From Sand and Ash(105)

“He was with me too. If it hadn’t been for him, I would be in Bergen-Belsen now. I dreamed about him, and he told me you were with me. Inside me. I didn’t understand what that meant until I found out I was pregnant.”

“How did you end up here? In Belgium?” he asked, trying to distract her from the building agony. He sat at her back, letting her lean into his chest, turning her face into his neck as she tried to escape the waves of pressure.

“I jumped.” She groaned out the words, tucking her face into him as she began to shake. “I jumped, and then I walked.” She stopped talking then, speech too great a task, and he could only marvel at her words.

She jumped. And then she walked.

Her contractions seemed to grow until there was no relief, no brief moments to regroup and quietly rest, and Eva began bearing down helplessly, her body demanding that she push. It was an onslaught, a blitz, and one hour grew into another and then another as the world beyond the shattered windows continued to burn, and the woman he loved begged for deliverance. Angelo moved her bed beside the fire and nailed blankets over the windows to keep out the worst of the cold and to block the light in case the German bombers returned, but conditions were far from favorable. Bettina had brought in plenty of boiled water, and Angelo kept the area as clean as he could and Eva as comfortable as he was able, when finally, as midnight neared, she reached the end.

A surge of blood-tinged water soaked the sheet beneath her as she groaned in agonized protest. She bore down, pushing and crying with an endurance born of love and little else. Angelo, on his knees before her, begged the Madonna for intercession, and a little baby boy, conceived in love and tribulation, came into the world on Christmas Day. The baby’s cry broke the sacred stillness of the moment, his little arms and legs kicking in outrage as his father greeted him for the first time.

“It’s a boy, Eva. It’s a little boy,” Angelo cried, overcome. In a bombed-out village, in a foreign land, a tiny leaf had appeared on a new branch, a new sun dawning on a day when so many sons had slipped away. Shaking and afraid of his own emotion, Angelo carefully laid the baby across Eva’s sweat-stained chest and cut the cord that connected mother and child. Eva’s smile was weak, but her breathing was deep and her face serene. She covered her son with a clean towel and searched his tiny face with glorious eyes.

“He is here, my little Angelo Camillo Rosselli Bianco.”

Her baby stopped crying almost immediately and stared up into his mother’s face with curious wonder, making Eva laugh even as her tears continued to fall, unabated. And then she started to sing, more a whisper than a song, and Angelo bent his head near hers to listen to the carol she’d sung exactly a year earlier in the cab of a delivery truck, wedged between Angelo and Monsignor O’Flaherty.



“Oh, my divine baby

I see you trembling here,

Oh, blessed God

Ah, how much it costs you,

Your loving me.

Ah, how much it costs you,

Your loving me.



Dear chosen one, little infant

This dire poverty makes me love you more

Since love made you poor now.

Since love made you poor now.”



Angelo kissed the tears from Eva’s face and tasted them on her lips. Love had not made them poor. Love had made them wealthy. In that moment, they were royalty, a king of fortune and a queen of destiny, embracing a tiny prince of peace. Angelo still had no idea where Eva had been, how she had ended up in a town called Bastogne in the middle of a firefight, but he’d found her.

He’d found her.

And there was no man on earth or angel in heaven who could convince him that miracles did not exist. For once, God had not been quiet.





CHAPTER 26


BASTOGNE


In the early hours of morning, Angelo and Eva heard the door downstairs being forcibly opened and feet clattered into the house, accompanied by shouting. Angelo, who had been dozing in a chair near Eva’s bedside, was up and out of his chair instantly and hurrying to the door. He flung it open and moved out onto the landing.

“Mario!” he called, the relief heavy in his voice. “Up here. We’re up here!”

Eva pulled her baby deeper into the blankets Angelo had laid over them, listening as boots pounded up the stairs, and Angelo laughed in sheer gratitude.

The men began talking at once, clapping each other on the back and reassuring each other they were both okay. Then Mario Sonnino was standing in the door, his face black with filth, his uniform splattered in blood and looking like it had survived a direct hit from an enemy bomb.

“Bettina—the woman who told me where to find you? She’s safe. We couldn’t get to you because there was debris as high as my head piled in front of the door. The building next to you took a direct hit, right through the roof. We had to wait for a bit. All hell was breaking loose outside, and none of us could stand out in the opening, clearing rubble,” he explained. He shook his head as if trying to clear his vision, and he rubbed at his eyes wearily. He looked as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

“Hello, Mario,” Eva said softly, and smiled at his awestruck face. He walked slowly to her bedside and knelt beside her with humble deference. Angelo followed him, his eyes on Eva, his mouth trembling with emotion.

“Meet Angelo Camillo Rosselli Bianco,” she murmured, revealing her son’s sleeping face. “Born on Christmas Day.”