The Lieutenant's Nurse

by Sara Ackerman

“What in the dickens—”

  She stepped away.

  “Shh,” he said, frowning.

  At that very same moment, two nurses wheeled in a new patient fresh from the operating room. The unmistakable smell of sulfa powder wafted off him. Eva glanced down and saw the faint rise of his chest.

  Clark, alive.

  “Dear Lord, thank you,” she said to no one in particular.

  Billy looked down. Something like recognition crossed his face. “Is that a friend?”

  “Someone I helped operate on. We thought he wasn’t going to make it.”

  A moment of awkward silence.

  “Isn’t that Clark Spencer? The guy who smashed your face?” he said at last.

  His words stung.

  “It was an accident. And yes, that’s him,” Eva said.

  One of the nurses pushing Clark scanned the room and said, “Looks like no place for him in here.”

  For Eva, it was imperative Clark remained in this room with Jack and Brandy. “Wait! I’ll go scrounge up a cot, leave him next to Jack for the moment,” she said. Then to Billy, “I’m so relieved you’re alive and unhurt, really I am. I want to talk to you more, but these boys need tending.”

  She saw a hardening around his eyes. “Right, of course. I’ll check in with you later.”

  He gave her a peck on the cheek and was out the door.

  Deaths accumulated in threes, heartache in pairs. Eva fought to see any good in what was going on around them, but it was something her father had taught her. In everything, there’s a silver lining. All of Honolulu had banded together to help. That was a real thing. The Japanese had not returned yet—as far as she knew. Clark and Billy and her friends were alive. She was alive.

  * * *

  Clark took his sweet time in waking up. His eyelids fluttered a few times, but then he fell off again. As much as she’d wanted to go help with surgery, Eva couldn’t pry herself away. Instead, she sent Grace. She busied herself by hooking Clark up to more plasma, which was far better than whole blood for shock. By some miracle they still had plasma, but Grace had informed her that Honolulu had its own plasma bank. At first Eva hadn’t believed her, but then she’d heard the appeals on the radio for anyone and everyone to donate.

  Ten minutes later, Dr. Newcastle came in to check on his patients. She felt her blood pressure skyrocket. While everyone else in the hospital looked haggard and spent, Dr. Newcastle had somehow managed to appear as though it was just another day at the office.

  “How is the kid?” he asked.

  “Jack seems stable. Respiration is a bit fast, but other than that, he’s hanging in there.”

  “And the big guy. Is he awake yet?” he said.

  “Not yet.”

  He walked around, carefully examining each man in the room. The fact that he wasn’t reprimanding her made her cautious. In all the bustle, had he decided to let it go?

  When Dr. Newcastle neared Jack’s bed, she moved to the opposite side and quietly snapped her fingers under the table for Brandy.

  Whatever you do, don’t thump your tail. Hot breath warmed the back of her hand. She lightly held the top of Brandy’s head. Heaven forbid she lick Dr. Newcastle.

  “The danger with these shrapnel wounds is infection,” he said.

  Of course she knew that. “Oh?”

  “Make sure to keep an eye on their wound sites.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  As soon as he turned to leave, she sucked in a deep breath.

  He stopped in the doorway, turned and said, “You and I will be having a talk when this is over.”

  * * *

  Just after sunset, Eva was holding the hand of a young man named Samuel Matthews, who had woken up convinced he was still in Mississippi on a bird-hunting trip.

  “You bumped your head pretty bad when your truck was blown up. We’re in Hawaii. Pearl Harbor’s been attacked by the Japanese,” she repeated.

  He looked annoyed. “But I’ve never been to Hawaii.”

  After a while, she gave up trying to persuade him. She glanced at Clark. His eyes were open, staring straight at her.

  “Have I died?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

  Eva rushed to his side. “Dying is forbidden in this room.”

  The very edge of his mouth curved up, almost imperceptibly. “It sure feels like I have, and what about the kid I was with?”

  She nodded toward Jack. “He’s right there.”

  “Can you come closer so I can see your face?” he asked.

  Unaware of anything else in the room, Eva knelt next to his cot. His eyes were glassy and rimmed with dirt, and his face as pale as a hospital sheet, but he was breathing, thank heavens. The way her heart raced along at two hundred beats per minute, you’d have thought she just ran a hundred-yard dash.

  “How did I end up with the prettiest nurse in the whole Pacific?” he said.

  “Shh. Save your breath, sailor,” she said, smoothing down his hair.

  He closed his eyes. “It hurts.”

  “What hurts?”

  “Everything.”

  At the sound of Clark’s voice, a soft thwack thwack started up under Jack’s bed. Eva checked the hallway for doctors and then invited Brandy over to Clark’s cot. If someone walked in and found her, Eva would go to bat for the little dog with everything she had. The only smiles she’d seen all day had been brought about by Brandy. It seemed fitting she was white, as if she was born a nurse.

  “Someone wants to know you’re all right,” she said.

  It was easier for Brandy to get close on the lower cot. She stood on her hind legs, with her ears down in the dog version of a smile.

  Eva saw their eyes lock and his face brighten at the sight. “You made it, girl,” he said.

