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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

The Medium (26 page)

BOOK: The Medium
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“So when are you and my big brother getting hitched, anyway?” Lloyd blurted.
Helen felt herself blushing. Silly goose, she thought.
“When he's done with his training at the end of February. He should get a couple weeks' furlough then, before he gets posted somewhere.”
“He'll probably be attached to a bomber crew, you know.”
“I know.”
“But maybe cargo.”
Helen really didn't want to speculate about Billy. Speculation could so quickly turn into apprehension.
“He shoulda stayed at the factory,” Lloyd said, the simple opinion edged with exasperation.
“He didn't want to. He couldn't.”
Lloyd leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Yeah, I know all about that,” he said. “You wanna look brave. Hell, you wanna
be
brave. But it doesn't turn out like you think.”
Helen missed not being able to peer into Lloyd's eyes. She'd never realized before how much can be learned about a person's
feelings that way, how many words can be dispensed with by a look.
“Are you sorry you went?”
“Nah. It was the right thing. It's a war that's gotta be fought. But I'd still like to see Billy miss it.”
“What was it like, Lloyd?”
He slowly shook his head.
“You wouldn't understand.”
“I think I would.”
“No, you wouldn't!” he snapped. “You weren't there.”
Lloyd had been in North Africa for eight months, six of those months in combat with the Germans. Helen searched her memory for desert stories from her boys.
“It's hot, right?” she said. “There's constant noise from trucks and planes and guns. You're dirty all the time, and sometimes you don't get enough to eat or the food is bad. You walk and fight, walk and fight, day and night. You're scared sometimes, but what's worse is being exhausted. Exhausted and bored and sick of it. But it keeps going, and you do, too, somehow. You just walk and fight.”
She said all this staring into the fire. It was down to red embers. She ought to put more wood on, but she didn't want to move. She looked at Lloyd. His face was oriented to her. She almost believed he could see through his bandages, he was so adamantly focussed on her.
“How do you know that?” he said, suspicion competing with awe in his voice.
“I've heard stories.”
“From who—some crybaby at the USO?”
“I've … I've seen it, too.”
“Seen it? You mean magazine pictures? Why, they can't begin—” He sat up straight in his chair. “Say, you're not talking about that spook stuff, are you? Billy told me about that, but I
thought he must be exaggerating.”
Helen winced at his characterization of her visions as “spook stuff,” but she wasn't going to challenge him.
“Let's just say there are things I know that I don't tell everyone, either. Because I think they wouldn't understand.”
“So, the walking and fighting and all—you really saw that? Like in a dream or something?”
“In trance. Which you could call a kind of dream, except I'm not asleep.”
The room was getting cold. Helen got up and piled some kindling and two small split logs on the glowing embers. The kindling flared up. She stood watching it, to see if more would be needed to get the new wood to catch.
“It was on the road to Messina,” Lloyd said to her back, each word so measured it seemed to stand as a statement all on its own. She turned around. He was running his fingertips gingerly across his bandaged eyes.
“That's where it happened,” he continued at a quicker pace. “The Italians gave up quick on the beaches, but the Germans kept fighting. We were driving them over the hills to Messina.”
Helen remembered from a newspaper map that Messina sat on the narrow strait between eastern Sicily and southern Italy.
“I was wounded before, you know. Near Algiers. A shell fragment in my wrist that went up my arm and came out here.” He pointed to a spot just above his left elbow. “They doped me up with morphine at the battalion aid station, patched me up later at the collecting station. I didn't even make it to a real hospital.”
“I didn't hear about that.”
“I wrote Billy about it, thought he could tell the folks. But I burnt the letter.”
“Why?”
“Because to tell about myself, I had to tell about my buddy who was hurt in that fight, too.”
“So?”
“We were pinned down by enemy fire for hours. The litter-bearers couldn't get to us. I saw he was dying, but I kept telling him it was gonna be all right. After a while, he said to me
it's okay, I know,
so then I didn't tell him that anymore.”
Lloyd rubbed the inside of his left wrist. Helen spied a shiny, ragged scar there.
“Then what happened?”
“Then … Then I fell asleep. Or passed out or something. When I woke up, he was dead. Flies all over the wound in his gut, flies in the corners of his eyes and inside his mouth. I couldn't even do that much for the poor bastard. Just stay awake and keep the flies off him.”
Helen sat down on the floor in front of Lloyd's chair. She wanted to be near him, she wanted him to sense her nearness.
“Is that what you dream about?” she said softly.
“What?”
“Barbara told me you've been having nightmares.”
“Barbara should keep her trap shut,” he snarled.
Helen felt as if she were standing on one foot on a balance beam.
