The Fire by Night

  Jo reached the crossing that forked either down toward St. Bees or out onto the headland itself. Her stomach tugged at her to return—Sunday brunch would be ending, the piles of hot ham and sausage and scrambled eggs the guests left untouched on the sideboards would come back to the kitchen. Even with rationing, the relative plenty of peacetime still amazed Jo. That she could eat until she was filled, until she was stuffed and sleepy, was still new to her. Mrs. Greerson was not stingy with her guests, nor with her domestic staff. Jo had filled out, grown strong; she was no longer the skeleton that had waited in line to ask for a job. Her skin was tan, her cheeks were rosy; she had plenty. She had enough to make it out to the headland without breakfast.

  It was green almost instantly. She left the road, and then it was green beneath her, green in front and all around her. The clouds had cleared out at sea, and the water beneath them shone ever brighter, ever stronger, as the front moved in toward shore. St. Bees was nestled below her, to her left, like tiny toy homes set up for play. The wind off the sea was bracing and drowned out all other sound. She was out to the end of the headland before she thought it possible. She didn’t go all the way to the edge, to the cliffs themselves, but stopped a little way in, surrounded by a sea of green.

  Jo lay down in the sun that was now directly over her, ignoring the grass stains, the damp on her dress; lay down and splayed her arms like a snow angel, grabbing on to great tufts of slippery grass, twisting it around and around her fingers like it was hair. She was all alone. Then she closed her eyes and felt the great solidness of the earth, rising up into her, and she was safe, she was well, she was well enough to ask:

  Did David ever love me?

  It had been too terrible a question even to acknowledge before, but now . . . now she could. She was centered, she was nearly whole.

  They had known each other for such a short time, they had been thrown together. She felt her heart tugging, felt her love for him raging there, bottled up—but what had he felt? Was it gratitude? Or just proximity? Was it anything?

  Did he love me? Did he ever really love me?

  The world beneath her was solid, was silent for a moment longer. Then one of Kit’s letters—the letter that had come Tuesday, the one she had picked up just before Duncan had traced her that far—came floating back into Jo’s consciousness. And then she knew that David had loved her once, that there had been a time when he had truly loved her.

  Dear Miss McMahon,

  I hope to see you again, you were so sweet, although a little sad, which is, I guess, what happens in war. Your uniform was awfully nice. We have not heard anything about David, but I said a novena to save him, so don’t worry about him anymore.

  I snuck into Mother’s room and copied out his last letter home. He wrote to us twice after he went back to fighting. A lot of it is about us and the farm and him worrying about it since it got hit in a raid. But there is a part about you, and I know it’s wicked that I copied it down (don’t tell Mother), but I think it’s dramatic and love is wonderful, don’t you think? and if I were you I’d want to hear it, so here goes. There are a lot of boring parts, and then he says,

  “You can tell Bumpy I fell in love, which he’ll laugh at since he falls in love every week and says I’m such a clod I never could. But she is an angel and I love her and, of course, you know from my last letter (when all I could do was write about her) that it is Josephine McMahon, the nurse who saved my life. And when I say she saved my life it’s not just because she nursed me through the typhus (although she did, she did that, God bless her), but because she saved the rest of my life too, the life that I thought I could be happy with on my own, just farming the land and entering the fair and each year being just like another. But now I see how foolish I was—that the poetry and songs I liked so much never got into me, into my heart—and it’s probably too late, I mean, to love her like I ought because I want to—”

  and then there’s this big part where the censors blacked it out, I don’t know what he was going to say, but then it starts up again, halfway down the page,

  “—and I would marry her, more than anything else in the world. But the world has turned evil. There’s something evil just in front of me, that much I know. The people are running from it, it’s so black and terrible they can’t even talk about it. I can’t tell you where I am, the censors would catch on, but I’m at mass today, at some convent or monastery, I won’t tell you which order—and there are a lot of little children here, wee children, Mum, no different from us when we were young.

  “And they’re putting them in uniforms, like for school, and cutting their hair and changing their looks with glasses and such; these children are sad, their parents must be gone. And they have names like Ephraim and Sarah, but they’re changing that too, to Peter and Bridget, and asking them over and over again until they remember. The children are crying, they are teaching them prayers, simple prayers any Christian would know, but they don’t know them and they’re telling them they have to memorize them, in case they’re stopped and asked. Why they’re hiding, what they’re running away from, they won’t tell me, no one here will say. But whatever it is, that’s where we’re heading next, Mum. So pray for us. And pray for them.”

  (That last part wasn’t about you, but I got so caught up copying it and anyway it sounded exciting—I should like to go about in disguise and wear glasses and cut my hair, but Mother won’t let me—Kit)

  Jo sighed and she thought of the children, losing their families, their identities, being smuggled farther back, back to France, back to England, to strangers who would hide them, who would take them in for a day, for a week; children crying in the night until they forgot their own names. She thought of David, marching blindly into that blackness, into that darkness and night where all would be death, all would be want, cold and ruthless and real.

