Fast Backward

by David Patneaude

  But now the bitter. From the back steps, Cocoa and I watch Pete and Captain Jack hitch up the trailer and move the captain’s belongings from trailer to truck. Pete will be back, of course, but not the captain.

  Cocoa sighs. She’s biting her lip, trying not to cry. When Captain Jack walks over, we shake hands. He gives Cocoa a long hug. I’m not even jealous.

  “I won’t be far away, Cocoa.” Like Pete, he’s in uniform. He hands me a slip of paper. “My Los Alamos number. You can both call me whenever you want.” He grins his Captain Jack grin. “Within reason. We’ll figure out a time—soon—to get together and talk about all of this.”

  Cocoa is still fighting tears. Pete wraps her up in an embrace. “Everything’s going to be okay, Future Girl,” he murmurs. “Thanks to you.”

  Lolly follows our soldiers to the truck. His own goodbye. Doors slam. Truck and trailer rumble and roll away.

  The yard looks empty.

  Out on the road, familiar shapes accelerate, grow smaller, disappear.

  “I haven’t hugged you yet, Robert.” Cocoa’s voice is watery. “Today, I mean.” In an instant, we’re in each other’s arms. I sense that there’s more—and for some reason, less—to her than there was the last time we were this close. Like the rest of the morning, the embrace feels bittersweet. A hello and a goodbye. But neither of us is going anywhere for a while, and when we do, we’ll be together.

  “Can we visit the Andrews sisters?” she says.

  We walk to the barn holding hands, passing the hens and Franklin the rooster and the sow and her unnamed piglets. Cocoa gazes intently at them, like she’s committing them to memory.

  Unlike the chickens and Franklin and the sow and her piglets, the Andrews sisters acknowledge our presence. Their big Jersey-brown eyes close with pleasure as we scratch their foreheads and feed them handfuls of fresh alfalfa.

  Walking back, Cocoa spends most of her time staring up at the sky. A wind, undetectable at ground level, pushes a slender white cloud across the blue. A minute hand, marking time.

  “It’s so nice,” she says. “Can we go for a car ride? Just to the Unsers’ house and back?”

  I get the keys. When I return, she’s sitting in the middle of the front seat, with Lolly riding shotgun. When I get behind the wheel, she fills in the space. Our hips and shoulders touch. I breathe her in.

  The windows are rolled down. Lolly’s head is already hanging out. As we turn onto the road, fresh air pours in. A smile lights Cocoa’s face. Then it fades. By the time we pass the Unser place, her smile’s gone.

  “Want to go farther?” I glance at the gas gauge. “We could drive into town.”

  “Let’s go home.” She sounds different. Defeated. But how can that be, when she’s just taken on the bad guys of the world, and won?

  We head back. Inside the house, Lolly sticks with her like a burr as we pour glasses of lemonade and go to the living room. While Cocoa sits on the sofa and Lolly plops down at her feet, I turn on the radio. I tune it away from the news until I find music, the beginning notes of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” A sad song, but three minutes of sadness should be okay.

  I sit next to her. She’s quiet. Tears glisten on her cheeks. Her skin seems almost translucent, like waxed paper.

  “Is it the music?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s dying. I can feel it.”

  “Who?”

  “Hitler.”

  “That makes you sad?”

  “Of course not. But what he would have done—what he did—won’t happen now.”

  Tears of joy, I decide. They must be.

  I get brave. I put my arms around her. She melts into me, cradles my face in her hands. Her fingers are feathers, her palms are dust.

  “You can’t wait any longer,” she says. “You have to kiss me.”

  I do. I kiss her, and she kisses me back. Sweet, like desert air. Morning. Springtime.

  Forget meeting President Truman. Forget Hitler dying. This, right now, is the highlight of my day. Of my life.

  “I love you, Robert,” she says.

  A dream?

  Our faces are close. Inches. I want to kiss her again, but first I need to tell her. “I love you, too, Cocoa.” Saying it isn’t that hard, at all.

  “Remember me.” Her voice sounds far away. “I could not ever forget you.”

