In the Shadow of Blackbirds (24 page)

Aunt Eva walked in just as I placed the lightning bolt image back on its nail. I saw the expression on her face when she caught my fingers wrapped around his photograph—the slump of her shoulders, the sudden downturn of her mouth. The previous glow of awe in her eyes when I’d mentioned communicating with the spirit world had now dimmed to deep concern.

She didn’t say a word about Stephen. She told me to go back to bed and left my room.

The compass’s needle followed me again. The smoke and frustration in the air lifted. I tucked myself beneath my blankets, but I couldn’t sleep until the early hours of the morning, when the crickets stopped chirping and the first strains of light glowed through the lace of my curtains. I could only lie there and think of a white, bloodstained sky and Stephen’s insistence that he was being watched and murdered by those hideous dark birds.

WITH MY MASK TIED TIGHT AND MY BOOTS LACED FIRMLY
in double knots, I returned to the Red Cross House in the morning, an hour after Aunt Eva left for work.

I grabbed
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
from the donated book pile and headed back into the throng of bandaged men and twittering canaries, the latter of which set my nerves on edge with their erratic, fussy, twitchy bird movements.

“Are you all right?” asked a woman’s voice.

I pulled my eyes away from a cage of yellow birds and found the Red Cross nurse with the amber cat eyes standing next to me. “Yes. Why?”

“You’ve been staring at that cage for at least two minutes. One of the men who’s been eagerly awaiting the end of
Tom
Sawyer
called me over and asked what you were doing.”

“Oh.” I blinked away a foggy haze muddling my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m sure I’ll be fine once I sit down and start reading again.”

“If this is too much for you—”

“I’ll be fine. I’m happy to be here again. I want to help.”

Her eyes seemed to ask,
Are you sure about that?
I gave her a confident nod and watched her walk away.

Then my attention wandered to the part of the room where Jones and Carlos had rested the day before, and I half expected to hear myself called Aunt Gertie again.

Carlos sat in his same leather chair, reading another old issue of the
Saturday Evening Post.

The seat beside him was empty.

Fear twisted inside my gut. Had Jones killed himself?

I strode over to Carlos, whose dark eyes shimmered above his mask when he saw me. “Good morning,
querida.
You’ve come back to us.”

“Of course I came back.” I nodded to the empty chair. “Where’s Jones?”

“Jones?” He knitted his eyebrows like he didn’t understand. “Oh, the joker there. That wasn’t his real name. I just called him that because so many of you gringos are named Jones.”

“Oh.” I glanced around the room. “Well, where is he? Is he sitting somewhere else today?”

“He’s in the influenza ward. They found him burning up with a fever in the middle of the night.”

“What?”

“A nurse told me this morning.”

I hugged
Tom Sawyer
to my chest and clawed the cloth cover. Tears pricked at my eyes.

“Don’t cry for him,
querida.
He was kind of a bastard.”

“I’m not crying for him specifically.” I wiped my eyes with my fingers. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.”

“He might not die. Not everyone does.”

“I know.”

An awful silence passed between us, which made Jones’s chair seem all the emptier.

“I heard you say something about a dead soldier yesterday.” Carlos reached his hand toward me across the armrest. “Did you lose a sweetheart?”

I nodded. “His funeral was only three days ago.” I sniffed and wrapped my fingers around Carlos’s. “Oh, this is silly. I’m supposed to be the one comforting all of you. That Red Cross nurse is going to give me the boot at any second.”

“Shh. It’s all right.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “I lost my sweetheart, too. She did not die, but she took one look at my missing legs and ran away. I have not seen her since I got back to San Diego in early October.”

“I’m sorry.” I sniffed again. “Maybe she’ll get braver with time.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I don’t really think so, though.” He gave my fingers another squeeze—a gentle gesture that reminded me I wasn’t standing there all alone in the world.
“Where was your boy from,
querida?
Around here?”

“Coronado. He was supposed to finish his studies at Coronado High School last spring, but he enlisted instead.”

“Oh, I wonder if he knew that Coronado fellow who’s convalescing here.”

“What? Did you—” My lips couldn’t function for a moment. “There—there’s a person from Coronado here?”

“You may have seen him—the poor
hombre
missing the left side of his body. I remember Jones making another one of his terrible jokes about the boy. ‘That Coronado bugger is
all right,’
he’d say whenever anyone wheeled him by.”

I remembered the boy—the sleeping one from the day before whose head was a mess of gauze.
That one’s in the arms of Madame Morphine,
the man with the eye patch had said before asking for his cookie.

“Do … do you think …” My tongue struggled to keep up with my thoughts. “Do you think he might have known my friend Stephen?”

“I don’t know.” Carlos let go of my hand. “Go ask him yourself.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind me going over there right now?”

“I’m not going to chase after you.” He snickered and gestured with his chin toward his missing legs.

“Thank you so much for telling me about him.” I pulled down my mask and kissed the top of Carlos’s head through his thick black hair. “Thank you, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,
querida.
Thank you for not having huge warts and buckteeth.”

I slid my mask back up and took off across the room, slowing my pace when I realized how jarring it would be for the Coronado boy to wake up to the crashing of boots against tile.

