Page 43 of The Magic of Ordinary Days

Now I was covered by a hoard of hungry bees and they were besting me. The radio on the counter blurred before me, and pressure built in my cheekbones. I blasted out the first sneeze, then a second.

Lorelei had said Stephan, not because she was nervous, but because that was how she knew him.

And the uniforms, the perfectly neat and new-appearing uniforms. With Rose and Lorelei’s skills in tailoring, an American Army uniform would have been a snap to duplicate.

Once they had told me of meeting German POWs while working the same farms. Now it all made sense to me, the tension between the two of them, the secrecy about these boyfriends.

Ray came to stand behind me while continued reports of the escape screamed at me from the radio. “Tell me,” he pleaded.

But I only sneezed once more before I calmed myself.

The POWs had been recaptured, I kept saying to myself.

No harm had been done. And perhaps I was jumping to conclusions.

Perhaps Walter and Steven were American soldiers, just as I’d believed them to be only a few minutes before.

Perhaps the similarities were simply coincidences.

I had no evidence to the contrary. But hard as I tried to convince myself, in some center place of me, I already knew.

Much as I kept trying to push it out of my mind’s knowing eye, it sat there nonetheless, for no one else except me to see.

Later, I must have looked quite content standing at my kitchen sink and gazing past the ice-encrusted windowpanes into the night.

Funny that sometimes people undergoing the worst kind of discord in their lives can look so calm.

But Ray could see. He pushed aside the paperwork he usually worked on in the evenings and watched me.

Occasionally he’d ask me to sit down and please tell him what was bothering me, but I hadn’t as yet fully admitted it to myself, so how could I tell another?

Bedtime couldn’t come. All I could see before me was a night of tangling with the sheets, and when I did slip into the bed where once Ray’s parents had slept together, I curled my legs high into my rounded body and dreamed of those green summer days that now seemed years ago.

It was the first subzero night of the winter, and from the walls, I could feel the frigid air oozing into my room through invisible seams. Although I bunched the quilts in all around me, and although we had the propane stove burning full out, the chill inside me refused to budge.

Every time I started to drift away into slumber, the words of the radio announcer came pouring back in over me as if I were a rock at the base of a waterfall.

Rose and Lorelei had lied to me and used me for transportation.

How long ago had the plan been hatched? So many things began to make sense.

I’d never seen them working in the silkscreen shop because they were probably sewing clothes for the men off in a place where no one could find them.

But it wasn’t their betrayal that bothered me.

I understood going against everything taught and drilled since childhood.

I had done it, too, and all for the promise of love.

My right calf drew up into a cramp. I threw back the covers, jumped out of bed, and stepped down on my foot, effectively stopping the cramping.

But then I couldn’t make myself get back in bed.

Instead, I found myself in Ray’s open doorway.

He slept on his side under smooth quilts, facing me.

I listened to the long deep breaths he took while soundly sleeping.

I studied the gentle curve of his fingers laid out on the pillow in front of his face.

And when I sank down on the bed beside him, he awakened, but moved only enough to give me more space on the narrow mattress of the bunk bed.

Then he held me from behind, as once he’d done before, and kissed the back of my neck and the tops of my shoulders.

In his arms, even the anguished cries of coyotes coming out of the black night sounded like songs.

Ray’s body and mine rested together like a pair of stacked bowls, and finally, I slept.

I slept until the earliest gray of daybreak sent my eyes flying open.

In the warm circle of Ray’s arms, thoughts began to bat around inside me.

I had knowledge of the escape, information that, as a good citizen, I should share with the authorities.

But if I talked, I would doom Rose and Lorelei to pay for the parts they had played.

And now I found that I disagreed with my father.

Rose and Lorelei had made the worst of mistakes, and I couldn’t imagine the anguish that had led them to do it.

Despite Lorelei’s justifiable anger for their imprisonment, for everything they’d been through, she had never seemed vengeful to me.

I’d never imagined them concocting so elaborate a deception and crime.

The German POWs had convinced them; I was sure of it.

Rose and Lorelei had fallen in love and wanted to rescue soldiers, just like so many other women before them had done.

And even though it didn’t excuse their parts, I understood it.

But must all persons bear the consequences of their actions, at all costs, as my father believed? The POWs had been recaptured without incident, without any harm having been done. I kept telling myself this. And wasn’t guilt of the deed itself sometimes punishment enough?

I remembered the man at the gas station who’d refused to talk to me, just because I was in their company.

I remembered the pain on their faces even when they were working so hard to conceal it.

I remembered new love on their faces, too.

And I saw Lorelei’s wings flapping, her colors falling to the ground.

Later, I found myself standing at the kitchen window again and staring down the dawn of a new day. And still I didn’t know what I was going to do.