The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  I left the document and the window behind and picked up my black petticoat and skirt from the floor.

  Daniel sank back against the sheets. “Are you finally feeling guilty about fucking a German?”

  “Don’t . . .” I shook my head and tugged both skirts up to my waist. “Don’t say that word. It’s ugly.”

  “Which word? Fucking? Or German?”

  “No . . . don’t.”

  “It’s what you’re doing, you know.”

  “I know.”

  I finished getting dressed, and he watched while the ragtime piano filled the empty gaps. I felt as if I’d swallowed a wasp or some sort of other stinging creature that pinched my tongue, burned my throat, and aggravated the guilty spot in my stomach. The pain seared and throbbed worse than ever.

  I fastened the last button of my blouse and headed over to Daniel’s side of the bed. My lips shook, and my voice threatened to crack, but I forced myself to speak.

  “Don’t call yourself an animal anymore,” I said. “And don’t assume I think the worst of you. I know there’s something sick and wrong with our country right now, but don’t make what we’ve done a part of its vileness.”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “I don’t think what we’ve done is vile.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Are you certain about that?”

  I hesitated a moment, but then I nodded.

  “Will you come back again tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “It’s risky.”

  “Why? Because of those APL jackasses?”

  “Because of the chance of me becoming in the family way.”

  “I can’t get you pregnant.”

  “You can’t?”

  He picked at a small wrinkle in the sheets. “No.”

  “Are you quite certain about that?”

  “Something happened. And I can’t.”

  I tucked my blouse into my skirt until the fabric lay smooth and flat against my stomach. “That’s another reason why I’m hesitant to come back again: you have far too many secrets. They make me uncomfortable.”

  “You’re much better off not knowing my secrets.”

  “Then perhaps you should be on your own, Herr Wilhelm Schendel.”

  “Don’t do that.” He reached out and grabbed my hand. “Don’t be cruel. My secrets are all a part of my past. There’s simply no need to discuss them.”

  “But—”

  “They won’t change anything, and they can’t hurt you. What’s done is done.”

  “Are you . . .” I peeked over my shoulder, as if Lucas might actually be standing there in the room with us, eavesdropping on our conversation—and our lust. I shifted back toward Daniel and said in a whisper, “Am I safe with you, Daniel?”

  “Nothing can hurt you here. I swear.” He kissed the back of my hand with a touch that warmed and soothed. “Out there”—he nodded toward the window—“is chaos. In here, it’s paradise. We found paradise, Liebling. But you have to keep coming back to make it stay.”

  I nodded with my lips pressed together. Tears blurred my eyes. “I’m sure I will. You know I will.”

  “Good,” he said, although it sounded like goot, and he slid his fingers out of mine. “I’ll be here.”

  Chapter 11

  The world outside smelled of rain. Beneath the streetlamps the sidewalks glistened with the dampness of a recent drizzle, and the trees dripped and made the world feel a tad cleaner. The jazz band played another song meant for two-stepping, and I heard the unmistakable hiss of a barn owl atop the roof of the bank building I passed.

  I crossed the street and stopped in front of Weiss’s Bakery. Inside the closed and darkened storefront, barely visible in the lack of light, sat the empty glass display counters that used to house cookies, cakes, breads, and pastries with long German names: Franzbrötchen, Spritzkuchen, Streuselkuchen. Before the war, we never thought twice about going into the little cream-colored shop, and I never worried about Helen working for Mr. Weiss—until all the talk started. Until we decided, Yes, these people aren’t like us. Their accents sound dangerous, not charming. Their countrymen back home are heathens and killers, so the ones living here must be the same.

  “Can you come see a picture with me?” Helen had asked me one afternoon just that past July.

  “You know I get headaches whenever I head into town,” I told her, and I almost didn’t go. I saw her bloodshot eyes and the way her red curls hung in a tangled mess beneath her brown cloche, as if she had just squeezed the hat over her head to hide the disarray. But still, I hesitated.

