The Bungalow (26 page)

“You promise?”

“Yes,” he said, kissing my nose.

I turned to the barracks. “Be careful,” I said.

“You too.”

“There you are!” Nurse Hildebrand whispered in the hallway. Even her whispers sounded like shouts. “I don’t have time to hear your explanation, nor do I have time to discipline you, so I will just say that you are the last of the nurses to make it to the cellar. The Japanese are coming. The colonel gave orders for the women to go under. We must hurry.”

My heart raced as I followed Nurse Hildebrand down a set of stairs. I patted the place on the collar of my dress where I’d fastened the blue rose pin, the one Kitty gave to me in Seattle. I’d worn it on a whim that morning and gasped when I realized it was
gone
. I stopped suddenly.

“What are you waiting for?” Nurse Hildebrand snapped.

Distraught, I looked down at the stairs, then back toward the door. “It’s just that”—I fumbled, patting my dress pockets frantically—“I lost something. Something very important to me.”

“Your life is important to you, isn’t it?”

I nodded meekly.

“Then let’s go. We have to get to the cellar.”

How could I be so careless to lose the pin?
I imagined it lying on the beach, buried in a clump of sand as a wave carried it out to sea. I shuddered, thinking of Kitty.
Is it a sign of the end of our friendship?

I followed Nurse Hildebrand farther down the stairs, through a locked door, and then watched as she pulled up a rug and pried open a hinge in the floor. “You first,” she said, pointing to a dark cavern below.

I descended a ladder into a shadowy space where a few lanterns flickered. When my feet hit the floor, I could make out Liz and Stella, and some of the others in the distance.

“Kitty?” I called out. “Are you here?”

Only silence answered back. I turned to Nurse Hildebrand with concern.

“She’s over there,” she said, pointing to the light of a single lantern in the far right corner.

“Kitty,” I said, walking toward her until I could make out her small, frightened face, wayward curls springing out in disarray. She sat against the wall, looking despondent.

“I was worried you weren’t coming,” she said, wiping away a tear.

I sat down beside her and squeezed her hand. “I’m here now.”

No one knew what was happening above. After two hours, or what felt like twelve, Nurse Hildebrand enlisted Stella to help pass out rations, water, and beans in tin cans. Enough to last days, even weeks. I thought about the prospect of living in the dark, eating canned Spam, and I shuddered.

“Here,” said Stella, offering me a canteen. I took a swig and swallowed hard. It tasted of rust.

We all froze when we heard footsteps on the floor above.

“Nurses,” Nurse Hildebrand whispered, reaching for a rifle on the wall, “put out your lanterns.”

We obeyed, and listened in the darkness, as the footsteps grew closer, louder. There was a thud, and then the creak of the trapdoor opening. I squeezed Kitty’s hand harder.
Dear Lord. The Japanese are here.

But instead of a foreign accent, a familiar voice rang out in the cellar. “Nurses, it’s all clear. The ship’s turned west. You can come out now.”

The women let out a cheer—all but Kitty, who just stared ahead. I reached for her hand. “Come on, dear,” I said. “It’s over. We can go now.”

She looked startled, as though I’d roused her from a dream. When she turned on her lantern, I could detect the familiar cloudiness in her eyes. The distance. “Yes, of course,” she said, standing up and walking ahead of me.

“Can you believe we ship out tomorrow?” Liz marveled at breakfast the next day.

Tomorrow.
I’d been dreading this day since the moment I fell in love with Westry. Leaving the island meant the end of our reality, and the beginning of a new one—one, I feared, that would be more complicated than we might know.

“The men ship out in the morning,” Stella added. She didn’t like that Will was joining the fight in Europe any more than I liked that Westry was.

“I was thinking,” she continued. “If I went to serve in Europe, I’d at least be closer to him. In case—”

I shook my head. The war had taken its toll on Stella, who was now shockingly thin. She needed leave more than any of us. “Going to Europe won’t protect him,” I said. “Go home. Wait for him there.”

She nodded. “Can you believe Kitty? I hear she’s heading to France, right in the middle of the action. She’s joining a group headed for Normandy.”

My cheeks flushed. France?
Why didn’t she tell me the extent of her plans? Does she think I don’t care?

“Well, speaking of the devil,” Stella said, pointing to the door.

Kitty walked into the mess hall, smiling. Her cheeks looked rosy, the way they once had. As she approached our table, I could see that she was holding a cluster of yellow hibiscus, and my cheeks burned at the sight.