  She was pulling so hard on the grass that it came out all at once in her hand. She let go of the tuft, the blades blowing away in the wind; she breathed deeply, praying for the lost—all the lost—for the children, and for David and herself. She joined her hands over her belly and the sun beat down. She could feel her nose starting to burn. The world was evil, the world was cruel, but the mountain rising beneath her comforted her; it was solid, it was firm. It said there is yet hope. Hope and peace and love.

  So David had truly loved her once.

  But did he love her still? If you died, what happened to your love? What would happen to the love that was bursting inside of her, looking for an outlet, for some way to break free? For the thousandth time, she asked herself, Is David alive or dead? And then, from the depths of the earth, from the depths of her soul, she heard his voice, calm and clear. It wasn’t her imagination—it wasn’t her at all. It was David, her David, and her body thrilled at his voice, at his words; they were touching her, caressing her, from wherever he was.

  “Do you think a little thing like death could ever separate those who love?”

  All at once, it wasn’t her loving a ghost, loving a memory; it wasn’t a one-sided love at all, but now he was loving her back, she could feel his love. Whether they were parted by distance or time or by death itself it didn’t matter—she knew that now. His love was reaching her, and she was sure (she knew) he was feeling hers. She had him at last, after all this time. The sheer relief of it all, of being able—fully and without fear—to love another and be loved back, without reservation, without threat of ever being parted again, overwhelmed her. She lay alone on that vast expanse of green glowing in the sun like a jewel, and her heart filled, burst with joy, filled up again. Death could not defeat her, could not destroy her or her ability to love. She had that. She was that.

  Jo was free.

  SHE WAS IN her room. Her plan had been to lie down, just for a minute; she had taken out her hairpins, started to line them up. She looked around her room, contrasting it with other places she had lived, other places she had called home—a squalid tenement, an Army base, a silt-covered tent in a fie
ld. Jo looked again, and now she knew this room for what it was. Cold. Antiseptic. A tomb. She looked at the hairpins, each exactly alike, each equidistant from each other—and she scattered them, sending them flying around the room, falling down cracks, under radiators, behind furniture. She dumped the water pitcher onto the floor, then smashed it against the wall; she ground the ceramic bits into powder under her heel. She threw the bar of soap out the window, as far as it would go—she lost it in the afternoon light. This was not what she wanted, this was not real, this was not her anymore.

  She didn’t remember throwing herself onto her bed, but she woke up suddenly and the sun was much lower in the sky. She must have been asleep for hours. Someone had been shaking her, shaking her shoulder, Jo could still feel the imprint of the fingers on her arm. It had been Queenie. But she hadn’t been bloody and she hadn’t been angry; it hadn’t been a nightmare, but Queenie the way she remembered her, the way she loved her. Queenie had been shaking her and shaking her like she was late for her shift, like she had to get out of her bunk and the moment before she opened her eyes, Jo had heard her voice, heard what she said.

  “Wake up, honey.”

  JO NEEDED TO clear her head. It was too late in the day, but she put on her swimsuit anyway and walked through the laundry room, past the piles of laundry that now meant nothing to her. Who cares if they’re ever washed, ever dried. She picked her way over the dry, prickly grass near the garden, down the rocky slope through the hedges, until she reached the beach, more deserted than ever with evening coming on so fast. She heard laughter and, slipping behind the cover of a shed used for shovels and weathered umbrellas, she saw a teenage couple as they embraced, kissed, laughed again. The girl squealed as she escaped from the boy’s arms, running a little way up the beach. She let herself be caught, pretending to twist her ankle. She kissed him, laughed at him again, at herself, at life, at the unpredictability, the inevitability of love. The two ran off together.

  Jo dove into the waves, and it didn’t matter if she was crying, if she was wracked with sobs—the ocean took it all, took the tears and the pain and the sorrow, and absorbed it into itself, freeing her, making her whole again. She couldn’t swim long—the water was icy—but she walked the length of the beach until the wind whipped her dry, her hair long and loose without its pins. She turned to face the sea. The sun was directly in front of her, setting into the west, sinking into the Atlantic, into America on the other side of the ocean. She couldn’t let the sun set, couldn’t let it go down, without deciding once and for all whether she would continue living as she had been or not.

  She knew what she wanted; she had seen the lovers, she knew she wanted that—not a cold, clinical nothingness that did nothing to protect her, that walled up her heart alive. She wanted a way to find it, to make it real. She took the chain off her neck (where it always was, she never took it off), slipped David’s ring off the golden loop, and held it in her hand. The chain slithered into the water and was gone, but she held on to the ring, pressing it, crushing it in her clenched fist until it hurt, until her eyes stung from the pain. She had to decide.

  Fling it into the sea and let him go.

  Or hold on to it forever.

