The Secret of Raven Point (26 page)

Signora Gaspaldi lit a row of candles in empty wine jugs
lining the floor, and yellow light wavered across the room. She disappeared and brought them a pitcher of water with glasses and set them by the door. She threw back the covers on the mattress and removed a hot brick wrapped in a towel. She patted the mattress excitedly:
“
É
caldo.”

“I’ll take the floor,” Willard said when the signora had left.

“That’s worse than a bedroll on the ground.”

“I’ll be fine.” Willard stood facing the door. “Go ahead and get yourself comfortable.”

Juliet sank into the ancient mattress and tugged off her boots. She tried to remove her pants as quietly as possible, but the sound of her zipper cut awkwardly through the room. She recalled Glenda undressing that day at the lake, her slow, languorous performance. Even with his back to her, Juliet still felt nervous. All her prudishness returned. What had happened with Beau seemed miles away, another lifetime. With Willard it was different. With Willard it mattered. She pulled the covers to her chin.

“All clear,” she said.

Willard turned and unbuttoned his shirt; his chest was pale and tubular. With his pants still on, he knelt to blow out the candles. “Well, good night then.”

She didn’t know what she had expected, but it was certainly more than this. She wanted to tell him about Charlesport and her father. She wanted to ask him about his parents, about Chicago, about his childhood. She wanted this thing between them named, acknowledged. But Willard had shrunk from her. Juliet lay in the dark and listened to him heel off his shoes and arrange himself on the floor, his belt buckle scratching the wood. He readjusted several times before lying still for a while, but she did not think he was asleep. The sounds of pots clanking in the sink downstairs rang through the room.

“That was a nice day,” she said into the darkness.

“Very nice.”

“You know a lot about opera.”

“To the great misfortune of those stuck in conversation with me.”

“Oh, I liked it.”

He was quiet, and for a moment she feared he was finally going to sleep.

“Dr. Willard, are you sure you’re comfortable? We’re supposed to be getting rest, after all.”

“I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine.”

Was he really going to say nothing more? Did he feel nothing between them? Had nothing happened in that long, wonderful day? Juliet felt as though an enormous weight were suddenly pressing against her chest; tomorrow they would return to the hospital, to their normal routine. Everything she had felt would vanish. She needed to say things, to ask things—questions she could ask only here, under the blanket of darkness.

“Dr. Willard,” she began, “how come you’re the only doctor in the whole hospital who doesn’t seem determined to get cozy with all the nurses?”

He was silent for some time; Juliet heard Signora Gaspaldi and Peppino coming up the wooden stairs, opening a door across the hall.

“I explained to you my belief in boundaries. The need for professional distance.”

A bewildered anger slowly rose within her, shook loose all her decorum. She would finally say what she had been thinking for weeks, and say it in a way too intimate to ignore. Her hand tightened around the edge of the sheet and she spat out a single word, a word she had used only a few times in her life, a word she had a right to use with the man she had wandered through Florence with, a man she had worked beside for almost three months: “
Bullshit
.”

He cleared his throat. “I have absolutely no reason to lie.”

Willard’s composure enraged her. How could he talk to her
with such condescension? Juliet shook her head, rustling the pillow. “Left and right,” she stated, “everybody is coupling off.”

“Well, what of it?” His pitch, finally, had risen to exasperation, and Juliet had the sinking feeling she had driven him away. The day was lost; any feeling he might have had for her was lost. Her true fear simply tumbled out of her:

“Dr. Willard . . . is it
me
?”

“God no, Juliet.” She heard him turn from side to side, his knees and elbows knocking the floor. He lay still and seemed to ruminate on something, exhaling lengthily. “For Chrissakes,” he finally whispered, “I’m married.”

Juliet sat up. She blinked in the darkness, her head fuzzy. Had she heard him right?

She was waiting for him to say more, to retract, to explain. How had she never imagined . . . ?

She hoped he was at least looking toward her, that he wanted, in his moment of confession, to see her. She wanted still to feel their connection. But in the darkness she could make out nothing. Instead, she felt the arrival of a new presence, a vague and shadowy figure lurking in the room, hovering between them.

