Long Way Home(3)

“Can I give you a hand with his room, Mrs. B.?” I asked her now. She turned to look at me and I saw tears in her eyes. Jimmy’s eyes were the same greenish-gray color as hers, like rainwater. They were kind eyes, filled with love and compassion the way I always imagined Jesus’ eyes must have looked. But Mrs. Barnett seemed older than ever before, too, her curly brown hair fading to gray like an old photograph, her sweet, wrinkled face lined with worry.

“Imagine . . . our Jimmy lived all through that war, went through all those terrible battles in dangerous places with barely a scratch. And now this. I guess there are some wounds you just can’t see.”

“I’m going to find a way to help him.” I carried the vacuum cleaner out of Jimmy’s room and put it in the hall closet for her. “I’m not going to give up until he’s better.”

“Oh, Peggy—”

“I mean it. I know Mr. B. has work to do, but I can drive you over to the veterans’ hospital once they let us visit him again. We’ll talk to him and remind him of all the good reasons he has to live.”

She sank down on his bed and ran her hand over the bedspread. “We waited so long for him to come home from the war and now . . . Well, we have to trust the doctors. They’re the experts. But I can’t bear to think of Jimmy all alone in that place.”

“I’ll go with you.” She reached for my hands as I sat down beside her, and squeezed them. Tears slipped down her cheeks. I saw her throat working as if she was trying to talk but nothing would come out. She was the one who found Jimmy, barely alive, and I knew the memory still haunted her. She pulled me into her arms. “We won’t give up, Mrs. B.,” I said through my own tears. “We won’t!”

She hugged me long and hard, then backed away to wipe her eyes on her apron. “Gordon and I tried so hard to get Jimmy to tell us what was wrong,” she said. “We thought something terrible must have happened to make him so depressed. Something he just couldn’t forget.”

“Or maybe it was a lot of things all adding up.”

“Yes . . . maybe.”

“If we can figure out what made him so sad, we can all help carry part of that load for him. Maybe the answer is in there somewhere,” I said, pointing to the duffel bag and rucksack Jimmy had dumped in the corner of his room. “Maybe we can piece the story together and figure out what went wrong.”

“Do you really think so?” I saw hope in her eyes and the deep love she had for her son, and I wanted it to be true.

“Yes, I do believe it. Let’s look through his things together.” I lifted his rucksack from the floor and set it on the bed, watching as Mrs. Barnett reached inside and pulled out each item—a mess kit, a shaving set, his discharge papers. She found a pocket-size copy of the New Testament and Psalms, and I leafed through it, noticing that several verses had been underlined. On the back flyleaf, Jimmy had printed an address without any name: 573 S. Second Street, Brooklyn, NY.

“I wonder who this girl is,” Mrs. B. said. She had taken out a photograph in a simple metal frame of a pretty, young woman wearing a nurse’s cap. I turned it over and saw writing on the cardboard backing: All my love, Gisela. My pulse started doing the foxtrot. Maybe Gisela held the key that would unlock Jimmy’s depression.

“Is she a girlfriend from college?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. He didn’t have a steady girlfriend before he enlisted.”

“Gisela is an unusual name. Did Jimmy ever mention her in his letters?”

She got a faraway look on her face as if she were trying to peer back through time and across the vast Atlantic Ocean. “Not that I recall. But he wrote less frequently after the Nazis surrendered. He was working in a hospital . . .”

“Might she be one of the nurses he worked with? It looks like she’s wearing a nurse’s cap. Maybe that’s where he met her.”

“Maybe. But he didn’t mention a woman in his letters. Or after he got home. But then he barely spoke two words to us.” Mrs. Barnett and I searched all the way to the bottom of Jimmy’s rucksack, but we didn’t find anything else that told us who Gisela was. “I saved all the letters he sent home,” she said when we finished. “You can read through them if you’d like.”

“That’s a great idea. Maybe we’ll find another clue.”

She went into her bedroom to fetch them for me but was interrupted by the telephone. I heard her hurrying downstairs to the front hallway to answer it and then her voice in the distance. “Yes . . . Yes, I see . . . Ten o’clock, then . . . Thank you.”

She was out of breath after climbing the stairs again. “That was the veterans’ hospital. They want us to go there tomorrow morning to talk about a treatment for Jimmy.”

“Is he getting better? Can he come home soon?”

“They didn’t say. But we’ll be allowed to visit with him briefly after our appointment with the doctor.” I didn’t ask Mrs. Barnett if I could go with her, but I must have had a pleading look on my face because she asked, “Do you want to come with us, Peggy?”

“Oh yes, if you’ll let me. If the hospital will let me.”

“They said family only, but you’re part of our family after all these years, aren’t you?”

I wondered if Mrs. Barnett had any idea how happy her words made me. I loved Jimmy Barnett and I loved his parents, too. Their home once held so much life and joy, and I wanted it to be that way again, for my own sake as well as for theirs. During the war, I worked at the IBM plant across the river, building aircraft cannons. I believed that if I did my part, the Allies would win, and Jimmy and his family would be safe, and life would go on. The war was over, and my prayers were answered when Jimmy came home. But nothing was the same as it used to be.