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It was just all of it. Cassidy exhaled. How could she be the weird mom at her kid’s school? She wasn’t as thick-skinned as her own mother—she knew that from her own time in school here. It would be living the nightmare all over again. But worse, how could she tell her kid that she’d been in California once, that she’d given up a different life? How could she make a life here as a single mom that didn’t feel like giving up?
Jane
Jane had three blankets on her lap. She shivered and watched the rain. Hard rain always brought her back to the day she’d told Owen.
Outside, Washington had been drowning in fat drops. Inside, Owen had hunched over in his chair, as if he had been shot in the gut. “Jane . . .” He sat up and reached a hand toward her.
Jane told herself not to go to him, but she couldn’t help herself. She took a step closer, and he touched her arm. For a moment, under Owen’s piercing blue gaze, with his tender, softening face and his hand gentle on her arm, Jane thought that it would be all right. This could be the beginning of their story. She could smell him—the salty, bready smell of him.
“Jane,” he repeated. “There are ways to deal with this sort of thing.” A sudden screech of furniture against the floor screamed out from Mr. Plunkett’s cordoned space. Owen lowered his voice. “I know a lieutenant in the hospital corps who’s here for another week—”
“Get your paw off of me.” Jane shoved his hand away. “How dare you try to sweep it all under the rug! No need to consider the danger to me, is there? No need to worry about me breaking the law.”
“I know this is all my fault, Jane, but I can’t be part of this.”
“You can’t be part of this?” Jane snapped. “You damn well shouldn’t have been part of this from the beginning, because I don’t have much choice in the matter now, do I?”
They were quiet for several moments.
Jane couldn’t go back to Buckhannon pregnant. She imagined the look on her mother’s face, Arzella lamenting to God, making quite sure Jane could hear her. She imagined the smug looks and whispers that would follow wherever she went around town.
She couldn’t stay in Washington pregnant. She imagined Flossie, Erma, Peggy, and the others as her dresses grew tighter and tighter. She imagined trying to survive in the city without her paycheck or her roommate.
Jane clenched her fists. “Take me to the hospital corps lieutenant.” She looked Owen straight in the eye.
If she was no longer innocent, she could at least be strong.
Without a word, Owen stood and walked to the door. Jane followed him down the slippery steps to the street, where he opened the Highlander’s passenger-side door. It was the first time she had seen it with the top up—closed off, private, uninviting. Jane did not thank him, just sat, swung her legs inside, and put her handbag on her lap. Jane looked up at Owen, and he closed the door behind her.
The heat was oppressive with the windows up so they opened them, raindrops spinning toward them like torpedoes. It was seventy-five miles of drizzle on Route 222. As the rain beat her face like sewing needles, Jane considered that this is what it was like to be a sullied woman.
Owen slowed before a gated complex and eased toward the entrance, where he showed his credentials to the seaman on duty.
Inside, several sailors worked on a dummy ship. On land, the vessel looked pathetic, like an oversized children’s toy. Owen parked his car beside the ship and held up a finger to indicate Jane should stay put, before walking over, and waiting for someone to notice him.
“Lieutenant!” a man called down, spotting Owen.
“I’m looking for Lieutenant Dickens!” he shouted back.
The sailor disappeared below the deck and returned a moment later with a man of about forty who smiled jovially when he saw Owen. Lieutenant Dickens hopped down to land and the two shook hands. They spoke, turning occasionally toward Jane, motioning toward the car. The men’s hands never seemed to stop moving. When they weren’t pointing in her direction, they placed their hands on their hips, crossed their arms at their chests, or stroked their chins.
It occurred to Jane that she was nothing but a problem for them to resolve, a thorn in Owen’s side.
At one point, Lieutenant Dickens shook his head and looked at the ground. Owen leaned in closer and said something into his ear. Dickens looked up at him, sighed, and the two men approached the car.