A wife.

From across the hall came the soft melodious syllables of Signora Gaspaldi’s prayers. Beneath that she could hear Willard’s breathing. If his thoughts were with her, or someone else, Juliet didn’t know. She slowly let her face drop into her pillow.

They rode back to the hospital the next morning in mostly an awkward silence.

“You don’t wear a ring,” Juliet said quietly, speaking to the road
ahead.

“And I don’t carry around photographs or talk about my life at home. It’s how it has to be, for my work.”

“But I’m not a patient.”

“No.”

Willard gripped the wheel, and she could see white spots of bloodlessness fill his knuckles.

“Well, you’re married and you’re from Chicago,” said Juliet, tapping out a drumbeat on the dashboard. In the painfully bright light of morning, her embarrassment had mounted. “I’ll get started writing your biography as soon as we get back.”

“I understand that you don’t like my rules.
I
don’t necessarily like my rules. But they serve us well.”

“How?”

“It would be reckless for us to start having long, personal conversations. That’s how it all starts.”

“
What
starts?”

Willard turned to look at her quizzically, and the jeep slowed as he eased his foot off the gas pedal. He smiled gently, somewhat disbelievingly, as though touched by her question. “You’re so young,” he said, shaking his head. Once more, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and looked around at the pale hills. Between the hills, oblong evergreens, velvety green, stood in dark clumps. “It’s a nice day,” he said, “a beautiful day, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you in Florence. You are an excellent travel companion.”

“Thank you,” she said, but she felt she had lost something. She wasn’t so young; she wanted him to understand that. She did not want to be a travel companion.

“I’m not a virgin,” she blurted.

Willard’s face went deeply red. “Sweet Jesus, girl.” He spoke to the roof. “That’s exactly the kind of personal thing I shouldn’t know.”

“I had sex in a cave. With a soldier.
Recently
.”

Willard’s eyes widened and he began to laugh.
“Juliet, did you inject yourself with some of the Sodium Pentothal? Try to rein in
some
of your thoughts. Especially while I’m driving.”

“Agree you won’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

“For the record, I outrank you not just in years but also medically
and
militarily. But if it will stem these confessions, yes, we’re agreed.”

As they pulled into the hospital encampment, they saw a crowd of nurses and doctors milling noisily outside Major Decker’s tent. Two military policemen stood nearby at full alert, and Bernice seemed to be arguing with them.

Juliet and Willard both stepped from the truck, leaving behind the Palazzo Pitti and their talk of opera, leaving behind their whispers in the dark, shedding their awkwardness and embarrassment with each brisk step toward the commotion, resuming their respective roles as doctor and nurse so seamlessly that no one would have guessed what had passed between them.

Juliet rushed over to Bernice. “What’s going on?” she asked. Willard came up beside her.

“It’s Private Barnaby,” Bernice answered. “The MPs are taking
him away for the court-martial.”

SEPTEMBER BROUGHT THICK
rains. The air was gray and cool, and the earth was endlessly moist—Juliet could taste it. The leaves in the trees were wet and gleaming and shook overhead like a jungle disturbed. A knee-deep fog rose from the ground and caused Juliet to move from tent to tent as though wading through clouds. Mud sucked defiantly at her boots. For balance, she walked with her arms extended, as if trying to take flight.

Barnaby had been gone almost two weeks, along with Dr. Willard, and no one had heard anything about the court-martial proceedings. Amid endless speculation, anger was mounting. To the other patients, Barnaby’s trial had come to symbolize the injustice of the entire Italian campaign. They were
all
mute, in some respects,
all
doomed. In his act of self-destruction they saw the wretched madness they could, at any moment, be driven to.

Juliet felt a growing anxiety about his trial, a deepening melancholy, sharpened every morning as she walked past Dr. Willard’s empty tent. In such haste to gather his notes and records, he left with Barnaby without saying good-bye. What if he never came back? It hadn’t occurred to her she might not see him again.

