In the Shadow of Blackbirds(7)
I TWISTED AND TURNED, TRYING TO GET COMFORTABLE IN my new bed. The mattress springs whined with every restless movement I made. Ambulance sirens screamed in the distance. I couldn’t sleep. I ached to see and touch Stephen again. The briny air I’d smelled all afternoon reminded me that we were last together only a few miles from Aunt Eva’s house—before the flu, before my father’s arrest, when Stephen still lived in his home across the bay.
I reached down to the black doctor’s bag on the floor and fetched Stephen’s second-to-last letter, dated May 30, 1918. The picture he had included fell out of the envelope—a portrait taken at a studio where all the Camp Kearny recruits had gone to get photographed in their army uniforms. He wore a tight-fitting tunic that buttoned up to his throat, narrow trousers that disappeared inside knee-high boots, and a ranger-style Montana peak hat that hid his short brown hair. I could tell from the stiff way he held his jaw that he was attempting to look serious and bold for the picture, but mainly he resembled a Boy Scout ready for camp.
His lovely handwriting on the letter shone in my oil lamp’s steady light.
Dear Mary Shelley,
They’re shipping us overseas soon, even though I’ve barely been in training. We’re needed in Europe something desperate, I guess. I’ll be on a train to the East Coast in the coming weeks and then boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic.
I’ve been wondering why you haven’t responded to the package I prepared for you the morning I left. At first I worried that I somehow offended you with the gift… or that I offended you by kissing you. But if you were offended, you would have told me so directly, wouldn’t you? You have never been shy or evasive. So I choose to believe the package never reached you.
If you aren’t mad at me, I would love to hear how you are doing and to receive a recent picture of you. I’m including an Army Post Office address where you can write to me at any point, even when I’m overseas. The only photographs I have of you are from your days of mammoth hair bows—those giant loops of ribbon that looked like they would start flapping and fly off the top of your head. I’m trying so hard to remember the grown-up version of you, with your bewitching smile and those haunting blue eyes that seemed to understand exactly what I was feeling.
If you would rather not attach yourself to someone heading off to war, I understand. After your aunt hurried you out of my house that day, after Julius told his vicious version of what happened, my mother yelled at me and called me cruel. She reminded me you have your whole life ahead of you and said the last thing an intelligent girl like you needs is to ruin her life for a boy heading off to war.
You don’t need to wait for me, Shell. I’m aware you need to live your life without worrying about me. If you do want to write, however, if you do think of me, I would love to receive your letters. I miss you so much.
Yours affectionately,
Stephen
P.S. I wish I had those goggles of yours that supposedly let you see the future. I could really use them right now.
I smiled at his last line and leaned over to my black bag again. Down in the cloth-lined depths of one of the side compartments were the coarse leather straps of my aviatrix goggles—a gift from Aunt Eva, purchased to blot out the memory of the crowd beating on the German man at the Liberty Loan drive during my last visit. We had come across the chaos just as the police were dragging the victim away in handcuffs, his right eye swelling, his nose and mouth a mess of bright red blood. Men with angry blue veins bulging from their foreheads had shouted words like Kraut bastard and goddamned Hun, even with ladies and children present.
I shoved aside the memory of the violence, fastened the goggles over my face, and lay back against the cool sheets to stare through the bug-eyed lenses at the empty white ceiling. Stephen’s letter rested against my stomach—an invisible weight, but there just the same. My mind opened to the possibility that the goggle salesman’s promises of enchantment had been true, as preposterous as the idea was. I would see the fate of the world through the glass lenses.
Yet the future refused to emerge.
Only the past.
I saw myself getting off the train on April 26 to celebrate my sixteenth birthday in Stephen’s new city … and to distract Aunt Eva from life with a husband wasting away in a home for tuberculosis patients. She and Uncle Wilfred had moved to San Diego for the healthier air, and I jumped at the opportunity to visit her—and perhaps see my old friend again. Faces didn’t yet hide behind gauze masks. Soldiers and sailors arriving for training smiled up at the Southern California sunshine and smacked one another on the back as if they were on vacation, and the air rang out with laughter and war talk and the boisterous melody of a brass band playing “Over There.”
Aunt Eva had met me on the train platform in a lacy white dress that fell halfway between her knees and ankles. Her hair, still long enough to reach her waist, was pinned to the back of her head in shimmering blond loops of girly curls.
As soon as we had escaped the bustle of recruits and music in the depot, I asked her, “Have you seen my friend Stephen Embers’s family since you moved here?”
“Actually, yes.” Her leg bumped into my swinging suitcase, which she did not offer to carry. “Julius now runs the family photography studio. He’s a spirit photographer—he captures images of the dead who’ve returned to visit loved ones.”