#sparkedupsilver

“Broke,” she snorts, and he feels bad so he finally hands her a smoke and his match book. Does she know she still hunches against the cold air when she lights up? Uses the small flame to warm her face and her hands for a moment before she shakes it out, winking with an indulgent grin. “Sure’d be nice to have this in bed. Where’s your lighter?”

“Germany. The girl next to ya’s got half a lung.”

“No one asked her to hop on a grenade. They let ‘em smoke in the loony ward, you know that? But all of us sound mind folks have to slum it out here ‘cause of Sergeant Silver Star.”

“Sound mind?” He has her talking now, might as well try.

She props an elbow on the arm of her wheelchair and taps, ash spilling onto her robe. Doesn’t acknowledge the ashtray when he pushes it toward her, just stares over the water and half-smiles, distant, flagellatory. “I’m righter than rain.”

“What’s the bandage from?” he asks, taking back his smokes. He needs something to do with his hands.

Her wrist turns slowly as she examines the white gauze wrapping up her forearm with critical interest, as if she’s only now noticed the wound. She sniffs. “Alex didn’t ask so many questions.”

Funny, since Alex is the reason he’s here in the first place. “You didn’t give him the chance.” 

“I did, he lost it,” she says, scowling at a pair of birds taking flight from the riverbank. “He marched up in here talkin’ ‘bout ‘healing’—” Her disdain is so palpable he can taste it next to his cigarette. “—Talkin’ ‘bout ‘guilt’ and ‘conscious.’ Talkin’ ‘bout talkin’ ‘bout it, like talkin’ ‘bout it will fix my leg, like that fuckin’ shrink gives a damn about me.”

She banned me from seeing her, Alex wrote. She’s got no one to take her once she’s discharged. The psychiatrist is worried she’ll try something again. Come down for a week, see if she’ll let you in.

Again? John wrote back along with the number for the boarding house in Green Bay, and Alex called three days later with that question that made him sick. Oh, no one’s told you?

No, no one’s told him. No one’s told him about anything — not Alex, certainly not her, not even Dr. Kaminski, the nervous little man John had cornered after he arrived to Mahalia’s empty bed and a nurse wiping up a pool of blood without a single person informing him of an incident as he was on his way up.

Major, I would prefer to save such a discussion for next-of-kin—

That’s me.

The doctor dipped the left temple of his eyeglasses and mopped at his forehead with a white handkerchief. Shell shock can manifest in bouts of passion, anger—

Passion? he asked not as a question, but so that the good doctor could hear his own words. The wood floor had already stained russet as the nurse ran a cloth over it, the smell of iron in his nose sending white-hot terror down his spine. Mahalia doesn’t do passion.

Kaminski sighs. I understand that Ms. Summerton—

Lieutenant.

I’m sorry?

Lieutenant, John repeats and it feels like he’s back in the stalag when her cough started and he knew it was something and no one would fucking listen until it landed her here. Backs against the wall, just them against the world, and he her protector. You don’t know her, not like I do. Lieutenant Summerton.

Yes, yes, of course, Kaminski said, waving a hand with all the ivory tower confidence of a man who’d seen John’s intensity and stature and decided he’s brawn over brain, another Major Meathead.

That’s when he resolved to break her out of here. They’ve let this happen twice on their watch in four weeks and he made it ten months, through pain so bad it made her sick and cold that you wouldn’t wish on the Devil, without losing her once. Later, sitting next to her bed while she slept in the neurological ward, he started planning his move from her parents’ bedroom to the couch so she can have the bed and the sunrise through the window in the morning, started calculating how to downsize to the top cabinet in the kitchen so she won’t know he’s back on the bottle. He’ll cook something she’ll finally eat and he doesn’t scream in his nightmares — not as far as he knows — so she’ll get a full night’s sleep, and he’ll help her stretch and drive her to the doctor’s and heal.

The birds land on a birch branch nearby, beautiful dark chests blending into the dappled shade from the canopy above. Her eyes go orange in the sunlight, like the dark center of an acorn, like sweet potato, as she follows them upward. 

“Those are black terns,” he says.

A laugh bubbles from her throat, more surprise than amusement, and he sniffs, tossing his head with a shrug. “My mother likes birdwatching.”

It comes out as more of a mumble than he meant it to, unable to raise his eyes above his lap, but is the best he can do. Tit for tat. 

Her lips part and he braces for impact — she can’t see his throat exposed without lunging for it — but the terns start singing, shrill and rhythmic, an alarm blaring. Smoke turns to ash in his mouth when he sees her eyes blow wide. The Red Tails were the defense part of the Allied Air Defense; he got gently shaken awake and coffee before his flights, she got sirens and no time to pray, and now she’s locked onto the branch, chest heaving, knuckles turning white as she grips the arms of her wheelchair. Prepared to fly.

