Page 10 of The Lies We Leave Behind

10

It felt wonderful to get out in the city, although strange. I’d grown so accustomed to living in the jungle, I’d forgotten how loud and full of life Manhattan was. Even the frigid temps didn’t keep people from hurrying down the sidewalks to meet with friends, walk in the many parks, or run to catch a bus, a train, or a taxi. The honks of horns from impatient drivers, the rumble of trucks, music and laughter and chatter—it almost felt as though there wasn’t a war going on—until I saw a group of men in uniform, clearly boys who’d never been to the big city and walked with their eyes staring upward at all the towering buildings. And yet, lovely as it was to see the familiar sights and hear the familiar sounds, I felt guilty being in the land of excess and ease, where things were accessible and many of these people had no idea about the hardships of war.

“That’s not true though, is it?” Aunt Victoria said, perusing the menu as we sat at a corner table with a view outside. “They may not be experiencing war like you have, or like soldiers on the front line, but they most likely have loved ones overseas and are frightened every day when a letter they’re waiting on lingers a bit too long. How they act out in the world does not necessarily reflect the fear and sorrow they feel inside. As you well know.”

Full from lunch, we wandered in and out of shops, her holding up items and asking if they’d survive the island we’d be sending them to. I nodded at some, shook my head at others, and nearly fell out of my wheelchair laughing when she held up a racy nightgown, thinking of Char as I did.

“That definitely wouldn’t survive,” I said and we moved on.

My cast came off a week later, a removable splint put on in its place. The pain was bearable, but then I had to begin the task of strengthening my leg once more, my aunt hiring someone to come in daily to work with me and my calf, which had diminished in size, the muscle weak and inflexible.

“Not to worry,” my therapist Alexander said when he took in my pale, skinny lower leg. “We’ll have it back in shape in no time.”

It didn’t take as long as I’d feared, my determination to get back on a plane and to the soldiers in need driving me to work harder and longer, pushing myself to my limits until Alexander had to stop me every day, for fear I’d injure myself again.

“What’s the rush?” he asked at our seventh appointment as I blew past the number of repetitions he’d set for me.

“I have to get back to work.”

He gave me a placating grin and patted the knee of my good leg as if I were merely missing shifts as a shopgirl. “I’m sure whatever job you were doing can spare you a little longer.”

“I’m a flight nurse,” I said. “For the military.”

His smile faltered, his hand sliding from my knee.

“You were overseas?” he said, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized.”

“Obviously.”

He sat back, considering me.

“That’s pretty dangerous work for a girl.”

“It’s dangerous work for anyone.”

“Right. Of course. Well...” His eyes narrowed, taking me in as if really seeing me now, and my injured leg. “I can work you harder. But you have to promise to listen to me. If you don’t, you could set yourself back, understood?”

“Understood.”

And so we worked harder.

In between appointments, I finally gave in to requests from friends and neighbors who had called asking to see me, and sending flowers and gifts when I said no. I was in too much pain, I’d had my aunt tell them, not wanting to admit that I just didn’t have it in me to act interested in their simple lives of keeping house and attending luncheons, even when they were in support of the war effort.

“You’re sure?” Aunt Victoria asked, still dressed in her uniform for volunteering at the hospital. “I can keep them all at bay longer.”

“I should see Janie and Claire at the very least,” I said.

Janie and Claire had been my best friends in high school when no one else wanted to get to know the strange girl who’d arrived midyear of eleventh grade and barely said a word for fear someone would hear something not American in her pronunciations, despite practicing for months before entering the private school her aunt had registered her in.

Both were married now, Janie a mother of one, Claire biding her time.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to raise a child yet when I still throw tantrums myself,” she’d said once while watching Janie bounce her crying infant in her arms.

Of course, now with her husband in the war, she was worried she might not get the chance to have a child with the man she loved. It was something she had spoken of often in the letters she’d sent me.

“It will be my biggest regret,” she’d said. “To never see my husband reflected back in our child’s face.”

I’d tried to reassure her, but when you’d seen so much death, it was hard to be positive. Thinking of that now, I was anxious to see both women and felt terrible for having put them off.

“Shall I ring them and set up a lunch here?” Aunt Victoria asked.

“Yes, please,” I said. “For as soon as it’s convenient for them.”

The following day, the three of us cried when we saw one another, the two of them hurrying across the sitting room, shedding purses as they went, to hug me.

“You’re very thin,” Janie said with a hint of envy, looking me over from where she sat in one of two matching armchairs after we had settled in for the afternoon.

“Janie!” Claire said, leaning over and smacking her hand. “What a thing to say. She’s been in a war. They probably didn’t even have good food to eat.”

