The Girls from the Beach

by Andie Newton

  The train’s whistle peeped once, then twice. Doors closed. The night air faded into a dark shade of midnight blue, and the train crept slowly down the track.

  “Red…” I swallowed dryly, finding it hard to even say the words. “They’re sending us to prison…” Women held on to each other, crying, saying tearful goodbyes to the empty platform. “What do we do…” The glow of exploding bombs lit up the hills. Our boys were so close. So close. And the train moved east. “We’re moving into the heart of Germany…”

  “Listen to me,” Red said, but I was near delirious. The train slowly gathered up speed, creeping, creeping, gaining momentum. There was no way out. Red shook me by the shoulder with one hand. “Listen to me!” And I looked into her eyes, which flicked once to the left, pointing to an emergency door that had a whistle of its own, one of air swishing through an open latch.

  I gasped, stealing a look toward the front of the train car where the guard had started moving through the throng of standing passengers, using his rifle to push women out of the way. “Red…” She moved her body in such a way that it blocked the guard from seeing me so close to the door. “We just… jump?” I said, feeling the flit of air through the gap.

  “Not we,” she said, and I looked up at her.

  “What do you mean?” The guard moved closer, some girls shrieking, others crying as he backhanded them to get out of his way.

  Red smoothed a lock of hair out of my eyes. “We had a good run, didn’t we?” Her lips quivered.

  “Red, no. What are you saying?” She pushed me gently toward the door. “Stop.” I grabbed her arm, trying not to hurt her but it was near impossible. “Jump with me, dammit.”

  “I’d never survive a jump.” She wheezed, and flinched terribly from a spasm of pain in her side. “Make it to the river, all right? Find the girls, lead them back to our field hospital. Use the gun if you have to.”

  She pushed me again, and I dug in, my feet sliding toward the door, surprised she suddenly had so much strength. “No! I’m not leaving you.”

  “You’re not, Kit.” She smiled, and a gush of tears spilled over her cheeks. “I’m leaving you.”

  And with one final push, my backside hit the door and I flew outside, tumbling and rolling, feeling the stinging wrath of fresh scrapes all over my body before coming to a stop. I lifted my head, seeing Red pull the lethal doses of morphine from her dress as the guard rushed up behind her. She tapped her heart, as if telling me her plan, before reaching out for me in the dark.

  “No, Red, don’t…” The train whistled, and I screamed. “Red!”

  *

  A minute or so passed, and the train was but a speck in the night, chugging softly away. Rain spat from dark clouds. “Damn you, Red,” I cried. A spotlight from the station searched the tracks, moving close as I lay on the ground. Dogs barked.

  I pulled myself up—aching, hissing, and scared—and hid in the bushes. A flashlight skirted over the tracks instead of the spotlight and I held my breath, listening to two guards chat about the night. I heard their dogs whining, sniffing. They hadn’t seen me.

  “Next load leaves tomorrow,” one said.

  I squeezed my eyes shut with my hand pressed to my mouth.

  “If there is a tomorrow,” the other said. “The battle’s advancing.” And with that, the other yelled at him for saying treasonous things and stormed off. A tossed lit cigarette flew through the air, and then they were both gone. I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled away down the track and into the night.

  I made the slow walk toward the center of the village, arms folded, shivering even with the sweater Jean had given me. The sprinkle turned into rain, and I saw the signage on the pharmacy, the brick façade, and striped awning. I ran laboriously the last few steps down the street and threw open the door.

  The bell clanged wildly and the pharmacist and his wife jumped in place from behind the counter, taking a shocked moment to look at me dripping water all over their floor.

  “Close the door!” The wife motioned for her husband who hurriedly closed all the windows and locked the front door, but not before looking outside and making sure I was the only one.

  I stumbled into the store, trying to hold myself together, but when I remembered Red’s face looking back at me from the train, I threw my arms around the wife’s neck, sniffling. “They took her…”

  She reluctantly patted my back, and I felt her apprehension as she looked to her husband for what to do. I pulled away, looking at them both, wiping my face of rain, wondering what had turned her so stiff when, despite her calls for us to be quiet, she’d always seemed to be the nicest one.

