“Well, thanks,” I said, staring longingly after the letters as she turned and dropped them in a bin. Part of me wanted to tell her to stop. To please give them back. I’d send them from another location. But in an instant they were out of sight and she was looking past me, her voiced raised a little as she said, “Next!”
I ate dinner alone that night, Lee having plans to dine elsewhere.
“I won’t be too late,” he’d said from the doorway of my room where he’d stood after his usual abrupt knocking that nearly always sent my heart racing in fear. “I’ll have the front desk ring you when I return.”
I’d nodded. It was usual for him to have me rung by the concierge after he’d returned from one of his briefings, knowing it made me feel safer to have him nearby. Despite being in friendly territory, there was still cause to be on alert, he’d informed me time and time again.
“The Germans could regain footing and push back,” he’d told me.
I was always on alert.
As usual, when left to my own devices for a meal, I headed to the hotel restaurant and asked to be sat in a far corner away from the rest of the diners, then pulled out a book in hopes of warding off any single men who might consider the sight of a young woman eating alone to be an invitation for company. The book was to show I was perfectly content in my aloneness. It often worked, but sometimes...
“Excuse me.”
Steeling myself, I looked up.
The soldier standing across from me, his hand on the back of the chair I’d forgotten to ask the waiter to take away, reminded me a bit of William with his blue eyes and dark hair. But the look in his eyes was one that concerned me. One I was very familiar with. I’d seen it hundreds of times as I’d transferred injured men from the front. It was the look of a man in distress.
The invisible armor I’d encased myself in melted away and I set down my book and leaned forward.
“How can I help you?” I asked, my voice low and soft. It was my “nurse” voice. The one I reserved for those in pain.
“Are you using this chair?” he asked.
I smiled and shook my head, watching him carefully, taking in the wear on his face and the haunted look in his eyes.
“I’m not,” I said. “You can take it.”
“Thank you, miss,” he said, ducking his head and sliding the chair from the table.
“Are you—” I stopped as his eyes met mine again. I slid my hand across the table toward him. “Are you okay?”
His eyes moved across my face as if unsure where a safe space to land was, my own gaze too knowing for him to meet it again. He shifted his gaze to the table and nodded, then tightened his grip on the chair, mumbled “thank you” again, and went back to the group he was with, a boisterous lot of young men in American uniforms.
A couple glanced my way as their comrade returned to them, clapping him on the back as if he’d accomplished something grand. Perhaps they’d sent him over. Maybe they’d been trying to bolster his spirits by having him talk to the pretty girl in the corner. Maybe they saw it too. That look of loss in his eyes. The sign of having seen too much, the heart and soul and mind churning through images of human life being taken over and over again while plastering on a fake smile in the aftermath and downing a beer in hopes of drowning out the screams, the sights, and eventually, maybe even his own life?
Or maybe they didn’t see it at all, and he’d be just one more eventual casualty to this war, the toll of all he’d been through too much to bear, the nightmares claiming his mind for their own.
I turned my book back over and stared down at the pages. But the words blurred as my thoughts turned to William.
“How do you do it?” I’d asked him one night as we’d lain curled around one another in the bed of our rented room.
“How do I do what, my love?” he’d asked, nuzzling my neck.
When I didn’t immediately answer, he’d pulled back and met my gaze.
“Ah,” he’d said. “That. How do I kill another human being?”
I’d closed my eyes for a moment. That wasn’t exactly the question.
“Not how do you do it,” I’d said. “Just...are you affected by it?”
He’d kissed my head then and rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling.
“Of course I’m affected. It’s a terrible feeling to take a life, even as I know I’m not only saving my own, but my men’s lives, those of the country we’re fighting in, and everyone back home. And yet, there is never a part of me that feels like it’s right. I always wish there were another way. And as time goes on, it sickens me how numb I become to it. It makes me mad. No one should become numb to taking a life. But I think it must be the way the brain protects itself. Which unfortunately, as we’ve both seen, isn’t the case for everyone.”
His voice had caught at the end and when I’d looked up, I’d seen a tear tracing a path down the side of his face to the pillow beneath his head.
