“Does it help to walk?” Lloyd asked.
“Now it does. In the beginning, I was so exhausted I could barely move around my house. I try to walk really fast. It helps me breathe.”
“Otherwise you feel like you’re suffocating?”
She studied his face. Did he feel that way, too?
“Exactly,” she said.
“The last time I saw Billy …” Lloyd began, letting the name hang suspended between them a few seconds, “ … was the day I left for Camp Kilmer to be staged through for England. He played the big brother to the hilt that day, telling me to watch my back, keep my nose clean, be sure to write to Ma. He didn’t try to do that very often.”
“He told me once that nobody could ever tell you what to do.”
Lloyd grinned.
“The Army knocked that out of me,” he said.
“Not all of it, I suspect.”
Lloyd’s expression became serious.
“I like to be my own man,” he said, “but now I know what it’s like to have somebody depend on you for their life and to have to depend on other guys the same way. I’m still stubborn, I guess, but I don’t believe anymore that I can do it all on my own, or that it’d be the best way even if I could. I want you to know that, Helen.”
“Okay.”
“I was a lousy brother,” Lloyd said in an anguished voice. “I shoulda pitched in more when Pop was gone.”
“That doesn’t make you a lousy brother.”
“It doesn’t make me a good one.”
Helen thought about Billy and Lloyd, what she’d seen of their interactions over the years; she thought about Rosie’s brothers, and about Teresa and Terence. It seemed to her that the brothers of girls behaved differently towards their siblings than did the brothers of boys. The brothers of girls could be disdainful, bossy, fiercely protective. Two brothers, however, could create what was almost a third entity, to which each donated a piece of his living, beating self. They might fight or have different interests, they might be envious and competitive, but they were bound together in an unbreakable way. That third entity continued to exist, if shrunken at times, ever at the ready to defend and nourish them.
“Billy loved you,” she said to Lloyd. “That’s all that matters now.” And she began, quietly, to weep.
Lloyd cleared his throat. He felt on his bedside table for a cup of water and took a couple of gulps through a bent glass straw.
“Are you crying?” he said.
“A little.”
Helen dug a handkerchief out of her purse and blew her nose. It had been a relatively mild spate of grief, more relieving than engulfing.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Lloyd said. “I haven’t had anyone much to talk to about it.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. I should be helping you, not making you cry.”
“You are helping me.”
Helen put away her handkerchief and stared at Lloyd. Suddenly, she wanted to feel his arms around her. They’d probably both start crying in earnest then, but it would be fine. It would be right. Then, in the next moment, she felt that their embracing wouldn’t be right, that it would be chancy, even perilous. The peril wouldn’t come from Lloyd, nor from her, but from somewhere outside them, somewhere that they were part of despite its being outside them. It was not just brothers who could spawn a third entity.
“Whenever I’m with you, I feel good,” she dared to say. “I relax. Even now. I know I can cry or not cry, I can talk about Billy or not talk about him, and either way, it’ll be all right. That’s how you help me. It’s something nobody else does.”
Lloyd seemed to mull this over for a moment. Abruptly, he stood up.
“You wanna take a walk?” he said.
“Where?”
“Down the halls, outside, anywhere. I just feel like moving.”
Helen put on her jacket and tied a scarf over her head. She crooked her arm, and Lloyd took her elbow. In the hall, she fetched him an olive green sweater out of a closet.
There was not much to look at in the central yard—the surrounding walls and tall windows of the hospital, the turned earth of the bare garden plots, the cracked concrete of the rectangular walkway, a few men wrapped in blankets and sitting in wheelchairs. Helen and Lloyd slowly walked the perimeter. The yard was sheltered from the wind, and most of it was bathed in afternoon sunlight. Helen loosened her scarf and let it drape around her neck.
“I thought he was safe,” she said after they’d gone halfway around the yard in silence. She felt a catch in her throat on the word “safe,” but she wrestled it down.
“He was a soldier, Helen.”
“But he wasn’t in the war yet.”
Lloyd stopped walking and turned to face her.
“My unit went ashore at Gela in Sicily,” he said. “Do you remember reading anything about what happened there? We heard General Eisenhower asked the war correspondents not to report it because of morale at home.”
“Gela? I’m not sure.”
“While we were fighting on the beach, they flew in reinforcement troops. Only, the transport planes happened to come in right on the tail of a heavy German bombing attack. Our gunners got confused. They thought the German bombers were back. They shot down our own men. Our own guys, Helen. Twenty-three planes went down. More than four hundred GIs were killed.”
“I remember it now—but the report didn’t come from anyone in the field. There was a leak from the War Department, and there weren’t many details.”
“The point is, Helen, that war’s messy. You listen to news broadcasts, you look at neatly drawn maps in the papers, you hear the President or the generals talk, and it seems like everything’s all worked out and under control, like some kind of gigantic football game. But it’s not under control, really. It can’t be. There are rules, sort of, but everyone knows they can be crossed if you have to. There’s people giving orders and other people following them, but they’re all winging it a lot of the time. And there are accidents …”
He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“When you sign on for war,” he continued, “you sign on for whatever comes down the pike, and you find out quick that anything can and that if you live long enough, you’ll see plenty, and not a lot of it will make sense—not in the way things used to make sense.”
