The Girls from the Beach

by Andie Newton

  “I never would have dreamt the rain could—” she looked over Evelyn’s body wrapped up in the blanket “—debilitate you. Cause you to—”

  “Michelle, honey,” Evelyn’s husband said. “I’m sure you have questions, but as you can see, your mother’s been through a lot tonight.”

  “Oh yeah, Dad. Of course.” Michelle got up, and when her hands slipped away, Evelyn’s curled up into themselves. She kissed her mother’s cheek before meeting her dad at the door where they talked in hushed tones, but Evelyn heard them just fine.

  “What happened, exactly, Dad? I’m worried,” Michelle said.

  “Doctor says it’s stress,” he said.

  “Stress?” Michelle said. “Out here? On the farm?”

  “No,” he said, “you don’t understand. Stress from before—from the war. It’s why she never wanted anyone to know she was in France.” He put his hand on her shoulder, turning his back to Evelyn. “I recently convinced her to see a doctor about it.” He rubbed his eyes. “I was at my wits’ end not knowing how to help her.” His voiced wavered, on the verge of a cry, and Michelle threw her arms around his neck. “We’re still trying to learn about it.”

  She pulled back. “Jesus, Dad, do you have it too? You were in the war,” she said, but he shook his head.

  “I have memories of war,” he said, “but nothing like hers.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “If you were both in the war…”

  He closed his eyes briefly, taking a breath. “I didn’t land on the beach. Your mom did, and she was on the front line all the way to Berlin. Do you understand? The casualties she saw, the wounded she attended to firsthand, many just young boys. It was an endless circuit. The rain is a reminder—it sets it off, brings all the memories back, only they’re not just memories. She relives them.” Michelle covered her mouth with this information while he glanced back at Evelyn still on the couch. “We can talk about it later. Go home to your family,” he said, and they hugged their goodbyes before he walked her outside.

  *

  Evelyn went to bed that night embarrassed that her daughter had seen her in a fit and unable to move in the back seat of her car.

  “I’m glad she knows,” her husband said, lying next to Evelyn in bed. “I went along with keeping your past a secret because it’s what you wanted, and I thought it would help, but it hasn’t. I think it was a mistake hiding the truth.”

  Evelyn absorbed what he’d said. Whether it was the right thing to do or not, the fact was Michelle knew now. That part of her secret was out. There was no way to erase it.

  “Go to sleep,” she whispered.

  “I think you should tell her all of it,” he said. “The whole story—what happened those five days in September.”

  A thick, unmistakable silence wedged between them. Even her husband didn’t know all of it. She stared into the open space above her bed, wishing she had her husband’s memories instead, ones he would be willing to talk about if she let him. But they had never talked about anything too specific over the years for fear it would ignite her own.

  “Evelyn?”

  “I called Roxy today,” she blurted.

  “You did?” he asked. “When?”

  “This morning,” Evelyn said, though she wasn’t about to mention the part about the reporter. “She said there’s something in Atlanta this fall—a salute and a reunion.”

  “I think you should go!” He rolled over and faced her in the dark, searching for her hand under the sheets. “You need someone to talk to, Evelyn. A support group. This could be the answer. Think about how many others will be there. Who you’ll see.”

  “Not everyone will be there,” she said.

  Evelyn felt the weight of her declaration, and she knew her husband did too. It was, after all, at the core of what haunted her the most, especially about those five days in September.

  “You can’t turn back time,” he said. “And it wasn’t your fault what happened.”

  Evelyn didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. But she did squeeze his hand, and after a long pause, with both of them facing each other in bed, they said goodnight. But what he didn’t know, and what Evelyn could never bring herself to tell him, was that when she went to sleep her memories turned terrifyingly vivid and alive, even as she held his hand under the sheets and without any provocation at all.

