by Amanda Dykes
If I moved, it could tip the sniper off.
If I stayed, the sniper could move. Spot us, pick us off. Or pick me off, leaving her alone out here, unconscious. I wasn’t much to look at, knew I didn’t have anything to offer the girl, but at least I could stand between her and danger. At least I could, in this moment, keep her warm. And—I prayed—alive.
There was no plan.
But there was a prayer.
“Please, God.” I sputtered it into the rain. But wasn’t He the one sending the rain? “Please.” Voice low, so ragged it hurt, muttered into the dark. But hadn’t He made the dark? How did someone entreat the God who could, if what they said was true, change all this in a second?
“Please.” For the third time, the prayer uttered in a single word because it would’ve taken a million to try and say it all.
Mireilles was growing cold in my arms. My leg was numb from the gash. I tried to move, just an inch, and couldn’t.
That’s when I knew—we might die here tonight.
And that’s when it came. The sound of gunfire, followed by footsteps and shouting. “Come on!”
It was Henry, rushing at us, eyes wilder than when he was in one of his writing furies. George was nowhere to be seen. “He’s covering us. Come on!”
I tried. “Take her.”
His eyes grew so big the whites of them would’ve given our location to the sniper from a mile away. “Is she—”
“Unconscious,” I said.
He struggled to get her up, into the shadows. I pulled in the deepest breath I could, held it, pressed my eyes closed, and heaved myself off of an old spike. I will never forget the single moment of searing sensation and sound—and will not detail it now. It is the sort of thing so unnatural it sickens a body.
I followed. Limping would be too kind a word for the way I dragged my own leg by my hands, lopsided and desperate to keep them in sight.
“There!” I whisper-shouted. “The church—on your right!”
The sound of gunfire. It didn’t add up. Chaplains didn’t fight.
It seemed an eternity, getting into that shell of a church. I told Henry where the pew was, and he got Mireilles settled. I got myself over to her and in the blur of everything, somehow Henry went back out, bringing George to safety with him this time.
“Did you see me?” George said, beaming in the moonlight. “Of course you didn’t. Good as invisible, I was. Not bad for a chaplain, eh? There were two of them up there in that old building. But we scared ’em off into the night like a proper pair of jackrabbits!”
He was right. It was a far cry from how he’d been at Plattsburg, when he’d spent target practice composing odes to the birds overhead, which he wished to see on his dinner table.
“Good on you,” I said. “Thanks.” I caught his line of vision. “Really. I mean it. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Right you are, and don’t you forget it,” he said. “But what’s got her?”
Ignoring the throbbing in my calf, I knelt beside Mireilles. “She hit her head.” I didn’t tell him there was a lot more going on with her than that. A whole lot.
I was no medic. All I had was the minuscule first-aid kit issued to each of us—a waterproof package with two dressings intended for a bullet’s entrance and exit. That wasn’t going to do anything for a head slammed into ancient stone . . . or for her other condition, if I was right. And perhaps I was wrong. What did I know of such things?
I knelt beside her while Hank and George checked the perimeter. The journalist and the chaplain were turning out to be the heroes in this tale.
“Mireilles,” I said, trying her name aloud in my full voice for the first time. It felt like one of the fine things, like how Celia used to stand at the shop windows in town and look at things she could never have and trace her finger on the glass around their shapes.
I lifted my hand and traced her cheek. It, too, felt too good. Too good for my rough, mud-streaked hands. She was soft and true, and I had no place touching her. But I had to rouse her, I knew.
I let my hand rest on her shoulder where she lay on her side. “Mireilles,” I said, a little louder.
Again, I heard the priest speak of hope. And for the second time that night, I prayed.
At first, nothing changed. But after a bit, she stirred, her breath coming deeper, her movements like one struggling to find their way to the surface.
She opened her eyes and looked around in confusion, letting her gaze land on the darkened silhouettes of the room’s objects. A lectern in the corner. A chair with a reaching back, beside it. And me.
