Willow Run (7 page)

A mud-colored jeep was parked in front of our apartment. Harlan grabbed my shoulder with his sticky hand. “Someone's in trouble.”

Ahead of us two women were standing frozen on the corner. They reached out to hold hands.

“They've come with a telegram,” he said. “Probably someone's missing or maybe killed in action.”

It seemed as if everything inside began to slide from my head down into my chest, into my stomach. My legs didn't feel as if they would hold me up. “I think I'd better go in now.”

I waited to run until I was nearly up the path; then I stumbled up the step and went inside.

Dear Eddie,

I'm sending this letter even though they say you're missing in action. I know you'll be found by the time it gets there. In fact, I'm sure I saw you in the movie I went to the other day.

Please write as soon as you're found. Mom and Dad are crying.

Love,

Meggie

P.S. I thought about opening your envelope, but I guess not. We're going to open it together, right?

I had to go to the movies. I couldn't remember the way Ronnelle had taken me, but I didn't want to knock on her door. She would have asked me to come in.

She had spent the last hour in our kitchen, chopping vegetables and chunks of pork fat into a soup that simmered in a pot on the stove, a soup that no one would eat, but she had whispered, “Have to have food, sooner or later.”

Something was wrong with my mouth; my lips were numb, so I couldn't talk the way I usually did.

I went across the bare packed earth in front of the rabbit hutch and down the block. I managed the first few streets, then stopped to ask a boy on a bicycle. “The movie?”

The boy pointed. In my mind I kept repeating the directions
he gave me:
“Two blocks, then left; one block, then left again.”
Who cared if someone saw me and thought I was talking to myself?

I had money in my pocket. I had taken it off the kitchen table, the newspaper boy's money; it was more than enough. I was probably going to end up in jail someday, but this was different from the Arnold the Spy money. I could pay the paper boy as soon as I got my allowance on Wednesday. I could even tell him that myself. He looked patient, kind of like a sparrow, with those skinny legs and no chin.

It made me smile. I'd have to tell Eddie that.

And then I realized. I had forgotten for a second. I might not ever see Eddie again.

But the movie. Maybe everything would be all right after all. It might be the same movie, the same news I had seen with Ronnelle. I'd take a look at the soldier with the daisies on his helmet again. And this time I'd be sure it was Eddie.

Please let it be Eddie. I'll never take ice cream again. I'll never
eat
ice cream again
. I'd even ask Dad for the money. I wouldn't wait for my allowance.

Dad at the kitchen table holding Mom's hand.

I didn't want to think about that. Instead, I thought of Pathe News and Eddie on the movie screen. I wouldn't wait for the second feature. I'd go home, running all the way; I'd go into that kitchen with the scratched-up table and tell them.

Would Mom be sitting there, her round face milk-bottle white? Still not talking, her fingers pleating her handkerchief? Dad next to her saying everything was going to be all right, like the song,
“We'll meet again,”
but with tears dripping from his chin?

I saw him,
I'd say.
He isn't missing in action. He was marching along with a bunch of soldiers, wearing daisies on his helmet. He's right there in Normandy, France
.

Those daisies. It made perfect sense. Eddie loved gardening the way Grandpa and I did, the way Mom and Dad did. I came from a family of gardeners the way Harlan said he came from a family of heroes.

Half a block in back of me, a voice: “Meggie?”

It was Patches. She didn't say anything, just began to walk along next to me, but she knew. I knew she knew. Harlan came next. “Hey, wait up.” He had another Dixie cup in his hand. I was losing count of how many ice creams he'd taken, but I couldn't worry about that now.

“Do you have to follow us everywhere?” Patches said.

“She needs every friend she's got,” Harlan said. “That's what my mother said when Uncle Leo… you know.”

Harlan's face was covered with beads of sweat. But even though I could feel the sun on my head, I was shivering, icy cold as if it were the middle of winter and I had forgotten my coat. I folded my arms across my chest, wishing I had a blanket to wrap around my shoulders.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the movies.” My lips were still numb.

