This Is How I'd Love You (5 page)

Charles cannot see their faces, but he hears one of their panicked voices reply, “I feel like I can’t breathe. I can’t bloody breathe.”

Charles nods. “Yes, you can, brother. Just relax. It’s important to be calm. Your lungs are muscles, too. You don’t want to strain them. So just take it easy. Nice and slow.”

This seems to satiate them for a while. The truck is silent save for their occasional coughing. The ground rumbles behind them, the shrieks of incoming shells wailing in the distance.

Just as they are passing the same wooden fence with the daffodils and the birds, one of the soldiers says, from behind his kerchief, “At last we’re not back there getting hammered. Probably a lucky break, this gas. You heard him. They got good docs, they do.”

Rogerson bangs his fist hard against the dash and Charles swerves slightly, nearly sideswiping the fence. The birds lift, en masse, in front of the truck, their wings flapping a sharp rebuke to this disturbance.

“Fucking bastards,” Rogerson says, glaring out at the road ahead of them.

Charles concentrates on driving. He suddenly wishes that he hadn’t followed Rogerson’s lead and loaded these soldiers into the truck without even examining the others at the relay post. Their own triage skills are limited. But if he hopes to be any good here at all, he cannot be sentimental. Practicality must overwhelm any sense of emotion. There may have been boys there that could be saved. And they’ve just driven off, leaving them to suffer through another attack before being evacuated.

When Charles pulls the truck in front of resuss, Dr. Foulsom is standing outside, smoking. He approaches the vehicle, his arms outstretched, ready to assess their patients. “What have you?”

“Hey, Doc, stand back,” Charles says, pulling his mask away from his face as he puts his boots in the dirt. “We’ve got gassed boys. I’ll remove their clothes, get ’em gowns. Give ’em a bed in resuss?”

Dr. Foulsom throws his cigarette into the dirt. “
Merde
, Reid. Why are you bringing them to us? We cannot do a thing for them. Not even morphine.
Rien
. We’re running too low. Leave them at the front where their
amis
can help them die. Take them back and bring me the bleeding.
Ils meurent
.”

From beneath his gas mask, Rogerson spits in the dirt. “What kind of a doctor are you?” he begins, but Charles, who is standing behind Rogerson, his foot resting on the truck’s tire, interrupts. “Sir,” Charles begins, but Rogerson claps his thick hand against Charles’s shoulder.

“Why don’t you just take your pistol and shoot them?” he says, pulling off his gas mask and throwing it to the ground, recklessly close to Foulsom. “That’s about what you’ve done. Leave ’em at the front? Our job is to clear out the wounded.”

“No, Rogerson,” Foulsom says, pushing the gas mask away from him with his boot. “Your job is to evacuate those who have the best chance to survive. These boys have no chance. Quite honestly, a bullet would be a mercy to them.”

By now the three boys have climbed out of the back of the ambulance and, their mouths still covered by their kerchiefs, they stand, listening.

“What about the docs? The best, you said,” one of them—the red-headed one with a copious amount of freckles—says, without recognizing Foulsom’s status. Dressed in army-issued pants and a graying T-shirt, Foulsom looks like some private just out of the latrine. The docs are hardly ever in uniform. Too much blood.

The redhead begins coughing, a short, wet little sound that is not alarming except for the way his eyes bulge, panicked.

Charles lays his hand on the boy’s shoulder, while his friends look frantically from Rogerson to Foulsom.

A sister walking from the supply tent, her arms full of bandages, hesitates near Foulsom. Quietly, she says something in French to him before disappearing into resuss.

Momentarily, she returns with three pairs of salvaged trousers folded neatly in her arms. She hands them to Charles in silence.

“Get them changed,” Foulsom says, before he grinds the cigarette butt into the dirt beneath his boot. Then he turns and crosses the small yard connecting the group of medical tents.

The resuss tent has six beds, all of them fitted with heaters and transfusion packs. It’s where they attempt to stabilize the most severely wounded for surgery. For the next twelve hours, however, it is where the gassed boys lie, their skin ever paler and their coughs producing pieces of their own burned lungs in small clumps of charred red tissue that the sisters pluck from their bedsheets and carry away in their small, gloved hands.

A
t noon, the train stops in El Paso, where Hensley and her father, along with a dozen other passengers, disembark. It has been nearly a week on the train. The sun shines directly onto the platform, turning its concrete a bright and blinding white. Hensley pulls the brim of her hat down, shading her eyes. Their journey is not over, but they will travel the next two hundred miles by automobile. Hensley stands still, grateful for the cessation of movement, the solid ground beneath her feet. She never thought it would end, the churning, chugging, aching motion of the train. As she stands there, she is similarly amazed by the way the air is so hot and dry, unlike anything she’s ever felt before. Her skin seems to contract and shrink around her jawbone and her knuckles. Hensley leaves her father on the platform with the porter, who is transferring all of their belongings to a trolley, while she goes inside to find the restroom. The station is brand-new and reassuring. It is surprisingly cool. Hensley likes the way her feet sound as they smack the stone floor.

The bathroom is large, with three sinks, three divided toilets, and pretty blue tile on the walls. As Hensley enters, a young girl emerges from one of the toilets, her black hair like a blanket over her head. Her skin is the color of their mahogany dining table, which they left in New York. Her face, too, is as smooth and expressionless as the wood. She is dressed in brown jodhpurs, like the boys wear in New York, and leather ankle boots and a tan jacket. Hensley forces a smile, but the girl bundles her hair beneath a large straw hat, turns her eyes to the floor, and leaves without a word.

Hensley does her business, wipes her face with a towel, studies it for changes. Shouldn’t she already be a different person, in such a strange and faraway place? But the same pallor and blue eyes stare back at her in the glass.

