Page 5 of The Lies We Leave Behind

5

We settled back into our regular routines, our days long, a blur of minutes, hours, and meals as we passed one another, hurrying off to catch flights, take showers, assist in the hospital, and return to our barracks after dinner, dead on our feet and scarred from the things we’d seen but didn’t talk about.

Winter turned to spring, the weather getting even warmer as the holiday season back home showed up on the island in the form of candies and cards and small gifts to remind us what we were missing, and that we weren’t forgotten.

Thanksgiving was celebrated with a turkey dinner in the mess hall, complete with all the fixings. There was wine, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, and some autumn inspired decorations that looked out of place among the palm trees and white sand beaches of Espiritu Santo. But the efforts were appreciated. Even if they made us long for home and our families.

Christmas came, and with it boxes from abroad sent by our loved ones.

“What am I going to do with this?” Paulette said, pulling a knitted scarf from the box in front of her.

We’d gathered in the mess hall for Christmas Eve dinner, some of us bringing our care packages with us, others leaving them to open Christmas morning. All depending on when we had to work—and our impatience levels. Paulette was due for an early shift the next day, thus her opening what she’d received while we ate.

“Ugh,” Char said. “Didn’t you tell them it’s hot? All the time?”

“Of course. But every year my mother knits everyone in the family a new scarf.”

“I think that’s sweet,” I said, reaching over to touch the soft red yarn. “And it’s very festive.”

She threw it around her neck where it stayed for less than a minute before she clawed it from her skin and dumped it unceremoniously back in the box it had come from.

“What else is in there?” Tilly asked as Paulette reached back in for another gift.

The four of us were sitting together at the far end of one of the many tables covered in red tablecloths with faux pine garlands in their centers. Tilly had brought the package she’d been sent too, despite the fact that she had the next day off.

“I’m impatient,” she’d said with a shrug.

“To thine own self be true,” Char had said with an impish grin.

Char and I had also received packages, but we liked the idea of having something to open on Christmas morning.

“What can I say,” Char said, pulling Paulette’s scarf from the box and wrapping it around her neck. “I’m a kid at heart. I have to wait until morning to see what old Saint Nick brought.”

We sat in the dimly lit room that had been decorated with hand-cut snowflakes, string lights, and a huge wreath made of palm fronds. In one corner was a small palm tree some of the men had dug up and put in a pot before decorating it with lights and ornaments someone’s mother had sent. It was cozy. Happy. We sang carols, shared treats that had been sent from abroad, and for a little while, we were almost able to forget we were at war and that there were patients a few doors down fighting for their lives.

Dinner brought memories of Christmas Eve meals with my aunt and uncle. And while there was ham instead of a roasted chicken, rice in place of potatoes, taro and yams instead of green beans and glazed carrots, dry dinner rolls, and watery Jell-O salad, it was being with family, blood related or not, that made it special. We had pie for dessert and there were rumors of pancakes for the morning. The pie wasn’t like the one my aunt Victoria ordered special every year, packed with fresh berries and surrounded by a flaky crust, delivered to the Upper East Side townhome I’d moved into when I was sixteen. And there wouldn’t be the babka ordered from Orwashers Bakery the following day. But it would be lovely nonetheless.

Our bellies full, spirits high, we returned to our barracks just after midnight, calling out Merry Christmas to one another, as drunken soldiers sang carols off-key, their voices fading as we parted ways, each of us finding respite within our small tented homes.

As I drifted off to sleep, I remembered another Christmas Eve. The last one I’d celebrated in my parents’ home. The elegant white-and-forest-green decorations reflecting in the windows and the crystals of the chandeliers above. The warmth of the fireplace in strict opposition to my mother’s tight smile and father’s watchful gaze. The relief of being dismissed so I could change out of my stuffy dress into my favorite nightgown with its soft fabric and unfussy neckline. The small hand of my baby sister in mine...

I woke with a start hours later to the sound of crying. Anabel, the youngest nurse in our midst, missing her family and fiancé.

“I wanna go home,” she sniffled quietly into her pillow as her bunkmate stood on the frame of the lower bunk and rubbed her back.

We cheered her by convincing her to open the packages she’d been sent. One box from Missouri where she was from, another from Paris where her fiancé was stationed. We exclaimed over a new blouse, a pretty silk scarf for her long, light brown hair, some cream with a fancy French name for her skin, a locket with a picture of her fiancé, and a box of chocolates that had partially melted in the heat.

She was in much better spirits when she was done, and hurried to try on the new blouse before her bunkmate took her to the mess hall for breakfast.

“You gonna open that before I have to go?” Paulette asked, pointing to the box sitting on top of my footlocker before pulling on her uniform.

