The Magic of Ordinary Days (32 page)

Lorelei had said Stephan, not because she was nervous, but because that was how she knew him. And the uniforms, the perfectly neat and new-appearing uniforms. With Rose and Lorelei's skills in tailoring, an American Army uniform would have been a snap to duplicate. Once they had told me of meeting German POWs while working the same farms. Now it all made sense to me, the tension between the two of them, the secrecy about these boyfriends.

Ray came to stand behind me while continued reports of the escape screamed at me from the radio. “Tell me,” he pleaded.

But I only sneezed once more before I calmed myself. The POWs had been recaptured, I kept saying to myself. No harm had been done. And perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. Perhaps Walter and Steven were American soldiers, just as I'd believed them to be only a few minutes before. Perhaps the similarities were simply coincidences. I had no evidence to the contrary. But hard as I tried to convince myself, in some center place of me, I already knew. Much as I kept trying to push it out of my mind's knowing eye, it sat there nonetheless, for no one else except me to see.

Later, I must have looked quite content standing at my kitchen sink and gazing past the ice-encrusted windowpanes into the night. Funny that sometimes people undergoing the worst kind of discord in their lives can look so calm. But Ray could see. He pushed aside the paperwork he usually worked on in the evenings and watched me. Occasionally he'd ask me to sit down and please tell him what was bothering me, but I hadn't as yet fully admitted it to myself, so how could I tell another?

Bedtime couldn't come. All I could see before me was a night of tangling with the sheets, and when I did slip into the bed where once Ray's parents had slept together, I curled my legs high into my rounded body and dreamed of those green summer days that now seemed years ago. It was the first subzero night of the winter, and from the walls, I could feel the frigid air oozing into my room through invisible seams. Although I bunched the quilts in all around me, and although we had the propane stove burning full out, the chill inside me refused to budge. Every time I started to drift away into slumber, the words of the radio announcer came pouring back in over me as if I were a rock at the base of a waterfall.

Rose and Lorelei had lied to me and used me for transportation. How long ago had the plan been hatched? So many things began to make sense. I'd never seen them working in the silkscreen shop because they were probably sewing clothes for the men off in a place where no one could find them. But it wasn't their betrayal that bothered me. I understood going against everything taught and drilled since childhood. I had done it, too, and all for the promise of love.

My right calf drew up into a cramp. I threw back the covers, jumped out of bed, and stepped down on my foot, effectively stopping the cramping. But then I couldn't make myself get back in bed. Instead, I found myself in Ray's open doorway. He slept on his side under smooth quilts, facing me. I listened to the long deep breaths he took while soundly sleeping. I studied the gentle curve of his fingers laid out on the pillow in front of his face. And when I sank down on the bed beside him, he awakened, but moved only enough to give me more space on the narrow mattress of the bunk bed. Then he held me from behind, as once he'd done before, and kissed the back of my neck and the tops of my shoulders. In his arms, even the anguished cries of coyotes coming out of the black night sounded like songs. Ray's body and mine rested together like a pair of stacked bowls, and finally, I slept.

I slept until the earliest gray of daybreak sent my eyes flying open.

In the warm circle of Ray's arms, thoughts began to bat around inside me. I had knowledge of the escape, information that, as a good citizen, I should share with the authorities. But if I talked, I would doom Rose and Lorelei to pay for the parts they had played. And now I found that I disagreed with my father. Rose and Lorelei had made the worst of mistakes, and I couldn't imagine the anguish that had led them to do it. Despite Lorelei's justifiable anger for their imprisonment, for everything they'd been through, she had never seemed vengeful to me. I'd never imagined them concocting so elaborate a deception and crime. The German POWs had convinced them; I was sure of it. Rose and Lorelei had fallen in love and wanted to rescue soldiers, just like so many other women before them had done. And even though it didn't excuse their parts, I understood it.

But must all persons bear the consequences of their actions, at all costs, as my father believed? The POWs had been recaptured without incident, without any harm having been done. I kept telling myself this. And wasn't guilt of the deed itself sometimes punishment enough?

I remembered the man at the gas station who'd refused to talk to me, just because I was in their company. I remembered the pain on their faces even when they were working so hard to conceal it. I remembered new love on their faces, too. And I saw Lorelei's wings flapping, her colors falling to the ground.

Later, I found myself standing at the kitchen window again and staring down the dawn of a new day. And still I didn't know what I was going to do.

Thirty-three

I knew the day ahead would be one of the toughest of my life, yet Ray was the happiest I'd ever seen him. I had come to him in the night, and he couldn't stop smiling. In the bathroom, I heard him humming over the sound of the shower. He came out dressed in his newest flannel shirt tucked in with a belt and his hair combed carefully over the thinning area on top. As usual, he had missed the bald spot in back, but I wouldn't tell him.

He pointed out the kitchen window. “Not too much snow last night, but more's coming.”

“Could we drive to the telephone?”

He looked out the window again and up at the sky. “Not a good idea. We could get stuck on the road.”

I couldn't make my bottom lip stop dipping and jerking. And I couldn't stop thinking about Rose and Lorelei, the only ones who could tell me the truth. Although the POWs were back in captivity, I had to know if I'd played a part in their escape. My plan was to call Camp Amache, tell the guards it was a matter of grave importance that they bring one of the girls to the telephone, then simply ask Rose or Lorelei if they had done it. I wouldn't chastise; I wouldn't complain. I simply had to know the truth.

