The Magic Of Ordinary Days Part 19

After he left, the cold air that had crept in through the open door closed in around my arms. I went searching for a sweater and pondered what I would do with myself on such a day. Beyond the bedroom window, I saw low gray clouds moving in from the northwest. Not a good day for driving or walking, as the weather would be dreary. Instead, I decided to try some holiday baking.

After I stirred up cookie batter and had the first batch baking in the oven, I pulled out extra quilts I found on the top shelf of the coat closet and spread these on Ray's bed and on mine. At the bottom of the stack I found an old blanket full of holes and decided maybe I could lay it out on some hay in the barn for Franklin. But when I mentioned my idea to Ray, he said, "The goat will just eat that blanket." And I had to believe him that Franklin would be warm enough without it.

Throughout the day, Ray returned periodically to fill his thermos with hot coffee and to catch up as more news reports continued to stream in. Details of increasing casualties and unexpected defeats caused some of the radio announcers to halt their speeches and gather themselves. On the few occasions when the radio station played music, I turned up the volume and let my mind dance to the tune of anything besides bad news. But when the news reports resumed, I couldn't just click the radio off. A need to know, to try to understand, still drove me. We turned it off, however, when Ray started bringing down the remaining boxes from the attic.

The first one he plunked down on the table contained his mother's b.u.t.tons. In one jar, I found plain b.u.t.tons of all different sizes and colors that looked like an a.s.sortment of hard candy or jelly beans. In the other jars, I found her more unusual b.u.t.tons-bra.s.s and silver ones that had come from uniforms, painted porcelains, black gla.s.s and rhinestone-covered ones, even some made with mother-of-pearl. I found celluloid-covered b.u.t.tons covered with pictures of MGM movie stars-Loretta Young, Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, and Myrna Loy. One b.u.t.ton held the image of the Eiffel Tower, and one very old and rare-looking perfumery b.u.t.ton still contained a swatch of wool inside that once had been moistened with scent.

In another jar, I found long strings of b.u.t.tons. Girls in the latter part of the nineteenth century had collected b.u.t.tons in this way as some kind of good luck charm. I'd have to ask Martha if she remembered the details.

Ray also carried down a box of his mother's china and a box of Daniel's things. A catcher's glove and baseball cards held together with rubber bands topped that box. Inside were a deflated basketball, a few trophies, and some fishing books. "He must have liked sports," I said to Ray.

Ray nodded. "There wasn't much Daniel couldn't do. He came out on top more often than not. I guess he figured with that kind of luck, he'd make it back." Ray sat down for a moment. "I always thought he'd end up married and I'd be the third wheel living around here. I thought he'd be the one with a wife and children, and I'd be a fine uncle, you know, helping out and watching over the kids while Daniel and his wife went to the picture show."

Ray brought down the last thing, an old wooden ba.s.sinet covered with yellowed and stained cotton. After Ray set it down, he caught his breath. "That's it." He pointed at the old ba.s.sinet. "I only brought that down to clear everything out up there. I'm sure we can order a new one from the Sears and Roebuck catalog."

I carefully tore away the old fabric from around the ba.s.sinet and found the bent wood beneath. "Oh, no," I said to Ray and ran my hands around its curved middle. "I'd rather have this one. I can refinish it and make it beautiful again."

Ray looked surprised, but said only, "Whatever you want."

That evening, after Ray came in for the last time, we turned the radio back on to listen to updated news while we ate dinner. Ray always ate voraciously after a day out in the cold, and this night was no exception. I studied the raw red streaks painted by bitter winds on his cheeks and found myself wanting to smooth out the cracks I saw dried into his lips. When I looked at him across the table, it didn't seem possible that he was the same man who once held me in bed. But then again, it seemed to be him, exactly.

Finally, I dove into my stew.

A few minutes later, a local announcer broke into the news report already in progress. I listened as the man's excited voice announced that two German POWs had escaped from Camp Trinidad and were still at large. Local police officers were on the men's trail, but the officials were warning all citizens to be on the lookout and to lock their doors.

As those words sank into me, my throat narrowed, and pressure built inside my cheeks. Ray was standing over me now, and I had to make myself swallow the tasteless ma.s.s of food in my mouth.

"Go down the wrong way?" he was asking.

I shook my head. I caught my breath and asked myself what had come over me.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Ray was saying. He put a hand on my shoulder. "They'll catch those prisoners. They always do. Most of them speak such broken English, they never get far."

