The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  Juliet sat up. She blinked in the darkness, her head fuzzy. Had she heard him right?

  She was waiting for him to say more, to retract, to explain. How had she never imagined . . . ?

  She hoped he was at least looking toward her, that he wanted, in his moment of confession, to see her. She wanted still to feel their connection. But in the darkness she could make out nothing. Instead, she felt the arrival of a new presence, a vague and shadowy figure lurking in the room, hovering between them.

  A wife.

  From across the hall came the soft melodious syllables of Signora Gaspaldi’s prayers. Beneath that she could hear Willard’s breathing. If his thoughts were with her, or someone else, Juliet didn’t know. She slowly let her face drop into her pillow.

  They rode back to the hospital the next morning in mostly an awkward silence.

  “You don’t wear a ring,” Juliet said quietly, speaking to the road ahead.

  “And I don’t carry around photographs or talk about my life at home. It’s how it has to be, for my work.”

  “But I’m not a patient.”

  “No.”

  Willard gripped the wheel, and she could see white spots of bloodlessness fill his knuckles.

  “Well, you’re married and you’re from Chicago,” said Juliet, tapping out a drumbeat on the dashboard. In the painfully bright light of morning, her embarrassment had mounted. “I’ll get started writing your biography as soon as we get back.”

  “I understand that you don’t like my rules. I don’t necessarily like my rules. But they serve us well.”

  “How?”

  “It would be reckless for us to start having long, personal conversations. That’s how it all starts.”

  “What starts?”

  Willard turned to look at her quizzically, and the jeep slowed as he eased his foot off the gas pedal. He smiled gently, somewhat disbelievingly, as though touched by her question. “You’re so young,” he said, shaking his head. Once more, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and looked around at the pale hills. Between the hills, oblong evergreens, velvety green, stood in dark clumps. “It’s a nice day,” he said, “a beautiful day, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you in Florence. You are an excellent travel companion.”

  “Thank you,” she said, but she felt she had lost something. She wasn’t so young; she wanted him to understand that. She did not want to be a travel companion.

  “I’m not a virgin,” she blurted.

  Willard’s face went deeply red. “Sweet Jesus, girl.” He spoke to the roof. “That’s exactly the kind of personal thing I shouldn’t know.”

  “I had sex in a cave. With a soldier. Recently.”

  Willard’s eyes widened and he began to laugh. “Juliet, did you inject yourself with some of the Sodium Pentothal? Try to rein in some of your thoughts. Especially while I’m driving.”

  “Agree you won’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

  “For the record, I outrank you not just in years but also medically and militarily. But if it will stem these confessions, yes, we’re agreed.”

  As they pulled into the hospital encampment, they saw a crowd of nurses and doctors milling noisily outside Major Decker’s tent. Two military policemen stood nearby at full alert, and Bernice seemed to be arguing with them.

  Juliet and Willard both stepped from the truck, leaving behind the Palazzo Pitti and their talk of opera, leaving behind their whispers in the dark, shedding their awkwardness and embarrassment with each brisk step toward the commotion, resuming their respective roles as doctor and nurse so seamlessly that no one would have guessed what had passed between them.

  Juliet rushed over to Bernice. “What’s going on?” she asked. Willard came up beside her.

  “It’s Private Barnaby,” Bernice answered. “The MPs are taking him away for the court-martial.”

  CHAPTER 12

  SEPTEMBER BROUGHT THICK rains. The air was gray and cool, and the earth was endlessly moist—Juliet could taste it. The leaves in the trees were wet and gleaming and shook overhead like a jungle disturbed. A knee-deep fog rose from the ground and caused Juliet to move from tent to tent as though wading through clouds. Mud sucked defiantly at her boots. For balance, she walked with her arms extended, as if trying to take flight.

  Barnaby had been gone almost two weeks, along with Dr. Willard, and no one had heard anything about the court-martial proceedings. Amid endless speculation, anger was mounting. To the other patients, Barnaby’s trial had come to symbolize the injustice of the entire Italian campaign. They were all mute, in some respects, all doomed. In his act of self-destruction they saw the wretched madness they could, at any moment, be driven to.

