The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  And always, there are lists—lists for the cottage, lists for Alec, lists to remind her to push through the mourning when it crests against her in waves of dizzying sorrow. Sometimes memories creep in unbidden—her father reading by the fire in the drawing room, the triumphant smile her mother tried to contain when she won a trick at bridge, the three of them on the coast of France during a school holiday, so many small moments bundled into a set of lives—and each time she has to remind herself to keep breathing. She has almost nothing left of her parents but memories. Is this how Alec felt, when he first came to Fenbourne? His parents and hers—gone suddenly, randomly, in a rain of chaos and fire. Even in their orphanings there are lines of connection to bind them.

  When she finds herself stacking her pencils the way her father did, she pushes the memories away. But there are echoes everywhere—sometimes the crescent moon reminds her of the tiny scar left on her mother’s forearm by a twist of wire in the garden. Sometimes a bicycle catches the light like her father’s glasses had. And always the absence of them. Somehow, though, she must organize the cottage, to the extent she can. While cleaning and cooking give her something to focus on that is more immediate and less abstract than Alec or the future, neither truly holds her attention. A few months ago she was part of the war effort; lives and histories were in her grasp and often under her control. Polishing a banister or boiling an egg . . . They are no substitute for the columns of codes that occupied her life for all those years, nor for the bond she had had with her team of Wrens and Admiralty civilians in Ceylon. Sometimes, in the rare moments at night when the birds go quiet and the geckering foxes have all found other ditches in which to hunt, she would give anything to have the silence broken by the flap and clatter of Wendy Fairchild and her deck of cards. But Wendy is in America, stationed at the British embassy in Washington, and often as not, thinking of her only leads to thoughts of the past, or of Floss. And now, despite herself, Berlin.

  * * *

  • • •

  She rings Sir Reginald once a week, torn always between decorum and determination. She ponders seeking out the men who had been in Germany with Alec; she has gone to London a dozen times to press the Red Cross for information, but his camp had held more than a thousand Britons, and there is no way to know whether they even knew him. Instead she pores through newspapers, slowly building a lexicon of Russian names and words, the occasional clusters of Cyrillic letters blossoming like ciphers. She makes lists and charts—everything from the routes of troopships that might bring him back to the names of anyone she has ever done a favor, and how they might help. She writes to friends in the Wrens and the Admiralty. And she watches the stars in the low night sky, hoping Alec can see them, too.

  When she needs a respite, she walks into Fenbourne, or farther out along the sluice road, depending on whether she can stand the idea of seeing the ruins, or talking to the well-intentioned villagers from whom she feels so disconnected. Determined to make herself useful in the village, she stops in at the teas Melody Keswick holds to discuss the issue of helping Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of the Continent.

  But whether or not she chooses to visit the village, the lanes are a balm, stretching out to the horizon as they always have. By November, the light has changed—it comes in flatter across the fields now, making its way to the sharp, clear gleam of winter. The nights are cold and full of the promise of ice riming along the edges of the Lark, but today is relatively balmy, and the sound of insects and birds echoes through the afternoon. Above her, a host of watery clouds scud petulantly across a Wedgwood blue sky. The canal flows with brackish water, swifts careening just above the surface to eat invisible insects. Willows and black oaks line the opposite bank, shading the field just to the other side, where a herd of Black Herefords grazes, the red calves nudging one another and their dams.

  She pauses at the crossroads, trying to decide whether she wants to go into the village. Sometimes there is comfort in the fact that the village, despite its scars, is still more or less the Fenbourne she remembers from her childhood. The Lark is the same. The sky over the canals rings with the cries of ospreys and thrushes, and at St. Anne’s the massive old trees are full of rooks, just as ever.

  As June turns toward the village, a boy comes around the curve of the hedgerow, a brace of hares slung over his shoulder. He stops dead when he sees her, his sharp adolescent face going pink as he grins.

  “Blimey, if it isn’t Miss Attwell,” he says, his accent unexpectedly pure London.

