Page 19 of The Lies We Leave Behind

19

In the days after William left I felt hollowed. Bereft. And more than a little distracted, my mind constantly wandering as I wondered where he was and what he was doing. Who he was with and if they were watching out for him.

“Lieutenant?”

I looked over at Theodore, who was pointing to a soldier struggling against the straps securing him to his litter.

“Oh,” I said, getting to my feet to find the wounded man had vomited and was having trouble ejecting it from his mouth due to the stitches keeping one side of his lips and cheek together.

“I need a bin,” I said to Theodore while carefully removing the scissors pinned to the soldier’s shirt and beginning to snip, making room for him to expel the vomit.

“You okay?” he asked from where he was seated at his desk after I’d finished cleaning up my patient and giving him morphine for the pain.

“Yes,” I said, crossing my arms in defense against the cold.

“First Sergeant Mitchell returned to the front, did he not?”

“He did.”

I glanced at him, and he gave me a sympathetic smile and patted my leg.

I was grateful that he didn’t say William would be okay, because we both knew that wasn’t guaranteed. Those words only worked on those back home. For those of us with a front row seat, we knew better.

We flew in with the last planeload around eight that night. I bid Theodore good-night and stared longingly at the hospital, missing being able to pop in quickly to see William before heading home for the night. Swinging a tired leg over my bicycle, I pushed off and rode home, listening to the sound of nature falling asleep and coming awake around me.

I could hear music playing in someone’s room when I came in the front door, voices talking, footsteps thudding up above on the second floor, laughter, and the clanging of dishes in the kitchen. The sounds were comforting. It felt like home.

I set my bag at the base of the stairs, checked the tidy entryway table for mail, smiling when I saw my aunt’s handwriting on one of the envelopes, and headed for the kitchen, tucking the letter in my pocket, my stomach grumbling as the smell of someone’s dinner wafted throughout the house.

“Kate!”

I smiled wearily at Luella, who was standing at the stove, one hand on her hip, a wooden spoon in the other, stirring something in a pot.

“The mess hall was gonna throw out a huge box of tomatoes,” she said. “There were still plenty of good ones in it so I took ’em. I’m making spaghetti. You want some?”

“You have enough?”

“I think I’ve made enough to feed the entire base,” she said with a laugh.

“Well then, I’d love some. I’m starving.”

The smell was delicious and brought several of the other women in from wherever they’d been enjoying the evening.

With so many of us eating, we gathered in the grand dining room, giggling as we sat around the massive table, more than half of the women in pajamas, the rest of us still in uniform, or at least parts of it. Hazel had removed her shirt and was wearing just a camisole. I’d peeled off my button-down and was in a T-shirt, sitting with one leg folded beneath me, something that would’ve earned me a stern look from my mother could she see.

I ate while listening to the others talk, sharing details from their day and telling of their plans for their next day off. Summer was ending and everyone was trying to take advantage of the nice weather while they could.

“I am not looking forward to the rain,” someone at the far end of the table said.

Not that we hadn’t had a few rainy days in the two months since I’d arrived, but from what we’d been told, fall and winter could be quite miserable. Gray, windy, wet, and seemingly never-ending.

“And how’s our newly engaged member doing?” I heard someone ask and didn’t realize they meant me until Hazel nudged me with her foot under the table.

“Oh!” I said, my thumb rubbing against the band around my ring finger. There was a smattering of laughter. “I’m...okay?”

“Any word since he’s been gone?” Beatrice asked, twirling a strand of strawberry blond hair around her finger.

Beatrice, I’d learned, was always twirling her hair. A nervous habit, she’d told me one evening while we drank beers with the small group we’d become part of by accident.

The group had formed one night after William and I had hurried into a pub to escape the rain and found Beatrice and Shirley, another nurse from the mansion, already bellied up to the bar. I’d introduced William to the two women just as the door opened and two soldiers from the base came in. When someone suggested we pull two tables together, the rest of us agreed it was a good idea, and the group was born.

There were others who had joined us on occasion. Hazel, Luella, Theodore, and a surgeon named John, who once nearly fell asleep in his meal. But usually it was just the six of us meeting up whenever we were all on base at the same time and not too tired.

I smiled at Beatrice now.

“He left a letter for me at the airfield,” I told her. “Had one of the guys give it to me the day after he left. There was another the second day. And the third. But none today.”

“It’s sweet that he thought to do that,” Edith said. “My fiancé remembers to write so infrequently, I’ve started to tell myself he’s dead. That way if a letter never comes, I’ve prepared myself. And when one does, it’s a wonderful surprise.”

“Edith,” Hazel said. “That’s awful.”

“Maybe,” Edith said. “But it’s easier than panicking every day, like I was doing.”

