In the Shadow of Blackbirds (4 page)

“It’s still impossible to believe.” I shook my head. “Stephen told me this is all the work of a drug addict and a cheat.”

“Julius isn’t an addict.”

“Stephen mentioned opium.”

“Maybe Stephen was the one who was lying. Did you ever think of that?” She plopped onto her sofa’s flowery cushions and untied her boots, which unleashed the foul odor of her feet. “Stephen was always jealous of his brother’s success.”

My stomach lurched. “What do you mean
was
?”

“I mean … Stephen’s battalion headed to France over the summer.”

“I know. We still write to each other.”

Her face blanched. “Oh, Mary Shelley.” She uncrossed her legs. “You shouldn’t be in contact with him. Does your father know?”

“He’s seen me receive Stephen’s letters.”

“No,” she said, “does he know what happened between the two of you when you were last down here?”

“He doesn’t know the made-up version you heard from Julius.”

“Why would Julius lie about what he saw?”

“I told you back in April, he and Stephen were having a fight.”

She pulled off her right boot without looking me in the eye.

I sank into the rocking chair across from her. “What has Julius said about Stephen’s whereabouts? Has their mother received any letters?”

“Only one since Stephen arrived overseas.”

“When was that?”

“June or July, I think.”

“My last letter from him was dated June twenty-ninth, right after he made it to France. Then he stopped writing.” I clutched my stomach. “Why hasn’t he written anyone since then? Does his family think he’s all right?”

She yanked off her other boot with a grunt. “As far as I know.”

“Why hasn’t his brother gone to war?”

“The draft board turned Julius down. He suffers from flat feet.”

“Oh, poor Julius.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure he’s suffering deeply because of those feet.”

“I was sincerely hoping you would have calmed down about Julius Embers during these past six months. He invited you over for another free photograph tomorrow. And he has something for you from Stephen.”

“The package?”

“You know about it?”

“Stephen kept saying he asked his mother to send me a
parcel right before he left, but it never arrived. Why didn’t she ever mail it?”

Aunt Eva avoided my question by rubbing the sole of her foot. I could see a gaping hole in her black stocking. Oberon let out an angry squawk, no doubt to break the tension gripping the room.

“Why didn’t she mail it, Aunt Eva?”

My aunt’s face flushed pink. “Mrs. Embers probably felt the relationship wouldn’t be good for either of you. You were both too young and too unmarried for that sort of intimacy, Mary Shelley. You should have never gone into that room alone with Stephen.”

“We didn’t—”

“It took me two months before I could show my face to the family, and it’s only because Mrs. Embers reached out to me after she read Wilfred’s obituary.”

I shot out of the rocking chair with the intention of grabbing my belongings and escaping upstairs.

“Mary Shelley—”

“My dad never even let me near Stephen’s brother when I was growing up.” I picked up my bags. “But you act like Julius is a saint. He told a terrible tale about his brother and me, but you worship him.”

“Stop. Please stop.” She kept on massaging her smelly old foot. “I know you’re upset about Stephen and your father, and I know I’m only ten years older than you—”

“I just want you to understand that what happened that
day was a thousand times more innocent than what Julius told you. Will you please start believing your own flesh and blood instead of this
friend
who’s striking it rich off war deaths?”

She lowered her head.

“Please, Aunt Eva.”

“Julius has been so good to me,” she said. “You don’t understand how hard it is to be alone when the world’s unraveling around you.”

“Yes, I do. I understand completely.”

She met my eyes, and her expression softened. She dropped her foot and exhaled a sigh that told me she was dead tired of everything, including our conversation.

I took a calming breath. “Despite this problem with Julius, I am extremely grateful you and I can be together right now. And I appreciate you letting me live here without once mentioning the danger Dad has posed to the family members still up in Oregon.”

She jutted her chin into the air with typical Aunt Eva pride. “Thank you. I’ve been worried about my brothers ever since we saw those people beat on that German man during your last trip. A Swiss German surname like Boschert doesn’t sit well with some people these days.”

“I know. The inability to see the truth about a person is a terrible thing.”

She returned to fussing over her foot, choosing to ignore the fact that I was still talking about Julius. “Go change out of those clothes, Mary Shelley,” she said without any fight
left in her, which made me feel guilty. “I’ll start running your bathwater. Look on the bedside table while you’re up there. I’ve left you something that belonged to Wilfred.”

“Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “I’ll go look for it.” I climbed the stairs with my traveling trunk thumping against the wood.

The gift she had left for me in my room was Uncle Wilfred’s weighted brass nautical compass, inherited from his seafaring grandfather and mounted in a mahogany case the size of a large jewelry box. A gorgeous device.

While my bathwater roared through the downstairs pipes, I wandered around my new room with the compass, checking to see whether the walls behind the gilded paper contained any metal strong enough to move the needle. And for a short while, the lure of scientific discovery blotted out the sea of masked faces on the train ride south, the purplish-black feet rattling in the back of that cart, my father getting punched in the gut in front of my eyes, and the first boy I’d ever loved fighting for his life in a trench in France.