  “You’re not welcome here, fräulein,” the pharmacist finally said.

  The wife held her chin up. “You must leave.” She scrunched something in her hands, curling her fingers around it so I couldn’t see.

  “Your American friend is gone,” he said. “And we are not in the business of helping. Not anymore.”

  “Jack?” I said. “When did he leave?”

  “He left right after you left.”

  I felt a grit in my teeth with this news, and resented Jack in that instant, his smiling face, and those nice words of his. The wife moved closer to her husband when she saw my lips curl, and he put his arm over her shoulder. “No more help, fräulein. We beg you. We can’t.” He swallowed and looked like he was gathering up the last bit of strength he had left. “If you don’t leave, we will alert the authorities.”

  The wife nodded, nervously clenching her fist on the counter.

  “What’s in your hand?” I said, flicking my chin at her, and she threw her arm behind her back.

  “Nothing.”

  I walked closer, and she looked a little worried, eyes glancing at her husband and then to me. “What’s. In. Your. Hand?”

  She shook her head, and I reached for her wrist and squeezed until her palm opened like a flower. A balled-up piece of paper tumbled out of it and onto the ground.

  She cried to her husband about how I needed to leave. “Now… now!” she demanded, and he shushed her while I unraveled the paper.

  It was a typewritten note—a threat. “Collaborators will face penalties. The first to surrender will be the first to hang.”

  “Someone knows about us,” he said, “and we simply can’t continue.”

  “But the war?” I pointed into the air, toward where I saw the glow of exploding bombs. “American soldiers are practically across the river…”

  “But they have not yet crossed. Have they, fräulein?” he said. “Tides of war can change in an instant. My wife is frightened. I’m frightened. They’ll make us bait, put my wife on the seven o’clock if we aren’t careful,” he said, and his wife cried out, reaching for him and burying her head into his chest.

  “What did you say?” I said, and there was a pause. “Bait?”

  “The train is made to look like ammunitions cargo, fräulein. For the enemy to blow up.”

  “Mother of God,” I breathed. Red. “You Germans are damn sick. You know that?”

  “Get her out of here!” the woman cried, and the pharmacist reached for my arm, but I pulled away.

  “Don’t touch me!” I wasn’t about to leave. I wasn’t about to let these Germans tell me what to do. Not after what I’d been through. Not after what we’d sacrificed. Especially Red.

  I pulled the gun out from under my skirt. The wife shrieked, hand to her mouth, but the pharmacist reached for it and I pointed the barrel at his face. He put his hands up. He didn’t know I only wanted to control him. He couldn’t know. The moment he figured out I didn’t want to kill him, the gun would be useless and possibly turned on me. I cocked it back.

  “You know Esser? Hear what happened to him?” I said, and the wife’s eyes grew quite large. “Yeah, that’s right sweetheart. That was me.” I waved the gun toward the back of the store. “In the cellar.” I snagged a box of gauze from the rack and a bottle of antiseptic, before following them into the cellar
and shutting the door behind us.

  We sat in the dim, cold room with a few flickering candles, and they watched me from the corner as I tended to my wounds on Jack’s old mattress. I set the gun down next to me, glancing up at them every few seconds as I dabbed my scrapes with antiseptic and gauze, hissing and grunting from the stinging pain.

  The pharmacist moved, and I reached for the gun. “Not so fast…” I said, and he backed away. I stood up, painfully, feeling every inch of my body where I’d hit the train tracks. “Now, take me to your house.”

  “We will not!” he said, and I aimed at his head. “Fine! Fine!” And we left out the back door for their house, which was a short walk away in the rain, even for someone as wounded as I was. A big house too, nice, just like Roxy had said, and as I suspected, they had a car. I told the wife to get in and drive, and the pharmacist protested saying she didn’t know how and that he’d drive, but I shook my head.

  A light turned on inside their house, and all three of us looked. The silhouette of a young girl appeared in the window. “Who’s that?” I said, and the wife suddenly remembered how to drive, racing around to the driver’s side door with her feet sloshing through the mud, offering to take me anywhere I wanted to go.

