Chapter 29
These weren’t faces I wanted in my photo display, nor were these hands I would ever admire. I centered my camera above the opened book, focused on the black-and-white photo of an army lieutenant, and clicked the shutter. A brief dry snap broke the library’s quiet of pages and thoughts. Click. I took another. I zoomed closer on McCoy and took another.
My camera dangled around my neck as I turned pages. Picture after picture went by of US Army men before the war. The New York Library hadn’t stopped me from bringing my camera in. It’s for research, I’d said, rambling on about my photo display and the faces I wanted.
I watched for Grandpa’s face as I flipped page after page. The reference librarian had suggested microfilm, but through my camera was how I saw best. Another of McCoy appeared, none of him alone with Grandpa, a few of their whole unit, faces that were tiny blurs, all looking the same. If it hadn’t been for names beneath most pictures, I’d never have paired Pvt. G. Crawley with Lt. S. McCoy.
I exhausted the books, my camera heavy with pictorial histories of Grandpa’s military days and Grandma’s war. I needed specifics. The librarian was right. I needed articles about McCoy…what he did, what he didn’t do, why he was being investigated. I returned the volumes to the reference desk in the strange atmosphere of nonfiction, the odor of facts. Real facts, not fictional confessions through the mouths of artificial characters.
“Thank you,” I whispered as I slid the military information across the counter. “I think I will go search through microfilm after all. Some faces in there warrant stories,” I lied. “That way I know how and if to insert them into my display.”
“Certainly.” The librarian smiled. “You know where to find the microfiche area?”
I nodded, gripping my camera in case she suggested I store it with library security. She eyed the camera and my hand but said nothing.
She slid the books I’d returned off the counter and set them behind her. “There was a gentleman asking for these. I’ll hold onto them for a little bit. He must be browsing somewhere.” She scoured the room behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder and scoured it with her. This was New York. It could be any of thousands of men who wanted to see the same books I just had, for any of a thousand reasons. The room was littered with people, some standing, most sitting, a few crossing the area on missions of their own. I scanned the room for tall. Tall with black hair and then tall with a corduroy jacket. There was no Emerson. And there was no Dietrich either, but he wouldn’t know about McCoy or even care.
“Thank you,” I said and stepped away. Emerson wouldn’t spy on his future in-laws in a public place. And Dietrich hadn’t paid attention to any of the other suggestions I’d made—such as hopping on a plane and putting an ocean between us—so surely he hadn’t come here requesting a book.
****
The sharp smell of developing fluid was home to me as much as yellowed pages and cups of tea. The red-lit darkness of the film developing lab I was allowed to use at the local college felt comfortable. More comfortable now than the one Grandpa had set up for me in their basement would. I couldn’t bring McCoy to Grandpa’s house and hang his face from lines while Grandpa whittled sticks upstairs.
I watched McCoy’s expressionless features wobble and swim beneath the fluid. Diligent. That’s how Grandpa had described him. Efficient. That’s what the microfilm articles had said. Lieutenant McCoy had efficiently managed his unit of men overseas—spreading them from France to Belgium to Poland, men stationed in several countries, strong efforts to thwart, but ultimately to prepare for, war.
I lifted McCoy’s face from the chemical bath. His hair may have been brown, but it was nearly impossible to tell. His face could have been anyone’s—average features, average coloring, regular military pose and style. Stiff and rigid, with a highlight of energy my camera had captured. I felt it as I hung him to dry.
Grandpa was in France. He’d been in Poland too, but briefly. My hands worked through my film and the photos while my mind reviewed what I’d read and the names I’d written down…men who were in France with Grandpa. Men who were probably also being contacted by the army about McCoy. Names I’d contact if I had to.
