Winter in June (12 page)

I knew the feeling. “If she felt that way, what made her change her mind and go home?”

“Kay, for one. When she found out Irene had a studio contract waiting for her, she told her she'd be a fool to pass it up.”

“And what else?”

Candy leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “There was some stealing going on in camp.”

So I was right—Blake had been talking about Irene. “Missing supplies?”

“You've heard about it?”

I nodded.

“The higher-ups said it was the Japs, but Irene was sure it was someone here at camp who was behind it. She tried to get the brass to hear her out, but they wouldn't listen. I think that was the last
straw for her. She said she expected that sort of messed-up logic in Hollywood, but she never thought people would behave that way in the military.”

“And why did Kay leave?”

Candy shrugged. “I don't know. She was a good Wac and I thought she was happy here. Everyone knew she wanted to be a singer, but she seemed content putting that on hold until after the war. She got sick, and then the next thing we knew, she'd arranged for a discharge.”

“Seems a little unfair to hold a grudge against a girl for getting sick.”

Her eyes drifted to where Kay was still struggling on the dance floor. “If I'd thought it was for real, I would've given her sympathy and more. She was pretty tight with one of the Red Cross nurses, and I'm sure the girl helped her trump up a good reason to go Stateside.”

I drained the rest of my beer and caught a sailor's eye to ask for another. “Where's the rest of your unit tonight?” I asked.

She looked around the room. “I think we're all here.”

“No, you're missing one. Blond bun, couldn't smile if her life depended on it.”

She removed a pack of cigarettes from her camp shirt pocket and tapped out a gasper. “Oh, you mean Amelia Lambert. She's our new commanding officer. She replaced Irene. Cig?”

“No thanks. When did she replace her?”

Candy tweaked her mouth to the left and blew the smoke away from me. “About the same time you five showed up. We were without a CO for months, and we thought it was going to stay that way, but a few weeks ago we got word that they were bringing in someone new.”

“You don't seem too happy about that.”

She rolled her eyes to confirm that I spoke the truth. “She doesn't exactly fit in with the rest of the group. We were a pretty casual unit, and she's a little obsessed with rules and protocol. We got an hour-long lecture on the way we dress.” She wiggled her toes through the cannibalized Abners. “She's also instituted a weekday curfew. We're all supposed to be in bed at eleven.”

“She can do that?”

“She's our CO. She can do whatever she wants.”

 

I limped through one more dance before I saw an opportunity to corner Kay.

“Hello, stranger,” I said.

She smiled through a mouth of Coca-Cola and joined me at a table. “Hi, yourself. I'm exhausted. I was thinking about trying to sneak out of here. Are you game?”

“Absolutely.” I signaled to Jayne that we were heading out. She was trapped in a foxtrot and mouthed that she'd be on her way as soon as she could free herself from the wandering hands of her marine partner.

Kay and I walked the dark path together, concentrating on making sure we stayed on the makeshift road.

“So I met a friend of yours tonight,” I told her once we were far enough from the canteen for conversation.

“Who's that?”

“Candy Abbott.” Kay didn't say anything. It was too dark to catch her expression, though I had to imagine she wasn't too pleased. “How come you never told us you knew Irene?”

For a moment, the jungle held its breath. The only sound was the scuffle of our feet moving across the dirt and gravel road. “I don't know. I was so shocked when Violet said her name,…I wasn't sure what to say. I kept hoping I'd misheard her, and then later I read the article for myself and realized it was true.”

“I take it that's why you took sick on the boat.”

Kay nodded. “I knew I should tell someone, but I just wanted to forget about it. The longer I waited, the more I worried about how odd it would seem that I hadn't said something.” In some strange way, I understood that urge she'd had to stick her head in the sand. There had been plenty of times since Jack disappeared that I wanted to pretend that all was fine because it was easier than contemplating what might've happened to him. “I'm the one who convinced her to leave the WAACs. I keep thinking that if she stayed, she would still
be alive.” She played with the dog tags dangling from her bracelet. She noticed my gaze and flipped the charms. I could just make out the name, rank, and serial number engraved on the aluminum. “We both wore them. It was kind of a tribute to what we'd been through. I never imagined they would be used to identify her body once she was discharged.”

Who could imagine a thing like that? “Candy doesn't know Irene's dead,” I said.

“You didn't tell her?”

“I didn't think it was my place.”

“She's not the only one I didn't tell.” She stopped walking and turned to face me. Moonlight glinted off the tears sliding down her cheeks. “Dotty was her boyfriend.”

