In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2 page)

“Hello.” She rubbed the pouch and looked me over. “I’m Mrs. Peters.”

“I’m …” I hoisted my black leather bag onto my lap and answered with a shortened version of my name: “Mary.” The newspapers rustling around me more than likely carried an article about my father, and I envisioned a mention of me:
Also present at the house during the arrest last night was Mr. Black’s daughter, Mary Shelley. The girl seems to have been named after the author of a certain horror novel with an extremely German-sounding title:
Frankenstein.

“Is that a doctor’s bag?” asked Mrs. Peters.

“Yes.” I squeezed the handles tighter. “It was my mother’s.”

“Your mother was a doctor?”

“The best one around.”

“I’m sorry she’s not on this train with us.” Mrs. Peters eyeballed the other passengers. “I don’t know what will happen if anyone collapses while we’re en route. No one will be able to save us.”

“If we get sick, we’ll probably just get dumped off at the next stop.”

She wrinkled her forehead and gasped. “What a highly unpleasant thing to say.”

I shifted my knees away from her. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about the flu.”

Mrs. Peters gasped again. “How can you not talk about it? We’re speaking through gauze masks, for heaven’s sake. We’re crammed together like helpless—”

“Ma’am, please—stop talking about it. I’ve got enough other worries.”

She scooted an inch away. “I hope you aren’t riddled with germs.”

“I hope you aren’t, either.” I leaned back against the wood and tried to get comfortable, despite my surroundings and the nausea that had been haunting me ever since my father’s arrest. Images of government officials punching Dad in the gut and calling him a traitor flickered though my head like grotesque scenes on a movie screen.

Steam hissed from all sides of the car. The floor vibrated against my boots. My hands and knees trembled, and my teeth chattered with the frantic intensity of a Morse code distress signal:
tap tap tap TAP TAP TAP tap tap tap.

To escape, I undid my satchel’s metal clasp and pulled out a bundle of letters six inches thick, bound together by a blue hair ribbon with fraying edges. I slid a crisp cream-colored envelope out from the top of the pile, opened the flap, and lost myself in the letter.

June 29, 1918

My Dearest Mary Shelley,

I arrived overseas four days ago. Our letters are censored, so I need to keep this message uneventful. The army will black out any phrases that indicate where I am, which makes me sound like an operative in a Sherlock Holmes novel. For example: I am in
and soon we’ll be going to
. Mysterious, no?

I received your letter, and as much as seeing your words on paper sent my heart racing, I hated reading that my package never reached you. It should have arrived at your house nearly two months ago. I blame my brother. But I’ll write to my mother and see if she knows when and if it was sent.

I also received your photograph. Thank you so much, Shell. That picture means the world to me. I look at your face all the time and still find it hard to believe that little Mary Shelley Black, my
funny childhood friend and devoted letter-writing companion, grew up to be such a beauty. I would give anything to travel back in time to your visit in April and still be with you. If I close my eyes, I can almost taste your lips and feel your long brown hair brushing against my skin. I want so badly to hold you close again.

Sometimes I can’t help imagining what would have happened if I hadn’t moved away at fourteen. What if my grandfather hadn’t died and my parents hadn’t rushed us down to live in his house on the island? Would you and I still be as close? Would we have grown more intimate … or drifted apart? Whatever the case, I feel robbed of your presence every day of my life.

Never worry about me, Shell. I chose to be here, so anything that happens to me is my own fault. You told me in your letter you wished you could have stopped me from leaving for the war when we were together in April. I was determined to go, and you know better than anyone else I can be as stubborn as you sometimes.

Write soon. Send me a book or two if you can.

I miss you.

Yours with all my love,
Stephen

A sneeze erupted in the seat in front of me.

My eyes flew wide open, and Stephen’s letter fell to my lap. All heads whipped toward a skinny redheaded woman, who sneezed again. My lips parted to utter a taboo word—
gesundheit
—but I quickly clamped them together.

“My wife has allergies!” said the woman’s companion, a man with thick, mashed-potato swirls of white hair. He scooted closer to his wife and tightened her mask. “It’s not the flu. Stop looking at her that way.”

The watchful stares continued.

At that moment, the train jerked into motion, knocking us all off balance. The whistle’s cry evaporated into the October mist. I tucked Stephen’s letter into my bag and gazed at the brick buildings passing by, followed by bursts of red and amber trees that offered small reminders of what I’d miss most about Portland. Autumn had always been my favorite season, with the smells of burning leaves and mulling spices and the arrival of bright orange pumpkins in my father’s grocery store.

