by Amanda Dykes
I reached out and grabbed the pencil. Snapped it in two, tossing it on the ground.
They gawked at me and I wished I could undo it all. Make sense of it for them while keeping Mira’s confidence. Find a way to keep her with us.
And not let her go.
But then . . . a home. A family. What if the husband was a good man, who didn’t care what people thought if his wife took in a lost niece who could undermine his wife’s inheritance and whose present state outside of wedlock could sink their name?
I looked back over at the house, still vacant of any sign of the girls. Rubbing my pounding temples I stooped to gather up the pencil shards. I fit the splintered pieces together, feeling how they completed one another, filling the cracks and broken places. I gripped them so, willed them to stay that way and handed the thing to Henry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
His mouth went grim. “What’s going on?” he asked. Ever the journalist. Digging for truth.
Well, maybe it was time he had some. Maybe it was time these fellows understood the gravity of the situation. That life was on the line. Lives, plural.
I hated myself for it before I even did it but couldn’t stop the words. I had promised not to speak them. And yet, if I kept that promise, would it not lead to her abandonment? To her being suddenly alone again? And with no guarantee of safety on the other end.
I told myself she was more important than a promise.
I told myself she could hate me if it meant that she would live and be well.
“You are a man to trust, Matthew.” The memory of her words stopped me. I had vowed, in the wake of them, to prove her claim true.
But if I let her go—if I did as they suggested and left her to face it all alone—was that the act of a trustworthy man?
No.
I told myself these things and shoved the words out before I could tell myself I didn’t believe any of that.
“She’s going to have a baby.”
The words dropped with too much force, driven like bombs from the black night and flung like shrapnel right into the men. I saw it sink into George, the way he unfolded those arms and stuck them in his pockets, hanging his head. I felt it click into Henry’s consciousness, watched his face draw somber. The tension across my shoulders eased its grip a little when he put his pencil back into his pocket and didn’t write a word on that notepad of his.
And last—I heard it. In the approach of light footsteps. In the way they halted, suddenly. And in the breaking dark between her and me when I turned to see it: complete betrayal, written on Mira’s face.
27
Captain Jasper Truett
The land mocked me. It blurred past from where I sat on the slipshod train. One second, all was green and growing. The next, the scene held crumbled buildings and rising smoke. Smoke that had me thinking of Amelia. I willed it to be the memory of flying her, laughing, through swirls of extinguished candles. I willed it not to be the other memory of her and of smoke.
Blue eyes flashed, her girlish smile, and I closed my eyes around the thought as if that might keep her. Catch her and anchor her to reality, where I might embrace her once more.
But my thoughts betrayed me. Too soon, they left the happy moment and went to the other one. Me, sitting in hot Panama under a clump of Poor Man’s Umbrella, rain falling on the larger-than-life leaves, the leaves earning their name twice-over. A steep drop-off that I hung my feet over, the sound of a river below.
We’d be leaving the country soon, heading home. I shined my compass with the best cloth I had—a scrap of jungle-soiled handkerchief—and studied the directional notations. “North by Northwest,” I said, repeating June’s words and picturing the way her long hair caught the wind atop our little Carolina hill when she turned to smile at me. “I’m coming home,” I said, then clamped my mouth shut when another soldier approached and delivered a letter.
I knew before I opened it. The writing was not June’s. It was more formal, no traces of June’s windswept loop at the bottom of the p’s just to bring beauty to something plain.
I opened it, swallowing.
Words scrawled on a paper. Stupid letters, just sticks and curves with dots. My finger flicked a torn corner back and forth to the cadence of those large sheltering leaves in the wind above—and I read.
The sticks and curves and letters arranged themselves into words that shattered my world. I closed my eyes, pressed them tight, and willed the words to rearrange into something different.
But they did not. My compass slid from my shaking hand, clattering onto a ledge halfway down the drop-off. Numbly and dumbly, I climbed down to get it, my chest pounding with a desperate plea to get them back, too.
When I picked it up, its tinny rattle told me it was done for. Its innards just scraped to a halt, its homing magnet jarred loose with no home to point to. It broke that day. And if a man like me ever even had a heart . . . that broke, too.
The train lurched, vaulting me from a cliffside in Panama to a train in France.
June and Amelia . . . they were gone again. Gone, still. But the girl—Mireilles—was not, and neither was Matthew Petticrew. Them, I could help. And perhaps if I could catch them, intercept that book they carried, we might help more. Far, far more.
The train chugged, the metal screeching of its many parts grinding into me. Into Épermay, where it spilled ragged passengers out like so many rats, me right in the thick of their current. It was jarring, never failed to be, when one left the front and saw that somewhere in the world people still walked streets, ate regular meals, meager though they might be, and endeavored to be human.
Even here, where being a railway hub meant the town was in constant danger, a target to the enemy. The oldest war tactic around: cut off the wheels of the operation, cut off the supply line. Cut off the supply line, stop the flow of soldiers, food, ammunition, medical supplies. Dry up those things, and victory is yours.