Juliet slept poorly, a chill clinging to her scalp. Visions of the blue eye returned, meandering hideously through her dreams, and as she woke in the dark and tugged on her clothes, the nightmares still clung to her. It was still black outside when she arrived in the Recovery Tent to begin her shift, that strange, fragile hour when those who had been awake all night encountered those who had just awakened. To the familiar stream of exhausted faces and bloodshot eyes Juliet said her hellos; clipboards were handed over, notes reviewed; then they were gone, those nurses and ward men who seemed to live in the underworld of the night.

Beside the nursing station Juliet drank her coffee and stared at the two long rows of cots, the sleeping, blanket-tangled figures. She dreaded these first hours of her rounds when, one by one, the patients woke; there was always a moan or a gasp of despair as they groggily patted their stumps and their bandages, having dreamt they were whole.

The fighting had intensified near Il Giogo Pass, and amputations resumed with disconcerting regularity:
Divide deep fascia. Retract. Divide muscle. Retract. Cut periosteum. Saw bone. Sever nerves.
One afternoon, while Juliet was assisting a surgery, a thought came to her as she stared into the bucket of limbs: Would she recognize her brother’s arm if she saw it? His hand? It had seemed at first a purely scientific question, but the full dismal weight of it quickly hit her. She realized she no longer believed she would find him. Day by day her hope was faltering. Barnaby was gone, half of the division in which Tuck had been fighting was shipped to France, and she knew no more about his disappearance than she did before she’d come to Italy. All she knew was that injury and death were beginning to seem strangely normal; the shock of the blood and gore had faded, and she felt a numb detachment from the bodies.
Bodies,
that was how she thought of them now, or parts of bodies:
the perforated intestine, the fractured tibia.
“The collapsed lung wants someone to write a letter for him,” she heard herself tell Bernice one day.

The days were a blur of surgeries and admissions; litters arrived covered with raincoats, and Juliet worked swiftly, calmly, until one afternoon, in the Receiving Tent, looking down at a man whose face was a bleeding pincushion of shrapnel, her whole body suddenly stiffened. Hesitantly, she read the man’s tag: Technical Sergeant Beau Conroy.

She stumbled. She had been eagerly awaiting a letter from
him, had been composing one to him. She had never imagined this.

She touched part of his earlobe, the only area that wasn’t blackened with blood. “It’s Juliet,” she whispered. “It’s okay. We’re gonna get you fixed up.”

Beau’s eyes were firmly closed, the lids slick with blood, but at the sound of her voice he strained to sit up, swinging his head as though searching out her voice. His breathing accelerated, rasping with panic.

“Beau, try not to move. You might have internal injuries.”

Juliet set about mixing the plasma, rigging the intravenous drip, but her hands began shaking. She inserted the needle and watched the plasma slide through the tubing. She carefully washed the blood from his face, and his eyes slowly opened. He blinked at her, stunned and miserable; she wanted to throw her arms around him but feared it would harm or terrify him. She lifted his hand and kissed his fingers. As the ward men came to carry his litter into surgery, the wounds she had washed began to seep, tears of blood running down his face.

For the next several hours, Juliet tried to stay calm, keeping busy with new admissions, tending several battle-fatigue patients. A captain from the 2nd New Zealand Division arrived, sitting upright and cross-legged on his litter, waving to and fro like demented royalty as he was carried into the Receiving Tent. His teeth were missing, and Juliet was told he had pulled them out one by one that morning in front of his entire regiment. High on morphine, he seemed amused and dazzled by her questions, but through his toothless swollen gums he spoke only backward: “End never will war this. Die to want just I. Her love I mother my tell.” Another man, a lanky lieutenant who kept his hands hugged tightly around his abdomen, claimed he was pregnant. Trying to lose herself in the darkened labyrinths of their minds, Juliet took careful notes, notes that if Dr. Willard ever returned, she could give to him. All the frustration
she had felt toward Willard—all her anger and embarrassment—vanished. She missed him terribly.