Page 17 of The Lies We Leave Behind

17

Kate

England August 1944

“Read it again,” I said, my eyes closed against the hot afternoon sun, the skirt of my yellow flowered dress hitched up midthigh as I worked on my tan.

William tugged a lock of my hair.

“Bossy,” he said, and I laughed and shielded my eyes from the light as I looked up at him.

“Please?”

“As if I could resist you.” His eyes swept down my body and something inside me squeezed sweet and low.

I rolled over onto my stomach, propping my chin on my hands, and he sighed, setting down the book of poetry he’d found earlier that morning when we’d poked around a bookshop that had become one of our favorite stops in a nearby town.

“How can I read when you’re looking at me like that?” he asked, stretching out beside me and tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.

I leaned forward, closing my eyes as his warm hand cupped my face, his lips finding mine. He rolled me gently onto my back, his injured leg, nearly completely healed now, intertwining with mine as my free hand made its way slowly up his arm, pausing to brush my fingers over where a bullet had pierced his skin, and then to his shoulder before digging into his hair and pulling him closer.

He swore softly against my lips, pulling away and staring down at me.

“Shall we go back?” he asked.

He’d rented a room in a small hotel in the neighboring town. We’d gone a half-dozen times, the woman at the front desk giving us empathetic smiles whenever we checked in and then out the next morning, always at an ungodly hour because of my work schedule.

I leaned down and pulled my dress up an inch, looking at my tan line.

“Not yet,” I said, and he laughed and rolled onto his back.

I could care less about my tan, what I really wanted was this moment. How many more of them would we get? I couldn’t bear the thought. I wasn’t sure what spell William Mitchell had put over me, but for once in my life I didn’t want to overthink it. I just wanted to be in it. Fully. Immersed in him and us. Never wanting to come up for air.

“Shall I read more then?”

“Yes, please,” I said, plucking three blades of grass and carefully knotting one end before proceeding to braid them.

His voice was low and husky as he read again a poem about a rekindled love, found the first time by chance, the second by happy accident.

“And I shall love you,” he read. “Forever. For always. Forevermore.”

There was silence as the words floated around us.

“Forevermore,” he said again, his voice a whisper.

I stared across the blanket into his denim-blue eyes. I had never had a sense of home before. The one I was born into I’d been made to feel unwelcome in. The one I’d shared with my aunt and uncle, while cozy and warm and accepting, had never felt quite like mine. Despite their efforts...their love and encouragement to make the space mine as well, I’d always felt a bit like a guest. And then there were the barracks I’d found myself in. Fun in ways, but certainly not home.

But William...he had no roof to shelter me. No four walls to ward off the elements. No floor, no door, no window. Yet being with him felt like home. He was home. My home. The only place I’d ever felt I’d belonged.

I smiled at him.

“Forevermore,” I whispered, and then handed him the braided strands of grass, which he plucked from my fingertips, put it in the book to mark where he’d left off, and jumped to his feet.

“I can wait no longer,” he said, holding out a hand, his other on his heart. “I must make you mine, milady.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

“The poetry is going to your head,” I said, letting him pull me to my feet.

“Hush thy lips, sweet maiden,” he said before laughter got the best of him.

“I’m burning that book.”

But it was a joke. I would never burn it. I would keep it with me every day, tucked in my medical bag after he was sent back to the front. It was a romantic promise I’d made to him after the first day we’d read from it, but it was one I planned to keep. No matter how sappy the poems could sometimes be, the memory of reading them...of laughing and sighing and staring at one another as a phrase or verse hit just so...was special. And I planned to hang on to the memory of that while I waited for him to return to me.

The following morning we rode back to base before the sun was up, the air promising another warm day, the sheep in the fields to the left and right of us nestled in small groups, a few raising their heads, watching as we pedaled by.

“Be careful,” William whispered in my ear as we shared a last embrace behind one of the buildings. “I need you in one piece. Promise?”

“Promise,” I said, lifting my face to kiss him again. “And you don’t overdo it today.”

“I can’t promise that,” he said.

“I wish you weren’t so determined to leave me.”

I was joking, I knew he was just anxious to get back to the job he’d signed on for. To fight for not only our freedom, but the freedom of millions of others. To do his part to right this unbearable wrong that was happening. And yet I still felt a sense of sadness at his resolve to be well enough to go back to battle. I wanted him safe and here with me. But if he didn’t get well enough to fight, then he’d be sent home and be even farther away, with absolutely no chance of us seeing one another until after the war ended. It was hard to know what to wish for, so I wished for nothing but both of our safety and an end to this war that had taken so many lives and ruined so many more.

An hour later I’d stowed my bag, gas mask, and canteen, and had a bottle of morphine tucked safely in my pocket should the need for it arise.

“How was your day off?” Theodore asked, buckling in beside me.

I felt my face warm and he chuckled.

“That good, huh?” he asked.

It was no secret First Sergeant William Mitchell and I were a couple. I’d initially tried to keep it quiet, preferring to keep my private life private. But he was too much of a flirt, and my constant visits to see how he was, despite my excuses of just checking on him after so much blood loss, were smirked at. There was no point in trying to hide it. We’d fallen for one another, and while there were several female broken hearts, everyone on base seemed genuinely happy for us.

“It was lovely,” I said. “The weather was nice so we rode our bikes into town, read some books we picked up, and had a picnic with some sheep.” He shuddered. Theodore hated what he called the “British wildlife.” Anytime we had to fly livestock over he tucked himself into his seat, put a blanket over his face, and pretended to sleep the entire flight to France.

We landed and Theodore and I stood aside as troops hurried in to unload the supplies we’d brought over with us. Blankets, bandages, rubbing alcohol, IV bags...

