“No,” said Laura. “Not the men out there. They’re caught in it just as we are. Go to sleep now. I’ll wake you when the shift changes.”
But Laura still couldn’t sleep. And judging by the rustling, Pim couldn’t either. “Come into my bed,” said Laura finally. “I’m cold. There’s enough room.”
It was a measure of both their weariness that Pim—chatterbox Pim—didn’t say a thing, but got up wordlessly and slid under the blankets in her chemise. They curled up together, and Laura put an arm over her, and blew out the lamp. They were asleep in an instant. Laura could not remember the last time she’d been so warm.
FALAND’S HOTEL, PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
March–April 1918
For the first time, Freddiewoke in the hotel not with an absence, but with a new memory. Faint as cobweb, blurred, but there. He’d seen Laura. Alive. Limping. In the hotel. Reason told him he hadn’t seen her. It could have been some new trick of Faland’s, a mirror-image that his mind tried to insist had been real.
But the memory persisted. The things in Faland’s mirror faded the second you looked away. But this woman looked back at him from his own mind’s eye, as unforgettable as a wound: wet, scarred, furious, vital, threads of white in her tawny hair. He could not have imagined her. It was Laura.
He’d forgotten so much, changed so much. But he hadn’t forgotten her. Nearly every memory of his childhood contained his sister. Seeing her, he remembered that he was a person too, however shattered. He wasn’t a single agonizing note in Faland’s patient hands.
He didn’t know how much time had passed since he’d seen her. He’d long since stopped caring about day or night. But now he thought,How long has it been? Where is she now?With a ferocity that surprised even him, Freddie got up and went downstairs.
He was a few feet down the corridor when the first bars of music hit him. He cringed back at the sound. Faland was playing a piece he hadn’t heard before, and the sound of it was shocking. Jagged, glorious, insane.
Then the music stopped and began again, more tentatively, as though Faland, for the first time since Freddie had met him, was feeling his way through something unfamiliar.
Freddie followed the sound down the corridor, down the stairs, to the archway to the foyer.
Stopped.
The foyer was empty. The foyer was a ruin. It smelled of mold and mice, the furniture overturned, broken glass on the floor. And the worst part was, Freddie wondered for a moment what had happened. Because it was just like waking up, when your vague dreams dissolve in the cold light of morning. Of course the foyer was like this.
A scrape at the fiddle seized his attention, and he realized that Faland was sitting on the edge of an overturned ammunition crate, oblivious to the wreckage. He tried again to play the new music; briefly it soared, glorious and mad, and then fell apart. Faland was frowning.
He glanced up at Freddie, the same as he’d ever been, a little shabby in his checked suit, sardonic, the ghost of a terrible beauty still lurking somewhere in his face, beneath the cynicism and dissolution. He seemed almost more at home in the wreckage than he had in the intact hotel.
They eyed each other.
Faland seemed to study him and then he said, “Look at you, the toy soldier remembering he is a real boy.”
Freddie said the only thing that mattered. “I saw my sister.”
Faland began to play his violin again. An ordinary run of notes now, flavored mockingly with longing. “Did you?”
He had. He knew he had. The rush of emotion was too violent, too shimmering and fragile even to name.She’s alive.“Where is she now?”
A little curling smile. “Gone off into the bright world, mon brave.Do you think that shining girl wants to lurk in the shadows with you?”
It shouldn’t have hurt. Freddie told himself that it didn’t. “She was limping.”
Faland said nothing.
“She looked ill.”
Faland’s answer was in music, a melody like a caterwauling of childish plaints. Freddie gritted his teeth and said, “I’m going to go find her.”
“Indeed?” The music took on an exaggerated nobility. As though Faland was laying out all the leaves of Freddie’s soul, and finding them shallow and obvious. “Allow her to lament the remains of the man you were? Make her aid a deserter? Will you let her watch when they shoot you, or let them shoot her along with you, when she tries to help you?”
Freddie floundered. How could he risk— Fumblingly he said, “No—I can’t— She’s alive. I have to go to her. She—she won’t care what I did. I’ll go in secret, I won’t stay, I…”
The violin music shifted to a major key, bright with ferocious courage, and Faland said over the sound, “Do you think she’ll accept it? That amber-eyed girl? No, she’ll turn traitor for you, harbor you, a deserter, without a qualm, she’ll try everything she can to save you and when they arrest her for it, she won’t flinch for a moment. She’ll go to her death alongside you. Or am I mistaken?”
Freddie hated himself for shivering and falling silent.