  Juliet felt a growing anxiety about his trial, a deepening melancholy, sharpened every morning as she walked past Dr. Willard’s empty tent. In such haste to gather his notes and records, he left with Barnaby without saying good-bye. What if he never came back? It hadn’t occurred to her she might not see him again.

  Juliet slept poorly, a chill clinging to her scalp. Visions of the blue eye returned, meandering hideously through her dreams, and as she woke in the dark and tugged on her clothes, the nightmares still clung to her. It was still black outside when she arrived in the Recovery Tent to begin her shift, that strange, fragile hour when those who had been awake all night encountered those who had just awakened. To the familiar stream of exhausted faces and bloodshot eyes Juliet said her hellos; clipboards were handed over, notes reviewed; then they were gone, those nurses and ward men who seemed to live in the underworld of the night.

  Beside the nursing station Juliet drank her coffee and stared at the two long rows of cots, the sleeping, blanket-tangled figures. She dreaded these first hours of her rounds when, one by one, the patients woke; there was always a moan or a gasp of despair as they groggily patted their stumps and their bandages, having dreamt they were whole.

  The fighting had intensified near Il Giogo Pass, and amputations resumed with disconcerting regularity: Divide deep fascia. Retract. Divide muscle. Retract. Cut periosteum. Saw bone. Sever nerves. One afternoon, while Juliet was assisting a surgery, a thought came to her as she stared into the bucket of limbs: Would she recognize her brother’s arm if she saw it? His hand? It had seemed at first a purely scientific question, but the full dismal weight of it quickly hit her. She realized she no longer believed she would find him. Day by day her hope was faltering. Barnaby was gone, half of the division in which Tuck had been fighting was shipped to France, and she knew no more about his disappearance than she did before she’d come to Italy. All she knew was that injury and death were beginning to seem strangely normal; the shock of the blood and gore had faded, and she felt a numb detachment from the bodies. Bodies, that was how she thought of them now, or parts of bodies: the perforated intestine, the fractured tibia. “The collapsed lung wants someone to write a letter for him,” she heard herself tell Bernice one day.

  The days were a blur of surgeries and admissions; litters arrived covered with raincoats, and Juliet worked swiftly, calmly, until one afternoon, in the Receiving Tent, looking down at a man whose face was a bleeding pincushion of shrapnel, her whole body suddenly stiffened. Hesitantly, she read the man’s tag: Technical Sergeant Beau Conroy.

  She stumbled. She had been eagerly awaiting a letter from him, had been composing one to him. She had never imagined this.

  She touched part of his earlobe, the only area that wasn’t blackened with blood. “It’s Juliet,” she whispered. “It’s okay. We’re gonna get you fixed up.”

  Beau’s eyes were firmly closed, the lids slick with blood, but at the sound of her voice he strained to sit up, swinging his head as though searching out her voice. His breathing accelerated, rasping with panic.

  “Beau, try not to move. You might have internal injuries.”

  Juliet set about mixing the plasma, rigging the intravenous drip, but her hands began shaking. She inserted the needle and watched the plasma slide through the tubing.
She carefully washed the blood from his face, and his eyes slowly opened. He blinked at her, stunned and miserable; she wanted to throw her arms around him but feared it would harm or terrify him. She lifted his hand and kissed his fingers. As the ward men came to carry his litter into surgery, the wounds she had washed began to seep, tears of blood running down his face.

  For the next several hours, Juliet tried to stay calm, keeping busy with new admissions, tending several battle-fatigue patients. A captain from the 2nd New Zealand Division arrived, sitting upright and cross-legged on his litter, waving to and fro like demented royalty as he was carried into the Receiving Tent. His teeth were missing, and Juliet was told he had pulled them out one by one that morning in front of his entire regiment. High on morphine, he seemed amused and dazzled by her questions, but through his toothless swollen gums he spoke only backward: “End never will war this. Die to want just I. Her love I mother my tell.” Another man, a lanky lieutenant who kept his hands hugged tightly around his abdomen, claimed he was pregnant. Trying to lose herself in the darkened labyrinths of their minds, Juliet took careful notes, notes that if Dr. Willard ever returned, she could give to him. All the frustration she had felt toward Willard—all her anger and embarrassment—vanished. She missed him terribly.