While the plane was emptied, I made rounds, checking in with the nurses tending to the patients waiting to be loaded and reading the tags attached to their clothing, blankets, or litters.

A young man sat off to the side, rocking himself on top of the litter, his ankles bound so he couldn’t easily run off. He didn’t look to have any physical injuries, but sometimes the wound went deeper than that. Sometimes what was damaged was the mind. The heart. The soul.

“Cracked up,” one of the nurses said, seeing me watching the young man who couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

He was mumbling to himself, staring blindly at the commotion around him, his hands twitching.

“Dangerous?” I asked.

“Not so far,” she said. “But we’ll sedate him before he gets onboard just in case.”

I nodded. “Any moments of clarity or...?”

“No. Not that I’ve seen.”

It broke my heart to see these young men so damaged by war. By the realities of how brutal humanity could be. It was cruel to pull them from lives where they’d dreamed of a future—working any number of jobs, educating themselves at universities, striving for an exciting future, marrying their sweetheart, perhaps having children—and plunging them into training to kill. Training to save their own lives, as well as the lives of the men around them. Men who had become brothers as they worked side by side maneuvering, shooting, building, and discharging weapons of destruction. Destruction of towns. Destruction of lives. Not a one of them would leave unscathed. Some would wear their battle wounds on their body. Some deeply within. And others would take them to their grave.

So many graves.

I smiled at the young soldier, his baby face caked on one side with the dirt he’d been pulled from before he’d been led to safety.

“Hey there,” I said, kneeling beside him, my voice soft as I looked at the paper pinned to his torn jacket. “Your name is Joel?”

He stared blankly at me.

“Well, I’m Kate and I’m going to hang out with you today on that airplane over there.” I pointed. “Do you think that would be okay?”

He was silent, his big dark eyes looking through me.

I wondered where his people were. If he had a mom and dad still. Siblings who would rally around him when he got home, a place he may or may not recognize, a place he may never see should he be deemed too dangerous, whether to others or just to himself, to be anywhere but a hospital for the rest of his life.

I squeezed his hand and stood, and then moved on to the next patient, my heart heavy but my smile light as I went from injured to injured.

We didn’t land back at base until the sun had gone down, having to take a load of wounded to a base in Scotland first before flying back to England.

“Hello there,” William said, when I wandered wearily into the mess hall after looking for him in his bed. “I came over figuring you’d be hungry when you got in and head here first.”

“You’re sweet,” I said, kissing him and waving off the whistles from the soldiers nearby. “But I always go to the hospital to see you first.”

“Well then, you’re the one who’s sweet,” he said, leaning forward to kiss me again. There was another round of whistles and we laughed as he pulled away and pushed his tray toward me. “Also, I knew these animals would eat all the good stuff if I didn’t save you some. I’ve been here for nearly two hours.”

“William!” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“If I had to, it wouldn’t be as much fun. Now, eat up.”

The food was still warm, thanks to him asking one of the cooks to set a plate off to the side under one of the warmers for me and keeping guard over it until ten minutes before I arrived when the kitchen was shutting down.

I tried not to wolf it down, but I was starving, having not had time to stop for lunch or even a snack due to the hectic schedule.

“How did it go?” William asked.

I shrugged. Most days I didn’t mind talking about it, but sometimes I had a hard time finding the words, the images of the men etching themselves into my mind and heart. My interactions with the young soldier named Joel had sat heavy with me for the remainder of my missions. He was so young. Too young to have had to experience what he had. I thought of all the others. The hundreds I’d heard about being marched from their homes, down the streets they’d known all their lives, and loaded onto trucks and trains, only to be taken far away, put to work, and never seen or heard from again.

An image of my childhood friend Ruthie rose in my mind and I sucked in a breath. It was indescribable still, the feelings of guilt I had surrounding her. Regardless of the fact that I’d been too young to do anything to help. When her father was arrested on suspicious charges the year before I’d left home, I knew that somehow my own father had had something to do with it. My mother had always relished telling her friends that he knew everyone and there wasn’t anything that happened in our city that he didn’t know about.

“He knows everyone, that man,” she’d say with the grin that always caused a chill to run up my spine. “And has his finger in every pot.”

Two weeks after Ruthie’s father was imprisoned, he was moved to another facility farther away. Then another. Then came the day Ruthie hadn’t shown up for school, when I’d run the many blocks to my friend’s house to find her and her mother packing.

“Where are you going?” I’d asked, looking around desperately, wanting to tell them to stop, tears hovering on my lower lids.

Ruthie had looked at her mother who hesitated before nodding.

“My aunt’s,” she said. “We’ve told everyone we’re just going for the weekend but...” Her big brown eyes had said it all and the tears that had hovered now streamed down my face as I nodded and stumbled to her, wrapping my arms around her.

“Can we write?” I’d asked when we’d parted, looking to her mother.

“Not at first,” she’d said. “To be on the safe side. For all of us.”

I’d nodded, understanding the things she didn’t say. They didn’t want to be found. And I could get in trouble for keeping their secret.

“I will write though,” Ruthie had said.

“Under a different name,” her mother had said.

I never knew if a letter came. I left home having never heard a thing, without knowing what had become of my friend, and wondering for all the years after if they’d escaped.

William squeezed my hand and I leaned into him, reveling in the warmth of his body against mine.

“Where’d you go?” he asked.

I stared into his eyes and then leaned my head on his shoulder. I never answered. He didn’t push. It was one of my favorite things about him. His silent acceptance of my sometime need to quietly wade through whatever feelings I was having until I was ready to talk about them.

Or not.