“That’s how I’ve been feeling about Billy—one of the things I’ve been feeling. That his death didn’t make sense.”
“It made as much sense as any of them.”
They started walking again. Gray Ladies came to take the men in the wheelchairs inside. One of them reminded Lloyd that dinner would be arriving on the wards soon. He said he wanted to make one more circuit before returning to his room.
With the men in the wheelchairs gone, Helen could pretend they weren’t in a hospital yard but in some undergroomed city park. She didn’t want to think about the soldiers shot out of the Sicilian skies by their compatriots. She didn’t want to think about the maimed men in the buildings around them. She didn’t want to think about war and its jumbled mix of sense and nonsense, of hard necessity and profligate waste. Would Billy’s death have been any easier to take if he’d died in battle? He was gone. That cold fact overrode its own trappings.
“We’re back at the entrance,” Helen informed Lloyd when they’d done their last tour of the yard.
“Is there a bench we could sit on a minute?”
There was, and she led him to it.
“Do you think, Helen, that you’re gonna hear from Billy? Do you think he’s gonna come to you?”
She hadn’t expected this. It was something she’d wondered herself. She’d even talked to Nanny about it. But she hadn’t thought anyone would broach the subject with her.
“My grandmother says he won’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“She’s never known it to happen. Besides, I’m not holding seances now.”
“Do you think she could do
it? Call him for you?”
Helen had considered this, too, but Nanny had refused.
“She doesn’t think her ability’s strong enough,” she answered.
The old woman had meant not only that she might be unable to bring Billy through, but also that she wouldn’t know how to supervise the energy between a new spirit who’d passed violently and a grieving, powerful medium.
“Nanny said we have the proof of all the others that Billy is all right. She said that’s enough.”
“Is it enough for you?”
Helen picked at a loose thread on her jacket. Lloyd was making her think, making her shape her thoughts into explanations. She balked at the effort, but she was grateful to him for forcing it.
“No, it’s not,” she said. “But seeing him wouldn’t be enough, either. It wouldn’t be the same as really seeing him again. And it wouldn’t last.”
Lloyd turned, angling his body towards Helen. When his knee bumped hers, he pulled back a few inches.
“He didn’t really believe all that stuff, did he?” he said. “About what you can see.”
“He had his doubts.”
“Would that stop him from contacting you?”
“I really don’t know, Lloyd. He’d have to want to, certainly. He’d have to think it would help me.”
“Would he come, do you think … would he come to help me?”
Helen was startled. Lloyd sounded as needy as any mourner at one of her seances. Was he asking her to bring Billy to him? Now that the wish was issuing from someone other than herself, the notion of fulfilling it suffused her with anxiety. Perhaps Nanny was right that mediums were not meant to call up their own dead.
“Is there something specific you want to hear from him? Or something you want to tell him?”
Lloyd slowly shook his head and stood up.
“Forget it,” he said. “It was just a cockamamie idea.”
Helen, too, stood up. Lloyd took hold of her elbow in preparation for entering the building.
“You know what else my grandmother says?” she told him gently. “She says that the dead hang around a while watching how the people they left behind are doing. So, if there’s something you want Billy to know, you can talk to him like he’s right in front of you. Because he probably is.”
CHAPTER 36
MAY 1944
Rosie was home on a month’s furlough. The day after her arrival in town, she was on Helen’s doorstep, looking fit and trim and serious. Helen immediately threw her arms around her, and they both burst into relieved laughter.
“Come in,” Helen said, pulling her by the hand. “I didn’t think you’d stop over for a day or two. My folks are all out. They’ll hate it that they missed you.”
“I couldn’t wait to see you,” Rosie said. “There’s plenty of time for everyone else later.”
They went through into the kitchen. Helen filled two tall glasses with iced tea made with spearmint from the Victory garden and cut two pieces of Ursula’s Linzertorte. They took their glasses and plates into the backyard and dragged two Adirondack chairs under the big maple in whose shade they’d spent so many summer afternoons. Rosie peered around the yard.
“It all looks the same,” she said. “And yet it’s not like I remember it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s smaller, for one thing. But that’s not all.” She scanned the yard again. “I feel it at home, too. It’s not a bad feeling, just a little confusing. When I was overseas, I’d picture this yard sometimes, and my mother’s kitchen, and Oratam Beach, and a couple of other spots. To remind myself of what our guys were fighting to save and why I was living in a wet, muddy tent or letting myself get eaten alive by desert flies. But it turns out the real places don’t fit the pictures I thought up.”
“Lloyd Mackey said he thought home could never be like what you dreamed about. He said when you’re away at war, you build up a dream of home, and you’ve got the dream, and then when you’re back, you’ve got nothing, and it’s like you’re moving slower than everyone else and you’re not sure how to join in.”
Rosie nodded thoughtfully.