She saw me and jolted back with a force that nearly tumbled me back, too. I worried she’d hit her head again, this time on the pew, but she scrambled to a sitting position and made to move as far from me as she could.
“It’s alright,” I said, holding up my hands with fingers spread wide. “Nothing will hurt you here.”
She stared, shoulders rising and falling, arms looped around her stomach in a protective instinct.
“It’s just me,” I said. “Matthew Petticrew. Remember?”
After a moment, her shoulders slumped a little, relaxing. A hand went to her forehead.
“Are you in pain?” I thought of what Celia would have done. How she had me hold a jar of fresh-caught creek water to any blow I took—and there had been many at the racetrack.
I had no jar of cool stream water. I looked around and spotted a pile of rubble in the corner. Pulling the smoothest rock I could find from it, I gave thanks that it was cold and placed it in her hand. “Hold this to where it hurts,” I said. “The cold will help.” I wished, rather than knew, this to be true.
She examined the rock a moment, one hand still resting on her small rounded stomach. A picture of one attempting to reconcile how a rock could remove a hurt so deep she could never pull it to the surface. Suddenly aware of my observation, she quickly removed her hand from her middle.
She held it, instead, to her head. I wondered if she remembered what had happened. Her courage . . . and her use of my language.
She raised her eyes to me, darkest blue, and in them swam so many questions. Mine answered in kind, surely, with so many questions of my own. Meeting hers in the air between us in an invisible, tentative dance.
At last she spoke. Daring to use English once more, her voice rich and sweet and low in her accent. “You . . . saved me.”
I hung my head. “I think it was the other way around. If you hadn’t warned me when you did . . .” I let the implication trail off.
“You are alright?”
“Yes,” I said quickly, forgetting my own wound and wincing when I moved my leg out in front of me. “Mostly.”
“The others . . . ?” she said, looking around and not finding George and Henry.
“They’re fine too. Keeping watch outside.”
She nodded, her forehead pinched.
I pulled out the kit from my jacket pocket and tried to make sense of the gash. Covering it would do little but stop the bleeding, and that had already slowed. And I might need these dressings, yet, for their intended purposes. Best to let the wound heal in the open air. I rolled up the pant leg and tried hard to ignore the burn every time I shifted my position.
“And you,” I said. “You are alright?” I used her own words.
She didn’t answer right away.
I gulped. She didn’t know that I knew of her condition. I considered, for a moment, not saying anything. It wasn’t right to speak of such to her, especially when I couldn’t be sure, and especially when I was an expert at bungling any words. Especially ones concerning sensitive situations.
But the weight that visibly settled on her knocked the bungling words right out of me and into the open, anyway. I could at least help carry the knowledge of it, when it seemed she had no one else to do so.
“I—I have to apologize,” I said. She tilted her head, looking childlike as she awaited my explanation. “I need to say I’m sorry.” I tried
it in a different way, in case she hadn’t understood.
“I would think you would wish me to apologize,” she said. “You know that I can speak with you. That I hid that.”
“I can understand why,” I said. “But . . .” Where was Celia? She would know what to say. Men didn’t speak to ladies about this. But then again, men didn’t usually stumble upon ladies in the woods, singing and making wreaths, and end up tasked with securing their safety in the City of Light. Nothing about this was usual. Still, I thought of Celia. She had a way with words. She would say something pretty, probably.
“I felt your stomach,” I blurted out. And immediately wished the words back. “I mean—I’m sorry . . .” I winced. And pushed forward. “When I tried to pick you up, when you were knocked out, I—something inside of you jolted. I felt it. Like a—a small kick.”
She was beginning to understand. The look on her face morphed into horror, then shame, looking down and refusing to meet my gaze.
We sat long in the silence, rain falling outside and neither of us knowing how to move from that declaration. “I only mention it in case—that is—can I help? Is there someone I can contact for you, or anything I can—”
“There is no one,” she said. She lifted her chin. It was clear she didn’t wish to tell me the story behind the child. “There is me. Only me.”
