by Bryan Young
Perhaps I needed to give it to someone else to have my luck renewed.
I’d clutched it tightly in my palm all night, waking with the teeth of it pressed red into deep impressions on the flesh of my hand.
After the doctor had taken my cast off and pronounced me fit to leave, I found myself standing over Sara’s station. She sat there with her back to me, folding clean bandages and rags from a laundry bag and placing them neatly on her table.
I took a breath and softened my voice. “I’m leaving today.”
“The doctor told me,” she said, careful not to turn her head to me as she spoke.
“Sara,” I said softly, “What’s wrong?”
“What makes you think something is wrong?” she said, keeping her head turned away from me. Was she crying?
“You won’t even look at me.”
She stifled a noise that I thought might have been a sniffle. But she offered no verbal response.
I made my voice small to match how I felt. “I think I know what’s stopping you…”
“Stopping me from what, Robert?”
“Listening to the voice of your heart.” I remember feeling instantly stupid the moment I said those seven small words. Perhaps they were accurate, but it was the most awkward and clumsy thing I could have said. “You’ve said you’re afraid of getting hurt once more. I know you made your secret promise, but it wouldn’t be like that.”
She pressed two halves of a bleached white bandage together and slammed it onto the top of her growing pile. “And what do you know of it, Monsieur Preston?”
I held LeBeau’s cog tighter, balled up in my fist. I could tell it held its charm because it gave me the strength to say what I felt I had to. “I know your heart overflows with kindness to everyone and I shouldn’t use that as an excuse to feel special. But you’ve sparked something in me in the time we’ve known each other and I truly believe that I’ve sparked something in you.”
She stopped folding her rags, taking in my words.
“I know you would never do anything to betray his memory. And I know you would never doing anything that would put you once more into the position that ended that relationship. But that’s not what I’m asking. You’ve talked to the doctor as much as I have, and LeBeau and Renault. The war is as over for me as it’s going to get, and we both know it. I’m not going to hurt you and you aren’t going to lose me.”
She swiveled her body slowly in my direction, revealing eyes wet with the beginnings of tears. “You can’t make that promise, Robert.”
“I will,” I told her, steadfast in what I had assumed was my undying love for her. “I promise you won’t lose me.”
But no matter how much I promised, she couldn’t trust that sentiment any more than I could. I could get ordered right back to the front at any minute. Or a German sympathizer could walk in the door of whatever place I was haunting and end things with the shot of a gun or the flick of a knife. Or a bomb could fall through the roof and strike me down in an instant.
The only way I’d be safe was if the war ended.
But it did not seem then, or even now, as though that would ever happen.
“You can’t promise that, Robert. No one can promise that.”
“I will.”
“Then I would be breaking my promise.”
“I love you, Sara, and I want nothing more than to be with you. Forever and always.”
She stood to face me and slid her chair back. It made a whimpering screech as it dragged against the floor. Then, with the light twinkling in her eyes just so, she brushed her hand lightly against my cheek and held my head as she spoke. “You are so sweet, Robert, but you barely know me.”
“But our time here–”
“–has been wonderful, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything on this blessed Earth, but I’m not sure I’m the one for you.” Her hand drifted from my face and down to my chest where she pressed firmly. The pressure was enough to have forced me back had I not been so insistent on standing my ground.
It’s dangerous to pretend to know the mind of another person. When someone feels one way and speaks against it, it’s largely impossible to decipher the code between what is said and what is meant. But in this case, here with her, I could feel it in the air, as though she’d fired a cable right into me and pulled me along toward her. “You don’t believe that.”
“You’ve idealized me, Robert. That’s the only explanation. Who else is there? Had Hortense been gentler with you, you’d have fallen for her as easily as you’ve fallen for me.” She pulled away and looked down, casting her thoughts to the floor and stuffing her hands into the pockets of her nurse’s apron. “I’m a sympathetic, pretty face in a world gone mad. I’m not your one true love, your eternal soul mate, or even your very own star-crossed lover. Maybe I don’t feel anything for you. Maybe I’m just a simple nurse who showed a soldier some affection to help him heal faster.”
I knew she didn’t believe it. She was being stubborn and telling me what I needed to hear to go.
But I knew I could be much more stubborn than she. I was an obstinate, bullheaded Preston, from a long line of obstinate and bullheaded Prestons. On no level would it be even the slightest bit fair to her how obstinate I could be, but there it was. How could a leopard change its spots any more than a Preston could change its habits?
I should have learned.
“It’s more than that, Sara.” I used my free hand to pull her hands toward me, placing them over my heart. “It’s so much more. And you know it. You’d be lying if you said we both couldn’t feel it. It pounds in our chests when we’re together and brings us one step ever closer to our destiny.”
As I go back and play the words back over in my mind, I understand that I was laying it on thick, but when you’re caught in the throes of such a speech, it has a way of dictating itself. It’s the way the heart wants to speak without the intrusion of the mind to filter it.
Absurd as my words may have been, they were certainly the truth.