“Really?”

“They broke up when she went home, but he was still crazy about her. It's going to kill him when he finds out. I keep hoping that he'll get a letter or something, so I don't have to be the one to break it to him. Pretty cowardly, huh?”

So that explained her odd behavior around him. “I can't say I wouldn't want the same thing in your shoes. Is that why you've been avoiding him?”

“It's impossible to be around him without thinking of her. And right now, that's just too hard.”

I bit off the urge to offer to tell him for her. That wouldn't help anyone, least of all her. “You need to though. You know that, right? There's nothing worse than getting bad news in a letter from someone you don't know. I've been there, believe me, and I would've much rather heard it from someone who was prepared to grieve with me.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “I'm just so scared that when I say the words out loud, it will mean she's really dead.”

“She is, Kay.”

She turned away from me and looked toward the ocean, where a second moon rippled on the water. “I know, but I keep thinking I can undo it.”

Kay talked to Dotty that night. I didn't ask how the conversation went. I didn't have to. The red-rimmed, swollen peepers she greeted us with the next morning were clear evidence that it had been hard on both of them. As we traveled by Jeep to the airstrip, Kay sat in silence, hugging her costume bag to her chest as though it was the only thing that could possibly give her comfort. Sensing that something was awry with our little group, our driver did his best to entertain us by catching us up on the latest news. There was heavy fighting going on in someplace called Kahill in the western Solomon Islands. The army air forces were doing most of the work, though the navy had sunk at least twelve Japanese submarines.

He paused in his recitation of our latest conquests and pointed into the distance. “And over there are the graves,” he said.

“Graves?” asked Jayne.

“Mass graves, really. Can't let bodies sit topside too long, or the smell will drive you nuts. And it destroys the water supply. 'Course, a lot of the bodies end up in the ocean. It's just easier that way.”

For the first time Tulagi didn't seem like a paradise. This wasn't just a tiny British-held island we'd won back from the Japanese. Death was everywhere, poisoning its land and its waters.

 

That day we flew to Guadalcanal, landing at Henderson Field. Our first show was scheduled for the main military hospital, where many of the injured from neighboring islands had been sent.

I had seen pictures of military hospitals before, and tons of movies and newsreels that featured them, but it still didn't prepare me for what we were about to encounter. Oh I knew to expect the size (enormous) and the number of injured men (incomprehensible), but one thing the movies hadn't been able to capture was the smell of the place. Like most Stateside hospitals I'd been in, the first scent you identified was the odor of antiseptic cleanser. But hovering above that was the stench of infected wounds that never got the airing they needed in the close, humid air. I wish I could equate the stink in some way, but it was like nothing I'd ever smelled before.

“Wow,” we said in unison as we surveyed the ward we'd been directed to. Some men sat alert in their beds, their injuries undetectable to our untrained eyes. Others played checkers and chess or read magazines. But the majority of them were too ill for idle entertainments. They lay asleep, courtesy of the morphine coursing through their veins, hopefully making them forget—momentarily—the limbs that were no longer there, the eyes that could no longer see, or the face so badly disfigured that their own mothers wouldn't recognize them when they finally came home. Still others were conscious in the loosest sense of the word, moaning in rhythm to the pain that emerged in waves that were constant but unpredictable. These were the ones who cared the least about our arrival. They were too focused on surviving whatever agony their bodies unleashed on them next.

I took it all in, hoping I might discover a familiar face. And fearing that very same possibility.

“Welcome, ladies.” A nurse in a crisp white uniform greeted us at the door. She was taller than me with a voice so deep that, for a
moment, I wondered if it wasn't a man wearing the carefully pressed skirt. The gender issue was further confused by several hairs poking out of her chin. “You're a little early. We were just about to serve the men lunch. Would you be interested in joining them?”

“No thanks,” said Violet, speaking for all of us. “We're just fine.” The truth was we were starving, but Violet wisely recognized that none of us were up to eating food in a room full of seeping wounds.

“Then you're welcome to make yourselves comfortable until we're ready for you to start. There's a latrine out that door and to the left.”

“Would it be all right if we visited with the men while they ate?” asked Gilda.

The matron's face burst into a wide smile. Her teeth were so crooked and overlapped that I feared that if a dentist removed one, the rest would come tumbling out. “Of course. That would be lovely. Just lovely.”

