The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  With a squeal of rubber, Nela threw the ambulance into gear and launched us over the tracks as if shooting us to the moon. Wind tore through our hair and split across our faces, and the shimmering metal rails fell into the distance behind us.

  Nela kept on driving with reckless abandon to the south side of town, and at the top of her lungs she sang out, “‘Mind the music and the step / And with the girls be handy.’ Cholera! That was fun!”

  WE DIDN’T FIND ANY red and white influenza notices hanging on front doors that night. Nela drove the ambulance up and down the lamplit streets of houses clustered throughout Southside, but all indicators of the flu seemed to have lifted from the earth. Few lights shone behind windows. Less clothing hung from the web of lines crisscrossing the alleyways and side yards. An unnerving emptiness and silence inhabited the entire region.

  I scooted to the edge of the seat in case I had simply missed the signs because of my new center position in the vehicle.

  “Where are the notices?” I asked. “I can’t honestly believe people stopped getting sick that quickly. Can you?”

  Addie shook her head. “I told you before, those influenza signs are as embarrassing as all heck. They tried to make us post one on our door right before we lost my sister Florence. Mama said it made her feel dirty as a dog.” Addie rocked against me to the beat of the ambulance puttering through the sleeping neighborhoods. “I bet people are pulling the signs down to keep their pride.”

  Nela steered us onto a new road, where the wheels crunched across crisp autumn leaves scattered across dirt and gravel.

  “I suppose we have to hope people will hear us driving by,” I said, “and come outside to wave us down.”

  “That’s not good enough,” muttered Nela under her breath.

  “How else are we supposed to find people, then?”

  Neither of them answered my question. I couldn’t answer it myself. An air of defeat settled over all of us in that chilly, open driving compartment.

  We crept through the streets for close to a half hour, and during that entire time we came across only one sign, posted on the door of a tiny wooden structure almost small enough to be a milk shed. The home sat on the southwesternmost edge of Southside, just before the land opened up to fields of autumn crops. Dark outlines of pumpkins lay just beyond a rusted collection of harrows and plows.

  No one answered the front door. The knob wouldn’t budge when Nela jiggled it. We got back into the ambulance with wilted postures and frustrated breaths, and we pressed onward.

  “Maybe we should just get out of the ambulance”—Nela steered us back onto the first street we had scanned—“and go door to door, knocking.”

  “No!” said Addie. “Are you crazy? It’s the middle of the night. We’ll wake up both the sick and the healthy. No one needs that right now.”

  “There is a daytime set of volunteers that drives down here, isn’t there?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Nela gave a brusque nod. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not needed right now. The flu doesn’t care about night and day.”

  “We had a fine doctor in our neighborhood.” Addie sank back into the seat and crossed her arms over her gray coat. “Before he answered the call for medical help overseas. Stupid, selfish war.”

  “Benjie’s father?” I asked.

  Addie nodded. “He would have been one of the first to help here in Southside. People of all colors trusted him.”

  “This is madness.” Nela slammed her foot onto the brake, and the ambulance skidded to a stop—miraculously, without stalling. “People must be lying in their homes, desperate for help.”

  “Should we transport more of the sick out of Polish Hall?” I asked. “Like we did with Benjie?”

  Both women spun their heads my way as if I’d just proposed carting the sick to Germany.

  “We volunteered to fetch people from their homes,” said Nela. “We’ve got to keep doing what they sent us out to do.”

  “I sort of feel . . .” I buttoned up my coat against the cold. “I just . . . I don’t think driving around all night in the dark is going to help anyone. I feel we should either relieve the emergency hospital of their work and take people to your house, where the recovery rate seems high. Or else stop for the night.”

  “We can’t stop.” Nela released the emergency brake and set us driving again. “And we can’t show up at a hospital and steal their patients.”

  “It’s not even a real hospital,” I said. “It’s more of a desperation ward. A ‘We Don’t Know How to Properly Take Care of Our Residents Here in Buchanan’ Ward.”

