“No,” said Freddie.
Her heart crumbled. They’d have to try the doors to get out. Door after door. What more lay behind them? Could she ask him toface it? Did she have a right to decide for him at all? “Then—do you want to stay here?”
“I don’t want anything,” he whispered. “I’m not—I’m not anything. You don’t want me.”
She caught his face between her hands. “Never say that. Never. You’re everything I have.”
For long moments, he was silent. She thought he wouldn’t answer. Then his ragged-nailed fingertip came up and blotted her wet face. “Laura?”
“I’m here,” she whispered.
“I’m—I’m not the same. You don’t love me. The Freddie you loved—he died.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’m a traitor,” he whispered. “I remember that. I—I did a terrible thing. I killed—” His voice stuttered. “I ran. I’m not brave.”
“You don’t have to be. Not for me.”
The blankness was trying to slide across his features again. But then he clenched his jaw. He said, “I don’t want—” He stopped. “I don’t know if we can leave.”
“We can. I know we can.”
He looked so frail. “I’ll try.”
He was shaking so hard it vibrated up her arm when she took his hand. They tried another door. And another.
None of them led out. They led back through his mind. Through fear, boredom, envy, anger. Waste, disillusionment, cold nights and dark days. Laura didn’t know she was crying until she tasted the salt. A man’s head blown from his shoulders, but his body still running. A shell that had fallen on an observation post, and Freddie given a sandbag and a shovel, to retrieve the bodies.
She began to hesitate before the hammer-blows of each door, but her brother’s blank face had slowly taken on an insane determination. Now he pushed ahead of her, opening door after door, as though looking for something. As though there were some truth about himself, something he needed, contained in one of those monstrous minutes.
A single glance back showed Faland on his feet, watching.
Then Freddie opened another door, and didn’t go on to the next. He stood there rigid. Laura, at his shoulder, saw Freddie, in memory, tumble into a shell hole, followed by a big man whose sandy hair was plastered flat with rain. Then another man, in a soaked Canadian uniform, fell into them, screaming. She saw the screaming man strike at the man with sandy hair—Winter,Laura thought. Freddie and Winter. Saw the Canadian stretch to his full height, bayonet raised. But Freddie was there, dropping his shoulder, tackling the man, sending them both flying into foul water. They writhed a moment, one uppermost, then the other, until Freddie got his feet under him.
Held the other man down until he stopped moving.
In the hotel, in the doorway, Freddie stood still. “I killed him.” His voice was perfectly flat. “I wanted you to see it. He was one of ours and I killed him.”
She didn’t touch him. She thought he’d flinch away. “You didn’t mean to.”
“Oh, I did,” said Freddie. They were still looking through the doorway, where, in memory, Freddie was crawling up the ice-slick slope of the shell hole. Winter caught him around the shoulders before he could fall, and put a canteen to his lips. They were staring at each other. As though each contained the other’s entire world.
Laura bit blood from her lip. Thought—and for the first time, really regretted—Winter’s going to die. He’d had a bout of madness—or patriotism—and tried to kill a general. He was going to be interrogated and executed.
She stayed silent. Freddie was staring into the dark. But he wasn’t looking at Winter. His eyes were on the body, floating facedown in the shell hole. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to it. “It should have been me, not you. I’m sorry.” Freddie reached out and slowly closed the door. He looked old. But the blankness did not come back into his face. “I needed to remember that.” His voice was a croak. “And there’s something else I have to remember.”
“What?”
“I’ll know when I see it.”
· · ·
Laura did not know how many doors later, but finally one of them opened onto nothing. Onto darkness like the beginning of the world. And in the darkness, she heard snatches of voices. “—Sunlight in the pines. Blackberries—”
“—the sea. I love the sea.”
A verse of a poem. Voices that mingled in the emptiness. She realized that she was crying again.