“Sorry,” Janie said, her cheeks flushing pink.

Janie had always been shorter and rounder than Claire and me, something she’d bemoaned at least once a day every day during our time in high school. She’d slimmed some since I’d seen her last, which wasn’t a surprise since she’d been on and off some crazy diet since the day we’d met. Her mother, a glimmer of what mine was, was always bringing her articles she’d clipped to encourage anything from only eating grapefruit to taking Bile Beans, a pill she found advertised in a magazine while getting her hair done at the salon.

Claire, the tallest of us, looked the same as she always had, her raven hair rolled but a little messy, her clothes expensive but partially wrinkled, her makeup an afterthought, blush not all the way blended, lipstick on her front tooth, a smear of mascara beneath her eye. She hated all of it, but did it to make her mother, who was a well-known stage actress and purchased it all despite Claire’s protests, happy.

I looked down at my thin arms that only two months ago had been lean, strong, and browned from the sun. Now they were just thin. And pale.

“Food definitely wasn’t what it is here,” I said with a laugh. “And I haven’t had much of an appetite since returning stateside, thanks to the pain.”

“Well, you look beautiful,” Claire said. “And your hair has gotten so long!”

I ran a hand over it and then twirled a blond lock around my finger. For years I’d kept it just below shoulder length and perfectly styled, but on the island there was no time for that. I’d always had it pulled back, barely giving notice to how long it had gotten. It wasn’t until I got home and my aunt mentioned calling in a hairdresser to give it a trim that I gave it any thought.

“Hair care has been the last thing on my mind,” I said.

“Well, it suits you,” Claire said. “You look like a princess.”

“Secret princess,” Janie whispered and we all laughed.

It was first thing she’d said to me when we’d met nearly ten years ago. Apparently, she and Claire had been watching me for days, wondering who I was and where I’d come from, finally making up a story that I was really a princess in hiding. It was only when we tentatively became friends and they came to my house and met my aunt and uncle that they decided I was just a regular girl like them. I just sometimes pronounced words in a slightly funny way.

“What was that word she always used to say?” Claire asked, peering first at Janie, then at me. “It was as if you had an accent. I loved it.”

I pasted a smile on my face, the old worry I’d thought I could finally bury resurfacing in an instant.

“Oh yeah!” Janie said. “What was it again?”

“Measure,” I said, in a perfect American accent.

“Oh right,” Claire said, and then repeated the word how I’d done years before, giving it, unbeknownst to her, a slight German accent.

“Yes, well,” I said, sitting straighter and lifting my chin just so. “That’s what you get when you grow up with a mother who loved vacationing in Switzerland and got it in her head that one sounds more elegant and refined if you pronounce certain words in a particular way.”

They had no idea how true the statement was. How many hours I’d stood beside her vanity, straight-backed, head held high, while pronouncing words just so as she applied her makeup and had her hair done, smacking the backs of my hands with her glass emery board if I said something wrong or slouched.

“She sounds like she was a riot,” Janie said. “You must miss her so much.”

It was certainly the lie I told. My poor parents, dead in a car crash, leading me to move in with my aunt and uncle, the only family I had left.

In reality, I’d escaped a monster.

We ate in the dining room, a meal dreamed up by Angeline, our cook, who felt the occasion deserved “a bit of style,” the idea sending her and Aunt Victoria hurrying to the kitchen to plan a menu the day before. Creamy potato soup, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a bowl of fresh fruit, and for dessert, tea and individual cakes.

“Your aunt sure went all out,” Janie said.

In truth, it was a simple meal, rationing taking a toll on some of the finer ingredients that might have been chosen. But fresh herbs from the greenhouse we kept out back helped any meal taste better.

As we ate and talked, I found myself quieter than I might’ve normally been, listening, watching, comparing. Even though I’d been home for nearly two months now, I still felt out of place. The problems here were not the problems overseas. True, my friends worried for the lives of their husbands who were fighting in the war, and for good reason. But their own lives had barely changed. They talked about shopping and shows they’d seen, friends they’d lunched with, and the best way to get a pureed pea stain out of the carpet.

They had no idea what it was to bathe using water shared out of a helmet, find creatures in their beds, sweat through their clothing but keep wearing them because your supply of clean clothes was limited. They didn’t know how our hearts got ripped out every time we flew, the cries of the soldiers staying with us, echoing in our dreams at night long after we’d delivered them safely to the hospital.

And they definitely didn’t know what it was to be at that precarious preteen age and lose your best friend to an unspeakable evil. To turn up to school one morning and find her not in her seat. To rush from class and search the halls, the library, and every bathroom, and not find her. To hurry to the nurse’s office and claim sickness, because the nausea was building as worry coursed through your body. And then to lie so they’d let you get home on your own, but really you went by that friend’s house to find her and her mother packing their things in a hurry, fear and dread reflected in their eyes.

