Nightingale (20 page)

Hold on, Esther. Hold onto me.
He held the words inside, longing to deliver them to her, longing to rip off the cursed buckle and draw her into his arms. But something about the way she curled into herself, the way she cupped her hand over her eyes, as if holding on to his hand was the furthest she could extend herself—

It hit him like a brick—harder than anything Fritz had dealt out.

She felt guilty.

Yes—her posture, bent over, protecting herself as if waiting for some assault—he recognized the posture of shame.

Oh, he knew it too well.
I think I brought them here.

His mother had stared at Peter with a look of coiled horror, her voice so slim it cut through him like a knife.
Who did you bring?

The SS. I recognize them from the café where father and I were arguing.

Then he'd curled into just that ball.

“I did this, didn't I?” he said now, on a thin slice of despair.

She shook her head.

“I did—only I don't know what it is. Please, Esther. I want to help.”

“You can't help me, Peter. For a while, I thought….” Her breath emerged so serrated, the shards of it made him wince.

She made to tug her hand away, but he held on. “No. Esther. Whatever it is—I want to know.”

She looked up at him then, a look so terrible, her eyes reddened, her cheeks glistening, that the ache in it swiped his breath from his chest. “No, you don't.”

“I do—is it me? Is it the kiss—I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have let it happen. But I meant everything I said. The war's over, and we'll be let out soon—”

A knot of desperation had gripped his chest ever since she'd taken his hand, the kind of desperation that could see the future and told him that if he let go, she might just flee from the room. And, prisoner that he was, he couldn't run after her.

Nor, maybe, should he, if he was going to cause her this much pain.

Oh, what had he done, dreaming up a future for them? Like she might be some sort of reward—

“It's not the war.” She wiped her cheeks with the meat of her hand, first one, then the other. “I need to get back to the nurses' station.”

“Please! Esther—”

“I'm getting married!”

He stopped moving. Stopped thinking. Just went numb, his entire body stripped. “Married?”

She yanked her hand away from his—he'd relaxed his grip just enough to let her.

“Yes. The man you saved in Germany is my fiancé.”

“Linus?”

She was blinking now, looking past him, out the window to the dawn. “Yes. Linus Hahn. He wasn't my friend. He's my fiancé.”

Something about the way… Is.
He's my fiancé
. “He's not dead.” The words tasted like char coming out of his mouth. “He lived.”

She nodded, but the way her eyes died made him want to weep. “There is something you're not telling me.”

Her beautiful face crumpled, just for a moment, and she cupped her hand to her mouth.

“Do you love him?”

She closed her eyes.

Then, shook her head.

A fist released in his chest, and he hated that he wanted to cry out from it. She didn't love him. She didn't love him. “I—don't understand.”

“We have a daughter.”

She said it while looking away from him, down at his shackled hand, still open for hers. “You have a…daughter?”

She nodded. Then cupped her hand over her eyes, as if unable to look at the past. “We had a night together—a stupid, mistaken night before Linus left for the war. I don't know what I was thinking. Just… I probably thought it wouldn't matter. I didn't love him, even then. I knew it. But I let him talk me into the back seat of his car—”

“His car?” Oh, he didn't mean the tone, except anger boiled through him, and he almost welcomed the screws of pain his quick intake of breath coiled through his chest. “He made love to you in the back of his car?”

“Stop, please. I can hardly think it myself. I… And no, he didn't make love to me. He—he didn't love me either.”

This was why God had shackled him to the bed. So he couldn't rise up and wrap his hands around this man's dishonorable neck.

But—wait. He'd been writing—courting, even, a betrothed woman. He swiped that thought aside, unable to face it. Or the truth that things might not have been different if he'd known.

So much for being faithful to God's principles.

“You got pregnant.”

She nodded, finally lifting her face to his. Oh, she was so beautiful, her silky blond hair rolled up around her nightingale hat, those curved lips, the way her eyes, blue, or even green in the early light—reached out to him. He held out his hand again. Please.

She slid hers into it, staring at his grip in hers. “I was dismissed from the Red Cross. I didn't have a job or money, and when I wrote to my parents…” She turned his hand over, traced the swell of his veins in his hands. “So, I wrote to Linus, and he told me to come here, to live with his parents.”

“They don't like you.”

She looked up, blinking her beautiful blue eyes again. “Not much. But, see, I've disgraced them. So, yes. I'm marrying their son, who has returned from war.”

She sighed, a shudder of breath through her. Outside, the birds had begun to chirrup, morning drifting into his room. He had imagined such a moment like this—seeing Esther in the morning light, her hand in his. Perhaps not exactly this moment, but—

No. She was engaged. He let her go.

“What am I missing, Esther? You have a man who loves you,
a child, and while you don't love him…” Although, wasn't that enough? She shouldn't be shackled to marry a man she didn't love. Or perhaps, well, she had acted as if she loved him, made a child with him… He stared at the buckle holding him to the bed.

She looked up, apparently misunderstanding, because she nodded. “I know—I should be thrilled—but, see…the letter.”

The letter. “The one I sent?”

She nodded then shook her head, and her expression came back to him, stripped.

“What was in the letter, Esther?”

She rubbed her hands together in her lap. “Linus told me that he wanted nothing to do with me, or Sadie.”

Oh.

“And then you wrote to me.” He wasn't sure why those words burned coming out, but they did, searing through him.

“No. I wrote to you before I knew what he wrote in the letter. Because I suspected the truth, that he didn't love me, and I had to know.” She drew a breath. “I had to know if he talked about me…” It seemed she forced her smile. “The way a man talks about someone he loves.”