  Italian civilians were streaming in, cold and hungry, fleeing the fighting at the edge of the mountains. A young woman Juliet’s age appeared in the tent clutching a baby to her chest. She wore a gray man’s overcoat. Her hair was black and tangled and she communicated in frantic tones that she had been eating only boiled grass and could no longer make milk for the baby. As evidence, she pulled one of her breasts out and twisted the nipple quite hard. Juliet quickly mixed powdered milk for the mother and infant, but the infant wailed and batted at the cup. Again and again the mother tried to urge the cup into the infant’s mouth. The woman finally held out the child and asked Juliet to try. Juliet had never before held a baby. Its bones were light and fragile; it blinked at her suspiciously from its gray, unhappy face, but as Juliet settled on the floor of the tent, she was eventually able to ease spoonfuls of milk into its mouth.

  Boy or girl? she asked the mother in Italian. A white line of milk crested the woman’s mouth.

  “Una ragazza.”

  Bernice found Juliet like this, late in the day, feeding the dehydrated girl. “There’s a Private Munson who came in this morning,” Bernice whispered. “A bullet struck his pocket watch. He’s got springs and hands and shards of crystal all over his organs. The infection is spreading fast. He asked for you.”

  Juliet returned the baby to her mother and rushed outside to find the Senator as his litter was being carried into the Recovery Tent. She walked alongside. “Hey there.”

  His eyes flickered open as he said, dry-mouthed, “Nurse Dufresne.” His face was white—corpse white. Sweat speckled his forehead. A latticework of tubing covered his abdomen. “I’m not doing so hot.”

  “Leave the prognosis to the doctors.”

  Juliet helped the medics ease him onto the mattress. “I’m starting to get the feeling you like this place,” she said.

  His head began slowly turning left and right, searching the tent. “Barnaby,” he said. “I wanted to talk to Barnaby.”

  “He’s gone. . . . Oh, God, sorry, not dead. In Rome. For the court-martial.”

  The Senator’s head collapsed onto his pillow. “Bastards.”

  “Who are bastards?”

  “Everyone. You know what I like? I like fairness. I like give-everyone-a-fighting-chance. Look, I need to tell you something.” He gestured her close, and his breath was hot against her ear. She could smell the rot of his infection. “About that last night he was sent out as scout. Brilling would kill me, but”—he glanced somberly at the tubing on his stomach—“I have a feeling he won’t get the chance.” The Senator coughed, and Juliet handed him a cup of water. She knew she should tell him to conserve his strength, but she desperately wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “We were drawing straws and Barnaby drew first, ’cause it’s alphabetical. But right off he got the short straw. So no one else ever drew. But I had this hunch, you know? Barnaby was always drawing the short straw. Always complaining he had the worst luck. And after the patrol went out, I looked outside the tent in the trash. Poof. A goddamned pile of short straws.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “You see a complaint box around here? I just can’t see blaming a man for trying to kill himself when he was sent forward to get killed. They were shits to him. He told me once that his squad hung him from his pack on a tree branch—for five hours. They dropped snakes down his shirt. Said he thought his shoulders would snap out of their sockets. Then someone found some field mice and covered him with K rations and stuck the mice on him. They wanted him dead. His pulling that trigger was a formality.” The Senator took another sip of water, and it seeped from the corner of his mouth. His eyes struggled to stay open.

  “Do you want to sleep?’

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Do you want me to write a letter home for you?”

  “Not this moment.”

  “Can I do anything?’

  “I think I’ll just lie here awhile.” His chin glistened with saliva and he looked at the ceiling. On the edge of the blanket his fingers tapped out a pattern, careful at first, then rapid, and she was about to ask him if he played the piano when his fingers stopped. His eyes were wide and unblinking and she felt for his pulse.

