He pulled her onto the couch beside him. And, wouldn’t you know it, she let herself be pulled. Once she made contact with the cushion, Pru buried her head in both hands.
“This must be surreal for you,” Charlie said. “We tried to find you but no one picked up the damn phone at your supposed number. Some friend of Mom’s … Edith, I think … we thought she was messing with us. Giving us bogus information. So I flew over myself, as soon as I could. We were going to send a private investigator but I wanted to be the one to hunt you down. You are one hell of a slippery girl, I’ll tell you that.”
“Hunting down women,” I said, trying to be funny, trying to be mean. “You Yanks are crafty, aren’t you?”
“Who are you again?” Charlie said, squinting.
I noticed then his rumpled clothes, the scarred face. The man was a long way from posh Boston, to be sure. He did not look like someone who fit with Pru. Hell, he thought she was Laurel, when she’d come so far from that.
“The name’s Win Seton. And I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Whoa, that’s quite a bold directive when a man’s come back from the dead to find his true love.”
“True love?” I said. “The girl who waved good-bye as your ship sailed off no longer exists.”
“I was never on a ship.”
“She’s not the same person.”
“Like I said, who are you again?”
“I’m Win Seton.”
“Yeah, I got that part. I might be missing a limb but my ears work.”
“I’m the owner of this apartment,” I said. “And she’s my girl.”
Pru looked up then. Her eyes were red and streaky. I saw in them what I mistook as a promise but was instead a plea.
“They told me he was dead,” she said, voice quivering. “I saw him.” Pru turned back to Charlie. “Your ashes. Kon Tum. They buried you! There was a funeral!”
“I know. It’s hella fucked up. A real botch job. The short version…” Charlie shrugged. “Wrong body.”
“Wrong body?” I said, as disgusted as I’d ever been in my life. “How is that even possible?”
The explanation was horrific enough but, on top of that, he was talking about it like someone muffed his lunch order and he was therefore forced to eat chicken salad instead of tuna.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Charlie said. “A bunch of men did die in the blast. The rest of us were captured. Uncle Sam tried its damnedest to match body parts with the list of those missing. But…”
He shrugged again. I wanted to punch him in the face.
Sixteen bodies were found after the attack, Charlie explained. Twelve were positively identified. The Department of Defense tried to sort out the leftover four and eventually used their best efforts to pin the parts on Charlie and three other men.
“Some guys reported as dead, like me, were POWs,” he said. “Some guys thought missing were already dead. A clusterfuck. No better way to explain it.”
It sounded so damned unbelievable at the time. But in the following years I’d come to learn this was not a one-time screwup. Bad luck, horrible luck, though not singular luck. Other misidentified bodies have been uncovered from that war, in the new millennium even, thanks to better forensics.
“They mixed up body parts?” Pru said, green-gilled and looking like she might vomit. “How does that even…”
“I guess, fundamentally, we were interchangeable.”
“And so you’ve been…” she stammered, trying to get a hold of what he was saying.
“In a POW camp,” Charlie finished for her. “Goddamned hellhole. Makes that decrepit mansion of yours look like the fucking Ritz. The shit I saw. The shit that happened. I can’t even tell you. I will never tell you. But I will say this. On a good day I only ingested twenty maggots, and the pus on my wounds was allowed to ooze unfettered, no new wounds piled on.”
Charlie said nothing else, locking up the details in the steel clamp of his mouth. I was unnerved to see hostility in his eyes, which I attributed to my own demented jealousy. He was a romantic rival, infinitely more sympathetic and brave.
“So they let you out?” Pru said. “Just like that?”
Though she’d heard of Operation Homecoming, Pru had not been one of the four million people glued to a television watching the POWs come home. She had been in Paris, in love, with no time to brood over world affairs.
“I wouldn’t say they let me out ‘just like that.’” Charlie smirked. “If you’re curious, I had both legs when I went into camp.”
“God,” Pru said, and made a small gagging sound.
“No, miss. There was no God where I was. Not a hint of Him to be found.”
“I’m … I’m glad you survived,” Pru managed. She looked unsteady, unsure, a woman in high heels walking across the deck of a careening boat. “Your parents must be thrilled.”