  She pulled out onto the main road as the rain pounded on the car roof and tracked down the windshield. “The Rhine,” I said. I motioned with my hand, and she sped off.

  We’d passed the orchard. Explosions in the west were now clearly visible, with flames of fire and clouds of smoke. “War is coming,” I said to her, but she only kept her hands on the wheel, wrapped white tight. “You know you don’t have to fear us. We’re liberating you from the Reich.”

  She stepped on the brakes and cried into her palms, the car puttering on the lone country road and the wipers moving back and forth across the windshield, squeaking, and squeaking. I rolled down the window, and the rain spit into the car and onto my face. I heard the light rush of the river over the car engine, but the area didn’t look familiar. “Go!” I half-shouted. We were so close. I was so close. I jostled forward in the seat. “Keep driving! Keep driving!”

  Her cry changed into a wail seconds before a mortar exploded not that far away, close enough to light up the road, and I saw the apple truck we’d wrecked and the orange leafy tree Roxy and Gail had disappeared into. No sign of the patrol. I opened up the door, one foot out. “I was never going to shoot you,” I said, and she looked up, eyes flooded, and I took off running as fast I could with how broken I was.

  The patrol drove out of nowhere, a revving car engine barreling over heaps of earth in the night. Bap! Bap! Bap!

  I jumped down the riverbank and into the mud, only to leap into the Rhine. I lost the gun as I bobbed and swam, pulling myself up onto the opposite bank using a gnarled tree branch, and crawling halfway out of the water.

  I spat out the sour river water, looking over my shoulder one last time at Germany. The patrol car puttered in the distance, headlamps dimming. Relief waved over me like the waves, followed by the pang of guilt and the debilitating numbness of shame. “Damn you, Red.” I hit the sodden ground with my fist, over and over again, bursting into a puddle of tears. “Damn you for leaving me.”

  25

  KIT

  I lay in the grass and in the rain with my face to the ground. Tired. Dog-tired. And when I said the words out loud, I thought I’d feel better, breaking the unspoken rule of our clearing station. “But I’m not in our clearing station,” I said into the ground, with the rain tapping on the back of my head.

  I gave myself a pass. One pass only.

  I’m not sure why I thought of Jack at that moment, but with my face in the mud and my body shivering from both the cold river water and the rain, I thought of his smile, and his drawn eyes when he said he was too injured to go with us. Liar. “Left right after us,” I said, repeating the pharmacist’s words, and with that, I got up off the ground, slowly, begrudgingly, and started the solitary walk through the vineyard where our journey first started.

  How would I explain to the girls what had happened to Red? Roxy, she’d be beside herself, and Gail, she wouldn’t know what to do, probably ever. And what was I going to do? The question haunted me vine after vine as I trudged throughout the night, deeper into the vineyard.

  When the sun rose, I found a bandage strung between two vines. Followed, by another and another up ahead. A trail. The sun had dried up most of the rain, and the mud started to crack, and the slosh from my shoes turned into more of a clip and slip on the hardening field road.

  The yellow farmhouse I’d been waiting to see for so many miles peeked out from the middle of the vineyard like a dollop of Mom’s lemon frosting, and it was a strange thing seeing that yellow farmhouse. I felt overwhelmed with having made it, and I landed on my knees.

  “Mother of God, I made it,” I said, and a tearless cry creased over my face. I opened my hands, palms up high, and thanked God for my life and asked him to spare Red’s. “I’ll do anything,” I said, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to make a deal with God, but I did anyway. “I’ll pray every day. Here on out. I’ll be a better person. Swear. Please. Bring Red back to me.”

  Red had resisted going across enemy lines to begin with. And when I was honest with myself, and acknowledged that she’d only gone to watch over us girls, the burden soaked into my chest like a dark stain.

  “Kit!” I heard, followed by the clack of the farmhouse’s front door.

  Roxy. I breathed a little easier hearing her voice, and collected myself as best I could, standing up and wiping a hand over my face. Gail ran out behind her seconds later.