“This way, Jane,” Owen said, opening her door. She got out, unable to meet Dickens’s eyes. He didn’t look at her, either, tapping his foot impatiently instead. The rain had stopped.
Fear gripped Jane suddenly and she froze, wishing she had told Ding. The useless anchor, draped off the side of the dummy ship, seemed attached to her own leg. She was unable to move.
The two men stared back at Jane, and she felt from both of them a curling, angry disgust—a grimy, thick hate that she understood was not about her, not really. She represented something to them. She was the caricature—the loose-moraled, red-lipped seductress.
Clutching her handbag and wishing with all her might that it was her cousin’s hand, Jane followed the men away from the ship to the long brick barracks, featureless save for hundreds of windows. It was empty inside, the boys busy training. On the right sat long rows of neatly made bunks. Dickens turned left, toward darkness and disorder.
Owen followed Dickens, and Jane walked a step behind, past the still-wet showers, past the toilets, one still burbling, and into a large furnace room. The walls of the room were unfinished and pipes of all sizes snaked from ceiling to floor and wall to wall. Two shovels leaned against the far wall next to a metal pail, beside which was a small attached room filled with coal, likely mined in West Virginia. It had probably taken the same B&O route as Jane.
“Excuse me,” Lieutenant Dickens said, leaving Jane alone in the dark room with Owen.
“I can go,” he said, not meeting her eyes.
“Don’t you dare,” Jane commanded, and Owen put his hands in his pockets.
How different this silent darkness was from that at the Hamilton. This room was not meant for luxury or joy, but for utility and necessity. It had the same lonely feel as the root cellar back home, and in spite of its warmth, Jane felt a chill.
Dickens returned with a small gray towel and a bag of medical supplies.
He cleared his throat. “You can take off your undergarments and lie down.” He handed the towel to Jane.
“Turn around,” she said, and both men obliged.
Apparently, Jane undressed for strange men now. The worst they could say about her would be true. Jane removed her underwear and lay down on the small towel. She thought of her innocent excitement as she had stitched her dress on her mother’s machine and wanted to cry as she realized the coal dust would ruin it.
“All right,” she said.
The two men towered over her and she closed her eyes, humiliated. A bobby pin poked the back of her neck. She was determined to be angry and dignified, not scared or embarrassed.
Dickens crouched down before her and without warning, placed his rough hands on her thighs.
“Oh!” Jane’s eyes shot open and she pushed back with her feet away from Dickens, hitting her head on the wall. She told herself again not to cry.
“Stay still,” Dickens muttered, his voice gruff.
Jane squeezed her eyes shut again, cracking them open just enough to catch a glimpse of something long and sharp. She closed them. She thought of home, of her mother and father, of the stench of the pigs and the flutter of the chickens’ wings as they moved to roost each evening. She thought of the soft petals of her mother’s violets and the dusty pages of her father’s books. Suddenly sharp pain shot from her bottom to the very top of her head, extending, it felt, even to her soul, which seemed to hover somewhere just above her crown. She howled now, in agony, and Owen cringed.
She told herself s
he deserved all of this.
“Stay still,” Lieutenant Dickens commanded, and Jane froze, the pain scorching her from tail to top. She felt rough fingers and then something dry. “I’m packing you with gauze,” Dickens said. “You might feel some cramping, but you’ll be fine.”
Jane tried to stand, but the room shifted as she moved. Owen took her arm and she leaned on him—a grotesque parody of their first dance. Together, they hobbled back past the showers and dormitory, and back past the grounded ship. Jane felt the seamen staring, pausing to wonder at the suddenly weak woman, escorted away covered in blood and coal. Lieutenant Dickens acknowledged Owen with only a “Sir” before returning to the ship.
Owen delivered Jane to Mr. Plunkett’s house, where she closed the door without a word. At the top of the stairs, she found Ding waiting. Ding took one look at her, from her disheveled head to her soiled dress and bare, bloodied legs, and pulled her into a long, tight hug. Tenderly, Ding helped her undress, then led her to the bath. She helped Jane step into the bath, which was supposed to have been their haven. Ding sat on the edge of the tub as she ran warm water.
