Page 9 of The Lies We Leave Behind

9

New York February

I woke, as I had the past three mornings, confused and disoriented by my surroundings. Gone was the netting above me, gathered at the center and stretched and tucked around a mattress too thin to hide the three bars that ran perpendicular to my body. Gone was the soft snore of Tilly below me, the sight of Char beside me, her arm thrown above her head as if she were on vacation, and not in the stuffy, humid, too-hot canvas barracks. And Paulette below her, talking in her sleep.

Instead, the ceiling above was a pale blue, the walls sturdy and covered in white wallpaper with tiny blue flowers. The bed was white-painted wood with a curved headboard and footboard, the joints quiet instead of creaking with every move I made, the mattress plush, my body sinking into it.

The air was cold. Too cold.

And it was quiet.

No buzzing of bugs, feet tripping over someone’s bag that didn’t get tucked away properly, people mumbling in their sleep, quiet breathing, loud breathing, the gritty steps of a soldier walking by, someone shouting in the distance, a plane flying overhead...

I sighed and pulled the comforter to my chin, trying to get warm, my body not yet acclimated to the cooler climate, and tried to turn over and pull my legs in, forgetting in my sleepy haze that I was injured.

I shouted as pain ripped through my leg and heard the thunder of footsteps before the door flew open.

“Kate?”

I pried open my eyes and a single tear trickled to my pillow, staring across the room to my aunt’s and uncle’s worried faces.

“Did you try and move it again?” Aunt Victoria asked, entering the room and filling the space with the soft, comforting scent of her perfume. I nodded.

“I keep forgetting,” I said.

She gave me a pained smile and lifted the stack of newspapers I’d scoured the day before, placing them on her lap as she sat carefully on the edge of my bed, her pale blue eyes, a shade darker than mine, taking in every inch of my face.

“Can I get you anything, kiddo?” Uncle Frank asked from where he still stood in the doorway, his tall, well-built frame nearly overwhelming the space, every strand of his dark hair in place, his suit impeccable.

They were something to behold, my aunt and uncle. Something to aspire to. Good-looking, intelligent, informed, kind...and warm. They’d spent their lives sacrificing for others, and it had only made them more empathetic, more understanding, and infinitely wise. They’d opened their home to me, giving me a safe haven to grow and explore in. A place I was accepted in, just for being me. For them, I didn’t need to change. It was something of a revelation when I’d moved in so many years before.

I shook my head and gave him a smile. There was nothing anyone could do. For now, all I could do was wait for time and biology to heal me.

The two of them lingered though, like overprotective parents, and I chuckled.

“I’m fine,” I insisted, just as I had a few days ago when I’d landed at La Guardia Field and saw the two of them watching me as I first got lifted, then wheeled from the plane across the chilly tarmac. “You two are such mother hens,” I’d said.

Aunt Victoria had laughed and bent to kiss the top of my head while Uncle Frank gave my shoulder a squeeze. It had been our ongoing joke since I’d moved in nearly a decade before. She and Uncle Frank had no children, and raising a teenager had been something of a shock to their system, no matter that they’d set the whole thing up and had been expecting me for years.

And yet, no one could be completely prepared when going from no child to a nearly grown child. As thrilled as they were to have me and had planned for me, I was a disruption in their lives. Lucky for them, I was used to my mere existence being a disruption. At least here I was wanted. In my parents’ home, I was a chess piece, brought out and moved around the board as their cunning plans saw fit.

“Well, I won’t ask how you’re feeling,” Aunt Victoria said now. “Clearly, it could be better. Can I get you some food to go with your pain medicine? And perhaps the day’s newspaper?”

She patted the stack on her lap and gave me a rueful smile.

“Yes, please,” I said as she got to her feet, the skirt of her periwinkle blue dress swinging gracefully around her calves.

