The Secret of Raven Point (21 page)

“Thought I’d get that in before you run off to Chicago.”

“It was much nicer than the first time.”

“Oh, that. Sorry. I was an asshole.”

“Yup. Asshole.”

He reached out and traced her birthmark with his fingertip. “I like it, you know. It’s unique. You’ve gotten so pretty.”

“That’s sleep deprivation talking.”

“You don’t even know you’re pretty. It’s why you’re so nice. Crap, I shouldn’t have told you.”

Tears came briefly to Juliet’s eyes; he had said something she’d always wanted to hear but hadn’t known it. Someone thought she was pretty. She’d always thought she was too smart to want such things. Yet it moved her now. Maybe he was lying, maybe he was tired, but it made her happy, and she leaned against his shoulder. She wanted to lose herself in the bulk of him.

She closed her eyes and thought of the colonel who died that morning; she thought of Glenda being loaded into the army truck; she thought of the day she waved good-bye to Tuck at the bus depot. It seemed that everything could vanish, at any moment.
This
could vanish. This comfort with Beau, this one chance, could be taken from her.

Taking a long, deep breath, she pressed her head against his chest. His heart beat strongly. She let her fingers travel across his arms and could sense his body flexing, coming to life. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. As he slowly reached for a button on her shirt, she nodded.

“You were my first kiss,” she whispered.

He smiled. “You were mine.”

He slid his hand across her stomach and up her chest. She looked around for a moment, into the cave, at the sleeping men. “Will you get in trouble?”

He kissed her neck and pressed himself against her, and she felt the full weight and warmth of him. He reached for the buckle of her pants and pulled her farther outside.

“Gunderson,” Beau called into the cave. “Gunderson.”

The man who had been tossing and turning sat up on his bedroll.

“Gunderson, you owe me one. Take over.”

It was not what she had expected. It hurt and it was messy and now she felt sticky and cold between her legs. But the sharpness of it, the insistent bluntness, the strangeness of his body inside hers, made her feel like an entirely different person.
Juliet would never do this,
she kept thinking. And soon everything else fell from her thoughts except this idea of the her before the act and the new her. She had thought little about Beau. It seemed that being so close to another human being, you would have to think about him, but she hadn’t. She had closed her eyes and thought about herself, her body, what was happening inside her body, as though she were entirely alone.

After Gunderson was sent back to sleep, Beau settled on his elbows, readjusted his rifle, and looked at the stars.

Juliet leaned back beside him and wished she could tell him what had just happened to her, as though he hadn’t been there.

He kissed her head and let his lips linger on her scalp.

“I’m gonna ask you something, Juliet. . . . How do you save the world from evil?”

“No idea.”

“You take out an ad in the classifieds. Wanted: brave young men
to defeat the forces of evil in the world. Every boy in every high school across the country is going to sign right up. What you don’t say in the ad? Expect to live in mud and shit and freeze your asses off while you watch your friends bleed to death. Expect frostbite, crappy food, bad attitudes, no sleep, shitty maps, old weapons, and lousy leadership, all while a psychotic enemy pursues you night and day. If you manage to survive, you get the honor of knowing you helped save the world from Nazi maniacs. But you think that anyone fifty years from now will bat an eyelash over it?”

“They’d better,” said Juliet.

“Growing up I never thought about all those guys who fought in the Great War. Not once. But I think about them now, all the time. All of Italy, all of Europe, the ground we’re sitting on, is filled with the bodies of guys just like me, who did exactly what I’m doing, thirty years ago.”

His eyes were red, fixed on a point outside the cave. His nose had begun to run, and he wiped it clean. The stars clustered thickly overhead like coins in a wishing pond. Had all those men, decades earlier, once made wishes?

“I really hope Tuck is alive,” Beau said.

Juliet was silent.

“I’d just like to make it out of here so I can get home to my grandma,” Beau said. “She’s eighty-eight. I’d like to get home so she doesn’t have to sit in that house by herself for what’s left of her life.”

“You’ll get home,” said Juliet. “You will.”

Beau nodded firmly. He clutched his rifle close and blinked with intense alertness.

“Goddamn straight I will.”

When Juliet and Lovelace returned to the hospital the next morning, Juliet found Dr. Willard seated at a picnic table pecking at his
typewriter. Beside him, a Coca-Cola bottle sat like an archaeological find, a cross section of beverage and ash and cigarette butts. The sky had turned gray, and in the distance the thunder rumbled, the serrated edge of a storm.

“You’re back, then,” he said, studiously typing several words and forcefully hitting the return carriage.

“Major Decker sent us into the mountains, and we got stuck overnight.”

“You and Lovelace.” He did not look up. But she wanted him to. She felt changed, she felt womanly, and wanted Dr. Willard to see it.

“We camped with troops,” she said. “I assumed you were told.”

He began typing another line, hitting the return carriage twice before pulling the page from the machine and setting it tidily on the table to examine his work.

“How’s Barnaby?” she asked.

“Yesterday was an eventful day here.” He patted the sheet he had typed. “I have good news, and god-awful news.”

“Well, give me the god-awful news first.”

“Captain Brilling is pushing to start Barnaby’s court-martial proceedings next week.”

“
Next week
?”

“I’m petitioning to buy some time, but I had not expected it to come to this.”

“Well, what can the good news possibly be?”

“He
spoke
.” Willard watched her face as though she were slowly unwrapping a present. “Without Pentothal.”

