The things I remember. The blooming garden. I thought maybe after that things would go back to normal with Kay. But they did and they didn’t. One night at two or three in the morning we were alone on a ward when the klaxon sounded. We’d been told if this happened we were to make for the basement, but we were on a ward where none of the patients could be moved. We ran down the ward putting steel pots and helmets on the patients, whatever we could find, and then we just crouched in a corner, put our helmets on, and pretended our whole bodies fit inside them instead of just our heads. What a store of faith we put in those helmets. We didn’t have anything else.
When you’re accustomed to shells coming in, you can tell by the sound whether they’re going to go over. You can hear them testing—the shells go too far one way, and then they try the other way, and then the third time they get you. “One,” I said out loud as I heard them go too far. “Two,” I said as I heard them go the other direction.
“Don’t,” Kay said.
Three, I said silently in my head. I waited. “Three,” I whispered. But nothing. I held my breath. I let it out. I could have sworn I heard Kay whisper, “Three.” But nothing came.
Kay reached for my hand. She clutched it so hard I felt my bones give way, but I didn’t say a word to stop her. I said, “?‘But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went, And there was silence in the summer night; Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. / Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.’?”
“Jesus, Maggie Jean,” she said.
“Siegfried Sassoon,” I said. “I had a patient, before the war, who used to quote poetry to me. Didn’t I ever tell you that? He’d been in the First World War, and I think he was hoping to persuade me not to join. Mr. Lewis. I can’t believe I never told you about him.”
More shells. The first went past us again.
“One,” Kay said.
“He was dying,” I said. “Cancer of the neck. He was probably fifty. He was married, no kids, and his wife almost drove me crazy, because from the moment I saw him I knew he’d come to the hospital to die, and every day she’d come in and ask me didn’t I think he was better. He’d been an English teacher of some kind, high school or college, I can’t remember. The cancer had affected his voice, so that he spoke in this scratchy way that sounded painful. Must have been painful. But he was determined to talk. His whole life had been about talking and it was the last thing he’d let go.”
I stopped talking for a moment and listened. Nothing. I went on. “The head nurse was a stickler when it came to pain meds, didn’t want us to up his morphine. I mean, was she afraid he’d carry an addiction into the next life, begging morphine from the angels? He didn’t complain, not Mr. Lewis, but when a patient’s on your ward long enough you learn to read him, and I could tell by his forehead . . .” In the dark I touched my own, picturing the tension in Mr. Lewis’s brow, the way the skin whitened around his mouth. “Once when I got near his bed I realized some sound I’d been hearing suddenly stopped. After that I started pausing a few feet away to listen to him. ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he’d whisper, when he thought nobody was near. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’?”
I stopped again. “Go on,” Kay whispered.
“I asked her—the head nurse—over and over to up his meds. She wouldn’t. So I went to the doctor. He not only upped the meds, he took her to task, let me tell you. She hated me after that.”
Kay snorted. “I shouldn’t wonder.” She sounded a little more like herself. We heard a howling overhead. “Two,” Kay said.
I listened hard. “That’s why I joined. Because Mr. Lewis died. I know that doesn’t quite make sense. But that’s why.”
“You never did tell me that,” Kay said, and I wondered why there was sorrow in her voice. “But I’ve told you,” she said, “how my father didn’t want me to join.” Her shaking seemed to vibrate the floor. “He said I would shame him. He said if I joined I could forget coming home again.” She pulled her hand from mine.
I swallowed. I didn’t want her to mean that I was part of that shame. I didn’t want that to be why she’d taken away her hand. “But where else will you go?”
“I have shamed him, haven’t I?” she said. “He was right to try to stop me. I never should have come.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry that I came.”
“Don’t say that.”
“We’re going to die right here, Maggie Jean. We’re going to die.”
“We aren’t,” I said, and I took her hand and held it hard, as hard as she’d held mine earlier, trying to stop her shaking.
We heard howling again, and this time it got louder and louder and failed to diminish. When would it diminish? “Three,” we said at the same moment, and then the shell hit. A life-altering sound. The walls quaked. Plaster rained from the ceiling. It felt like it was not just the building about to crumble around us but the entire world.
A long time after the walls stopped trembling, we stayed in that corner. Kay shook and shook and I held her hand and listened to the both of us breathing.
We waited. Nothing, and nothing. Then some distant shouting. “Is it over?” Kay asked.
“Yes,” I said, as if I had any idea.