It took him a moment to realize that someone had stopped for him, finally.
“Nurse,” he said.
Lottie took his hand, scanning the man for his wound. She didn’t immediately see one, which wasn’t a good sign. If his arms and legs were still whole, that meant he was suffering from some kind of internal wound. The doctors might have patched him up, but that didn’t mean they’d really been able to patch up whatever the bullets or shrapnel had torn up inside him.
When she took his hand, he met her eyes. Suddenly, his face lit up in a beatific smile. It had been so long since she’d seen a smile like that that Lottie felt her knees begin to buckle. Quickly, she sank down on the bed beside him.
“Nurse,” the young man breathed, as if it were the name of an angel.
“I’m Lottie,” Lottie said matter-of-factly. “What’s your name?”
“Ben,” the young man said. “I’m from Detroit. Where are you from?”
At this simple question, tears sprang into Lottie’s eyes. Embarrassed, she blinked them back. What was she doing, letting herself cry, when this man was in so much more pain than she was?
“Detroit!” she said, trying to make her voice sound as cheerful as it would have if she’d just met him at a party. “That’s impossible! I’m from Detroit.”
She wouldn’t have thought Ben’s smile could get any bigger, but somehow it did. “I think there’s room for both of us in Detroit,” he said. His eyes wandered a bit, and Lottie wondered if he’d just had a flash of pain. But then they connected with hers again.
“Only thing I can’t understand,” he said, “is how I never met you before.”
“What do you do in Detroit, Ben?” Lottie asked.
“I’m gonna work at Palmer Stamping,” Ben said, pride flaring in his eyes. “That’s where my dad works. He says when I get back, he can get me a job, for sure.”
Lottie’s heart turned over at the name of her father’s company. If Ben’s dad had any trouble finding him a spot, she resolved then and there, she’d find him one herself.
“It sounds like you’ve got a lot to look forward to,” she said, taking his hand and squeezing it. “You’ve just got to concentrate on getting better for now.”
Ben gave a wry smile. “If you tell me how to concentrate on growing myself a new stomach, I’ll do my best,” he said.
Lottie had a sinking feeling. He had internal wounds. And to a vital organ.
“You rest,” Lottie said.
“And pray,” Ben said.
“That’s a good idea, too,” Lottie told him with a smile.
Lottie managed to make it down to the end of aisle before another man called her name. This time, the voice was coming from the next aisle over, just a few beds from the end.
Lottie gave her head a little shake. She couldn’t get in the habit of stopping for every man who tried to get her attention. Nothing would ever get done around here if all the women did that. The best thing was just to get back to what she’d been doing before, toss a little smile and nod that direction, and keep moving on, unless it became clear something was really wrong.
And if she did that, she thought to herself, maybe she’d be able to shake the aching sensation of loss, even as she walked away from the bedside of one of her hometown boys.
But then she realized: Whoever it was wasn’t calling for a nurse, like the boy from Detroit had been. He was calling her name.
The instant Lottie turned her head, her eyes locked on the only face in the whole place that she recognized.
Eugene lay on a cot several rows over.
And he was smiling.
The sensation of seeing his familiar face, safe and sound, in this ward full of hardship and suffering and hard work, was overwhelming.
She completely forgot any semblance of professional demeanor and rushed over to his side just like she might have when the two of them were kids.
A moment later, she was kneeling beside his bed to give him an awkward embrace, the two of them laughing and talking at the same time.
“How did you—?” she began.
“I’m so glad—” he started.
They both stopped, looked at each other, started again, stopped again.
“You first,” Eugene finally said, his eyes crinkling around the edges as they always did when he smiled.
“What are you doing here?” Lottie asked.
It was a familiar question, one she’d asked him a thousand times. But as she asked it this time, a feeling of dread washed over her.
There was only one reason that Eugene would be here: he was wounded.
And the fact that as she drew back from his arms and looked at him, he looked just as solid as he ever had wasn’t necessarily a good sign. Was he suffering from internal wounds, just like Ben?
Lottie turned her head, looking for the answer to her own question.
And found it, with a sickening lurch that seemed to knock the whole world off its axis.
“Eugene,” she said, reaching blindly back for his hand.
“It’s all right, Lots,” Eugene said as she took in the sight of him and everything it meant. “I’ll be okay.”
But Lottie was already shaking her head. How could he be okay? What could he possibly mean?
Because under the fresh sheet, where Eugene’s left leg should have been, was nothing but empty space.
Twenty-Five
“NEXT THING I KNOW,” the young soldier told Lottie, “you’ll be telling me that if I just eat enough of this Navy-issue Spam, I’ll be able to grow wings.”
Lottie pursed her lips to hide her own smile. “I didn’t say any such thing,” she told him. “I told you to drink up that pineapple juice, because the vitamins will help you heal.”
Ben, the boy from Detroit, shook his head.
“I’d drink it, Lottie,” he said. “I love the taste of that juice. And even if I didn’t, I’d drink it for you. But…”
Lottie set the glass down on the table beside him again.
“But what?” she asked.