  She tried to remember what her doctor had told her to do, and took a few deep breaths through her nose, thinking about the things that brought her joy, but as she thought about Michelle, her grandchildren, and her husband, a current of old memories flooded over her just the same. She never knew where she’d end up. Would she be bobbing in the sea, trying to get her nose above water, or would she be in the surf, feeling the grittiness of beach sand between her teeth?

  One thought led into the next, then somewhere in her kaleidoscope of swirling darkness, Evelyn’s thoughts landed on the pharmacy in Lichtenau. The coolness of the glass doorknob in her palm, the breeze fingering her bangs as she looked up at the striped awning. The sterile odor of the bare shelves inside.

  Her heart ticked up, but instead of counting away the memory like her doctor suggested, she held on to it, and felt her consciousness slip inside the cellar—a ghostly apparition—watching Red and Roxy tend to Jack. Then she saw Kit.

  The girl she used to be.

  Evelyn watched Kit pace the center of the room, hands on her hips, feeling the strange gap of air between her legs from wearing a dress. The crustiness of the river water hardening the tips of her brown bob, and the wave of her dark eyelashes, which would eventually turn sparse and gray in the many years to come. In this scene, Evelyn thought, Kit doesn’t know what lies in wait for her.

  If only she could go back in time, whisper in her ear. Warn her.

  Evelyn took a deep breath through her nose and when she exhaled, the cellar’s cement walls caved in over top of her, sucking all of them into an endless black hole where Evelyn dreamt her dreams.

  *

  The next morning, Evelyn sat drinking coffee at her kitchen table, listening to the light buzz of farm equipment tattering in the field where her husband was working. Her chest still ached from yesterday, like she’d been out in the cold and a sickness was trying to take root. She fought back by taking a sip of her incredibly black coffee and trying to relax. A bird sang not that far away, a robin, she decided, and a woodpecker hammering on a tree.

  She opened her window to let the morning breeze in, thinking the fresh air on her face would carry her away, and indeed it did, but not in the way Evelyn hoped. The sudden sharp clang of rattling chains from the barn reminded her of the SS Pendleton, the rope ladder to her landing craft, and how her boot clumsily fit in each rung. She felt the burn in her palms as she hung on, and the impact on her bones when she fell three feet into the craft. She set her coffee cup down and clenched her fists, chanting to herself the way her doctor had told her to do when these sensations washed over her, but the woodpecker’s hammering sounded like the pop of gunfire in her field. “I’m safe,” she said, eyes closing. “I’m in Washington…”

  She thought about last night in bed with her husband, when he said keeping her past a secret had been a mistake, and in a desperate move to try something different, she spoke her truth out loud and into the quiet air of her kitchen.

  “I was a battle nurse.” A deep breath followed.

  Evelyn said the words again, though this time she opened her eyes. “And my name was Kit.” Each syllable rang in her ears.

  Evelyn boxed up her life as a nurse after the war in 1945, and although she rarely looked at it, she knew exactly where the box was in her cellar. Behind the Kerr jars, second shelf up.

  Evelyn bolted from her chair and walked down the hall. She paused a second before wrapping her hand around the doorknob, giving herself a moment to reconsider, and in spite of the little voice in her head telling her not to go into the cellar, she threw open the door and padded down the wooden stairs in her b
are feet and stood where it was cool and dark and moldy. She pulled on the light string.

  Evelyn walked right to the box, moving the glass jars out of her way: big, made of cardboard, and webbed in the cobwebs of her thoughts. She gave it a shake, the clattering of her old life.

  There were times throughout the years she had thought about opening the box. She’d set dates that would come and go, picking the perfect time and the perfect place—but as the years passed, she began to think the box would remain closed until her very last days, just before she died—just before her daughter took her to hospice. This is what she imagined. Yet there she was with no planning at all and standing in her bare feet and house pants, very much alive, with the one thing that could rip her open or save her from drowning.

  Evelyn blew dust from the box and had a little cough. She pulled on the flaps.

  Snap. Snap.

