The Guineveres (37 page)

And then, just like that, after an interminable week of steady rain, spring popped, first in whites and greens, then followed by yellows and reds and shades in between. The cherry blossoms bloomed in the courtyard, flowers perched like white butterflies on the branches. But cherry trees never stayed in bloom for long; soon enough the petals withered and drifted toward the ground like snow.

We were waiting, but waiting for what? For something, for nothing. Like the Drexels, we soon began our own letter-writing campaign to the Veterans Administration, each of us writing on behalf of Her Boy. Sister Fran agreed to mail the letters, believing our inquiries to be part of the War Effort, but we had to leave out crucial details because, although we didn't know for sure, we believed she read through all our letters before sending. We couldn't ask about Junior's death, or the personal effects we found. Instead, we simply provided a description of Our Boys, their date of arrival, and the long strands of numbers listed on their duffels. In our desperation, we asked Reggie if she'd heard anything else from her dad, any details that might be of use. Reggie shook her head, shrugged her wide shoulders, then went back to stuffing brussels sprouts in her cheeks.

We begged Sister Fran to allow us to volunteer our services in the Sick Ward again, believing our proximity to Our Boys might awaken them. A miracle could yet occur. Our spirits rallied when she agreed. We spent our Rec Time in the Sick Ward, gathering dirty towels and reading from the Bible and carrying basins of water to the bedsides of old folks who needed to wash their hands or their faces. We practiced caution, discretion, never lingering near the bedsides of Our Boys, whose skin we'd casually touch when pretending to straighten their sheets. We'd feel their warmth and catch glimpses of their flickering eyelids that seemed to be the only thing standing between us and them. Gwen guessed that the color of Her Boy's eyes was blue. Win believed Her Boy's eyes to be hazel. I knew the color of My Boy's eyes: greenish gray, like the sky before a storm.

One evening, when Sister Connie had gone to the cafeteria to pick up the dinner cart and Sister Magda was counting out pills into tiny paper cups, we stood around the bed of Gwen's Boy. His face was still bandaged, though the gauze was thinner and no longer seeping. We watched while Gwen pulled his eyelid open with a glide of her index finger. His eye rolled backward, and all we could see was the white part; thin red veins were rivers leading to a larger basin of blood pooled at the corner. Gwen stepped back, appalled, then quickly wiped her hand on her apron.

“We must love despite flaws,” Win said.

“Nobody's perfect,” I said.

“Perfection is boring,” Win said.

Gwen recovered herself with a deep breath, flicked her slick hair from one shoulder to the other. “I'm sure his eyes were beautiful before the War,” she said, and we all agreed.

To be careful, we divided our time between the old men and women again, dismayed to find their teeth soaking in glasses set on the bedside tables, startled when they'd moan in crackly voices that sounded like static. There was nothing romantic about the way they stared at us as we read the Bible or the way they pursed their lips for sips of water. When we saw Sister Magda or Sister Connie tending to one of Our Boys, our heads felt hot as teakettles, our breath storms in our mouths. We tried our best to remain calm, but it didn't come easily to us. We were restless. We were in love.

Mr. Macker no longer got out of bed and into his wheelchair. Though we didn't know what was wrong with him, exactly, other than the fact that he was old, we could hear a rattling in his chest when he breathed, and when he spoke, his voice sounded like gurgling water. Sometimes he'd ask in a low voice for one of us to come over and sit with him, and he'd take our hand and he'd squeeze it weakly. “Do you want to do one of your coin tricks?” we asked, picking up his old coin from his bedside table and pressing it into his leathery hands. He looked at us as if he were trying to remember something, though he couldn't think of what. “Do you want to take two of us and not call the doctor in the morning?” we asked. Still he didn't say anything in return, so we sat there awkwardly on the edge of his bed, lumps in our throats like unswallowed food. “Do you want to go home?” we asked.

“Where is that?” he said. His voice was faint, like a record player with no needle.

During confession the following week, we wept as we separately faced the old priest who looked like a bird. His nose sloped forward and tufts of hair were feathers.

“I don't know how to love,” Gwen said.

“I hate myself,” Win said.

