by Amanda Dykes
Mireilles, her wide eyes now in the rain and the way she seemed to calm when I spoke, reminded me of Celia, though a few years older than my sister.
She took a step closer, then another, until she had wound her way so close I could feel her warmth.
My breath hitched in my throat. The rain had soaked her fast, soaked her through, slicked her dark hair down like a veil and washed her face clean of the dust of our journey. I saw, for the first time, a light scattering of freckles over her nose and the way her lips looked red against her too-pale skin.
She shouldn’t be out in this. I remembered the way she stumbled on the path today and knew she wasn’t well. But I was quickly learning she had a stubborn streak to match my own, and if I wanted to get her out of the rain, it meant getting a move on and getting back to the others fast.
“Alright,” I said and tipped my head onward.
She gave a small smile.
I laughed. “You’d be better off with those fellows,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve been known to fall irrevocably into massive holes.”
It was the first time I’d spoken of Saint-Mihiel aloud. I had buried it all and meant never to speak of it. Certainly never to a stranger. And certainly never in a tone so light.
She seemed to like it. Some color inched back into her cheeks.
Keep talking.
It was a foolish notion, and I didn’t know where it came from. Perhaps the way her eyes lifted, inviting more.
Well, what could it hurt. Besides dredging words up from inside of me, where they liked to stockpile and die a slow and ceaseless death, it felt oddly . . . nice. To tell someone of that night on the front.
So I talked to the only person who would keep my words safe, for she could not understand a single one.
“Did you ever see much of the battles, back at home?”
She studied me, not answering. Waiting.
I blew my cheeks out and shook my head. “I hope not. It’s . . .” I shook my head again. How to put words to the ache of it all? “Well. I did, I fell in a hole, just like I said,” I tried to make light of it. “Truth was, I thought that was it. I’d die there. I probably should have. There was a moment when my back hit the wall made of earth and I slid down and sat. The sky rumbled like only the earth should, and the earth bled like only people should, and people—” my voice caught—“people lived and died like nobody, ever, should.”
She looked grave. I reminded myself I was talking to help her, not burden her. I lightened my tone.
“Anyway. I understand, I do. War happens. We help. It’s what we do. Not one of us can fix this whole mess, but maybe we can help this one moment. You know?”
She smiled in answer, a sad smile. I began to forget she couldn’t understand.
We walked on, and I talked on, telling her things of the war, telling her of Celia, telling her of home. The racetrack, the New York sunrises. The smell of spring fields. Things full of life. I told her of getting myself locked in with the goats in the barn when I was seventeen and of how Celia wouldn’t come near me for days after that, swearing I still smelled like the hairy beasts.
And she, Mireilles, marched on beside me. Slowing when I slowed, plowing on when I did, picking her way around a tumbled pile of rubble when I tried to climb over it and slid promptly on my rear. She looked triumphant, beating me to the other side, and I swear I saw one of her dark eyebrows lift, a sparkle in her eye. Mireilles, this somber soul—it seemed she had a sense of humor that was as deep as it was quiet.
I would have to watch out for her.
Looking pleased, she picked up her skirts to better navigate the wet rubble and blazed right on ahead. I shook my head. This Angel of Argonne had a mind of her own.
She looked over her shoulder, pausing to see if I followed, and I caught up quick.
I ceased my aimless rambling, and in the stillness, we walked on. It was strange, the way the only sound was of our two pairs of feet, as if we were the only people in all the world, here in this lifeless place. Because we knew it wasn’t true. That somewhere, hidden here, enemy or friend, people lived and breathed.
Together we scanned, paused, listened, walked on, trying to find the officers. And then, at least I presumed our thoughts aligned, we gave up on finding them and began to look on our own for shelter. Night would fall in a few short hours.
The sound of a bell ringing snatched my attention and I saw it: the partially crumbled steeple of an old chapel. I squinted, hoping to see in the distance who might be ringing the bell. A man exited the building, dressed in a dark suit. I ran to catch up to him and saw his suit, like his town, had seen better days. But he wore it with care, the priest’s collar pressed and crisp, a faded yellow mark upon the white where someone had worked hard to remove a stain.
“Hello!” I hollered, and he slowed his walk, turning.
He was old, I saw, with a face marked by both kindness and sadness. “Hello,” he said, wrapped in an accent thick as the hills beyond were green. He extended a hand, and I shook it gratefully. “You are come to help,” he said, gesturing at my uniform.
“We hope so,” I said.
“And I,” he replied, looking sadly at his crumbling church.
“Is it—is it a working church?” I could feel my face burn. The audacity of that question, and the words all wrong . . . but how did one ask if a church was alive? I didn’t know the right words, the holy words needed to speak of such things. What would George say? All he had was holy words, even if he had nothing to back them up.
The man studied me. “Yes,” he said. “Working church.” He nodded slowly. “It is empty, but it works.” I was caught in the way the words settled deep in his accent, deep in his meaning.