She bustled away to see to the final preparations for lunch, leaving the five of us staring, slack-jawed, at Gilda. “Well, go on,” she said. “This is what we're really here for.”

While Violet and Gilda moved forward to greet the men, Jayne, Kay, and I hung back. I know it sounds awful, but the idea of talking to them terrified me. What would I say? How could I avoid staring at their wounds? Would some of them even know I was there?

“Come on, Rosie,” said Jayne. “It won't be so bad.” The men who still had the capacity to do so, greeted Gilda with a gasp of surprise. Soon the majority of the room was murmuring her name as word of who was there spread about the ward.

Jayne gently pushed me forward, and I headed toward the first bed I saw. The man there was awake and alert, playing a game of solitaire to pass the time. His feet were wrapped in a thick layer of bandages. Something pink stained the outermost layer of his left foot. The blob of color looked like a Rorschach test. It was an empty vase. No, it was a face in profile.

“Hiya,” I said. “I'm Rosie Winter. What's your name?”

“The boys call me Whitey.” He barely looked up from the cards. “You with the USO?”

“That I am.”

“When's Gilda coming over here?”

“She's got a whole ward to visit with. Give her time.”

He laid a ten of clubs on top of a queen of spades.

“I don't think that's how you play,” I said.

“My game. My rules.”

“Suit yourself.” He didn't laugh at the pun. I sat in a chair beside his bed and waited for him to initiate further conversation. It was going to be a very long wait. “So what are you in for?”

“Jungle rot.”

I didn't know what that was, though I could hazard a guess. “You getting out of here soon?” He hummed an answer that may have been a yes, a no, or a
mind your own bee's wax
. “Any chance you know a sailor named Jack Castlegate?”

He didn't pause in his card slapping. “Who wants to know?”

Me, you dumdora. That's why I asked. “Do you know him or not?”

“Nope,” he said. “Never heard of him.”

It was obvious this guy couldn't have cared less about me. I left him and moved on to the next bed. This fellow was in considerably worse shape than mister personality. One of his legs had been reduced to a stump that ended above the knee. The other one was elevated at a forty-five degree angle, his pale, bare toes wiggling like they were seedlings struggling to find the light.

He didn't look like he was up for conversation, so I started to pass him by.

“Miss! Miss!”

I turned and found that he was more alert than I'd given him credit for. “Hiya,” I said. “I didn't think you were awake.”

“Is it true Gilda DeVane's here?” It never ended, did it? Even the wounded wanted to see her first.

“It's true.” I started to leave again.

“Aren't you going to stay and talk?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Sure. It's not every day that a fellow gets to chat with someone who knows Gilda DeVane.” It wasn't quite a compliment, but I decided to cut him a little slack. Somebody had to.

“I'm Rosie Winter. What's your name, soldier?”

“Leo Thistlewaite. But folks call me Gumball.”

“Looks like you've had a hell of a time, Gumball.”

The toes wiggled again. “Better than some. How's your handwriting?”

“Worse than most.”

He grinned. “It can't be that bad. Mind writing a letter for me? My hands aren't working so good these days.”

“I'd be happy to.”

He told me where to find pen and paper, and I dug both out from the kit bag hanging over the end of his bed. The pen was an army-issue ballpoint. We couldn't get ballpoints back home, but the army made a habit of passing them out to its men as one of the spoils of war. It seemed terribly cruel that a boy like this would end up with a fancy pen to remember the war by and no functioning hands with which to use it. Together, we cobbled a letter to his ma, assuring her that he was okay and that he'd be coming home soon. There was no mention of the missing leg. That, he'd rightly decided, wasn't the kind of news you put in a letter. He then had me write a similar note to the Hershey bar he had at home, assuring her that as soon as he was Stateside, they'd finally get hitched.

I prayed for his sake that the girl still wanted to.

As though he read my mind, Gumball asked. “Would it bother you?”

“What?”

“The leg. If you were her, would it make things different for you?”

I couldn't help but transfer the question to Jack. Would it bother me? There was a time when it might've given me pause but not anymore. I would've been so grateful to know that Jack was alive that he could've been missing both legs and I don't think I would've batted an eye.

The question was: How would Jack feel about it?

“Things would be different, sure,” I said. “But that doesn't mean I wouldn't be thrilled to have you home safe.”

“Thanks.” He closed his eyes. “That helps.”

I asked him about Jack before I moved on. He'd never heard of him.

