dried the stump thoroughly, allowed it a few minutes of fresh air, then fixed the prosthesis back in place and drew down his pant leg.
He was startled by a sound of movement behind him. He turned to find April standing in the open doorway.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
He quickly drew on his shirt and rose to his feet. How much had she seen? But the light was dim, and he’d been partially concealed by one of the counters.
“It’s no problem. I was just getting cleaned up a little.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “You can come in if you want.”
She advanced uncertainly into the room. Kittridge moved to the window with the AK. He took a moment to quickly scan the street below.
“How’s everything outside?” She was standing beside him.
“Quiet so far. How’s Tim doing?”
“Out like a light. He’s tougher than he looks. Tougher than I am, anyway.”
“I doubt that. You seem pretty cool to me, considering.”
April frowned. “You shouldn’t. This calm exterior is what you’d call an act. To tell you the truth, I’m so scared I don’t really feel anything anymore.”
A wide shelf ran the length of the room beneath the windows. April hoisted herself onto it, bracing her back against the frame and pulling her knees to her chest. Kittridge did the same. They were face-to-face now. A stillness, expectant but not uncomfortable, hovered between them. She was young, yet he sensed a core of resilience in her. It was the kind of thing you either had or you didn’t.
“So, do you have a boyfriend?”
“Are you auditioning?”
Kittridge laughed, felt his face grow warm. “Just making talk, I guess. Are you like this with everybody?”
“Only the people I like.”
Another moment passed.
“So how’d you get the name April?” It was all he could think to say. “Is that your birthday?”
“It’s from ‘The Waste Land.’ ” When Kittridge said nothing, she raised her eyebrows dubiously. “It’s a poem? T. S. Eliot?”
Kittridge had heard the name, but that was all. “Can’t say I got to that one. How’s it go?”
She let her gaze flow past him. When she began to speak, her voice was full of a rich feeling Kittridge couldn’t identify, happy and sad and full of memory. “ ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain …
“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain …”
“Wow,” said Kittridge. She was looking at him again. Her eyes, he noted, were the color of moss, with what looked like flecks of shaved gold floating atop the surface of her irises. “That’s really something.”
April shrugged. “It goes on from there. Basically, the guy was totally depressed.” She was tugging a frayed spot on one knee of her jeans. “The name was my mother’s idea. She was an English professor before she met my stepdad and we got all, like, rich and everything.”
“Your parents are divorced?”
“My father died when I was six.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
But she didn’t let him finish. “Don’t be. He wasn’t what you would call an admirable sort. A leftover from my mother’s bad-boy period. He was totally loaded, drove his car into a bridge abutment. And that, said Pooh, was that.”
She stated these facts without inflection; she might have been telling him what the weather was. Outside, the summer night was veiled in blackness. Kittridge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.
“I saw you, you know,” April said. “Your leg. The scars on your back. You were in the war, weren’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
She made a face of disbelief. “Gosh, I don’t know, just everything? Because you’re the only one who seems to know what to do? Because you’re all, like, super-competent with guns and shit?”
“I told you. I’m a salesman. Camping gear.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
Her directness was so disarming that for a moment Kitteridge said nothing. But she had him dead to rights. “You’re sure you want to hear it? It isn’t very nice.”
“If you want to tell me.”
He instinctively turned his face to the window. “Well, you’re right, I was. Enlisted straight out of high school. Not Army, Marines. I ended up as a staff sergeant in the MPs. You know what that is?”
“You were a