Speak such broken English? Never get far?

Now I was breathing regularly again, but I couldn't eat another bite. I kept remembering that whirlwind I'd driven through the day before, and then chastising myself for giving any credence to that kind of superst.i.tion. But then I remembered the strong sense of impending doom that had come over me later the same evening, in the bathtub, its sweep of me as deadly as a breath of the gases made at the Rocky Mountain a.r.s.enal. What had caused that? In twenty-four years, I'd never known such a strong sense of foreboding to come to me without some reason.

Today, two German POWs escaped from Camp Trinidad and are still at large.

Now I had to stand up and go to the sink. I ran water and started scrubbing dishes, my thoughts racing around in circles as I rubbed the sponge outside and inside each gla.s.s, over and over, getting off every single spot, just as my father had once cleaned those gla.s.ses of his. As I worked, Ray sat and watched me with worried eyes. "Please tell me what it is."

"It's nothing."

I cleaned and dried every dish, then took a broom and swept away new cobwebs that had recently formed in the kitchen corners. The news continued with a report from the Pacific theater, which wasn't good, either. In the Philippines, two more ships were sunk by kamikazes on the way to the island of Mindoro, and a storm hit the island with ninety-mile-per-hour winds, sinking three destroyers and drowning 279 men. Reports of brutality by the j.a.panese toward prisoners also came streaming in, with such horrific revelations as Americans ignited with gasoline-lit torches and buried alive.

Ray shook his head. "At least at Pearl Harbor, they died quick."

I came to him then, sat in his lap, wrapped my arms around him, and held him to me as closely as I could. I wanted to kiss his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, but something stopped me. On the radio, the local news announcer came back on, preempting the nationals and updating an earlier story of interest. The two escaped German POWs, Afrika Korps corporals, had been captured in northern New Mexico after having camped out in a remote canyon.

I stood up and went to the radio. The announcer went on. A trucker who picked up the POWs. .h.i.tchhiking on the highway had immediately recognized strong German accents. Instead of driving them farther south as they had requested, he drove them to the local county sheriff's office. The prisoners surrendered without a fight, and according to the deputy on duty, even expressed relief that their ordeal, however short, was over. They hadn't known a winter storm was coming, hadn't worn adequate clothing or brought with them appropriate supplies. They sat before the stove at the sheriff's office, warming up, until guards from Camp Trinidad could travel down and pick them up.

Now I knew. They hadn't spoken a word to me because they couldn't do it without giving away who they were. But because of me, they did get far.

Now I was covered by a h.o.a.rd of hungry bees and they were besting me. The radio on the counter blurred before me, and pressure built in my cheekbones. I blasted out the first sneeze, then a second.

Lorelei had said Stephan, not because she was nervous, but because that was how she knew him. And the uniforms, the perfectly neat and new-appearing uniforms. With Rose and Lorelei's skills in tailoring, an American Army uniform would have been a snap to duplicate. Once they had told me of meeting German POWs while working the same farms. Now it all made sense to me, the tension between the two of them, the secrecy about these boyfriends.

Ray came to stand behind me while continued reports of the escape screamed at me from the radio. "Tell me," he pleaded.

But I only sneezed once more before I calmed myself. The POWs had been recaptured, I kept saying to myself. No harm had been done. And perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. Perhaps Walter and Steven were American soldiers, just as I'd believed them to be only a few minutes before. Perhaps the similarities were simply coincidences. I had no evidence to the contrary. But hard as I tried to convince myself, in some center place of me, I already knew. Much as I kept trying to push it out of my mind's knowing eye, it sat there nonetheless, for no one else except me to see.

Later, I must have looked quite content standing at my kitchen sink and gazing past the ice-encrusted windowpanes into the night. Funny that sometimes people undergoing the worst kind of discord in their lives can look so calm. But Ray could see. He pushed aside the paperwork he usually worked on in the evenings and watched me. Occasionally he'd ask me to sit down and please tell him what was bothering me, but I hadn't as yet fully admitted it to myself, so how could I tell another?

Bedtime couldn't come. All I could see before me was a night of tangling with the sheets, and when I did slip into the bed where once Ray's parents had slept together, I curled my legs high into my rounded body and dreamed of those green summer days that now seemed years ago. It was the first subzero night of the winter, and from the walls, I could feel the frigid air oozing into my room through invisible seams. Although I bunched the quilts in all around me, and although we had the propane stove burning full out, the chill inside me refused to budge. Every time I started to drift away into slumber, the words of the radio announcer came pouring back in over me as if I were a rock at the base of a waterfall.