  What? The words make no sense. “What?” But even as I think it and say it, her body—its radiance, its essence—seems to flare, like a shooting star, then dim. The skin of her face thins, her eyes brighten, then darken. Their spark dwindles. Her melancholy smile fades. She grows light in my arms, papery. Her clothes loosen, deflate.

  Lolly is up, whining. He noses into her.

  Panic strikes. What’s going on? What the hell is going on? I can’t breathe.

  But I can cry. Tears blur my vision.

  A nightmare.

  Everywhere, her skin—face, neck, arms, hands, legs—suddenly transforms into a million transparent beads, microscopic marbles, separating, swimming, fusing, separating again. They radiate color, like stained glass. Under her, the cushion rises. She’s weightless, a desert mirage.

  In an instant, she’s gone. I tell myself, It can’t be true, it can’t. But her blouse, still buttoned, dangles from my arm. Inside it, barely noticeable, is a beginner’s brassiere. Her shorts, still buttoned and zipped, along with her underpants, are crumpled on the sofa. Her shoes, still tied, and socks are on the floor, empty.

  Everything is empty.

  I try to comprehend. It’s incomprehensible.

  In the stifling living room air, the final notes of “Moonlight Serenade” die. In less than three minutes, everything that was just beginning has ended.

  Lolly circles the room, still whining. I glance around. It’s possible she’s still here. It’s possible she hasn’t vaporized, turned back into the atoms that created the essence of the girl named Cocoa.

  Future Girl.

  But in my heart, I know she’s gone.

  I think of Mom. I promised her I’d take care of Cocoa. I promised her I wouldn’t let Cocoa break my heart. And now this.

  I lay Cocoa’s blouse on the sofa and go to my bedroom. Afraid to look, I pick up the photos from my dresser.

  But the pictures are unchanged. She’s there, alive, close to me, smiling. Not a dream or hallucination or mirage. For a while, she did exist.

  Where is she now?

  Leaving Lolly in the barn with the Andrews sisters for company, I get on my bike and ride. It feels good to have the hot wind in my face, blowing away the tears. It doesn’t feel good to be alone.

  At the spot where I found her a lifetime ago, I slow, still hopeful. A breeze whispers through the desert grass and scrub and cactus. It’s not whispering my name. Robert.

  I continue on to the base camp. I find Pete alone, coming out of the stable. The tears resume. My story unfolds in fitful scraps. Hitler’s dead. Cocoa’s gone. My heart’s breaking. Even though I fear he won’t believe my unbelievable story, he does. I see it in his eyes, in the sag of his shoulders.

  “She must’ve been right about Hitler,” he says. “His death will—did—change everything.”

  “For the better,” I say. “But not.”

  “I’m so sorry, buddy. She was special. One of a kind. But I guess that’s obvious.”

  “I was holding her. I can still feel her going.”

  He puts his arms around me and squeezes, not letting go. “I know.” What he doesn’t know is that I’m a contagious weeper. He’s a soldier, and tough, but when I start in again, he sighs, and the sigh becomes a sob. We hold on, crying quietly, while I think about Cocoa, and where she is, and if she is. I gaze into the gloom of the stable and wonder if Big Muddy is in there, deliberating over the odd scene of two humans standing in the heat of the desert sun, doing nothing other than propping each other up.

  I wonder if she remembers Cocoa. How could she not?

  Pete takes me to the mess hall,
where we find a corner table and nurse a couple of Cokes. He forces smiles, but his eyes don’t lie. While I wait, he goes to Dr. Bainbridge’s office. How will he explain this to a scientist?

  When he returns, he has keys to the Army car and condolences from Dr. Bainbridge and an okay to leave. We jam my bike into the back seat and take off. For the first time, I ride up front, which is okay.

  The windows are rolled down. Fresh air blasts in. Once more I’m on the edge of tears. I can’t help but think of sharing the back seat with Cocoa, holding her hand, watching her stare out at our surroundings and try to absorb this world that is—was?—so different from hers.

  I assume we’re on our way home, but Pete gets us going west and then north, toward Socorro. Before long, I give him a look, like what’s going on?