  She gasped suddenly, robbing the room of all its oxygen, when she saw her old fatigues lying right on top where she’d folded them over forty years ago. She ran her fingers over the olive drab twill, over the buttons. Her dog tags slid out from a pocket, which caught her off guard. Evelyn ran her thumb over the embossed letters of her name before rubbing both tags together.

  Then she saw it.

  A locket she’d been given on that fateful day. It almost took her breath away, seeing it again in the dim cellar light. Tarnished silver, cool and matte. She set down her tags and pulled the locket up gently, its delicate chain rubbing against the cardboard box as she pulled it out and held the locket in her hand, closing her eyes. She slumped forward a little, remembering.

  “Goddamn you,” she said, and the guilt and pain from something that happened many years ago pulsed in her throat. How is this a good idea? She looked up, her eyes skirting over the beams that held her house up, wishing she had as much strength.

  Evelyn stifled a cry and forced herself to dig deeper into the box, finding her old canteen and putting her helmet on, when a knock on the front door startled her.

  She spun around, looking up the stairs, feeling very much like she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. “Coming!” she yelled, stuffing her fatigues back inside and throwing her helmet in before closing up the flaps.

  She slid the box back on the shelf, anxious to see about the door, but in her haste she’d forgot to put the locket inside. As if an afterthought, she slipped the locket over her head as she dashed up the stairs, even though it had been decades since she’d worn it. Another knock. “Coming!” she said again, and as if opening the box and wearing the locket again wasn’t bad enough, she went on to make the most fatal error of her day.

  She opened her front door without looking through the peephole.

  “Hello—”

  The reporter.

  She gulped, though she wasn’t surprised to see him; she knew he’d be back. She felt it in her bones. If only he knew where she’d been moments ago, feeling out her old nurse fatigues.

  “Well, hello there to you!” he said.

  This time she opened her screen door and joined him outside, looking around the farm as if he wasn’t the most important thing to step up on her porch that day.

  She folded her arms and the door clacked closed behind her. “Yes?”

  He pulled a folder from his leather bag, opening it up for her to have a look at what was inside. A large black and white photo of her and Red outside the nurses’ tents.

  She instinctively gasped, reaching out to touch her and Red’s faces, but he pulled the photo back. “We need to talk.” He paused. “Kit.”

  She folded her arms back up, and he smiled, and it was slippery and cunning, a smile that belonged to only one other. Evelyn already had too many memories to count, now here was a lost one, and it was staring at her, standing right on her porch. Evelyn’s spine straightened; she should have known—she should have recognized his offspring.

  “I believe you knew my dad,” he said.

  Evelyn gazed into his hazelly eyes—like seeing a ghost. Of all the people, she thought. Of all the people to turn up on my doorstep. A puff of air escaped between her lips, saying that old coyote’s name in her mind. Benny.

  “How’d you know it was me?” she said.

  “The library in town has records. I saw your photo in a yearbook.” He laughed. “Good old yearbooks!” He tucked the folder back into his leather bag. “You ready to chat?”

  Evelyn thought she’d be coy, feel him out. “About what?”

  “Oh, I think you know,” he said, and when he smiled a ray of sunlight glinted off a white tooth. “Tell me, how’s your German these days?”

  Evelyn dropped her arms to hold on to her thighs. She was about to tell him to leave when her husband walked around the house, and upon seeing a stranger at their doorstep, he walked up to them both, wiping grease from his hands on a rag. “Good morning,” he said, and the reporter shook his hand. He looked at his wife, and then back to the reporter, studying. “Can I help you?”

  The reporter stood nice and tall, meeting Evelyn’s husband with a commanding, yet agreeable stature. Evelyn knew better; he was a snake. All reporters are snakes. Especially one related to Benny.

  “I’m a reporter from New York,” he said, handing her husband a business card. “I’m doing a story about World War Two nurses. To be precise, there’s a mystery I’m trying to solve about four nurses from the 45th, and my search brought me here,” he said. “To find Kit.”

