“Don’t talk about food.”
“The boy I talked to was jaundiced and had lost forty pounds.” Out the window a man behind wire stared bleakly in my direction. I didn’t think he could see me. “Looks like this mess won’t be over before the fall,” I said. “If I have to go to the CBI I’ll be a section eight.”
“Maggie Jean,” she said. She waited for me to turn and look at her. She was sitting up now, propped on both arms. She swallowed hard, like someone trying not to be sick. “Do you know I’m pregnant?”
I didn’t. I didn’t know. I just stood there, gone slack. I’d been trying so hard with her, trying so hard for weeks. All that effort, like doing a rain dance in the desert. I’d exhausted myself. I could think of nothing to say.
“The night after the shelling,” she said. She pulled her knees up, wincing, and hunched over them. “He held me down.”
“What?” I asked.
Now she looked at me. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” she asked. “Please don’t make me explain.”
I had wild thoughts: that I would find the man, that I should have known, that maybe she wasn’t really pregnant, that I should have known. I tried to stay calm. Maybe that wasn’t the right response. I don’t know what the right response would have been. “What do you want to do?” I asked.
“What do I want to do?” she repeated. She shook her head. “I can’t get rid of it.”
I don’t know what she meant by this. I’ve thought about it plenty since. That she didn’t know where to get an abortion? That she’d tried something and it hadn’t worked? Or that she couldn’t bring herself to try? In some ways despite all I’d seen I was innocent, and I was inadequate. All I really understood was how inadequate I was. I wanted someone else to be in charge. “Does the chief nurse know?” I asked.
“Of course not,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here.”
“How can you stay? Between your back and this . . . What if they send you to the CBI?”
“I can’t go home.” Her voice a whip-crack. “They won’t have me.”
“Then go to my parents,” I said. “I’ll ask them to take you in. Then when I get home, we can get jobs in Nashville, get an apartment there.”
There was a long silence. “Why would your parents take me when even my own won’t?”
“I’ll tell them a sad story,” I said. “You’ll be a war bride. Married two months, then your husband was killed. And I’ll make you an orphan, too.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll come home. There will be nursing jobs in Nashville. I still know people at Vanderbilt. We’ll share an apartment. I’ve saved some money, you probably have, too, my parents might even help a little . . .”
“What about the baby?”
She was right—I was leaving out the baby. The baby was hard to imagine. The baby that shouldn’t have existed. “I’ll help you with the baby,” I said.
“How will I go to work?”
“Maybe you won’t,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go to work and you’ll stay with the baby.”
“Like a married couple?”
“No,” I said. “Like friends.”
She lay back down on the cot. She put her hands over her eyes. She said, “I don’t know what else to do.”
That was the tone she took from then on, when we talked about our plans. Weary resignation. I admit I sometimes felt frustrated, sometimes wanted a little more gratitude. It’s not as though there wasn’t any, but it wasn’t what prevailed. She’d given up, I think. To her I wasn’t the one who threw the life preserver. I was the one who wouldn’t let her jump. I wrote to my parents, embellishing my sob story, and my sweet, kind mother wrote back, Of course. Kay’s eyes filled with tears when I showed her the letter. That time she said thank you, or at least that’s how I remember it.
I don’t know quite how long we treaded water. The war was slowing, and so we weren’t busy, and it wasn’t hard to cover for Kay. Then the Sixth Cavalry found a concentration camp in Austria, and they sent for our unit to take care of them. You’ve seen pictures, Jennifer, but you’ve never seen a human being like this, in those striped uniforms and nothing but bones. No flesh on them at all, just skin. Oh Lord. The soldiers wouldn’t let us into the buildings—the women, the nurses. They said they found dead ones in bed with live ones. The townspeople said they didn’t know anything about it, but they’d requested that the camp raise the chimney because the smell of burning flesh was bothering them. Bodies and bodies, dumped in a ditch. General Patton made the men of that town bury all those people. I have pictures of that. And our chaplain said a service. Man’s inhumanity to man, let me tell you.