Romeo Blue (16 page)

As soon as I was outside, I ran as if I had no legs at all. I ran till my lungs squeezed and shuddered and burned. I ran as if the wind and the sea and the sky and the whole world were lifting me up and pulling me along.

As I drew closer, the Bathburn house loomed in its usual large, brown, imposing way over the point. Its many windows seemed empty for some reason, voiceless, as if no one at all were inside. Even Captain A. E. Bathburn and his wife and daughters seemed to have vanished, leaving only a great wooden shell holding up against the wind. Still I had passed some black cars parked in a neighbor’s driveway several houses down from ours and I knew who those cars probably belonged to. Isn’t it odd how a gray day can make colors brighter? A red dress, for instance, on a gray day can glow like a burning flame. Those dark cars glowed with rich, fearful blackness.

It was just November and a hazy, lonely, mild afternoon and the Bathburn house was utterly silent before me. Nothing moved. Not a twig, nor a stick, nor a fallen leaf.

Then I suddenly saw a man in a dark suit at the back door. He had a gun in his hand. He was not going to let me in; I was sure of that. I stopped on the path and before he saw me, I quickly turned the corner and went for the kitchen window at the other side of the house. There was a ledge outside the window where we often set our laundry baskets, full of wet clothes, before hanging them
on the clothesline. We had done some laundry earlier. I knew the window would still be ajar. I got up on that ledge and slowly lifted it open and slipped in.

Now I was in the kitchen. How silent everything was. Mr. Fitzwilliam’s men were in the hallway. I could see their shadows. I could feel their heavy presence. They were standing stock-still, leaning back against the walls. They had holsters with guns strapped across their chests, all of them. One of them saw me and startled and then began shaking his head back and forth. Then he put up his hand, stopping me. He swung his arms about, motioning for me to stay where I was. So I froze and leaned against the doors of the dumbwaiter.

Derek and I and even Stu Barker used to play with that dumbwaiter. It was supposed to be loaded with trays of food and those trays could be pulled up to the next floor on ropes and pulleys, but we often loaded it up with trays of shells and rocks and sent them up the shaft during one of our games. Because he was small, Derek and I once hoisted Stu Barker up to the gymnasium that way. Now I slowly opened one of those little doors of the dumbwaiter. I could see then a slice of the parlor through the doors on the opposite side. I could see my father on one end of the room and Derek’s father on the other. Derek was standing in the center of the room between them. It looked to me as if the Gray Moth had just dropped his gun, because Derek was holding it in his palm. He wasn’t aiming the gun at anyone but it was
lying in his good hand. He was looking down at it as if his hand were on fire.

“Derek,” my father called out, “give me the gun so we can arrest this man. He is not your father. He is a Nazi spy. Please. Stand back and give me the weapon.”

“No,” shouted Derek, holding the gun now with his finger on the trigger and pointing it up to the ceiling. “He is not a spy. He is my father and my friend. I have been waiting all these years for him. We have been taking photographs together. He likes my portraits. You don’t understand. You’re wrong.”

“Derek,” said Gideon, “I do understand. I know you need a father. But this man is a Nazi and a spy. Hand me the gun!”

“Derek, you must give the gun back to me,” said the Gray Moth. “A son should stand by his father. We have so much to learn about each other, so much to know. Time has separated us. A father and son should stand together.”

“Derek, a gun is a dangerous thing,” Gideon called out. “You could get hurt!”

“No!” shouted Derek.

“Please, please, Derek!” said Gideon. “Hand me the gun now so we can arrest this man.”

“Don’t listen,” said the Gray Moth. “They will take away our time together. It will be vanished!”

I did not know why Mr. Fitzwilliam’s men, hidden out in the hall, were not moving. What were they waiting for?
Why were they standing like dark marble statues? Was it because Derek had the gun? Were they afraid he would be harmed or shoot someone if they charged in now?

“Derek,” I called through the doors of the dumbwaiter. “Derek, Derek. I found out Mr. Fitzwilliam put the ad in the paper on purpose, to catch this man. They didn’t know what he looked like. You were set up. We were part of this without knowing it. He’s not your father. He’s a fake.”

“Leave us alone,” Derek shouted. “We were going to work on a scrapbook today. You’ve ruined everything, Felicity.”

“Derek,” said Gideon again, “if I have been amiss, tell me. I can change. Let me be the father I would like to be for you, forever. I love you so much, Derek. Please give me the gun.”

“No. No. No!” cried Derek. “No. No. No. No!”

The next things happened so fast, I could not say in what order they fell. I could not say how or why I did what I did. Sometimes some other part of me acts and it feels like it has nothing to do with me. Somehow, suddenly, some other part of me was up inside the dumbwaiter and then in a blurry instant I hurled myself out the doors on the other side and I fell and rolled into the parlor and knocked against Derek with quite a force, though I claimed later that it did not hurt at all. I felt nothing, only the whole room seemed to spin and faces and voices churned and shattered about me. When I knocked against
Derek, the gun he had in his good hand went flying across the room and landed in front of my father.