I finished hanging the last of the photos, McCoy’s history having traveled through my mind several times—his time of enlistment, becoming an officer, where he’d been stationed, where he’d been before, during, and after the war. Nowhere near New York, never affiliated with Grandpa alone any of those times except for that brief time overseas. Grandpa must be nothing more than a faint thread of military hope in their investigation, making Emerson’s apprehension unnecessary. I glanced at Grandpa’s photo, a recent one, lying nearby. There was no faint thread of military hope in his expression. It was more the look of someone too tired to run and always on trial.
I closed my eyes. Grandpa never ran. He wasn’t the one on trial.
I needed something more. Like Governor’s Island. It was the Coast Guard’s now, but it used to be army. I retrieved my camera and its case—my ticket to anywhere—left my pictures to dry, and went to find old army records. Ones where Grandpa didn’t look like Emerson’s doubts or Dietrich’s lies.
Chapter 30
My photo display, black-and-white snapshots of faces along with old and young hands, was telling a story. A real story. I stepped back, scanned the array of profiles—bent heads, distant glances, deliberate grasps—the photos of my grandfather overshadowing them all.
Governor’s Island had been the right place to go… yet so wrong. From there I was led to other sources of military archives, pictures of a young and broken soldier coming home, discharged by duty papers issued by McCoy, scanty information about his leg and an explosion. Like the eruption in my gut when I’d managed to find two of the soldiers who’d been sent to France along with him, their stories identical—sorry and surprised. Sorry a man so gifted with his hands and legs had been hurt. So surprised those very legs hadn’t been able to deliver him farther and faster from danger than they had…like Jill had thought…he being by far the fastest man in their camp, probably even with the pain medication he was on.
No runners in our family. I’m looking for a runner…you’re so small yet surprisingly fast. Dietrich couldn’t be looking for Grandpa. Grandpa hadn’t been fast enough, and neither had he been in Germany, where Amabile supposedly was.
I thought of Grandpa’s wrists and hands, what little I’d seen of the streaks and blotches of unnatural skin jutting below the long sleeves he always wore. I got rid of everything pertaining to the military because it bothered my wife. I looked up from the photo arrangement. That would be why Grandpa suffered with long sleeves in the New York summer heat and humidity—for Grandma. That would be why he never used his cane, why he struggled to walk as if he had no limp—for her. Grandpa was a man broken by losing all he knew—gifted hands, fast legs…and his wife. How dare the army come back and drag him into affairs Grandpa had intended to erase from his wife’s life.
I grabbed my camera bag and car keys, locked my photo lab’s door, and hurried to my car. It was time to be candid with my grandfather, burst that shell he was stuck in by telling him I understood what he had been trying to do for Grandma. The carved lily in his workbench was just a coincidence, only evidence of the talent Grandpa’d once had according to his military companions, or something he admired as an artisan.
I unlocked my car and set my camera bag in the back seat, then climbed into the front. I inserted the key, felt the roar of the engine, and stared through the windshield.
At paper, yellowed pages pinned beneath my wiper. I opened my door and stepped out. Sheets torn from a small book had been put there.
The mirror was her companion, her window to the world. It was where she saw him as she lay still, dowsing the fire that raged over her skin, through her heart. She kept it close, what was left of it, so she could see his fair hair, the length and strength of his build. The smile, even when it was only the back of h
im she saw, the look that promised he’d always be with her and be hers. And he was. In the mirror.
I dropped back into the car, the pages falling onto my lap. My heart hammered louder than voices, footsteps, and other vehicles as they passed. I glanced down at the printed words.
She saw what little there had been, salty tears searing cheeks that were tender with pain. She saw his hands over her mirror, adorning it with thoughts, feelings, little carved ornaments he said were for her. She saw his face alongside hers, though his much higher with his height, the promise and oneness in his eyes that his words couldn’t convey. Not from his language to hers. Their communication within. That was the language they understood. The vision of the two of them in the mirror, the life together they held.