Rose and Lorelei had lied to me and used me for transportation. How long ago had the plan been hatched? So many things began to make sense. I'd never seen them working in the silkscreen shop because they were probably sewing clothes for the men off in a place where no one could find them. But it wasn't their betrayal that bothered me. I understood going against everything taught and drilled since childhood. I had done it, too, and all for the promise of love.

My right calf drew up into a cramp. I threw back the covers, jumped out of bed, and stepped down on my foot, effectively stopping the cramping. But then I couldn't make myself get back in bed. Instead, I found myself in Ray's open doorway. He slept on his side under smooth quilts, facing me. I listened to the long deep breaths he took while soundly sleeping. I studied the gentle curve of his fingers laid out on the pillow in front of his face. And when I sank down on the bed beside him, he awakened, but moved only enough to give me more s.p.a.ce on the narrow mattress of the bunk bed. Then he held me from behind, as once he'd done before, and kissed the back of my neck and the tops of my shoulders. In his arms, even the anguished cries of coyotes coming out of the black night sounded like songs. Ray's body and mine rested together like a pair of stacked bowls, and finally, I slept.

I slept until the earliest gray of daybreak sent my eyes flying open.

In the warm circle of Ray's arms, thoughts began to bat around inside me. I had knowledge of the escape, information that, as a good citizen, I should share with the authorities. But if I talked, I would doom Rose and Lorelei to pay for the parts they had played. And now I found that I disagreed with my father. Rose and Lorelei had made the worst of mistakes, and I couldn't imagine the anguish that had led them to do it. Despite Lorelei's justifiable anger for their imprisonment, for everything they'd been through, she had never seemed vengeful to me. I'd never imagined them concocting so elaborate a deception and crime. The German POWs had convinced them; I was sure of it. Rose and Lorelei had fallen in love and wanted to rescue soldiers, just like so many other women before them had done. And even though it didn't excuse their parts, I understood it.

But must all persons bear the consequences of their actions, at all costs, as my father believed? The POWs had been recaptured without incident, without any harm having been done. I kept telling myself this. And wasn't guilt of the deed itself sometimes punishment enough?

I remembered the man at the gas station who'd refused to talk to me, just because I was in their company. I remembered the pain on their faces even when they were working so hard to conceal it. I remembered new love on their faces, too. And I saw Lorelei's wings flapping, her colors falling to the ground.

Later, I found myself standing at the kitchen window again and staring down the dawn of a new day. And still I didn't know what I was going to do.

Thirty-three.

I knew the day ahead would be one of the toughest of my life, yet Ray was the happiest I'd ever seen him. I had come to him in the night, and he couldn't stop smiling. In the bathroom, I heard him humming over the sound of the shower. He came out dressed in his newest flannel shirt tucked in with a belt and his hair combed carefully over the thinning area on top. As usual, he had missed the bald spot in back, but I wouldn't tell him.

He pointed out the kitchen window. "Not too much snow last night, but more's coming."

"Could we drive to the telephone?"

He looked out the window again and up at the sky. "Not a good idea. We could get stuck on the road."

I couldn't make my bottom lip stop dipping and jerking. And I couldn't stop thinking about Rose and Lorelei, the only ones who could tell me the truth. Although the POWs were back in captivity, I had to know if I'd played a part in their escape. My plan was to call Camp Amache, tell the guards it was a matter of grave importance that they bring one of the girls to the telephone, then simply ask Rose or Lorelei if they had done it. I wouldn't chastise; I wouldn't complain. I simply had to know the truth.

"Ray, I need to make a phone call."

"Come here," Ray whispered before I found myself back in his arms.

After we ate a hot breakfast, Ray got the truck running while I bundled into my coat and m.u.f.fler and closed up the house. Once we were heading down Red Church Road into town, the truck's heater finally started to send warmth up from the floorboards, but little blasts of freezing wind squeaked in from poor seals around the windows.

Ray kept glancing over at me, but he didn't ask me why I needed so badly to place this call. And even if he had, I wouldn't have known what to tell him. If I told him the truth about Rose and Lorelei, then he would have information he, too, was withholding. Or would he report it? It didn't take me long to decide to stay silent. Perhaps I'd never find it necessary to tell anyone. The POWs were back in custody, the weather had made any trip to the sheriff's office impossible anyway, and hadn't Rose and Lorelei suffered enough already?