He studied the building, as if reading the stones. And then he opened his mouth and read those stones to me. “Never could we have imagined something crushing into our walls from the clear blue skies like they did. Never did I know that our pews would be splintered by the—the—”
“Shrapnel,” I offered. And knew too well what he meant.
“Shrap-nel,” he repeated. “And never did I think that these walls, which have been filled with music . . . life . . . hope . . . laughing . . . tears . . .” His words slowed and rolled up and down in their own melody. “That they would be silent. But . . .” He trailed off, letting his gaze roam the outskirts of the village. “They are not silent, really.”
I waited. He began to walk slowly, running his weathered hand over the jagged edges of his wrecked chapel. “They have done what they were always meant to do. Let the life and music and hope out beyond these walls. Trotted”—he let his fingers mimic the word, tripping over the top of the stones and grinned like a kid at his word choice, proud of his English—“over the hills. This town has been French, and German, and French, and German, each one taking turns taking over. This church has seen more bombs”—he waved his hand in the air—“than people over the past three years. And do you know what we have learned?”
I shook my head and hung on his coming words, my chest aching for reasons I couldn’t explain. “Things may crash into our worlds and blast all we have known to bits.” There was pain in his eyes, cinching his voice as he said this. “But you know, don’t you, that great holes in stone buildings let the light through.”
From the outside in, or the inside out, I didn’t know. But the man’s words felt like treasure he was offering from his near-empty pockets right into ours.
“And now,” he said. “It is yours.”
“Ours,” I said, not following this leap.
“You need shelter, no?”
I had forgotten the rain.
“Ah, broken it may be, but it can still shelter the weary from the wet. Come.”
He showed us inside. I followed, and soon sensed an emptiness behind me. Mireilles had stopped at the threshold, face upturned as if she could see the reaches of the ceiling that had once been there. As if it was the Sistine Chapel, with Michelangelo’s painstaking handiwor
k captivating her attention.
Only there was no ceiling. The handiwork above her was that of God himself, and it came in the form of a gentling rain upon her upturned face. She stood that way for a long time and must have sensed me watching. She blinked against the sprinkling.
“You have come to help,” the priest had said at the sight of my uniform. The words pounded through me and told me to cross the expanse between us, take her face in my hands, wipe the raindrops from her cheeks.
And yet—nothing seemed more natural, either, than to see this girl, so untouched, unspoiled even by the war at her own front door, washed clean by water from heaven itself.
She looked around, eyes wide, as if she’d never set foot in a church before. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe we had that in common. Mr. Haggerty, with his homespun sermons stewing in his soil-darkened hands, had brought church to me, out on those old garden plots back home. As I followed Mireilles’s gaze around the room, splintered pews shining in water, I shared her awe.
“Come, sopping creatures,” the priest said. He led the way to the back of the church and opened a creaking door to reveal a room with roof enough to keep a few souls dry. “For you,” he said, pointing at me. “And for you—” he pointed at Mireilles and removed a ring of keys from his pocket. He slid them by and by until reaching the right one, its shape clearly familiar to him as he rubbed it between his fingers and his wrinkle-mapped face lit with a smile. “The ‘holy of holies,’” he said, and unlocked another door.
For a door in a church with no walls, or not many to speak of, to be locked, it must surely hold great treasure.
I leaned to the side, craning to see as Mireilles followed him in. There was one pew untouched by war, a worn cushion that the man retrieved from a shelf and placed upon the pew, and a robe of some kind that he spread across the pew like a blanket. “There, you see? Fit for a queen.”
She murmured something to him. “Ah, you speak French! Of course.” The two talked in their shared language, me feeling ever more an intruder. I stepped back and surveyed my own room. To someone else, in another life, it might have resembled a bleak prison cell. Nothing but hard floor. But to me—and I knew to George and Henry—it was as good as a castle. No mud, no rats, no stench of the trenches.
“George and Henry.” I winced. I’d forgotten about them. I poked my head back in toward the priest, who was taking his leave from Mireilles. She was perched upon her pew, deep exhaustion shadowed under her eyes as she ran her hand back and forth over the smooth wood. She smiled at me, this woman who was now the unsuspecting keeper of all of my words and none of their meaning.
“I’ll return soon,” I said, hoping she understood. Gesturing that I’d come back. Knowing I probably looked a fool.
She nodded and stood. I went to leave and sensed her following once more.
The priest gone, it was just the two of us in this holy place. “You can stay.” I held out my hands in a stopping motion. “Rest. I won’t be long.”
She nodded again and continued to follow. I turned to try again, only to see that stubborn quirk of her eyebrow and a half-smile that told me she was coming, whatever I had to say on the matter.
“Alright,” I said. “We’ll be quick. You’re already soaked through.”
At this, she looked up and down my uniform, making a point.
She was right. I was drenched. Not one to talk.
Dusk was falling outside as we picked our way through former streets. And with the dusk rose birdsong.
Looking back, I nearly blame it. Pecking holes in my defenses, tuning my ears to the sound of hope. Telling me birds only sang where war was far.
How wrong. How very, very wrong.