  “It’s important,” she had said, grabbing hold of my arm. “People just searched my apartment. They threw me across my own room when I told them the truth about Mr. Weiss and me. They tore open everything I own. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  And she did. According to her mother, who spoke to my mother, Helen left Buchanan on the first morning train. I hoped—although I never knew for sure—that she made it safely to some faraway destination and forgot all about the ostracized Mr. Weiss, who supposedly failed to buy Liberty Bonds and caused all of her troubles to begin with. No letters from Helen ever arrived, though. She might not have wanted her postmarks traced. She might have needed my help, but I just stayed inside my house, worrying that the walls would collapse and the roof would cave in if I wasn’t there, watching over everyone.

  I blinked at the empty skeleton of the bakery in front of me.

  Daniel was right: paradise hid behind closed doors. Outside, the “Friendliest Town in America” felt cold and ugly and stripped of life. I felt cold and ugly.

  Without warning, an automobile engine roared around the corner. Headlights blared across my face, and my stomach dropped. I turned in the opposite direction and walked at as brisk a pace as possible without looking like I was running. The vehicle rumbled nearer, and I broke into a jog and darted around a corner, nearly slipping on the damp sidewalk. I launched into a full-fledged sprint, and the vehicle careened around the corner behind me and growled at my heels.

  “Ivy!” called a familiar female voice that sounded like Addie’s. “Why on earth are you running away from us?”

  I stopped and turned. Addie and Nela—the bottom of their faces still swathed in gauze masks—peeked out from the windshield of the ambulance trailing behind me. Nela shifted a lever, and the engine sputtered and choked like a hundred-year-old man and died a brisk death. The street fell silent.

  I clutched my chest and bent forward at my waist, and I laughed with relief. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were someone else.”

  “If you didn’t want to help us tonight”—Nela slid out of the driver’s side—“you should have told us. We’ve been looking for you for hours.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I walked toward them. “I thought I said something about needing a short break tonight.”

  Nela snorted. “Our transports would like a break, too, but do you see anyone giving them one?”

  “I know.” I glanced down to the street’s junction with Willow. “There’s just—someone I’ve been worried about.”

  “We know all about that someone.” Addie shifted to her right and dangled her legs out of the side of the ambulance. “Your German lover.”

  “What? What did you just say?” I hurried closer and lowered my voice to a whisper right in front of her. “Who on earth said that I had a lover?”

  “Some man with thick glasses,” said Addie, also in a whisper.

  “You spoke to Lucas?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know his name. We were looking for you and saw the man standing outside of that lodge back there that’s playing jazz. He asked who we were searching for, and we told him.”

  I bit down on my bottom lip, feeling the pinch of my own teeth.

  “Don’t look so frightened, Ivy.” Nela leaned her elbows against the ambulance’s olive hood. “We don’t care that this sweetheart of yours is a German. We just want to fetch you so we can fetch more patients. We�
�ve got to go.”

  “Thank you for not caring about what he is.” I released another sigh. “And look at the two of you, racing through the streets! I’m overjoyed to see that you tried to drive by yourselves. You should have just gone over the tracks and started without me.”

  Nela shook her head. “I’m not driving over those tracks. I need your help.”

  “I’m not even an official volunteer. I don’t have a uniform.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I have a job I need to return to soon. I teach piano lessons to children, and I really should contact my students and let them know I’ve healed and can—”

  “There aren’t going to be any more piano lessons, Ivy,” said Addie, gripping the edge of the seat. “Don’t you see? Nothing is ever going to be the same. Nothing matters but taking the suffering out of their homes and helping them.”

  I shrank back, haunted by the words of the seventeen-year-old girl sitting in front of me. There aren’t going to be any more piano lessons.

  A segment of my soul seemed to physically leave at the thought of music draining away from the world.

  “Please.” Nela softened her voice. “We should go.”