Gently, quietly, Ding washed her cousin. She would make a good nurse.
On the first day, Jane stayed in bed. She felt hazy and heavy, her legs made of lead.
On the second day, she felt hot, feverish, confused. They had treated her like an animal, like one of her mama’s pigs.
On the third day, she sent a telegram. Daddy, it read. I got myself in trouble. I’m sorry. I know what I am. No trouble any longer, but may need to come home. She felt guilty, sending it this way. Her mother, especially, would worry herself sick at a telegram, with her brothers away.
On the fourth day, the walls breathed, moving in and out—a carnivalesque squeeze-box accompanying the big band pulse in Jane’s head.
On the fifth day, Mr. Plunkett’s telephone rang and Ding helped Jane down the stairs. The telephone, its surface as shiny as West Virginia coal, its cord, a noose—the telephone, like the telegram, was only for bad news. How adept mankind had become at delivering dreadful messages.
“Come on home, honey.” Jane could still hear Philip’s voice crackling on the line. “Come on home.”
“Jane!” Ding’s voice rang through the darkness, and Jane blinked her eyes open to see her cousin’s startled face staring down at her from above.
“You fainted.” Ding knelt, putting a hand to Jane’s forehead. Below her, the floor was hard. Jane looked at Ding’s eyes, which wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to focus on. All of Ding’s boys, but Jane was the one on the floor. Who would have thought Ding was the smart one? Kisses and promises didn’t put you on the floor.
Mr. Plunkett’s heavy footsteps reverberated toward them.
“You’re burning up.” Ding rushed to the bathroom and returned with an armful of cold wet rags. Jane stood, brushing off her skirt, but when she straightened fully, she fell again, landing on her arm so that she cried out in pain.
“Mr. Plunkett!” Ding called, and the pat pat pat of his footsteps on linoleum gained speed.
Jane felt a starry purple darkness descend. She awoke in the hospital.
“Hello, dear,” a nurse said kindly as she fussed with an assortment of syringes arranged on a metal tray. Her dress and stiff cap were glaringly white. “You’re in the septic ward. You’ve had an infection, love. And a sprained wrist.” The nurse never stopped moving. Satisfied with the placement of the syringes, she bustled to another woman’s bedside, administered something orally to the girl, then at the next bed, examined a moaning woman’s bloody underwear. In one steady movement, the nurse lifted her bottom, swiped her clean, and replaced her garments with a fresh pair.
“An infection,” Jane repeated, looking around. Her whole body throbbed like a foot trying to push out a splinter. All around her were metal-framed beds occupied by girls in various states of infirmity. They had all gone through it. They’d all gotten themselves into a worse fix trying to get out of one.
For a week Jane slept, ate, and stared at the ceiling. There were hardly any visitors to the septic ward. Who would want to visit them? Its occupants did not speak to one another. What could they say? How could one talk of such disgrace?
Jane dozed, stared, and worried. What would her mama do if she didn’t get better?
“It really is a miracle,” a cheerful young nurse said as she administered Jane’s daily dose of penicillin. “You’re very lucky to have it.”
Jane smiled politely and envisioned the miracle mold coursing through her veins, destroying whatever horridness had entered in the furnace room. In her mind, the drug wore red, white, and blue. But even this wonder of modern medicine could not destroy the darkness Jane felt inside. The war had won. That was its purpose, wasn’t it? War sought to destroy the human spirit—hope, connection, and innocence. The war had won.
At the beginning of the second week, the doctor, whom Jane had never met, decided she was well enough for visitors. Less than an hour after a nurse informed her of this fact, Ding strode through the doors of the ward in a fur pillbox hat and snood.
“New hat?” Jane asked.
“Indeed. I asked myself why I wasn’t entitled to a little happiness.”
“You certainly are,” Jane said.