  They paused in the grass and looked at each other when they realized I was alone. “Where’s Red?” Roxy said. She looked behind me, off into the horizon as if Red was just lagging behind. “Kit?”

  My lips quivered, and a weeping cry spurt from my mouth with having to tell them what had happened. I wrapped my arms around Roxy, trying to gather my words.

  “She’s gone,” I finally said. “The Nazis took her. A train…” I told them the whole story, and they latched on to me as if they never wanted to let go, and we cried together. “She saved me, pushing me out of the train car before it got going too fast.” I shook my head. “But that’s not the worst of it.” Crying hiccups stifled my words, and I wondered if I could even tell them the truth, looking at Gail with her lost and worried eyes, and Roxy, who patted my back and told me to take a breath to calm down.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat, the hard core of it pulsating with sorrow, and I thought about telling them a lie, but Red would want them to know the truth. “The train is disguised as a munitions car, bait for our boys to blow up.”

  Roxy’s face was one of disbelief. Gail covered her eyes, shaking her head.

  “How do you know this?” Roxy said.

  “The pharmacist told me,” I said. “I went back there after Red pushed me from the train.”

  Roxy dried her cheeks. “They’re German. At the end of the day, they can’t be trusted,” she said.

  “Even if they’re lying, there’s still the morphine,” I said. “It was in her dress when she pushed me out of the train.”

  “She wouldn’t,” Roxy said. “Red liked to think she would use it, but deep down I know she couldn’t go through with it. Not with her mama counting on her like she does. Red couldn’t do that to her.”

  My cry settled into my chest as I thought about what she said. Roxy made sense, and that little bit of hope got me to stand upright enough to walk.

  “I hope you’re right, Rox,” I said. “God, I hope you’re right.” Roxy petted my hair, sweeping a lock of it out of my eyes, when I heard Jack’s voice.

  “Jack’s here?” I said, and I looked into the field, wiping the remaining tears from my eyes into my hair where it was wet. He walked slowly through the field toward us.

  “Oh yeah, he’s here,” Roxy said.

  “Yeah,” Gail said, eyes rolling.

  I was glad to s
ee he was alive and well. But then of course he was alive and well; he’d left for the Rhine right after we left for the butcher’s. Jack smiled, and his eyes were bright, no doubt he’d been fed by the winemaker and had rested too.

  “Jack!” I lumbered toward him, smiling, and when he got an arm’s reach away, I hauled off and popped him in the nose.

  Roxy gasped behind me, followed by a giggle, while Gail bit her lip.

  “Hey, why’d you gotta do that for?” he said, but I’d turned back around to hug the girls.

  “Come on, Kit. Let’s get you cleaned up,” Roxy said, and we walked toward the farmhouse, arm in arm, leaving Jack in the meadow holding his nose. “The winemaker’s wife made a pie,” Roxy said. “Not like Nonna’s, no way, but a sure better tart than I could have made…”

  Roxy went on, trying to pretend that everything was all right, but there was no mistaking, or forgetting, that one of us was missing.

  *

  I slept restlessly but in clean sheets. And in a real bed. When I woke, I’d forgotten where I was and it was daylight. I sat bolt upright. The last moments of my dream played out in my mind, images of me and Red in the tent, tending to one of our boys. Her red hair tucked under her headscarf, asking me what new trouble I’d gotten myself into.

  “Red?” I called out, and the image dissolved like baking soda in stirred water.

  Roxy stared out the window. “I think our boys reached the Rhine. We’ll be able to leave soon.” She looked at me over her shoulder. “We’re waiting for word about liberation from the village.”

  The winemaker’s wife came into the room after a soft knock. “Mademoiselles?” She wiped her hands on her apron, smiling, her skin wrinkly as an overcooked baked potato left on the counter to cool. She dipped her hand into her apron pocket, pulling out what looked like a handful of jewelry tangled in her bony hand. “You pick…” she said. “You pick.” She separated three lockets and said a bunch of words in French, pointing, before shoving a gold one at Gail, and I understood that these lockets were valuable, probably her most prized possessions.