“Then what’s wrong? I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“It is. I just always assumed I’d go back to the island. But...what if I’m sent somewhere else?”
She stopped walking, her blue eyes searching mine.
“Would that change your mind?”
“Of course not. I just...”
A shiver of trepidation ran through my body. A large part of me wanted never to return to that part of the world. I had mostly only ever experienced pain there. But there was another part of me that yearned for something left behind. And even though it no longer existed in reality, the memory of it created a longing in me. To walk where I had as a girl. To remember the slivers of joy I’d been granted. A smile. The little sister I’d doted on.
“I assume you’ll be stationed in England if they don’t send you back to the Pacific,” Aunt Victoria said. “There are dozens of bases and hospitals there. Of course, I can’t be sure, but it seems the likely scenario as it’s away from the fighting.”
I breathed a tiny sigh of relief, but was still sad at the thought of not returning to my friends and previous base.
Aunt Victoria reached out and squeezed my hand. “You’ll make new friends,” she said.
“Mind reader,” I said and she shrugged with an impish smile.
“Are we headed home or...” She raised her eyebrows.
I shook my head.
“Lead the way then.”
Within the hour I was across the desk of one of the supervisors for the nursing division while she read the letter I’d handed her. When she was done, she gave a little nod, held up a finger, and left the room, leaving me to shift nervously in my seat, drumming my fingers on the wooden arm of my chair while my aunt calmly perused a magazine.
“Okay, Lieutenant,” the supervisor said, returning with a piece of paper in hand. “You have three days to get your affairs in order and then you are to report back here at oh-eight hundred hours Sunday morning. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting to my feet. “What about the Atabrine? Don’t I need to start taking it?”
“Not for where you’re going.”
Silence became a thick wall between us as I looked down at the paper in my hand, my eyes flying over the words, looking for Espiritu Santo as the location I’d be assigned to once more. But it wasn’t there.
“Fulbeck, England?” I asked.
“Give my best to the king,” she said.
11
US Army base, Fulbeck,England
June 1944
“First time?”the man next to me shouted over the sound of the plane’s engines.
I turned away from the window, where I’d been staring out at a sea of green land below, and looked at the soldier buckled in beside me. He was young and had a scar across his cheek that looked fresh, the skin still pink and healing. Gunshot? Knife wound? It was hard to tell.
“To England?” I yelled back. “Yes.”
“You a nurse or something?”
I nodded.
“You ain’t never seen what you’re gonna see over here. Hope you have a strong stomach.”
I didn’t bother to tell him that while it was my first time in England, it wasn’t my first time experiencing this war.