She saw also what would be, even with her broken body and his absence screaming what would have been, instead. The mirror itself, even in its scorched and burned state, its battered frame with his two surviving carvings discolored by ashes, spoke of now and tomorrow, its smoky glass revealing the life that was theirs. Their hands woven together, a life in a city foreign to her, his visits to this, her city, foreign to him. He ran. Faster than ever. And she wrote. Better than ever. She saw him win. She saw herself spreading the love she’d only imagined before on pages for all to see.
She rested, the heat and the brokenness less when she saw the two of them in the mirror’s glass. It silenced her heartache, its own destroyed state silencing questions she didn’t want to hear from visitors she didn’t welcome. Interrogations, queries suggesting blame. Eyes dismissing the mirror, seeing only something that wasn’t whole.
But it was. It preserved him, the two of them, the visions she saw. That’s when she knew the mirror must go to him. It and its seared frame, along with only one of the two surviving lilies attached, the other to be hers forever. It would remind him of what they’d seen.
I folded the pages, creased the runner and the writer until only the back showed, where someone had written—Amabile.
Chapter 31
Dietrich watched the little runner read Amabile’s story. He was going to take down that black frame from her grandmother’s wall, and Cate needed to be ready. She’d need to understand, be prepared to move forward through the pain…like he may have to.
Brown waves fell around her profile, hiding her expression. She had a pleasant face, though it wouldn’t look that way now.
He turned and left the little runner to her thoughts. He had his own to contend with—the even faster race Oma’s conversation had thrown him into the night before.
Guten Morgen. Dietrich had called Oma when he knew she would be up and starting her day.
Wo bist du? she’d asked. It was standard conversation for them. Where are you now, where have your travels taken you this time? It had only been a week, but she would be ready for him to return. He was too often far away, keeping near through phone calls and postcards, sometimes letters if he was gone long.
Amerika, he answered. New York. He waited for her usual comment or question about what he was doing, especially since he’d said little when he left. But Oma was silent. He filled her silence with lies…fiction…about this trip and the article he pretended he’d been assigned. She was listening, and he caught her intake of breath.
Wie lang? How long? It wasn’t the question that caught him off guard but the way she asked it.
Long enough to finish the article…short enough to get back home…soon, sooner than he’d expected.
Mehr Zeit. Not long, he said, and more silence was her answer. He needed to hurry. His employer was impatient, and maybe Monika was the same. Maybe she’d gone to Oma’s house and said things that stunned the poor woman. He apologized for being so far away and asked if there was anything he could do, anything she wanted.
New York, she’d said. She’d wanted a ticket to join him. Oma never asked to join him anywhere. She never left her home, her quiet Berlin suburb. It had to be Monika, her silly fantasy driving Oma here to Dietrich for comfort…or to the “he” who could be Monika’s father.
His pace quickened, his feet rushing down the sidewalk toward his car. He wasn’t a runner. He came here to deny a runner, prove such a person never really was. And yet, there was a runner, one he couldn’t deny—the little runner.
Chapter 32
Grandpa’s car was gone. Again. I parked on the street instead of in his drive and stared at the quiet house, glad for this moment before I talked to him about his good record of service, burned arms instead of burned lilies, about holding our family together while that German and rumors that alarmed Emerson tried to take it apart.
I left my car and went to the garage, let myself in the side door, and fumbled for the light. A harsh fluorescent glow flooded his bench where everything looked the same. Nothing had been touched, nothing new created, just as he’d promised.
I walked to the last drawer beneath his workbench’s top. I slid my fingers through the handle, felt the gritty sensation of who I knew him to be—or maybe used to be—and pulled.
The drawer opened to his row of carving tools, all neatly in a line. I swept my arm to the back, to the carved flowers, and dragged the three of them forward. Two roses and one lily. I’d looked up pictures of lilies to be sure, praying I’d been wrong, but I wasn’t. I laid the two roses on the bench top and studied the flower Amabile had called herself, the type of flower that hung charred to her mirror. This wood was aged and dry, almost splintering at the lily’s ridges and peaks, but not burned.
