The Bungalow: A Novel

by Sarah Jio

  The other women nodded in agreement, and Kitty softened.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not going to read it; I’m merely tucking it away until she’s ready. Her heart is weak. She needs to regain her strength first. I won’t let this letter conflict with her recovery.”

  “All right,” Kitty said. “But you really shouldn’t meddle when it comes to love.”

  Is she giving me some kind of warning about her own life?

  I scrunched my nose in displeasure and tucked the envelope into the pocket of my dress for safekeeping. “I’m not meddling,” I said directly to Kitty. “This is a matter of health.”

  Kitty pushed her plate aside. “Well, girls, I don’t think I can stand another bite of these overcooked eggs. I’m heading to work. Nurse Hildebrand says we’ve got a live one coming in today.”

  I stewed about Kitty’s comments as we walked to the infirmary that morning, but forgot about the interaction entirely when we got word that a medic had radioed from another island that a wounded pilot was en route. The pilot would be our first real patient, aside from Westry, who was mine alone.

  The airman arrived at a quarter past ten. It was as serious a case as any one of us could have imagined—shrapnel wounds to the head. Kitty, first to wheel the soldier into the operating area, worked alongside the doctor with steady hands, removing bits of blood-covered metal and piling them on a plate beside the operating table. Liz excused herself to vomit, yet Kitty didn’t flinch. She handled the procedure with such skill and ease that the doctor requested she stay on for another hour to assist with the patient’s care. She quickly agreed.

  After our shift ended, I walked back to the barracks, eager to escape the sterile infirmary and relax in the comfort of the bungalow. I packed a little bag and tucked in scissors, a needle and thread, and a bolt of pale yellow fabric I’d found in a trash barrel outside the infirmary. Perfect for curtains, I’d thought, snatching it up before the enlisted men could haul it away with the garbage collection.

  Westry wasn’t inside when I arrived, so I retrieved the key from the book, remembering how he’d thought of the hiding place, and unlocked the door, setting my bag down on the old mahogany chair.

  I immediately got to work on the curtains, measuring the width of the windows and calculating the length and width of each panel. I laid out the fabric on the floor, shooing a baby lizard away as I did, and commenced cutting. I listened to the birds’ songs as I hemmed the curtains. I didn’t have an iron to press them, but the seams would be fine for a beach hut, and in time, the warm, misty air would soften their creases.

  As I stitched, I thought of Westry, so spirited and spontaneous, so unlike Gerard and his consistent, measured ways. Why can’t Gerard be more free, more of a lover of life? And yet, as I pushed my needle and thread through the fabric, I realized the concerns I had harbored about him in Seattle seemed only to fester in the tropics. In particular, his ability to sidestep the war gnawed at my conscience. Why didn’t he disagree with his father’s wishes and do the honorable thing?

  I remembered the painting resting under the bed as I fitted the rod into the first set of curtains on the window. I wondered about the subjects of the canvas, but mostly I wondered about the artist.

  Who lived here so long ago? A man like Westry, with adventure in his soul? I pictured Westry spending the rest of his days here on the island. Maybe he’d marry a native girl, like the one we’d met with Lance and Kitty at the market. What was her name? Yes, Atea. But would he be happy then? Would a woman like that make him happy? I grinned. Yes, happy in one way, certainly, but would they be on the same intellectual plane? Passion fades, yet love lives on. It’s what I wished Kitty would come to believe.

  Darkness fell on the bungalow just then, and I looked out the open-air window at gray, rain-soaked clouds looming in the sky, ready to drench the land below, whether it obliged or not. I scanned the beach, hoping I might see Westry bounding toward the bungalow, which is when I remembered the mailbox, or rather, the creaky floorboard in the corner. I walked over and lifted it, peering inside, and a white envelope caught my eye.

  I tore it open with anticipation.

