Losing Julia (39 page)

I’m just sorry I won’t be there to see their faces when they open the letters.

“DANIEL?”

I pull myself to the top of the hole but the machine guns are still firing so I sink down and load my gun and stare at the torso at the bottom of the pit.

God the screaming is awful.

And my shoulder hurts.

Am I the last one alive? No, I hear voices behind me. How far am I from our line? I’ll wait until dark, then crawl back. But if the Germans counterattack? I’ll play dead. Can I do that? I don’t know that I can. Should I be on my stomach to protect myself? But if they are going to bayonet me I won’t see it coming.

I hear Daniel.

Yes, I am sure it is Daniel. Dirt rains down on me. Someone’s throwing hand grenades. My shoulder’s bleeding.

“Daniel!”

I know it’s you Christ where are you? I crawl back to the top of the hole and listen and peer out between clumps of dirt and I see hundreds of figures through the stinging smoke running and squirming on the ground and quivering in the entanglements.

“Daniel?”

Oh shit Daniel what are you doing out there come back.

“Daniel?”

Dear God is that you in the wire? No please it can’t be. Is that you Daniel? Is that you in the wire?

I REMEMBER
Daniel twisting in the wire.

TODAY FOR
a few minutes I couldn’t find my room. It was just after lunch and I wanted to retrieve a book from my bed stand, but I didn’t know which way to go.

“Now what’s that expression all about?” said a woman’s voice. It was Sarah, my Sarah. “You heading outside, Patrick? Beautiful day, isn’t it?” I stood still, one hand on the shiny steel railing that runs along the length of the corridor. Could it be Erica?

“Yes, I’m heading outside.” I saw sunlight and headed toward it. Left foot right foot left foot right foot careful with the cane. Sarah? Sarah my jaw feels numb and I’m lost. Sarah?

SCOTTY WESLEY,
a nineteen-year-old chicken farmer from Arkansas, lasted in no-man’s-land for forty-eight hours. Or at least that’s how long we heard him. But I hear there’s a German down the line who hung on for four days before a shell silenced him.

THIS AFTERNOON
I watched Sarah sitting outside during her break. She was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper but then I saw her put the paper down and pull out an envelope from her sweater pocket and read one of my letters over again. I went back to my room and closed the door and put the soundtrack to
Camelot
into my tape player and turned the music up loud.

DANIEL STOPPED
crying just after eleven p.m. I hope his eyes were closed.

I GOT A
new photo of Katy this morning. She’s wearing pigtails and a little blue dress and patent leather shoes and she smiles on the verge of a laugh. I sit in the corner of my room and stare at the photo, which I cup gently in my hands. What is it about the photo of a great-granddaughter that makes an old man in a nursing home break apart?

It is everything. I head back outside to my bench, walking faster than usual.

IF, ALL TOLD,
eighteen million people died in World War I, how many broken hearts is that? How many individually crushed, aching, shattered hearts? A multiple of three? Four?

How many simply stopped?

I HATE YOU
God.

KATY?