When she finds her father in the station, he is in animated conversation with the girl from the bathroom. The girl with skin like dark wood.

“Hensley,” he says, extending his arm. “This is Humberto Romero. He works for the mine. He’s going to drive us to Hillsboro.”

Hensley frowns. “Humberto?” she says. “But . . .”

His eyes harden. There is no acknowledgment that they were in the same women’s restroom moments earlier. Hensley turns her head to see the door, to make certain she hadn’t accidentally been in the men’s bathroom. Perhaps she is confused. Perhaps this dry heat has affected her eyesight.

Humberto reaches out his hand and shakes hers, gripping it harder than necessary. “Welcome.”

Hensley looks closely at this face, its eyebrows gracefully arched, its lips smooth and full. Humberto could easily be a girl of profound beauty, but his eyes are so dark and fierce and her grip so strong that Hensley says only, “Thank you,” and follows her father and Humberto to the truck parked in the lot behind the station.

 • • • 

T
hey sit in a row on the bench seat, her father sandwiched between them. Humberto handles the truck confidently on the paved roads of El Paso and soon enough they are traveling a well-groomed dirt road, supposedly headed northwest. Her father doesn’t say much, but he leans forward, his hands on his knees, as though in a theater, afraid to miss a single line of dialogue.

“This is New Mexico,” Humberto says eventually, lifting a hand from the wheel and motioning to the land in front of them, though there is no obvious change in the scenery.

Her father echoes Humberto’s words, in case Hensley has not heard. “New Mexico,” he says, gesturing out Hensley’s window.

“Got it.” Hensley inventories the terrain: scrub, scrub, rock, tree, dirt, scrub. She wonders how anyone could ever locate herself in such a never-ending, wide-open landscape. There is no uptown, downtown; no east river, west river. No storefronts or street signs. No people. Not a single, wretched person is on the road with them. She sees a rabbit in the scant shade of a scraggly bush, watching their truck pass. Her face brightens. There are squirrels in Central Park and rats in the subway tunnels, but she’s never seen a rabbit—the way its front paws hang in front of its chest in prayer. The constantly twitching nose. The oversized teeth and ears.

“Rabbit,” Hensley says, pointing out the window.

Humberto laughs a high-pitched giggle. “What? Never seen one?”

Hensley looks at her father. Surely, he, too, can hear this girlish laughter.

He only smiles and says, “Rabbits are not the main inhabitants of Manhattan, I’m afraid. The wildlife there is mainly pickpockets and politicians.”

Hensley looks back at the small creature under the bush. She finds herself composing a letter to it:
Dear Little Rabbit under the Bush, You are not as dull as they think you are. You are the first living thing in New Mexico to make me smile. Aptly grateful, Hensley Dench.

She looks at Humberto’s slender brown hands holding onto the steering wheel. Hensley would like to announce that she’s just composed a letter to the rabbit under the bush. That she already cares more for that rabbit than she does for anyone else she’s met in this vast, dry place. Especially more than she cares for that pretty girl with the long shiny hair in the ladies’ restroom in the El Paso train station. The girl who wouldn’t smile at Hensley. The same girl who Hensley is sure just laughed at her for noticing a plain brown rabbit along the side of the road.

If she had the courage, Hensley would sabotage this fool’s errand; return to New York and let New Mexico remain a faraway, irrelevant place. Go back to the city that was her home. Tell her father to write whatever the
Times
said he had to write. The war will go on, whether or not Sacha Dench approves. Whether or not newspapers take their orders from the Committee on Public Information.

She looks at her father’s eager face, the wrinkles around his eyes speckled with dirt. What would her mother think of their exodus? Hensley closes her eyes, an ache in the back of her throat. The agony of this loss courts her, showing up just often enough so that she does not forget. Her mother’s face is suddenly so close she can touch it, but then it is gone and Hensley has a glimpse of her father’s heartbreak. The awful train that has carried them away from New York, like the black death that carried her mother away. Leaving them in an unknown, empty place where nothing makes sense and neither of them feel whole.

Back in the heat of July last year, there had been a series of explosions in the middle of the night when the artillery factory on Black Tom Island blew up. Her father had roused her from her bed, leading her into the street with the other neighbors, where they stood shoulder to shoulder, watching the skyline burst and burn. Later, investigators discovered that the fire was set by German saboteurs, but at the time, her father was hopeful that such a display of violence, whatever its cause, would be a warning to Americans that entering the war would be a grave mistake. A few children in their mothers’ arms started to cry, but were soon distracted by the exhilaration of being in the middle of the street in the middle of the night and began games of chase while the adults carried on rowdy conversations amid the fireworks. Nobody knew what had happened, but the blasts soon grew louder and a window shattered on Broadway and this ended the strange block party as people hurried inside, afraid of what might happen next.

Her father stayed up nearly all night writing a preemptive editorial, trying to turn this brilliant spectacle into a symbol of the destruction that American artillery would cause overseas. He hoped the event would quell the nation’s warmongers, whose voices were growing louder each day. Hensley had curled up on the couch near his desk, shivering beneath a blanket, though the midsummer heat was palpable all night. She dozed on and off, listening to the scratch of his pen against paper. Finally, as the room ever so slightly brightened, he’d noticed her crumpled figure.

“Hennie?” he said, placing a warm hand against her brow. “You must get some sleep, child. I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“Daddy,” she said from a place between wakefulness and sleep, “why must you work so much?”

He stood above her, his hands deep in his pockets. He walked away from her, toward the fireplace. Then he turned and, as though speaking to a room full of colleagues, said, “The disagreements between rich and powerful men should remain just that. But an entire generation of young men is bearing the burden of royal tempers and old grudges. It is immorality of the worst kind. Those with plenty turning their countries into slaughterhouses for the sake of what, I ask?”