  Dear Mrs. Cleo Hodge,

  I suppose you’re wondering who Mrs. Cleo Hodge is. Why, my dear, she is you. We need code names in case we’re found out. Let’s not forget, we are living in war times. So, you will be Cleo. I will be Grayson. What do you think? I considered the surname Quackenbush, but we’d fall to our knees in laughter every time we’d address each other and get nothing done. So, we shall be the Hodges, unless you have a better suggestion.

  Yours,

  Mr. Hodge

  P.S. Look in the desk drawer. A surprise is waiting.

  I giggled to myself, opening the drawer to find an orange. Its shiny, dimpled skin looked brilliant against the darkness of the mahogany drawer frame. I held it to my nose and inhaled the floral citrus scent before turning the letter over and writing a message to Westry:

  Dear Mr. Grayson Hodge,

  Today, I have been hard at work on the drapes, which I hope you will find satisfactory. Do you think we need a rug? A nice oriental? And how about a bookshelf and a place to sit, other than the bed? Perhaps, if we are lucky, a sofa will wash up on the shore. Thank you for the orange; it was perfect.

  Yours,

  Mrs. Hodge

  P.S. Your imagination is uncanny. Where on earth did you come up with the name “Quackenbush”? I can hardly contain my laughter.

  I tucked the note in the space below the floorboard and locked the door behind me. The wind had picked up since I had arrived, and the clouds overhead, now even darker, threatened rain. I hurried along the beach, nibbling on sections of the orange as I went.

  I startled when, not far from the bungalow in the brush above the beach, I heard a rustling sound, causing every muscle, every tendon in my body to freeze. What was that? Is someone following me?

  I took a few steps toward the jungle line, and waited. There it is again, that sound. Rustling, and faint voices. I crept closer, taking cover behind the base of a very large palm, and squinted. Two figures stood in the shadows of the lush jungle brush, one male, one female. Then I saw the telltale sleeve of an army dress shirt, and a bare female leg. I shrank back behind the palm before tiptoeing again onto to the beach and quickening my pace to a sprint, looking over my shoulder at every turn.

  Once inside the room, I was disappointed to see that Kitty wasn’t there waiting.

  Chapter 6

  “Can you believe it’s been two months since we arrived?” Mary marveled, her cheeks tinged a rosy pink. It was good to see the color, the life back in her face. She had insisted that Nurse Hildebrand let her work morning shifts instead of making her continue on bed rest. Despite intermittent trembling in her hands, Mary continued to gain strength, and she eagerly volunteered to assist me in a round of immunizations that morning.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It sometimes feels as if we arrived only yesterday.” I paused to count the vials of vaccine we’d be giving the men after breakfast. “Yet, so much has happened already. I hardly feel like the same girl who stepped foot on that tarmac the first day.”

  Mary nodded. “Me too. It’s hard to imagine life back there.”

  I sighed. “I’ve almost forgotten what Gerard’s voice sounds like. Isn’t that terrible?”

  “Not really,” Mary said. “You still love him.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said with extra emphasis, feeling guilty for not yet taking the time to write him.

  “I’ve almost forgotten Edward’s voice,” Mary added. “But that’s definitely not terrible.” She grinned, and I nodded in agreement.

  I remembered the letter I’d been keeping from her. Is she ready yet? I listened to her hum as she unwrapped the packages of vaccine and set them on the trays. That letter could spoil everything.

  “Where’s Kitty?” Mary asked. “I thought I saw her here earlier this morning.”

  “Oh, she’s
here,” I said. “We walked down together.”

  “No,” Nurse Hildebrand grumbled. “She said she wasn’t feeling well, so I sent her back to the barracks.”

  That’s odd. She looked fine this morning. I tried not to let my mind wander, but Kitty had been behaving strangely, almost since the moment we’d arrived on the island—saying she was going somewhere and turning up in another place; promising to meet me at breakfast or lunch only to disappear. She rarely spoke of Colonel Donahue, and I hadn’t mentioned witnessing their boat trip. That ship seemed to have sunk, yet she spent far too much time with Lance. Yesterday they stayed out until nearly midnight. Jarred from slumber, I’d eyed the clock sleepily when she finally stumbled into bed.