The next man needed help spooning his broth into his mouth, his bandaged hands making it impossible to maneuver the utensil. He wasn't much for talking; in fact I wasn't sure if he could. But when I got up to leave, he grabbed onto my arm with one of his white swathed lobster claws and insisted that I stay sitting beside him until he fell asleep. I remained in his grip, too afraid that if I detached myself from him he'd awaken again. And I didn't want him to because for the first time since I'd sat with him he was smiling.

Across the ward, Gilda signed a man's cast. Violet chatted animatedly with two men lying side by side. Kay wrote a letter, a pair of glasses perched atop her nose. And Jayne…Jayne—

“Billy!” she shouted. The entire ward turned to look at the tiny blonde as she raced across the room and joined a man at the end of the ward. I was afraid she was hallucinating for a moment, but it became clear that he knew her just as she knew him. I watched their reunion with an odd mix of elation and jealousy. Why did Jayne get to see her missing sailor when I didn't? How was that fair?

“Rosie!” Jayne stage-whispered from across the room. She frantically waved for me to join her, so I carefully pulled the sleeping soldier's paw from my arm and lay it across his chest. When I arrived at Billy's bedside, Jayne was perched on his bed and holding on to both of his hands. “Rosie, this is Billy DeMille,” she said. “The sailor I met at the Stage Door Canteen.”

“So I figured.”

“Billy, this is Rosie, my best friend in the entire world.”

Jayne released one of his mitts long enough for me to shake it. He was small, like Jayne, with the largest brown eyes I'd ever seen. “We were wondering what happened to you,” I said.

“He was in Attu and got a bad concussion when his plane got hit,” said Jayne.

“I didn't realize you were a navy pilot,” I said.

“It was his first time on an air mission.” She was so slap-happy I expected her to bounce like a rubber ball. “He's been flat on his back for two weeks now. But he's going to be out soon.”

“Does he talk?” I asked.

“I do now.” He put his second hand back in Jayne's. “I thought I was dreaming when I saw you all walk in. Never in a million years did I think Jayne would show up here.”

“Are you going Stateside after this?” I asked.

“Hell no. As soon as the doc gives me clearance, I'm back in the air. I think Peaches would have my head if I didn't return.”

I froze, certain I must've heard him incorrectly. “Peaches?” I said.

“My CO. His real name is—”

“Paul Ascott,” I said.

Jayne stopped glowing at Billy long enough to realize what was going on. “I didn't know you knew Peaches,” said Jayne.

“I was about to say the same thing,” said Billy.

“So he's here?” I asked. Peaches was the man who told me Jack was lost forever. But that wasn't all he was.

“Sure as shooting. In fact, he'll probably be by later tonight. We have a standing chess game.” His brow creased. “Say, how do you know him, Rosie?”

I tried to respond, but the words wouldn't come. Billy knew Peaches. Peaches was on Guadalcanal. If they were in the same unit, that meant Billy knew Jack.

I didn't get to ask Billy anything. Before I'd found the strength to form the question, the matron clapped her hands together and announced that we would be going on in five minutes.

Jayne was buoyant as we headed to change into our costumes. “I can't believe he's here. It's kismet.”

“It is pretty amazing,” I said.

“He said he wrote me a few days ago. Before then, he couldn't
even think about putting pen to paper, his head was hurting so much. He thinks he'll be out by the end of the week and said it's nothing to get one of the pilots to take you to another island. He said when we first walked in, he thought I was an angel.” She finally noticed the look on my face and stopped her gushing. “What's the matter?”

“If he knows Peaches, isn't it possible he might know—”

She froze with her skirt half off. “Oh my goodness! I didn't even think of that! We'll ask him as soon as the show's over, that's for sure.”

The performing conditions were more primitive at the hospital. Instead of a stage, we used the center aisle. Instead of a dressing room, we had two hospital drapes that served as our wings. Because there was no piano, there was no pianist, so all the songs would be performed a cappella. But despite the setup, the men were enthralled with us. We still started the show with Gilda, though it probably wouldn't have been necessary, given that this captive audience didn't have the strength to demand that she appear earlier than scheduled. Besides, after getting a chance to spend time with us before the show, we had all become stars in their eyes, more because of our compassion than any fame we'd managed to acquire. In the more intimate space, we didn't have to project as hard, and our voices soared into the building's peaked ceiling, mingling with the voices of the soldiers and sailors who felt the urge to sing along. When it was over, the men who could stand did so, and rather than dismissing their ovation as a reward well earned, we sang two more pieces.