I TWISTED AND TURNED, TRYING TO GET COMFORTABLE IN
my new bed. The mattress springs whined with every restless movement I made. Ambulance sirens screamed in the distance. I couldn’t sleep. I ached to see and touch Stephen again. The briny air I’d smelled all afternoon reminded me that we were last together only a few miles from Aunt Eva’s house—before the flu, before my father’s arrest, when Stephen still lived in his home across the bay.

I reached down to the black doctor’s bag on the floor and fetched Stephen’s second-to-last letter, dated May 30, 1918. The picture he had included fell out of the envelope—a portrait taken at a studio where all the Camp Kearny recruits had gone to get photographed in their army uniforms. He
wore a tight-fitting tunic that buttoned up to his throat, narrow trousers that disappeared inside knee-high boots, and a ranger-style Montana peak hat that hid his short brown hair. I could tell from the stiff way he held his jaw that he was attempting to look serious and bold for the picture, but mainly he resembled a Boy Scout ready for camp.

His lovely handwriting on the letter shone in my oil lamp’s steady light.

Dear Mary Shelley,

They’re shipping us overseas soon, even though I’ve barely been in training. We’re needed in Europe something desperate, I guess. I’ll be on a train to the East Coast in the coming weeks and then boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic.

I’ve been wondering why you haven’t responded to the package I prepared for you the morning I left. At first I worried that I somehow offended you with the gift
…
or that I offended you by kissing you. But if you were offended, you would have told me so directly, wouldn’t you? You have never been shy or evasive. So I choose to believe the package never reached you.

If you aren’t mad at me, I would love to hear how you are doing and to receive a recent picture of you. I’m including an Army Post Office address where you can write to me at any point, even when I’m overseas. The only photographs I have of you are from your days of mammoth hair bows—those giant loops of ribbon that looked like they would start flapping and fly off the top of your head. I’m trying so hard to remember the grown-up version of
you, with your bewitching smile and those haunting blue eyes that seemed to understand exactly what I was feeling.

If you would rather not attach yourself to someone heading off to war, I understand. After your aunt hurried you out of my house that day, after Julius told his vicious version of what happened, my mother yelled at me and called me cruel. She reminded me you have your whole life ahead of you and said the last thing an intelligent girl like you needs is to ruin her life for a boy heading off to war.

You don’t need to wait for me, Shell. I’m aware you need to live your life without worrying about me. If you do want to write, however, if you do think of me, I would love to receive your letters. I miss you so much.

Yours affectionately,
Stephen

P.S. I wish I had those goggles of yours that supposedly let you see the future. I could really use them right now.

I smiled at his last line and leaned over to my black bag again. Down in the cloth-lined depths of one of the side compartments were the coarse leather straps of my aviatrix goggles—a gift from Aunt Eva, purchased to blot out the memory of the crowd beating on the German man at the Liberty Loan drive during my last visit. We had come across the chaos just as the police were dragging the victim away in
handcuffs, his right eye swelling, his nose and mouth a mess of bright red blood. Men with angry blue veins bulging from their foreheads had shouted words like
Kraut bastard
and
goddamned Hun,
even with ladies and children present.

I shoved aside the memory of the violence, fastened the goggles over my face, and lay back against the cool sheets to stare through the bug-eyed lenses at the empty white ceiling. Stephen’s letter rested against my stomach—an invisible weight, but there just the same. My mind opened to the possibility that the goggle salesman’s promises of enchantment had been true, as preposterous as the idea was. I would see the fate of the world through the glass lenses.

Yet the future refused to emerge.

Only the past.

I saw myself getting off the train on April 26 to celebrate my sixteenth birthday in Stephen’s new city … and to distract Aunt Eva from life with a husband wasting away in a home for tuberculosis patients. She and Uncle Wilfred had moved to San Diego for the healthier air, and I jumped at the opportunity to visit her—and perhaps see my old friend again. Faces didn’t yet hide behind gauze masks. Soldiers and sailors arriving for training smiled up at the Southern California sunshine and smacked one another on the back as if they were on vacation, and the air rang out with laughter and war talk and the boisterous melody of a brass band playing “Over There.”

Aunt Eva had met me on the train platform in a lacy white dress that fell halfway between her knees and ankles. Her hair,
still long enough to reach her waist, was pinned to the back of her head in shimmering blond loops of girly curls.

As soon as we had escaped the bustle of recruits and music in the depot, I asked her, “Have you seen my friend Stephen Embers’s family since you moved here?”

“Actually, yes.” Her leg bumped into my swinging suitcase, which she did not offer to carry. “Julius now runs the family photography studio. He’s a spirit photographer—he captures images of the dead who’ve returned to visit loved ones.”

“I know.” I squinted into the burning sunlight. “Stephen mentioned that in one of his letters. He didn’t sound pleased about his brother’s work. And I’ve only received one letter from him since their father passed away in January. I’m really worried about Stephen.”

“I’ve posed for Julius.”

“You have?”

“A couple of times.” The sun glinted off her round spectacles, but I could see a funny little gleam dancing in her hazel eyes. “I recognized his name in the newspaper when he presented an exhibit of his work in February, and I was absolutely flabbergasted when I saw his photos. He’s trying to summon your mother and Grandma Ernestine for me.”