Nightingale Read online

  We were unable to immediately evacuate our location, and thus, I spent a goodly amount of time with Linus. He talked of his family in Roosevelt, and of course mentioned you. As morning crested, I assessed his wounds further, and only then did he pass along this envelope to me. He pressed it into my hand, asking me to send it to you, fully trusting I would keep my word.

  And, by God’s grace, I promised I would.

  Reinforcements came for him—for us—at dawn, yet I suspect you already know his fate. Let me say that while I returned to America, I kept this letter upon my person at all times, waiting for the opportunity to send it, to do that one right thing in an age when everything else feels askew. I know, for me, the world has turned kilter for quite some time.

  I again apologize for the delay in sending this. I pray the fulfillment of my promise and the contents of the letter might give you some comfort in the darkness of your hour.

  Regards,

  Peter Hess

  Medic

  CHAPTER 2

  Listening to the oxygen, watching the yellow tubes, the IV over his bed feed life into his veins, Esther wasn’t sure who to blame for the life of the man in bed sixteen.

  Chief of Surgery Neil O’Grady…or God.

  One of the two had kept Charlie alive. His heart continued to beat, despite the fact he’d shattered his good leg, crushed nearly all his ribs on one side, and cracked his skull. They’d had to drill it open to save his life.

  She should be praying for him to live. Instead she found herself at the end of his bed, her hand blanched around the metal footboard, her heart choking off her breathing as she stared at his distorted, purple-ballooned face, his shattered eye socket, now Frankenstein grotesque, his leg, pieced together with spikes slung above the bed.

  He’d just wanted to be free.

  “You did good in there,” Caroline said, brushing past her. She pressed her fingers to Charlie’s wrist, counted the second-hand clicks on her watch. She checked his IV drip then reached for the BP cuff. “It’s like you knew what the chief was thinking. You had the right instrument in his hand even before he said it. You’re an amazing surgical nurse.”

  “There weren’t enough nurses on duty. Someone should have been here, watching him. Where was Rosemary? She was due on at seven this morning.”

  “Probably spent the evening at the USO and overslept. Must be nice not to have to go home to an empty bed.”

  “Caroline!”

  “Just because she doesn’t have a man to write to doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be doing her part.” Caroline glanced at her, added a lilt to her voice, Kate Smith on the radio, “Can you pass a mailbox with a clear conscience?”

  “At least she’s not pining for some soldier. She’s the lucky one, to be single, to not have to worry every night, fight the darkness with prayers of desperation or grief.”

  At Esther’s words, Caroline shot her a look, something in it Esther couldn’t decipher. “Uh, that wasn’t directed at you.”

  For a moment, grief pulsed between them, that empty place where words fall shallow. Then, Caroline turned back to Charlie.

  Esther reached for something to erase her gaffe. When would she remember that Caroline had actually loved her fiancé? “Besides, maybe Rosemary was out spotting for enemy aircraft. Never can be too careful.”

  “Probably saw a blackbird and called it in as a Messerschmitt. Good grief, who’s going to bomb Wisconsin?” Caroline hooked the BP cuff onto Charlie’s arm, unwound her stethoscope from her neck. “You should rethink that application to the nursing management program.”

  “I have a daughter, Caroline. When would I attend classes? Who would take care of Sadie?”

  Caroline finished listening to Charlie’s vitals then removed her stethoscope and unhooked the BP cuff. “Maybe I would.”

  She didn’t look at Esther when she said it.

  Esther smoothed her hand along the metal bed frame. “Linus said he doesn’t want me working. Once he comes home…”

  “That’s his father talking. Linus met you when you were working, and he certainly knows you have a job you love.”

  “Linus met me at a USO event. Everyone worked for the Red Cross. He couldn’t distinguish me from a recreation worker. For all he knew, I served donuts and made coffee.” She lowered her voice. “Linus took about as much time looking at me as I did him.”

  Caroline picked up Charlie’s chart, made a notation. “So, you start over. He might not be as prosaic as his old man. Talk to him—how hard can that be?”