But Épermay, by all appearances, had escaped unscathed thus far. I prayed that good fate would continue. Rumblings were that Germany was on unstable ground back on their home front—and all the more desperate to make one final push toward Paris. Towns like this were not yet out of danger.
Yet life went on here. Across the way, a café hosted a handful of soldiers and a violinist playing. I scanned their faces and saw none of my men. I hoped they’d be here, that I might find Petticrew and get him back. Things were gearing up for the next offensive, and we had need of his skills. I needed to get back on that train and on to headquarters for orders and to get that book to the General’s men there, but first I wanted Petticrew on his way back, posthaste.
This was the likeliest place I’d find them, based on my calculations of their pace and where they should be by now. But I saw no one familiar. Truth was, they could be anywhere. Taken a different route, or made camp along the way.
I looked instead for the girl. She’d be easier to spot in this sea of uniforms. The girl I’d blockaded from every thought, cursing the way she’d presumed to look so like Amelia. It was the sort of thing June and I would have laughed at together, both of us knowing just what the other was thinking.
But it had been a heap of years since I’d looked up from a meal to catch my wife’s knowing glance, see her tipping her head for me to look at Amelia before I missed some remarkable something. Years since she’d begged me not to go again, saying I’d miss all remarkable everythings.
And years since I turned my back and took the step that changed it all. It followed me, that one step. My blasted black boot falling on that old dirt path, a cloud of dust swallowing it up. A cloud of regret gulping us all down, never to release us back to one another.
“Why must you go, Papa?” Amelia’s eyes, so round, imploring me to stop buttoning my uniform jacket, stop packing my things.
“Because I must,” I’d said, ruffling her hair and wishing I could say it better. That I must go to protect her and her mother and our country and others l
ike them everywhere. That though my service wasn’t required, it was requested. I had never said no. Could not imagine starting then.
So I said no to the ones dearest to me instead.
“Because you’re brave?” she’d said, patting my cheek with chubby fingers that I held as long as I could.
I’d nodded. I didn’t feel it, but I let her believe it. “And so must you be, my little lightning bug.”
And while I was off being “brave,” protecting lives in the middle of a war in Columbia, my own family slipped away at the hands of a senseless house fire.
I had seen my share of fires. Played my part in putting them out, even. And yet it was the one I never saw, the one I should have been there for, that burned inside of me still. Burned until I was hollow. The Incredible Hollow Man, they should call me. Who lived and breathed though his heart stopped beating long ago. Who became so mechanical in his existence and movements that he was very convincing as a soldier. A hollow tin toy soldier, the ideal vehicle for giving heartless orders and moving on, over and over again.
But that was in the past. Far, far, far in the past. I’d boxed it up and nailed it tight so long ago—and yet somehow that box had found me here in France and opened irrevocably like that old legend about Pandora. Try as I might to shove it all back, to put Amelia and June back into their safe and silent space and close the door on them, they followed me everywhere in this war.
I turned. Ignored them, knowing adding ten thousand more apologies to the million ones I’d spoken over the years wouldn’t change a thing. I set my foot on a dusty path again. Found the billet office who told me what I needed to know, and off I went.
It was dark already. I should’ve made camp, waited until morning. But something drove me on, down a too-quiet road through a vineyard where I wondered who, one day, would drink the fruit of these vines, decades from now, and whether they’d give thought to the soldiers who walked these roads, whose shoulders were touched by the reaching leaves of the grapevines like sad farewells.
A humble farmhouse rose in silhouette and I checked it against the description given me. Brown picket gate. Sheep in the yard. Stone house.
This was the one.
I approached the door and was ready to knock when I heard raised voices and knew immediately that it was the sound of soldiers and anger. My men.
I rounded the outside of the building and there they stood. The Brit with his arms crossed, proud as a peacock. The reporter leaning forward, taking in every word spoken by the impassioned speaker. And that speaker, the very man I’d come for.
I was tired. Tired of the journey, tired of this war. Tired, so tired, from life. I knew I should have walked right up to them, given Petticrew his new commands, and taken him along with me that instant.
But if this tiresome life had taught me one thing, it was how to pause. Listen. Even—especially—when my instinct was to charge in and take action. So I did, taking one step at a time closer in the shadows, until I began to be able to make out their words.
The girl—Mireilles, if I was remembering right—approached from the direction of the house.
With her soft footsteps came the impossible sound of my own heart. Rising up from black soil and trying so hard to beat. A rusty sort of sound from inside me, the Incredible Hollow Man. The shriveled heart, coming to life. I ignored it—all of it, and her—as long as I could. Until the beating within grew louder, ordering me to look at her. To see what my daughter could have been like, had she lived.
She looked so broken. And yet so full of hope. Something lighting her young face as her eyes fell on Matthew Petticrew. And the cracks of brokenness seemed to sear the light of that hope right through her whole being, right out into the night until it was palpable to this clumsy, rusty old heart of mine.
The men climbed the steps of Petticrew’s words, ascending toward that moment when everything froze.