  “We’re not even supposed to be driving this truck,” said Addie.

  I swiveled toward her with a shift of my knees. “What?”

  “Addie!” hissed Nela, and she stopped the truck again. “You were never supposed to tell her that. I warned you—”

  “She might as well know the truth after coming this far with us.” Addie sank back into the seat, her arms still locked across her chest. “I’m not even a registered Red Cross nurse. This is my sister’s uniform.”

  “But . . . what?” I turned back to Nela. “Have you been stealing this ambulance every night?”

  “No, it’s not quite like that . . .” Nela unbuttoned a pocket on the breast of her coat. “I’m a card-carrying Red Cross volunteer with hygiene courses and hospital volunteer hours completed. Liliana had trained to drive ambulances in the hopes of volunteering overseas.” She pulled out a Red Cross card and shoved it at me. I saw an official Red Cross stamp and certification that referred to her as “Mrs. Fred Stone.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Stone?” I asked.

  “Me.” Nela grabbed the card out of my hand and wedged it back into her pocket. “I told you the first night I met you, my husband is American. I’m not lying about who I am, and I didn’t steal this ambulance.”

  “Then why did Addie just say—?”

  “Liliana and I answered the call for help at the end of September, after watching people suffer without anyone coming to save them. She fell sick one night when we were on duty, and I needed to drive her. No one else was there with me except for Addie—this crazy girl who was mad as the devil from losing her sister and desperate to help. So we jumped into the ambulance and went.”

  “No one knows you’re driving this truck every night?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter!” Nela slammed her hands against the steering wheel and caused Addie and me to jump. “People need help. I don’t even care that this seventeen-year-old girl hasn’t had one single hour of hospital training. I don’t care that her skin is as black as coal. She’s strong enough to carry a stretcher. She’s willing to walk through Southside muck to save people’s lives. That’s all that matters right now, Ivy. Nothing else matters.”

  I sat stock-still and opened my mouth to mutter drivel about the American Protective League watching out for all types of subversive activity, but before I could utter a word, Nela jumped out of the ambulance with the motor still running, and marched toward a two-story house beside us that looked like nothing more than a home-shaped shadow.

  “Don’t wake them up.” Addie leapt out of the truck and ran after Nela. “Stop it, Nela! If we make them mad, they’ll report us. We won’t be allowed to help.”

  “Let’s go to Polish Hall and ask if they want our help.” I scooted over to the driver’s side. “I’ll drive again so if anyone catches us . . .”

  “I don’t give a damn if they catch me,” said Nela, shaking herself free of Addie. “They need to know we don’t have enough care down here. We need at least two more emergency hospitals and care for children with sick parents. We need doctors and translators and medicine. We need a way to convince people hiding in their homes to seek help when they need it. We need Americans like you to push the high and mighty to open their blind eyes and see us struggling down here.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Nela. I swear I will. But, please, for now, let’s start by checking on Polish Hall. Let’s
ask the volunteers who are knee-deep in assisting the ill what they need. There’s nothing else we can do out here in the dark.”

  “Come on.” Addie took Nela by the hand and led her toward the ambulance. The hems of their gray Red Cross skirts swayed below their knees.

  Nela came to a stop beside me at the driver’s-side door. The smell of gasoline from the Ford began to bother me, as did the whole difficult venture.

  “We volunteered to fetch people from their homes,” said Nela again. “We’ve got to keep doing what they sent us out to do.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remain calm. I wanted to tell her again how useless we seemed, puttering around in the dark, not knowing where to find patients, but the entire conversation seemed circular and endless.

  “Fine.” I opened my eyes. “I’ll drive for another half hour. And then I’ll drop you back off at your house, where patients are already lying, in need of your help. Will you promise to only be out here for a half hour?”

