The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  All their lives they had known things, Kay and Maggie Jean. They understood each other, the two of them, because many of the things they’d known were the same. When they were children they knew their mothers loved them and were reasonably sure their fathers did too. They knew their sisters didn’t like them much but in certain moods could be fine playfellows. They knew what they read in books. They knew they were smart. They knew their multiplication tables. And then when they were student nurses they knew such a host of things. Even before they’d learned how to insert an IV they knew what time they had to be up in the morning, what time they had to be back at the dorm, what chapters they had to study for the next day. After they found jobs they knew their patients’ names, what their vitals had been the day before, what meds they’d been given, even what they’d had to eat. It was all right there on the chart. In basic training they knew what bed they were going to sleep in that night. In England they knew not to say bum and what was meant by biscuit and where they could find the pub.

  Then they got to the war. They got to the war, Jennifer.

  This is how it is when you keep moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary and back again: the world expands to include a fleet of ships; a coastline; the sky, black with planes; and then contracts to the wet heat of your clothing, the taste of salt water in your mouth, and later the routines of helmet baths, amputations, waking to the whoosh and smash of shells, and all of that is ordinary, ordinary. The very ordinariness of it is the strangest thing you could have imagined.

  I suppose the idea with training for what you cannot imagine is that when nothing else holds, when the world becomes a place you’ve never seen before, that training will keep you moving. Certainly we’d never practiced clambering down the side of a ship on a net, but we’d had plenty of practice in doing what we were told. The net must have swayed a little with the weight and movement of other bodies, but I don’t remember fearing I would fall. I remember I kept my eyes on the men still on the ship, and they grew smaller and smaller to me, as I must have done to them.

  At the bottom I got in a smaller boat, a landing craft, and Kay was in there, too, and a few of the other nurses. I kept my eye on Kay. The night before, during the crossing, she’d fallen from a top bunk and done an injury to her back. She’d made me promise not to tell anyone. She was afraid the chief nurse would have her checked out, find some reason she wasn’t in shape to go on. The other girls in the cabin—Ada Dawson, Nina Hagenston—had been asleep, and when the noise woke Nina, Kay claimed she’d just dropped her helmet. Lucky it was Nina who woke, as she wasn’t the type to ask questions, such as what Kay was doing splayed out on the floor. I was sure she’d pulled something, or at least bruised herself badly, and that carrying all the weight of our equipment must have been twice as hard for her as it was for me. But she gave no sign that anything was wrong.

  When we got near the beach they lowered the ramp on the front of the landing craft and we walked into the water. I had never been so hot, hunching through the water to the shore. It was like a steam bath inside my gas-impregnable clothing, and I was so weighted down with blanket and tent, gas mask and canteen, first aid kit and shovel that once I got out of the boat I couldn’t stand up straight. The equipment was arranged very carefully—you had to do it just so to make it fit—and it was all very well as long as you kept your feet but if I’d fallen on my back I would’ve been lodged there like a beetle. When I think about it now, I don’t know how I made it down the net in the first place with all that stuff hung all over me. Someone told me to go and I went, and that is what it is to be in the army, and sometimes just what it is to be alive.

  What a mess that beach was, the sand churned up by feet and tires, strewn with vehicles and equipment, crisscrossed with lines of soldiers. If there had ever been anything beautiful about the spot it was gone, and if there would be anything beautiful again I couldn’t imagine it. Ahead of us up the hill we could see the concrete bunkers the Germans had built, squat and unlovely even if you hadn’t known how deadly they were. Behind us in the water the massive bodies of the ships.

  Though the front line was only a few miles into France, the beach itself was safe. We walked up it and over the dunes with less fear than we’d had on our infiltration course way back in basic training. Only thirty-eight days before men had been slaughtered in that place by the thousands.

  Dead bodies? No, there were no dead bodies. I just said this was D-Day plus thirty-eight. We didn’t wade through the floating dead, as I’ve read the nurses did who got there first. Do you wish I had? Would that be a better story? That’s not much of a thing to wish on someone. What I saw over there had horrors enough.

