The Lines Between Us

by Amy Lynn Green

  Stop it. It won’t help. There’s nothing you can do.

  The others were staring at me, I realized now, the ones who weren’t staring at the floor or wiping away tears. No one unaffected, no one able to offer comfort or feel pity. I tried to find Sarah Ruth at her usual table. Some instinct hinted a sympathetic look from her might calm me down. But she wasn’t anywhere to be found.

  Do not look at Thomas. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see him standing, his face still bruised, like he was going to make a pronouncement about God’s will being done.

  Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed . . .

  And I ran. This time, instead of shouting or throwing a punch, I let the cookhouse door slam behind me, my feet pounding off the path and onto the crunch of the frost-stiff grass.

  Where I was going, I wasn’t sure. Not to the woods or to the mountain, where the fire tower loomed over us like the eye of God.

  Back to the bunkhouse. That was it. Where I’d last seen Jack.

  And as I ran, the what-ifs came again, swarming around my thoughts just like they had when Nelson, my father, had died.

  What if I’d offered to go to the lookout instead of Jack? What if we’d gotten to the fire sooner? What if we’d never applied to be smokejumpers in the first place?

  It hadn’t been my idea, that’s for sure. Jack and I had been with over one hundred others building a dam in South Dakota when the announcement came: a flyer pinned to the bulletin board, asking for applicants “tough of body and mind” to apply for the smokejumper program. Beneath it, an image of a brawny man holding a shovel with a look of determination gave us a picture of what we could be if we just filled out the application.

  I knew from my construction days that heights made me uneasy—even nailing shingles into a two-story roof set my head spinning—so I’d flatly refused to apply.

  “Come on, Gordon,” Jack had begged on the way home from a trip into town. “Aren’t you tired of biding your time shoveling dirt and pouring concrete? This is our chance to actually make a difference. Can’t you see?”

  “What I see is a lot of crazies who need to jump out of planes to feel useful.” At his crestfallen look, I added, “Listen, it’s all well and good for you, Jack. You’re the brave one. Go on and apply without me.”

  He’d fallen back, toeing the ground with his boot. “Aw, Gordon, you know I wouldn’t leave you behind. Not for anything.”

  And that’s how it stood: Jack had wanted to go, and he wouldn’t go without me.

  So I’d filled out the form and prayed I wouldn’t get in, but I answered all the questions honestly, and it turns out two and half years of construction work to raise money for college had made me strong enough and the Deerfield Dam had a surplus of men. They were fine with shipping the two of us out to Missoula, Montana, for training.

  I sat down on my bed, remembering Jack’s face the first time we’d gone up in a practice flight. “I feel alive, Gordon. Really, truly alive.” Then he’d noticed how still I was. “Hey, are you all right?”

  “Gordon.” The voice was higher, more feminine, than the one in my memories, and I raised my head. Dorie stood in the bunkhouse doorway, outlined by Sunday morning daylight like she was afraid to cross the threshold. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I said flatly. “I’m not. Why are you?”

  “I couldn’t show it, or say anything, or . . .” She took a fortifying breath. “PFC Nora Hightower isn’t supposed to care.”

  “But does Dorie Armitage?” Had she ever really cared about either of us?

  She moved toward me like a sleepwalker, her voice stripped of its usual animation. “It doesn’t feel real. Not yet.”

  I tried to believe her. After all, it could be denial leaving her numb, like I’d felt just after the fire. It could be.

  She sank onto the first bed in the row like her knees weren’t enough to keep her aloft anymore. I breathed in deeply. She smelled like smoke instead of her usual floral perfume.

  “That was Jack’s bunk.” I said the “was” deliberately. It had to hit her soon, that he was really dead, that this wasn’t one of her stupid stories.

  But her eyes weren’t on me, so I wasn’t sure if she even heard. “Oh. He kept them.” The frame creaked as she reached up, and her voice grew fainter still, drained of private-detective bravado. “All of them.”