Rain soon drummed against the window.

Everything outside turned to gray.

Beside me Mrs. Peters knitted her furry eyebrows at the lady who had sneezed. “We’re all going to be dead by the time we get off this train, thanks to that woman.”

I nearly replied that if we were dead, we wouldn’t be getting off the train, would we? But, again, I clamped my jaw shut—something that had never been easy for me.

Everyone around me sat stone-still with straight backs, stinking of folk remedies. The stench of my neighbor’s medicine pouch and someone’s garlic-scented gum was strong enough for me to taste through the four-ply barrier of my mask. The wheels of the train
click-clacked, click-clacked, click-clacked
over the lack of conversation.

Was I dreaming? Could it all just be a terrible, terrible nightmare that would end if I pried my eyes open? I dug my nails into my palms with high hopes of stirring myself out of sleep, but pain and half-moon marks emerged. I was wide awake.

Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H. G. Wells–style world—a horrific, fantastical society in which people’s faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn’t be real. And it couldn’t be the United States of America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

But it was.

I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed.

1918.

• San Diego, California—October 18, 1918 •

AUNT EVA DIDN’T GREET ME ON THE RAILROAD PLATFORM
when I arrived, which meant one of three things: she was running late, she hadn’t received my telegram, or she had been stricken by the flu. The third possibility made me shake with both dread and loneliness, so I refused to dwell on it.

I slouched on a hard, uncomfortable bench in San Diego’s Santa Fe Depot and stared up at the white plaster arches that spanned the ceiling like rainbows leeched of color. Great wagon wheels that held electric bulbs also loomed above me, so heavy they required a battalion of metal chains to keep them fastened to the arches. Sea air breezed through the
open entryway—a mixture of salt and fish smells that made my empty stomach growl. My back ached and my brain longed for sleep after traveling more than a thousand miles. All I could do was sit and wait.

The posters hanging on the blue and gold mosaic walls had changed since my visit six months earlier. Back in April, signs in vivid red, white, and blue had screamed fear-inspiring slogans meant to rally us around the fight against the Germans:

B
EAT BACK THE
H
UN WITH
L
IBERTY
B
ONDS
!
G
IVE TILL IT HURTS
—T
HEY GAVE TILL THEY DIED
!
A
RE YOU
100% A
MERICAN
? P
ROVE IT
!
D
ON’T READ
A
MERICAN HISTORY
—M
AKE IT
!

I remembered Aunt Eva grumbling about “questionable taste” when she steered me past an illustration of a slobbering German gorilla clutching a golden-haired maiden with bare breasts.
DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE. ENLIST. U.S. ARMY!
barked that particular poster.

Aside from one navy recruitment notice, the propaganda signs were now gone, replaced by stark white warnings against coughing, sneezing, and spitting in public. The words
INFLUENZA
and
EPIDEMIC
watched over me from all directions in bold black letters—as if we all needed reminders we were living amid a plague.

A half hour after Aunt Eva was supposed to fetch me, a new train arrived, and it was full of U.S. Army recruits on
their way to Camp Kearny, on the northern outskirts of San Diego. After a great deal of fuss and shouted orders, officers in olive-green tunics and flared-hip pants marched through the station, accompanied by a silent herd of young men outfitted in flu masks and Sunday-best clothing. The boys were young—most of them not much older than eighteen, now that the draft age had dropped from twenty-one. Some of them saw me, and their eyes lit up above their gauze, even though I must have looked like a sack of potatoes slumped there on the bench and wearing my ugly mask.

“Hello, dollface,” said a burly one with light brown hair.

“Hey there, beautiful,” cooed a scrawny one in black trousers too long for his legs. “Got a kiss for a soldier?”

Others whistled until the officers snapped at them and told them to remember they were respectable members of the U.S. Army.

I felt neither flattered nor offended by the boys’ attention. Mainly, they reminded me of the way Stephen had looked the last time I saw him, with that strange mixture of bravery and terror in his brown eyes.

Through the windows, I watched the boys proceed to a line of green military trucks that waited, rumbling, alongside the curb. The recruits climbed one by one beneath the vehicles’ canvas coverings with the precision of shiny bullets being loaded into a gun. The trucks would cart them off to their training camp, which was no doubt overrun with feverish, shivering flu victims. The boys who didn’t fall ill would learn
how to kill other young men who were probably arriving at a German train station in their Sunday-best clothing at that very moment.

Don’t think like that,
I scolded myself.
That’s why they took Dad away. You can’t afford to think like him.