“I question my faith,” I said. In addition to my usual prayers, the ones for my mom, I prayed for My Boy to open his eyes again, and yet they remained sealed. His sheet no longer rose where it shouldn't rise. His body no longer shifted in his bed. Every day he felt further away from me, even though I prayed, even though I pleaded.

The next week, following Afternoon Instruction, while the other girls went outside to spend their Rec Time in the garden, now in full bloom with black-eyed Susans and purple hydrangeas, The Guineveres plodded to the Sick Ward for a service hour. The door was locked when we arrived. We knocked, but no answer. We knocked again, this time harder, until our knuckles cracked, the skin split, red rising to the surface. Our Boys were inside, and we were uneasy—and maybe this is what we were waiting for all along, for the worst, for that one day we'd come here and find Our Boys gone, with nothing to show for them but some dirty bedclothes and a sagging mattress. We knocked again, this time with our fists. We pounded and pounded until the lock finally clicked. Sister Connie poked out her head, which due to her height grazed the top of the doorframe, knocking her paper hat askew.

We stepped backward, then tried to move forward, but she blocked us. “You can't come in here, girls. Not today,” she said. She gripped the door with one hand and fixed her hat with the other.

“Why not?” we said, alarmed. We tried to look around her, but we couldn't see past the Front Room, where a few old men and women were sitting slumped in wheelchairs. An old box fan whirred behind her. Sunlight spilled through the windows in rectangular shapes.

We feared the unspeakable.
He suddenly made a turn for the worse,
Sister Fran had said once about Ginny's Boy. Our Boys needed us; at this very moment, they needed us. The Guineveres tried to push past her, and she sensed our urgency, our panic.

“Girls, you can't see him. I insist. He needs some peace at this moment,” she said. We could see where her white nurse's cap was clipped with bobby pins, her hair greasy at the roots. We didn't budge. “Mr. Macker,” she explained. “He's passing, and he needs to do so with dignity. You don't need to see this, not young girls like you. Now go,” she said. “Enjoy the afternoon.” She closed the door again; our hearts released like fists unfurled. We stood staring at the wood grain of the door, both relieved and upset. Our Boys were fine.

But Mr. Macker wasn't.

Tears filled my eyes. I felt a drop skim my cheek, and my mouth began to quiver, then Win put her hand on my back. Where she touched me, I could feel my heartbeat, right between my shoulder blades.

“It could be worse,” Gwen said coolly, playing with her ponytail, twirling it around her finger. “It could be one of
them,
” she said.

“Don't say that,” I said.

“Who would you rather it be?” she asked.

“Nobody.”

“Who's Nobody?” she said, her voice all high notes and air. “Is that the gentleman in the second bed over who'd be handsome if not for his rotting teeth?” She cocked her head, flexed her cheeks into a condescending smile.

Win turned toward Gwen with that fiery expression, the kind she usually reserved for Lottie Barzetti or Shirley or another one of The Specials. She scrunched her face until her nose and mouth and eyes came together in a jumble.

“Besides, we're all going to die someday,” Gwen said, and she turned and slipped out the side door to join the other girls in the courtyard.

Mr. Macker died a day later.

They say death brings you closer to life. Maybe this is true. I can say Mr. Macker's death made us ache at the thought of losing Our Boys, aches that began in our hearts, then radiated out like an earthquake to all our limbs, out to our fingers and our toes. In a way, I suppose you could say we ached for Mr. Macker, too, though not on the same scale. Our love for him did not radiate, only tickled a little, the kind of tickle you know will go away if you ignore it. We imagined him in a white room, standing free of his wheelchair, younger looking but still old. He'd see the beautiful woman from his photo, and her poodle, too, and they'd smile in recognition. He'd extend his palms, and she'd see that he still had that old coin of his. “Want me to do a magic trick?” he'd ask, by which he meant he still loved her very much.

Only a few days after Mr. Macker died—the Sisters used the word “passed” to make us all feel better about it—we visited Our Boys at night for the first time since Ginny had left. After Lights Out turned the Bunk Room black, and after the slumbering breath from the other girls filled the air, and after we waited for Checks and after we calculated the duration of three rosaries' worth of prayer, we met in the stairwell, like we always did, and made our way to the third floor, like we always did, and crossed the length of the convent to the Catacombs, like we always did, only now we were three instead of four.

