47
William
Somewhere over theAtlantic
2003
Try as Imight, I couldn’t sleep.
Lizzie sat beside me on one side, Emma across the aisle on the other. Both had been looking after me all day, from the moment they arrived at my house to pick me up, on the drive to the airport, as we went through security, to when we took our seats on the plane. But now, finally, they were asleep, and I was left alone with my thoughts.
It had been startling to hear from Selene that Kate had come to find me that day. It had been shocking to find out she’d been alive. Though shocking didn’t quite cover the feeling. It was something more along the lines of devastating. I’d been so sure she’d died. There was no other explanation in my mind. I knew there hadn’t been some other great love she might’ve gone back to. We had made plans. We were in love. I’d never been so sure of anything or anyone in my life. So the only thing that made sense was, she’d died. And in the chaos of war, when we weren’t legally bound or blood relatives, there was no reason I’d have been told.
I’d ached for her. Mourned. Grieved for months. I became a danger to my platoon, putting us at risk when my mind had wandered, bullets whizzing past my helmet, missing me left and right...until one didn’t. This time the damage would take more than a couple of months to heal, and with the war nearly over by all accounts, on February fourteenth, nineteen forty-five, I was sent home.
Except I no longer had a home. My parents had moved when my brother was sent home in a wheelchair, the stairs making it impossible to get to his bedroom.
I found a small apartment once I was released from the hospital, barely unpacked any of the boxes, threw a mattress on the floor, put a radio on the counter, and made do with one pot and one pan. I was isolated, sad, and angry. I’d lost friends. I’d lost the woman I loved. I didn’t care anymore and it showed.
And then an old friend showed up on my doorstep.
“There’s a group of us that gets together once a week,” Bill said. “We have a couple of beers, talk a little about what we went through, what we saw over there... It helps. No one else understands.”
“I don’t feel like talking.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s really just a way to get us all out of our houses and remembering how to have friends when there aren’t bullets coming at us.”
I said thanks but no thanks. But the next week when he came by again, I couldn’t find a reason not to. After that I was there every Thursday night. Sometimes I talked, sometimes I only listened. It didn’t matter. It was just nice to not feel alone after a night of thrashing, the nightmares chasing me around my pillow.
After a while, a couple of women joined the group. One was the sister of a guy we all knew who’d been killed. She’d been close with her brother and had had a hard time since his death. The other woman was named Olivia.
A widow, Olivia’s husband of two months had died almost immediately upon being sent to the front. He’d been friends with several of the men in the group, which was how she got the call to join. They knew she’d been struggling for a long time, her folks and several friends encouraging her to move on.
“I’m tired of people assuming I’m ready because of some timetable they’ve put on my grief,” she’d said quietly the first night she came.
We all understood. We felt the same.
And then one Thursday I got off work early from the job I’d just started at an architecture firm and found her tucked into the corner of the bar we all met at, reading a book and scribbling furiously into a notebook.
I bought her a beer and she told me she was a writer.
“Or trying to be anyways,” she’d said with a shrug. “I’ll get there eventually.”
I asked her what she liked to write about and she asked me what I liked to design. We started meeting before the gatherings every Thursday after that. We hadn’t made a decision to, it just began to happen. But despite my interest in her as a person, and the fact that she was beautiful and smart and kind, I was still too broken by the loss of Kate to care about her in any way other than as a friend. And despite her husband dying years before, I could tell falling in love was the last thing on her mind.
Until the night we got caught in the rain.
The meeting had been canceled that Thursday, but I was antsy after work. I had no idea if she’d be there, but I went to the bar anyways.
“It’s closed,” she said as I walked toward her on the sidewalk outside the pub.
I frowned and stared at the handmade sign inside the window. Short-staffed. Closed Thursday, it read in messy handwriting.
The rain was pissing down and neither of us had an umbrella.
“This must be why the meeting was canceled,” I said.
“It is,” she said. “I saw it this morning and called Hal to alert everyone.”