There were several nods around the room as everyone understood the plight of a woman whose man had gone off to war.

The talk turned to other things then. Someone hadn’t followed the chore schedule and the trash in the kitchen hadn’t been emptied. Someone else had tracked mud on the main staircase.

“And there are beer bottles and cigarette butts outside the back door off the kitchen,” Marlene, the head nurse said, her golden blond hair pulled back in its usual unyielding bun. “We have to keep the house clean, ladies. They could do an inspection at any time.”

“I mean, what are they gonna do to us?” Betty was from Alabama and as usual, her easy-sounding drawl made at least one of the women around the table giggle. She had a way of saying things that made even the most important information sound un-rushed and not important.

“Can you imagine her in an emergency situation in the air?” Hazel had said to me once, making me purse my lips so as not to burst out laughing. “She talks slow as molasses. By the time she asks her tech for help, the patient will be dead.”

I didn’t mention that Hazel spoke so fast it was sometimes hard to understand what she’d said. Which could also result in a dangerous outcome. So far, thankfully, neither woman seemed to have any trouble with their patients. And neither of them would be here if the instructors at Bowman hadn’t found them fully capable.

Marlene gave a small huff in response to Betty’s question and pasted a smile on her face.

“They could fine us,” she said. “Or take away shifts. Or add shifts. And most certainly write us up.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble over some cigarette butts and beer bottles,” Betty said. “Good thing I don’t smoke or drink.”

There was a smattering of laughter around the table as she took a swig from the bottle in her hand and adjusted the cigarette behind her ear. Marlene sighed.

“I’m going. I’m going,” Betty said, pushing back from the table to go clean up her mess.

“Truly, ladies,” Marlene said, her eyes taking in each of us. “I don’t want to mother you, but it’s on me if this house isn’t kept in tip-top shape.”

There were several nods and murmurs of understanding, and then one by one we got up from the table and began to clean before making our way to our bedrooms for the night.

“You okay?”

I turned to see Beatrice behind me on the stairs.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice quiet.

“You miss him.”

It was a statement, not a question, and I nodded. I missed him in ways I couldn’t put to words. It felt as though I’d lost a limb, the thought reminding me of what I’d learned about people who’d actually been through it, and the ghost limb phenomenon many experienced after. The itching of a leg that no longer existed. The ache of an invisible arm. William had become that for me. But instead of a limb, I felt as though I’d lost my heart, the beating inside merely an echo of the organ that had once resided inside me.

It was shocking to me how fast it had happened. One day he was just another face in a sea of so many others. The next, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Imagining a life with him. Aching to be with him again.

“You on tomorrow?” Beatrice asked.

I shook my head.

“Me neither. Wanna go into town?”

I wanted to say no. But my plans to lie in bed all day wallowing in grief and wasting our dwindling sunny summer days would only put me in a worse mood.

“Sure,” I said, and waved good-night as she passed me to go to her own room two doors down.

Hazel was already asleep when I opened the door and I grinned and shook my head. I didn’t know how she did it. The girl could talk right up to the very second she passed out.

“It’s a gift,” she’d told me when I’d mentioned it a few weeks ago. We’d been having a conversation and, as usual, she was prattling on, my brain trying to keep up with her mouth. When it was my turn to talk, my own words were met with silence and when I glanced her way, I saw that she’d fallen asleep, mouth open as if she’d been waiting to respond but sleep had moved even faster and stolen her away.

I pulled my aunt’s letter from my pocket, set it on my bedside table, and changed quietly into my pajamas. Slipping into the hallway, I waited my turn in line for the bathroom, then padded back down the hall when I was done, and climbed into bed to read Aunt Vic’s letter.

Usually the pages were filled with the normalcy of life in Manhattan, just like I’d asked of her.

“Won’t it make you feel bad?” she’d asked.

“No,” I’d said. “It will remind me of what I get to come home to.”

And so, in previous letters, she’d regaled me with the latest ailments of the neighbor’s dog, Mr. Bones. Mr. Bones was always having something treated. A sore on his paw, a scratch on his nose, a sniffle...

I was told of new shops coming to the neighborhood, and old ones going out. Who’d gotten married, whose daughter or aunt or cousin had had a baby. And who had received telegrams, telling them their loved one wasn’t coming home. As always, Aunt Vic’s letters, with small scrawled notes and drawings in the margins from Uncle Frank, were filled with details I could practically see and smell.

But this letter was different. In place of the usual jovial greeting was a more serious one. No notes from my uncle in the margins. No terribly drawn pictures of Mr. Bones. And instead of flowing thoughts and funny tidbits, there were halting and unsure sentences that made my blood run cold.

My Dearest Kate,

I am at a loss and unsure how to write this letter. The news I must convey is not happy, but there is some good to share as well. Please bear with me.

