The Girls from the Beach

by Andie Newton

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and we continued to eat our apples under the tree where some birds had perched. “Besides, I’m starting not to like him. Leaving us to get this—” I patted the bag of jewels “—all on our own. I know he was too weak to come, but still…”

  “Yeah,” Gail said, touching her wounded arm, “but still…”

  “Yeah, but still,” Roxy added. “He left us. Fed us to the werewolves and that crazy butcher. Even if he didn’t know the extent of it, let me tell ya…” Roxy clenched her fist then punched the air. “Pop! Right in that plum mouth of his.”

  We all laughed. Even Gail, who winced afterward and held her arm close.

  “I don’t think he knew,” I said, and then turned to Red. “Did he?”

  “If he did know and didn’t tell us, he’s going to get more than Roxy’s fist in his face,” Red said. “You better believe it.”

  “He is cute though,” Roxy said. “Gotta give him that.”

  “Yeah, I suppose he’s cute,” I said. “Those eyes, and that chest—”

  “Man, what I wouldn’t give to have a dreamboat like that someday,” Roxy said, and she dug her heel into the dirt. “Damn this war. What if we never get across the line to France? What if we can never leave?” Her angry voice turned into a muffled cry, and when I swung my arm around her, she sobbed into her hands.

  “Don’t cry, Rox,” I said. “We’ll get out, and there’s someone for you,” I said, petting her head. “Promise. I’ll introduce you to my brother, Sam. Oh, you’ll love him. Tall, handsome, kind…” I hung my head, suddenly overwhelmed thinking about where he was, and where I was, with the werewolves’ diamonds, and the possibility that we wouldn’t get out at all.

  Roxy wiped her nose, looking up. “Don’t stop, keep going…”

  “We’ll get out of here, Rox,” I said, trying to sound sure. “We have to believe.”

  We threw our arms around each other.

  “I bet if I told him what I did to save the POW camps, he’d like me real good,” Roxy said, and we both laughed, pulling away.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He would, Rox.”

  “Fräuleins!” a man yelled from a puttering truck, and my stomach dropped like a rock through a paper sack. His arm hung out the window. “You girls there!” he spouted in German. “What are you doing in this orchard?”

  We stood up and gathered behind Red still holding our apples. “What did he say?” Red said from the corner of her mouth.

  “What do we do?” Roxy whispered. “Do you think he heard us talking?”

  My first instinct was to run, but he was in a truck and could easily catch us. He drove closer, his tires rolling slowly over fallen leaves.

  “Say something, will ya?” Roxy said, but even Gail seemed to have lost her voice.

  I cleared my throat. He was wrinkly, a seasoned old man, an apple farmer if I’d ever seen one, and I’d seen a lot. Only this one was German, and there was no way to know if he’d be sympathetic to a few American women or not, like the pharmacist and his wife had been. He could be friends with the butcher and had been out looking for us.

  I smiled, quickly making up a story. “Good day, sir,” I said in German. “We lost our dog. Have you seen a shepherd?”

  His eyes skirted over Red, Roxy, and Gail, who’d hidden her bandaged arm behind Red. “Nein.” And he paused, noticing our apple cores on the ground, which made the air between us feel very uncomfortable.

  I cleared my throat again. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, even though it was him who’d stopped us. I promptly turned around and mouthed, “Go, go… go…” And the girls followed me deeper into the orchard as if we knew where we were going and that it was all right to be there, through the kindling collected between the trees, the fallen leaves, and apples left to spoil. I felt him watching us from his puttering truck, one arm draped over his steering wheel with a keen German eye. I turned around once, catching a glimpse.

  “Keep walking,” Red said, reaching for my shoulder.

  He had the same strange look on his face as he did when we talked, one that said he didn’t believe me. When we found cover behind a row of mature trees, his truck rolled slowly forward until he could see us again.

  “Ah, hell,” I said. “He’s following us. Maybe he did hear us talking?”