  “Lolly okay by himself for a while?” His voice is full of conflict—false cheer versus sympathy and grief. A mismatch.

  “He’s in the barn. He has water.”

  “Good.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “I need to chase down Captain Jack,” he says. “I called, but he hadn’t arrived yet. I’d rather talk to him in person, anyway. I also need to make a phone call.”

  “They have phones pretty much everywhere now, Pete.”

  “I’m predicting a long conversation.” He says this mysteriously, which ordinarily would prompt me to ask more questions. But this isn’t an ordinary day. Every thought and feeling I might have had on an ordinary day gets overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings about something, someone, extraordinary.

  She can’t be gone. Like the photos, shouldn’t she still be here? Shouldn’t there be a device—a new, top-secret invention—that could detect her? Some modification of radar or sonar or photography or X-rays or one of the instruments—stethoscope, otoscope, ophthalmoscope—in Dr. Kersey’s office?

  Couldn’t the smart guys at the base camp or Los Alamos come up with something? She saved the world, for Christ’s sake.

  “You know some German words, right, Pete? From your interrogation days?”

  “A few. The ones for making excuses. Shifting the blame.”

  “How about goodbye? How do you say goodbye?”

  His hand rests on my shoulder. He squeezes. Tears flow. Mine and, through the blur, his.

  “Their way is better than ours. Auf Wiedersehen. It means ’Until we meet again.’”

  “Auf Wiedersehen.” I say it out loud, then to myself, over and over. Auf Wiedersehen. Until we meet again. I look up. The sky is cloudless, but the blue has paled.

  Three hours later we’re approaching the gate at Los Alamos. I was expecting another base camp, but this is a small city, plopped down in the remote New Mexico hills. The gate guard gives us directions to a building that looks a lot like most of the other buildings. There are dozens of people walking the grounds, hurrying from place to place. I wonder how many of them know about Hitler—that the head has been cut off the snake.

  The snake. I picture Cocoa miraculously dodging the rattlesnake’s strike yesterday. Or did she? Was the rattler attacking something that was already fading away? Filmy? Elusive?

  I remember her in my doorway in the night. Her creepy dream that wasn’t a dream.

  “I could not see my fucking reflection.”

  Captain Jack’s office is down a corridor that feels a mile long. Our footfalls reverberate off the near walls, the ceiling, the far wall. Echoes. Displacements of time.

  Was Cocoa the echo? Or am I?

  The captain is surprised and happy to see us, but not happy when Pete tells him why we’ve come. Unlike Pete and me, he doesn’t cry, but invisible tears curdle his words.

  “We need to tell the general,” he says. He dials his phone, gets a busy signal. We walk back down the corridor to another office. General Groves’s name is on the open door in stenciled letters, and inside, behind a desk, on the phone, sits Corporal Amy. I study Pete’s face, wondering if he had more than one reason to pay a visit to Captain Jack.

  She smiles. Pete manages one of his own. The captain glances at me with a half-hearted wink.

  Amy hangs up and opens the inner door to announce the captain’s arrival. He leaves us in the outer office and closes the door behind him. We sit, listening to the rumble of voices, and then what sounds like the general only, on the phone with someone. I read a Stars and Stripes and imagine a full-page headline—HITLER DEAD—fronting the next edition. Pete and Corporal Amy make eyes at each other, but his half of the exchange looks sad and distracted, and I wonder if she notices.

  Maybe he’s also wondering. And worrying. He pulls his chair close to her, and they murmur back and forth. A couple of times she glances at me. I see sympathy, and pity.

  I don’t want either. I want Cocoa.

  The captain comes out. “The general would like to talk to Bobby privately, Sergeant,” he says. “These walls won’t allow that. So why don’t you and the corporal go have a soda, or something stronger if you’d like.” He glances at the wall clock. “Give us until sixteen thirty.”

  Sixteen thirty. Four thirty, civilian time. More than a half hour away. What conversation that I’m part of could take more than a half hour?

  Pete and the corporal don’t need to be told twice. Pete leaves me with a smile as they exit. A smile for me, and, for Corporal Amy?—his hand, gently placed at the small of her back as they head down the hallway.