  June’s eyes widen. “George Cowan?”

  “That’s right.” George glances down at the road, then back at her. “I’m so sorry, Miss. They were good to me, your parents. Awful, what happened to them.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “I hadn’t realized you were still in Fenbourne.”

  Something changes in his face, and it’s a moment before June recognizes it as something she has seen in her own eyes lately. So many orphans, she thinks. First Alec, and then she herself, and now George.

  “Mrs. Hubbox took me in,” he says, subdued.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” June says. She ponders him for a moment, thinking again of Mrs. Hubbox, who must also be in mourning; the vicarage had been her home as well. “And, George?”

  “Yes, Miss?” George tilts his head at her like a sparrow.

  “Will you ask Mrs. Hubbox to call on me, when she has time? I’d like to ask her advice about some things around the house.” She smiles. “I would be very grateful.”

  George grins at her. “Happy to, Miss.” He glances at the hares. “I’d best be home, now.”

  “Yes indeed,” she says, realizing belatedly that the hares are probably poached.

  George ducks his head and resumes his trek along the hedgerow. June watches him go, pleased to have encountered him, but also relieved—if Mrs. Hubbox is available, her help with the cottage will be invaluable.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two weeks later, a miracle. A boy skitters into the cottage’s front garden on a battered bicycle, his bell ringing. June, roused from her perusal of a map of shipping patterns in the Black Sea, opens the door just as he knocks. He pulls a telegram from his messenger bag, and she takes the thin paper and fishes a handful of coins from her pocket to tip him. As he races away again, she opens it, nerves skating like eels beneath her skin. And then, the relief and adrenaline too much to contain, she lets herself cry—Alec is coming home on a British troopship, part of an exchange of prisoners in the next few weeks, actual date to follow.

  That afternoon, June writes to Sir Reginald to thank him, and then she renews her focus. She traces routes across the globe, folds and refolds maps to show the most likely paths of Alec’s return. As the days grow shorter, she visits her parents’ grave more often, although she has still not crossed the threshold of the church. Attending a service would be beyond her just now—the idea of some other man in her father’s place, leading the congregation, leaves a great cavity in her chest.

  Perhaps as time passes she will feel otherwise. It helps when she makes complicated housing charts for Melody Keswick, trying to help with the refugees, whose losses she can’t begin to comprehend. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hubbox comes now three mornings a week, and George appears to help with smaller tasks when he’s not in school. Often as not, June comes back from the village to find him sweeping the porch or pulling years of debris from the bedraggled and overgrown garden behind the cottage.

  At last, well into January, word comes from Sir Reginald: Alec’s ship will dock in London three days hence. June stares at the telegram that brings her the news, then folds it with shaking hands to put away. That night she sits out on the front steps and watches the sky. The future, whatever it holds, is here.

  1946, Fenbourne

  She hardly sleeps the night before his ship is due, trying to come to terms with what she will tell him when he asks how she’s s
pent the last few years. She knows she looks different, not least because of the sun her pale skin couldn’t avoid in the tropics regardless of her efforts. She knows she is different, after so many years of war and absence. But he must be different too, after everything. Finally she gives up altogether and takes an early train into London. She would rather wait at the docks than wring her hands anywhere else.

  The crush of sailors and dockworkers reminds her of her own travels, and she can’t help but hope that the troopship bringing Alec to London is less infested than the one that took her to India. She straightens the cuffs of her jumper, running her fingers around the ring he gave her all those lifetimes ago. She remembers Alec’s face when he proposed, and his hand pressed against the small of her back, the bright London sun, the warmth of him coursing through the yellow silk blouse she’d been wearing, the softness of his mouth when he kissed her afterward in the darkness of the shelter.

  When the ship docks, the thud of the hull against the dock echoes in June’s heart, and she can hardly breathe. She had sent a telegram to the port in Gibraltar, hoping to tell Alec she would be here, but there’s no way to know if he received it, and that adds a layer of unease to her excitement. There is a flurry of activity, and then at last the gangway lowers, and men begin to come off the ship. They’re all so thin, and while a few have tilted their hats to jaunty angles, they all look out of place somehow, relieved and wary all at once.