“We're like Romeo and Juliet,” Gwen said. “Forbidden love, which only makes it more complex.”

“Like three Romeos and three Juliets,” Win corrected.

“But that would mean we all died,” I said, and they both rolled their eyes.

“Don't be so literal,” Gwen said.

“But why did she kill herself at the end?” I asked. “Why didn't she just leave the tomb when she discovered he had died?”

“She couldn't live without him,” Win said.

“What would
you
do?” Gwen said.

“Well, I wouldn't kill myself,” I said. “That's sinful.” Gwen looked like she had just vomited in her mouth, but at that moment she pulled open the door to the Sick Ward, and we fell silent with reverence.

The ward smelled different from usual, like bleach and lemons. Moonlight filtered through the open windows. Everything looked softer; shapes lost their edges. We averted our gaze from Mr. Macker's bed, now stripped down to a bare mattress. We didn't want to think of Mr. Macker now. Especially not when we reached the foot of Gwen's Boy's bed. At the sight, we let out a collective gasp that punctured the darkness. His bandages were removed. For the first time we could see his face.

Gwen walked slowly toward his bedside; she raised her hand as if she were going to touch him, but she didn't, and so it looked like she was praying over him, even though I knew she wasn't. I couldn't see her expression, but I imagined what it must have looked like, her top lip curled as if she had eaten onion pie.

With his bandages on, he looked like a normal boy: We could see his eyes, his pillowy lips, the shock of hair that poked out of his bandages like alfalfa sprouts, only blond. But with his bandages off, he was more wounded than we'd imagined him to be, than we could have imagined him to be. Two deep gashes, stitched together, looked like a smile on the left side of his face, and where his nose should have been was a bone bound by withered skin, like a dried apple core.

“We must love them despite their flaws,” I said.

“It might heal,” Win said optimistically, but I could hear her clear her throat.

Gwen said nothing; her back was to us. She shook, lurching forward and back, propelled by the power of restrained dismay. We stood behind her for a few minutes, until she said, “Go on; I'll be fine.” So we left her alone.

Win's Boy's legs were still bandaged together, though they were no longer lifted up in traction. We suspected he was healing nicely. She sat on the bed next to him, her back to his body. She hunched forward and rested her forehead in her hands, her dark hair completely covering her face. I gave them some time alone.

I moved toward My Boy's bed, and I sat down next to him, so close I could feel his breath humid against my skin. He smelled like soap, the same kind we used on Wash Day. Sleep, it's such an intimate act. When we sleep, we accept our vulnerabilities, offer them up to the darkness, bare ourselves whole, exactly as we are. There's no hiding oneself in sleep. We are our truest selves then. And so I felt such intimacy with My Boy in these moments. I watched his eyes flicker, as if he were watching a filmstrip on the inside of his eyelids. I traced the outline of his forehead and nose and lips and chin, feeling a tug inside me with each curve. I felt the gentle rising and falling of his chest, and I pressed my ear to him, resting my head near his heart. I closed my eyes for a while, and I imagined his breath as waves, pulling me in toward him. I prayed in that moment. I prayed hard for My Boy.

And then I opened my eyes and I saw it again: that awful tented sheet. His body responded to mine, and this made me blush. I wasn't sure if it was wrong, this pull in me that both wanted this response and didn't. I wasn't sure if it was sinful, like the Bible said. But it didn't feel that way at that moment, didn't feel shameful like I'd been told. Sister Fran spoke so derisively of the Flesh. The Flesh. “The Flesh” sounds so singular, so solitary. But we were connected, and this couldn't be sinful, what I felt for My Boy. If it were, I'd have admitted right then and there—my body moving up and down in rhythm with My Boy's breathing as I rested on his chest—that I was a sinner.

“Looks like he's up.” I sat up to see Gwen standing at the foot of the bed. A smile stretched across her face to reveal her teeth, whiter in the darkness.