“I just wonder if what I tried to do made any difference at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Devon after a swallow of wine.
“Well, I saved my friends, I savedthem, but I didn’t save the radio.”
Stanley looked at his jelly jar glass, though he didn’t really want to drink any. The wine at supper had numbed him a bit, but now his feelings were back, and they felt important enough not to drown out.
“In the end, I still had to go on my mission. Which then failedagain. They died anyway.”
Devon nodded as if he understood. Which he seemed to, and would, because he knew all about the war, knew how it had ended, and how peace had soon turned into another war.
“You never did explain what the mission was,” said Devon. Stanley watched him put a bit of chopped garlic in the pan and, yes, morebutter. “But I guess it was a secret mission and if you tell me, you’ll have to kill me?”
Devon’s eyebrows went up like this was the tail end of a very old joke, one that Stanley had never heard before. The look on Devon’s face made him smile, and he realized that he’d never fully explained what he’d set out to do on that fateful morning.
“Well, the first time,” said Stanley, and you could have knocked him over with a feather if somebody had told him he’d go through that moment not once, but twice, and then end up talking about it in a kitchen in the distant future. “Isaac had died, along with Rex and Bertie. The same shell that killed them also destroyed the radio. The lieutenant needed somebody to go, to deliver the request for retreat—”
Devon made a sound, and Stanley could see that he was tempted to get out his pencil and paper and start taking notes. But then he shook his head as if chiding himself.
“Go on,” he said. “Tell me more, tell me the rest of it.” Devon paused to cup Stanley’s cheek, gentle and reassuring, giving Stanley the strength to tell his story.
“The request for retreat,” said Stanley, explaining it as though to a new recruit, “is half of the code. You find the highest ranking officer and you give him the first half of the code. Then he gives you the rest of the code, which is the approval for retreat.”
“Why does it have to be in person?” asked Devon, stirring the food in the pan. “Oh wait, because the radio was broken.”
“Yes, and the second time, I forgot about the radio, which if I hadn’t—” Stanley’s voice broke and he stopped, the full weight of his decision coming down on him so heavily he had to take a breath and start again.
“Right,” said Stanley. “Normally, you could do this over the radio so that if the Germans were listening in, they wouldn’t be able to crack the code. They wouldn’t know that you were out of bullets and food, and that you wanted to head for the hills.”
He felt his memory stagger back into that moment when he’d stood in front of Lt. Billings. He’d been full of dread, his stomachsinking, but he’d known he was the best choice for the mission because his friends were dead, and nobody back home would miss him if he failed.
“You did what you could,” said Devon. Instead of this sounding like a platitude, it felt genuine to Stanley because the expression on Devon’s face, with his turned-down mouth, made Stanley feel as though Devon truly understood.
“But I failed twice, Devon,” said Stanley, half of his mind whirring at how bizarre that sounded. “Twice I couldn’t get it right.Twice.”
Devon looked at Stanley like he didn’t quite know what to say to this, but at least he wasn’t insisting that Stanley should just get over it. Instead, he turned off the heat beneath the frying pan and took out the crusty bread, warm from the oven, and pulled Stanley to the table and fed him. Food was a good distraction, even though he’d recently eaten. As they sat catty corner from each other, close enough so that their knees touched, Stanley made use of the moment to gather his thoughts while he ate the sausage and peppers, and warm bread with butter dripping off it. The wine, he left for Devon.
“If only you’d known the code when you went back the second time,” said Devon. He tipped his head back to polish off his wine and plonked the jelly jar on the table. He looked at Stanley, his eyes serious, as though he had come to a decision. “You know, we could probably look that information up.”
“We could?”
“Sure,” said Devon. “It’s not classified anymore. Right? It’s in the records, at least it should be. There’s got to be somebody out there obsessed with the small details. You know, like the trainspotters.”
“Like the what?” asked Stanley.
“You know,” said Devon. “The guys who know every bolt and every button on every train on every line that ever ran. Guys like that.”
Stanley couldn’t imagine anybody with that much time on their hands, or access to that kind of information. They all must have their own version of Devon’s metal laptop, though, where everything that had ever been known was available with a few taps on the keyboard. Itmade his head spin to think about it too much, so he nodded and licked his finger and poked at the breadcrumbs on the table by his plate.
“I could wash the dishes and you could look,” Stanley said. He didn’t think he could bear to scroll through the records for that kind of information.
Devon nodded and stood up, scraping his chair back, and together they cleared the table. Afterwards, Devon began researching, clicking on his laptop as Stanley began washing the dishes.
Stanley soothed himself by swishing his hands in the hot water, which was supplied by a never-ending source of more hot water from the tap. The suds were mighty as well, and the bubbles never seemed to shrink. In no time, he was finished. He dried his hands on a towel and, leaving the dishes on the sideboard to dry, joined Devon at the table. He pulled his chair close to Devon’s so their shoulders brushed.
“I’m not finding anything,” said Devon. He moved his little roller mouse, which somehow knew how to communicate its position on the window, and scrolled the page down and down and down. “It’s just not here.”
Stanley shrugged. The code wouldn’t make any difference now anyway, so there was no point in finding it. Devon was determined, however, and kept at it for another hour. Stanley stayed at his side, his shoulder pressed against Devon’s, feeling a little lost.