  Those were her choices, and the sun was going down. She had to decide, she could not live another day, another night, without choosing. She was a tempest inside, she was bursting at the seams, she could not contain her love for David any longer. But she could not have him and she could not let him go and the sun was lower now, much lower. Something surged up within her—she wanted to be that girl laughing, turning her ankle in the sand, laughing and kissing and hiding behind the shed; she wanted love, physical love, not just a spiritual connection, a hope, a dream coming up from the sea, from a cold mountain. She opened her palm and looked at the ring—the only thing she had of David’s, the only thing he had had to give her—

  Keep it without promising anything. Keep it so I can know it goes with you—that my love goes with you—so I can hope, one day—

  But what if one day never came? Without him, what did life hold for her? She was no modern woman, she had no ambition outside of a home—children and David and a home—where he could make love to her and recite his poetry and sing her songs when the Morning Star came out. She held the ring in her hand, but lightly now, as if gauging its weight. She would have to leave this place soon, and it would be either with or without David, his ghost, his love. She could choose to be haunted, or she could throw this ring and the waves would swallow it up and he would leave her forever.

  The words of her prayer came back to her: Separated from you let me never be.

  The sun was still up; it was suspended in space. The world must have stopped turning, waiting for her. Her hair streamed back from her face in the wind. The wind filled her ears, made a wild sound like a canvas tent, stakes pulled up, blown out and flapping violently. Above it she heard something, faint and far away, someone calling for her, and she thought it was David. She turned her head and then she saw the man coming, still far off down the beach.

  She wanted to run away. Damn him, damn Duncan, so smug, so obsessed with himself that one woman denying him had made him into a megalomaniac, tracking her down, following her like this. For a second more she wanted to run, then her anger took over and she started walking toward him deliberately, both fists clenched now; she would tell him, tell him to his face, what she thought of him, of his arrogance.

  And as he started toward her, she could see he carried a stick and was limping slightly.

  Duncan didn’t have a limp.

  THEY CAME UP to each other. The sun was still up, they were bathed in it, his tousled hair, his weather-beaten face was aglow. She was just a few paces away now, slender yet strong, basking in the warm, pink light. Her hand hurt—she remembered that, her hand hurting and hurting, clenched around something hard—but she couldn’t look down at it; she was staring at him, staring at a dream. They looked so different from the last time they had seen each other—cold and wet and miserable. They were healthy now, they were whole—the limp wasn’t much, he had thrown away the cane as soon as they got close. He was looking at her now—she was gorgeous, she was more beautiful than he had imagined her, she was a goddess come down to him.

  “David,” Jo whispered, and the wind carried away her voice, carried away the word so that just her lips moved; they parted for an instant and were still.

  They held on to each other, clung to each other as the sun set, as the water swallowed up the last glowing ember of the sun, holding on to each other as if he’d vanish, as if she’d disappear with the last of the light. They opened their eyes, looking about them, and the beach was silvery gray, the light had gone, the water was dark and choppy—but they still had each other, they were home, it was real.

  David was crying now, and kissing her all over, and holding her so close she couldn’t breathe. His eyes glanced heavenward for a moment, as if his joy were too much, as if he would burst; then he laughed through his tears, still struggling to speak, to get even one word out.

  “Aye.”

  16

  Kay Elliott

  January 1947, Fitzsimons Army Medical Center,

  Aurora, Colorado

  Kay looked out the second-story window at the snow below. An enlisted man shoveled furiously as two officers came down the narrow walkway, then leaned back on his shovel, cupping his hands to light a cigarette as soon as they passed. Kay smiled.

  The snow swirled outside the window, traveling upward in glittering vortices that caught the light before smashing against the glass. Kay couldn’t get enough of it, of the cold and the snow; she never wanted to be hot again. She looked around the waiting room, at its cheap furnishings, its vinyl upholstery, the galvanized steel—you could hose the place down when you were done with it, it’d be none the worse.

  She felt in her pocket. It had arrived in the mail today, and she still couldn’t believe it. Without looking, without having to look, she felt again the
worn scrap of paper—the IOU she had signed back in Manila, in prison camp. Someone had saved it and found her, and incredibly, a clerk in accounts receivable on the twentieth floor of some corporation in New York was now calling in the debt. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was—the IOU was in her pocket. Well, she’d pay them back their $60, every cent of it. It had saved her life. But still, she just couldn’t believe it.

  Kay glanced at the clock on the wall—her appointment had been for ten o’clock, and it was nearly eleven now. She shifted in her chair. She thought of the other office much like this one, back in the Pacific, where the nurses had had to sign that oath of secrecy. They had sworn never to reveal or to discuss their imprisonment, their wartime service; if they did, they would lose their pension and military benefits.

  “Do you understand, miss?” the clerk had repeated. “This is a very crucial point.”

  Kay must have seemed groggy, swaying back and forth on her feet.

  “Is she even listening? Now, miss, I need you to sign this.” Kay had reached for the pen—and missed. “But before you do, I need to be quite clear. You cannot repeat anything that you saw, before or after Santo Tomas. Nothing you saw, understand?”

  “Nothing I saw.”

  “You can repeat none of it—even to family members—in any format, oral, written, or recorded.”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “By signing this form, you acknowledge that I have explained the penalties for breaking any of the clauses, and you agree to not divulge any information—”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “—for sixty years.”

  “Sixty years?”

  “Yes . . . until the year 2005.”

  Fuzzy-headed as she was, Kay had laughed a little at that, at the thought that any of them would still be alive by then. Or maybe they would—maybe science would defeat old age, maybe they’d all be driving around in flying saucers and taking holidays on the moon. She signed the form.