Another Homecoming (2 page)

“They told me—” She stopped, her face a bewildered mask, then started again. “They said that battle in North Africa was so . . . was so awful that there wouldn’t be any survivors.” Howard had to lean forward to catch her last words, barely a whisper. He had heard the news reports and knew the officers were correct in not leaving her with false hope.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “Anyone I can call?”

“I don’t have anyone, you know that.” A single tear trickled down her cheek. She did not bother to wipe it away. Her unseeing gaze returned to the window. “I’m all alone in the world now.” Her voice sounded drained of all energy. All feeling.

Howard started to protest, to tell her that she could always count on him. But he couldn’t honestly say that. Just that morning he had received his own induction papers. Every glance at the yellow telegram in his hand left him chilled to the bone. “Anything at all,” he repeated. “Isn’t there something?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time Martha seemed to find the strength to bring the world into focus. She turned to look at Howard with eyes so full of haunting pain and fear that his heart twisted. “I’m eighteen years old. I have nobody in the world.” She crossed her arms over her distended belly. Martha was a small woman, and the child was scarcely three weeks away from term. Even seated as she was, her lightly boned frame seemed scarcely able to support the load. “What am I going to do, Howard? How will I take care of this baby?” Now her tears fell freely, as though she were weeping on behalf of her unborn child who would never know a father’s love.

The deliberate way she pronounced the last sentence left him unable to draw on his doctor’s training or his usual good cheer. Howard leaned back in his chair and studied this stoically calm woman. And woman she was, no matter how few the number of years she could claim. Her marriage and pregnancy and now the loss of her husband had left little of the child he had known for most of her life.

A few years apart in age, they had been raised on the same Baltimore street, in a section of the city that had been almost entirely Irish in their youth. Now it was much more cosmopolitan. To Howard it seemed as though while he had been away at college and then medical school, other parts of the world had invaded and taken over their old neighborhood. And during that same six-year stretch, knock-kneed little Martha O’Leary had grown into a willowy young lady, lost both her parents, fallen in love with a man from a different social class, a soldier, and wed. Howard could not help but wonder how things might have been had he stayed in Baltimore as his mother had wished and attended a local college.

“What am I going to do?” Martha was asking again. Her quiet voice held to a single note, droning out words heavy with feeling.

“Martha,” Howard started, then hesitated. Suddenly he found himself taken by a desire to ask her to wait for him, to let him send her money until he could return from his own army stint. But something held him back. How could he say such words the same day she had learned about her husband? It was impossible. And what if he didn’t return? Howard Austin felt as though his heart was humming with the tension of not being able to say what he wanted, while his country pressured him to leave and prepare for war. He swallowed hard and said, “Wait a few days—maybe something will turn up for you.” He hoped the words didn’t sound as empty to her as they did to him.

“I know what I have to do.”

Something in Martha’s voice filled Howard with apprehension as he looked at her across his desk. She had come in for a final examination before her baby’s delivery. He watched the play of emotions across her delicate girl-woman features, deep pain and sorrow along with determination.

“I want you to find a family who will adopt my baby.”

Howard’s breath left him as if he’d been struck in the stomach. “You don’t really mean that, Martha.”

“You said you would help me, Howard.” Her voice was pleading.

“Wouldn’t it be better—well, a child would be such comfort to you now.”

“And wouldn’t that be a fine, selfish reason to deny my baby a decent chance at life?” Martha rose from the chair, easing herself up in careful stages. She walked over to the office window and traced one finger along the trail left by gently falling rain. Her other hand caressed the baby. “I couldn’t do that, Howard.”

There was no anger to her tone, nothing he could hang an argument on. His heart ached for her and the unborn child. It was at times like this that he wished he did not care for his patients as much as he did. Being colder would have made him a much better doctor. And his personal feelings for her made it even worse. “If you say so. But I still think—”

“A good home,” she said and turned back to him. For an instant her features crumpled despite her resolve. Howard watched as she swallowed and seemed to gulp away the tears, making a huge effort to regain control—not for herself, but for her child. “A mother and a father who can give everything my baby deserves to receive.”

“Sergeant, hello, can you hear me?”

The voice was as soft as the light. He struggled to open his eyes. He looked up at a golden haze. Strange how the light could be so brilliant and so soft at the same time.

“Can you hear me, Sergeant?”

He licked dry lips. A hand slid beneath his head, lifted, and a cup touched his mouth. When he had sipped a few mouthfuls, the hand lowered him back to the pillow. A voice said, “There, is that better?”

A tent. His eyes focused enough for him to see that he was lying in a tent. The sun struck the canvas overhead and turned it into a sheet of brilliant gold. He turned his head and saw that a nurse was seated beside his bed. She smiled at him. “Nice to have you back among the living, Sergeant.”

