The Medium (40 page)

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Authors: Noëlle Sickels

BOOK: The Medium
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“Sorry,” Helen said. “It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but this is the first time I've tried to talk about it.”
“It seems to me that things happen and people do things, period. People can make plans, and we remember things and read history books, so how can you say there's no future or past?”
“That's the common sense viewpoint. It fits into mine, except that it's a very small part of it. It only seems like it's big and complete because we use it so much to get through day-to-day living. But it doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain what I've seen and heard in my trances.”
“Didn't you say you weren't doing trances anymore?”
Helen, who had been invigorated by this conversation, felt her mood punctured.
“That's right.”
They'd reached the River Bend Savings and Loan, at the corner where they'd parted ways so many times over the years. Helen hadn't the mental energy to continue the discussion about what was real and what was not, but she wasn't ready for Rosie to leave, either. Rosie must have felt the same, because instead of saying good-bye, she sat down on the low brick wall in front of the bank. Helen sat down beside her.
“And what about Lloyd?” Rosie said.
“What about him?” Helen replied, caught off-guard.
“Well, I could say how's he doing—and I do want to know that—but what I mean more is, what about him and you, and what about him bringing up Billy—is he one of those people that won't talk about him—and what about you and Billy and Lloyd?”
“Whoa there,” Helen said, putting up her hand like a crossing guard.
Rosie laughed. “Too much too fast, huh? Maybe my dad's right that being in the Army has made me brassy.”
“I don't know where to start.”
“So there
is
something to tell. More than a report on how he's getting along in his program?”
“Lloyd and I
don't
have an understanding, if that's what you're getting at,” Helen said.
“But you keep in touch?”
“Yes. And we do talk about Billy sometimes—that is, neither of us is afraid to mention him or memories of him.”
“Do the memories ever get in the way?”
“Get in the way of what?”
“If you have to ask, I guess not,” Rosie said, sounding nettled.
“I'm not trying to put you off, Rosie. I do … feel something … for Lloyd. But he doesn't know it. So there's really nothing for memories to get in the way of.”
“Feeling something isn't ‘nothing.'”
“I suppose.”
“It
isn't
.”
“Well, to answer your question, then—no, my memories don't get in the way of my feelings for Lloyd.” There was that annoying catch in her throat again. “But it's crazy, Rosie, because I still love Billy, too.”
Rosie took her by the shoulders, as if Helen were a drunk or an hysteric she was trying to steer back toward reason.
“You know what, Helen? Someone else might say ‘crazy' is the most important word in all that, but I say the most important word is ‘too.'”
Rosie let go of Helen's shoulders. A car paused at the corner before making a left turn. Helen looked away from her friend to follow the car's progress down the street. Rosie stooped to pick up her bag.
“One other thing before I go, Miss,” she said lightly.
Helen hauled a matching lightness into her voice. “What's that, Corporal?”
“Lloyd Mackey?” Rosie had dropped her bantering tone. “He knows, all right. I'd bet my last dollar on it.”
DECEMBER 1944
The black sky was clean of clouds. The snow-laden hills and trees surrounding the frozen lake glowed in the light of a full moon. Holding Lloyd's elbow, Helen was ice skating with him, cold air brushing her face. She didn't mind a chilled nose and cheeks. Her exertions were keeping the rest of her warm. After the long train ride to Connecticut, it felt wonderful to be outdoors with her body pumping and her blood singing. There were other pairs of skaters on the lake, and many single men standing around a roaring bonfire on shore. The skating party was the first of the season at Old Farms, and few soldiers wanted to miss it, whether they had a girl to bring or not.
Everyone was skating in the same direction, following the shoreline some distance, then curving out to form a wide oval route. The large bonfire, tended by two sighted staff members, cast a flickering ocher radiance over one section of ice. When skaters passed through that area, individual features were discernible; otherwise, they were silhouettes in a Currier and Ives print.
“Which way to the center of the lake?” Lloyd asked Helen after they'd gone several times around the oval. “They say it's solid clear across.”
Helen steered Lloyd out of the stream of skaters and faced him away from the shoreline. They stopped, and she let go of his arm. After standing very still for a moment, he crouched like a sprinter and shouted, “Let's go!”
He set off at a brisk pace away from the party. He'd taken only two or three strides before Helen followed. As soon as she was beside him again, he began skating even faster.
Going in a straight line allowed for a greater build-up of speed than going around an oval. Helen was skating at the limit of her strength to keep up with Lloyd, but there was a sense of partnership in their headlong flight. She never felt that she was chasing him, or that he was on the verge of breaking away from her.