  “He’s got it bad, Robert,” the captain says.

  Robert. I’ve grown accustomed to it. “I know how that feels.”

  “Right,” the captain says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Will I get over it, Captain Jack?”

  He hesitates. “I’ve never experienced what you have. Nobody has. But I was one of the saps who got a Dear John letter when we were battling across France. I lost good buddies there and before and after. The memories survive, the pain too. But with time, it gets duller. And if you’re lucky—and I believe you will be, because you have a generous spirit—you’ll have heartwarming experiences that will stand in front of the heartbreakers, cast shadows on them. Make them less visible. And intrusive. You can’t pretend them away, but there’s no need to wrestle with them every day.”

  He gestures toward General Groves’s door. I walk in, apprehensive. But the general is on his feet with his hand outstretched. I shake it. “Robert,” he says, and I wonder if the Robert thing is contagious. “Tragic about Cocoa,” he says. “I know you two were close. I can hardly believe the story. Hardly comprehend it. But it was incomprehensible from the start, wasn’t it?”

  “I didn’t believe her at the start,” I say, remorseful. Embarrassed.

  He points to a pair of chairs. The captain and I sit. “None of us did. Not until she proved us wrong.” He lights a pipe. “Helluva thing,” he says between puffs. “Helluva thing.”

  “It is,” I say.

  “Have you moved her clothes, son?” he says. “The ones she was wearing when—”

  “I might leave them there forever.”

  He clears his throat. “I’ve just talked to Secretary Stimson, who has been avidly following this story from the start. He passes along his condolences to you and your family.”

  My family. I haven’t even told my family.

  “And he has a request,” the general says.

  “Sure.”

  “We’re going to send him the photos of Cocoa—and the rest of you—from the day you went swimming. But additionally, the secretary would like the captain, with your permission, to take photos at your house tomorrow morning. Your sofa, her clothes and shoes, you sitting nearby. We don’t want to aggravate your pain, but the secretary would like something for the record. Which, given the circumstances, will likely never see the light of day.”

  I decide I don’t mind the idea of the captain taking a few pictures. It will involve wrestling with memories, no doubt, but that’s already a given. “That would be okay.”

  The general looks relieved. “Would ten hundred hou
rs work for you, Captain Nelson?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Expect the captain then, Robert. No preparation necessary or desired.”

  “It won’t be hard for me to stay away from the living room. And I’ll keep Lolly, our dog, out of there, too.”

  The general stands, opens his wallet, removes a twenty-dollar bill. “Take this young man to supper, Captain, or have the sergeant do it when he returns. Make sure it happens before the town of Santa Fe shuts down for the night. He may have no appetite, but he needs to eat.”

  I take a deep breath, working up my courage. “I have a request, too, sir.”

  “Of course.”

  “My mom and dad have been sent to Gila River. They don’t know about Cocoa. Can I—or someone—call them to let them know?”

  “As soon as Corporal Lewis returns, I’ll have her place the call.”

  We go to the outer office to wait. At exactly 1630 Pete and the corporal return. I tell her that the general has authorized a call to my parents.

  Pete jumps in. “I’d planned on calling them. I was going to ask to use your phone, Captain Nelson.”

  “It might help to have the general pave the way,” I say to Pete. “They wouldn’t give him any shit.”

  “I can be pretty convincing,” Pete says. “If we need the general, we can still call on him.”

  “Fine plan,” Captain Jack says. “Okay with you, Robert?”

  “Whatever works.”

  Corporal Amy locates Gila River’s number. We go back to the captain’s office. Pete reaches the long-distance operator, supplies the number, and waits. Someone answers on the other end and gives him the runaround: Phone conversations aren’t allowed, it’s too difficult to locate a “resident” at the spur of the moment, blah, blah, blah.

  Pete doesn’t accept any of it. He tells the person who he is—a brother, an Army sergeant, a wounded veteran—and why he’s calling—a death in the family—and forecasts what’s coming if he doesn’t get cooperation. Next, they’ll be talking to an Army captain and, if that doesn’t work, an Army general will get on the line and give their boss a tongue lashing he’ll never forget.