  Just as she steps closer, hardly able to bear the waiting, Alec appears at the top of the gangway. He’s wearing a too-large coat hanging open and a flat blue cap, with a worn rucksack slung over one shoulder. He looks like part of a crew of some kind of tramp steamer, not a pilot. June nearly doesn’t recognize him—he looks cold and alone, not at all like the Alec she used to know.

  He steps onto the gangway, treading hesitantly down to solid ground, and June moves forward to meet him as he reaches the end. His eyes widen as he spots her.

  “Alec,” she whispers. His eyes have locked onto hers. His cheekbones are too sharp. All of him is. Alec is emaciated, perhaps only ten stone now. How has this happened to him? She tries to take him all in, tries to see all of him at once, but he’s got his hands behind his back, and he’s still just looking at her the way he would regard a ghost.

  A moment of panic—what if he no longer wants her? What if the war has broken what they had? Her heart quails away from the idea that after everything, they might be over. How can they take apart something that lit them both like the sun? But then, at last, his face opens, and she can see that boy again in his face.

  “June,” he says, his voice ragged.

  “Yes, Alec,” she says. “Yes.”

  He comes to her then, his arms tight around her, his face pressed to her shoulder like an animal looking for its burrow, trembling.

  * * *

  • • •

  June had thought they might stop in London, find lunch or a cup of tea, but Alec is skittish and pale, hewing close to her even while he seems almost to inhabit another world entirely. When she asks him if he’s hungry, he shakes his head, his face uncertain. “Not just yet.”

  “All right,” she responds, although she can only imagine he must be ravenous. But he’s likely overwhelmed—perhaps once things are calmer and he is less absorbed by the urban maelstrom surrounding them he will want something. She had hoped for a more triumphant return, which seems unfair now that she has seen him. And forcing him to sit in a crowded café, with all its noise and humanity, seems more complicated, and more fraught, than she would have guessed, and so instead she hails a cab and directs the driver to King’s Cross. She had tried to be prepared for scars, visible or otherwise, and for the immutable changes that a POW camp might wreak on a man, let alone one camp after another.

  In the taxi, she turns toward him, meaning to say something about Fenbourne, but then she sees his hands, bundled on his lap, and something creaks in her heart. His right hand, especially, bears the marks of whatever has been done to him, and it has curled into itself like a paw. The left is better, but still mottled with scars, two of the fingers crooked and gnarled. How can this be? Those lovely long hands, broken now. She can only imagine the pain and misery he must have gone through. She was ready for so much, or thought she was. But she had not girded herself against the sound that comes from her at the sight of his hands, or for his face, crestfallen and defensive, when he hears her.

  She reaches for his hands. When he flinches, she feels it all the way through her. But then he lets her cradle them in her palms. She wants to hold them to her lips. She wants to heal them with her touch. It’s another thing she has no idea how to navigate. And underneath her sorrow for him, an ache of confusion—how could she not have known? She goes cold when she thinks of his letters from Italy and Germany, and that unfamiliar penmanship, and wants to strangle him—banged up my hands is all he had had to say?

  At the station, Alec shrinks into himself, his face closed and wary. June takes his arm, keeping him close to her. When last they had walked like this, her hand had tucked neatly into the crease of his elbow, and now her fingers vanish into the folds of his outsized topcoat as if his arm is not even there. Her Alec, that sweet boy with stars in his eyes . . . How could this have happened to him?

  “I’m sorry,” Alec says. “All the people, and the trains . . .” His shoulders jerk in a shrug.

  “I’m right here,” June says. She squeezes his arm. “I won’t let go.”