“As are you, dear. How are you?”
“Infected.”
“Still?” Ding teased in a dry tone. “I would have thought this whole ordeal would have got you off the fellow.”
The girls smirked and then quieted.
“You had a caller,” Ding said, sitting at the foot of the bed. “A Mrs. Wills.”
“Claudine!” Jane said. Claudine knew all about her. She was mortified.
“Yes, that was it. She came around after you didn’t show up at the Armory. She seemed to know the situation.” Ding paused and gave Jane a quizzical look. When she remained silent, Ding went on. “Anyway, she told me to tell you that when you’re ready to work again, her husband is on the hunt for a new secretary.”
Secretary for a colored man. Jane imagined what folks at home, and even the girls at the Armory, would say. And so what? Claudine was a lovely person and a far better friend than most of the girls at the Armory. If she got looks for working for a kind, successful man, maybe it would make up for a portion of the detestable things she’d done.
Ding patted Jane’s leg and looked around the room.
Here Jane was, worried about judgment for crimes almost no one knew about while Claudine and her husband faced judgment every day for the way they were born. She could learn a lot from Mr. Wills, she figured. When she thought of starting a new job, though—a new building, new people, new responsibilities, all in the city bustling with optimism, ambition, and servicemen, Jane knew what she must do.
“That’s so kind,” she said. “If she comes by again, please give her my very sincere thanks. I don’t imagine I’ll be taking her up on it, though.”
“Whyever not?” Ding asked. “You know as well as I that in this city, connections—”
“It’s time for me to go. Back home, I mean. This city has chewed me up and spit me out.” Jane shook her head. “Mama will be happy to know she was right.”
Ding looked aghast, blinking several times and then straightening her hat. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, finally.
“About going home?” Jane asked. “I’ve barely been conscious.”
“Not about going home. About . . .” She drew a handkerchief from her purse and covered her mouth.
“I didn’t want anyone to know,” Jane said. “I didn’t want anyone to know what I was.”
“You know I would never think any less of you. I love you more than anyone, Jane.”
It was true, Jane knew. Ding would never in a million years have allowed her to lie on a dirty towel in a coal-covered furnace room. She would never have allowed he
r to fester for days in her room if she had known her malady was more than lovesickness.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you,” Jane said.
“And I should have known.” Ding bent and began brushing Jane’s hair with her fingers. “We’ll just have to eat our ‘shoulds,’ won’t we?” She took her tube of Revlon from her pocketbook and applied it to Jane’s parched lips, then stood back to admire her work. “You’ll be the most stunning woman in the hills.”
Behind the hula girl, in her room at the nursing home, the rain was trying to turn to snow. Jane touched her shaking fingers to her dry lips and pulled another blanket onto her lap.
Cassidy
The trip to Charleston usually took two and a half hours, but Cassidy had already been driving for four. Finally the gold dome of the state capitol building shone like a promise up ahead. Cassidy couldn’t help gaping out the window.
Mesmerized by its sheen, Cassidy drifted to the shoulder of the road. Bopbopbopbopbop—the tires bounced over the rumble strip and Cassidy pulled to the left to correct. As she did, she felt the back tires slip to the right. Ice, she thought, surprised at her lack of panic. There were cars, buildings, she was slipping. She simply noted the objects and sensations around her, turned the wheel to the right, and felt them glide. Crunch. She sat motionless now, the peaceful feeling of surrender to the unknown interrupted by the sidewalk. Cassidy was too stunned to move.
Then, all at once, the fear set in. She could have died. What if a car had been coming the other way? She wouldn’t have even known to be scared. She would have let it happen. She wondered for a brief moment if she had died, or maybe been grievously injured, and this was her brain’s way of coping. No, she was here. She was okay. She reached for her seat belt and bumped a tender spot on her chest where it had locked and tightened around her. The baby. How hard had the seat belt hit? How protected was the baby? Jokes about punching pregnant women in the stomach sprung to her memory.