“How is Lloyd?” she said.
“He’s all healed, but he won’t ever see again. He’s in a rehab hospital in Pennsylvania.”
“Gee, that’s tough.”
“Oh, he’ll be all right. He’ll be better than all right. He’s got so much heart, Rosie. And guts. When you’re with him, you feel like …”
Helen interrupted herself with a swallow of iced tea.
“Well, you know, same old Lloyd,” she continued brightly. “Nothing could ever keep him down for long.”
Helen thought she saw a question in Rosie’s eyes, but her friend turned her gaze to a couple of robins on the grass. She crumbled up a bit of torte crust and threw it to them.
“Helen,” she said quietly when she’d turned back, “I’m so sorry about Billy.”
“Yes, I know. I got your letter. It was wonderful, the things you wrote.”
“I can’t even think how I’d feel if anything happened to Arnie, and we’ve only known each other seven months, while the two of you …” Rosie shook her head. “Gosh, Helen, you were in love with Billy even before there was a two of you—your whole life practically.”
“A kid’s crush,” Helen said, shrugging.
“But not later.”
“No, not later.”
Rosie set her empty plate on the ground and her empty glass on top of it. One robin hopped a little closer, cocking its head to inspect the plate for crumbs.
“Do you miss him a lot?”
Only Rosie would dare to ask so blunt a question, though it wasn’t really daring, but simply an expression of her guileless nature and her deep affection for Helen. Rosie’s bluntness made Helen feel daring, too, which was not particularly natural to her. It was as if Rosie had leant forward and cajoled Helen, as she’d done so often when they were children and she was proposing some mild trespass or chancy exploit. “C’mon,” she’d say, “you can do it. It’ll be okay. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I miss him,” Helen said. “But maybe not as much as I should.”
“Who says?” Rosie spouted. “That mooning mother of his? Say, Mary Steltman hasn’t been needling you again, has she?”
“No, no,” Helen said, smiling.
“What then?”
“Oh, Rosie, I’m afraid to say it out loud. I’ve hardly even said it inside my own head.”
“C’mon, it’ll be all right,” Rosie said, reaching out to squeeze Helen’s arm.
Helen took a deep breath.
“Sometimes I think it was just the nearness of the wedding making me nervous. You know, like you hear all brides get? That my nervousness mixed me up.”
“If me and Arnie ever get to where we set the date, the only thing could make me nervous is whether he’d show up on time! But you’ve got to be a little plainer, Helen. What happened?”
“Lloyd happened.”
Rosie raised her eyebrows and sat back in her chair.
“Plainer,” she instructed.
“Well, I visited him in the hospital, over in Staten Island, and then he came home on furlough at Christmas, and he got in the habit of stopping by. We’d take walks, I’d read him the newspaper, we’d talk.”
“Did he make a pass at you? ’Cause these soldiers, sometimes they can be—”
“No, nothing like that. But one day, my parents and my grandmother kind of warned me about him, that they thought he was falling for me. I was mad about them saying that, but then I started to think that maybe I could be falling for him. At least a little. And I got scared. ’Cause how could I fall for somebody when I was about to get married? Especially, how could I fall for my fiancé’s brother?”
“Well, how could you? Honestly. Tell me what’s so swell about Lloyd that you’d think for one minute about throwing over the love of your life.”
Helen slid forward on her chair.
&n
bsp; “I didn’t think of throwing Billy over,” she protested. “But I did think maybe … I did start to wonder, Rosie … if he really was the love of my life.”
“Look, Helen, like you said yourself, it was probably just bride’s nervousness.”
“I didn’t say probably.”
“What was it then?”
“Being with Lloyd is so … so easy. And Lloyd’s not an easy person.”
“And being with Billy was hard? C’mon, Helen, you were ready to marry the guy. You can’t tell me there was nothing there.”
“Of course there was something there. There was a lot. He was … well, I guess he was my definition of what being in love is. I couldn’t imagine him not being part of my life. I still forget, sometimes, that he’s gone.”
She looked over at the fence along the driveway. The old wooden box she used to stand on was still there, a clump of dandelions growing pressed up to one side of it. Rosie was right. She had loved Billy practically her whole life, with a naive ardor that would not tolerate doubts. When misgivings or misunderstandings did crop up, a kiss, a touch, the fulcrum of private history eviscerated them so handily she barely knew it was happening. She looked again at Rosie.
“It was something you wrote me about Arnie that gave me my first twinge of not being sure.”
“Arnie?”
“Not about him, exactly, but about how you felt with him. That you felt more like yourself. You thought I’d know what you meant because of Billy. But I didn’t.”
Helen fiddled the fingers of her right hand on the broad wooden arm of her chair.
“Later, I thought of your letter again,” she continued, resting her hands in her lap, where she stared down at them. “Because later, I thought I did know what you meant. But not because of Billy.”
“Because of Lloyd?”
Helen nodded.
“Oh, brother,” Rosie said, shaking her head. Quickly she added, “Gosh, I guess that’s not the best thing to say.”
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