  She screwed up her face and shook from head to toe, and I worried for a moment that something might not be right with her head. Maybe she experienced skull-splitting moments of terror similar to the ones I used to endure whenever I attempted to leave home.

  “All right.” She relaxed her shoulders. “We drive for another half hour. And then I help Liliana with the people in my house.”

  “Good.” I grabbed hold of the steering wheel. “Jump inside. Let’s get going.”

  WE MANAGED TO FIND one additional influenza sign during that half hour. We knocked on a thin wooden door, and no one answered, so Nela—more determined than ever to discover someone to transport—handed me her end of the stretcher and pushed her way inside.

  Another darkened house. More smells of sickness and dirty diapers. Addie and I carried the stretcher upstairs, behind Nela, and we poked our heads into the rooms of the sleeping.

  How frightening it would be to wake up, I thought, delirious with a fever, to find two masked females and an exhausted American woman peeking into one’s bedroom.

  We roamed the hallways and scanned each bed of sleepers, but only one person stood out: a girl around the age of eleven, with auburn braids. She huddled in a dim corner of a hallway in a nightgown, her bare toes sticking out from beneath the frayed white hem.

  “Hello.” Nela hurried over to her and embarked upon a few questions, all spoken in Polish.

  The girl stared up at her with enormous dark eyes that made me shiver. Something about the child’s lost expression and motionless body gave me gooseflesh and set my heart galloping in my chest. I remembered May sitting over her Ouija board, saying to me in her calm and steady voice, Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died.

  “Is she alive?” I asked before I could even think how odd my question sounded.

  Nela peeked back at me. “Of course. She’s just ill and frightened.” Nela spoke in Polish again, and the girl shook her head and pushed her away.

  Addie lowered the front end of the stretcher a few feet from the child. “Tell her we have music at your house, Nela. Tell her there are other sick children there, and they’ll want to play with her when she feels better.”

  Nela translated Addie’s words with encouraging little nods of her head, and the girl eased her stiff posture against the wall. Finally she spoke, also in Polish.

  Nela turned on her heels toward Addie and me. “She’ll come, but the stretcher scares her. She’d rather walk.”

  “Is she able?” I asked.

  “She says she is.”

  Addie and I picked up the stretcher and carried it away, while Nela slid her arm behind the girl’s shoulders and helped her to a standing position.

  “Are there any others here who are sick?” Addie called over her shoulder.

  I heard more exchanges in Polish before Nela answered, “She says the others are recuperating.”

  We lugged the empty stretcher down the unlit staircase, careful not to bang the walls or walk with too loud a tread.

  I backed out the front door and asked, “How is that poor girl going to ride in the back with the stretcher if it frightens her?”

  “I can ride back there,” said Addie. “I don’t mind. She can ride in front.”

  “Absolutely not!” I stopped in my tracks. “If you haven’t contracted the flu yet, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a compartment where we carry the sick.”

  “I’m near the sick all the time, and I’m doing just fine.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see where I was going and heard someone call the name “Wendy Darling.”

  Across the street a figure in an army tunic and breeches stood beneath a lamp and smoked a cigarette.

  Billy.

  “No!” I dropped my side of the stretcher, and the handles crashed against the sidewalk.

  “What’s happening?” asked Addie.

  “No, no, no!” I crouched on the ground and covered my ears, closed my eyes, shook from head to toe.

  “What is it?” Nela’s Red Cross boots clomped over to me, and I heard the shuffle of the girl’s bare feet beside her. “What is wrong?”

  “Will you look across the street”—I stayed on the ground with my hands pressed against the sides of my head—“and tell me if you see a United States soldier smoking a cigarette beneath that lamp.”

  “There’s a training camp—”

  “I know there’s a training camp not more than ten miles away, but this soldier looked familiar to me.”

  “Your brother?” asked Addie.

  “Please, tell me if you see him.”

  No one answered for a moment, which made me tremble all the harder.

  “Well?”

