The Ocean Between Us by Susan Wiggs Page B

a glittering robe of gold, unreachable.
    “Don’t get all pissed off at me, Gracie. I didn’t make the rules. The point of raising kids is to prepare them to be independent, so they can leave and find their own lives.”
    Logic wasn’t what she needed right now. She needed…she didn’t know how to put it into words. “I’m not mad at you,” she said.
    “Then what’s this?” he asked, touching her forehead with his finger, then with his lips. And just like that, her annoyance melted. “You’re frowning.”
    She smiled up at him. “Not anymore.”
    “Good.”
    They stood on the porch together and silence lingered, punctuated by the cry of a gull and the shouts of children playing down the block.
    The neighborhood was an uninspired cluster of plain but neat houses designed for wayfaring Navy families. This section was known as officers’ country, housing squadron skippers, executive officers, captains and commanders, lining streets named after aircraft or astronauts. Some of the places had million-dollar views of the mountains to the west, but the Bennetts’ place faced another house that looked just like it.
    As they walked back inside, a few lights came on in the windows across the way. The strange wistfulness that had weighted her chest all day pressed harder now, and she felt as though shemight burst. Discontent had crept up on her, entered through a side door. Everything around her was changing, and she felt compelled to change, too.
    She wanted to talk to Steve, really talk, the way they never did anymore. She wished he would notice her mood, ask her what was on her mind. That would be the day, she thought. She cleared her throat. “Steve.”
    “Yeah?”
    “When I was out shopping for school clothes with the girls, I looked in the mirror and realized that I’ve turned into a fat lady.” She just blurted it out. It sounded so stupid, spoken aloud.
    “What?” he asked.
    “Fat and forty.”
    “Aw, Gracie,” he said. “You’re not fat and you’re—” He paused, and she could see him doing the math in his head. “Not forty.”
    “Okay, a stout thirty-nine, then.”
    He chuckled and pulled her into his arms, burying his face in her hair and inhaling as though he’d forgotten the scent of her. And maybe he did forget, she thought, slipping her arms around the familiar muscular torso. Maybe, when he was six months at sea, he forgot the way she smelled, the texture of her hair and the way she tasted. Funny, she had never asked him.
    Though she’d known him half her life, there were facets to him that remained a mystery. She pictured the carrier as an alien spacecraft that sucked up five thousand earthlings and took them away for long periods of time, doing experiments on them in the guise of training exercises. Then the earthlings were returned to their home planet, altered in subtle ways.
    When he returned from a cruise, his hair was often different. He might have a faint scar from a healed-over cut. Sometimes he grew a mustache. During the first Gulf War, when he returned from a cruise that had run three months longer than scheduled, she even had the strange sense that his whole body chemistry had changed. She remembered running her fingers through his hair so thoroughly that he asked what she was doing.
    “Looking for the alien probes,” she had replied.
    And even though she might momentarily forget he was in the house, she never, ever forgot how he smelled and tasted, what the beating of his heart sounded like when she leaned her cheek against his chest.
    “Where did that come from?” he whispered, rubbing her back.
    “What?”
    “This forty-and-fat self-flagellation.”
    He made her sound so silly. She shouldn’t have spoken up. He couldn’t do anything about it, couldn’t fix what he didn’t know was broken. For that matter, she didn’t know exactly what was broken.
    “I told you,” she said, taking another stab at explaining. “A three-way mirror in the dressing room. The