“She’s going to have a baby,” he said. And in his low, breaking voice was the very shadow I see on all my men’s faces just before they’re about to go over the top and into the thick of the battle. It is everything good in their lives, gathered up for strength, rallied around them to drive them on. It is everything impossible ahead, looming in sheer, terrifying dark. It is the collision of those two things as they explode over the top, charging into that unknown. Some come back. Some do not.
In that instant, Petticrew locked stares with the girl. She froze in place, the searing light of hope snuffed out completely. Her chin lifted. Her shoulders rose and fell in measured defiance of what had just happened, in absolute war against the flash of utter destruction I’d seen on her face the instant Petticrew uttered those words.
I’d seen that look before.
The one of hope betrayed.
It had stayed with me for years. Foot in sand, swallowed in dust.
It was a moment that was fleeting and eternally branded into a soul, all at once. One of those that can never be forgotten.
Until a bumbling British chaplain speaks up and shatters it.
Piccadilly pointed, flabbergasted. He pointed at the girl, who was most assuredly wishing she were anywhere but there, anywhere but the subject of a buffooned point like that.
“Did you see that,” he said incredulously. “She understood. She understood! You understood every word of that, didn’t you, Angel of Argonne?”
I rolled my eyes.
“I am . . . a genius,” he said, spreading his hands wide in emphasis. “I have been translating, you know. Tutoring her along the highways and byways of the intricacies of the English language.”
“If you think expounding on Welsh pastries is tutoring.” This, from the journalist.
George looked offended. “It is. It is, and it’s worked, and she’s just understood every single word we’ve said.” He took a step toward her. “Haven’t you?”
She took three steps back, stumbling into another young woman, one who’d gone white as a sheet and was looking between Mireilles and Petticrew.
“Matthew?” this new young lady said. All concern, very earnest.
“I—I—” he stuttered. Poor fool. He looked around, looked for some bit of help, maybe a way to undo what he’d just done. Poor kid. He’d know, now, that there was no undoing.
Only maybe for him—unlike me—it wasn’t too late to mend the tear, jump the chasm.
“Petticrew,” I said, stepping into the reaching ring of light that encompassed them from the glow of the farmhouse. As I stepped closer, Mireilles stepped farther back, disappearing beyond that same ring of light.
There was a pang in my chest as she vanished. Stop it. She was not mine. Not my daughter. Not disappearing again.
And yet . . . she was somebody’s daughter. What would her father give to be here? To guard her? To bring her back into that ring of light and vanquish whatever she faced?
Anything. Her father, if he knew what was well and good, would give anything. I’d wager my life on it.
“Petticrew,” I said again, and this time he registered my voice. There was a lag, for this boy who was the quickest among them, to stand at attention. But when he did, and saluted, I could read it in the stiffness of his determination: He was fighting every impulse to turn and run after her.
“A word, please. At ease,” I said to the others as an afterthought, watching the chaplain fumble into salute too late.
Petticrew joined me, and I lowered my voice. “Explain to me why one single week after I sent you on your way to Paris, you are standing in a cornfield, blithering about something that is no concern of yours?”
My words were too harsh. I knew it. Saw it in the way he winced.
“The men thought it better that we send her away from here tomorrow,” he replied. “By herself.”
I waited.
His jaw twitched.
“They . . . did not have all the information needed to make an informed decision,” he said, sounding terribly unconvinced.
“Petticrew. Listen. Think of the tr
enches. That dark room with the swaying light and the maps where I go cross-eyed trying to make plans. Do you think I might receive highly confidential information in that room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And is it my duty, then, to go running after every one of you soldiers to explain that confidential information? So that—what, you’ll do your duty better?”
“No, sir.”
I bit back words stronger than the ones that came. “Right. Because, Petticrew, sometimes the whole truth would just plain kill you all.” The whole truth nigh on killed me every day, though I wouldn’t say so. “Sometimes it’d be too much for you to carry, when you’ve got so much on your shoulders. And sometimes, a man’s gotta trust that his men are just going to do their duty for duty’s sake. Top secret intelligence be hanged.”
Petticrew looked to his comrades from the corner of his eye, as if he wasn’t so sure.
That made two of us.
His face burned red, even in the dark. It was a fearsome hard thing to come face-to-face with a calamity you caused and could never undo. I could feel the weight of it on him. Crushing him. Wished I could’ve shouldered the pack of it for him, for my muscles knew the burden well. But this . . . this was a burden only undone the hard way.
By facing the one harmed.
“There’s a girl out there in the dark, son.” He winced at the word son. “Alone. Now I could go get her, any of us could, but something tells me she’d have none of it. Probably wants nothing to do with us. And truth is, there’s only one man who has anything to say in the matter that might begin to make it right. That is, if he’s got his brain screwed in right.”
Heaviness descended upon him like a stone until, finally, he nodded. He turned to go, but then stopped and faced me.
“Captain?”
I waited.
“How . . . are you here?”
A question I’d asked myself in this life more times than I could count. How am I here? How was I the one who remained?
But that was not what he meant. “You know that top secret intelligence I mentioned?” He nodded gravely. “Something to do with that. Reporting to Chaumont for directives. I tracked you down on the way because we need you back.”
