“And several other kids and grandkids still in Spain, but this one has a wife, three children, and a dog . . . People should be terrified with how much information is out there.”
“I know.” I laughed through sputtery tears. “But I’m so glad, right now, that it is.” I reached up and hugged him. His arms slowly wrapped around me and held.
This morning he smelled like lemon and mint. It was a good early morning scent, relaxing in a sunshiny way. I breathed him in and it brought hope to another of my senses. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I can’t tell you how much I needed some good news.”
I felt Mat stiffen within my embrace. He stepped back and closed his computer. The glow I felt tracing Martine’s trail across Europe and her family’s journey to the United States vanished with his laptop’s click. Suddenly our reality, rather than Martine’s successful escape, loomed before us—and, with Mat’s sudden retreat, there was awkwardness, a distance, and something yet unnamed between us I still couldn’t put my finger on.
“Mat?”
He backed away—all the way around to his side of our worktable. “I just wanted you to have that.”
“It must have taken hours.”
He fussed with the chaos of pages in front of him. “A few. But it’s good to have that loop closed.” He located what he was looking for and stretched a list across the table to me. “After those field notes, read the diary entries I listed here. It all comes together. The story is forming a cohesive whole. Caro gets cut in France, comes home, gets assigned more training, and in these entries we read what she told Margaret about it all.”
9 July 1941
Dear Beatrice,
Another disastrous dinner. Why does she bother to come home? Does she simply come to fight? Again, I left the table early with Mother on my heels. I don’t think Father and Caro even noticed we left.
As usual, Caro came to my room upon leaving the dining room. I sat on my bed and listened to her pound up the stairs and down the hall. She stomps like an elephant when mad.
She didn’t bother to knock, just burst through my door. “I’m not coming back.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. The Blitz is over. Things will calm down. He’ll calm down.”
“It’s not him. It’s me. I keep picking needless fights. I just get so angry.” She plopped onto my bed. “But it won’t calm down, Margo. Don’t believe that. This war will get far worse before it gets better.”
“Listen to you.” I laid down my book and sat upright. “This is a new tune.” I didn’t want to revisit all that claptrap she used to recite, but couldn’t help teasing her a little.
She stared at me. “I know more now.”
I lifted a brow. She says that expression makes me look like a hawk. She noted it and banked her fire. I sensed she caught that she had accidentally signaled something by her tone, something she didn’t want me to know.
The air thickened between us, but rather than share with me, she flicked her fingers as if shooing a ladybug. “It’s nothing. Just talk in the RAF. Randolph is worried.”
She was lying. So I decided to dig—and I sometimes play dirty. “You’re still stringing him along, are you?”
She’s not, but the charge reddened her face. “I’m not stringing him along, Margo. Don’t say that. I love him and I would never hurt him.”
“I believe you did. Once. But you lied to him, Caro, and you used me as cover over our birthday last year. You had never planned to come home, yet you deliberately told him that. You lied to him then as you’re lying to me now. Isn’t that a form of betrayal? A form of cheating?”
She moved as if ready to leave. I reached for her arm. “Just talk to me. You can trust—” She jerked back, toppling off the bed to stand. Noting a flash of red, I pounced forward after her. “Show me.”
“What?”
I grabbed at her other arm to keep her from leaving. “Show me.” I repeated the command with such force she wilted and lifted her sleeve.
There is a huge red, raised, and jagged scar across her forearm! It had to have been a horribly deep cut that required stitches to close.
“That’s fresh. Who hurt you?”
“No one. It happened about a month ago.” She stood at the foot of my bed, feet braced to either flee or fight. I wasn’t sure which.
She traced the scar with her finger. “It was a fallen wire . . . I didn’t see it heading to work one morning and walked right into it. If I hadn’t raised my arm at the last second, it would have sliced my face.”
“I’m so sorry.” I stepped toward her. “You poor thing. Did I just hurt you?”
“It’s still tender, that’s all.” She slid her sleeve back down as if needing to hide it again.
All my anger evaporated, but my fear for her increased. She lied to me, Beatrice. Right then and there—again. No wire can create such serrations.
But what was I to say? Push her and lose her? Accuse her again? Then she really might not come back home—ever. I sit here safe in the north while she lives and works in London, braving bombs and who knows what else each night.
“Remember how well you know me, Margo. You know my heart and I love you.” She fixed me with an intense stare. “George too.”
“I know.” A sigh signaled to us both that I was backing down. It’s true; I’ve never doubted her love for me or for Randolph.
She didn’t leave. She climbed back onto my bed. “Will you be sad to move to the South Cottage in the fall?”
“Not at all.” I climbed up next to her. “It would be impossible to stay when the Army takes over. And it’s what we must do. Sometimes we don’t have a choice with the situations handed to us. We’ll make the best of it.”
She smiled up at me. “See? I always said you were our better half. I’d be put out.”
“Somehow I don’t believe that’s true.” I glanced to her arm and her now-hidden scar. “I’ve got an uneasy feeling you’re giving life and limb and I’m simply moving to the end of the garden.”
“Do you think if you do something well and good that how you get there doesn’t matter? Can the end justify the means?”
I sat straighter. “What are you talking about?”
She hung her head “Nothing . . . I hurt Father tonight. More deeply than I intended to. I simply . . . I can’t have him worry. That’s why I said I wasn’t coming back. It’s better to have him angry at me than to make him worry about me. I can’t have any of you worry.”
“You’re poking him on purpose?” I gestured toward her arm and watched her tuck it behind her back. “There’s more to that cut, isn’t there?”
She climbed off the bed and backed to the door. I knew I was right, but also knew I couldn’t push.
“Don’t discount your work or your value, Margo. And I’m sorry I’ve jabbed you about Mother and Father. They need you. Right where you are, doing what you are.”
“And you?”
“I’m doing what I can.” She shrugged, one hand on the knob of the connecting door between our rooms. “Maybe one day they’ll even be proud of me again.”
Her last sentence lingered long after she left. It brought to mind a long-ago letter. She once wrote that Father told her she was “amounting to nothing” and that those words now sat between them.
What is she willing to risk to prove him wrong?
I fear everything.
Thirty