The Girls from the Beach

by Andie Newton

  I glanced over my shoulder and the last thing I saw was the sergeant standing with his hands on his hips, watching the German come to.

  *

  The soldier let us ride in the front of the lorry instead of the back, where both Red and I squished in next to each other with me in the middle. The sun rose in the distance, looking blood red through a veil of bomb haze. B-17s droned overhead from a lift in the rain—two, three, four I counted without looking up. I closed my eyes, thinking of Sam. “Come back to us,” I said, breaking the silence, and when I opened my eyes back up, Red was looking at me, watching, studying, but I looked out the windshield.

  The soldier shifted gears and the lorry grumbled as we turned off a dirt road for a paved one. “If you’re having regrets, don’t,” he said, taking his eyes off the road long enough to glance at both of us. “Sergeant Meyer was right. You did the right thing.” He looked again. “Sorry about your brother. The men from the Eighth—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you going back there, to the barn?” I said, but he kept his eyes on the road this time and I took that to mean he wasn’t going to answer the question. Then I thought it was probably best I didn’t know and was glad he didn’t answer. “Well, can you tell me your name at least? I think I deserve to know it now—”

  “Jack,” he said, brushing the hair from his eyes, and I caught a good look of his face with the rising sun. He was a real person now, and not the stiff shadow from the back.

  “Well, Jack, I guess we’re connected now. All four of us. But if it’s all the same, I hope we never see each other again,” I said, and he chuckled, though I wasn’t trying to be funny.

  He drove us to our field hospital instead of our clearing station near the battlefield. Red hopped out of the lorry before Jack turned off the engine, walking toward the tent we shared with Roxy. “Red—” I scooted from the seat and ran after her. “Wait up!” I said, walking the last few steps with her up to our tent as she shook her head over and over. “I hope Roxy’s asleep—”

  “I hope Roxy’s asleep,” she said at the same time, and we looked at each other. “Listen, Kit. She can’t know where we went or what we’ve done. Got it?”

  I hesitated answering, exhausted by it all.

  “Got it?” Red said again, and I mustered up the energy to nod. She looked back at Jack and the lorry, but he’d driven away. “Come on.”

  I followed her into our tent. Roxy sat on her cot, taking her boots off. “Boy, are you a sight for sore eyes,” she said to us, but Red and I had already collapsed on our cots. She tossed my K-ration on my blanket, and Red’s too. “Same breakfast as yesterday, dolls.”

  I sat up to grab my box, only to collapse back on my cot.

  Red ripped hers open, shoving a piece of the chocolate in her mouth as Roxy studied us.

  “Well, you only missed twelve patients,” Roxy said. “Cute boys too, poor fellas. Had to amputate a foot before we could send him to evac.” She whistled. “And the doctor was mad, cursing and swearing like a sailor if I’d ever heard one. Had to steal a nurse from another tent to administer ether.” She paused for a split second, which I’m sure felt like a minute to Roxy. “Sure glad the rain stopped though. It rains like that in Jersey, but worse. Nonna always said a good dose of rain is God’s way of—”

  “Roxy,” I finally said, as my boots plunked to the floor. “Quiet.”

  I was hoping Roxy could see that Red and I had been through the wringer and that we didn’t want to talk, but I knew it was only a matter of time before she asked where we’d been. I was thinking it would take her about five seconds to pipe back up, when in fact it only took her three.

  She sneezed after taking a whiff of her ration crackers. “So where were ya?” Cracker bits sprinkled her front pockets as she chewed, eyes shifting back and forth between me and Red.

  “On vacation,” I said in the air. “Soaking in a hot bath, salts for our feet.” Roxy crinkled up her cellophane into a ball. “Yeah, and later we got glammed up in silky dresses, went dancing at the Paramount followed by a dinner at the Ritz!”

  “No, really, where were you gals?”

  “Drop it, Rox,” Red said from her cot, which surprised Roxy. “Not another question.”

  I shook my head when Red wasn’t looking, mouthing, “Not now,” and our tent fell eerily quiet with only the crackle of cellophane balling in Roxy’s fist.