  “She must have caught the virus that’s going around,” Mary said. “A terrible stomach illness.”

  I didn’t believe that Kitty had a stomach illness. No, something else was going on. Our shifts in the infirmary didn’t leave room for meaningful conversation, now that more wounded men were arriving from nearby islands, where the fighting was thick. They trickled in slowly, but the cases were grim. Knife wounds. Gunshots to the abdomen. And just yesterday, a nearly severed leg that needed an immediate amputation. The somber work of caring for fallen soldiers consumed our days, and when our shifts ended, we’d scatter like mice to our favorite hiding places. But where was Kitty’s?

  I thought about the other nurses. Stella had begun spending a lot of time in the recreation hall, where she’d taken a new interest in shuffleboard, or rather, in Will, who played shuffleboard. Of course, Liz dutifully tagged along. Mary, with little energy after a shift in the infirmary, went back to the barracks to read or write letters to friends at home, while I snuck away to the bungalow. Sometimes Westry would be there, sometimes not, but I always hoped to find him.

  “Mail’s here!” one of the nurses cried from the front door of the infirmary.

  I left Mary with the vaccines and ventured over to the wooden crate filled with letters and parcels. Mail deliveries had been sparse. But this was a mountain of mail. It spilled out on the floor when I pushed the crate closer to the table—so many letters, like covert submarines, infiltrating our private world.

  Stella received five; Liz, three; and Kitty, just two, both from her mother. And then I saw one addressed to me and I felt a familiar tugging at my heart when I recognized the handwriting. Gerard.

  I opened it discreetly, prepared to tuck it away the moment Stella or another nurse crept up.

  My love,

  The leaves are turning colors here, and I miss you so. Why did you have to go again?

  Seattle is the same, just as you left it, only it’s lonelier without you. I suppose the war has something to do with the loneliness factor. It’s all anyone can talk about. I worry about you out there. There will be great action in the Pacific. I pray that your island will be shielded from it. The military minds who I’ve spoken to here believe it will be untouched. I pray they are right.

  The war has taken the best of us. It’s a ghost town at the Cabaña Club. You wouldn’t recognize the place. Every able-bodied man has either joined up or been drafted, and I wanted you to know that even after all Father has done to protect me from the fight, I can’t help but wonder if I should join too. It would be the right thing to do. The next wave of troops ships out on the 15th of October, and I’m thinking about voiding my exemption and going with them. I’d be spending two weeks in basic training at a base in California before heading to Europe.

  Please do not worry about me. I will write you often to tell you how I am, and will dream of the day when we are reunited.

  I love you with all my heart and think of you more than you know.

  Yours,

  Gerard

  I held the letter to my heart and blinked hard. As much as I reveled in his burst of patriotism, I hated to think of him in danger, and cringed when I thought about the lapse in time between his sending the letter and my receiving it. Could he be on a battlefield right now? Could he could be . . . ?

  I felt an arm on my back after I’d slumped over in my chair, trying to hide my tears from the other women. “What’s the matter, dear?” Mary asked softly.

  “It’s Gerard,” I said. “I think he signed up.”

  Mary patted my back as my tears dotted the crumpled paper in my hands, smearing Gerard’s beautiful handwriting into patches of muddled black ink.

  “What do you think it would be like to be a military wife?” Kitty asked me that night before bed. She sat in a pink cotton nightgown on top of her bunk, brushing her blond curls—and clearly feeling just fine—as I tried, unsuccessfully, to read.

  I set the book down. “You can’t be saying you’re already thinking of marrying Lance, are you?”

  Kitty didn’t answer; she just continued brushing her hair. “I suppose the lifestyle could have its benefits,” she said. “All the traveling and the excitement.”

  “Kitty, but you’ve only just met him,” I said.

  The evenings were the only time we talked anymore—at least, those evenings when Kitty wasn’t out with Lance.