  He looked like he was concentrating on lifting an arm to pet her, but couldn’t muster it up.

  “You can pet her later.”

  Brandy hopped down and once again, several of the wounded called her over. She went to Samuel Matthews first and nuzzled into his side.

  “Good job today, Bubba, we’re gonna be eating duck for weeks,” he said.

  Clark gave Eva a confused look, and she knocked on her head and mouthed, Head injury.

  “That Brandy...” he said, and the words faded out.

  If it had been at all possible, Eva would have crawled onto the cot with Clark and curled up as he slept, just like Brandy had been doing with all the men. She would have rewound the clock to December third. To that moment in her cabin, when she’d been wrapped in his arms. Or standing at the rail watching the whole ocean light up blue. The smell of Old Spice. She noticed herself shivering, not from cold but from nerves and outrage and blind fear. Men had done this to each other.

  Why had it been allowed to happen this way?

  INFAMY

  No one in this room was in the clear yet, not even close. In fact, no one in the hospital was in the clear yet. Or the island, for that matter. As night began to fall, lights were turned off and flashlights covered with blue cellophane were handed out. Some help that was.

  Eva was standing at the nurses’ station when she heard familiar voices coming down the hallway. She spun to see Bree and Sasha dressed in white tennis outfits, bright points of light amid the gray ash of a day. Impossible but true.

  Sasha rushed forward and threw her arms around Eva. “Eva! Some man in scrubs sent us upstairs and said to get busy. We were hoping we’d see you and that you were okay, and look at you, all in one piece and beautiful.”

  “Are you sure you want to be here?” Eva asked.

  “We were meant to be here, love, otherwise we’d have gone straight on to Oz,” Bree said.

  “Put us where we’re most needed. But before we start, any word on Lieutenant Spencer?” Sasha said.

  Eva didn’t
want to jinx his survival. “He’s alive.”

  “He’s hurt?” the twins both said in unison.

  Holding herself together was proving difficult, but Eva was determined. “He took some shrapnel, but he’s out of surgery and stable.”

  “That tennis match seems like another lifetime ago now, doesn’t it?” Bree said.

  Eva couldn’t think about it. “Come on, let me get you two set up. You can help make the rounds in our room and the others on this floor. But I have to warn you, you’re going to need to summon every bit of strength you ever had and more.”

  “We’re in.”

  Eva led them around and watched them fight to maintain composure. She was impressed at how they managed to keep their faces in order. No tears fell, at least not in front of the men. Not only that, but the wounded sailors and airmen perked up in their presence.

  “Sit with me a little longer, will you?” one man asked.

  “As long as it takes,” Bree said.

  It didn’t take long and he was gone.

  * * *

  At about eleven o’clock, Eva rounded up the twins and Grace and Judy and sneaked outside for a break. She was bone tired and hungry and weak, and she wondered how much longer she could keep it up. They found a curb across the street to sit on. Grace had managed to find a package of Saloon Pilot crackers and three Coca-Colas, and handed them out.

  Sasha waved it away. “You need these more than we do.”

  Grace pointed toward the harbor, where the bottoms of the clouds glowed orange from fires scattered across the waters and airfields. “Would you look at that. They blacked out our windows, and yet any Japanese plane for miles will know exactly where to come. We’re sitting ducks.”

  “It’s hard to hide a burning island,” Bree said.

  Eva felt the weight of the day pressing down on her. “This is going to make some story for those of us who survive.”

  “We’ll survive,” Sasha said.

  Eva shivered. “Look at all our ships, most of them are on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “But our planes are out there,” Grace said.

  Judy said in a very flat voice, “Don’t count on it. The Japs shot up all the airfields before they even arrived at Pearl Harbor.”

  She might have been right, seeing in what shape the boys from Hickam had arrived at Tripler.

  Around them, the street was eerily deserted. Everyone had been ordered inside after dark and a strict curfew was going to be enforced. Eva was thinking about the Japanese transports mentioned earlier, dropping parachute troops, and she kept her voice low when she spoke. “How are you holding up, Judy?”

  Judy let out a heavy sigh. “I died this morning and now I can’t feel anything. There’s simply none of me left.”

  “You’re a brave girl,” Grace said.

  She and Eva were on both sides of Judy, and they each held an arm around her. “That’s normal. But when the feelings do start to come, and they will, you come and find one of us. No matter what we’re doing, okay?” Eva said.

  Judy stared straight ahead. Even if Judy couldn’t feel her pain, Eva could. So real and alive, it might as well have been sitting between them on the sidewalk.

  Grace added, “You are not alone in this, nor will you ever be.”

  Judy said, “I’m here just for the boys.”

  Eva felt hard inside. Furious and mad with pain. She was no stranger to death. “His light will always be in you. Remember that. I know it seems black now, but Sid’s spark is there.”

  Eva felt guilty that the grief belonged to someone else this time and not her. They sat there arm in arm, leaning on each other and listening to the far away sounds of motorboats and sirens, while the clouds glowed above them. Bree and Sasha remained quiet, too.

  “Have you thought about being captured and what you would do?” Grace finally asked.

