blue skies

It’s a rotten little note that comes for her in London. He could have called to tell her he’d gotten the ring back — like a grownup. Jo pictures him sat at his Remington Noiseless, stabbing out the letters in dying blue ink, correcting the date on that wartime onionskin paper they all hate. Like it’s to his fucking editor.

Entirely William, she thinks. Suddenly, every moment she spent in his arms comes back to her like a bee sting. No sparkling stones on her finger, like the afterimage of bright lights. Good riddance. She wasn’t meant for them, anyway. Diamonds or spinels or white sapphires. Paste stones, maybe. Cut glass.

It might be fun to pull out her lighter and set it on fire. The letter. The words about how maybe he’d overstepped, in what he’d said, but that she couldn’t deny what it looked like. What what looked like? she wants to ask, even though she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Doing my job? Doing what every man here does? Being a little ruthless like you? Like he’d like to be, anyway. Easier to make up stories in his head about what he thought she did to get a story. 

A knock at the door — she has a phonecall. 

Kay would say he deserved another sock in the jaw for what he’d said about his mother being right. God, that’s another thing she can’t think about, scampering down the stairs behind the bellboy in her trousers and half her sweater set. William wasn’t enough of a coward to go whining about it to anyone, although the idea that it would have made it very far up any ladder is laughable. He did have shame somewhere underneath all that pressed cotton. 

The night clerk eyes her warily, hands her the receiver. 

“Josephine?” The voice she recognizes instantly, somehow contained inside a machine. “Jo Brandt?”

“This is she.”

“What kind of hotel’s your paper springing for that doesn’t give a lady her own phone?” The crowing voice inside the wire all the way from the airfield. She exhales like a laugh, like it’s a little punch to her chest. “Good, I’ve got the right girl.”

“The one and only.” Oh, does she sound bitter.

“I’m glad you picked up.” She turns, leans a bare arm against the wall. “Listen,” he says. “I should say I’m sorry, but-” 

She can see his hand in his hair, the jacket and his shoulders. 

“Don’t-”

“I won’t,” he says. “Because I’m not.” Maybe he should, maybe he shouldn’t. “My mother will be delighted to know she was right after all.” Maybe she wouldn’t have minded if he’d loosened a few of William’s teeth. “But I will ask that your next drink’s on me.”

She could use a drink right now, staring down a stack of proofs  and Kay’s contact sheets and a red pencil. The best she can do here is some weak tea. “The next time I’m in town, sure.”

“Maybe a little sooner than that, I hope-” She shifts her weight to her other foot, listening. “I’m in a phone booth outside Liverpool Street Station.”

“You’re serious?”

“Serious as the bobby outside this booth giving me the eye.” It’s like she can hear him looking outside. “Say yes and get me out of here, Josephine.” She huffs a laugh again. “Call it. Call it an apology.”

Somehow, he spots her before she spots him. The look on his face says it’s not a hard thing, now that there’s a band of light on the horizon,  something to reflect off the wet grass and texture the bark on the trees. His boots crunch on the gravel, nearing hers. “You’re up early.”

Now it’s her turn to look half-puzzled. “Can’t tell the readers I came here to sleep in,” she says. Not that anyone could have, when the Clubmobile girls were up in the early blue dark to start their work, when the blackbirds and wrens and warblers had chirped her back awake. He’s up to see them off and back. His boys.

“You need coffee?” Major Egan’s shadow fidgets, looks towards the row of bikes parked outside the mess.  “I don’t mean you look like you need it, but-” I do look like I need it. Quiet nights leave more room, don’t they. He’s talking, she’s happy to let him talk. “And it doesn’t deserve the advertisement, but it gets the job done.”

“I won’t tell General Spaatz’s daughter you said that.” Yes, she does need coffee, but she’s  not about to tell him that. She’ll go hang around after the planes take off, get some then.

“Nah, me and Tatty are like this,” he says, crossing his fingers.

She tugs at the hem of her jacket in the morning chill, waves a hand. “I’ll sort it myself, don’t worry. Thank you,” she says, before it sounds like she’s trying to brush him off. He cares. She’s only known him a week and it’s the thing that radiates off him, if you didn’t count a song. If she had one sentence — and she might, she often does — that’s the thing she’d say. “I won’t keep you.”

The light licks at the dark circles under his eyes, the bruises on his knuckles. You had a bad dream too, didn’t you? How could you not? “Let me know if you can’t find some, we’ll sort you out.”

It’s a watch-tick brighter even in just the minutes they’ve stopped and talked. She wants to ask him a hundred questions. If he slept. If he believes in lucky streaks. What he carries in his pockets. She’ll get to that last one. 

What does it mean, she thinks, to know someone’s alive? Except it’s not someone. It’s Bucky, it’s John. He never calls himself that, and maybe if Jo doesn’t think too hard she’ll convince herself it isn’t a betrayal to think of him as John. The name he grew up with, shouted from the kitchen window. The name he shed as soon as he was far enough away.

What does it mean to know he’s alive, when anything could change at any second?

She tries to keep the headlines from her mind, kept at bay like snarling dogs with a whiskey pour this side of too-heavy, with a record that isn’t one she ever danced to with him, tries not to cry. 

She dreams again about wandering in the dark, the grass high at her elbows, dandelion leaves at her heels, something scratching. Towards a copse of trees in the dark, the one a ship had lit ablaze two weeks after she’d arrived. 

The last time she’d had that dream was Norfolk, half-woken by it in a tiny bed, nuzzled into him, his naked chest. He’d kissed her shoulder, right by his mouth, let her cup his cheek. Let her twine her cold thighs with his. 

His mop of warm curls. Too dark to see the fresh-nutmeg freckles on his nose.  Maybe she loved him more than she ever thought she’d be allowed. She wonders if he ever thinks about her. Of course not, she thinks, bigger things to-, and they make her want to throw  up.

That cottage. The last time before the last time, before the earthward-spiral of late summer, the autumn shock. His blue eyes in the dark, like a storm on a lake. When she thinks of quiet, she thinks of him. When she thinks of anything, she thinks of him. A sorry state for a reporter to be.