  He nods, but he’s shaking all over, the effort he’s putting into following her almost visible. As gently as she can, she shepherds him onto the platform, then onto the train, holding her breath when he freezes midway through stepping into the carriage. Every moment brings something that makes him flinch—the metallic thud of a compartment door closing, the rattle of chains between the carriages, the shriek of the whistle. When the train rumbles into life, Alec shudders, his jaw clenched so tightly she imagines she can hear his teeth grinding together.

  “We’ll be home soon,” she says as the train emerges onto the rails outside the station.

  Alec turns to her, his eyes searching her face. “I don’t . . .” He pauses.

  “I’ve been staying at your aunt’s cottage,” June says softly. “Getting it ready for you. Mrs. Hubbox has been helping me. So we’ll go home, and then we’ll see if we can suss out what comes next, all right?”

  His gaze clouds when she mentions Constance, and June takes his hands gently into hers, sitting as tight against him as she can. “I’ve got you now, Alec. I’m here.”

  Alec nods, his shoulders loosening. “All right.”

  He’s quiet then, watching her when he’s not eyeing the landscape rolling past outside. When the train emerges into the countryside, he relaxes a bit more.

  “Quite a thing, having a compartment to ourselves,” he says. His leg jitters nervously, and he goes back to looking out the window.

  It’s not much later that an older woman appears in the doorway with a trolley laden with hot beverages, pastries, and sandwiches. Alec regards the trolley hungrily, and June’s heart pangs for him. “Would you like something?”

  “I don’t know,” he says helplessly, and after a moment June realizes he doesn’t know how to choose.

  “Ah, he’s moithered, the poor lad,” the old woman says to June in a lilting Welsh accent. “What about a cup of tea, then?”

  “That would be lovely,” Alec says, his voice soft with relief.

  “Righto,” she says. She bustles about to get them each their tea.

  “A couple of sandwiches also,” June says. “Do you have the cress today?”

  “Gosh,” Alec says. “I haven’t had a proper sandwich . . . I don’t know when.”

  “Two cress,” the trolley attendant says, nodding, and hands the two paper-wrapped sandwiches to June, followed by the cups of tea. She pauses to regard Alec, her lips pursed. “Wo
uld you like something sweet as well?” She points to the simple pastries that occupy the top tier of the trolley. “The sticky buns I do like, but the seedcakes are rather better.”

  “Caraway,” June says to Alec, setting the china teacups and their saucers on the small table that juts out just beneath the window. His eyes light up, and she smiles and asks the woman for two of those as well, thanking her for the recommendation.

  “Glad I am to do it,” the woman says, beaming. “Just a small little thing can help a day.”

  “Indeed it can,” Alec says.

  June thanks her again when she pays for the food. When she’s gone, June sits down across from Alec and lays out the food like a picnic, arranging the sandwiches and cakes. At her elbow, the spoons rattle in the saucers as the train moves along the track. Alec stares at the sandwiches, and her brow furrows. Hoping to encourage him, she picks up the egg and cress sandwich and unwraps it to find better bread than she would have expected, and more butter. “Go on,” she says to Alec with a smile. He pauses and reaches with his left hand, awkwardly clutching the sandwich in the rough vise of his thumb and first two fingers. His right hand stays in his lap like something he’s left behind.

  His eyes close when he bites into it, and for a moment June thinks he’s in pain. But then he swallows and opens his eyes, and she realizes he is swamped with emotion.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” She takes a bite and has a drink of tea.

  Alec nods reverently, eating his sandwich in a series of bites so precise, nearly delicate, that June wonders if he’s trying to keep himself from swallowing it all at one go. It’s only when he turns his focus to the seedcake and the sweet, murky tea that June sees he needs both hands to hold his cup. She understands now how severe the damage to his hands must be—how tangled and scarred his fingers really were. When she notes the furrow between his eyes as he concentrates on his grip, and how steadfastly he seems to be refusing to look at her, she can’t help but wonder if he’s embarrassed or ashamed. Wanting to give him a moment as best she can, June nearly fumbles her own sandwich, and turns her gaze out the window.