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did any of the other vital signs register so much as a blip. Mary squeezed his hand, but it was limp to the touch. It had been a spasm. Some last reflexive and wholly unconscious response.
    She gazed through the window into the corridor. Dr. Alexander and Don Bennett were deep in conversation. The resigned expressions on both their faces spoke volumes.
    For another hour Mary held her husband’s hand. She told him about the first time she saw him walking across Healy Lawn at Georgetown. He’d just completed his second summer of Officer Candidates School at Quantico. His hair was high and tight and his muscles were practically bursting out of his sleeves. He was one good-looking slab of All-American meat. I want me some of that, she’d told herself.
    That fall they had shared a theology class called “Jesus in the Twentieth Century.” Lots of essays by Karl Rahner and Martin Buber. And she saw that Mr. Joseph Grant wasn’t some dumb jarhead. He was smart, and funny, too. And like her, he believed in some higher power. Not believed.
He knew
. Rahner called it love. She was good with that.
    She told Joe that marrying him was the happiest moment in her life, and she asked if he remembered holding Jessie an hour after she was born, all of her fitting neatly on his forearm. He’d called her Peanut, because that’s what she had looked like all swaddled, her face so red and wrinkled. And she said that they’d have to put off their anniversary celebration until another time. She wanted to say “until you are better,” but Mary was a no-bullshit girl and Joe liked getting the truth straight, no chaser. Honesty was their bond. They did not lie to one another.
    “I looked pretty good in that LBD,” she said. “Don’t know what you’re missing.”
    Joe’s hand remained slack.
    The EEG didn’t budge.
    His chest rose and fell with the respirator.
    “Goodbye, hon,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
    Joe’s body jumped as if he’d been given a jolt of electricity. An alarm sounded. Code blue. Mary stood. Her eyes locked on the heart-rate monitor as the numbers dived and nurses rushed into the room.
    “Don’t do anything,” she said. “Let him go.”
    “Excuse me, ma’am,” said one. “You’ll have to leave.”
    Dr. Alexander was there a moment later. Mary looked at him, pleading, and he nodded.
    Outside the ICU, she placed her palm against the glass and searched out her husband’s face. A nurse wheeled the defib cart to the bed and took hold of the paddles, raising them above Joe’s chest. Dr. Alexander stopped her, giving a firm shake of the head.
    For a moment Mary caught a glimpse of her husband, the proud profile, the raised chin. She closed her eyes, wanting to see him as he was, as she remembered him when he was away.
    It was in Samui. Joe walked ahead of her on the beach, Jessie and Grace to either side. He kicked water at them and they kicked it right back. She heard him call their names and laugh. A happy man.
    Mary opened her eyes to say goodbye.
    “Safe journey.”

5
    It was the third lap and Ian Prince was falling behind.
    He curled the fingers of his left hand around the throttle of the P-51D Mustang and eased it forward, keeping one eye on the rpm’s, the other on the panorama of earth and sky that wrapped itself around the Perspex canopy and the planes flying above and below him. His right hand gripped the stick lightly as he approached the third pylon, a red-striped oil can set atop a fifty-foot telephone pole. The plane whipped past the pylon, Ian pushed the stick over, and the plane banked sharply, wings tilting to ninety degrees, the Nevada desert an adobe blur. He clamped his mouth shut, holding his breath and tightening the muscles of his core. He was pulling five g’s through the turn, shoulders digging into the seat, jaw burrowing into his neck. The engine whined magnificently, a buzz saw cutting hard lumber. He completed the turn and leveled the wings, the g’s easing,