  She reached for her boots, looking up at Red as she shoved each foot inside, but Red only stared at the tent ceiling. “I’m filling my canteen,” Roxy said, storming out the tent flaps. I expected Red to sit up with Roxy gone, but she remained still on her cot, eating crackers.

  “Psst,” I said to her. “What are we going to do?”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “What do you mean, what do I mean?” I said. “How can you sleep after all that?”

  “Drop it, Kit. I mean it. You heard the sergeant. You want to get mixed up in something?”

  “Red, we put him back together, stitched him up like Raggedy Ann. We’re as mixed up as anything.”

  Red had pressed her pillow to her ears to drown me out. Moments later she pulled it away. “And how does someone from a dairy farm in Washington know fluent German?”

  “Please don’t tell anyone, Red. I didn’t join the Nurse Corps to fix up German POWs. If anyone got wind of it—”

  “I won’t, Kit. I promise. But tell me, how did you learn it?”

  I had sat up completely by this time, crisscrossing my legs and digging into my ration box. “I know it seems odd. My great-grandparents were German Russians from Odessa. They came to live with us when I was small. My mother enrolled me and my brother in German classes so we’d be able to talk to them properly. Frau Hess, my teacher—jeez, what a grumpy old woman she was—she wouldn’t die until I’d perfected an authentic Berliner accent. Swear to God, she died the day she told me I was fluent.” I lit up one of four cigarettes from my ration pack. “Damn German classes. Ruined my summers.” I glanced up through the puff of smoke.

  Red looked at me for a long moment. “If you’re so good at speaking German, then how’d he figure out you were lying? You had a complete conversation with him, then on a dime, he changed.” She paused. “You did stick to the script, didn’t you, Kit?”

  I tidied up my ration pack to avoid eye contact. Red had a way of reading people, and I thought if I looked up, she’d know I wasn’t telling the whole story. “Of course, I did. He figured it out is all. One moment he was fine, then he switched, just like you said.”

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “Well yeah, Red.” I slowly looked up, but she had rolled back over.

  Roxy came back in and lit a cigarette. She waited for Red to fall asleep before snapping her fingers at me, her body half-hanging off her cot. “Hey… what’s with that cock-and-bull story you fed me?” She took a drag off her cigarette, batting her giant brown eyes. “Spill it, will ya? I’m growing old already.”

  I exhaled from my mouth, eyes flicking over to Red as she slept, knowing I couldn’t tell her anything that resembled the truth. Roxy had a mouth that ran like water. I had violated the rules of the Geneva Conventions—not something I wanted her to talk about the next time she went on one of her talking tangents.

  “Well, it’s this…” I smoked my cigarette, taking many drags while sitting on my cot, looking at her. “Damn that sergeant if I can say it. Let me tell you, Nurse Blanchfield will be getting a nice writ when I get home. What I saw was definitely not in the War Department film, let me tell you, Roxy. Oh! Let me tell you!” By now my cigarette was a tiny nub, burning my fingers.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” She snuffed out her cigarette on the floorboard, and I hung my head down. “I tended to all those boys myself, me and the doctor. One had a wedding ring, lost the poor boy right in front of me.”

  Roxy had a soft spot for the married ones, because she felt sorry for their wives. I reached for her hand; out of everyth
ing she’d seen in France, the married patients she couldn’t save were her worst thing in the world.

  “I’m sorry, Rox. But yeah. I can’t.”

  She rolled over and talked from under her blanket. “Well, wherever you gals went, I know it must have been a real picnic, I tell ya.” The blanket over her head rose and fell with her huffing breath. “A real picnic!”

  I lay back and tried to get some sleep, but I tossed and turned like laundry for an hour or more. I finally decided I should go for a walk to clear my head; only when I sat up, Red was staring at me from her bed. Her eyes looked right through me, tired and worn, and her hair looked like she’d had her hand in it over and over again, slicking her ginger locks back.

  “Red,” I whispered, but she didn’t move. “Red,” I whispered again, and her eyes slid to mine. “You all right?” She shook her head slightly before getting up and putting her boots on. “Where are you going?”

