After their father deployed, she and Will would sometimes come home to find a letter from him waiting there. “My little leprechauns,” he called them. They would snuggle up on either side of their mother on the couch and ask her to read the letter over and over. Usually, there came a point when Conn could hear a shift in the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, and she knew her mother was close to tears. Conn would take Will to the kitchen table then, and help him write a reply to Daddy.
As hard as those months were, spending Thanksgiving and Christmas without Daddy, it all got harder in April. Conn remembered precisely when. It was April 5th, the day after Martin Luther King was shot. She remembered because they didn’t have school that day, so she was home when the doorbell rang. Will was still in bed, but Conn crouched at the top of the stairs and peeked down at the two Marines in their dress blues. They removed their white hats respectfully when Elizabeth opened the door, and one of them read from a letter in his hand, “It is with regret that we must inform you that Lieutenant Colonel Mark Mitchell has been shot down and is reported missing in action.” They spoke words of regret and condolence, handed Elizabeth the letter and left. As Elizabeth closed the door, she looked up and saw Conn. They stared at each other for several seconds before Elizabeth walked to the kitchen.
Conn went back to her room and waited. She tried to read the Nancy Drew mystery she had started, but she found herself listening for the sound of her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. When Elizabeth knocked softly and opened the door, Conn put her book down.
“You heard?” Elizabeth asked as she sat on the side of the bed.
Conn nodded. “What do we do now?”
Elizabeth laid her hand on Conn’s knee, still scabbed from a crash on her bicycle last week. “If anything happened to him, Daddy wanted us to go to Nana’s. We’ll wait for him there,” she said.
Conn nodded again, staring hard at Nancy Drew’s blond hair and blinking back tears. Elizabeth kissed Conn’s forehead and went to Will’s room to tell him.
That night, Conn had tiptoed to her mother’s bedroom door where she could hear her mother crying. She slid to the floor and sat there until the sounds quieted, and then went back to bed.
She had done this nearly every night since, standing guard as she was doing now in Nana’s house on this cool May night. She listened to the unfamiliar sound of crickets chirping as she waited. At length, her mother’s room was quiet. She padded back down the hall and crawled into bed.
Rising From the Ashes: The Chronicles of Caymin Page 29