“You talk like we’re in a cheap love story.”
“Aren’t we? The world is blowing up all around us as fast as our leaders can arrange it. We’re left to fight over the scraps of what’s left and pick up all the shattered pieces. We’re all fighting for something bigger than ourselves, but never for anything of our own.”
With a crooked finger beneath her chin, I brought her gaze back up to mine. “Sure, I joined up to help in the fight against the Germans because I thought they were doing awful things for all the worst reasons, and because I love France and England almost as much as my own country. And here we are, the two of us, neither of us French, both of us supporting their cause, and we find each other in all this horrible madness. If that doesn’t sound like the most typical of cheap love stories, then I’ll start a fire and burn myself to ash, starting with this uniform.”
Her grimace turned into more of a slight frown as she weighed my words silently.
“Why me?” she asked, finally. “What makes me so special and precious to you?”
I remember sighing deeply. I remember doing a lot of that in those days. I still do it a lot, to tell the truth. It comes from leading a life of self-inflicted unhappiness. You want to spread the unhappiness around and prove to everyone how dreadful things really are, so you sigh deeply and hope someone heard your non-verbal code for being beset upon.
It was a rubbish coping system, but it was all I had when I was off the battlefield and out of the trenches.
“I have a thousand reasons why it would only, could only, be you, Sara.”
“Name one.”
“You are the most caring, gentle soul I’ve ever met. When I first arrived here, my level of frustration knew no parallel, not just because of my broken body, but because you were there, showing everyone a warmth and affection that could only be reserved for the most intimate of lovers. But somehow you managed to make us all feel that way. You care.”
“Robert…”
“In al
l the quiet time we’ve squirreled away together, I’ve never felt more human than I’m with you. You said that I’ve idealized you, and for a while I had. But that was a long time ago, in the beginning. We’ve shared things together, stolen moments of joy in this war where I thought that would be impossible. My heart was dead when I came to this war and I thought it beyond repair. But you’ve breathed a life into it. And even if you leave, even if you were to say that we could never see each other again, I’d know that it was you who taught me to love again, and I’d love you until the end of my days.”
I never thought I’d take part in such a scene in my life, standing in a dim hallway outside a nurse’s station with a woman who wasn’t Lucy pressed to my chest, pouring my feelings out as easily as water from a pitcher.
The tears glittered in her eyes, spilling singly down one side. “You all leave. James left. You’ve all left. You have to go no matter how much I hate to lose you. I don’t want you to go, Robert…”
“I don’t have to go. We’re only two people that don’t amount to much in this crazy world. We might as well find our own happiness...”
I took her hands from my chest and dropped to one knee. Then, I uncurled each of the fingers of my right hand, slowly revealing the polished, copper good luck charm. I took her slender hand, pleased to find that LeBeau’s gift was just the right size to slide over her finger.
“Sara, will you marry me?”
And despite a striking fear of having her heart broken once more, she said yes.
There in that hospital the stems in our flower bed of trouble had firmly taken root.
17
I suppose it’s fitting then that I begin the next leg of my story in a bed. Our bed. Sara and I bought it on the return from our too-brief honeymoon, where we went to Paris and spent three days not leaving the hotel. On our way out of Paris, we thought to stop at the Louvre and see what was left of the art collection. Most of it had been moved underground, and the pieces too big to move were braced under steel-topped shelters. The last thing we saw before going home was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, headless yet ready to fly. It wouldn’t get very far under the steel ceiling they’d built to protect it.
The bed we purchased was an old oak four poster that creaked hideously when we made love. Afterwards, Sara would giggle, wondering aloud what the couple in the neighboring flat thought of the sound.
“Who cares what they think?” I told her, “To hell with them.”
And I’d meant it.
Sara pulled her hair over the front of her face, covering her mouth and nose as if it would obscure her sheepishness. “I don’t care what they think, per se, but wouldn’t it be terribly embarrassing if they could hear us?”
I laughed, running my fingers softly along the curves of her hips, still glistening in the sweat of our afternoon of lovemaking.
“That doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t be any worse than being caught in a closet by Nurse Hortense.”
She sighed and looked into me, through me, down to the soul as if my eyes were windows looking out over a scenic vista. “I love you.”
We’d come so far in those few months. We were new people, no longer in love with specters from our past. Thoughts of Lucy no longer pained me; instead they came with a wave of nostalgia for an older version of me. I was grateful she let me go, I was grateful to her parents, even, which is something I never thought I’d be.
Somehow, I was even grateful of James and the sacrifice he made. His name no longer filled my throat with bile and stomach with dread.
“I love you, too,” I told her.
Thinking back on moments like this, I can close my eyes and I can still feel her running her delicate fingers across my face, smiling at me like an angel. My angel.
After that last night at the hospital, the one from the storybook that wasn’t worth the paper we’d printed it on, we went directly to a small village church and found a priest who would marry us immediately.