  She walked out of our tent without a sound, slipping into the daylight. I threw my boots on and ran outside to catch her, my laces dangling in the mud from not tying them. “Wait!” I said, shielding my eyes. Red had taken off between a row of nurses’ tents. The swing shift was up and washing their hair out of their helmets in the grass, taking advantage of the break in the rain to clean up.

  “What are you doing up, Red?” one said, followed by another and another. “You got your shift mixed up?” The nurse had her fingers in another gal’s hair, working up a lather. Red swatted her hand as she rushed past, ignoring them all. They looked to me for an answer as I chased after her, but I could only shrug.

  “Red!” I finally caught her arm, stopping her behind the field hospital and a parked ambulance with nobody inside. “Will you wait already?” I was out of breath and bracing my knees. “What’s gotten into you?”

  She pushed up her sleeves. “Do you realize what we participated in?” she said. “The laws we broke. He tricked us, Kit. We can’t be ordered to break the law. I’m a nurse first; I felt I had to help that man. But damn… I think we really messed up.”

  “It’s done now,” I said.

  “I can’t lose this gig, Kit. Nursing’s all I’ve got. We shouldn’t have done it.” She leaned into my ear. “What if he killed that German? No sense in letting him live after he figured us out, tell others about what we’d done. What if we get pinned for murder? I save lives!”

  “Listen, it was the right decision, Red.” I straightened up, as tall as I could get being as short as I was, and folded my arms, but she had turned her head. “It was!”

  I thought of my brother, dirty and lonely. He’d be lucky if he was a slave, making German bullets in one of their munitions factories—I prayed this was the case. Deep down I knew he was most likely being starved and tortured. Without a shadow of doubt, if I were given the chance again to operate outside the rules of war to get information about my brother and the men captured from the Eighth, I would.

  “Damn Germans. He’s lucky we fixed him. You think they’re doing the same for our boys?” I said, and my eyes uncontrollably welled with tears. “My brother.” My throat balled up. “Sam…” And when I said his name aloud, I erupted in a gasping, heaving cry. Red took me into her arms and I wept into her shoulder, and for the first time since his capture, I let myself feel the loss of my brother as if he had died, and it poured from my skin and soul with prickling pain, leaving an empty space inside where I’d once felt alive.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, petting my head. “That’s why I walked out of our tent. I didn’t want you to know how I felt.” She pulled away to look at me, and I dried my tears well enough with the back of my hand. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if he hadn’t figured us out.”

  “I know…” I sniffled.

  “I hope we never see Meyer again,” she said, “or that Jack.”

  We hugged again. “Me too—” Over her shoulder, Jack had walked out the mess tent with some others. They talked briefly, pointing to papers he had in his hands before splitting up in different directions. He spotted me watching him, eyes shocked wide over Red’s shoulder, and I thought I was going to have a heart attack—of all people to see after what we’d said—and then he smiled, which caught me even more off guard.

  Red pulled away, but he was still there, smoothing his dark hair back before putting his helmet on. He fastened his chinstrap. “Right, Kit?” Red said, and he flicked his helmet brim as if it was a wave.

  “Yeah, Red…” I said, near stuttering, and I shut my eyes briefly, hoping he’d go away, but when I opened them back up, and he had left, I wondered where he went. “Yeah.”

  “Come on, let’s go—” Red said, and we took a couple of steps only to gasp. A photographer was making his way toward us, nurse by nurse, taking snaps of the girls washing their hair. “A photographer. Damn! It’s Benny—little creep.” We turned around and stood still, shoulder to shoulder.

  “What’s he doing here?” I said, wiping my eyes completely dry.

  She scoffed. “He can smell a story a mile away.”

  Benny from the New York Times. He loved to take photos of the nurses. He had a slick of dark hair that ran over the top of his bald head, and he was petite like me, which I thought was unusual for a man.

  We started to walk away, trying to scoot into someone’s tent unnoticed, but Benny had already snuck up behind with his camera. “Red, Kit,” he said, and we sighed. “Turn around.”

  Red flicked my arm, and we put on huge smiles.

  “Yes…” we both said, turning around.