“You’re not no one,” I said.
Her look turned quizzical. I wished I could elaborate. But I knew so little of her. Yet still, I knew without a doubt that she was not “no one.”
“You’re Mireilles,” I said, giving it the simplest answer I could. The only thing I truly knew enough about her, enough to speak.
“Mira,” she said quietly. As if unsure whether to speak it.
“Mira.” I repeated the name. It suited her, somehow. She with the long hair that whipped about in curls in the wind, her being just flowing from the shortened form of her name.
“And you are Matthew,” she said.
I nodded. There was nothing more to add to that, really. I was just me.
She looked at me long and finally breathed in deep. “Thank you, Matthew.”
“For what?”
“For saving . . . us. And—if I may ask—for keeping this to yourself.” She folded her hands in her lap, fingers interlaced, one thumb gliding over the other nervously.
I nodded. I had so many questions. How soon was her time? Where was the man who should be here, helping her? And why did I feel my defenses rising when I thought of him, and thought of how I sat, right now, in his place?
I checked myself. For all I knew, he was a good man. A prisoner or casualty of war who would’ve given anything to be here. Perhaps a farmer, working the fields far away to make a life for his family. I shouldn’t make assumptions. But then other possibilities came knocking. Scenarios less honorable, the sort common in this war. And my anger riled me wide awake. This was the cadence of my thoughts as they stretched on into the night.
She watched me warily, fighting to stay awake as her eyelids grew heavy. To my shame, it took me too long to realize—while I sat here keeping vigil—my presence was keeping her from rest. She was keeping her own vigil.
In the corner of the room sat a tiny chair, one meant for a child. I moved it to the threshold of the door and placed it just inside, sitting on it. Hoping she would know she was safe, both by my distance and my proximity. Far enough that I hoped the distance might instill a little trust—but near enough that I could see if any trouble befell her.
At last, sleep found her. She turned and awoke after a time, her eyes studying the stars above where the ceiling had fallen away in the corner. Then turning, slowly, to my place at the door.
“Did you not find sleep?” she asked, trying to lift herself to sitting.
“No,” I said. Her wording was uncanny. There’d been a long time in the trenches where I’d searched for sleep, and searched hard—and more than that, searched for rest. But I’d given up on that.
She looked troubled, apologetic. “Not for a long time,” I added. Hoping it would ease her conscience and help her know that night was familiar to me. It had become a strange sort of home.
“Many nights?”
“Many.”
Her concern only deepened.
“It’s not so bad.” I tried to think how to lighten the mood, ease this unseen burden from her. Without telling her that when I did sleep, it was to nightmares that gutted me. “Gotta stay awake long enough to think,” I said. “It’s hard to get a thought in at all during the day, with George and Henry always yammering.”
“Perhaps if your bunkmates were here,” she said.
“George and Henry?”
“No. The smellier ones. The goats.”
I must have looked one hundred percent befuddled.
“The ones who your sister said you smelled like?” She wrinkled her forehead, remembering. “How did she say . . . like ‘hairy beasts’?”
I gulped. I’d forgotten. Sputtering on, half madman, half schoolboy, as we picked our way across this no-longer city, dropping stories from my youth like seeds into every crevice.
Thinking it might calm her. Liking how they cheered me, too, all the tales from boyhood I should’ve been embarrassed by. Shenanigans and all.
I stammered. Must have looked like a fool, frozen in the realization that she’d understood every word—and yet whatever look of horror she saw on my face, she smiled. Dropped a shoulder . . . and laughed.
“Do not worry, Matthew Petticrew. I have a goat story or two myself. I think we all must. And . . . in truth . . . it was nice to hear, today.”
I regained some of my senses and sat a little straighter, pretenses falling away before the woman who knew more of me, now, than the few who had known me for a lifetime did.
“Well, if you like smelly animal stories, I have plenty.”