  “We need to do something else,” Roxy said.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “What he’d expect young German women to do,” Roxy said, and she picked up a wad of leaves in her hands and tossed them on Gail’s head, who gasped momentarily before following suit.

  “Laugh loud,” Red said, and she squealed like a little girl, and we ran around the trees trying to catch each other, grasping at dress hems, and tugging on hair. Soon we were out of breath from playing tag and tossing leaves.

  I looked back, and his truck was gone. “He drove off!” I said, and we ran as fast as we could through the orchard, but now it was near dusk and dark among the trees, which made our steps more deliberate, and careful, strenuous.

  Roxy ran out of steam. “Wait,” she said, falling against a tree. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  We moved into a small circle around her. The boom of thunder and a cold sweep of air roared over the treetops. “It’ll rain soon, that should keep him away,” I said, and the stark cut of yellowy headlamps beamed through the trees, lighting up the kindling and our last steps.

  “Quick! Follow me…” Red said, grabbing Roxy’s hand while I took Gail’s good one, and we dove into a narrow ditch and lay like cigars, packed real tight. Red put her arms over us, holding us in place and praying.

  “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want…”

  A downpour of rain followed a crack of lightning, dirt turning into mud, and water channeling into the ditch. Headlamps skirted over the ground above us through the rain, followed by the roar of a truck engine. I squeezed my eyes closed, gripping the bag near my waist, thinking desperately of a place to hide the jewels if the Germans found us in the ditch, but I couldn’t risk standing up or even moving out from under Red’s protective arm.

  “Please God,” I said to myself, eyes closed even tighter, “please God…”

  The truck rolled up next to us in the ditch, squealing with rusty, tired wheels. My eyes popped open. Headlamps flickered. And then a door opened and closed.

  Wet footsteps slopped through the mud.

  I felt frantically for the gun under my dress, wet fingers searching a wet leg. Roxy wept openly while Red searched her brassiere for the lethal doses of morphine. “Ladies,” Red said as the rain fell on top of us. “It was a pleasure to serve with you…”

  22

  EVELYN

  Sometime around midnight, Evelyn woke up with a jolt, shrieking and clutching her chest in bed. Her husband barely roused next to her. After several deep breaths, she opened her eyes to the darkness of the cold October night. The wind whistled against her windowpane, and she heard the light tatter of blowing leaves. But she was burning up, moistened with fear that had left her nightgown damp and limp.

  It had been several weeks since the reporter had visited her home, and the salute was creeping up on her; in a matter of days she’d be in Atlanta in front of a news crew trying to tell her story. She still hadn’t made peace with what happened behind enemy lines, and even though she tried with all her might to mentally prepare for the interview and tell her big secret, she wondered how she could talk openly about something that had scarred her so severely. She asked God for help, making deals she knew she couldn’t keep, which she was used to doing—she’d been doing it since Lichtenau.

  Evelyn crawled out of bed and tiptoed into the kitchen, where the linoleum was lit up with moonglow. She reached into the little basket above her refrigerator for the cigarette her husband had put there for an emergency, feeling blindly for it.

  She felt some relief after she lit it and inhaled in her kitchen, flicking ash into her sink, but it didn’t last nearly
as long as she hoped.

  She couldn’t go back to bed yet, and walked to her slider. A single raindrop fell outside onto the patio—one black spot. Crinkled brown leaves pinwheeled across the patio from a gusty breeze, and Evelyn played with the door lock, feeling safe inside, flipping it up and down, up and down. She thought back to when Michelle was a little girl, when they’d run around the house and lock up all the doors when it rained—just one of those games Evelyn had made up so her daughter wouldn’t ask questions.

  Evelyn flipped the lock into the lock position—clack—and held it there as another drop became two and then three, splatting onto the concrete.

  Michelle was eighteen months old when Evelyn realized she had a problem, when the rain had triggered a reaction in her that wasn’t normal, wasn’t sane. It was April 3rd—she remembered the day as if it was yesterday.