“It hurts,” Ben said, and turned his face away on the pillow.
“Well,” Lottie said, trying not to entertain the memories of all the other boys she’d cared for with internal wounds over the last week, and all the ones who were no longer in their beds, because they hadn’t survived. “It hurts when we heal, too.”
Ben tilted his head, considering this. “Maybe,” he said. Then he nodded over her shoulder, in the direction of Eugene’s bed. “Now get out of here,” he said. “Have you visited your old friend yet?”
“I’m about to,” Lottie said. But first, she bent down and gave Ben a little kiss on the cheek.
This had become her habit, ever since Eugene had arrived back on the base: she worked all day in the shop, then came to the wards full of wounded, where she worked as long as she could, just as she had before he arrived. But then she sat with Eugene for a while before she went back to her own barracks, long after midnight, to try to sleep.
Eugene, when she reached him, somehow managed to seem just as polished and debonair in his Navy-issue patient’s robe as he ever had in the most expensive drinking jacket she’d ever seen him in.
Every time she saw him, she wondered how he managed to pull it off. He could comb his own hair and shave his own face, but why did his bed always look neater than the other men’s, and his clothes so much less rumpled?
As she came up, she saw him lay aside a letter.
“News from home?” she asked with a smile.
Eugene nodded as she sank down beside him.
“Everyone still doing well?” she asked, trying to keep her voice cheerful, as she always did when she came to see him.
Eugene had always had a good poker face. But she still noticed a slight jump in his eyebrows and widening of his eyes. And when he nodded, he nodded just a fraction too slowly.
“What?” Lottie said. “Is something wrong?”
“Have you heard from your mother?” Eugene as
ked.
“I got a letter from her a few days ago,” Lottie said. Throughout her time in the WAVES, her mother had kept up a steady stream of messages from home, full of the same cheerful news and mild gossip. And Lottie tried to answer her when she could—which was less and less often these days. The pressure of leading the shop wore on her even in her dreams, and it took up so much mental space that she could barely think of anything else. And even then, she was constantly worried that there were things, important things, that she had forgotten—details that might affect the lives of countless men. “She sounded fine.”
Another raise of Eugene’s eyebrows.
“What?” Lottie demanded. “Is she sick? Is Daddy all right?”
Eugene nodded and patted her hand. “They’re fine,” he said in a completely unconvincing tone. “They’re both healthy.”
“They’re not fine,” Lottie said, reading his expression.
Eugene took a deep breath and squeezed her hand. He looked at her with sympathy. “This…” he said, obviously choosing his words carefully. “This war hasn’t been easy for them.”
Instantly, Lottie understood what he wasn’t saying. It was her. She was what wasn’t fine in her parents’ world. And from Eugene’s expression, she could see that she wasn’t the only one paying the price of her choice to join the WAVES. For Eugene’s expression to be so somber, her parents must have been under considerable strain.
“Are they…?” she began, but couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
Eugene just gazed back at her. “You can imagine what it’s like for them,” he said. “Your father never talks about it. Your mother doesn’t talk about anything else.”
He didn’t need to say anything more. She’d been trying to avoid the knowledge for months, but suddenly, she knew exactly what it must have been like for them: how helpless they must have felt, and how frightened.
“I haven’t had much time to think,” she said, a pang running through her heart at the thought of her parents.
And even in the stolen moments when she did have a second to think, she realized, some of her thoughts never seemed to settle.
Like her thoughts about Eugene, which just whirled and whirled in the back of her mind, never seeming to find a place to land.
Having him on the base felt like a member of her family had just arrived—and was in trouble. The men around him assumed that she must be his girlfriend. In Eugene’s current state, she had no intention of disabusing them of that notion.
But things were unclear, even in her own mind. She’d been Eugene’s girl for years, and his friend for as long as she could even remember. And even the fact that she’d left town on the day of their wedding, bringing all their plans crashing down, didn’t seem to change the easy way they got along and how well they knew each other.
It seemed so natural to be with him. As the world fell into chaos around her, full of twisted metal and broken men, he was the one spot that still seemed familiar—and good.
Had she made some kind of terrible mistake, all those months ago?
Was this God’s way of bringing them back together, giving her a second chance at happiness, after all she’d gotten wrong?
She didn’t know.
But like clockwork, every day, she came to tell him good night, as she did now, and talk for a while.
Eugene looked up and smiled when she settled down on his bed, but she could see the pain in his face. So much about Eugene was just the same as it always had been, but the pain was new, a constant strain that he never complained about but that Lottie couldn’t ever stop seeing, even when he smiled.
“Hey there, Lots,” Eugene said as she sank down beside him. “How was your day in the trenches?”
Her day had been tough. They’d had more planes to work on than men, and for some reason any part anyone had asked her for all day seemed to have gone missing or not have come in yet. But that was par for the course.
The real problem was the strain—not just of being in charge, but of Luke’s absence. Not just of Eugene’s wound, but of the whole war. And not even the war, but her own days and nights turned upside down and blending together after days and days with little to no sleep. She’d taken the job Luke entrusted to her confident that she could do it. But she felt more and more uncertain. And the longer Luke was gone, the more dread built up in her heart.
