I placed my arm over his shoulders. “Of course not.”
“Well then, let’s get started,” Levi said, moving to start the fire.
“The only problem I see, and it’s a pretty big problem,” I said, causing Levi to pause, “is that there is no way we can completely straighten the propellers. Even slightly warped, they could cause my plane to vibrate, and if it’s too much vibration, it’ll rip my engine apart.”
Levi chewed the inside of his cheek, contemplating the scenario, and then said, “I can’t promise you we can make them perfect, and it’s a risk, but what other choice do you have, Charles? It’s this or nothing.”
The thought of falling out of the sky for a second time did not appeal to me. I paced back and forth while I weighed the pros and cons. Inevitably, I came to the same conclusion as Levi. I stopped pacing and blew out a breath. “Okay, show me what you can do.”
We worked tirelessly throughout the day. We hammered and pounded on the propeller blades until I thought my arms would fall off. It was hard work and part of me was grateful for it because it kept my mind occupied. I had a simple goal – to get home. Levi didn’t ask me about Sophie after I’d spoken briefly about her the night before, something else I was grateful for. I suppose he realized I wanted to keep her to myself for the most part and I figured he was trying to be respectful of that.
We had probably been working about five hours or so when Maikel, who had been working the field by himself, came running inside the barn. “Papa, we have company!”
Levi and I stopped what we were doing. “Who is it?” Levi asked.
Maikel’s eyes drifted over to me. I still had the hammer in my hand, suspended in the air mid-swing. “They’re looking for you,” he said.
“Who’s looking for me?”
“The Germans.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” Sophie asked.
She was letting me walk her home after her shift. Well, she walked; I hobbled, although I had gotten pretty good at the crutches thing.
“You smile like you have a deep, dark secret,” I said. “Like you’re bursting to let others in on it.” She stopped mid-stride, and I saw an opportunity to get close to her. I bent towards her and whispered in her ear, “Do you have a secret, Sophie?”
A hearty laugh erupted from her. She wasn’t one of those girls who giggled quietly. When Sophie found something funny she laughed from somewhere deep inside her and she let it out in rich, beautiful tones.
“Heavens no,” she said. “No one would ever trust me with a secret.”
“No? Why is that?”
“I can’t keep anything a secret. I don’t have that much self-control.” She looked at me with bright eyes and an undercurrent of mischief. “Don’t ever tell me anything you wouldn’t want anyone else to know, Charlie. Consider yourself warned.” She pointed to a wooden bench along the sidewalk. “Let’s take a break for a minute. We still have a couple more blocks to go and I know you must be getting tired.”
I was, but I didn’t want to admit it. “I’m all right.”
“We’re taking a break,” she insisted. “Don’t argue or I won’t let you walk me home again.”
I smiled at that. “I guess I’m following your orders then.”
She patted the seat beside her and I sat, resting my crutches on the other side of me.
“So,” she said.
“So,” I repeated. We both seemed to be searching for what to say next and apparently we figured it out at the same time because together we said, “What do you–”
Then again we said in unison, “Sorry…you go...I’ll start...”
“Oh for crying out loud,” Sophie said. “Are we starting and finishing each other’s sentences now?”
“It would seem so.”
“Well, ladies first,” she said.
I gestured for her to continue. “Be my guest.”
She settled herself against the bench. “Tell me something, Charlie. What do you do when you’re not hanging around the café?”
I leaned back, making myself comfortable and smiled. “I like that.”
“Like what?”
“That you call me Charlie. No one has ever called me that. I thought I would hate it if anyone ever did. I don’t, not when you say it.”
She looked disappointed.
“What?” I asked.
The corners of her mouth lifted into a semi-grin. “I was hoping you would hate it.”
A laugh bubbled up inside of me so I let it out, sounding loud against the quiet backdrop.
“I kinda figured that. I think that’s why I love it.”
She huffed and crossed her arms.
“What? Do I win a round? You wanted to irritate me and you didn’t. Ha! One point for Charlie!”
“Oh hush. You’ve won nothing. Answer my question.”
Feeling good about my win, I decided to let it go and bask in my victory later. “I’m on furlough until my leg heals. As soon as I’m out of this cast I’ll have some rehab to do.”
“And then what?” Sophie asked
“And then, hopefully, I get to fly again.”
“So you’ll be going back to war?”
“That’s the plan.”
Sophie worried her bottom lip and for the longest time she wouldn’t look at me. Then she said, “Break’s over. Finish walking me home?”
I was afraid I had upset her, and because I didn’t want to broach the subject again…the talk of war…I let the subject fade away into the misty evening. The rest of our walk was quiet and my victory from earlier was long forgotten. When we reached a white house with blue shutters she said, “This is me.”
Her father was sitting on the porch. He stood when he saw us. “Hi, honey,” he said.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“This is Charlie. He walked me home.”
He walked down the front steps and met us where their white picket fence met the sidewalk and reached over to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you. Charlie, is it?”