“The movies?” He sounded surprised. “Anyway, wrong way, wrong time,” he said. “The movie isn't supposed to open for another hour or so anyway.”

“Show me where it is. I'll get there early and just wait.”

He finished the last of his Dixie cup and tossed it in the street. “I got Veronica Lake again,” he said.

What was he talking about?

“On the Dixie cup lid. I already have her twice. I'm looking for Gary Cooper.”

“Where's the movie?” I asked.

He chewed his lip. “Got any extra money?”

“A few cents.”

“That'll do it,” he said. “I'll go with you.” He reached down to pick up a stick.

“I'll go, too,” Patches said, hopping on one foot. “Stones all over the place. But I can pay my own way.”

I kept thinking of the two soldiers in the kitchen, their hats off. One of them looked as if he might be sick. A piece of paper, the telegram, was on the table, and everyone was staring at it.

“Missing in action … June sixth … Normandy … Possible that he's still alive.”

One of the soldiers had said that. It must be true. Of course it was true.

If only I could go back to the apartment for a sweater, but how could I walk past Mom and Dad at the kitchen table?

“There's the movie.” Harlan ran the stick along the ground after him, raising dust and making a
swish-swish
noise. “In Detroit we sneak into the movies all the time.”

I tried to listen to him. Lily did that, too. But I kept thinking of the words in my head:
missing in action
. What a terrible sound that had.

“We can sit right here on the curb and wait for the woman to go into the ticket booth.” Harlan slid down against the telephone pole to sit on the ground.

“Will you stop talking?” Patches asked him. “You're vibating in my ears.”

I sank down next to them, watching Harlan make circles in the soft dusty earth with his stick.

After a while a woman went into the ticket booth. I watched her arrange everything: a money box, a pile of blue tickets, smoothing back her long pageboy hairdo.

“We're in luck,” Harlan said. “She's earlier than I thought.”

We went into the empty theater. I was glad they were with me. Somehow it would have been terrible to be alone there in the dark.

Just before the picture started, someone else came in. Harlan nudged me as the person went down the aisle. “There's Arnold the Spy.”

I shook my head. “We should never have taken that ice cream.”

“What's he doing watching a movie anyway?” Harlan
whispered. “He should be in the army, overseas somewhere, like my uncle Leo was.”

I couldn't say
like my brother
. I wished Eddie weren't in the army, wished we were all home.
Fishing with Grandpa, the backs of my legs against the rough rocks of the jetty, the water swishing up, cooling my feet, my ankles
.

I wished the war were over. No, I wished it had never started.

I didn't want to be the only one at home. How had I ever thought that would be fun?

The picture began, and I tried to pay attention.
It's an ordinary day,
I told myself.
I'm watching this boy from Iowa on the screen and he's on a train going into the army. And then I'm going to see the news … and what a surprise. Eddie will be marching along on the screen—and everyone thought he was missing! See? Nothing to it.
I shouldn't have even written that two-minute letter to him. By the time it reached him, he would have forgotten he had even been missing.

It was hard to pay attention, though. It seemed to take forever until the boy from Iowa was wearing an army uniform and it was over.

At last I heard the music that meant the news was coming next. The picture grew large on the screen.

But it wasn't the same news I had seen with Ronnelle. There were soldiers, but they weren't marching; they sat in a muddy field, one of them drinking from a canteen, another with his head back against a stone wall, sleeping.

Not one of them had daisies on his helmet. Not one of them was Eddie.

The camera switched and a line of girls marched along a platform in white bathing suits. They made me think about Virginia Tooey. What would she think when she didn't get letters from Eddie anymore?

The cartoon began. I closed my eyes, listening to Elmer Fudd sputtering over something Bugs Bunny had done. By the time I opened them again, Elmer had a rifle. He was chasing Bugs up and down a pile of rounded hills and into the woods.

And a sign wrote itself across the screen in huge white letters:
THAT'S ALL, FOLKS
.

Maybe there were woods in France. You could get lost in the woods and wander around for a while before you found your way out. Of course you could.