  I wondered for a moment what she meant, before she reached up to tug on a corner of paper I’d left loose from the frame of the bed, pulling it free. Of course. The newspaper clippings.

  Wait a minute. She knew about them. That could only mean . . . “You sent those?”

  “Yes.” The flicker of guilt I saw on her face was quickly, and literally, shrugged away. “Our commanding officer got all the major papers. I’d snip out articles now and then to send to him.”

  I thought of all the times I’d cursed the anonymous sender, the frustration I felt every time Jack got a new envelope in the mail. And all along, it was Dorie. “But . . . why?”

  Silence for a moment, and she tore the newspaper article in half, then in quarters, before looking up at me with challenge in her eyes. “Why do you think?”

  Thinking, my usual area of strength, felt too hard at the moment. Breathing felt hard, for that matter. “Enough with the mysteries,” I snapped. “Why can’t you just say what you mean?”

  “Fine,” she said, her usual spark back in her voice. “When it came to arguments, I knew you, Gordon Hooper, would beat me every single time, so I didn’t bother trying. But if my brother saw how awful the Axis powers were, if he understood that this war was just . . .”

  As her voice wavered and her gaze dropped from mine, the anonymous mail I’d thought was only meant to mock Jack had an even more sinister purpose. “You wanted him to drop out of the CPS.”

  “Maybe.” Her voice was defensive, without even a hint of shame.

  I thought of all the times Jack had opened those letters, dread in his expression, and the way he slumped in his seat afterward.

  “Did he know you were the one sending them?”

  “Gosh, how should I know? Probably. He knew I was stationed in Seattle. Who else would it have been?”

  “Do you realize,” I said, struggling against the anger rising up in me, “what you did to him?”

  Some part of me knew I should walk away, go a few rounds on the obstacle course or for a run in the woods until I’d calmed down.

  But she did this. It’s time for her to face the consequences.

  “Jack made his own choices,” she said, but her voice wavered.

  Was she finally feeling something? Maybe even a faint trace of guilt? Good.

  Even though it was too late.

  I stood, trying to put my emotions into movement . . . and into my words. “No, Dorie. You didn’t send those clippings because you wanted Jack to give up on pacifism. Not just that anyway. You wanted him to agree with you, plain and simple. You can’t stand the thought of being wrong—”

  I might as well have punched her, the way she reared back. “That’s not true.”

  “—and if that means joining the army, condemning your brother, and blackmailing him with guilt, well, that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?”

  There was only a split second of silence before she stood, stepping toward me, and said, low and deadly, “Take. It. Back.”

  But I’d seen Dorie’s stubbornness before, and she couldn’t bully me. “I won’t. Because we both know it’s true.”

  We were only a couple of feet apart, and something about the stiff, straight way Dorie stood told me she almost reached up and slapped me for my audacity. But she didn’t argue, because there was nothing to say in her defense.

  That silence, more than anything, was what spurred me on, toward the one part of Morrissey’s story that hadn’t made sense—until now. “They told us that Jack charged into the center of the fire, without any gear, without calling for help. Does that sound like the br
other you knew?”

  Whether she understood the change of subject yet or not, she seized on it, on any chance to take the focus off what she’d done. “No, it doesn’t. That’s why I thought someone must be—”

  “Maybe no one is lying or hiding anything. Maybe your vast conspiracy is a dud, and you came all the way out from Seattle to find out that the real reason Jack ran into that fire is because . . .”

  But I stopped, like a hiker at the edge of a precipice who realized it was a long way down.

  It was as if the fire went out of me and into Dorie, now standing, her hands hanging in fists at her side. “Say it,” she ordered, and I hated the military precision of it, as if she expected me to salute and obey.

  Fine. She wanted the truth? I would give it.

  “Because he looked at all that”—I gestured to the newspaper clippings— “and was reminded time and time again of how worthless he was, how much his family disapproved of him, how little he could do from here in the woods of Oregon.”