She kept calling him “Sergeant.” Was that his name? He could not think. His mind felt so foggy. And there was something about the way she spoke, something strange.

“You’re in a British field hospital. You’ve been wounded.” The nurse hesitated a moment, then continued, “Nod your head if you can understand what I’m saying, Sergeant.”

He nodded his head, though he could make little sense from her words. They seemed to dance through his mind and then disappear before he could lay hold of them. Strange how he could hear her and understand her, and at the same time understand nothing at all.

“You lost your identification in the battle. We don’t know who you are. There seems to be no record of you.” When he did not respond, she raised her voice. “Can you tell me your name? What regiment are you from?”

A dull drumbeat sounded at the very back of his consciousness. Steadily it grew louder, until he realized it was not a sound at all, but rather a pain. A dull agony that beat to the steady rhythm of his heart.

Another voice approached the end of his bed, one that spoke with authority. “Any word who he is?”

“Not yet, doctor. He seems to just come and go.”

“Just as well.” The deep voice spoke with clipped brusqueness. “No need to have him awake enough to feel his leg.”

His leg
. As though the words were a cue, he felt the dull beat of pain center down to his left leg. It did not hurt too badly yet. But there was something about the pain that scared him, even in his confused state. As though the pain was only the slightest hint of what was to come.

The terse voice demanded, “Any word from HQ?”

“Yessir. Still no idea who he is.”

“Well, let’s see what we can do about this leg. There probably was a letter in his back pocket, but the scraps that are left don’t tell us anything. We can worry about his identity later.” The deep voice drew nearer. “Help me shift his bandages so I can have a look.”

Harry felt movements around him. Then the pain focused. It became not just a feeling, but a white-hot light. He groaned.

“How long has it been since his last injection, nurse?”

“Just under two hours.”

“Well, no need to chafe him any more than necessary. Hurry and give him the morphine before we go any further.”

Hurry.
Harry
. The pain shot through the fog in his mind, bringing every thought into crystal clarity. Perhaps that was his name. But maybe it was the name of someone else, another friend out there in the heat and the dust and the war. He wanted to speak, to ask if he was the Harry or the other guy. Then he felt the needle’s jab, and soon a new wave of confusion swept through him. He did not mind. The pain receded with the sound of his heart, until it was nothing more than a shadow on the distant horizon of his consciousness.

The last words he heard were, “Now let’s see if we can save this leg.”

The administrator of Baltimore General Hospital stepped into Dr. Howard Austin’s office. “Got a minute?”

“No.” He did not want to be disturbed. Packing up and preparing for his departure was harder than Howard Austin had expected.

But the administrator did not move. His normally unflappable calm had deserted him. “I told you, leave all that. We’ll just lock the office up and hold it for your return.”

Howard finally said the words that surrounded him, clawing at his throat until it was hard to breathe. “And what if I don’t come back?”

Instead of arguing, the administrator slumped in defeat. “Howard, this is a terrible time to be asking, but I need a favor.”

“You are joking.”

“I wish I were.”

“My train leaves in exactly”—he glanced at his watch, then continued—“four hours.”

But the administrator still did not budge. “You know the baby you delivered yesterday morning.”

“The Grimes girl?” His attention finally shifted to the man standing in his doorway. “What about her?”

“We’ve been in contact for quite some time with a couple who wants to adopt a baby girl.” It was the administrator’s turn to avoid Howard’s gaze. “They want to speak with the doctor in charge of the birth and prenatal care. They insist on it.”

His movements stilled, Howard demanded, “What are you
not
telling me?”

“This couple,” the administrator said, with a sigh, “they’re, well . . .”

“Rich,” Howard guessed, his tone flat.

“You know we urgently require donors to keep going and buy new equipment,” the administrator replied, his voice rising defensively. “They’ve offered to help build our new wing if we find them a proper baby.”

A
proper
baby.

“How much?”

“Half a million dollars,” the administrator replied, awestruck. “No strings attached.”

Right, no strings—but a baby.

Howard rose to his feet and started toward the door. Despite all he faced, he very much wanted to meet this pair. He had a deep feeling of obligation to Martha and her baby. The baby she had refused to see. She knew that once her eyes settled on her baby girl, she would never be strong enough to carry out her resolve. It would be so much easier for her to know that her child had been well placed. “Where are they?”

The hospital entrance was a product of a bygone era, a tall, swooping dome of brick, crowned by brass lights. The floors were marble and worn into soft waves. The wooden walls probably had once been very grand, but now looked faded and in dire need of varnish. Howard was halfway down the stairs when he drew to a halt, his attention caught by the Rolls Royce automobile. Just outside the glass-topped entrance doors, a uniformed chauffeur stood patiently beside the long, low-slung vehicle.