Someone he loves. Peter saw Linus in the mud, then, listened to him talk of home, of his friends, playing football, of a redheaded girl back home. Yes, he had talked of someone as if he loved her. But it hadn't been Esther. Not once had he mentioned her as his fiancé.

He looked at her hands, the way they wrung together in her lap.

“He didn't talk about you that way.”

She nodded, a sort of sadness on her face. “I know. And, heaven help me, I was relieved.” She blew out a long breath. “Relieved, Peter. I was sort of set free. And by then, I had started to…”

“To write to me.”

She looked up, her smile quick, like lightning. “To care for you.”

Oh. Now he had to look away, into the rose gold of the morning. But… “I don't understand then. Why does he want you now?” He turned back to her, and she was watching him, something tender on her face.

“I don't know. He was so wounded. I'm thinking that he feels trapped. Maybe even like his life is over. I think he came back a different person, even wrecked, and maybe he thinks I'm the only one who might understand.”

Wrecked. “You do, don't you?”

“I do understand looking in the mirror and not recognizing the person there. I understand losing yourself inside your sins. I understand needing to hold on to someone because they see you as you want to be seen.”

Her eyes flickered over to his. Again, that flash of smile.

Yes, he understood that too. Especially the part about being seen beyond the man in the POW uniform, under gunpoint. Perhaps this, more than anything, had filled his long nights with hope.

“You don't have to marry him, Esther.”

She shook her head. “Yes, I do. And you know it.”

Oh. He did know it. And that's what hurt, probably the most. He knew it and hated it. And that part of him—the desperate, wounded man inside—that was the man that spoke. “Why? So you can work off your sins?”

“I'm trying to make it right!” She cut her voice to low.

This, too, he understood. Understood facing the wretched truth and the scrawling of one's name on a dotted line in order to atone for one's mistakes.

Understood that sometimes the choices weren't about love or happiness. Sometimes they were about life. His father's life.

Sadie's life.

May the God whom you continually serve deliver you.
His father's words as Peter stepped on the military transport rang through him.

But it seemed, suddenly, as if God had delivered Peter right into prison.

He tasted the bitterness of those words even as they scraped through him.

No. God had kept him alive as he'd stumbled into the smoke and chaos of battle, faithful to his Hippocratic oath. God had brought him back to the land he'd loved, given him a glimpse of safety. And, for some reason, God had helped him save Linus Hahn.

He swallowed down, again, the bitter taste of betrayal. No.

Still, it burned inside him. “Please, Esther. Don't… Wait. See, the war will end, and I'll come back, and…”

She shook her head, a stiffness in her expression. “No. I don't have a choice. Linus is my fate—”

“Linus is your atonement!”

She flinched, but he didn't care.

“You're marrying him because you are trying to erase what happened! You're trying to find forgiveness. But don't you see—you already have it.”

“I don't have it!” Her tone slapped him, but he didn't recoil. Just bled for her, watching her unravel as she stood up, whirled away from him, clamped her hands around her waist. “Maybe you don't understand what it feels like to walk around always bleeding inside. To see the shape of your sins tucked beside you so desperately sweet, and yet
know what this incredible love cost you? I haven't felt whole since that night. Well, until…” She turned, then, sharp. “I wasn't in love with you, Peter, I just thought I was. I was in love with the thought that someone might not see me the way I did. But—that's not going to happen.”

It could happen. It did happen. “Esther, you don't solve the problem of your sins by trying to forgive yourself. You have to let God forgive—”

“I have to marry Linus. I have no other choice. I made my mistakes, and now I have to live with them. It doesn't matter what I want—it's the right thing to do.” She cut her voice low. “And don't talk to me about God. He doesn't love a woman like me.”

Her small words severed from him the desperate man trying to hold on to what he'd wanted.

He suddenly realized, this conversation wasn't about his heart… but Esther's soul. Perhaps, in fact, God had delivered him into prison for just this moment.

His voice softened, and he put a caress in it. “Esther, He loves you more than you can imagine.”

She flinched again, and he wanted to cry out.

“Listen to me. Don't despise the grace given to you by staring at your sin. You must turn around and keep your eyes on the face of love. The face of grace. This is where you'll find forgiveness.”

She closed her eyes as if his words pained her.

Please, God, I'm sorry I despised my imprisonment. It's Yours for Your glory.

“Esther, you're not lost. God knows exactly where you are. You just have to stop and let Him find you.”

“I thought He had, with you.”

He caught her eyes, those beautiful eyes that softened with a smile.
He held his hand up, spread his fingers open. She debated for a moment then slipped her hand into his. He closed his fingers around hers. “Maybe… Maybe we could just hold on to that, for one more moment.”

She sat down in the chair, and her face softened even as a tear dripped off her chin.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean—of course I care for you, Peter.”

“Shh… It doesn't matter. I can't matter.” But he took her words in, captured them.

They sat there in the silence of the morning, the gold sliding over the speckled gray and red terrazzo floor.

Finally, she got up, adjusted his covers, then leaned over and pressed a gentle kiss on his cheekbone, right below his eye. She smelled of a floral perfume, something he might remember, later.

He smiled into her touch, glad, for at least this moment, that he couldn't sweep her into his arms.

“Be safe, Peter,” she said quietly. “I'll never be sorry I met you.”

Then she turned, and her intake of breath stopped Peter, made him cut his gaze to the door.

In the outline of the morning stood a nurse, her red hair caught back in a snood, her hands fisted into boulders in her apron pockets. And she wore an expression not far from the one Fritz had given him in the yard.

Changing his world with a look.