  *

  Michelle had a fever. Her face had turned beet-red, and her forehead and belly hot as a griddle while scream-crying herself into an oblivion. Evelyn rushed out of the house for the doctor’s office, baby in one arm and purse hooked on the other, when she saw a single raindrop fall on the front step. Her muscles locked up, fibers stretching between unmoving bones, right there in the doorway with a screaming baby in her arms. Her body throbbed from an inner gush of imaginary fluid, rain that would fill her up as if she were a glass and flow over the sides, rain that would kill her if she stepped out in it.

  Evelyn couldn’t move. She couldn’t leave.

  She thought she would die.

  Several hours later, after the rain had stopped, she escaped from her house with the baby and drove to the pediatrician’s office in town, barely making it through the doors before they closed for the day. She waited impatiently in the waiting room, her stomach turning from the vile smell of antiseptic and the stink of latex before being led into an examination room.

  The doctor wrote Evelyn a script to bring Michelle’s fever down, who was now asleep in her buggy. But after examining the baby, the pediatrician seemed to be examining Evelyn, looking at her oddly. “I thought you were coming in this morning. It’s almost five.”

  Evelyn sat in the examination room, hands folded nervously in her lap with trembling fingers. She wanted to cry out. Tell him what had happened, but the thought of him judging her felt like a rock forming in her chest.

  “Evelyn?” He handed her the script, and she took it, eyes flittering over the room, pulse quickening. “I know your husband had been away on business. Is everything all right at the farm?”

  It was then Evelyn realized the doctor thought there was a problem in her marriage, which was far from the truth. “Oh, no… no… it’s not that,” she managed to say. “Nothing like that.” She lifted her head after taking a heavy gulp of air and looked into the doctor’s eyes. She’d known him for many years, before the war, when he was friends with her parents, both since passed. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Should I have the nurse come in?”

  Evelyn thought she might be going insane. She felt it in the days after Lichtenau, and progressively in the years since, first starting in her chest, a heavy, rapid heartbeat followed by a bubbling of fear gripping her muscles, yet this was the first time she couldn’t pull herself out of it—the first time she stood unmoving, watching the rain and feeling the ticks on the cement patio as if they were a sharpshooter’s bullets in the night, unable to help her daughter.

  Evelyn swallowed her pride and told the doctor what had happened and how she thought it was connected to her time in the war, her time as a nurse. “I’m deathly petrified of the rain. I know it’s only water, I know it can’t hurt me, but at the same time I feel I’d be walking to my death if I step out in it.” She tapped her chest. “I feel it in here.”

  She had stood up and paced the little examination room, trying to make sense of it herself, clutching the locket she’d worn around her neck, a locket she’d been given during the war, a locket she swore she’d never take off. “So, you see doctor, that’s why I’m late.” She walked toward him, hands reaching, pleading for help, but stopped short from grabbing his lapels, remembering who she was, and who she was talking with. She dropped her hands, and at her wits’ end she asked, “Can you help me?”

  The doctor stared at her for a long while. So long that Evelyn started to feel self-conscious and cold and she rubbed her hands for warmth. “Doctor? Please. I beg you…”

  He backed away, his eyes narrowing. “How dare you.”

  “What?” Evelyn folded her arms, but not from anger, for protection. She’d made herself vulnerable telling him her secrets.

  “My son was in the Pacific. Guadalcanal. There isn’t a moment that goes by the suffering he endured doesn’t affect him. But you…” He flicked his finger at her. “You were a nurse. You can’t possibly suffer the way our soldiers suffer. You’re making a mockery of—” He set his clipboard down. “Don’t think I won’t remember this, Evelyn Jones.” He walked out of the examination room leaving Evelyn with Michelle who’d woken up from the doctor’s voice and had started to fuss.

  “Liar,” she heard him say as he walked down the hall.

  A nurse came into the room after watching the doctor storm off. “Everything all right in here, Mrs. Jones?”

  Evelyn picked up her baby, trying to soothe her, wiping tears from her own eyes with the back of her hand. “Mmm-hmm,” she said through quivering lips.