“He’s awake?!”

“Well, snapping in and out of consciousness; but he’s experiencing moments of real lucidity, finally. Brief, but conscious. His eye is now opening on its own and tracking motion, tracking sound, actively taking in what’s going on around him. Earlier yesterday, when I went to check his vitals at 9:28, he said good morning.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“That was all. ‘Good morning.’ But it means he is slowly climbing out of his mental cave. He knew who I was, he knew it was morning. That is, right now, miraculous progress considering where we started.” Willard spoke quickly, and Juliet saw how happy he was to share his news. “Go see for yourself. You’ll notice the difference in his stare. If he says absolutely nothing, don’t take it personally. His speech will come in bursts right now. Lasting a few seconds at best. It’s a little like staring at the sky, trying to watch for a shooting star. It’s easier to just stumble into it. It’ll come more frequently in time, though.”

In the Recovery Tent, Juliet headed straight to Barnaby’s bed and dropped her bag. An olive army blanket had been tucked beneath his long arms. His eye was closed, flanked by the steep ridges of white bandages.

“Hi there, Private Barnaby, I’m your nurse. Do you remember me? I’ve been taking care of you for a few weeks. My name is Juliet Dufresne.”

His eye remained closed, so Juliet sat beside him and eased off some of the gauze, soaping the edges of his chin and patting it dry. She rubbed Vaseline into his stitches.

Suddenly, he moaned, the sound of a child roused from a nap. His eye opened and sleepily directed its gaze at her face. He reached up and touched her cheek, his fingers traveling slowly toward her birthmark;
his eye sparkled with amazement.

“You’re the sister,” he said.

IN THE UNCOMFORTABLE
days that followed—hoping, impatiently, for further moments of Barnaby’s lucidity and for a coherent explanation of what he knew—Juliet sought distraction. She worked long hours and after dinner found herself drawn to the hospital’s entertainments—the movies and plays and impromptu dances she’d formerly avoided. Since her night with Beau, she felt newly confident, finally entitled to join all the socializing.

The late-July nights were radiantly black. Insects thrummed against the tents and dead gnats stippled the surface of every drink. Drinking was unbridled now—no one had had a furlough in weeks, and the news from France, albeit triumphant, wrought a gloominess throughout the hospital.

Normandy, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Saint-Lô, Caen—each night, the names of the French towns and cities taken by the Allies crackled from BBC Radio. The staff and patients gathered by the radio, listening intently, angrily, not for the news itself but for news of
them,
for some momentary tribute to the one hundred miles of fortified Italian terrain they’d conquered in the last month, for some scant recognition of the hills and valleys littered with bodies, the rivers clotted with their division’s blood. They began calling Italy “the Forgotten Front.”

When the radio had been switched off, they all spilled into the recently assembled Rec Tent. News that Bob Hope and Marlene Dietrich had visited hospitals in France prompted Major Decker and Mother Hen to schedule extensive diversions. Several ward men had gotten hold of a copy of
Macbeth,
and one night it was passed from hand to hand while each man read aloud his part. One of the cooks had a banjo, and accompanying tambourines were made from ration-tin lids; from empty cigarette packs and shrapnel maracas were fashioned. Twice a week, movies were projected onto a large white sheet—
The Maltese Falcon, Fantasia, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

The night of
Lassie Come Home,
the entire staff except Bernice crowded the tent. She explained to Juliet that she liked only movies in which a woman renounced things she deeply desired, or in which a man had to convince those around him of a looming disaster. She did not like comedies or romances or movies with happy endings, which she said gave people false expectations about life.

Juliet wasn’t in a mood to argue. She’d just left the Isolation Tent, where Private Eddie Fishwick had been moved. A bullet had pierced his vocal cords, but after surgery he developed septic shock. It was clear he wouldn’t survive. For days he’d been writing furiously. At all hours Juliet could hear his pencil scratching away, pages fluttering. Mute, he handed stacks of his writing to Juliet, his hazel eyes unnerving in their clarity. But the pages held only scribbles—nothing legible. What, she wondered, did he so desperately want to communicate? Were they notes for his loved ones? Were they confessions? Questions? “I’ll put these somewhere safe,” she said, lacking the heart to tell him his dying words were gibberish.

And now Fishwick could barely work his pencil across the page. He drew faint, uneven lines, mere dashes and arcs, but his eyes sought Juliet’s for signs of comprehension. His skin had taken on a gray translucence. As she left the Isolation Tent that night, he’d shaken his pencil at her; all she could say, guiltily, was “I’ll come check on you later.”

She was becoming strangely accustomed to this—the feeling of ineptness. Where she had once believed the task of nursing was knowing exactly what to do, here she found, again and again, that the challenge was understanding what she could not do. It was quite
simple, really, to rush to an injured man; to walk away was another matter entirely.

In the Rec Tent, she squeezed onto a bench with Major Decker, Dr. Willard, and Mother Hen; in front of them sat a row of patients, crutches laid at their feet. Ration crates lined the sides of the tent where the ward men sat beating out a drumroll with their boot heels. The overhead lights flickered off, and the tent quieted as a preface scrolled on the white sheet:

The author of
Lassie Come Home
was a man of two countries. Born in England, he survived the First World War as a British soldier, only to die in the Second World War, killed in the line of duty in the uniform of the country he had adopted . . . America. With reverence and pride, we dedicate this picturization of his best-loved story to the late Major Eric Knight.