  Evelyn’s husband’s eyes grew round as saucers when the reporter said “Kit,” and she knew he was looking to her for how to react, but then he saw the locket around her neck, and his whole face changed.

  “Maybe you should come inside,” Evelyn’s husband said, and she glared. She certainly wasn’t giving him permission to invite the little snake in.

  “This is what I was talking about last night,” he whispered into Evelyn’s ear. “You need to talk to someone. Maybe this is the first step. You must be thinking this too if you were in the cellar.” His eyes moved to the locket around her neck.

  “But…” she said, only he led the reporter into their house and into their kitchen, despite her protesting, where he poured them both a cup of decaf at the table. She knew her husband was only trying to help, and it took a moment for her not be mad at him, and a few deep breaths.

  Unlike her husband, Evelyn had no expectations other than to see the photo again. She scooted up in her seat. “Can I…” she said, motioning to his leather bag. “Can I see the photo again?”

  The reporter placed the photo in front of Evelyn on the table. She gazed at the glossy image, taking in every detail. She remembered when it was taken, she remembered the planes flying overhead, how Benny had snuck up on them near the field tent, and how nervous Red was about the German. She touched Red’s face. It had been so long since she’d seen her.

  “Do you feel okay?” Evelyn’s husband said to her, and she nodded, though she couldn’t quite pinpoint what she was feeling. Her stomach had knotted up and her head felt heavy. And her throat. God, the pain in her throat!

  The reporter placed another photo in front of Evelyn and she immediately covered her mouth. It was the photo Benny took of them in the mess tent the night they left with the doctor. A window into the past. The tears that had pooled painfully in her eyes spilled over her cheeks. She pulled three tissues from a box she had on the table, one after another, and dabbed her cheeks.

  “These are the other nurses from tent seven?” The reporter pointed to each of them, saying their names. “Red, Roxy, and Gail?”

  “Are you asking me their names?” she said. “Because I’m sure you already know.”

  His smile rose and then fell. “I do.”

  Evelyn continued to pat away the tears from her cheeks. “What is it you really want to ask?”

  The reporter stared at Evelyn as her husband rubbed her back, almost as if reconsidering his questioning given her state, but he couldn’t resist, and Evelyn expected not
hing less of him. “What happened those five days you disappeared?”

  Evelyn snagged another tissue from the box and pressed it to her eyes while her husband reassured her everything would be okay.

  “It’s all right if you need a minute,” the reporter said, and Evelyn looked up.

  “You’re damn right I need a minute.”

  13

  KIT

  The room turned quiet with Gail and Roxy gone. Red didn’t move for ten minutes, and when she did, it was only to pace. “I should have gone with them,” she said. “Roxy isn’t used to being in charge of herself. She’ll need me.”

  “At least Gail knows German. She can do the talking if she has to.”

  Red glanced over her shoulder. “You think Roxy isn’t going to talk?” she said, and I immediately heard Roxy’s voice in my head. “What do you mean by that, doll?”

  I sighed.

  “Come on,” I said, motioning for her to help me with Jack, “we need to get this bullet out.” I pulled his shirt up over his head, and he winced and moaned from having to move his infected arm. Then he shivered from having to sit on his mattress bare-chested. I’d seen a thousand men with their shirts off, and I surprised myself by glancing at him longer than I should have, my eyes skirting over his shoulders, down his sculpted chest, and ending where his belt looped around his waist.

  “You ready?” I said to him.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be, I suppose.” He smiled nervously before his lips fell into a thin line, preparing for the inevitable. I held his arm still, reached down for my medical kit out of habit, patting my skirt, only to remember we buried our kits by the river. Red laid out what equipment had survived the Rhine on the bed.

  “Can we get anything from the pharmacy?” I said, and Jack shook his head.

  “They have to account for everything they sell and they said it would look suspicious if some of their supplies went missing,” Jack said.