  Another, she thought.

  She remembered the ride from Naples, how he’d boisterously arranged card games, how he’d flirted with her. At the top of his bag, a letter had been set. Blood crusted the edges.

  Dear Pop,

  It’s morning here, and I’m all alone, in a dugout. I was awake through the night, but had to wait for daylight so that I could see the page. I’m not afraid. You taught me not to be afraid, and I’ve been thinking of you and hearing your voice, all these dark hours. I was remembering one of our fishing trips, when you caught three trout, and I caught nothing, and you told me I had to learn to be okay with nothing at times; that you couldn’t get to times of something without times of nothing. This is a time of nothing, but I’m holding strong.

  I got your last letter and read it many times. It made me thi

  Juliet set the letter back down. Interrupted, she thought. Everything, everyone, interrupted.

  She wandered mutely from the Recovery Tent as the rain began to fall again. At the Surgical Tent, her scalp cold and damp, she asked Dr. Mallick about Beau.

  “He’s stable. We cleaned up his face. But the blast tore his large intestine and collapsed his left lung. I can’t say what’ll happen with that lung. Oh, and one of his legs had to go . . . right at the knee. Trench foot turned to gangrene.”

  Juliet remembered the night in the cave. How she’d rubbed his blistered feet, how his cold fingers fumbled to open the ration tin.

  “How long before he comes to?”

  “A couple hours. Maybe three.”

  “I’d like to be there.”

  “Well, don’t worry about timing it exactly. You’ll know because you’ll hear him screaming all the way to France.”

  She meandered through the hard, cold rain, her thoughts tangled, and at the outhouse she stepped inside and latched the door shut behind her. Scream, she thought. That’s what she wanted to do after all this time: she just wanted to scream. She held her breath and pressed her hands against the wooden walls, pushing hard, wanting to break the structure. Blood rushed to her face, and she imagined a long, primal shriek coming out of her, something warped and wordless, something honest. A scream to name every loss she’d ever felt. But Juliet released her breath and slumped forward in defeat. Even from in there she’d be heard, and she couldn’t bring herself to burden the others with a sadness they no doubt felt themselves. What if all the nurses went off shrieking in the outhouse after a bad day? While the men missing limbs lay quietly in their bed
s. . . .

  A sinking loneliness took hold of her, a sudden desperate homesickness. She missed Tuck and her father. She even missed Pearl. She missed feeling safe. She missed days when nothing happened, those long, rambling afternoons of sun-warmed daydreams. She missed matters of inconsequence: her silly pink bedroom and her posters and the dogwood tree outside her window. She missed life. This was death, death was everywhere and all around her; she was living in a cemetery. And like those corpses of former centuries, buried with bells on their fingers in case of error, she wanted to ring the bell and bang on the coffin and say, Let me out. I’m not ready to be here. It’s all a mistake.

  She had come to find her brother, but she no longer thought he was anywhere to be found. Now she was stuck.

  A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. “Just a sec,” called Juliet, pressing hard at her cheeks as though to hold herself together. “It’s all yours, Helen,” she said as she stepped into the rain.

  Slowly, Juliet made her way back to the Recovery Tent to finish her rounds. She tried not to think of Beau and of Munson. She tried not to think of Barnaby hanging from a tree with mice crawling over him. An unusual stillness had settled over the tent; the dozens of men lying on litters were entirely silent. “Everything okay in here?” she asked.

  “Shhhhh.” One of the men gestured to the corner, where the young Italian woman, sitting on the ground, slept with her back against the green canvas of the tent. The baby was asleep on her chest, its face nestled in the hollow of her neck, gently gurgling. There was a beautiful synchronicity to the rise and fall of their chests, to the soft whisper of their deep, exhausted exhalations. Four empty milk cups sat beside them.

  The men in the tent clearly had been watching this scene for quite some time.

  “That’s a pretty baby,” one of them said softly.

  “Pretty eyes,” another whispered. “I think they were blue.”