Ruthie.

I’d had no one to talk to. No one I could turn to or cry to. My aunt had left by then, my only other friends the ones approved by my parents, and thus not people I could trust with the truth of my ongoing friendship with sweet, funny, Jewish Ruthie.

She was the only reason I almost faltered when it was time to go. What if she returned and I wasn’t there? But the truth I knew even then was, she probably never would.

As Janie regaled us with tales of her son’s new ability to crawl, I lifted my hand and grasped the charm hanging from a simple gold chain around my neck. It was the letter G . A gift from a disappeared friend to a girl who no longer existed. Whenever anyone asked, I told them the necklace had been my mother’s.

As the weather warmed, the city glistening with heat, I began to take walks, working on my strength and gait, pushing my endurance until I could walk two miles and return home with only a whisper of an ache.

“It looks good,” my doctor said as he put me through a number of tests, making notes in my chart.

“Does that mean I can return to work?” I asked.

“You’ll still need to be a little gentle with yourself for the next few weeks. Put it up at the end of the day, ice if it swells. But you’re cleared by me,” he said. “Obviously you’ll need to contact someone over on the base to get clearance on the military’s end, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a yes.”

I grinned at my aunt, who smiled back.

“Guess we’d better make a call,” she said.

An hour later I had an appointment scheduled.

“Next Wednesday,” I told my aunt as I entered the elegant navy-and-gray office she shared with Uncle Frank on the main floor. “June seventh.”

She sighed. “I hate to see you go. It’s been so lovely having you home. But I know your heart is there. And I certainly know why.” She grinned and held out a hand to me, which I took in my own and squeezed. “I’m so proud of you, Kate.”

“You’ve taught me well.”

After dinner that night I pulled out the standard issue bag I’d been given and set it on the floor beside my closet. It was funny to think about what I’d packed the first time I’d gone overseas. Blouses that had gotten ruined, a pair of heels that dug into the dirt on one of the nights I’d gone out with Char, the strap on one breaking as I pulled my foot free. This time I’d know better.

For the next week I prepared for my trip, sure I’d pass any tests the military physician put me through with flying colors. I sent a letter to Char, Tilly, and Paulette, telling them I was nearly on my way, and on June fifth I met Janie and Claire for dinner to let them know I’d be shipping out soon.

“You’re so brave,” Janie said, her nose pink as she sipped her second glass of wine.

“I’m not,” I said. “I just want to help where I can.”

“But why not get a job working at one of the hospitals here?” Janie asked. “There must be lots of soldiers here that need help. Single ones too.” She winked.

It was an argument I’d heard from the two women before, their concern for my safety appreciated, but my deeper reasons for going weren’t something I could explain to them. Only my aunt and uncle really knew why I had to go.

“It’s okay to let the guilt you feel drive you to help others,” my aunt had told me when I’d made the initial decision to go overseas the year before. “But don’t let it make you stupid. Don’t let it make you blind to the very dangerous risks you are taking.”

I smiled at my friends and took a sip of my own wine.

“You just want me to babysit,” I told Janie, who laughed and shrugged.

“Maybe,” she said and then pointed at Claire. “Because this one never will.”

“I’ve seen what comes out of the back end of that child,” Claire said, wrinkling her nose.

Much to my relief, the subject matter moved to Janie’s son and after a while we said our goodbyes, me promising to let them know what the doctor said, and the two of them threatening to never talk to me again if I didn’t let them take me out one last time before I left.

“How was your night?” Uncle Frank asked when I returned home.

He was sitting in his usual spot on the sofa in the sitting room, a glass of bourbon in one hand, a book in the other, the shades and curtains drawn as they always were now once the sun had gone down.

I grinned and collapsed beside him.

“It’s so good to see them,” I said. “But they talk about such silly things.”

“I remember a time when you spoke of silly things.”

“I have never spoken of silly things,” I said, pretending to be shocked.

“I seem to remember a particular hat you went on and on about and just had to have because you saw Greta Garbo wear one in a film.”

I laughed. “And I looked terrible in it.”

He chuckled and then reached for my hand.

“You have to remember, your friends haven’t seen what you have. They haven’t had the same kinds of experiences in their lives. Not in the war, and not before it either. And what they are dealing with now, their husbands away in some far-off land, fighting in ways they can’t even imagine, is terrifying for them. This isn’t how anyone expects their life to go. And so they talk about silly things. To distract. To keep their minds busy. It may seem like they don’t care or aren’t paying attention, but I imagine they’re doing exactly what you are behind closed doors. Reading every newspaper article they can find and listening to the radio late into the night. I can’t imagine you didn’t notice the dark smudges beneath their eyes?”