I shook his hand. “Yes, sir.”
He noticed my uniform, which I always wore when I ventured out. “Pilot?”
“Yes, sir.”
He pointed to my leg. “What happened?”
“A flak burst, sir. I caught shrapnel while escorting our bombers over Germany.”
“I see. How bad is it?”
“Well, three surgeries later, I’m doing all right.”
He nodded in understanding while Sophie stared at my leg. “You didn’t tell me you had three surgeries,” she said.
“It’s no big deal. I’ll be good as new in no time.”
For a minute, her father looked between the two of us, and then announced he was going inside. “Well, I have some papers to grade. It was nice meeting you.”
“You too, sir.” Once her father was out of earshot I asked, “Papers to grade?”
“My father is a professor. He teaches history at the university.” I was getting ready to say something else when she blurted, “Well, thank you for walking me home. I need to go inside.”
“Have I upset you?”
“No. I – look, Charlie, you seem like a sweet guy. Really. But I can’t do this with you.”
“Do what with me?”
“This,” she said, waving her finger back and forth between us. “I can’t worry about you when you go back off to war. I mean, I won’t let…” She cursed under her breath. “I have dreams, you know. And they don’t involve me sitting around waiting and worrying all the time. I can’t do that. It’s best we end this now.”
She unlatched the gate to their fence. I grabbed her arm. “Wait.”
“Charlie–”
“No, let me say something.”
Keeping her back to me she said, “I can’t–”
“I don’t have anyone, Sophie.” She turned and looked at me. “I lost my best friend, and it was my...” My voice broke and I found it impossible to ke
ep looking her in the eye, so I looked down and flicked a rock with the toe of my crutch, shaking my head while I gathered my composure. “I blame myself,” I muttered.
“Charlie...”
“I need someone who will care about me if I don’t come back. I need someone to care about me, Sophie.” My eyes skirted over her head and up towards the moon. I closed my eyes and quietly said again, “I don’t have anyone and I need someone. I desperately need that someone to be you.”
She placed her hand on mine. “Why?” she asked softly.
I lowered my eyes to hers. “Because…I think you need me too.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t think it. I feel it.”
Sophie let me walk her home every day after that. We spoke casually most of the time, never getting too personal, and I was okay with that. I learned Sophie’s telltale clues over time. Like, when she was nervous, her left eye would twitch. When she was excited, she hummed. When she was mad, well, you needed to get out of her way because she was a pistol. I even started referring to her as my little spitfire. She absolutely hated it. I absolutely loved it.
I learned other things about her, too. Even though Sophie was only eighteen years old to my twenty-two, she was mature and spoke with quiet sophistication. She had dreams of becoming a writer someday, and she wanted to become a schoolteacher.
Every new thing I learned about Sophie only reinforced why I had been attracted to her from the start.
I was falling for her.
She was falling for me too, although she worked at hiding it. I knew, though. It was the subtle things that I picked up on. I would be sitting at the café reading a newspaper, look up, and catch her staring. She would instantly look away, embarrassed. At times, when I would speak to her, she would watch my lips move. I loved those moments best because I got to say, “Eyes up here, sweetheart.” Her whole face would burn a nice scarlet color and sometimes that earned me a smack in the head with her dishcloth before she walked away. Other times it was simply the way she would listen to me, like I was the most interesting person in the world to her.
I wondered if I was being fair. I knew Sophie was trying to maintain an emotional distance. She thought that if she allowed her heart to fall with mine it would hurt her more when I left. She didn’t need to tell me that, I could read between the lines. And her reluctance to get involved with me was proof enough. Sometimes I felt guilty for coming into her life, though not guilty enough to leave her. I was strong in most things, however, with Sophie, I was weak. Weak in the knees, that is, making it impossible for me to ever walk away.
We developed a routine, Sophie and I. We would stop and sit at the same bench on the way to her house and we would chat. We chatted for hours some days. Some days we only sat in silence. I often wondered on those days what she was thinking about. As for me, I thought about simple things, like how it would feel to hold her hand. If I tried would she retreat? Would she let me? I wasn’t sure, and to be honest, I wasn’t ready to. I wanted the cast off my leg first, so I could hold her hand properly while I walked her home. That’s also the reason I hadn’t taken her on a second date yet. I needed to be completely healed and able to run like the wind in case she took the notion of running. And something told me that if Sophie ran, she would want me to chase her. And I definitely would.
Until that moment came, I had to be satisfied with what she gave me. Company. Friendship. And most of all, hope. Hope for a future, that until then, I wasn’t sure I even wanted.
The days ticked by the same way they always had. A week later the cast came off, and with it, the proverbial ball and chain that had been weighing me down came off as well. I felt lighter, less burdened.
“How does it feel?” Dr. Amberson asked, bending and extending my leg in slow, meticulous motions. “Any pain?”
“No. Just feels itchy.”
