His voice changed slightly, becoming a little weaker. “Last month, my trucks and I were sent north for a prisoner exchange instead of a delivery. Three hundred women from the Ravensbrück camp were being traded for a bunch of German civilians in France. Our assignment was to get the women out, take them across the hellscape of Germany, and deliver them to Switzerland. I figured I’d just deliver the rest of us to Switzerland, too, and get the hell out of there.”
Ravensbrück. Dot shuddered inwardly, thinking of the research she’d done on the concentration camps. Ravensbrück had been the largest concentration camp in Germany, second in size only to Auschwitz, in German-annexed Poland. It was almost exclusively for women, who had been subjected to horrific conditions and torture, including starvation, forced labour, medical experiments, and sterilization. When the camp had been liberated just a month ago by the Soviets, there were more than fifty thousand women trapped there. Dot had seen a few photos and would never forget them. She couldn’t imagine how Gus had felt, being there in person.
He gnawed on his lower lip. She was seeing so many new mannerisms. A twitch, a wandering gaze. What had they done to him?
He set the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at the smoke twisting upward.
“It was Easter,” he said softly. “Or somewhere around then. We pulled onto the side of the road outside Ravensbrück’s gates the night before, staying out of the way of an air raid. When the sun came up, we sat in our trucks and waited for the women to come out.”
He was back there, she could see, and he didn’t want to be. In his hardened jaw and parted lips, she watched him relive that morning.
“They didn’t look like women. If they hadn’t been standing, we might have thought they were dead already. Their bones… They’d been beaten, some of them mutilated. I kept reminding myself that those women were the strongest of the thousands within the camp. If they’d been too weak to stand, they would have been killed ahead of time.
“Nothing about that morning felt real. We were gaping like idiots, andthose poor, brave women just stared at us. I didn’t even know I was crying at first. Then someone started yelling in German, and I jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the gate. The others came with me. When I came face-to-face with one of the women, I held out my hand. She looked at me like she was a child, like she wasn’t believing what was in front of her.” He took a shaky breath. “Then she touched my hand and said, ‘You’re real.’?”
Dot closed her eyes against the tears that threatened. What horrors those women must have survived.
“She collapsed into my arms,” he said. “I carried her to the truck. All sixty pounds of her, maybe. Her bones were sharp. I remember trying not to cry as I went back and carried more of them. Some were able to walk, but they were so weak.”
Forgotten in the ashtray, most of his cigarette had become an inch-long cylinder of grey ash. Dot lit a second one and replaced the first. He didn’t notice.
“One of the women kept saying how lucky she was. She said five hundred women had been gassed just that morning before we arrived.” Again, that gnawing on his lip. “My truck blew a tire after a bit, and two of the women dropped out of the back and went to it.” He stared at Dot, incredulous. “They thought we would make them fix it!”
His voice cracked, and Gerald looked away. A part of Dot broke, hearing the fragility in his words. It was almost like hearing human voices interrupting the Morse code in her headphones. She didn’t know how much more of his pain she could take, but just like at Hydra, she would never stop listening.
“We ran out of gas in Hof, a little Bavarian town. We all slept on straw for a couple of nights, then we left again. Everything was bombed out. The whole country looked like rubble. We took the women to Switzerland, but I couldn’t escape like I’d planned. None of us could, because so many people were counting on us. We went back to the trucks and started making deliveries again.”
A tear escaped her eye, and she wiped it away. She shouldn’t becrying. It was his story, not hers. Except knowing that he hurt made it hers as well.
“After another month or so of driving all night, I parked in a ditch and fell asleep. In the morning, there were American soldiers standing all around the truck. They told me my job was done, and they sent me home.”
The second cigarette was turning to ash in his fingers. Gus stubbed it out and the three of them sat in silence for a full minute.
“Anything else?” Gerald asked.
Gus shook his head, and Gerald looked between them. “I’ll go back to the office then. Give you two some time. Thanks, Gus. And welcome home. We missed you.”
They both showed him to the door, then Gus faced Dot. He looked completely defeated.
“I’m not sure what to do now, Dot. I had a purpose, now I don’t.”
“But you do,” she said. “You need to be here with me.” She put her arms around him. “Thank you for coming home.”
He leaned down and kissed her, slow and soft. “I promised you I would, didn’t I?”
epilogueDASH— 1982 —Oshawa, Ontario
Thirty-six years. That’s how long Dot had been married to Gus. A marriage Dash never could have expected, and yet one that had made so much sense. The first time Dot had told her that she and Gus were together, Dash had been stunned.
“You two have been keeping secrets!” she had teased, but when she really thought about the two of them, it felt right, and it made her heart happy.
They were happy, too, though it had not been an easy path for either. After the POW camp, Gus had been plagued by illness. Dot was with him every step of the way, and he had been determined to live through it all. Stubborn to the end, Gus had died a month ago, when his body finally gave in to the malnourishment and sickness that had destroyed his organs. Sixty years was pretty good, she reasoned, considering everything he’d been through. Then she exhaled, feeling empty. No, she thought again. It wasn’t nearly enough.
Dot had dealt with Gus’s death in her own quiet way, but Dash never could have suffered in silence. Gus had been their best friend. He’d been their brother, and somehow he had saved Dash’s life. He and Pete.Neither one of the men had ever said anything more about that day, no matter how much she pushed them, and it had always made her curious. She wondered if that’s why they did it. To tease her. She didn’t really mind. She’d rather not think about that time in her life anyway.
Gus had been the quiet but funny uncle to Dash and Pete’s four children. He was also the father of two blond angels, and grandfather to three more. But more than anything else, he had been Dot’s world.
Shortly after they’d married, with Dash and Pete standing as witnesses, their mother had died. Again, far too young. Dot and Gus had moved into the old house and never left.