My aunt, like my mother, was a stunning woman. They had the kind of fragile beauty that made people stop and stare. Though, where my mother’s looks had begun to take on a hardened demeanor as she aged, my aunt’s had only become more charming. Five-eight and five-seven respectively, their pale blond hair and sky-blue eyes, creamy skin and slender figures made them the most sought-after girls when they’d been in school. A year apart, my aunt the oldest by thirteen months, they couldn’t have been more different than night and day. Where my mother loved to enhance her looks and use them to lure people in and gain favors, my aunt barely seemed to notice hers, and always seemed surprised when people were shocked that behind that angelic face was a brain not to be toyed with. Something I’d always admired about her.

We’d had a connection for as long as I could remember. When she’d come for holidays or one of the parties my parents threw, I’d run to her, finding refuge in her arms, my small body seeking solace against her warm one.

“Stop coddling her,” my mother would say, to which my aunt would scoff.

“Children need coddling,” she’d say. “It’s how they learn things like empathy and love.”

But my mother thought those things would make me weak.

“Why does she hate me?” I’d once cried to my aunt in a back corner of our garden.

“She doesn’t hate you, little love,” she’d told me, running a gentle hand over the perfect ringlets my nanny had been directed to put in my hair that morning. “She’s always been this way. I’ve never understood it. Our parents, your grandparents, were kind, loving people. But your mother...she was born different. Angry. Fierce. Always on the hunt for better and more, as if it were owed her. And she’s never cared who she hurt to get it. Some people are just born—” She’d stopped herself, letting out a long sigh and shaking her head.

“Born what?” I’d asked.

She’d given me a sad smile and wrapped her fingers around mine.

“Ugly.”

Unfortunately, people like my mother tend to marry a puppet whose strings they can pull, or they find a mirror image of themselves. Someone with the same harsh outlook on life. The same selfish goals. The same cruel nature.

My mother met Gerhard Holl?nder her last year of high school in Dresden. They married after he graduated college four years later. According to my aunt, they were a perfect match in all the worst ways.

“They fed into each other’s worst qualities. Two people who seemed bent on destroying the happiness of others for their own wicked desires.”

“But...how can you stand to be around them?” I’d asked.

“I don’t come here for them. I come here for you and Cat.”

The arguments between my mother and aunt happened nearly every time she came to visit.

“Gisela needs to learn to be strong and not rely on others,” my mother shouted one afternoon as I listened from the upstairs landing. “She needs to learn how to sacrifice for the greater good. And whom to form alliances with.”

“She’s ten, Gabriela,” my aunt had said.

“Exactly.”

It was then that my visits with my aunt began to shift. Rather than tea parties in the garden or in the playroom with my baby sister nearby, we went for long walks that took us away from the house so that she could ask me about school, my friends, and inquire carefully about what I was hearing—within my school, but also at home.

“Father doesn’t like our butcher anymore and insisted we change,” I’d told her one day. I was upset about this because sometimes I got to go along with our cook to pick up the week’s meat and I was always given a treat by the kindly old man who showed off the selection he’d chosen.

Not long after we changed butchers, we changed florists too. And then I wasn’t allowed to go in my favorite bookshop any longer. Or go to my friend Ruthie’s house.

“Why can’t you go to Ruthie’s house?” my aunt asked as I cried on a park bench.

“Father says she’s the wrong kind of friend. But...she’s nice to me and we like the same games. How can that make her wrong?”

Eventually, I began to understand that to have the friends I wanted, or frequent the shops I liked, I’d have to become two versions of myself. One my parents found acceptable, and one I did. But only for a while.

Only until the plan hatched with my aunt in the back corner of my parents’ garden became my reality.

“You ready?”

I looked up from the article I was reading and glanced at my aunt, flawless in a pair of wide-legged gray slacks and a white blouse with a high lace collar, and then stared down at my dress and the cast below. After weeks spent inside, my leg resting on pillows, my every want and need tended to by my aunt Victoria, Uncle Frank, or Angeline the cook, today was the first day I was being allowed outside the house for something other than injury checkups.

“I suppose,” I said, setting the newspaper aside.

“I thought you’d be more excited,” she said, her smile disappearing.

