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I was over at the clinic every spare minute, taking care of Buster until we knew that he was going to live. Of course, I couldn’t pay for an operation like that, so I told Mr.B. that I would clean the dog pens and the horse stalls for him—whatever he needed me to do. Jimmy became my hero for saving my dog. He nicknamed me Peggety that day and has called me that ever since.
“You operated on Buster nine years ago,” I told Mr.B. now, “and he’s running around on three legs just as good as you please.”
“So he is.” He gave me a small, sad smile and swung his leg inside the cab and slammed the door. A deep, wearying grief had settled over him ever since Decoration Day—the day that Jimmy tried to kill himself. I remembered the day because the village officials held a memorial service in the cemetery behind the church for all the fallen soldiers. I looked at Mr. Barnett’s ashen face now and it seemed as if all hope had bled right out of him. I feared the sadness would be the death of him if Jimmy didn’t get better. That was another reason why I couldn’t give up—for Mr. Barnett’s sake as much as for Jimmy’s.
“Maybe the doctors will be able to figure out why he’s so depressed,” I said, “and they’ll coax him into talking again. Maybe his battle fatigue will be better after he rests in the hospital for a while.”
“Let’s hope so.” Mr. Barnett turned the key in the ignition and the truck growled to life.
The Barnetts lived beside the veterinary clinic in a comforting white farmhouse with bay windows in front and a frilly porch that wrapped around the front and sides. Before Jimmy went to war, that porch used to overflow with his friends on warm summer evenings. The music of the Andrews Sisters and Jimmy Dorsey’s band would spill into the night from Jimmy’s radio. I would gaze at the house from my bedroom window across the road and hum along to the music.
I went into the farmhouse when Mr. Barnett and I got back, calling to Mrs. Barnett from the kitchen door to tell her we were home. “I’m upstairs, Peggy,” she called back. “Come on up.” I found her in Jimmy’s room. It needed cleaning after all the weeks he’d stayed in there with the window shades pulled down to block the sunlight as if he didn’t want to see the view of the distant mountain ridge or the new yellow-green buds that were bursting from the trees. But I didn’t think Mrs. Barnett was in there just to clean. She had been so excited when Jimmy wrote that he was coming home, and she’d made plans to cook all of his favorite meals, including the red velvet cake he always asked for on his birthday. Mrs. Barnett was my friend, too, and more of a mother to me than Pop’s girlfriend, Donna, had ever been.
After we knew that Buster would live, years ago, and I’d been cleaning dog pens and sweeping up for a while, Mrs. Barnett came to me one day and said, “I have a little present for you, Peggy, for working so hard.” It was a boxed set of bubble bath and talcum powder that smelled like roses. Then she filled up the tub for me in her own bathroom. She gave me a bottle of Halo shampoo that made my hair all shiny and nice and said I could keep that, too. When I turned thirteen, it was Mrs. Barnett who took me to buy my first bra and coached me through all the changes of womanhood. I made a regular pest of myself after Jimmy enlisted, running over to his house all the time, asking his mother if she’d heard from him. I knew how much she loved him and how she would suffer if the doctors couldn’t figure out a way to save him. I wanted to help Jimmy for her sake, too.
“Can I give you a hand with his room, Mrs.B.?” I asked her now. She turned to look at me and I saw tears in her eyes. Jimmy’s eyes were the same greenish-gray color as hers, like rainwater. They were kind eyes, filled with love and compassion the way I always imagined Jesus’ eyes must have looked. But Mrs. Barnett seemed older than ever before, too, her curly brown hair fading to gray like an old photograph, her sweet, wrinkled face lined with worry.
“Imagine... our Jimmy lived all through that war, went through all those terrible battles in dangerous places with barely a scratch. And now this. I guess there are some wounds you just can’t see.”
“I’m going to find a way to help him.” I carried the vacuum cleaner out of Jimmy’s room and put it in the hall closet for her. “I’m not going to give up until he’s better.”
“Oh, Peggy—”
“I mean it. I know Mr.B. has work to do, but I can drive you over to the veterans’ hospital once they let us visit him again. We’ll talk to him and remind him of all the good reasons he has to live.”
She sank down on his bed and ran her hand over the bedspread. “We waited so long for him to come home from the war and now... Well, we have to trust the doctors. They’re the experts. But I can’t bear to think of Jimmy all alone in that place.”
“I’ll go with you.” She reached for my hands as I sat down beside her, and squeezed them. Tears slipped down her cheeks. I saw her throat working as if she was trying to talk but nothing would come out. She was the one who found Jimmy, barely alive, and I knew the memory still haunted her. She pulled me into her arms. “We won’t give up, Mrs.B.,” I said through my own tears. “We won’t!”
She hugged me long and hard, then backed away to wipe her eyes on her apron. “Gordon and I tried so hard to get Jimmy to tell us what was wrong,” she said. “We thought something terrible must have happened to make him so depressed. Something he just couldn’t forget.”
“Or maybe it was a lot of things all adding up.”
“Yes... maybe.”
“If we can figure out what made him so sad, we can all help carry part of that load for him. Maybe the answer is in there somewhere,” I said, pointing to the duffel bag and rucksack Jimmy had dumped in the corner of his room. “Maybe we can piece the story together and figure out what went wrong.”
“Do you really think so?” I saw hope in her eyes and the deep love she had for her son, and I wanted it to be true.
“Yes, I do believe it. Let’s look through his things together.” I lifted his rucksack from the floor and set it on the bed, watching as Mrs. Barnett reached inside and pulled out each item—a mess kit, a shaving set, his discharge papers. She found a pocket-size copy of the New Testament and Psalms, and I leafed through it, noticing that several verses had been underlined. On the back flyleaf, Jimmy had printed an address without any name: 573 S. Second Street, Brooklyn, NY.
“I wonder who this girl is,” Mrs.B. said. She had taken out a photograph in a simple metal frame of a pretty, young woman wearing a nurse’s cap. I turned it over and saw writing on the cardboard backing: All my love, Gisela. My pulse started doing the foxtrot. Maybe Gisela held the key that would unlock Jimmy’s depression.
“Is she a girlfriend from college?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. He didn’t have a steady girlfriend before he enlisted.”
“Gisela is an unusual name. Did Jimmy ever mention her in his letters?”
She got a faraway look on her face as if she were trying to peer back through time and across the vast Atlantic Ocean. “Not that I recall. But he wrote less frequently after the Nazis surrendered. He was working in a hospital...”
“Might she be one of the nurses he worked with? It looks like she’s wearing a nurse’s cap. Maybe that’s where he met her.”
“Maybe. But he didn’t mention a woman in his letters. Or after he got home. But then he barely spoke two words to us.” Mrs. Barnett and I searched all the way to the bottom of Jimmy’s rucksack, but we didn’t find anything else that told us who Gisela was. “I saved all the letters he sent home,” she said when we finished. “You can read through them if you’d like.”
“That’s a great idea. Maybe we’ll find another clue.”
She went into her bedroom to fetch them for me but was interrupted by the telephone. I heard her hurrying downstairs to the front hallway to answer it and then her voice in the distance. “Yes... Yes, I see... Ten o’clock, then... Thank you.”
