Pretty damning, wouldn’t you say? For the woman’s own daughter to be that sure? Even a teenager loves her mother.
The last time Jennifer saw Zoe, she showed up at her parents’ house, Tommy’s mother, Caroline, in tow. “We want to see Milo,” one or both of them said. Jennifer stepped back to let them in, and yet still felt as though they’d forced their way inside. As if they’d shown up with a warrant, banging on the door. Milo was playing in the living room. They dropped to the floor beside him and checked him over: Zoe touching his little hands, Caroline tilting his head back to examine his face. Caroline—who’d always taken Jennifer’s side, who’d tried to tell Tommy he drank too much. How could she imagine Jennifer would hurt her little boy? Before they left Zoe told her that Caroline had been to a lawyer to talk about custody, Caroline herself lingering behind with Milo, hugging him even as he squirmed, hugging him like she wanted to lift him up and carry him away. Zoe said more, but Jennifer wasn’t listening. Jennifer was listing in her head all the things she’d need to pack. She’d planned her departure, then hesitated; now it was time to go. So her son would never look at her the way her daughter did. So her son would stay safe in the enchantment of early childhood, where incomprehension is a blessing, where memory is a rushing stream. So her son would stay hers.
If Margaret knows, what will happen next? Will she have told Sue the librarian? Probably not, from what Jennifer knows of Margaret. She’ll hoard the secret. She’ll retreat with it to her castle in the woods. And then what?
Two Girls
Kay and Maggie Jean, they lived in a world of knowing nothing. Not the language. Not how long before they’d move again. Not whether the person they were talking to would be alive the next day. Not even, sometimes, where they were. A field. A building. Sometimes that was the best they could do.
They moved. It rained. They moved again. Every day they seemed to sink deeper into the mud. They waded through it up to their knees, stood in the shower with their feet in a thick pool of it. Their pants were splattered with it, their boots caked with it, the unrelenting, unending mud.
Let me tell you something I remember, something I’ll never forget. Oh, Jennifer, wait, stop—I already told you. There’s no way to count the things I forget, but I do remember telling you now. About the dress that came to me in a pasture in France, the dress from my old life, and how Kay insisted I put it on, and we danced in the grass while men sang and played their helmets like drums. Heaven should be your happiest memory. Heaven should be that memory, forever, with just enough bittersweet to make it matter, to make it hurt.
I tried to protect her, I really did. I pretended she had a fever, once or twice, when she was laid up. I carried things for her. I got her pain medication on the sly. I tried. That’s why she wasn’t with me the night I got loaned out to another hospital—they’d asked for two nurses, and we were both supposed to go, but when the jeep came I got in by myself and told the driver I was all the chief nurse could spare. There was artillery fire up ahead and the sky lighting up a sick green as shells exploded. He took me to a filthy hospital—it’d been occupied by the Germans—and I didn’t like being there. I was worried about Kay, lying in a fetal position on the hard ground in our tent. I was tired. I didn’t like being in a strange place alone. I tore a German sign off the wall and crumpled it in my hands.
I don’t remember the first part of my shift, before they brought the boy in. And I don’t remember what exactly his injury was. You might argue that I don’t want to remember, and you might be right. He was young, a teenager. A French civilian, a boy who should have been in school. Maybe he had a brain injury. Maybe he was gut shot. What I remember is the screaming. My God, he screamed. It was the most desperate sound I had ever heard, like you might imagine people scream in hell, if you believed in hell, which I don’t. Hell right here. That’s what I believe in.
The doctor on shift was young, too, and green as grass, and in the way people often do, he tried to make up for inexperience with arrogance. He wanted me to hold the boy down so he could do something—if I remembered the nature of the injury I might remember what the something was—and I tried, but the boy screamed and writhed as though my hands were branding irons. I remember the feel of his shoulders, the way even his skin seemed to shrink from me, the sharpness of the bone.
“He needs morphine,” I said.
“What?” the doctor said. He couldn’t hear me over the screaming.