It was quieter away from the bonfire and the other people. Soon, the only sounds were the rhythmic scrape of their skates and their hard breathing.
Helen was watching, as best she could, for treacherous lumps in their path. This was no groomed rink, and a rough patch could appear anywhere. It was difficult to see very far ahead, even with the bright moon. Her heart was pounding as much from trepidation as from the labor of her legs. She cast a quick glance at Lloyd. His knit cap had blown off, and his dark hair whipped back from his forehead. His artificial eye glinted. His mouth was open in a wide grin. A grinning man skating full tilt into total darkness! She wished he'd slow down, but she didn't want to ask it. It seemed important to let him go until the urge to stop came to him spontaneously.
Finally, Lloyd started coasting. He stretched his arms wide, as if to embrace the night. They were still moving fast.
“Oo-ee!” he shouted.
His glee was infectious. Helen laughed.
When their momentum had slowed considerably, Lloyd spun to a stop. He sat down abruptly on the ice.
“That wasn't a fall, by the way,” he said, panting.
“What would it matter if it was?” Helen replied.
She sat down, too, carefully tucking her long coat under her
so that the cold wouldn't seep through her wool pants to her skin.
“Some people,” Lloyd said, “take one gander at a guy with a cane and dark glasses and think they know everything about him. When the bunch of us came here, we changed trains in Philadelphia, and I'll tell you, conversations in the station waiting room stopped dead when we got close. Picked up again in whispers at our backs. One lady's whisper wasn't soft enough, though, and I heard her tell somebody that she'd rather her son didn't come home at all than to have him come home ‘like that.'”
Helen put her hand on Lloyd's coat sleeve and shook his arm gently.
“I'm not ‘some people,'” she said.
“I know. I've gotta get better at remembering I don't have to prove myself to everybody all the time.”
Helen studied Lloyd's profile in the moonlight. Sitting there, a lock of his windblown hair falling over his brow in the same endearing way his brother's used to, Lloyd appeared completely whole and normal. It was only when he started to move that you noticed a difference. Even then, it was subtle. At Old Farms, they trained the men to avoid the stereotypical bent posture and shambling gait of the blind. Most of the soldiers Helen had seen on campus didn't even use canes.
Looking at the defiant lift of Lloyd's chin, Helen wondered how difficult it was going to be for him and other disabled veterans to fit back into their former lives and how difficult it was going to be on the rest of the population to let them fit in—where, on both sides, misunderstandings and unexamined assumptions and just plain inexperience would place extra obstacles. There were also hundreds of thousands of men and women who'd been permanently disabled by accidents in ammunition factories and defense plants.
“Anyway,” Lloyd added, “they've taught us how to fall like paratroopers. And how to bump into things without jarring our bodies.”
They sat in silence a few minutes. From the other side of the lake came the plaintive call of an owl.
“Owl,” Lloyd said.
“Yes, I heard it.”
“Do you hear Johnny singing?”
“Singing?”
“From over there.” Lloyd pointed towards the distant bonfire.
“I can see people moving around, but I can't hear any of them.”
“The bonuses of blindness, Miss Schneider,” Lloyd said in a professorial tone. He held up a gloved hand and began counting on his fingers. “Sharper hearing. More refined senses of touch, smell, taste. And for the lucky few—yours truly included—facial vision. You can't hear because you're too distracted by all you see.”
“And you can hear well enough to know who's singing?”
“I flimflammed there. Johnny always sings when we have a social event with girls,” Lloyd said, smiling. “He thinks he's Frank Sinatra.”
“What's facial vision?”
“It's when you're able to tell something's in front of you and how near it is. Sighted people probably have it, they just don't need to use it. Some guys don't ever get very good at it, but I'm lucky—I seem to have a natural capacity. I just
know
when there's a wall there, or a table or whatever. It's like I feel a shadow pass over me when I get close to something. The docs think it might be a change in air pressure against your face.”
“Is that how you all are able to walk around here without canes?”
Lloyd gave a short laugh and shook his head.
“Facial vision's the least of it, though I'm glad I have it,” he said. “Mostly, we pay attention. Deep, deep attention. Remember that scale model of the grounds I showed you this afternoon? Every new guy spends hours and hours feeling that model to memorize the layout. Then he takes walks with a guide, and after a while, the two things click, and he knows where paths and steps are, where to turn. We listen to how voices and footsteps change depending on the size of the room and on where we are and where other people are, so we don't have collisions.”
“What about outside of Old Farms?”
“That's where cane work comes in. We have bus steps here for practice, and once a week the New Haven Railroad brings in a train half an hour early so we can learn how to move around the train and the station. And for new places that you're gonna be staying in a while, there's brailling.”