Returning the roses, I tucked the lily into my pocket, jiggled the drawer closed, turned off the light, and left the garage. I took the steps up to his porch, dropped into his rocker, and waited. I watched the quiet street, listened for his car, and felt the breeze that normally swept away his whittled nothings.
I ran a hand into my pocket and wrapped my fingers around the carved lump. I pulled it out and wallowed it in my hand, glancing down the street both directions, then at my feet, at steel gray paint on the porch floor, clean and free of shavings.
I stood, walked to the porch’s edge, and leaned over the side. No shavings there, either.
Stuffing the flower into my pocket I stepped to the door. It was locked. I ran to my car, fished my key out of my bag, and darted back to the house. “Grandpa?” I opened the door and barged into the silence. An empty silence, one where even the smell of Grandpa waned.
“Grandpa?” I ran into and through the living room, to the kitchen, his bedroom, and the rest of the house. “Grandpa?” I called down the basement stairs, leaning through its door. I turned on the light and hurried down the steps, the odor of developing fluids growing stronger with each one. “Grandpa?” I stopped in the space he’d built for me, the place I stood to peel life off of film.
Cate.
The note lay next to the first tray. I recognized Grandpa’s handwriting even though I’d seen very little of it my whole life. My hands shook more than the quiver I saw in my name and the way he’d written it as I unfolded the note.
I told you a man is always on trial. He is when he lies, and sometimes even when he doesn’t. I lied to you, my dear. I’m going now, not in October, for the investigation. And if preliminaries don’t fare well, I’ll have to stay. Don’t lie to your fiancé. Tell him. Lies are a grip on what should never have been held to begin with. Grandpa
Chapter 33
Tell Emerson. Don’t lie. I trotted alongside my fiancé, my pace slowed to his, a half-mile trot so he could smile and wave at his public. Frank would be waiting at the end of our half mile, and then I’d run. Really run, hammer and re-hammer the conversation I had yet to have, while Frank pedaled around me telling me to lighten up—go far, not deep, light foot, not heavy. Things he should probably say to his wife.
“I have another function this weekend,” Emerson huffed at my side. His arms were pumping windedness into his words. “It’s casual, but I’d like to get you another outfit. Maybe this evening?”
He glanced my way, a
strand of black hair dangling over his forehead, an unusual but attractive sort of casual for him. My heart beat a little faster. I’d made a commitment to that hair, that face, the man running alongside me. A commitment I trusted he had made, too, far above the one to his campaign, one that honesty wouldn’t break.
“This evening.” I added breathiness to my words for his sake. “That might work.”
We trundled along in jagged silence, broken by choppy breathing, the occasional hello and wave from Emerson to people we passed, and the truth reverberating in my head. I took a sudden turn toward the college and veered Emerson off his normal course to where an old track lay without use.
“Catharine?” He followed, and I led him to the broken oval, a secluded place we could continue our trot.
“I need to talk to you,” I said at the first curve.
He tucked his elbows closer to his ribs, knotted his fists into tighter clenches.
“It’s about Grandpa.”
“I know.” Emerson pulled ahead. Not much, but enough that more of his hair came loose from its plastered style, enough that more of a glistening appeared on his skin.
“You know? How much? More than before? How do you know?” I breezed alongside him.
“Miles. He does a good job of surveying the landscape. He’s kept me informed of what your grandfather is going through.” Emerson stopped, clutched his sides as he watched me.
I powered three steps beyond him, stopped, and turned and saw what I hadn’t before. The mirror of Miles’ cool detachment in Emerson’s warm affections, the slight crispness of the times Miles had smiled down at me. The worry I was an enemy instead of a worthy wife, that one or both of them had mistakenly chosen someone who might drop the baton in Emerson’s race…the bad and ugly they didn’t want.
Out of Splinters and Ashes Page 12