She smiled, and so did I. How, on the tails of both of us nearly losing our lives, and in the wake of me unearthing a secret she clearly wanted kept, had we ended up here? Laughing, in the dead of night. Our lives still hanging in the balance, for this was war. But learning to stand on an unexpected patch of memory of simpler times and smelly animals.
She looked so tired. I rose and snatched an old bedsheet from its place covering an ancient instrument in the corner, shook it out, wrapped it quick around itself, and carefully slid it under her head.
“A pillow,” I said and felt ridiculous.
But she looked at it and ran her hand across it like it was gold. “Thank you.” She laid her head down, dark hair coiling in strands behind her that looked softer, much softer, than the makeshift pillow.
I swallowed, embarrassed. I would never watch a girl sleep in any normal world. Just sit here and watch like it was alright. As if it wasn’t too close, as if it didn’t matter that I hardly knew her and she hardly knew me and I, somehow, seemed to be the only living bearer of her greatest secret.
So I retreated from Mira’s chamber, this time to the outside of the door, lying down, and checking in as the night wore on, just to ensure she was still sleeping peacefully, more times than I should have.
But it was her face above mine, checking on me, that I awoke to at first light the next morning.
21
Mira
When I was young, I followed Papa into the woods one day. He was hunting for us, winter soon to come. I saw him spot a fox, so red against an early snow. He had it in the view of his weapon and was ready to pull the trigger.
“Stop, Papa!” I yelled at him. He looked angry for a moment; how many times had he told me to be as silent as the snow when we were hunting? But even my shouting did not send the animal running. For I had seen what Papa had not: the fox was wounded. Asleep, perhaps, or near unto its death, but I remember how I thought I would explode from the ache inside of me, thinking of the little thing becoming someone’s dinner.
I ran to it and saw such sad eyes. It was an animal and I was a girl, and I knew there was a natural o
rder to things and the way of life, but still—I could not fathom killing it.
Papa knelt beside me. He laid one hand upon my back, and one hand upon the fox.
“Créature torturée,” he said. Tortured creature.
His voice was soft, so strong and kind, and I did not know whether he spoke of me or the fox. I only know he sent me home and never told me what became of the little fox. I named it Pierre and invented many wonderful tales of a happy fate for it in the days that followed, chattering each of them into Papa’s ears. He only smiled, sometimes sadly, and laid his big hand on my small head.
“Mon papillon. Si plein de vie.” So full of life, he called me.
I wonder what he would call me if he could see me now. Sitting in a holy place destroyed. Kneeling beside this sleeping man—he himself a créature torturée. And I was, yes, full of life—but not the kind Papa spoke of. The kind that would make me unfit, in the eyes of some, to be in such a holy place as this, ruined though it might be. Ruined though I might be.
I turned my attention toward the American soldier. Even in his sleep he looked tired. An ancient sort of tired that went deep into his bones, no rest upon his face as his dark eyebrows pressed toward each other like they meant to hold the world together.
I laid a hand upon him, just as Papa had done for me.
“Si plein de vie,” I uttered Papa’s words, this time as a prayer. “So full of life, Father in heaven. Make him so.”
If God above would hear a plea of one such as me, I would spend it on this man. For he was spending his life on me, though I knew not why. Perhaps it was this that had caused me to tell him my name, the name I had thought lost forever with the passing of my grandfather.
I heard a sound, repeated like the steady ticking of a clock but softer. Looking up, two shadows stretched over us. George. Henry-or-Hank. And an apple, flying up and down, up and down in George’s hand as he tossed it like a ball and smiled like a child.
He held it out to me. I took it, nodding my thanks. These men did not yet know that I spoke their language.
Matthew Petticrew stirred, that ancient tired way of his easing, just for a moment, into the fleeting look of a little boy. I wondered what it would be like to have a little boy. If he was like this man . . . something in me squeezed in a happy way at that thought. I had not often had such a feeling, when wondering about this baby. Indeed, it was very hard to think of, sometimes. But I knew that the time for thinking and wondering would soon come to an end.