“You just want to see what treats are inside,” I said. Paulette had a bit of a sweet tooth, and often claimed it was the only sweet thing about her. But we all knew better. Under her oftentimes gruff demeanor, she had a heart of gold.

“Damn right, I do,” she said. “I’m working Christmas Day! I need something to look forward to.”

“Fine,” I said, grabbing the package and taking a seat next to Tilly on her bunk. “Char? You gonna open yours?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking I wait until after Paulette’s taken half your loot with her so she won’t take mine.”

But she grinned and sat on Paulette’s bunk, setting her own package on the bed beside her.

Char’s package came from her sister in San Diego, but it held gifts from her parents, brother, grandma, and best friend, Jo. Each present was individually wrapped and she made us laugh by telling us who they were from by the quality of the wrapping.

“Definitely my brother,” she said, holding up a small box with horribly wrinkled paper. “My mom.” A slender gift wrapped with pristine edges. “Granny.” Tissue paper with a ribbon.

There were candies, a makeup compact, socks, a coveted pair of nylons she squealed over, a diary, and a pair of men’s pajamas, size small.

She grinned at me and I laughed. Finally, someone else would know the comfort I’d found in the men’s sleepwear section.

When she was done, all eyes turned to me.

My aunt gave gifts that made you feel known. Seen. And appreciated for exactly who you were, not what she thought you should be, like my mother used to do. The change from living with my parents to living with my aunt and uncle was felt in many ways, but the most important one was, I was accepted just as I was, for who I was.

“Look at that paper,” Paulette whispered, an oddity for her as she was always so brusque and loud.

“Our own little machine gun,” Tilly had once said. “Shooting words instead of bullets.”

The paper they all gasped over was pristine white with barely a wrinkle, despite the traveling the package had done. Bright red ribbons were tied around some of the gifts. Green around others.

“It’s like something from an advertisement,” Char said. “Or a fancy shop window.”

I grinned, thinking of my aunt and how she was raised. Some things just never left a person.

Inside the box were the kinds of things one would find in my room in their home. A set of journals, a fountain pen, and thin satin camisoles that Char gaped over. There were scarves for my hair in sensible dark colors, a copy of my favorite book, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, and a new one, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Hard candies, little boxes of chocolates, a handwritten card with a photo of their dog, Harley, and a necklace with a small bird charm, the note attached reading “Fly safe, my love,” in my aunt’s beautiful penmanship.

“She’s so elegant,” Tilly said, reading the card.

“She is,” I said. “But also smart as a whip and has a wicked sense of humor.”

I handed Paulette one of the small boxes of chocolates and a few hard candies, then placed the rest of the items carefully back in the box.

“Be safe,” I said to Paulette, who was shoving the sweets I’d given her into her duffel.

“Steady hands,” Tilly said.

“Bring me back a cute one,” Char yelled as Paulette waved on her way out the door. “Preferable single too!”

New Year’s came and went, nineteen forty-four blowing in with another storm that rocked our tented home but did less damage than the one that had whisked our last one away.

Injured men came and went, and we worked tirelessly to keep them alive as we flew them out of war-battered islands back to our own tiny island in the Pacific, praying daily we made the trip back and forth safely.

But war took as it pleased, and more often than not one of us returned having lost someone along the way.

“You did all you could do,” we’d tell one another.

Or “There was nothing more you could do.”

“He did his duty. It was just his time.”

“It’s the nature of war...”

The words that tumbled from our mouths didn’t make any of us feel better. The cruelty of war had left its mark on us. It had stripped us of an innocence. A belief that at their core, all men were good. We knew better now. We’d seen firsthand the atrocities one human could inflict on another, and we were changed forever. While we were proud of our countrymen for standing up for what was right, for sacrificing their lives for the survival of a community, we couldn’t help but wonder—wasn’t there another way? But as Germany marched on, we knew in our hearts there was not.

“How was it?” Tilly asked one evening as I came in from a flight.

I sighed and shook my head, my shoulders hunched from exhaustion.

“They all made it,” I said. “But it was terrifying for a while up there.”

My hands were stained red, even though I’d spent a long time in the restroom scrubbing at them with soap and a rough rag. A patient had woken midflight, delirious from pain, from medication, from whatever images haunted him, and thrashed, ripping stitches from a head wound and bloodying not only me, but the soldier in the bunk below him and another to his side. By the time we landed, it looked like someone had gone on a rampage.

“Holy shit. What happened back here?” the pilot, a wiry man called AJ, had asked.

I could only look at him. Through him. My body weary from the fight I’d just fought and barely won.

I didn’t bother with dinner that night. I stripped out of my bloody clothes, shoved them in my laundry bag to be dealt with tomorrow, put on my pajamas, and went to sleep, the sound of the young soldier’s screams following me into slumber.