  What I remember is that we hit the beach and had to climb a hill—that I remember well because it was so difficult. It was very hot. The foxholes were already there when we got to the top—I never had to dig a foxhole the whole time, after all the practice we had in basic training—and we slept in them that night and damn near froze to death. “Holy cow,” Kay said beside me when we flopped down at the top of the hill, and I laughed, though not because anything was particularly funny. For twenty-four years my life had been so small I could carry it in my pocket. Here I was in France, part of a thing so large it was beyond imagining. I was at war.

  I’ve slept in a foxhole. I’ve sat on a hill in the dark and watched the tracer bullets go by. I say these things with a certain degree of amazement. Looking back it seems like someone else’s life.

  I woke up just before dawn. I thought I’d heard something—a shell, an explosion—but now all was quiet. I’d slept balled up so tightly I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to straighten my limbs out again. I wanted badly to try—suddenly my whole body seemed beset with an unbearable cramping—but what if I really had heard something? I waited. And waited. Maybe I’d dreamed it. I gave in to the impulse to stand and all the bones in my body popped and cracked at once. I looked down over the beach. In the early light it looked like a graveyard, like all the vehicles had been abandoned to rust, like all the men were dead. I knew the fighting was ahead of us, now, but gazing at that beach, imagining what it had looked like a month ago, it seemed like everything that was going to happen already had.

  On the other side of me a nurse named Evelyn was fumbling endlessly in her pack, muttering, “I know it’s in here, somewhere, or did I put it in the—” She cut herself off with an “Aha!” and turned to me in triumph to display a compact and a lipstick. “Found ’em,” she said. She flipped the compact open, studied her face in its mirror, sighed, and applied her lipstick with a steady hand.

  People used to like to give me books about the war, imagining, I suppose, that I wanted to relive it, and in one of them I read about a nurse who used to let the soldiers watch her put her lipstick on. She said, “It reminded them of their mothers.” I thought, Yeah, sure, that’s what it reminded them of. I mean, were we really that innocent? Or were we just pretending? It’s hard to look back on that time without imprinting on it everything I know now. I can’t recollect it in what may have been its original purity.

  In the foxhole beside me, Kay stirred, and then let out a startled sound—a hurt sound.

  “Kay?” I whispered.

  She didn’t reply for a moment. I couldn’t see her face. I could hear her breathing, which sounded to me like the breathing of someone trying not to acknowledge pain. “Good morning,” she whispered back.

  “You’re pretty banged up, aren’t you,” I said.

  “Maggie Jean,” she said. She got to her feet so that she could look down at me. “Don’t ever say anything like that again.” She studied my face, not smiling. “Don’t say anything like that to anyone.”

  I was hurt, I have to say. She didn’t trust me. She thought I might go to the chief nurse about her. Maybe it was silly of me to be affronted. But I was affronted nevertheless, and I turned away so I wouldn’t have to look at her.

  That was a strange day. We spent hours waiting for transportation. Twi
ce the chief nurse made us all line up and do calisthenics. Kay stood at the back and did her best to fake it, waving her arms in a feeble imitation of jumping jacks. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, and then made myself stop looking. She struggled on, and I did my best not to watch her, not to appear concerned. I jumped and kicked and swung my arms from side to side, and the chief nurse shouted out, “One, two, one, two,” in her stentorian voice, and down on the beach a few people stared up at us and wondered what the hell was going on.

  When we weren’t busy jumping around like lunatics, we sat and sat. I couldn’t absorb the reality of anything outside each moment. I was hot. The clothes I’d been wearing for three days were stiff with dried sweat and salt water. I was hungry, and then we broke out the K rations, and the crackers were tasteless, the fruit bar so tough and chewy I had to work my jaw over it like a cow. The water I washed it all down with had a sharp chemical taste from the purification tablets. The other girls were sweetening the water with the lemon crystals that came in envelopes in the ration boxes, so I did that, too. What was real—a sip from a canteen of sweet, warm water, the taste of lemon mixed with chlorine, the way the chlorine lingered in my mouth.

