Sons of Thunder (24 page)

“Lizzy, I can explain.” But his brain tossed through memories, moments when Reg might have discovered his secret—all the way back to the day of the bombing.

To his letter, wadded in the wastebasket. To Reg, by the door, flicking his ashes into it. He must have seen the letter, not wanted to start a fire…

Except, of course, true to Reg St. John’s form, he’d used it to flame an inferno.

“You can’t marry Reggie.” Dino tried, oh, he tried, to keep his voice low, but she recoiled anyway. Shook her head.

“Of course I can. If he
lives
.” Her eyes filled and she backed away. “Get away from me, whoever you are.”

Whoever you are.

He stared at her, a chill whisking through him.

“Dr. Scarpelli?” The charge nurse, a woman he didn’t recognize, waved him over to the desk. “Your wife didn’t keep her appointment. Can you ask her to reschedule?”

Wife? “Reschedule?”

“She said she was feeling ill. We ordered a TB test for her.”

The words swept over him. Sofia had been feeling weak, looking pale. What if she had TB?

Now he realized why Sofia had appeared so shaken, almost afraid when he’d met her in the hallway. Why she looked at him with water in her blue eyes and nearly ran from him.

I told you…I’m poison, Dino.

Outside, the rain bulleted down, thrashing the earth, torrents forming rivers that furrowed the dirt on either side of the cement walk. He ran out into the deluge, past the watery lamplight—the water sluicing into his hair, down his shirt—and into the sodden darkness.

Sofia!

The sun edged just over the cityscape as Dino finished making his bed. At least he should leave it the way Elsie hoped.

She’d served him a stew last night that should feed him for three weeks. But it still couldn’t fill the hole gnawing in his stomach, the one that hollowed him more every day Sofia didn’t return to the boardinghouse, and every hour he sat in the train station those few days after she left, hoping she’d appear.

Dino shoved his sweater into his bag—he didn’t need a big one, just enough for his kit, his shoes, a picture of Dr. and Mrs. Scarpelli. His mother’s worn Greek Bible.

He stood for a moment at the end of the bed, staring out at the run of silky golden light into the city, pushing shadows across the lime green grass. Had it only been five months ago that Beanie’d collected his own belongings and shipped himself off to war?

To honor. At least that’s the prize they advertised at the recruiter’s when Dino had signed up. As Dino Stavros, future American citizen. A stint in the army would automate his citizenship.

Already he felt less of an enigma. Less of a vagabond.

A man with a mark to leave. Maybe a heroic legacy to pass on.

Dino tied the bag, threw it over his shoulder, closed the door behind him.

He stopped for a moment at Sofia’s vacant room, palmed the paneled door. If only she’d left a note, something.

He ran his index finger along the bottom of his eye, wiped it on his dress pants.

Elsie waited for him by the door, wearing a buttoned smile.

“You didn’t have to get up.”

“Of course I did. I say good-bye to all my boys.” She handed him a bag. “Hot brötchen. For the train.” She leaned forward, kissed him quick on the cheek. He caught her and pulled her cottony body into a hug.

“Thank you.” He whispered into her ear.

She patted his back. “I’ll tell her you are a soldier if she ever comes back.”

He closed his eyes, inhaling her words.

After a moment, she stepped back. “Okay then. Stay alive.” She kissed him again on the cheek and shooed him out the door.

The lilac-rich breath of spring filled his lungs as he stepped off the porch, threw his bag once more over his shoulder. Stay alive. He intended to do more than that.

Much more.

CHAPTER 18

Dino had gone deaf with the pounding of the 105 Archie’s anti-aircraft guns hammering the sky. Like thunder, only relentless, the rumble of them tunneled under his skin, turning his bones brittle. Right behind them followed the 88 barkers, those flak guns more like a punch deep inside his chest. They’d swept his breath clean out of him as he’d clung to the LST—Landing Ship Tank—plowing through the waves toward the Normandy shore.

He could barely hear the MG42s, the machine guns more like buzz saws or an annoying Minnesota mosquito behind the shouts and screams and explosions that obliterated Omaha Beach.

Thankfully, three days later, the odor of iodine and the tinny stench of fresh blood on the stone floor of his “operating theater” had cut away the stench of burning rubber, oil, wood—and the curdling odor of the animal carcasses.

“I need more blood over here and—”

A tray of utensils upended, forceps and surgical knives clattering to the stone floor.

Dino glanced behind him where Captain Stan “Flash” Gordon, a narrow-nosed Brit from the RMAC, bent over a patient, trying to insert a chest tube to relieve a tension pneumothorax. “Calm down, Flash. You’re going to be fine. You just have to stabilize him to be evacuated—”

“I know—it’s these bloody nurses! Where did they get them?”

Dino looked up at his own surgical nurse, a woman who had waded onto Omaha Beach through the bloody waters, pushing past soldiers bloating in the water or facedown in the russet sand, all so she could work non-stop delivering plasma, administering penicillin, and sending the bloodied through triage. “Sorry,” Dino said softly.

Her name was Vivian. He remembered that now. Brown curly hair worn short; quick, sure hands. Not enough meat on her bones. She hadn’t complained through eight hours of surgery, eighteen soldiers, four deaths on the table, and too many men going home in bags.

Overhead the lights of the cramped former boudoir burned the back of his neck. Then again, perhaps he should be thankful he wasn’t stitching up this chest wound with bullets whizzing past his head. No, the Chateau Colombrière, an estate built some three hundred years earlier, with turrets and a beautiful courtyard, better suited for some exotic vacation than a makeshift hospital, had at least a decent water supply. And a line of Allied defenses.