“I used to have nightmares,” she said.
“About what?”
“About dying soldiers and sailors.”
Lloyd twisted his mouth dismissively.
“If you haven't seen the real thing, it's not the same,” he said.
“I'm sure you're right,” Helen conceded.
She didn't want to make this into a contest. But she did want him to understand what she'd seen, especially what had been so hard about those dreams.
“Sometimes,” she continued, “the men in my dreams reached out like they wanted me to save them. If they were already
dead, they just lay there very, very still. But even they—the dead ones—even with them, I felt like they wanted something from me.”
“They do,” Lloyd said. “They all do.”
She wished he'd elaborate, but something in his manner informed her he wouldn't. At least not tonight.
“You didn't finish telling me about how you were wounded this time,” she said, tacitly agreeing to his closure of the topic of nightmares and what dying men might want.
“Yeah, and I'm not gonna finish, either. It was stupid even to start.”
So, they were done all around, Helen thought. She got up and fiddled with the fire again, putting on a big log and banking chunks of burning wood around it. Then she returned to her place on the floor near Lloyd's chair.
“Helen?”
“Yes?”
“What do they look like?”
“Who?”
“My family. Do they look the same as when I left? Does the house?”
This must be the first time he's asked, Helen thought. Maybe the first time he's admitted so directly that his blindness will force him to rely on others for some things. It wasn't the story of his wounding, but it was just as good, perhaps better.
“Well, Linda's bigger, of course,” she answered lightly. “Your mother got new curtains for the kitchen. Yellow, with red tulips along the hem. And Barbara cut her hair short. It was getting in her way at the plant.”
Lloyd nodded intently, as if this were all vastly interesting.
“How about you?” he said.
“Me?”
“You didn't cut your hair or get bigger or anything, did you?”
She laughed. “No. But I do wear my hair up sometimes now. I never did when we were in school.”
“Like Betty Grable?”
She laughed again. “Hardly.”
“Is it up now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I see it?” He was reaching his hand out tentatively, and she realized he meant he wanted to touch her hair.
She took his hand and guided it to her head. Gently and slowly, he felt her hairdo, moving from the top of her head to the back of her neck. Then he put his hand on the arm of his chair and smiled.
“It's nice,” he said.
She was a little flustered. No one had touched her so intimately since Billy. But she was grateful, too. For his careful, appreciative touching. And for his letting her feel, while they talked, that there was someone else who knew what it was like to have secrets that defined you yet also kept you apart from other people. She had set out tonight to help Lloyd, and he had ended up helping her. She hadn't known she needed help, and he didn't know he'd given it, but all that could be discussed some other time. She felt that she could tell Lloyd anything. He might tease or debate her, but he'd remain her friend. He'd never tell her not to be the way she was.
He stood up and announced it was time he was going. She got their coats. She felt awkward guiding him along the sidewalk, and neither of them spoke until they'd reached the bottom step of his porch, where he ventured a small joke.
“I'm okay now,” he said, releasing her. “I coulda walked on my own, you know—if I didn't mind ending up in the river.” She was glad he hadn't thanked her.
They exchanged good nights, and he felt for the stair railing. She watched him until he reached his front door. He must have
known she was still there, because just before he went into the house, he turned and waved to her.
The day after the night Lloyd touched Helen's hair, he returned to the Schneiders' for Ursula's sauerbraten, and he came again every day that week. Linda walked him over when she came home from school for lunch, so he always arrived shortly afternoon.
Sometimes he ate lunch with Helen and Ursula, sometimes he simply kept them company with a cup of coffee. Then he and Helen would go for a walk. They'd been blessed with bright, dry weather. The air was cold, but tolerable. After their walk, there'd be mulled cider or cocoa, and Helen would read Lloyd the newspaper. And in all the small spaces that these pursuits afforded, they'd talk, idly for the most part, but with islands of serious exchange and connection. Or else they'd sit or walk in easy silence.
On the day before Lloyd was to go back to Halloran, the weather turned nasty. The air was damp and chilling, with occasional gusts of biting wind. Helen was reminded of the day Billy had told her he'd enlisted and they'd walked through Brinker's Green along the cheerless river. She marvelled that that had been nearly a year ago.
Helen knew this was the kind of weather that made Lloyd's hip and shoulder ache, but he didn't want to abandon their routine on this, his last day. They compromised on a short outing, just one circuit of the block. Before they were four houses away from home, Helen's face began to sting from the cold. She
pulled her beret down over her forehead and her scarf up over her chin and nose. Lloyd wouldn't admit to any discomfort.
“All the same, you should be dressed better,” she said. “Wool pants, a sweater.”