I found him in the same chair as the day before—a mangled young man who could have been Stephen’s age. His head seemed to have caved in on one side and now hid beneath all those crisscrossing bandages, including his left eye, which may or may not have still resided in its socket. The left sleeve of his button-down shirt lay empty and deflated, as did the left leg of his tan trousers. All I could see of his actual body was a hand, a pale eyebrow, and an open right eye the color of green tea.

He drew in his breath beneath his flu mask. “Oh, sweet Jesus.” He sounded like he could only talk out of the right side of his mouth; each
s
that he spoke whistled through his teeth. “I thought I was a goner.”

“I’m sorry I scared you.”

“You looked like an angel.” He took a few shallow breaths. “I don’t mean that in a flirtatious way. You honestly looked like a golden beam of light. I thought you were going to take me away.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m just a person.” The chair where the man with the eye patch had been the day before was empty, so I pulled it closer to the boy and lowered myself into
its cushion with a squeak of leather. “Are you in much pain?”

“They keep me on morphine. I’m too far gone to care about the pain when I’m doped up like this.” He chuckled a little. “It’s nighttime that’s the worst. That’s when everything aches and the nightmares come breathing down my neck.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve heard the others talk about the nightmares, too. I’m sure it’s not easy.” I found my hands shaking. “Umm … look … someone told me you were from Coronado.”

“Yes.” He pushed himself up a little straighter. “That’s where I’ve lived all my life. Except for my time in the army, of course.”

“Did you go to the high school there?”

“Yes. Good old Coronado High.”

“Did you know Stephen Embers?”

“Stephen?” He nodded. “Yes, definitely. We’ve been friends since he first moved to the island.”

My heart beat faster. “D-d-did you see him in France?”

“Yeah, a group of us from school joined up at the same time.” He cocked his head at me and raised his visible eyebrow, as if he suddenly recognized me, even with my mask covering most of my face. “Say … what’s your name?”

My entire name counted too much to hide any part of it. “Mary Shelley Black.”

“Ohhh …” The soldier’s eye brightened. “No wonder you look so familiar. Stephen pulled out that photograph of you all the time.”

“He did?”

“I was there when he first got it in the mail, and boy, you would have thought you had sent him a pile of gold from the way he reacted.” He held his chest and took a longer break to catch up with his breathing.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Sorry. It’s sometimes hard … to get the words out.” His labored speech sounded like it was tiring him, and every
s
whistled worse than before, but he kept going. “I was just going to add that Stephen wedged your photo inside his helmet when we were down in the trenches. He mooned over it—when he was feeling well. He told the rest of us boys you were the prettiest and smartest girl in the world.”

“He said that?”

“I was even”—the exposed section of the boy’s forehead turned pink—“a little jealous of him.”

I blushed as well, and smiled so much the strings of my mask tautened enough to hurt. My eyes smarted with tears, but I sniffed and held myself together for the sake of Stephen’s friend.

“How’s he doing?” asked the boy.

My blood drained to my toes. “What do you mean?”

“Have you seen him yet? Or did they put him in a hospital on the East Coast first? They said that might happen.”

My eyes narrowed in confusion. “Weren’t you there when it happened? Stephen died in battle in the beginning of October.”

“October?” He shook his head. “No, that’s not possible. He wasn’t even overseas in October.”

I clutched the armrest. “Pardon?”

“They had to send him home.”

“Alive?”

“Yes.”

“When? Why?”

He answered in a tone so hushed I had to balance myself on the last two inches of the chair to understand him. “It was pretty bad. I hate to be the one to tell you.”

“Please, just tell me.”

The boy swallowed. “Stephen sort of … well … he lost his mind over there in the trenches. Got to the point where he couldn’t even move anymore. He’d just huddle in the mud, shaking. They tried to help him in one of the field hospitals once—examined him to see if he was faking. But then they sent him straight back into battle … and he got worse than ever.”

I folded my hands to conceal how much they jittered. “What did they do to him then?”

“They discharged him and shipped him home. He wasn’t the only one like that. Hell—excuse my language—but hell, most of us went a little off our rockers over there. You couldn’t help it. Some of the fellows’ bodies and brains just stopped working right. Scary as heck.” The soldier rubbed the right side of his bandaged forehead and wheezed a little. “Stephen was so bad off I didn’t think anything could fix him. It was like
something inside him broke.” He turned his eye back to me and looked like a lost pup. “You don’t know where they took him once he got back to the States, then?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know anything. His brother said he died a hero’s death over in France. He never said anything about him coming home.”

“I wonder if he died during transport. Maybe it was the flu. The family could be misinformed. The army gets antsy about the men whose minds leave them.”

“He died somewhere, somehow. I went to his funeral.”

Stephen’s friend got quiet. I snapped out of my shock enough to realize I’d just informed a drastically injured boy his close friend was dead.

“I’m so sorry I had to tell you that news,” I said.

“He was a good fellow.” Tears blurred his visible eye. “A really good fellow.”

“Yes.” I nodded. “He is. Was.”

“Some of the other soldiers gave me trouble because my father was born in Germany and my last name’s Spitz. They called me slurs like Kraut and Boche. But Stephen …” The boy’s eye brightened a moment. “He would tell them all to shut their damned mouths. Oh … sorry …” He lowered his head. “There goes my language again.”