And, thanks to the German’s own recognition of an industrious location for a medical base, the U.S. medical corps had an instant working field hospital. Yes, Dino very much appreciated the use of the German’s medical supplies, the iodine, the penicillin, and the sulpha they’d surrendered when the advance line of troopers who’d glided in behind enemy lines relieved the Germans of their hospital.

Occasionally he still heard the popping of a luger from the stables where, apparently, a crew of Jerry medics had decided to pick up weapons.

In truth, Dino had felt just a little naked in only his uniform and the white mark with the red-cross banding his arm as he’d slogged up Omaha Beach and dragged to cover countless soldiers, their bodies burned and torn. However, not once had he been tempted to pick up one of their Brownings.

Violence made him a man he didn’t respect. Even for a good cause.

“Okay, what’s next?” he said, finishing the last of the whipstitches to this private’s chest. He checked his dog tags. Lund, David.

Vivian laid a dressing over the man’s wound. “Next you take a break.” She smiled at Dino, a gentleness inside it. He guessed her to be about twenty-four, not much older than he’d been when he’d shown up at the recruiter’s office.

Two days after Sofia left him with his hat in hand, desperate to make things right.

Three years later, after the army conferred on him his medical degree, gave him surgical experience, and declared him a captain, they sent him to France.

“I have an entire courtyard of wounded soldiers out there. I can’t—”

“You need a break. You’ve been on your feet for sixteen hours. Twenty minutes won’t matter, sir.” She raised an eyebrow, and he had the uncanny feeling she might be an incarnation of Elsie.

He did want to scrub the taste of sand and smoke from his teeth. Maybe get a drink of water, douse his face, and attempt to scour the grit from his eyes.

He washed his hands, removed his mask, his surgical apron. “I’ll be back. Thanks, Vivian.”

“Vivi. And you’re welcome.” She gave him a sweet smile that, in another time or place, might have made him pause. Made him wonder who she was, and if she liked to dance.

If she left behind someone she loved.

Behind him, Dr. Flash had inserted the tube, was now taping it in place. His nurse gave Dino a sour glance as he exited.

They’d shipped in sixteen nurses. He passed the five other surgical rooms in the Chateau, other doctors with their hands inside the chests
or heads of soldiers. Too many of them were from the 101
^st
Airborne, dropped four days ago behind enemy lines. Wounded paratroopers dribbled in from the countryside, on foot, in jeeps, with broken limbs, chest wounds, a few with head injuries—all grubbing for life with everything inside them, clinging to the salvation of the field clinic. Most hadn’t even met up with their units. Triage turned into reunion.

The ambulatory gave blood or created billets while the dire rotated into surgery. Or elsewhere. Parachutes turned into blankets, became the webbing for cots.

At the end of the hall, patients crammed the post-op room, cot to cot, their IVs filled with plasma or blood, dangling from bottles over their heads. A continuous moaning echoed down the corridor, as if the chateau itself had been torn asunder.

The medics who came on the later wave of gliders, after the Normandy storm, set up rooms for blood transfusions, plasma delivery, shock, burns, and even general medicine.

Dino could just as well be at Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island. Well, except for the chipping of gunfire into the horizon.

Standing on the second floor, he stared out at the courtyard. Cows gobbled hay from a mangled stack, two grubby soldiers sat atop an ancient tractor, smoking cigarettes. Medics, the red cross banding their arms, trundled men on stretchers into the château. Soldiers cluttered the yard, some digging into K-rations, others checking their field gear.

Too many simply stared with stripped expressions across the ravaged countryside, littered with trampled hedgerows, burning tanks, bloated cows. Acrid smoke darkened the horizon.

A scratchy radio transmission played some sort of military encouragement.

Probably the BBC. Those Brits were always so jolly.

Dino descended to the main floor. Every room filled with groaning men, medics working over them, triaging them for the surgical rooms upstairs. Nurses crouched on the ground, adjusting plasma IVs, taking vitals—or listening to, oh, hopefully not—deathbed confessions.

Although, if he had been crushed on the beaches of Normandy, he might also be pouring out his confessions to some blue-eyed Betty from Detroit.

I fell in love with my brother’s girl—slept with her.

Yeah, that’s the first thing he would say, followed by,
I was so angry with my brother, I think I wished him dead.

Until he was, of course.

Third might be something about Yannis, and Kostas, and the regret that he’d never written his mother, never returned to Zante.

But those sins seemed so far behind him now, he might not waste his breath to confess them. Just move on to—
please, God, take care of Sofia.

He’d set up a bank account, had been pouring his military pay into it for the past three years. Someday he’d find her, and, if she wasn’t already married, he’d hit his knees and beg.

And, if he pleaded well, perhaps she’d marry him. They might even have a child. He imagined a little girl with blue eyes, like Sofia. Or perhaps a boy—with Markos’s dark bronzed skin, a shank of sooty hair shagged over his reddened nose, the keen eyes of a fisherman narrowed against the sun. He couldn’t bear to bequeath upon a child his own narrow nose, his sometimes too-big mouth.

He hadn’t a clue what traits, really, he might pass on to his child.

No, in his mind, the child always bore a mix of Sofia and Markos.

But first, he had to find her. He’d barraged the census bureau, but of course she’d never bothered to become a citizen either. Written to Elsie, but Sofia never returned to the boardinghouse.