  You trapped my son into marrying you. She shook the judge’s words from her head. See, that’s what fatigue did to her. Fatigue and watching a young man try to end his life. Despair seeped into the crannies she’d tried so hard to bind.

  Except, maybe Linus would end up being nothing like his family. “How is Charlie?”

  “He’s holding on. I don’t know how.” Caroline hooked the chart back on the end of his bed. “I’m beat. I’m going straight home, to bed, and you’d better too. You’re two hours into the next shift.”

  Esther picked up the dusky odor of cigarette smoke as Caroline moved past her. “Thank you, Caroline.”

  “Get some sleep.” Caroline slid her arm over hers. Kissed her on the cheek. “And think about what I said.”

  Esther watched Charlie’s oxygen breathe for him, his chest rising and falling with the forced air. Probably she should pray—a gasp of penitence swelled inside her. But she swallowed it down.

  What could she say, really?

  Instead, she walked to his bedside, touched his maimed hand. “I’m sorry, Charlie.” Then she turned and walked the gauntlet of ten other men recuperating in the surgical ward, taking pulses, blood pressures, checking IV bottles. Her body buzzed with the residual adrenaline of the surgical theater, the smells of Betadine, and blood lodged in her senses.

  She had kept up with Dr. O’Grady. Had anticipated his requests. Had been essential to saving Charlie’s life, benefit or no.

  She liked being needed. In charge.

  It stirred inside the old ambition, and she tasted it for a moment, standing in the sunlight at the last bed. A dangerous sweetness that left in its residue only bitterness.

  She hung the chart on the end of Lieutenant Nelson’s bed. She couldn’t wait to get home, climb into the lumpy double bed in the attic with Sadie, savor those last precious moments when her daughter’s lips lay askew, moisture at the corner of her mouth, her chestnut hair tangled in curls, her pudgy body sweetly limp with sleep even as she burrowed into her mother’s chest.

  Only, with the sun already clearing the hips of the Baraboo mountain range, perhaps she’d join her daughter for some of Bertha’s porridge.

  Caroline appeared at the doorway, her topcoat over her blue uniform, gloves crushed into her boney hand, a flush on her face. She gestured to Esther.

  Oh no, please let it not be a code—

  “It’s over!”

  “What’s over?” Esther strode past the beds.

  Caroline met her, tucked her arm into Esther’s. “The war—it’s over!”

  “What?” Esther spied a cluster of nurses at the desk down the hall, could hear a male voice cutting through the static of the radio.

  “It’s President Truman—Germany surrendered yesterday. The war is over.”

  “I can’t believe the war’s over!”

  Esther recognized the voice of Ellen Savage, fresh out of nursing school, too young, it seemed, to even understand the significance of her words. Or perhaps not, because her brother was stationed on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic.

  Over.

  “It’s over?” This voice from Lieutenant Simon, who appeared at the door of the fourth ward, his pajama arm floppy, his head bandaged from his last bout of skin grafts. She’d just begun to get used to seeing a man with so much of himself missing. “It’s really over?”

  “Back to bed with you,” Esther said, catching him before his dizziness sent him to the linoleum floor
.

  “The Nazis surrendered?”

  She draped his arm over her shoulder, turned him back to the twenty-bed ward, the long-term convalescents who waited for prostheses, more surgery, or even to simply remember their names.

  She didn’t look at bed sixteen.

  “They must have.”

  “I heard yesterday that Berlin was burning. We got ’em on the run!” PFC Jimbo Harris used the t-bar to pull himself into a sitting position. His upper body had doubled in size since he’d begun PT in gym, and he’d become a traffic hazard in his wheelchair. Just two days ago, he’d caught up with Esther and pulled her onto his lap, nearly toppling the stack of linens in her arms, living proof that a guy didn’t need legs to be a charmer.

  She lowered the lieutenant back into his bed. Gave him a sturdy look and got him a drink of water. “As soon as we have more information, I’ll send the nurse in, boys.”

  But, for a moment, she stood there, cataloguing the remains of the men who’d come home. They’d all left too much of themselves across the ocean. They deserved people who honored them.

