Page 23 of The Lies We Leave Behind

23

William

Seattle 2003

I set the leather-bound book of poems down, the braided grass bookmark smooth and pale and fragile between my fingertips.

“I was heading to battle when I got the letter,” I said.

“The letter?” Selene said.

I nodded, remembering the young soldier who had delivered it to me. We were in a makeshift barracks on our way across the country to take up arms in place of the men that had fallen. The city of Metz in France and her many fortresses had proven one of the hardest cities to take back, the Germans in underground bunkers and a central fort with a fifteen-foot reinforced concrete roof, and dozens of tunnels leading to and from it like the unwieldy legs of an octopus.

I was tired. Weary from travel and from keeping up the morale of my men. So when the letter was handed to me, wrinkled and dirty from its own travels, a weight I’d been carrying on my shoulders lifted. Until I read the contents.

“Yeah,” I said. “She sent me a letter. Someone in her family had died. She didn’t say who and I remember being curious. The only people she ever talked about were her aunt and uncle, whom she lived with in New York. She didn’t say if it was one of them. And I knew her parents had died years before. I had no idea who this person was who was so important to her she’d leave her post and go back home. Lots of people lost loved ones while they were overseas fighting or helping, and they didn’t go home. I thought maybe an old boyfriend...? Anyways, I got the letter and of course wrote her back immediately, telling her how sorry I was for her loss and if there was anything I could do, to please tell me. Not that I could do much from the mud in the middle of France.”

I looked out at the water then, remembering that next month. How depleting the battle at Metz had been. The numbers we’d lost. The fear when communication and equipment failed. The desperation as we waited for more men, more weapons, and more food, our rations barely getting us through.

So many nights I’d wake from hunger, only to hear those around me suffering the same fate and shivering in the cold and damp, rain gear, like everything at that time, in short supply.

“War is strange, you know?” I said aloud. I turned to look at Selene, my eyes lingering on her features, looking for something I didn’t want to name, but not finding it regardless. And yet there was something. Not now, but when she smiled. And those eyes...

“Strange how?” she asked.

“Oh.” I waved a hand, laughing at myself a little. She hadn’t come here to listen to an old man wax poetic about the tolls of war.

“Tell me,” she said and my heart hitched inside my chest. There it was. Something in her voice. A timbre I knew I’d heard before.

I shook my head, trying to shake it loose from me. I was imagining it. Wanting to believe something wouldn’t make it so.

“You’re kind to listen to an old man’s ramblings,” I said.

“I love history. Love what it can teach us, if only we pay attention. Which so many of my generation do not.” She smiled and I peered at the way her lips lifted on either side before returning to the conversation.

“I was just thinking of that battle. Something I haven’t done in ages. Like most people who fought in the war, or any war for that matter, whether it be with weapons or some other kind of trauma, we don’t like to talk about it. Reminiscing is painful. Internal scars threatening to tear and break open...” I laughed then. “Can you tell I was married to a writer for years?”

She tapped the stack of letters on the table.

“I think you have always been something of a writer yourself, William. Credit where credit is due?”

“Perhaps.” I shrugged and went on. “Metz. I’d fought before then. And I fought after. But the letter from Kate sat strange with me. It was too bright. Not that she wasn’t often bright in her messages to me. But it felt forced. She listed so many memories we’d made together. And that worried me. It was as if she expected something bad to happen.”

“To you?”

“That’s what I assumed at the time. But then...”

I took a long drink of my beer, rubbing the braid of grass between my fingers once more, my gaze resting on the book of poetry.

“But then what?” she asked.

“But then one after another, my letters to her went unanswered.” I met her eyes across the table, my own burning with emotion at the memory. “I never heard from her again.”

Her breath was soft, her chest rising and falling as she watched me. After a moment, she gave me a small smile and nodded.

“I think I may know why,” she said, and pulled out another book.