  The only time Eva had given it any real consideration had been that last morning on the Lurline when Clark had warned her. In truth, her thoughts had been more on Clark and Billy and her new job than the Japanese.

  “Hardly, what about you?” Eva said.

  Grace held a plumeria flower up to her nose. “I never want to be captured by those bastards. I’ll walk into the ocean and swim out to sea if it comes to that. Drowning is supposed to be a peaceful way to go.”

  “But if you’re dead, you can’t be rescued. Our guys could come in the next day and get you. Have you thought about that?” Eva argued.

  “You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you? About what they did to the Chinese,” Grace said.

  Of course she had. Looting, raping, killing at whim. She hated to imagine herself at the hands of such captors. But she was an American surrounded by American soldiers. Wouldn’t that make her immune?

  “That would never happen here,” Eva protested.

  Judy jumped in, her voice dead serious. “Sid gave me a gun, and I plan on using it if I have to. Shoot as many of them as I can...and then shoot myself.”

  Eva felt Billy’s gun in her dress pocket, pressing against her thigh. “Clark told me about a place on the other side of the island where I could hide. It’s up a stream and in the jungle. I suppose we could try to get there if we had to.”

  “But what about all of our patients here?” Judy said. “You two can go where you want, but I’m not leaving them behind.”

  “They won’t be the ones getting raped,” Grace said.

  A small explosion ripped through the night. They all jumped. Talk about frayed nerves. Every person on the island was going to be shell-shocked for the foreseeable future.

  Eva tried to imagine running off alone into an unknown forest. “Whatever happens, I hope you will at least think about coming with me.”

  “How will you get there?” Grace asked. “And what about food?”

  “We can take your car. And Clark said the place is full of fruit trees and there are prawns in the stream.”

  “Count us in,” Bree said, and Sasha nodded.

  “You’ll need weapons,” Judy said.

  “I have a gun,” Eva said.

  Grace looked surprised. “How did you get a gun?”

  “Billy thought I might need it.”

  “I mean machine guns, that kind of thing. If I end up with you out in the boonies, I’m going down fighting. Those men will not take me alive.”

  At least Judy was considering it.

  “An impossible choice, really,” Grace said.

  “I guess we won’t know until it happens, but it’s good to have an idea.”

  No matter which bottle you drank from, the outcome did not look good.

  * * *

  They worked all night, surviving on adrenaline and catnaps. Willa had dragged a few sheetless mattresses onto the hallway floor. Eva blocked out thoughts of their earlier conversation and focused on keeping the men alive. Between the dense heat and overflow of patients, she felt like she was working in a field hospital in the jungles of Asia.

  That the doctors were still operating was heroic in and of itself, and Eva attached herself to Dr. Hall, a young surgeon with one quarter the attitude of Dr. Newcastle, but also half the skill. Her suggestions didn’t seem to bother him, as he appeared to be awake solely due to caffeine. She kept drilling into his head, “Drop ether is the only way to go with these shock patients.” Whether or not he was safe to be wielding a scalpel was another story, but you took what you could get.

  Every chance she had, she checked on Clark, who went from dazed and awake, to restless dreaming. His forehead was hot and she didn’t like his weak pulse, but Dr. Newcastle had informed Willa, who told Grace, who told Eva, that Clark needed to regain some strength before they operated again. A piece of shrapnel was lodged close to his heart.

  Clark’s presence in that room was never far from her mind and it reminded her of
the last days with her mother. The feeling of wanting to hold on so badly that you could hardly breathe. A lot of bargains had been made with God. If You let us keep her, I promise to never ever complain about another thing in my whole life. Eva would sit by her bed and imagine her mother’s lungs clearing and returning to normal. The finality of her death loomed big and inevitable, and yet Eva fought it every step of the way. Even when her mother had given up, Eva refused to.

  Later, her father said to her, Evelyn, dear, life and death are part of the same cycle. There is such thing as divine timing and once you accept that, you’ve won half the battle. It was simply your mother’s time.

  That was a lot easier said than done, she realized. But the notion of divine timing had stuck with her. Meeting Clark had felt like the opposite of divine timing. Why couldn’t they have crossed paths sooner? She wanted to trust that there was a reason, but that reason was not revealing itself. The truth was, he had tipped her whole world on end. When she did the math in her head—two men divided by one woman—it did not calculate well. If not Billy, then Clark. If not Clark, then what?

  More than anything, she wanted to gather him in her arms and squeeze some life back into him. To tell him how she felt. Now was not the time, she knew that, but what if tomorrow was too late? An awful taste filled her mouth and she fought back tears.

  Billy was another matter. How could she tell him?

  Just before dawn, Eva laid out a musty army blanket on the floor next to his cot and curled up. Grace had dozed off in the hallway half an hour ago, and now she was back.

  “I can’t keep my eyes open one more minute,” Eva said.

  “I’ll wake you up if anything important happens.”

  She was asleep in seconds.

  * * *

  At first she thought she was having a nightmare about Tommy Lemon again, in which he had gone blue but she had been unable to get Dr. Brown’s attention. No one told her he had gone deaf, and she was screaming at the top of her lungs, but he remained hunched over the table, oblivious.

  “He’s blue. Get some oxygen on him.”