Under his coat and muffler, Lloyd was in his lightweight uniform.
“Well, aren't you the little mother.”
“Really, Lloyd, why
do
you wear your uniform?”
He didn't answer right away. Helen was getting used to this. She felt less and less that he was being secretive—though he still was about some things—and more that he was searching for the best way to express himself. She knew this because it had happened often enough for her to recognize the signs, and because she had experienced the same deliberation in her own mind when she had something, in her turn, to confide in him.
“One morning, after I was home a couple of days, I put on my old clothes,” he said. “They felt heavy. And sad.”
“How can clothes feel sad?”
“I guess I mean I felt sad in them.”
“Why?”
“Because they're the same, and I'm not.”
Helen resisted an impulse to assure him he certainly was the same. He wasn't, and his blindness was not the only difference, though it was the change everyone would react to and accommodate. She resisted her next impulse, too, which was to tell him that he was still the same in important ways, in his honesty and humor and toughness. She was too aware that she didn't know all the ways in which Lloyd was no longer the same person who'd left town so confidently two years ago. She would probably never know all the ways. But she was sure that, at the core, Lloyd remained the boy she'd known all her life. Adventurous, optimistic, wholehearted. That boy had simply stepped into another world where things didn't add up exactly as he'd
expected them to, and now he'd stepped back, and things here weren't quite adding up either, even though this was where he ought to belong.
“And you don't feel sad in your uniform?” she said in the place of her impulsive sops.
“No, I don't feel sad. But it doesn't feel
right,
either. I'm still a soldier, technically, but yet I'm not.” His next words were uttered harshly. “I wish they could just fix me up and send me back.”
“Really?” Helen said, surprised.
“It can be hell, sure, but at least you know what's what and who's who, and you're part of something. You can actually have a kind of happiness if you just take the days one by one and don't think too much. Like a dog or something. Yeah, a dog's kind of happiness.”
They continued on, hunched up against the cold, Helen alert for icy patches on the sidewalk. Lloyd's relaxed hand was on her elbow, and she walked a half step ahead of him, which allowed him to anticipate turns, stops, and curbs. They hadn't been as smooth on their first walk. It was like learning to dance with someone, Helen had thought, except that the roles of leader and follower were reversed. They were almost back to Helen's house when Lloyd spoke again.
“It's funny, when you're over there, all you think about is home. Guys are always talking about what they're gonna do when they get back. The jobs, the girls, the grub, lots of things. One guy in my outfit, all he could talk about was getting a little gas station and calling it Rogers and Sons, even though he's only got one kid who's not even a year old and who he hasn't ever seen. We all got so's we could've drawn a picture of that place, with the oil cans and the pumps and the tools that used to be his old man's, all in the right spots.”
Lloyd was quiet a moment.
“But then you do get home,” he continued, “and it's not like you dreamed about. And I don't just mean because of this.” He pointed to his bandaged eyes. “If Rogers gets his gas station—and I hope he does—if he gets it, I'll bet you any amount of money it won't be like he imagined it. Even if he makes it look exactly right.”
“Why not?”
“How could it be? How could anything? You think you're just taking a break to take care of some bad trouble that's got to be cleaned up, and that the time away won't count somehow, that your real life has just stopped for a while and is waiting there for you where you left off. But it's not true. Home's different, and you're different, and you can't figure which way to go.”
Having reached Helen's house, they went inside and hung up their things. Helen left Lloyd in the living room while she went to make cocoa. When she brought in the mugs, she put Lloyd's down in the same spot on the end table next to his chair that she always put it.
“I haven't been to war,” Helen said after they'd sat sipping their cocoa for a few minutes. “But when I first started getting premonitions and spirit messages, before I'd begun officially to do seances, I felt something like what you described. No matter how much I wanted to ignore it, I had changed, and I wasn't sure how I could still fit inside my ordinary life—school and friends and even Billy.”
“But you figured it out.”
“Pretty much. You will too, Lloyd.”
He gave a slack smile.
“We're a pair, aren't we? You see things most people can't, and I don't see anything at all.”
He set down his mug.
“How about the newspaper?” he said. “There was something about Anzio on the radio this morning.”
Helen retrieved the afternoon
Record
from the hall. But when she'd sat down on the sofa, she laid the newspaper unopened beside her.
“Lloyd,” she said nervously, “I'd like to read you something else.”
“What?”
“Remember when I told you about the automatic writing?”
“The stories from the dead flyers and soldiers? Yeah, sure.”
“I'd like to read you those. Or … or a couple of them.”
Lloyd considered. It was on the tip of Helen's tongue to say “oh, never mind.”