  “I see no one,” said Nela.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Look for yourself. No one is standing under that lamp.”

  With utmost caution, I stretched myself back up to a standing position and shifted toward the street.

  He was gone.

  “Go home.” Nela nudged my arm. “Your eyes are looking—how did you say it? ‘Bleary’? I remember that hedge you killed the last time you were like this.”

  “But . . . you’re all still working so hard. All those people at your house . . .”

  “You going home to rest will give us room to put the girl in the front seat,” suggested Addie.

  “Let me at least . . .” I grabbed up my end of the stretcher. “Let me help you put this back in the ambulance. I don’t . . .” I glanced back at the empty streetlamp where I thought I’d seen Billy. “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t see them. I really do.”

  Addie and I returned to the back of the ambulance and slid the stretcher inside the dark compartment that smelled of sickness and damp canvas.

  “Go”—Addie tapped my shoulder—“before Nela changes her mind and gives you any guilt. We know where to find you if we desperately need you again.”

  “But—”

  “Go! This isn’t where you need to be right now.”

  I turned and left, and the knife blade of guilt tried to dig its way back into my gut, but I pushed it away as best as I could.

  Chapter 18

  I walked through the midnight streets on my own with my arms clasped around my torso. The echoes of my footsteps ricocheted off the Southside houses and sounded as though a second pair of feet traveled through Buchanan with me, and I worried I’d hear Billy’s voice again, calling to me, Wendy Darling.

  From the eaves of one of the homes, another barn owl hissed—a disturbing noise akin to leaking gas. Across the street, a couple argued on their front porch in Russian, and their tension sliced straight through me. I pressed onward, glancing over my shoulder every half minute. Thankfully, no one stepped out into the road behind me, but that didn’t stop me from checking with obsessive regularity.

  On the northern side of the railroad tracks, the music of the jazz band enlivened the slumbering businesses lined in their neat and organized grid of brick and stone. The sound sizzled like stat
ic across my skin. The piano beckoned. Seduced. It tempted me to turn toward the direction of Daniel and the Masonic Lodge.

  Don’t be a stranger, Ivy sweetheart, I remembered Ruth Sellman calling to me across the dance floor. Next time, wear your dancing shoes and stay for a while.

  I turned west on Willow, however, ignoring the pull of music and rapture, and continued onward until I reached May’s house.

  My cheeks warmed with shame. I stared up at the dormer window that belonged to my new room in the attic and thought back to the man lying below May on her bed. My brain now could not convince my eyes that they had genuinely viewed Eddie Dover. A fair-haired man had lain with May, it’s true, but, honestly, Eddie wasn’t the only blond male who ever graced that part of the world.

  I still carried my key in my coat pocket, but I found the front door unlocked, just as Daniel’s front door often sat free of any protection—which deepened my concern over Buchanan residents’ naïve trust in their neighbors.

  No lights lit the front room, but my eyes adjusted to darkness after my trek through the nighttime streets. With my upper body stiff and my lungs tight, I managed to steal across the house, past the closed doorway of May’s silent bedroom, and up the staircase.

  I navigated my way through all of May and Eddie’s belongings on the attic floor, lifting my knees high in the air as though wading through mud, and reached for the cold base of the gold lamp standing next to the bed. I pulled a chain and clicked on the light.

  A surprise awaited me.

  Across the white ruffles of the bedspread lay a pair of human-sized butterfly wings made of shimmering periwinkle fabric. Someone—May, I assumed—had sewn little jeweled bracelets to the tops of the wings so that the costume could be slipped over one’s arms to be worn. A note rested on top of the creation:

  Where did you fly off to, little butterfly?

  I picked up the small piece of white paper and pressed my hand against my forehead to dim another wave of humiliation.

  “Well?” asked a voice from behind me.

  I spun around, finding May at the top of the attic stairs, dressed in the red silk robe I remembered from before. She wore her hair down, and her thick motion-picture star curls fell to her waist.