She was taking me to Delmonico’s for lunch, and then shopping. She’d taken the day off from her volunteer work at one of the area’s two hospitals after the doctor gave me the go-ahead to start being more active.

“I am excited,” I said. “But getting around with this thing is going to be difficult.”

“That’s why we have the wheelchair.”

I nodded and she frowned, coming to sit beside me on the bed.

“Would you rather not?” she asked. “Is it too much?”

“No. I just...”

As nice as it had been being home...the comfortable bed, the food, the hot water whenever I needed it, the availability of books and clothes... I was restless. And shopping and eating out at a fancy restaurant wasn’t going to feed the need in my soul.

I glanced at my bedside table where a small radio and a framed photo of Aunt Victoria, Uncle Frank, and me sat amid a collection of letters. Four from Char, two from Tilly, and one from Paulette. In my absence I’d missed another squall. “It ripped the roof and sides off the showers and there were naked men running for cover!” Char wrote. Paulette had had a near crash, Tilly had lost two men on one plane ride, and Mac had gone missing for a day, only to be found drunk and hiding in a ditch, having lost his way on his walk home from Luganville.

But it wasn’t just the drama of living on base, it was the lives I guarded thousands of feet in the air.

“You miss the work. And your friends,” Aunt Victoria said. “Your purpose.”

My eyes filled and I closed them, tears running down the sides of my face.

I’d known at the age of seventeen, when I’d followed her into Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where we lived, and donned a candy-striper apron, that helping others was what I wanted to do with my life. Tending to the sick, holding a hand, helping the injured... I was good at it. And the sense of worth it gave me, after the verbal and sometimes physical abuse I’d endured for years, was priceless.

I remembered following my aunt around those first couple of weeks, watching as she chatted with patients, taking their mind off needles and injuries and sickness, bringing smiles to their faces and oftentimes even a laugh. She was graceful and respectful and most importantly, kind. And I wanted to be her. I wanted to emulate how surely her hands moved and how comforting her words were...the soothing tone of her voice.

I’d stood in my bathroom for hours, staring at my reflection, practicing how to speak like she did. Slowly, I began to shed the old me, coaxing my mannerisms into new ones, quieting my accent until it had all but disappeared and no one ever asked again where I was from.

And then the war began. I found myself reading the paper and listening to the radio constantly, sick with the news being reported, worried and angry and determined to do something. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I began to think I might have found a new purpose for my acquired skills, guilt driving my need to get overseas and help wounded soldiers. Wounded Allied soldiers. To be in the thick of it and sacrifice myself should I have to. It was the least I could do in my determination to right a dark, incomprehensible, and infuriating wrong.

But it was more than that.

There was also shame. Shame for where I’d come from. Shame for what I’d left behind.

I opened my eyes and stared at the woman I’d revered since the first moment we’d met.

“I want to go back,” I said. “If the war is still going, my skills are still needed.”

“I know.” She took my hand and smiled. “I’ve sensed it since you landed. Your entire body screams, ‘take me back!’” she said and we laughed.

“That obvious, huh?”

“Oh, Kate...you are selfless and brave, and have been since the day you split yourself in two to be who they wanted, but also who you wanted. Who you needed to be.” This time her eyes filled, her delicate nose reddening. “I’m so proud of you—and furious you’re not my child.”

I squeezed her hand. “But I am your child. You have always been the mother I wanted and needed.”

She sucked in a breath and looked away for a moment, nodding, a single tear making its way down her cheek. She wiped it away, her chin quivering as she met my gaze once more.

“I’ve failed you,” she said.

“You haven’t. You and Uncle Frank went above and beyond. What’s done is done.”

“Do you ever think about—”

“I always think about them,” I said, my voice soft. “What’s done is done,” I repeated.

She sighed and nodded. “We don’t have to go out if you don’t want to.”

“I actually think I could do with lunch and a little shopping. Maybe we could pick up some things for my friends? I’ll never hear the end of it if I don’t send chocolate.”

“That sounds like a perfect day out,” she said. “And then next week, why don’t we see about getting you back to work where you belong.”