And then I realized I couldn't remember what Eddie looked like.

How could that be?

And then I quieted myself. Lily had the key to our house in Rockaway. Everything was still there: the couch in the living room, the lamp Mom had gotten for her birthday two years ago, the picture of Eddie in his uniform smiling at us.

As soon as I could make myself go back into the kitchen of our rabbit hutch, I'd write to Lily and ask her to send his picture.

“I have to go home,” I told them.

“Don't you want to see the second feature? It's a western,” Harlan said.

I shook my head and stood up. Patches stood with me.

Harlan waved his hand. “I'm going to stay until the end, otherwise we're wasting all this money.”

Patches and I walked out of the movie, blinking in the light. I began to hurry when I heard someone in back of us, whistling “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week).”

Eddie used to sing that on his way out the door to go to the movies with Virginia Tooey. But I knew he didn't think it was lonely. He would pat the top of my head as he went by and do a little dance down the steps.

“What are you thinking about?” Patches asked.

I shook my head. If I told her, I knew I'd begin to cry.

I said, “See you later,” to Patches and went into the kitchen. No one was there. A cup was on its side at the table, a lake of milky tea spread out beside it and dripping onto the floor. I dipped my finger into it: not even warm. It had been there a long time.

“Nothing like a hot cup of tea to soothe the spirit,”
Grandpa always said; and Ronelle:
“Have to have food sooner or later.”

I tiptoed to Mom and Dad's bedroom door. Their room was almost as small as mine, the double bed taking up most of the space. A tall floor lamp with a ripped shade leaned against the wall.

In the dim light I could see Mom lying under the patchwork quilt, her arm hanging off the side, the crumpled handkerchief
in her hand. I backed away, thinking she had gone to sleep, but she turned and sat up. She wasn't crying anymore, but her eyes were swollen, and a strand of hair was stuck to her cheek. “Oh, baby, where have you been?” Her voice was breathless. “We didn't know where you were.”

I started to say I wasn't the baby anymore, but that would have made it worse. “I'm sorry.”

“Dad is out looking for you. How could you do that?”

I couldn't say I had gone to the movies. How would that have sounded?

“Go outside, look for Dad. He's frantic trying to find you.”

I didn't move.

“I thought…,” she began, and stopped. “Two gone in a day.” She sank back on the bed again, her eyes closed, and tears seeped out from under her lashes. “Go find Dad,” she whispered.

I went through the kitchen then, turning the teacup upright before I went outside.

I heard Dad's whistle when I opened the door, a shrill sound that he used to call me home for dinner when I was at the beach.

“I'm here,” I called, going down the cement walk. Kennis was sitting there trying to stick two pieces of wood together with a couple of rubber bands.

Dad stood in the middle of the street, his back to me,
whistling again. I kept calling and waving as I went toward him until he turned and saw me.

“Meggie?”

“I'm sorry,” I said again, but he pulled me to him, hugging me so hard I had trouble taking a breath. I knew he'd ask where I had been, so I rushed on. “Listen, I could make more tea. Some for you and some for Mom. Lots of sugar.”

His eyes were red.

My father crying. “What happened to you?” he asked.

I stared down at the cracked cement under my feet. “I was with Harlan and Patches,” I said slowly. “The kids on the other side of the walls.”

Dad nodded. “It's all right. We were just worried….” He swallowed hard. He was having trouble with his mouth, too.

“Let's go home,” I said. “Let's just go home to Rockaway. Eddie won't even know how to picture us here. He won't know what it's like.”

Dad closed his eyes for a moment; then we walked along the street together. “I want to show you something,” he said.

He took long steps, so I had to hurry to keep up with him. We passed a row of ugly apartment houses, then a bunch of trailers with wash strung on lines from one to the other. People were coming and going from the factory, swinging their lunch pails.

And then the houses were gone, and the people, and we
walked along a dirt road toward open fields. “It's just a little farther,” Dad said.

As the road curved, I saw what he wanted me to see: a row of trees that hadn't been sawed away, and after that a field of grass so high we could just about see over it.