  That night after dinner, while Evelyn cleared the plates, her husband asked her what was wrong. She swallowed the lump she’d been carrying with her since the doctor’s office, and thought about telling him everything was all right, that she was just worried about Michelle, but her eyes sagged in an unfamiliar way, a way she couldn’t hide from her husband.

  Evelyn sat down at the table and sobbed uncontrollably with her head on the checkered tablecloth.

  “What is it?” her husband said, rubbing her back. “Honey?”

  She rolled her head over to look at him, tears sliding to one side and pooling on the tablecloth, hiccupping between her wails. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s the baby,” he said. “Maybe it’s too much. You try to do everything…”

  “No,” she moaned, “it’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  She lifted her head only to rest her eyes in her palms. “I think it’s the war. It’s in my head.”

  Evelyn’s husband got quiet, and she looked at him through the gaps of her fingers. “Don’t you think of it?” she said, and he shook his head slightly, but then nodded.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “How do you do it?” she said through her sobs. “How do you keep it from ruining your life?”

  “I don’t know…” he said, looking her over before motioning at the locket around her neck. “I don’t keep mementos of the war with me—souvenirs to remind me.”

  Evelyn sniffled, wiping her runny nose with the flap of her apron. “But I said I wouldn’t take it off.”

  “You’re not in France anymore, Evelyn. You’re home. The war is over.”

  Evelyn felt sick to her stomach. She’d sworn she’d never take it off; she’d never get rid of it, not until—

  “You have to move on,” her husband said, and he wiped his eyes swiftly with the back of his hand, which made her feel guilty for speaking about it. “The locket is a constant reminder.”

  Michelle fussed from her crib in the other room and Evelyn stood up. “Michelle needs me.” But as she left the kitchen, her husband pulled her back.

  “I love you, Evelyn,” he whispered, hugging her warmly. “You’re safe with me, okay?”

  And she melted into his arms, knowing there was nothing he could do to save her.

  *

  Evelyn unlocked the sliding glass door—clack—and a flit of cold air whistled through a crack where the door had pushed open slightly. The patio had turned speckly with raindrops. If she walked outside, surely one would hit her. She felt a lump in her throat with that t
hought, but instead of closing the door up tight like she’d always done in the past, she decided to face her fears, something she’d discussed with her doctor but hadn’t been brave enough to try.

  She forced herself to stick her fingers through the gap and wiggled them in the jamb, feeling the cold damp air. Goose bumps rolled up her arm, over her shoulder, and down her back under her nightgown. With the door open she could hear the patter of rainfall, the light tick of it hitting the windowpane as the wind blew, and smell it, the bitterness of dust and dirt.

  She slid the door open a little more and stood in the doorway, feeling naked and exposed to the elements and her thoughts. Normally she’d think about dying, but what happened caught her by surprise. She thought about living. Being haunted by her memories for more than forty years felt like a prison. She couldn’t just try to tell her story at the salute, she had to do it; she had to confront her fear. Talking was, after all, the only thing she hadn’t done, and when she thought of her next steps, she thought she’d try them in the rain.

  Evelyn felt a pop, a sudden release in her chest with this resolution despite the bubble of panic trying to rise up inside her, and for the first time in so many years she had courage. She lifted her nightgown up above her ankles and stepped outside, first with her toe, feeling out the cold cement patio, and then her entire foot. One wobbly step turned into two and then three, her nightgown catching a breeze from the bottom up, billowing around her, revealing her twiggish legs as she walked across the slick patio and into wet grass, shivering and cold.

  She reached into her nightgown pocket and pulled out her silver locket, looking at it briefly in her palm before hanging it around her neck and pressing it flat to her chest instead of clutching at her heart. Evelyn tipped her head back, looking into the night air, and waited for the first raindrop to hit her skin when she felt a sting on her cheek, a needle from the sky that slid cold and wet into her eye. She gasped, shuddering from her toes to her head before turning stiff, but after a second of being frozen in the grass, she fluttered her fingers and batted her eyes, realizing she hadn’t drowned.