Gideon reached for it quickly. “Okay, Derek,” he said, “back away carefully now. Move way over now. Slowly. Fliss, back away! Stand back!”

He roared like a great grizzly bear and rushed forward towards Derek’s father. At that same moment the house snapped, exploded with the sound of Mr. Fitzwilliam’s men moving in quickly. I heard the rumble of their shuffling feet. It sounded like a whole flock of birds coming to rest in a tree. I saw some of the dark jackets plunging into the room. They circled and enclosed
die Graue Motte
. He pressed himself against the wall, his arms out, as if struggling to fly. They surrounded him and cornered him. Fitzwilliam put handcuffs on the man who had claimed to be Derek’s father.

Now Derek began crying. He cried and he sobbed and he called out, “No.”

“Derek, listen to me, if this man truly is the German agent we think he is, then he will have a birthmark on his forehead,” said Gideon.

“No, he won’t!” Derek said.

“Yes, he will,” Gideon said, his voice thundering like the wind when it rushes through the tower room at night, like the ocean when the waves pound the shore in winter.

“Well then, we’ll have a look won’t we?” said Mr. Fitzwilliam. He pulled off Derek’s father’s hat and
pushed his hair away from his forehead and there, at the very top of it, near the hairline, was a gray-and-black birthmark. It was distinct and clearly had two triangle shapes to the mark. It reminded me of the wings of a moth.

“Get away. Go away,” shouted Derek, pushing past Mr. Fitzwilliam. “No. No. No!” He ran out of the room, knocking over the tea tray and the muffins we had made earlier that day. He pelted down into the hall. Then he barreled through the kitchen and I heard the back door slam. I rushed out into the hall, and through the window in the dining room, I saw him run along the ledge above the sea.

Later when I looked out the window to the north of the house, I could see a line of black cars leaving the point, headed back towards Portland.

But what happens after an arrest? What happens to those who are left behind to clean up the muffins that were ground into the carpet, to sweep away the broken crystal and the shattered teacups? What do you do about the terrible emptiness that sits amongst the disarray?

“Derek!” my father called as soon as the cars had pulled away. “Derek.” He plunged through the house and he found me crouching in a corner in the kitchen. I was crying and he was crying. “My God,” he said, “what were you doing here? You could have been killed. I thought you were with Miami. And where is Derek? Where has he gone? Oh my God, Derek.”

We both stood at the back door for a moment, looking off towards the top of the hill where we could see Derek sitting alone up high on a rock ledge above the sea. My father and I stood there, unable to move or to decide what to do for him. How helpless I felt. My father put his head against the wall and he put his fists up and he pounded on the wall over and over again.

Then he went outside and stood in the garden in a
helpless kind of way. He stood there and he called out to Derek. I watched him climb the hill towards Derek. I heard him calling and calling out his name. But Derek did not turn round. I wanted to rush out and comfort Derek but I knew he needed time to be alone. He had been cruelly hurt and there was nothing to be said or done.

I waited until dusk when a swath of early stars appeared in the fading sky. Then I climbed the hill towards Derek. He was now a silhouette in a fiery sunset. I sat beside him and for the longest time we didn’t speak. We let the ocean say it all. We were children in the midst of a war. We had no choice but to accept the waves as they rolled in and out. We were caught in the sea of it. But those new stars, like fireflies, beamed and blinked and lit their tiny lights all round us. I waited and waited and hoped as I sat there that he might say something but he did not. Finally, in the darkening air, Derek got up and walked away from me.

Derek’s anger at me now was slow burning and constant. He was extremely quiet that next week. If I walked into a room, Derek would leave or else he’d stick his head out the window or under a table or turn towards any corner where I wasn’t.

That week in Bottlebay, about fifty boys were drafted and when The Gram and I went to town, there was a bit of a gloom in the air, especially in Mr. King’s hardware shop because Mr. King’s son was one of them. He was shipping out to a training camp somewhere faraway. Mr. King hung an American flag outside the shop and there were little flags sticking out of watering cans and waving from flowerpots in the window.

Perhaps I could find a gift for Derek, something to cheer him up, something to make him forgive me. So when The Gram and I stopped at the five-and-dime, I had a look round in the bins. I knew that I had betrayed Derek and the memory of it went through me like knives. It felt a bit like Derek was a knife thrower in a circus these days and I was the girl holding balloons in her mouth while he threw knives and popped the balloons with great precision, just barely missing me at each turn.
I hadn’t wanted to betray him, really. I had saved him, hadn’t I?

I looked at the selection of trinkets in rows at the five-and-dime store. The wooden floor sagged and creaked under my feet. There was a bin full of little birds made of china or porcelain. They were ten cents each and I fancied a small white dove. The Gram was just picking out rolls of fly tape and a new flyswatter, so I handed my ten cents to the woman behind the counter and she wrapped the dove in brown paper. Her daughter was a WAAC, that is, a woman in the auxiliary army corps. There was a framed photograph of her behind the cash register. She was wearing a lovely, smart uniform.