And the more tired she got. She thought she’d worked hard before Luke left the shop to her and Cunningham, but she hadn’t had any idea what hard work meant before then. The labor itself was so demanding that she worked just as hard as the men. The hours were longer.
And there was never time to sleep when work was done—not with the flood of wounded men, and Eugene waiting for her every evening. She was so worn out that she could feel parts of her mind shutting down; she barely had the energy or imagination to think. And she was sometimes surprised to find her hands still sure and steady when she worked on an engine.
But none of this compared to Eugene’s missing leg and the physical pain she frequently saw reflected in his face.
He didn’t like to talk about it. But he said it helped when she told him stories. So every day, she armed herself with a new batch of tales, regaling him with everything that had happened since the two of them had been separated. It distracted him from the pain, and it also built a bridge between them, over the only significant time they’d ever spent apart in their lives, so far.
And the men around him had gotten used to listening to her spin her yarns, almost as if she were a favorite nighttime radio show, there in the flesh.
And since her day had been uneventful, Lottie had decided to tell the tale of an unlucky recruit whom Luke had decided one day wasn’t taking his job seriously enough. The young man wasn’t filing the rivets on a wing thoroughly and didn’t seem to believe Luke when he told him that could have a big effect on the plane’s drag, and even the way it flew.
So Luke had assigned him to buff the rivets of every plane in the place, which had taken the kid the better part of a week.
“Captain Woodward” was a favorite character of Lottie’s audience, growing to something like Paul Bunyan proportions as she told story after story about his unusual methods. And it was a comfort to remember the days when Luke had been firmly in charge of the shop. No matter how much she might have rankled under his leadership at moments, she had never realized how much he was carrying—until she tried to carry the same weight herself.
But tonight, as Eugene’s eyes crinkled at the story, his pain momentarily forgotten, and the other men around her broke out in guffaws, she heard a voice she didn’t recognize.
“Did you say Woodward?” it asked. “Captain Woodward?”
Lottie felt her stomach lurch as the hair on her arms rose in a combination of expectation and fear.
Her eyes darted to the man who had spoken. A few beds down, there was a new man, a little more battered than the soldiers who had been recovering for longer. He had a bandage around his whole head and a bright red cut across his cheek.
“That’s right,” Lottie said, reaching for Eugene’s hand, which closed around hers comfortingly.
“I’m real sorry about that,” the man said.
“Sorry about what?” Lottie asked, surprised by the high sound of her own voice.
“I went into action with Captain Woodward at Iwo Jima,” the man said. “We lost him.”
“Lost?” Lottie repeated.
She glanced at Eugene, who met her eyes, a different kind of pain in them than in his.
The man nodded. “I’m real sorry to tell you,” the man said again. “He was riding as engineer in a bomber that went down.”
He shook his head as Lottie’s fingers closed ever tighter on Eugene’s hand.
The man looked her square in the eyes. “He never made it back.”
Twenty-Six
“NOTHING?” LOTTIE ASKED. “YOU didn’t find anything?”
Maggie, who was carrying an empty basin fu
ll of fresh bandages, shook her head. She had just arrived in the ward, after a full day in the office. And as soon as Lottie saw her, she’d taken a detour over to meet her.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “I checked every list we’ve got. Twice.”
Lottie took a deep breath. A week ago, when she’d first heard the news that Luke’s plane had gone down, she’d gone to Maggie, who had access to classified reports and manifests in her office. Maybe the man in the bed near Eugene’s had gotten it wrong. He’d known another Luke, or another Woodward. Or maybe he’d even known her Captain Woodward, but he’d made a mistake about what had happened. That would have been easy to do, she told herself, in the midst of the chaos of war, when the man was wounded himself. Maybe his injury had even done something to his memories.
In her mind, she continued to grasp at straw after straw, until Maggie came back with the word: Luke was, in fact, on the list of men missing in action in Iwo Jima. Last contact, in a downed bomber. Just like the man had said.
“Missing,” Lottie had said. “So they still might find him.”
She could see from Maggie’s face that this was only a faint hope. But Maggie didn’t know Luke. Not the way Lottie did.
Lottie hadn’t liked watching the other men in her shop go off to battle without her. And she knew the men who had stayed with her didn’t like being left behind, either.
Now, at the thought that Luke was missing—perhaps gone forever, or perhaps just stranded on some harsh rock half a world away from everything he called home—the desire to be there, wherever there was, became unbearable. Lottie would have done anything to get to where he was.
The only problem was that nobody knew where that might be. Except for Luke himself, if he was even still living. Against all odds, Lottie believed that.
So she began to pray. It seemed unfair to ask God to watch out for just one when all of the men who were wounded or missing from that battle had people who cared about them, at least as much as she cared about Luke. But she couldn’t help the way her thoughts turned to him, again and again. And when they did, she sent up tiny prayers that, wherever he might be, God would take care of him and watch over him.
For Love and Country Page 18
