“Freddie, it’s Laura.”
He looked like a ghost himself. He didn’t even acknowledge her. “Freddie, what’s happened to you?”
She tried to take his hand. He removed it gently from her grasp.
“Freddie, for God’s sake—”
His brows drew together. He didn’t look at her. “Are you dead?”
“No, I’m not. I’mnot,Freddie, I’m here. I came back to find you. Freddie,please.”
There was so little of her brother left in this hunched, gray man.
She turned on Faland.
“What have you done to him?” At Brandhoek, and after, during all those long days on the hospital train, on the hospital ship, despite the pain, she had not cried. But she was crying now.
Faland’s voice was almost gentle. “At least I know his name. I’m sure you’ve seen men worse, and at the hands of their fellow man.”
Laura was silent.
“Stay,” said Faland. “As my guests. You’ll be together. What’s the world got for you anyway?”
“Is that what you told him?”
Faland didn’t answer. He’d taken out his violin, his fingers restless on the neck of it as though he could pull music from her love and sorrow. Maybe there was no way to reach her brother.We have to get out,she thought. Out under the sky, into a world that sometimes made sense. “Freddie, we have to go.”
He was like a puppet when she pulled him to his feet.
Which door had they come through? There were too many. All alike. She dragged him to the nearest. Turned the handle.
It was unlocked. The door opened. She recoiled. Freddie cried out.
It wasn’t the way out. It wasn’t anything Laura understood at all.
· · ·
The door opened, with a gust of frigid air, onto an iron-hard daylight, with bitter rain falling. Laura wavered; the ground had fallen away. She had to grip the doorframe to steady herself.
They were standing at the edge of a trench.
Laura stood still, disbelieving. Beside her, Freddie made a small sound, of fear or sudden comprehension. It was cold, and the rain was falling just behind that ordinary wooden door. There was the sound of guns, the smell of wet wool, and excrement, and corpses. Men waded along the trench, not glancing up, mud to their waists, holding rifles over their heads. One leaned in to the other and said, grinning, “They’ll have to bring in the navy soon, to bring us up. Too wet for the infantry…” just as a section of a trench gave way, and a body, half-rotted, slumped out of the revetments…
Freddie made a low, agonized sound.
Laura slammed the door. Freddie backed up. Horror was trying to break through the blankness in his eyes. “No,” he said. “No, I’d forgotten.”
Faland was watching them.
She pulled herself together, caught Freddie’s unresisting hand, tugged. “We just have to get out. We’ll try another door. Just one more, Freddie.”
But the next opened into a hospital, and now it was Laura’s turn to freeze rigid in the doorway. For they’d bundled a dead man up into a sheet, with orderlies preparing to lift him, and a sister lurched forward, calling, “No, wait, be careful—”
But they’d lifted him too quick, and his broken body simply—slid apart…
“Laura,” Freddie said then. “I can’t.” It wasn’t dramatic. It was just a statement of fact. The door was still open. The memory-hospital was sharply real, down to the smell. She slammed the door shut. Freddie was shivering as if he was sick.
“Do you want to come with me?”