  Loved them.

  Longed for them with open arms.

  She pressed her hand against the swell of acid in her chest.

  The war had ended. Which meant hers had too.

  She brushed past the celebration at the nurses’ station and headed to the locker room, where she retrieved her coat, her hat. Her hands shook as she tried to pin it to her head, skewering herself twice.

  The pin dropped to the floor, bounced under the long bench.

  Maybe she didn’t need a hat.

  She’d just abandon her hair to the wind. After all, the war was over.

  Flags flapped in the wind, the sun hot upon her cheeks as she walked down Park, turned right on Third, passed the church, and then turned again on Pine.

  She waved to the Walkers, dodged Ernie Olson as he pedaled to school, his lunch pail swinging over the handlebar. Probably school would be dismissed, but she didn’t call after him.

  She found Sadie waiting for her on the front step, dressed in her Sunday sailor dress with white trim, her hair in high pigtails.

  “Mama!” Sadie leaped to her feet, threw herself down the front steps and into Esther’s arms. “We’re going to church!”

  Esther tucked the little girl close, inhaled the Camay embedded in her skin. So Mrs. Hahn had bathed her too. “Why?”

  “The war is over. We need to thank God, of course.” Arlene Hahn worked on her gloves as she descended the front steps. Dressed in a light blue wool suit and a pair of contraband hosiery, prim in a pillbox hat and veil as if she might be going to luncheon at the Rotary, she appeared to have already recovered from the four years of rationing, the sleepless nights.

  The shame of her illegitimate granddaughter.

  She stopped in front of Esther. “No hat?”

  “Not today.”

  Mrs. Hahn nodded, her lips in a knot of disapproval. Esther supposed they might someday just solidify putty that way. “I don’t suppose you’ll be joining us.”

  Esther swallowed, kissed her daughter’s creamy cheek. “No.” She put her down. “Mind your grandmother.”

  Mrs. Hahn held out her hand for Sadie.

  The toddler skipped alongside her grandmother, down the sidewalk, as if on her way to a party, nothing to weigh her steps.

  Esther watched her. Last time she remembered skipping may have been the day she’d met her sister Hedy at the train, that last time Hedy visited the Lange farm in Ames, fresh from the big city of Chicago. The memory rose so crisp, so vivid, Esther could smell the green corn in the fields, the earthy redolence of her uncle’s pig farm as they rode in the back of her father’s 1925 pickup, taste the crisp August air, the tang of her mother’s apple pie waiting on the windowsill. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from her beautiful sister, with her painted red lips and that funny accent and the mysterious way she called her “dahling.”

  It took nearly a decade for her eight-year-old brain to comprehend why Hedy didn’t want to ride up front with her parents. Or why, after giving Esther a white-as-snow rabbit stole, Hedy fought with her parents over it.

  And why, two days later, Hedy left, never to return.

  Esther climbed the step, noticed the V-Home sticker in the window—probably they could take that down—and opened the front door. The house still bore the chill of the Wisconsin winter, the coal furnace having been shut down for the season, the windows opened at Easter, during cleaning. From the kitchen at the end of the hallway, the remnants of cinnamon, the tinge of nutmeg beckoned her.

  Maybe Bertha had left her some porridge on the stove.

  Esther shucked off her coat, hanging it on the mirrored rack, pausing too long to sweep her blond hair back into place. After today’s shift, she felt eighty, rather than twenty-six, and the etchings around her eyes didn’t offer any solace.

  Oh yes, Linus would be thrilled to see her. Maybe he wouldn’t recall what she looked like. She might not have remembered that little scar on his jaw, the nearly pitch darkness of his eyes, except for his photographs on the living room wall. Mrs. Hahn had assigned her to Linus’s bedroom after she’d arrived, outcast from the Red Cross and destitute on her doorstep, armed with Linus’s letter, three months pregnant and desperate, and there she’d also lived with Linus’s face, in boyhood, staring at her from the corner shelf.