I sighed. I had noticed.

“You’re right,” I said.

“Let them have their distractions. Because there may come a time when they can’t think of one silly thing to bring a smile to their faces, and that will be a terrible, terrible day.”

“Why are you and Aunt Vic so smart?” I asked.

“Life has a way of doing that to you. If you’re paying attention.”

I stood then, landed a kiss on his head, and went up to bed. As I slid between the covers, I made sure to take in the feel of the soft cotton sheets, the quiet and calm around me, and the very breath that echoed in my ears as I drifted off to sleep. Despite my past...the moments weathered, the stories weaved, and the pain endured, I knew I was one of the lucky ones. And I couldn’t take one second of life for granted.

As usual though, life didn’t let me dwell in peace. When I woke, it seemed all hell had broken loose.

“Kate.”

I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the dim light to see my uncle standing beside my bed as he leaned down to turn on the radio that sat on my bedside table.

“What’s going on?” I asked, panic racing through my body as I sat up, my leg giving a slight twinge as it always seemed to now when I woke.

I rubbed my eyes, watching him fiddle with the dial.

“Uncle Frank?” I said, and then quieted as a man’s voice came through the speaker.

“It’s just after four,” Uncle Frank said and pressed a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

I sat quietly for a moment, trying to register what the man on the radio was saying, my eyes widening as I slowly began to understand.

“We’ve invaded?” I asked.

“We have. Troops landed in Normandy, France. That’s all we know for now. Your aunt is in the sitting room with the radio on there if you’d like to join us.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, grabbed my robe, and hurried after him.

We spent the day inside, listening to the radio, scouring the newspaper when it finally arrived—though there was nothing yet of the invasion, and grazing on food put out by Angeline. I nearly missed my doctor’s appointment the following day as the three of us, like I assumed most of the world, sat glued to the radio, taking in every account we could find that was being broadcasted.

“It looks good, Lieutenant Campbell,” Dr. Armstrong said, watching me walk, crouch, and stand on tiptoe.

He checked my reflexes, asked me to touch my toes, shuffle back and forth, jump in place, and walk like a duck.

“I’m marking you as cleared for work,” he said, making a note in my chart. “I’ll have an official letter typed up and you can give it to whomever you need to. Sounds like your services are definitely going to be needed.” He pointed to the radio in the room, its volume on low.

“I don’t know if I’ll be seeing any of that action,” I said. “I was stationed in the Pacific.”

“You might not be anymore. Regardless, stay safe out there.”

I exited, letter in hand, a frown on my face.

“Did he not clear you?” Aunt Victoria asked.

“He did,” I said, handing her the letter.

“Then what’s wrong? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“It is. I just always assumed I’d go back to the island. But...what if I’m sent somewhere else?”

She stopped walking, her blue eyes searching mine.

“Would that change your mind?”

“Of course not. I just...”

A shiver of trepidation ran through my body. A large part of me wanted never to return to that part of the world. I had mostly only ever experienced pain there. But there was another part of me that yearned for something left behind. And even though it no longer existed in reality, the memory of it created a longing in me. To walk where I had as a girl. To remember the slivers of joy I’d been granted. A smile. The little sister I’d doted on.

“I assume you’ll be stationed in England if they don’t send you back to the Pacific,” Aunt Victoria said. “There are dozens of bases and hospitals there. Of course, I can’t be sure, but it seems the likely scenario as it’s away from the fighting.”

I breathed a tiny sigh of relief, but was still sad at the thought of not returning to my friends and previous base.

Aunt Victoria reached out and squeezed my hand. “You’ll make new friends,” she said.

“Mind reader,” I said and she shrugged with an impish smile.

“Are we headed home or...” She raised her eyebrows.

I shook my head.

“Lead the way then.”

Within the hour I was across the desk of one of the supervisors for the nursing division while she read the letter I’d handed her. When she was done, she gave a little nod, held up a finger, and left the room, leaving me to shift nervously in my seat, drumming my fingers on the wooden arm of my chair while my aunt calmly perused a magazine.

“Okay, Lieutenant,” the supervisor said, returning with a piece of paper in hand. “You have three days to get your affairs in order and then you are to report back here at oh-eight hundred hours Sunday morning. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting to my feet. “What about the Atabrine? Don’t I need to start taking it?”

“Not for where you’re going.”

Silence became a thick wall between us as I looked down at the paper in my hand, my eyes flying over the words, looking for Espiritu Santo as the location I’d be assigned to once more. But it wasn’t there.

“Fulbeck, England?” I asked.

“Give my best to the king,” she said.