  Like a wildfire with no firebreak in sight, I couldn’t stop, not now. “You know what I think? I think Jack looked at that smoke and remembered your words: ‘This is what happens when a good man does nothing.’ And so he ran into the flames, trying to do something, not caring if he made it out.”

  She staggered back, thudding against the bunk’s metal frame. “No. That’s not true.”

  “You didn’t kill him, Dorie, but you sure did make him want to die a hero’s death. Can you blame him for taking his chance?”

  When she looked up at me, hazel eyes round and scared, I thought for a horrible moment that she would burst into tears.

  And the horror was mostly because I realized that’s what I’d wanted all along, during my whole terrible speech. To make Doris Armitage, WAC, cry.

  Instead, she ran. Out the door, down the path, as far away from me as possible.

  I almost called after her, but my voice caught in my throat.

  What had I done?

  CHAPTER 17

  Dorie Armitage

  January 21, 1945

  I attacked the quarter-sized crater in the logger truck’s fender with a dent puller I’d found on the workbench, pitting the metal tool against whatever rock had bounced up to leave a lasting mark. Morning light streamed through the windows of the forest service’s garage, too cheerful for my mood. The memories had come, even if the tears hadn’t.

  Jack and his friend Harry making miniature trees out of whittled wood and crepe paper to set beside Harry’s electric train. Jack sitting in the front row of my school recitals, ready to mouth the words to “Paul Revere’s Ride” in case I forgot. Jack helping mean old Ralph Gillespie up when a snowball with a rock packed inside had given him a bloody nose.

  Harry and Ralph were, last I had heard, an army gunner and a navy midshipman, respectively. Harry had gotten a Purple Heart pinned to his puffed-out chest already during the Battle of Salerno, or so said the local paper clipping Mother had sent my way. They’d had a few choice words for Jack before he’d left for CPS work.

  At the time, I’d agreed with them. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  The COs I’d met here were so . . . kind. Respectful. Thoughtful. No one seemed to be looking for a cushy job until the end of the war. They just genuinely believed it was wrong to kill another person, even in combat. Just like Jack.

  But Jack had second thoughts, near the end. I reached my hand in my coat pocket. The brochure Thomas had given me was still there, bold and confusing. That was another thing that didn’t make sense. Why did Jack have to die right when he wanted to do the right thing and fight, or at least serve as a medic?

  I hadn’t told Gordon yet what Thomas had revealed to me. Stupid of me, trying to spare him when he didn’t care two Fig Newtons about my feelings.

  But would it change anything? Gordon was genuinely broken-up about Jack, or he wouldn’t have lashed out half as badly. No sense in returning spite for spite by revealing that Jack was thinking about joining the army.

  Right on cue, I heard a scraping noise, metal against concrete, and sighed.

  The back door to the garage hadn’t been locked when I’d found it, so I hadn’t bothered to latch it either, simply pushed a paint can in front of it so I’d know if someone came in. A classic spy trick. And it didn’t take Lord Peter Wimsey or Sam Spade to figure out who this was.

  If I’d really wanted to get away from him, I could have gone back to the Morrisseys’ house. But no. I’d come to the garage to be surrounded by wrenches and workbenches and the soothing scent of motor oil.

  Just in case I was wrong, in case it was one of the Morrisseys tracking me down after I’d left the cookhouse without comment, I called out, “Who’s there?”

  “I wondered if you’d be here.”

  I closed my eyes, braced myself. It was Gordon, all right. That voice, furious and cutting only fifteen minutes ago, now hesitant and hopeful.

  “Well, here I am.” I ran my fingers over the dent on the fender’s exterior—smaller now—and pressed the dent puller against the underside, smoothing out the metal. “You all keep a tight shop in here. The tool bench is more organized than the one at Fort Lawton.” Yes. That was something I could talk about, something that didn’t hurt.

  “We have lots of time on our hands during the winter.” His footsteps slapped against the concrete until he stopped to sit on the stool by the workbench.

  I didn’t make another effort at conversation, for once wanting an awkward silence. He’d sought me out; let him put in the effort.

