
Chapter 3
I rang the bell. I rang the heck out of that bell. I rang it until the voices down the hall stopped cheering and started asking me to stop ringing the dang bell.
Completed Treatment was engraved on the brass plaque above it. And as I took in some of the faces celebrating with me—nurses and techs who had become mainstays during my chemo days—I felt something unfurl. I thought it might be hope. Or maybe it was future plans. The months that had been metronomed by visits to the Cancer Center, where soothing colors contrasted with the beeps of machines dispensing life-saving poison, were over.
I was bald. I was chunkier than I’d ever been. I was tired and still growing into my new “bosoms,” as Darlene called them, but I was done. The nausea, the fatigue, the blood draws and delayed treatments and pep rallies from caring nurses—all behind me.
Darlene hadn’t been able to come for the big moment, but she’d given me a bright-red shirt with Perky, bald, and cancer-free! written on it in all caps.
“Not pink?” I’d asked when she handed it to me over a hamburger and fries the week before.
“Pink is for sweet people. But red? That’s for fighters like you who take on cancer with cold-blooded courage and show it who’s boss.”
I was fairly sure the description was an overstatement—what with the hours I’d spent, on several occasions, pouring out my frustration and pain to her in rants and tears—but I appreciated the sentiment. “I’ll wear it with pride.”
“And you’ll puff out your chest too—brand spankin’ new as it is. Own your victory, Cecelia Donovan. You’ve earned it.”
“Did you get the whole bell-ringing?” I asked Nate as we were leaving the hospital. His sole job for the day had been videoing the moment, then whisking me away for a malted chocolate shake. The late-January chill wouldn’t keep us from our tradition.
“The next county over caught the bell-ringing, Cee.”
He’d been patient. Patient and strong and kind—in a painstaking, let’s-get-this-done way. Only on a couple occasions could I remember him getting short with me or expressing something less than full-bodied support. He’d shaved my head when fistfuls of my thick auburn hair had started falling out toward the end of October. He’d researched natural remedies for the side effects of my treatment and been there with me through the vomiting, the out-of-whack emotions, the changes of course—over and over again. And he’d somehow made our cancer-tinged Christmas a gentle, meaningful occasion. He’d endured it all with a steadfastness that shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d always known that I’d married a good man, and he’d proven it to me all over again.
“So . . . Hawaii or Switzerland?” I said once we were in the car. I’d refused to plan any celebratory travel until the last treatment was over. There had been too many surprises from the moment I was diagnosed, and I didn’t want to jinx my dream trip by expecting it to happen on a predetermined schedule. I turned in my seat. “Hawaii has beaches, but the sun on my hairless scalp . . . not sure that’s wise. Switzerland, on the other hand. Mountains. Lakes. Chocolate.”