  I remember at some point Kay said, “I’m sorry I was short with you earlier. I know you wouldn’t say anything. I just . . . I’m doing my best to pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “I’ll try not to remind you,” I said.

  “Will you help me? If I need it?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll protect me?”

  “To the death,” I said.

  Carrasco

  The fog is on the Mountain. For the first time Jennifer understands what that girl meant all those years ago in New York City—a place that, from the vantage point of this window on the foggy woods, now seems like a fanciful notion. Afraid to drive in these conditions, she has kept Milo home from school and canceled her appointment with Margaret. Margaret seemed quite put out at first, but then subsided into understanding, telling her it was of course best to be safe. In truth Jennifer’s glad to have an excuse not to go back today. Yesterday’s interview was strange from the beginning. After the massage, Jennifer set up her tape recorder and settled in for another irritable round of I’ll Tell You, I’ll Tell You Not. But Margaret only said, “Are you ready?” That was all. Jennifer barely got out the yes before she began.

  And then when she said, “To the death,” and abruptly stopped talking, Jennifer prompted her. “Protect her?”

  “Keep her secret. Help her out when she couldn’t manage something. Keep her from getting sent home. Protect her.”

  “Were you able to?”

  “I tried.” Margaret looked right at her. Why, whenever she does that, does it feel like an accusation? “Do you know why I’m telling you this story?”

  “Because you wanted to make a record,” Jennifer recited, though clearly that’s not the real reason, or Margaret wouldn’t have asked. She has a feeling the reason is nothing she wants to know.

  “No,” Margaret said. “Do you know why I’m telling this story to you?”

  “Because I remind you of Kay?”

  “No!” Margaret smacked the arm of her chair.

  Jennifer tensed. “I really have no idea.”

  “All right,” Margaret said. She leaned her head back against her chair and closed her eyes. “I’m tired now.” She said this like she was dismissing Jennifer under a cloud of disappointment, a student who hasn’t lived up to her promise, or won’t. Refuses to.

  Should Jennifer call what she feels uneasiness? Or is it actually something approaching dread? She was hoping Margaret didn’t notice. Carrasco. But maybe she did. Let’s imagine the worst: Margaret went to the library, armed with that name, and looked her up. Information poured forth like gold treasure from behind a secret door. Now Margaret knows everything. Every fact except the one that matters most.

  Outside her window Jennifer can see trees in the foreground, the color of charcoal except where the green moss is on them, their stolid trunks thinning into branches, thinning into delicate graceful twigs, opening like hands to grasp the sky. Never in her life has she paid so much attention to trees. Beyond these are vague and smudgy trees, as in a watercolor painting, and beyond them nothing. There is just nothing there. Impossible not to see magic in this, the gray mist that disappeared the world. She can’t stop looking at it.

  Milo appears beside her at the window, putting his palm on the glass. “Can we touch it?” he asks.

  “We can go out there. But I think it’ll just feel damp.”

  “What’s damp?”

  “A little bit wet.”

  “I think it will feel like a cloud,” he declares.

  “What do you think a cloud feels like?”

  He appraises her, catching on. “It doesn’t feel like it looks.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “So what does it feel like?”

  “What do you think?”

  He considers, then abandons consideration. “Cows.” He giggles.

  “Cows?” she asks with amusement.

  “Cows!” He laughs, enormously pleased with himself. “It feels like cows!”

  “All right, silly,” Jennifer says. “Let’s go test that theory.”

  Outside the fog moves with them, so that as they approach an object it resolves before them into clear solidity, while beyond it obscurity reigns. They’re enclosed, as in a spell of protection. “It’s mystical,” she says.

  “What’s mystical?”

  “A little like magical, but different. Magical is bright and sparkly. Mystical is . . . strange.”

  Milo reaches out his hand cautiously, as if the air might bite him. “I feel it,” he says.

  “What do you feel?”

  “Cows!” he says, and looks at her hoping for a laugh.

  “No, really,” she says. “What does it feel like?”

  “Damp,” he says. Then he looks at her in earnest confusion. “Why doesn’t my hand disappear?”