“What the heck?” he said. “Read 'em all.”
Helen's heart was twitching as she went upstairs to her room to get the writings. Was she going too far? Would Lloyd think, as Billy had, that there was something unseemly, almost improper, about her communion with her boys? Would he turn away from her as he might from a freak? So far, Lloyd had accepted all she'd told him about her abilities and experiences with an open mind, even, she would say, with sympathy. She supposed his war ordeals had made him so receptive. She had met men after death, with the knowledge of battle still fresh in them and the wonder over their new state even fresher, but Lloyd had been with similar men just before they'd died, he'd seen their last bursts of animation and personality and, sometimes, the final brutal moments of their transition. Both Helen and Lloyd were burdened by what they knew. Both admitted they also cherished the knowledge. Helen found Lloyd's tales made hers easier to own. She thought it worked like that for him, too. But she'd never exposed him to as much as she was about to now.
Helen was so anxious about Lloyd's reactions, she read the dictated stories straight through, one after another, without looking up from the scrawled pages. Lloyd listened in silence, interrupting her only once near the beginning to ask her to read
more slowly.
She finished with an airman who had related in awful detail the misery of being trapped in a burning plane on its way down. As the plane was breaking into pieces, he'd seen rays of light in the sky. At first, he thought they were German searchlights, but then he saw people walking on them. He and his crew climbed out of their plane onto one of these rays and found it was as firm as a wooden plank. The men were drawn through the air and deposited on the ground. Feeling drowsy, the airman went to sleep.
When I woke up, I was alone in a hilly place, like Scotland, where my grandparents are from and where I went once when I was a kid. Church bells were ringing from somewhere. It was sunny and warm, like a good day in June, which stumped me, 'cause when we took off from England, it was November and wet. And that was just hours ago, get it? Then I turned around, and there were all my buddies from the squadron, joking and talking, and right in the middle of them, my old Granpop. I was sure surprised to see him, and right away I took him to one side and start asking questions. All he'd say was that we'd been brought there because it was a good place to recover, and that questions could wait. “You've seen enough for now,” Granpop said. “You're safe and well, warm and happy. What else could a man desire?” In a snap, all my curiosity was doused, like I'd been real thirsty and someone had given me a long drink of water and a full canteen besides, so I wouldn't ever have to worry about not having water when I needed it. Answers came later, some from Granpop, some from other folks, and more answers are ahead, too, but I'm in no rush. Some of us are still here resting, some
of us have gone on, but no one is alone. We'll keep moving. It's what we're supposed to do. It's what you all are supposed to be doing, too.
“That's it,” Helen said, laying the pages in her lap and looking at Lloyd.
He had slumped down in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. He let out a long whistle.
“Damn!” he said. “Pardon my French, but damn!”
“They're pretty amazing, aren't they?”
“I'll say!”
Lloyd resumed a more ordinary position in his chair.
“Then … you do believe them?” Helen asked with some trepidation.
“I have to. I know for a fact that what they say about getting shot or blown apart is right, so the rest of it must be, too. I can't buy
all
of it, but I don't think swallowing stuff like the light rays and the singing fountains and that kind of thing is really the point, do you? Probably different guys see different things depending on what kind of joe they are, what, maybe, would make it easiest for them. It's what's the
same
in what they say that's important to believe, don't you think?”
Helen felt like hugging Lloyd, she was so relieved at his response. Even her grandmother had not so thoroughly appreciated the messages from her boys.
“You know what else, Helen?” he continued more quietly. “I
want
to believe them. I want to hold on to the chance that all those guys I saw die—some of them screaming their heads off—that they all woke up some place sweet and peaceful, with people to look out for them, and that later, they helped look after the new guys that came. I'll never feel okay about them dying. None of them deserved it. Especially not the way they had to go. But
to think they're okay somewhere—it does make it a little less hard.”
“It was you talking about things being different now you're home that made me think of the stories,” Helen said, patting the sheaf of writings. “These fellows are getting used to a new situation, too. They're the same, and yet they're not.”
“Yeah, but they all met someone who told them it was gonna be all right in the end. Someone who was gonna stick around until it was. Someone they could bank on.”
You can bank on me, Helen wanted to say, but she didn't dare. The very sentiment confused and unnerved her. What might its expression do to him? What did she really mean by it, anyway? What viable meaning existed for it?
“You don't think you're gonna be all right?” she said instead.
“Was I talking about me?”
“Weren't you?”
Lloyd grinned.
“Guilty as charged,” he said. “But don't worry about me. I'm coming around. At least I know I'm luckier than your friends there.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the writings.
BOOK: The Medium
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