  He lowered the camera from his eye. “You can’t pose,” he said, which is why we did it. “Pretend I’m not here.” He put the camera back up to his eye. “But still smile. People back home want to see winning smiles.”

  I reached for his camera. “Benny, why don’t you—”

  Flash.

  “Try again, Kit,” he said, pulling his camera back.

  B-17s droned in the sky, flying in from the east. I closed my eyes briefly, tapping my heart, counting the planes by their sound. One, two, three… My eyes popped open after I’d only counted three. The fourth one came up from behind real slow, its tail dragging and its engine smoking up the sky with a thick, gray haze. “Four,” I said, and I looked at Red, and she’d put her hands on both my shoulders.

  Bennie took one snap of the three planes that flew over us, then dropped his camera, watching me as I felt for my heart, and Red as she looked into my eyes. “Maybe later,” he said, and he walked back over to the nurses washing their hair.

  “Kit, I’ll say this one last time. Then I don’t want to hear anything else about it. We can’t tell anyone. You hear me? Nobody.” I heard Benny taking snapshots of giggling nurses over her voice. “Promise?” Red said. “You won’t say anything?”

  “I already did promise you,” I said. “But, Red, what are we gonna do about Roxy? She won’t let up—you know that.”

  Red hooked her arm around my neck and we started back to our tent. “I’m sure you’ll think of a story,” she said. “You always do.”

  3

  KIT

  Our shift that night was changed to the following day while the troops refueled. We had a break. Proper recreational time wasn’t something we normally experienced so close to the battlefield; it was something we talked about while huddled between sandbags at our makeshift canteen supplied with gifts brought over from the villagers. Gunfire popped randomly in the far distance—the usual song of the night. Bap, bap…

  I set a crate of wine down between us. “Are you sure we’re good to drink these?” Roxy said. “We’re not gonna get in trouble, are we?” She rummaged through the bottles, pulling them out to read the labels, but they’d been ripped off. “Not like the last time you found us some wine. Right, Kit?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “This is different.” Before we mobilized near Arracourt, I’d found some wine in an unmarked crate. Turned out it belonged to the battalion surgeon. A search was made, and out of fear of getting i
n trouble, I fessed up to the mistake.

  “Who gave them to ya?” Roxy said.

  “I won them playing Bridge,” I said.

  “Yeah?” she said, and I thought I saw a questioning shift of her eyes.

  The truth was, I got the bottles from an old villager and his wife, a thank you for tending to their daughter’s burns. We weren’t allowed to accept edibles from villagers since Mont-Saint-Michel, where our boys got poisoned by collaborationist chefs in a brasserie. These bottles were plumb. I inspected the corks myself. Plus, I didn’t think that little old man and his wife wanted to kill the person who’d saved their daughter.

  Red found a bottle of champagne hidden among the bottles of wine. “The champagne too?” she said, and I nodded, but that one I sort of ended up with. She held the champagne up to the lantern light, eyes bright. “If we get in trouble, I’m blaming you, Kit.”

  Roxy looked in the box for a corkscrew, but I handed her one from my pocket. She began to uncork it, twisting and twisting with a grit in her teeth. “Stubborn little fella, isn’t it?” Roxy said, finally popping the cork. She licked her lips, looking at the bottle once more in the light, before giving it a sniff. She whistled. “Nobody makes wine like the French.”

  Roxy guzzled that wine, and God’s truth, it sounded like she was pumping gas.

  “Hey now, Rox,” I said, reaching for the bottle. “Easy does it.” I tugged and tugged until finally she let go, a little spurt of wine dribbling down the bottleneck from the back-and-forth. “Don’t want anyone to think you’re a lush, do you now?”

  “I deserve an extra slug or two after the shift I pulled last night.” She reached for the bottle I had taken from her, and I let go, no resistance after she mentioned last night. “You two weren’t there so you wouldn’t know.”

  I felt the sting in her voice, and I looked at Red, but she was looking at Roxy. I tried to think of something else to talk about, swirling the wine around in my bottle, but the quietness made Roxy’s remark hang more awkwardly in the air.