  I nodded, with some reluctance. “But you’ve got to pay attention to how I drive. I might not always be able to be here. Will you try turning the starter crank again?”

  Nela stiffened. “It took me five tries when I used your method earlier tonight.”

  “Just keep practicing exactly as I instructed,” I said. “You won’t get hurt, I promise.”

  Nela huffed a bit, but she climbed out of the ambulance and crouched down into position in front of the grille.

  I rounded the vehicle to the driver’s side and pulled all hand levers into a starting position. Then I turned the coil box switch to the left and called out, “Everything’s ready.”

  Nela turned the crank only twice before the ambulance sparked to life. I cheered, and she cheered, and she leapt into the passenger seat beside Addie.

  “Watch how my feet control the three pedals on the floor,” I said, “and how my hands work the various levers. Especially note how I keep this clutch lever beside my left leg in an upright position to keep the ambulance in neutral. That’ll be helpful when you’re still getting used to the vehicle, and it will keep you from stalling. If there’s time, I’ll let each of you drive for a bit.”

  “There won’t be time,” said Addie, straightening her gray hat.

  “We’ll make time.” I pushed the clutch lever into neutral and increased the RPM by pulling down on the spark advance lever on the left side of the steering column. The ambulance hummed with contentment and cruised down the road.

  “One day,” I added over the loud purr of the motor, “if we finally receive a reprieve from this illness, I’ll take you both to a place that serves jazz and booze and doesn’t care about the location of your home or the color of your skin—or whether or not you stall a stubborn old mule of an ambulance.”

  I steered the vehicle around a bend to the right and guided us to Lincoln Street and the railroad tracks.

  DURING OUR SEARCH for influenza signs on the front doors of neighborhood houses, I made the mistake of passing Polish Hall. Men in plain work clothes and dark caps carried three covered bodies out the front door. My eyes couldn’t stop looking at the stretchers and the white sheets shaped around human forms.

  The men loaded the dead into the Halloran’s Dry Goods delivery wagon, as if carting away unwanted furniture.

  I kept driving.

  We delivered a young Polish priest to Nela’s house after finding him slumped in the doorway of the cathedral. Nela’s home had grown quite warm and bright, despite the influx of patients recuperating within those walls. Mrs. O’Conner and Liliana helped with the transportation of the priest up the staircase, while Benjie played records on the Victrola again, entertaining a group of five children, both black and white. The little ones sat in front of the fireplace with blankets wrapped around their little bodies, and a sentimental song that might have been a Henry Burr piece rose into the air along with the flames crackling in the hearth.

  “Do you like jazz?” I called to Benjie after shutting the front door.

  He sauntered toward me with his hands in his pockets, his eyes bright. “I adore jazz, miss. It’s life.”

  “Oh, I absolutely agree with that statement.” I put my hands on my hips and sized up his appearance. “My, you look much improved. So healthy.”

  “I told you I was already on the mend. I just wouldn’t have lasted in Bloody Hall, as I call that wretched place.”

  “Well, if you get a chance to go out for a bit—if you need a little more music to cheer you up”—I gestured with my thumb over my shoulder, toward the front door—“I highly recommend heading to the Masonic Lodge in town. A band plays there every night, and they don’t give a fig about the flu. Or race.”

  “They don’t?”

  “No.” I smiled. “They’re celebrating life. Head over there when you’re strong enough. They’ll welcome you there.”

  “I will. Thank you, miss.”

  Addie and Nela’s thick Red Cross boots clomped down the stairs at a speed meant for hurrying, and so we swept back into the darkness of night.

  MY FELLOW VOLUNTEERS refused to sit for driving lessons, even as daylight glowed above the flat fields to the east, beyond the towering mills that still seemed asleep. Not a single puff of smoke streamed from the stacks reaching up to the awakening sky.

  “The time we’re wasting fooling around with pedals and levers,” said Addie, “could be spent fetching one more patient.”