“All right. Let’s get you on your feet. Easy…take it slow.”
Steadying myself, I put my weight on both legs. It felt unnatural at first and when I took my first steps, I did so with hesitation.
“I feel like a toddler,” I admitted to my doctor. “Like I’m learning to walk for the first time.”
Dr. Amberson handed me one crutch. He was the specialist I had been assigned to and the one who had performed my surgeries. “Put some of your weight on this and take small steps.”
I did as instructed and practiced the art of walking for a good ten minutes until I felt confident that I could do it without the aid of a crutch.
In a stern voice Doc said, “Now, I don’t want you overdoing it.”
“What’s overdoing it?”
“Too much too soon, Charles. You have screws in your leg. You’re still healing. It will take time to get your range and motion back. I want you walking and exercising in small increments throughout the day and I want you resting in between.”
“Sure.”
Doc went over a list of exercises for me to do each day, and by the time I left his office, I felt like a new man, unencumbered and determined to bounce back in record time.
In the following days, the strength in my leg improved, although I had a noticeable limp. Still, I was moving through rehabilitation like a champ and had recently been assigned a desk job for the short term. Combat crew replacement. Pretty self-explanatory. Whenever we needed to replace a pilot or rotate one out, I helped with the logistics of getting our men where they needed to be as quickly as possible.
I didn’t hate my new job. I was glad to be serving in any capacity I could, although on a base level, I was bored out of my mind. Pushing a pencil around all day did not do it for me. However, when I walked inside the café and saw the girl I could never stop thinking about all other thoughts drifted away.
I waited for Sophie’s shift to end and then I walked her home like all the times before, only this time was different. The air felt charged, magical, and spiced with exhilarating freshness. It seeped into the pores of my skin and I felt rejuvenated. It was the oddest thing. I think Sophie felt it too, because while we walked with our arms linked, she hummed.
“Smile.”
“What?” Sophie asked.
“You’re humming Smile by Charlie Chaplin.”
“I was? I didn’t realize.”
“Is it the song you like or the fact that it was written by someone who shares my name?”
“Well, it would have to be the name, of course,” Sophie said, poking me in the side. “Do you have family, Charlie?”
I chuckled because Sophie was like a ping pong ball at times, bouncing from one topic to the next without a break in between.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“You are. You switch gears faster than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“If you can’t keep up then say so.”
“I can keep up.”
“Good. Then answer the question.” She poked me again.
We walked a little further before I answered. “My mother died when I was eleven. My father raised me.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly.
“My dad and I, we did okay.”
“Does your dad live nearby?”
“Nah, he lives in Oklahoma.”
“Then why are you here in Tennessee and not there?”
“The type of injury I had required a specialist who happens to be here. I got lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah,” I said with a wink. “If I didn’t need a specialist then I never would have met you.”
She shook her head and chuckled quietly. The sun was beginning to set, and the orange glow was doing amazing things to Sophie’s features. I found myself unable to look away.
“I feel like I’m leading the blind,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
That jewel of a smile that was uniquely hers showcased itself. “If you don’t start watching where you’re going you’re gonna have another broken leg. Eyes in front, Charlie.”
“I’m mu
lti-tasking. I have great peripheral vision. No need to worry about me.”
She scoffed like the idea was preposterous. “I’m worried about being seen with the guy who trips over his own two feet because he wasn’t paying attention. Crowds would gather, people would stare. I’m only trying to spare you the humiliation of it all.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you.”
“I thought so.” She squeezed my arm. “Look at that.” She was admiring the sun setting on the horizon, looking at the sky as though she were seeing it for the first time. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered.
I wasn’t looking at the horizon. I was looking at her. “Sure is.”
“What’s it like to fly, Charlie?”
“I’m not sure I can describe it really.”
“Then tell me what you love about it.”
I pondered that for a moment. I had never tried to put my love of flying into words. It was always something that I felt, mostly because no one had ever asked me before.
My eyes traveled upwards where blues, grays, oranges, reds, and yellows decorated the skyline like a beautiful canvas, an artist’s masterpiece. “Up there is like another world where you can escape the one below. Everything is simultaneously larger and smaller. When you look down, the Earth beneath you seems small. But when you look towards the vast open sky all around, you realize that there is so much more to living than the little boxes we create for ourselves. Anything seems possible when I’m soaring above the clouds. The view offers a unique perspective we’re not granted with our feet on the ground.” My gaze traveled back to Sophie and I offered an apologetic shrug. “I don’t know if that answers your question, but it’s the best I can do. I don’t think it was meant to be explained, only experienced.”
“When you put it that way, I can understand why you love it.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. She nuzzled into me while we walked, resting her head on my arm. “This is nice.”
Her body was warm against mine and she smelled of jasmine and vanilla. And that’s when I felt it. That moment of utter awareness when your heart, mind, body, and soul agree on the exact same thing at the exact same time.
I, Charles Edward Hudson, was falling in love.
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