A beat passes, then another, then a whole cigarette in silence. The birds keep crying and her head turns unconsciously toward the wind chimes sounding from the patio like a dog hearing a high whistle. 

Eventually, her shoulders drop from their hunch and she smooths over her robe with mechanical precision. “My mother liked gardening.”

“Yeah?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

They lapse into quiet again, but he doesn’t feel settled. There’s a buzz hanging in the air, a trickle through a crack in a dam, a page turning — it’s unlike her to not pick up after herself, but he finds that she leaves the words with him more and more. The ball in his court, the door unlocked behind her exit.

He steps through after her. “I saw some tools in the shed.”

“You can toss those. The same rusty ones she’s been using forever. Couldn’t get a nickel for ‘em if you tried to sell.” 

And to think he’d forgotten what it feels like to sit next to her — the hot prickle on every inch of his skin and the peace in his bones like he’s finally in the ground, as if his heart’s walked out his chest to stand right in front of him. Like a reflection, like the back of his hand, like eighteen months of stalemates on Hambone’s busted chessboard. Gale calls it Newton’s Third Law, and perhaps that’s why John can feel the pain behind her eyes like he’s the one seeing through them. The defective parts in him are the same in her, mirrored each time he tries to pull her closer and she pushes him away.

He’ll keep trailing her footsteps because this war taught him that there are three things he can’t quit: drinking, hope, and her. And as these bright June days march into July, she’s unfolded as much as she dares — still angry, still stubborn and haughty and righteous — but unfolded nonetheless, giving him hope.

“It doesn’t hurt to have them,” he says.

You gotta meet me somewhere. A quarter of the way, an eighth, even — I see your sister’s pictures on the walls and no one tells me a goddamn thing. Meet me somewhere.

“I suppose,” she replies. And that’s a start. She doesn’t yell at him, doesn’t tell him to get out, doesn’t roll off on her own and leave him with only himself and the terns. She instead picks at her robe while the breeze turns cool in the early evening. “I — Don’t—“

“Excuse me, sir.” A nurse approaches, hands twisting nervously, eyes flitting between him and Mahalia. “Visitation will end in an hour for patient dinner.”

He nods at her, pops a soothing smile. “Thank you.”

“Of course. Lieutenant Summerton.” She departs with a dip of her head.

“Did I yell at her?”

“I did,” Mahalia sighs, “and I got blood on her shoes.”

His heart seizes to the point that he’s speechless, but he can’t sit in it or she’ll back out. “How’d that happen?”

For a moment, he thinks he’s too late as she pulls her good leg to her chest and rests her arm on her knee, her chin tucking into the crook of her elbow. She doesn’t say anything until the birds sing again.

“Don’t tell Alex,” she murmurs. “Or Vera and Benny, or — or Brady, or—”

“Or Gale?”

She exhales and her entire body sinks. It’s easy to lie to Gale — to counter, contradict — because he doesn’t believe you. But omission is another thing. That’s when the guilt comes in; Gale knows when you’re telling the truth, he just doesn’t know that something’s missing. And you get that small, easy smile like he’s proud of you for your candor knowing you usually dodge, and he’s none the wiser.

“Not Gale.”

“He’s worried about you.”

“He’ll get over it.”

“He wants to visit.”

“Great, he should bring Marge.”

A low blow, but that’s how she gets when she’s cornered and how she prefers to do her fighting. She and Alex still won’t talk about what happened on the day they went down; trapped animals will do whatever necessary to be free. Whatever necessary.

“You wanna get outta here?” he asks, squinting at the sunlight circling her head in a corona. 

She turns to him, a saint. “I thought you’d never ask.”

It’s humorless and bitter and she lights a smoke like it’s February in Germany, but it’s not a no, and he’s instantly dreaming — hope again, fucking hope — of watching her shamble into the kitchen in the mornings and sitting barefoot on the porch stairs with coffee as they watch the streetlights come on. There’s life, Mahalia, it’s everywhere. I’ll show you.

“They can discharge you tomorrow.”

Her frown loosens and her brows furrow like they’re of two different minds. “But — how — but you’re working.”

He shrugs. “A man’s gotta make a living.”

“And you trust me? Alone in the house by myself?”

If she wants him to flinch first, she’s going to have to come out with it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I — I just figured, y’know…”

“What?”

She shrugs, all nonchalance falling flat over the avian thinness in her shoulders, and stares at a passing nurse. “I just figured you learned your lesson the first time.”

Ah, the first time. He was determined to get himself killed the first time, losing her and Gale within hours of each other. But he lived, didn’t he? And she lived and Gale lived, and that makes him want to stay right in it as long as he can. She his mirror wants to run before it burns her. They’ll meet in the middle.

Her cigarette burns down to her fingers and she turns to the ashtray. Stamp, stamp, stamp. She checks her watch before gesturing for his pack. “Gimme another one.”