  “You say Jack knew all this time you’d joined the army?”

  I nodded, staying focused on the fender and seeing Gordon only in its dull reflection.

  “Whenever your name came up—in a story he was telling around the campfire, or when anyone asked about his family—he said that his sister was determined and—”

  “Full of life,” I finished automatically, gripping the tool until my knuckles went white.

  “How did you know?”

  “We had a party to celebrate my high school graduation.” I tried to picture those carefree times before the war, full of lightning bugs and lemonade and laughter, and almost couldn’t. “Everyone made toasts. That was his. ‘To my sister, may you always be as determined and full of life as you are now.’”

  How many times had I whispered that to myself? When Daddy had tried to stop me from entering the WACs. When I’d been so exhausted from basic training I wanted to collapse. When I heard another lewd joke whispered about me in the garage, out of Max’s earshot.

  You, Dorie, are determined and full of life. You can do this.

  “He was proud of you,” Gordon said, drawing me away from those thoughts. “It didn’t change, after he knew about . . . you know.”

  I set the dent puller down and turned to face him fully. “You can say the word ‘army.’ It’s not cussing.”

  I expected the blush that colored his face, but not the next words that came out of his mouth. “Listen, I’m trying to say that I’m sorry, Dorie. Sorry that I blamed you for Jack’s death. He never would have wanted that.”

  He was sorry, he said.

  Did I believe him?

  Gordon doesn’t lie. That, at least, I could count on.

  Which told me he’d meant every one of those angry words he’d shouted at me back at the bunkhouse. Yet he meant these too.

  “People are never simple.”

  Ever since Lieutenant Leland had said that back in the Stratford Hotel dayroom, I’d been mulling it over, and it turned out he was on to something. After all, wasn’t I a talented mechanic and a talented dancer, wearing oil-stained coveralls while dreaming of Hollywood glitz and glamour?

  Gordon wasn’t the only one with a few contradictions.

  I polished the fender with a rag I’d found on a hook by the workbench. Good as new, the dent completely gone. “I’ll probably forgive you eventually.” I inspected my sleeves for traces of rust and oil before tugging them dow
n again. “Anyway, we’ve both said our share of things we regret.”

  He blinked, probably not sure if I was sincere or not.

  Fair, since I wasn’t even sure myself. Looked like we’d both have to prove ourselves.

  All I knew was that Jack would want us to find out the truth. No matter what it took.

  “You’re going home now, aren’t you? For the funeral.”

  I felt another wave of shame, this time that I hadn’t even thought of the fact that they’d likely already told Daddy and Mother the news. “I want to. But . . . I can’t. I’m in too deep. And I’m getting close to something, Gordon. I can feel it.”

  I expected him to get frustrated again, to tell me that there was nothing to find out. Instead, he just asked, “What have you found out?”

  This was my opening. Time to spring the trap. “Not as much as I’d find if you were helping me.”

  Now he raised his hands in self-defense, as if I was going to yank a wrench off the workbench and start swinging it at him. “Look, Dorie, I already told you—”

  “You wouldn’t have to lie.” That much, at least, I’d decided. “I can ask questions until I turn blue in the face, but these fellows don’t trust me.” I thought of the dismal interview with Lloyd, the way some of the men stiffened whenever they looked at my uniform.

  He looked at the ground, then briefly at me, and I could think of a dozen excuses he might make. I didn’t have the energy to respond to any of them. “Listen,” I said, before he could voice any of them, “it’s the least you can do after you were such a bully.”

  Should I have played that card, right when he was most vulnerable? Maybe not, but I’d been dealt a bad hand, and it was the only ace I had left.

  When he looked up from studying the garage floor, any trace of hesitation was gone, and his voice was all resolve. “What would you want me to do?”

  And that was the most enthusiastic response I was likely to get from Gordon Hooper. “Ask around. See if the other COs noticed any strange conversations Jack had before he went on lookout duty, any enemies he might have made, any reason someone might . . .” I swallowed hard. Say it. “Might not want him to come back.”