  Nela nodded and shifted in the seat beside me. “Let’s fetch one more.”

  “But . . .”

  “Just one more,” said Nela. “Please, Ivy, we’ve got to help. Think of the people alone in their homes, without a single doctor to check on them.”

  And so we indeed fetched yet another suffering patient—a young Russian girl who had just lost her mother to a wicked bout of pneumonia brought on by the flu. I helped in a blur of rushing and lifting and calming, and I prayed that such nights of ferrying the ill would end soon. I prayed that I, along with everyone else left on the crumbling earth, could actually head into the world and live.

  Truly live.

  Chapter 12

  I returned to May’s house and heard her whimper behind the closed door of her bedroom, and I swear by all that’s holy, her sounds matched the labored breathing of flu victims struggling not to drown in the thick black fluid swimming in their lungs. I inched toward her bedroom door and leaned my head against the wood to hear better.

  “Oh, Lord,” she cried with a guttural moan. She gasped for air and called for the Lord again, and all I could think about was the sight of children bleeding from their eyes in Polish Hall and all those bodies traveling out to delivery wagons underneath bedsheets.

  Without a knock of warning, I opened her bedroom door.

  May, naked and sitting upright on her bed, gave a start and whipped her head toward me. A hand reached up to her bare right elbow.

  Eddie Dover sat up from beneath her and stared me straight in the eye.

  Eddie Dover—dead—but there.

  “Oh, God!” I slammed the door shut and backed into the table that held Eddie’s photograph, knocking the frame to the floor. The glass cracked down the middle. “Oh, God.”

  May called my name from within her room, but nothing on earth could have persuaded me to stay inside that house a moment longer. I turned and bolted.

  Outside, the sun bled red into the eastern sky. I followed the brightening light of dawn down Willow Street, past other quaint and seemingly normal houses with pretty mailboxes out front, and then I marched beneath the white awnings of the business district. Shopkeepers unlocked their front doors and raised their American flags. On the corner of Lincoln and Willow, a newspaper boy set up a stack of the morning edition, and I caught the top headline: ALLIES GAIN VICTORIES
IN THE BATTLE OF ST. QUENTIN CANAL. Another Red Cross ambulance—also manned by female volunteers in gray hats and coats—puttered northward on Farnsworth Street, toward the main hospital.

  Someone is about to die was all I could think. Harbinger spirits. Someone is going to die.

  I threw open Daniel’s boarded-up door, which set off the bell hanging above.

  “Daniel?” I called over the jingling. “Daniel, are you all right?”

  He stirred upstairs. Footsteps hurried down the back staircase.

  “What is it?” He bustled out from the workshop with his hair uncombed and buttoned up a striped nightshirt. “What is wrong?”

  “I had a terrible premonition someone’s about to die.”

  “No, go get some rest.” He walked over and cupped a cold hand around my right cheek. “Christ, you worked all night, didn’t you?”

  “You’re all right, then?” I grabbed the front of his shirt between my fingers. “You don’t feel ill or—?”

  “Rest, Ivy. You’re wearing yourself thin. You’ll collapse.”

  “It’s going to be my mother, then.” I slipped away from his touch. “I should have never left her.”

  “Ivy.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  I swung his door open and left.

  A MILE OUTSIDE OF TOWN, I reached the graveled country road that led to our unassuming white farmhouse where Mama’s side of the family had resided ever since the 1870s. Our home looked so empty sitting there, alone on endless fields sprouting shoots of winter wheat. Our nearest neighbors lived a half mile to the south, well beyond the long row of spruces planted to protect the crops from winds.

  The closer I got to our property, the more I thought of my dear Emily Dickinson again.

  I years had been from home,

  And now, before the door,

  I dared not open, lest a face

  I never saw before

  Stare vacant into mine

  And ask my business there.

  “My business, —just a life I left

  Was such still dwelling there?”