“Ray, I need to make a phone call.”

“Come here,” Ray whispered before I found myself back in his arms.

After we ate a hot breakfast, Ray got the truck running while I bundled into my coat and muffler and closed up the house. Once we were heading down Red Church Road into town, the truck's heater finally started to send warmth up from the floorboards, but little blasts of freezing wind squeaked in from poor seals around the windows.

Ray kept glancing over at me, but he didn't ask me why I needed so badly to place this call. And even if he had, I wouldn't have known what to tell him. If I told him the truth about Rose and Lorelei, then he would have information he, too, was withholding. Or would he report it? It didn't take me long to decide to stay silent. Perhaps I'd never find it necessary to tell anyone. The POWs were back in custody, the weather had made any trip to the sheriff's office impossible anyway, and hadn't Rose and Lorelei suffered enough already?

Big snow started pouring out of a sky capped by low-lying storm clouds. The flakes blew in sideways, building up on the windshield and nearly blocking our view of the road. Stiff gusts made Ray grip the steering wheel with both hands just to keep control of the truck. He kept creeping onward for a mile or so longer, then he gradually put on the brake and turned to me. “Whatever it is, it'll have to wait. It's just too dangerous. I got to turn back.”

Slowly he inched the truck around in a circle and started urging it back in the direction of the house. He had the wipers going, but they couldn't keep up with the ragged chips of snow now clattering down on the windshield. The weather worsened by the minute, but Ray worked the truck back toward the house, taking extra precaution when we passed over a bridge. I heard him let out a big sigh as we finally saw the triangular shadow of the barn's roof rising out of a world suddenly gone devoid of color and depth.

Snow was already building up, covering everything slippery white. After he helped me up the porch steps, Ray said, “I need to go close up the milk cows and the horses in the barn. I'll be back soon.”

I entered the house by myself and clicked on the radio.

After a song ended, the announcer began to relay more details of the POW escape incident. The most bizarre twist in the story had only recently been revealed, he said. The recaptured Germans named two Japanese interns as accomplices in their escape. The interns, Rose and Lorelei Umahara, living in Camp Amache, had immediately been arrested and charged with treason.

Now I knew the source of the doomed sensation that had plagued me for nearly two days. As full realization clamped down on me, the room became a dark and cold dungeon. I became small and shaking and full of anguish more profound than the pain I'd felt even when I first realized Edward had left me and that I was pregnant. It couldn't be true. Their betrayal was worse, worse even than mine had been. A more cruel breach of faith I could never have imagined. The POWs would receive some token punishment within camp, such as a few days of solitary confinement or loss of rations, but nothing more. After all, the Geneva Convention maintained that it was a POW's duty to try to escape. But the Umahara sisters, the announcer said, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, ironically, because they were citizens.

I wasn't prepared for the gravity of this tragedy. The pain of it turned my lungs into sponge, made it impossible for me to go on breathing. I flew out the front door without turning off the radio. I stumbled down the porch steps and ran out into the storm as fast as my burdened legs could carry me.

A monstrous ghost of snow and storm bore down on me from above, but I didn't care. I ran full-face right into it. Now I was pounding the ground, trying to send it all away with every heavy thump of my feet and each new boot track laid out in the snow. I didn't wish for summer, didn't think of the city. As I ran, I longed only for a return to the recent past, for one last opportunity to change that grievous mistake of faith committed by girls who couldn't have realized the dreadful consequences of their actions.

Before long, my feet and fingers began to sting and burn, as if thrust into a fire rather than freezing. Cutting winds made my clothes and coat into transparent gauze. But I kept stumbling and trudging myself through the snow, drawn to the spot on the road between the fields where first I'd met them, back on a day of sunshine and Indian summer. I stopped running and stood in the place where once, so long ago, we had introduced ourselves and talked of butterflies. Their wonderful lives had come down to this, this one mistake, caused by belief in men who professed to love them.

If only they had told me the truth, I could have cautioned them not to do it. I could have warned them. But in that instant, my own truth came over me. At the same time the snowflakes were encasing my body into a frozen shroud, the realization of my own part oozed its way out of me and into the gray daylight.

Rose had tried to tell me. That night of the barn dance, when she walked me out to the truck, she had tried. But I had been so consumed with my own problems that I hadn't given her the time and attention she needed in order to be able to get it out. I had underestimated what they were going through by daring to compare their pain and suffering to mine. I had underestimated their endurance because I assumed them too strong to be easily manipulated by others. I had underestimated everything about them. I had failed them by taking them for granted, too, along with everyone else.

I thought of the water nymph Clytie, who, too, had given it all away. As friends, Rose, Lorelei, and I had started swimming together on the surface of the water. We had at times dipped below the surface as we went along. But we hadn't taken a deep dive, hadn't delved into those dark waters, the ones where we kept hidden the unseen frailties that lie in wait. In the end, the friendship had failed because we failed to dive deep.

I stood adrift in the snowstorm until my shivering stopped, until my body settled into an artificial calm. Now my feet and hands no longer existed, and sky tears froze into silence on my face.

I don't know how long I languished in the middle of the storm. I remember making my way back through a soup of snow, seeing the lights coming from the house windows, and feeling the heat envelop my body as I walked through the door.

Ray stood before me. His voice was full of frustration, but gentle on me nonetheless. “What are you doing? Trying to kill yourself out there?”