A single moment. Just one. I let my guard down.
There are things that will never make sense to me. Details I remember from that instant, when time slowed impossibly. The stone that I stood on somewhere in the ruins of Beaulieu-en-Coteau, how it was cracked at a diagonal, in the shape of a lightning bolt. How I was zapped with the thought—zapped, for there was no actual time to think it in any articulate sort of way—that if lightning had a sound, it must sound like the bullet searing toward us.
And then, in the same instant—right after the sickening snap of a sniper’s bullet—the sound of Mireilles. And me thinking I must be going mad—because her words came out in English.
“Down!” she said. “Get down!” This time a scream, and her stricken face running toward me as if to tackle me into obedience.
I had been looking for birds.
She had seen a sniper.
And she was running at me, in the path of a bullet much too fast to outrun.
We split the air. Tangled—and dove to the ground.
The bullet collided with a ruined pillar inches from my ear and even closer to the top of Mireilles’s head. She was on her hands and knees after knocking into me, her dark hair whipping as she turned to search, frantically, for the source.
But there was no time for that. “Quick,” I said and pulled her around the corner of the building. I hated how fast we moved, how it surely scraped her. But it was that or death.
We sat upon a white chipped-paint sign that said Fleurs and listened. Sitting where a flower shop once sold blossoms, every sense aware that the slightest movement could end our lives.
She drew her knees up slowly and wrapped her arms around them, making herself compact. Whatever her tale, she knew how to hide herself.
In the silence, so many questions pounded with the rain.
Who was this woman? How did she speak English? How much English did she speak, and why had she hidden that fact? How, in all the world, had our paths crossed and planted us here together, holding our breath, sitting on a splintered sign in a pile of ruins, wondering if we would live to see morning?
But in the midst of the questions, another shot rang out. This time, closer.
I moved to cover her. To put myself between her and this unseen enemy. Desperate to be fast enough.
The same muted pulse of blood descended over my hearing.
I moved myself away from her and saw two things.
Mireilles, slumping into unconsciousness.
And on the sign beneath us, Fleurs blossoming blood-red in the rain.
20
“Mireilles,” I whispered, fiercely as I could. “Mireilles.” No response.
If my pulse had been pounding because of the sniper, it was galloping a thousand times faster now. I held the girl, slumped in my arms, rain beating down. The crimson river running into the mud in rivulets now, washed by the rain.
“What do I do?” I whispered, thankful for the downpour covering the sound of my voice. Wishing it would wash that question away. There was always a plan. Always something to do. That question, unanswered—my stomach twisted.
But maybe the rain, now bucketing, would give us some visual cover. I had to get her to shelter, to safety. That is, if she was even . . .
I pressed my ear against her dress, listening. Cursing, now, the sound of the rain. Where was the beat of her heart?
I listened harder. These were the ears that could pick out a race winner from a mile away. These were the ears Captain Truett depended on for artillery fire warnings. I shook my head, willing them to clear. How could I not hear a single person’s pulse?
I had to. I pressed myself closer, willing my face to feel warmth from her breath, pounding from her pulse.
I shifted her body, thankful she was at least not aware of my touch. That my hand rested on her stomach to brace her. And that as I listened so hard for a heartbeat—something else came.
A small but mighty slam—right against my palm.
My palm that rested on her stomach.
My hand shot away faster than the bullet had come at us—and I stared.
I had to stare hard, let my eyes adjust in the growing dark. But as they did, I saw it clearly: her dress, the one I’d thought old-fashioned, was slicked against her body from the rain. And in clear relief was
the gentle roundness of a stomach that looked out of place on her nearly starved form.
She was—was she? With child?
Slowly, I pressed my palm back to her stomach, feeling at first only warmth, and thanking God for that sensation. She lived.
And then, after a moment that stretched long, that same tiny, mighty, unmistakable ricochet against my palm.
My eyes hurt from staring so hard, and the wind that came now in place of the rain made them sting but shot my mind through with clarity.
Mireilles was with child.
I stood—or tried to, only to have my leg buckle beneath me. The river of blood had slowed to a trickle and looked black now in the moonlight.
It led to me.
I lifted my pant leg, wincing at the way the fabric tore from my skin, where it had been embedded. The gash went deep. Too big, I hoped, to be from a bullet.
Bracing myself and gritting my teeth, I struggled to stand and gather Mireilles up—but couldn’t. I would drop her, I knew, if I attempted to carry her in this state. In our fast move around the corner to safety, she had struck her head against the building, best I could tell.
A cold knot cinched tighter in me with each realization. We had taken her from the refuge of her home to find safety . . . and delivered her to the lion’s den. Her—and her unborn child.
Every second stretched on, settling upon my chest with heaviness that made it nearly impossible to breathe.
What do I do? I listened hard and heard no shots. Their absence sent fear drilling deeper into me than when I did hear. The man—or men—could be anywhere.
Make a plan. Make a plan. Make a plan. The driving words of my youth, pounding with my pulse.
But there was no plan.