  She endured being an interloper in their lives until three months before Sadie’s birth, when she’d begged to be allowed to clean out a place of habitation in the attic. Where, perhaps, she might see the stars and sing her child to sleep without Mrs. Hahn’s puttering presence.

  Oh, sure, she could hardly wait for wedded bliss.

  That wasn’t fair. Linus would be a perfectly adequate husband. He would provide for her and Sadie, and perhaps they would come to love each other.

  What choice did she have, really?

  Sometimes, the moment—the one where he asked her if she was sure, if she knew what her yes meant—rushed at her, gulped her whole. Oh, how had she let her independence, her overseas assignment with the Red Cross, the fact she and Linus were shipping out to war, cajole her into departure from her senses?

  No, actually, it was her senses that took over in that sultry, alluring moment. The way Linus danced with her, as if he needed her, the musky allure of his cologne, Benny Goodman in her ears, the taste of his kisses.

  Indeed, her senses had betrayed her, and she’d departed from the woman she’d wanted to be, the places she wanted to visit, the love she had pledged to wait for.

  That starless night outside Fort Dix, in Atlantic City, she’d lost herself.

  And three years later, she still couldn’t seem to find the Esther she’d left behind in the front seat of his Ford.

  With the war over perhaps she’d never find her.

  Esther treaded down the hallway to the kitchen. Yes, there on the stove, in the aluminum pot, a batch of milky porridge and covered in a towel, fresh bread.

  She lit a match, turned on the heat to the stove, poured herself a glass of milk from the icebox, and then cut herself a piece of bread, standing at the counter to tear it into pieces, watching a squirrel contemplate its way up the cottonwood outside.

  “Oh, Esther, you’re back.” Bertha came into the kitchen carrying a fresh stack of starched table linens. In her midfifties, dark-haired and solid, the woman had long ago mastered English, although her native German still spiced her words. She routinely refused to speak about the family—a mother and two sisters—she’d left behind in Germany when she’d immigrated at the age of seventeen. “Did you see the letter I left for you on the bureau?”

  Esther stopped chewing, the bread caught in her throat. She reached for her glass, washed the bread down, meeting Bertha’s eyes. “Letter? Is it a…”

  “Och! No!” Bertha caught her hand. “Nothing like that. It’s just a letter.”

  Just a letter. “I haven’t heard from Linus in almost two years.” No
, he’d sent her to his parents and forgotten her. Not to mention Sadie.

  “It’s not from Linus.” Bertha picked up the linens.

  Not from Linus? Perhaps her mother… But she hadn’t written to her since Esther informed them, as succinctly and gently as she could, that she’d defied everything they’d ever taught her, and God too, and given herself away.

  She turned off the heat to the bubbling porridge, finished the milk, and returned to the hallway.

  There it lay in the center of the bureau, white and bold, with red and blue striping on the sides—an aerogram. She’d walked right past it as if she were blind. She picked it up, studied the handwriting. Crisp, neat, the addresser clearly possessed an education.

  The return address read Fort McCoy, the base just thirty miles north of Roosevelt.

  A soldier.

  The envelope felt bulky, as if it contained something else.

  She opened the flap, probably too fast, for the paper ripped, and out dropped another letter. It hiccupped on the floor, twice folded and grimy, a plain brown envelope. She stared at it, her heart jammed into her ribs, climbing up her throat.

  No.

  She just…wouldn’t pick up it up.

  Just leave it on the floor. Just put her foot over it. Just… But she bent down and scooped it up, her breath turning to razors. Fingerprints on the outside, brown and ruddy, and a smell, the faintest tang of blood—or perhaps sweat—rose from the paper.

  She held both letters in her hand, not sure, unable…

  Oh, God, please—no…

  She dropped the aerogram on the bureau and unfolded the brown envelope. Read the words scrawled on the front.

  To Esther, upon my death.

  Esther stood outside the door to Linus’s room, the door closed, her hand palming the smooth walnut.

  Downstairs, Bertha fried cabbage and onions for lunch, a dish she’d brought over from Dusseldorf, back when the Hahns paid her way across the ocean. The tangy enticement of onions frying in butter nearly detoured Esther back downstairs.