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Jake's Aunt Peg came home when he was seven. The war was over and nothing interesting would ever happen again, all before he was old enough to do anything. She didn't want to talk about the war, though. Aunt Peg and Dad talked about the news and about books, about people they knew that Jake had never heard of. She never talked about the war at all. Finally Dad told him to stop pestering her about it. "She'll tell you what she wants to tell you when she wants to tell it," he said sternly, and so Jake stopped. He knew an order when he heard one.
Aunt Peg stayed with them all through the winter and the spring, and then in the summer she moved out to the west coast because she had a job there. "Why don't you stay in the Army?" Jake asked. He was sorry to see her go, even if it did mean that he wouldn't have to share a room with his sister anymore.
"I'm demobilized," she said. She kept on folding clothes into a suitcase. Then her mouth pursed. "It's not as if I were a man," she said. "Men can stay in, but they're done with women."
"That's not fair," Jake said.
At that she looked up at him and her face gentled. "Jake, when you're older you'll understand that almost nothing is."
She came back for holidays and things. It wasn't like he never saw her again. But she never talked about the war.
When he was fourteen they all went out to California for her wedding. They took the train, and he had the upper berth and his parents the lower. His sister didn't go because she was at school. He curled up in his berth and drew the curtains, watching through the window at the moon-streaked dark. The mountains of Colorado rose pale and snow capped, bright as dreams.
"I didn't think she'd get over Steve," his mother said from the berth below.
"I'm just glad she's found someone to be happy with," his father said. He sighed. "Peg had a rough war."
Jake frowned. He wondered what a rough war meant. But he wasn't supposed to ask.
The wedding was fine, but weddings weren't Jake's speed. It was more interesting that the groom was in the Air Force. His name was Jim, and he flew jets, real ones that went so fast they were gone almost before you saw them, hundreds and hundreds of miles an hour. "How fast can a plane go?" Jake asked.
"Nobody knows for sure," Jim said, and clapped him on the shoulder. "Every year the record gets broken. Maybe you'll be the one to set it for good."
Jake felt taller almost that second. "I want to go to Jupiter," he said.
"You'll need a hell of a jet to do that," Jim said, but he grinned. "You're just like your aunt."
"Are you scaring my nephew?" Aunt Peg asked, but her face was light.
"Never," Jake said. Things tumbled on his tongue to be asked, but weren't.
And maybe that was why, four years later, when he thumbed through the course catalog at Ohio State, he wrote out Aero 101 on his paper. "Introduction to Aerospace Studies." Requirement one for the Air Force. It was just a course, just looking.
Aunt Peg came to his graduation four years later, his graduation and his commissioning and his wedding the next weekend all at once. Waiting to go into the chapel, butterflies in his stomach, she straightened his collar and smiled up at him. "I'm very proud of you," she said.
"Thanks, Aunt Peg."
"Your idealism… You remind me so much…." She stopped, her smile wavering. "I wish it were another year, another time. That you weren't going straight to Vietnam."
She was worried about him, Jake thought. Like Mom. People always were. It was a thing old relatives did. "I'll be ok," he said. "I'm lucky. And good."
"That's not always enough," Aunt Peg said. Her dark hair was gray in places and there were crinkles around her eyes. "Be careful."
"Sure," Jake said. Like he'd be careful in a Phantom!
And then the music started and he had to go in to stand at the front while Aunt Peg and the last comers were seated, sweating bullets at what he was about to do. But Ellie was beautiful and when he saw her he knew he was grinning like an idiot. He could barely get the words out when the time came, "I, Jacob Carter, do take thee Ellen McCleese to be my wedded wife…."
They were both at Dad's funeral, Jake and Aunt Peg. It was really sudden and Jake got emergency leave from Edwards. Peg was in DC doing some kind of contract work for the Pentagon and Ellie was pregnant for the second time and Mom was a mess because it was so unexpected. They all stood around at the wake and Jake had one drink too many before he went and found Aunt Peg in the alcove, his daughter asleep in her arms with her head on Aunt Peg's shoulder, golden hair against dark. She was crying.
"I have a bottle of Scotch," Jake said.
For a second she froze, and then she laid the little girl carefully on the padded bench. "Let's have it," she said quietly.
They traded the bottle back and forth in the dark.
"Your father was a good man," she said. "He never didn't have to not be."
"I know," Jake said. And he did by now.
"That last tour…."
Jake took a swig. "There was a close one," he said. He hadn't even said as much to Ellie, though she probably knew even though it was nothing to tell her about. He wasn't dead, and so there was nothing to say. But Peg would get it, that moment when something walked over your grave. "They were all over my ass. If George Hammond hadn't done the damnedest thing…."
"Lucky," Peg said, taking the bottle back.
"Yeah."
"He got the Air Medal."
"And you're here." Peg took a long drink. "You win."
"Yeah," Jake said. "I do."
She came for the next funeral and she stayed. He wasn't sure how long. Weeks. A couple of months. It all blurred together, all of it from the moment the highway patrolman had come to the door. "Is this the residence of Ellen Carter?"
Mark was nine and Samantha was twelve. They needed meals and clothes and laundry and things packed for school and they had to go to school. Life couldn't just stop because it had stopped for Ellie, because she would never breathe again or smile again or watch them grow up or graduate from high school, because she would never touch him again and never reach for his hand without speaking because he knew what she would say. Life couldn't stop for them just because it had stopped for him.
Peg did those things. It didn't make sense. He told her so.
"My contract with the Pentagon is up," she said. "And I'm retiring."
"Really?" It didn't seem to him she could be that old.
"I'm sixty-two," Peg said. "Twenty years your senior. How old did you think you were?"
Jake shrugged. He hadn't thought about it. You don't, not really. Not until you think about how unfair it was for Ellie's life to end at forty-two.
"You'll go on," Peg said, and her voice was hard. Jake looked up, surprised. "You'll hate yourself for it at first, but you'll go on."
She said it like she knew, and it came out without thinking. "Did you?"
Peg nodded, clasping her hands around her coffee cup. "I did. When Steve died."
He cast his mind back to that conversation in the Pullman ages ago. Steve. "I'm sorry," Jake said.
"He was KIA," Peg said. "His plane crashed into the North Atlantic. There were no survivors." One of her brows twitched. "It was important and it had to be. But that doesn't make it easier."
"You…."
"I might have married him. I don't know." She looked up at Jake. "Whatever else, you and Ellie had sixteen wonderful years together. And nothing can ever take that away from you. Nothing can ever take that away from her."
And at that he put his head down on the table and cried while Aunt Peg put her arm around his shoulders.
She died four months before he was supposed to. His lymphoma was advanced. Aunt Peg was eighty. He couldn't interrupt his chemo to go to the funeral all the way across the country. She would have understood, Jake thought. She wouldn't have minded. Samantha went for him. She sent him pictures of the white casket, the cemetery in winter. She was still mad at him about him messing with her career, trying to get her transferred to NASA, the last thing he could do while he was on active duty. Jake guessed it was some kind of pride thing. Aunt Peg wouldn't have appreciated him messing with her career either.
And then he didn't die, and some entirely extraordinary things happened.
Looking out at the moons of Jupiter near enough to touch, he thought of her.