“Brailling?”
“Feeling with your hands. When I first got to Valley Forge and here, too, I brailled the whole ward again and again until I knew how to get to the bathrooms and the water fountains and my locker without groping. You cold?”
“Beginning to be.”
Lloyd got to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants. Helen got up, too.
“Let's skate back more slowly,” he said.
“That sounds good to me.”
Helen oriented Lloyd and they set off. Lloyd didn't offer her his arm, and she wasn't about to take it on her own. She supposed he was listening to her skates to stay so neatly beside her.
“It's a beautiful night, isn't it?” he said, after they'd gone some distance.
“Yes, it really is.”
“I can taste it in the air.”
“There's a full moon,” she elaborated.
“A full moon. Clouds?”
“None.”
“Stars?”
“Some. The moon's washed out all but the brightest.”
“How's the snow look?”
“White.”
“What kind of white?”
Helen stared at the hills and the woods. Lloyd was right. There were different whites.
“On the far hills,” she said, “the snow's a bluish-white, like skimmed milk, and almost gray in the shadows. Closer in, it's a thicker kind of white, and where there are open spaces between the trees, the snow sparkles like sugar.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can see it. And ain't it grand?”
 
Helen slept in the next morning. The Red Cross bus that took her and the other girls from the skating party to Hartford hadn't left Old Farms until close to midnight, and by the time she'd settled into her room at the boardinghouse where she was staying, it was almost two o'clock. Lloyd had things to do in the morning, anyway, starting with breakfast at seven, the compulsory daily gripe session at eight-thirty, and then classes. He had a pass for the afternoon and evening, and they'd arranged to meet for a late lunch at a diner. He'd gone there several times with friends and was ready to find his way on his own.
Helen arrived early at the diner, which was crowded and busy. She took a booth with a view of the front door. When Lloyd came in, he'd probably pause there, and she'd be able to spot him and go to him. She ordered a cup of coffee and opened the morning edition of
The Hartford Times
.
Two days ago, under cover of a low fog, German panzers and troops had punched through the sparsely manned American
lines in the Ardennes Forest in southern Belgium. American troops, astonished and outnumbered, were fighting fiercely. Nevertheless, many of them had been forced to retreat, and some had had to surrender. Hundreds of American prisoners, hands on their heads, had been summarily shot by SS troops. Eisenhower was speeding Patton to the area with reinforcements. More than a million men were going to be fighting one another. Soldiers who, last summer, had dreamed of a stateside Christmas with their families were now facing the reality that Christmas Day and New Year's Day, and maybe beyond, would be spent in cramped, frigid foxholes or advancing from tree to tree in bitter cold, through deep snow, under fire from tanks, machine guns, and 88s.
Helen recalled the variations of whiteness in the snowy woods last night and the prettiness of Old Farms' red sandstone buildings set in smooth lawns of fallen snow. How horrible to think that in the thick woods and rocky gorges of the Ardennes Forest, snow was only making miserable, endangered men more so. Lloyd's old division was there.
Helen folded the newspaper shut. She'd just read that the soldiers in the Ardennes were stuffing newspapers under their clothes for insulation. In an attempt to take her mind off the bad news, she looked out the plateglass window and watched the passing cars and pedestrians. She wondered from which direction Lloyd would be coming.
“Excuse me, Miss,” a male voice said.
Helen turned to find a young man in civilian clothes standing beside her booth. He had an overcoat draped over one arm, and Helen spotted an eagle pin in the lapel of his suit jacket, indicating he'd been honorably discharged.
“The place is full, and the waitress suggested maybe you might share your booth …”
“I'm sorry, but I'm waiting for someone. He should be here
any minute.”
The young man smiled. It was a pleasant, easy-going smile, Helen thought.
“Of course you'd be waiting for someone,” he replied. “And he's one lucky son of a gun—if you don't mind me saying.”
Before Helen could answer, Lloyd came up behind the man as if out of nowhere and gave him a shove. The man stumbled forward against the table. Coffee splashed out of Helen's cup.
“Hey! What the … ?” The man spun angrily around.
“I mind, buster,” Lloyd said loudly.
Helen jumped up to intervene, but as soon as the man saw Lloyd's cane, he dropped his aggressive posture.
“Sure, sure, soldier,” he said. “No harm done, and none meant. Ask the lady. She'll tell you.”
Helen put her hand on Lloyd's arm, but he shook her off and took a step in the direction of the man's voice, his cane sweeping out in front of him like a menacing tentacle. A burly older man in a stained white apron hurried out of the kitchen and headed for the trio.

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