An old associate of your uncle’s, thought to be dead these past many years, resurfaced. Apparently his work made it impossible for him to come forward sooner. He made contact and passed on some news. I wish I were there to tell you myself. It seems cruel to put it all in a letter, but I can’t bear to keep you in the dark.

Your father has been killed. The circumstances at this time are unknown. Your mother is alive, but has apparently been ill for some time and the prognosis is not good. She is not expected to live another year. Possibly not even through the next six months.

I imagine you must feel some sense of loss, and yet maybe all you felt for them was buried when you stepped foot on that ship so many years ago. Regardless, I wish I were there in person to deliver this news. Most especially because the next bit might be harder to bear.

Catrin is alive.

I stopped reading, my mind and body growing cold and numb.

Catrin. Kitty Cat. Little sister.

Alive.

Images flashed through my mind. Her small hand in mine. Her long pale hair across my arm as she slept beside me, having once again escaped her bed for mine in the middle of the night. Her giggle when I teased her as we ran around the back garden. The sound of her cry when our mother once again smacked her, merely for laughing too loud. For being filled with joy. A child, yearning to play and sing like other children got to.

But not us. There were rules. We were to be barely seen, rarely heard. And if we needed to speak, then we must do so quietly.

I stared back down at the letter, my eyes taking in the rest of the words, but my brain unable to comprehend them, the previous words still swirling in my head.

My father was dead. My mother was ill and dying. After all the grief, abuse, and neglect we’d suffered because of them, did I care?

I waited for a stirring inside me. A sadness. Something that let me know I still cared, even just a little. But all I felt was anger. Fury that I even had to think about them. I’d have been fine to never know what fate befell them, wishing since the day I left that I’d never have to see them again.

But Catrin...

The plan had been to get her out too. Two years after me so that it wouldn’t seem so suspicious and she’d be twelve and better able to keep a secret and remember the information that would keep her from falling under suspicion. But when the time came, the plan fell apart. Contacts were compromised. And then there was the explosion.

Those able to escape watched the family for days...weeks. But all the reports were the same. Catrin Holl?nder had been killed in the blast that had also claimed the lives of four other children and two adults at a small gathering for one of the children’s birthdays. There were arguments about who planted the bomb, and fingers pointed. My father at that time had been the target of several attacks. This was the first time his only known living child had been targeted. And as far as the attackers, and the country knew, it had been a successful mission.

I had been shown an image of the funeral cut out of a newspaper, my sister’s name in stark letters below, a gleaming casket at the center with my parents beside it, their heads bowed.

I’d been inconsolable for months, and never spoke her name aloud again. I’d failed her. I never should’ve left without her.

My mind went back to that day. I’d been on edge for weeks, and my hands shook that morning as I picked at my breakfast, trying to breathe normally, my eyes flitting from my plate to my sister, taking in her features, the way her hair had been tied back that morning by our nanny, the collar of her blouse, the way she chewed her lip in-between bites of her food as she concentrated on getting an appropriate amount on her fork.

She’d sat in my room with me, playing with one of my old dolls, while Nanny Paulina finished packing my bags.

“What do you think you’ll do there?” she’d asked. “In California.”

She’d practically whispered the last part, in awe that I was going to a place so far away it almost didn’t seem real.

I’d forced a smile. “We’ll go to the beach, shop...” I’d trailed off with a shrug, trying to downplay the lie that had been advertised to my parents as a fun, sun-filled time with my American pen pal. For them it was a chance to spread their ideologies through their child. For Catrin, it meant losing her sister and best friend for a few weeks. Something that had never happened before. Little did she know she’d be losing me for much longer.

As soon as I was all packed, Nanny Paulina, Catrin, and I stepped one by one down the grand staircase of my parents’ Hamburg apartment to the main floor where they waited with my mother’s good friend, Alina, who would be my escort for the trip.

“You’re going to have such a wonderful time,” Alina had said, embracing me. “I love California.” She’d looked to Catrin then. “Next time we’ll take you too.”

“Perhaps next time,” my mother had said. “We’ll all go.”

I’d swallowed hard, pasting a smile on my face and trying to seem as carefree and excited as Alina. I didn’t know how she so effortlessly acted as though we weren’t doing something bad. As if she weren’t essentially kidnapping me—and wouldn’t be killed on sight were we to be found out.

At Nanny Paulina’s urging, I hugged each of my parents and then turned to Catrin, whose eyes were glossed over with tears as she reached for me.

“You’ll be back soon?” she asked.

“I’ll see you again,” I told her, pulling her closer and breathing in her fresh, soapy scent.

“Promise?” Her wide blue eyes implored me.

“I promise, Kitty Cat,” I whispered.