  “Well, you can’t disappear to yourself.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugs. “The fog is never right where you’re standing. Not to you, anyway. It would be to someone looking at you from far away.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Magic.”

  He doesn’t say, Mo-om, a reproving singsong, like he normally does when she offers this explanation. He frowns like he’s taking it seriously. “So I could disappear to you.”

  “You could,” she says. “But please don’t.”

  He dances away with a mischievous expression, daring her. She stays very still because if she gives chase he’ll definitely run. “Don’t,” she says. She feels a flicker of fear.

  He utters a whooping laugh and takes off.

  “Milo!” she shouts, running after. She could catch him easily, except that she trips on a tree root and stumbles, and once she’s straightened up he’s gone. Oh God. He’s gone. She listens with terror for the sound of a splash or a scream. But he’ll see the pond if he comes upon it. Just because she can’t see him doesn’t mean he’s actually been swallowed by the fog.

  “Milo?” she calls. She moves slowly, listening. He’s doing a remarkably good job of keeping still. Not a crackling twig. Not a giggle. The fog parts for her as she approaches but doesn’t reveal her son. Trees and rocks she can have, but him it keeps. “You did it, Milo,” she calls, trying not to sound terrified. “You disappeared.”

  Now she hears a giggle. From Milo, or the changeling sent to replace him as the fairies carry him away? She walks in what she thinks is the direction of the giggle. “Milo? Please come out now. Really, Milo. I don’t like it. It’s not safe out here.”

  Silence. She takes a long breath, slows her heart, changes her tactic. She walks backward instead of forward, falls silent herself, stays very still. Waits. Droplets kiss her skin. A small wind shivers the bushes and branches and there is the sound it makes and nothing
else in this muffled world—no color, no bright spangling noise. This is what it is to vanish.

  Doubtless the time she waits is much shorter than it feels, because how long can a small child bear to be alone in the woods, where his mother cannot find him? A burst of sound, and then he appears, running, running toward her, and she crouches down as he approaches so she can sweep him into her arms. “Mommy!” he says breathlessly. “You disappeared to me!”

  “I know,” she says into his ear, squeezing his warm little body. “It was scary, wasn’t it?”

  “The fog is jackass,” he says.

  “You don’t like it anymore?”

  “I wish it didn’t exist.”

  “Maybe not if you stay with me, though. If you stay with me then you’re safe.”

  “I want to go inside.”

  “All right.” She starts to rise, but he clings to her, so she hoists him up and carries him in, heavy though he’s grown. “Milo,” she says into his ear at the doorway to their house. “What’s your name?”

  “It’s Milo,” he says.

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Young.” He says it like she’s crazy, like there’s never been a doubt.

  She doesn’t press. You can create a problem in the effort to discover if one exists. She doesn’t ask, So why did you say Carrasco? What else do you remember? What else? What else? Carrasco, Carrasco, Carrasco. There’s bad magic in that word. You shouldn’t speak it, not if you know what’s good for you.

  So she doesn’t. She carries her son inside and makes them both hot chocolate, and they count out how many marshmallows they’re each allowed.

  Has everything she’s done been for nothing?

  Blood on My Hands

  I was once a girl named Maggie Jean being driven on a truck next to a girl named Kay through the war zone of France. Soldiers trudged along the road on either side, and when they noticed us it was with a wonderment that girls of our average prettiness weren’t used to provoking. In the war, we were more beautiful than we had ever been, and everything that should have been beautiful was not. Some places the trees grew together over the road and you couldn’t see any place but exactly where you were, worse than being in a maze because you couldn’t even see the sky. Imagine being trapped in there with somebody shooting at you from the other side. A lovely green arch under a summer sky is a death trap. Topsy-turvy. When you’re in a war, everything is topsy-turvy. Men in blue overalls and berets are smoking at tables outside a café, even though the buildings on either side look like they’ve been punched in from the top by a giant. You put up a hospital in a cow pasture. At first it feels exciting and ridiculous, like you’re players in the world’s biggest game of make-believe. You’ve gone out in the backyard with your tent and your toy medical kits and now you’re busily pretending that sooner or later the patients will arrive.