  Kitty set her brush down on her bedside table and climbed into her bed, pulling the coverlet up to her neck, before turning to me. “Anne,” she said. Her voice was childlike, curious, naive, tremulous. “Did you always know that Gerard was the one?”

  The question caught me off guard in a way it wouldn’t have in Seattle. “Well, yes, of course I did,” I said, remembering his letter from earlier today. My devotion to him swelled. “I just knew.”

  Kitty nodded. “I think I have the same feeling,” she said, turning her head to the wall before I could question her. “Good night.”

  Westry had been away on a mission to another island for thirty days, and when he returned on November 27, I waited near the men’s barracks, pretending to gather hibiscus, in hopes of meeting him on the pathway. It was Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and the buzz in camp revolved around two things: turkey and cranberry sauce.

  “Hey, you, nurse!” one of the men shouted from a third-story window. “Do you think we’ll get a bird?”

  “Do I look like the cook?” I said sarcastically.

  The soldier, barely nineteen, if that, smirked and recoiled. It had taken me months to become comfortable with the ways of men and war. No longer shy, I grunted at those who grunted at me and greeted inappropriate remarks with retorts that leveled the playing field. Mother would have been beside herself.

  Twenty minutes of flower picking resulted in no Westry sighting, so I retreated to the barracks with a heavy heart and a bag full of hibiscus.

  “The mail came,” Kitty said, tossing an envelope on the bed. “It’s from your mother.”

  I shrugged and tucked the envelope into my dress pocket as Kitty peeked into the flower-filled bag I’d set by the door. “They’re gorgeous,” she said. “Let’s get them in water.”

  She plucked the blossoms from the bag and arranged them, one by one, in the water glass on her dressing table.

  “They’ll never keep,” I said. “They’re a terrible cutting flower. They’ll wilt by morning.”

  “I know,” she said. “But don’t they look so pretty right now, just as they are?”

  I nodded. I wished I could see the beauty in the moment the way Kitty did. It was a gift.

  She stood back and marveled at the makeshift vase, packed with bright red blooms that would be limp by the time we came back from dinner, before glancing at her bedside table. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I also got a letter from home. From Father.”

  Kitty tore the edge of the envelope and pulled out the letter, reading at first with a grin. But then a frown appeared, and a look of shock. Tears began a slow trickle down her cheeks.

  “What is it?” I asked, running to her side. “What does it say?”

  She threw herself on the bed, burying her face in the pillow.

  “Kitty,” I persisted, “tell me.”

  She didn’t budge, so I
picked up the pages of the letter that had fallen to the ground and read it myself, in the words of her father.

  You should know, love, that Mr. Gelfman left for war in September, to Europe, and I’m afraid he was killed. I know this news is going to be hard for you to hear. Your mother did not want me to write of it, but I felt you should know.

  I tucked the letter into Kitty’s dressing table. The damned mail. Why does it come and haunt us the way it does? We were getting along fine until the letters started arriving. “Kitty,” I said, leaning my face into hers. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Just let me be,” she said quietly.

  “I’ll bring dinner up for you,” I said, hearing the sound of the mess hall bell.

  “I’m not hungry,” she whimpered.

  “I’ll bring it anyway.”

  I heaped a pile of mashed potatoes on my plate and, with the cook’s permission, I got an extra plate for Kitty, followed by sliced carrots and boiled ham that looked curled and dry under the warming lights. Still, at least it wasn’t canned. I was glad of that.

  Stella and Mary waved at me from the nurses’ table, and I nodded and walked toward them. “I’m just grabbing a tray for Kitty and myself, to take back to the room. Kitty got a letter from home today. A bad one.”

  Mary frowned. “I’m sorry to hear it,” she said. “Can you sit for a minute, though? You can’t juggle both of those trays on the path back. You’ll trip. Why don’t you eat first?”

  I thought it over, then agreed, sitting down next to Mary.

  “They say there was a fight in the barracks today,” Stella said in a hushed voice. “This island’s really wearing on the men.”

  “It’s wearing on all of us,” I replied, attempting to cut the tough slice of ham with a dull knife.