“Morning, ladies,” she said. “How are the rations today?”

I felt Stella’s eyes boring into the side of my head.

“Fine,” Liz, said, oblivious to the tension in the air, “if you like rubberized eggs.”

Kitty giggled, setting the flowers, tied in a single white ribbon, on the table. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said, admiring their yellow petals against the contrasting sterile beige tabletop. I knew them instantly, of course—the hibiscus that grew near the bungalow. They had to be.

“Well, well, well,” Stella said. “It looks like someone has an admirer.

“Oh, Stell,” Kitty said, playing coy.

“Then where did you get them?” she said relentlessly. I wished she’d stop. I didn’t want to know.

Kitty grinned and twirled around toward the buffet line, leaving us to our imaginations.

Stella cleared her throat and smirked. “What did I warn you about the first day on this island?”

I stood up abruptly and began walking to the door.

“Anne,” Stella called out. “Wait. I didn’t mean anything by it. Come back.”

Outside on the path back to the barracks, my heart pounded as I retraced the past few weeks. I thought of the way Kitty lit up whenever Westry appeared, and the way she had pulled back from me.
Of course Kitty feels something for Westry.

I froze for a moment.
Could he possibly share her attraction?
Every man in our past—well, except Gerard—had favored Kitty over me. She was asked first to dance. She had received a half dozen invitations to the Homecoming banquet, when I’d had one. My mind raced.
The letter
.
My God. Westry didn’t seem at all concerned about the prospect of someone taking it. Did he pretend it had been stolen so he wouldn’t have to face my declaration of love, my hope for the future—of a future together?

I kicked a rock on the path and shook my head, dismissing the disturbing train of thought.
No, I won’t think of it a moment longer, not when we are leaving tomorrow. Not when we have mere hours left together. There isn’t time for nonsense.

“That’s it,” Kitty said the next morning after breakfast, sighing. She bent over to zip up the side of her bag, which looked, strangely, smaller than the enormous duffel I’d lugged into this room ten months prior. Like the bag, Kitty had lost some of herself on the island.

“My flight leaves in an hour,” she said in a distant voice, her gaze turned to the hillside outside the window, a scene that often captured her attention. I wondered what she was looking for up in those hills. “Nurse Hildebrand and I will meet up with a squadron flying into France tomorrow. And then . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Kitty in France. All by herself.
I hated the thought of it, just like I had hated the thought of her coming here, to the South Pacific, alone. It didn’t matter what I thought of her feelings for Westry. I knew that somewhere beyond the layers of emotional scars draped over her like armor, my best friend resided. But this time I wouldn’t insist on going with her.

“Oh, Kitty!” I cried, leaping to my feet.
If I could only get through to her.
“Why did things turn out the way they did for us?”

Kitty shrugged, reaching for her bag. She looked at me for a long moment. “The island had its way, I guess,” she finally muttered.

“No, Kitty, you have it wrong,” I said, hearing the panic in my voice—panic at what seemed like the end of a friendship, the end of an era. I thought about my transgressions as a friend.
I could have spent more time with her. I might have been more supportive through her final weeks of pregnancy—but wasn’t I? Most important, I should have been honest with her about the bungalow, about everything.
I had let too many secrets creep in between us. Secrets I had promised never to keep. “Kitty,” I pleaded. “I haven’t changed. I’m still the same old Anne. And I’d wager that you’re still the same old Kitty in your heart. I want nothing more than to go on being Anne and Kitty.”

She looked at me with eyes I didn’t recognize. They were tired and older, hardened. “I wish that too,” she said softly, turning away from me. “But I don’t think we can now.”

I nodded, feeling tears rise from a place deep inside. They welled up in my eyes before spilling out unbidden on my cheeks.

“Good-bye, Anne,” Kitty said without turning around. Her tone was businesslike, the way I’d witnessed her speak to the servants in her home growing up, or the clerk at the drugstore. I felt the urge to scream, “
Kitty, stop this right now! Let’s end this charade.
” But I could only stand there, mute, too stunned, too sad to open my mouth. “I wish you the best of luck,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “With everything.”

The door clicked closed and the silence in the room pulsed. I fell to the floor, sobbing into my hands for what felt like hours.
What right does she have to leave like this, to declare our friendship over? How could she behave so coldly?

When the clock told me it was eleven, I willed myself to stand, prying my tired limbs off the floor. I’d promised Westry a farewell on the tarmac, and his flight left in a half hour, just after mine.