It was only after we were married that she finally warmed up to the idea of actually being married. It took every assurance I could muster to convince her that she would never have to part with me, and even if she did in brief spells, I had to swear no harm would befall me.
I was in a perfect position for such a promise. After my discharge from the hospital and my request for time off for the honeymoon had been granted, I had all but fallen through the cracks of military bureaucracy. Since there was no longer any Aeronautic Corps, and my transfer to Renault’s unit seemed nothing more than a verbal formality, I wasn’t technically assigned anywhere. With the scar on my face and the limp the war left me with, everyone assumed I was just another discharged soldier who had done their duty.
And that suited me just fine. I wanted nothing more to do with the war. It had cured me of my terminal affliction and I had no more use for it. Sure, I still hoped the Entente would win and we’d bash the hopes of every German invader we could find, but it was all so far away by then.
Together, Sara and I moved into a tiny flat in the town closest to the line, and I spent my time while she was away at hospital trying my hand at writing about the war. I would sip at cold coffee and sharpen my pencil with my pocket knife, leaving the brittle shavings on the saucer next to the cup. The words came out in fits and starts, as though the stories didn’t want to come out yet. I wrote of my time in training and that first meeting with LeBeau, but none of it worked right. Invariably, I would crumple the pages out of my book and leave them there on the table for the bussers to take away after I’d left.
None of it was worth keeping.
It would take much worse than fading away from the fight to force me to put down my story once and for all. It was all a practiced prelude to the writing I do now, with the war long behind me and a new life ahead.
Forgetting the war and what I experienced wasn’t the easiest thing to do as I wrote about it. Sometimes the sound of clattering dishes would ignite the sensation of bullets and shrapnel heading toward me. Sometimes the sound of steam shooting from the coffee machines might take me back up to the sky over a trench. Passing steam trains would force me to a prone position. The shadows of drifting clouds might force my gaze up to see if I’d been ambushed by a zeppelin. Other times, it would be nothing more than the sound of horses and trucks flying by, bringing me back to my time in convoys.
Writing was my attempt at exorcising the war from my mind, but to be honest I probably spent as much time or more at the café simply drinking wine and buying extra casks of it to smuggle to my mates left in the hospital.
Not much aroused my suspicion in those days, though once after my stints writing in a café, I left a pile of crumpled false starts at the table. I’d packed my paper and pencil into the outer pocket of my coat and walked away. A noise behind me caught my attention and I turned to see a man there at my table. The papers had disappeared and he hurried to stuff his hands into his pockets.
Though it seemed odd, I thought nothing of it. Perhaps the waiter was quicker than I realized in clearing the table. And maybe the man’s rush to pocket his hands had more to do with the cold than anything else.
It wasn’t the only time I noticed the odd person lingering behind me, but I assumed it was just my mind playing tricks. I had bigger things to worry about.
I focused instead on sneaking my way into the hospital, taking a page from LeBeau and Sara’s book and doing my best to ease the minds of the troops trapped there. Smuggling in packages of goodwill and booze to the others, I found myself quite an adept blockade runner.
The rest of my time was spent volunteering at the hospital, stealing glances from my wife, the incorruptible Sara Preston. We’d wink and smile and carry on like fools when we thought no one was looking, just as it had been before.
Our evenings were spent on long walks in the soft twinkling lights of the village, eating as fine of dinners as we could afford and drinking even more.
I remember once we’d taken a long walk through town and had gott
en lost amidst the old buildings and cobblestone alleyways. Her hand tightened around mine, and we pulled our jackets closed against the cold, trotting through the streets, looking for something familiar to set us back on our way.
“You’ve lost us,” she told me in her sassiest voice.
“We’ll find our way.” But when she tugged me back, I knew she wasn’t looking for reassurance.
“Why are you in such a hurry?”
I had no answer.
She pulled me back, closer to her, stopping me completely. Turning to look at her, I hadn’t noticed the sly grin on her face and the sparkle in her eyes. Looking down from there, the sight of her neckline meeting the wide-lapelled coat she wore thrilled me, but the black dress that reappeared below it, just above her knees was enough to give me ideas. By the time I saw her legs, it was all over for me.
She backed me up against the wall, kissing me aggressively and running her fingers along my side and around my back, pulling herself into me, playfully biting at my lips like a woman possessed.
In the distance, under the spot of a yellow street light, was a man in a wide brimmed hat. I couldn’t tell if he was staring at us or at nothing at all. Perhaps he was a lost soldier, not knowing where the next step should take him.
When I noticed him, Sara and I walked on and, from the corner of my eye, I could see his gaze shift to follow us.
A shiver took me, but I tried ignoring it. There were a thousand reasons he could have been there.
Putting him out of my mind, we pecked and pawed at each other through the streets until we finally made our way home. Instead of giving into our urges, we found ourselves merely cuddling beneath the blankets, telling each other secrets and why we loved each other until the sun rose with the morning.
We still had secrets then, before we’d exhausted every corner of our lives in talk.
“Why do you love me,” I asked.
“Because you’re braver than I am.”
“Never.”