Big snow started pouring out of a sky capped by low-lying storm clouds. The flakes blew in sideways, building up on the windshield and nearly blocking our view of the road. Stiff gusts made Ray grip the steering wheel with both hands just to keep control of the truck. He kept creeping onward for a mile or so longer, then he gradually put on the brake and turned to me. "Whatever it is, it'll have to wait. It's just too dangerous. I got to turn back."

Slowly he inched the truck around in a circle and started urging it back in the direction of the house. He had the wipers going, but they couldn't keep up with the ragged chips of snow now clattering down on the windshield. The weather worsened by the minute, but Ray worked the truck back toward the house, taking extra precaution when we pa.s.sed over a bridge. I heard him let out a big sigh as we finally saw the triangular shadow of the barn's roof rising out of a world suddenly gone devoid of color and depth.

Snow was already building up, covering everything slippery white. After he helped me up the porch steps, Ray said, "I need to go close up the milk cows and the horses in the barn. I'll be back soon."

I entered the house by myself and clicked on the radio.

After a song ended, the announcer began to relay more details of the POW escape incident. The most bizarre twist in the story had only recently been revealed, he said. The recaptured Germans named two j.a.panese interns as accomplices in their escape. The interns, Rose and Lorelei Umahara, living in Camp Amache, had immediately been arrested and charged with treason.

Now I knew the source of the doomed sensation that had plagued me for nearly two days. As full realization clamped down on me, the room became a dark and cold dungeon. I became small and shaking and full of anguish more profound than the pain I'd felt even when I first realized Edward had left me and that I was pregnant. It couldn't be true. Their betrayal was worse, worse even than mine had been. A more cruel breach of faith I could never have imagined. The POWs would receive some token punishment within camp, such as a few days of solitary confinement or loss of rations, but nothing more. After all, the Geneva Convention maintained that it was a POW's duty to try to escape. But the Umahara sisters, the announcer said, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, ironically, because they were citizens.

I wasn't prepared for the gravity of this tragedy. The pain of it turned my lungs into sponge, made it impossible for me to go on breathing. I flew out the front door without turning off the radio. I stumbled down the porch steps and ran out into the storm as fast as my burdened legs could carry me.

A monstrous ghost of snow and storm bore down on me from above, but I didn't care. I ran full-face right into it. Now I was pounding the ground, trying to send it all away with every heavy thump of my feet and each new boot track laid out in the snow. I didn't wish for summer, didn't think of the city. As I ran, I longed only for a return to the recent past, for one last opportunity to change that grievous mistake of faith committed by girls who couldn't have realized the dreadful consequences of their actions.

Before long, my feet and fingers began to sting and burn, as if thrust into a fire rather than freezing. Cutting winds made my clothes and coat into transparent gauze. But I kept stumbling and trudging myself through the snow, drawn to the spot on the road between the fields where first I'd met them, back on a day of sunshine and Indian summer. I stopped running and stood in the place where once, so long ago, we had introduced ourselves and talked of b.u.t.terflies. Their wonderful lives had come down to this, this one mistake, caused by belief in men who professed to love them.

If only they had told me the truth, I could have cautioned them not to do it. I could have warned them. But in that instant, my own truth came over me. At the same time the snowflakes were encasing my body into a frozen shroud, the realization of my own part oozed its way out of me and into the gray daylight.

Rose had tried to tell me. That night of the barn dance, when she walked me out to the truck, she had tried. But I had been so consumed with my own problems that I hadn't given her the time and attention she needed in order to be able to get it out. I had underestimated what they were going through by daring to compare their pain and suffering to mine. I had underestimated their endurance because I a.s.sumed them too strong to be easily manipulated by others. I had underestimated everything about them. I had failed them by taking them for granted, too, along with everyone else.

I thought of the water nymph Clytie, who, too, had given it all away. As friends, Rose, Lorelei, and I had started swimming together on the surface of the water. We had at times dipped below the surface as we went along. But we hadn't taken a deep dive, hadn't delved into those dark waters, the ones where we kept hidden the unseen frailties that lie in wait. In the end, the friendship had failed because we failed to dive deep.

I stood adrift in the snowstorm until my shivering stopped, until my body settled into an artificial calm. Now my feet and hands no longer existed, and sky tears froze into silence on my face.

I don't know how long I languished in the middle of the storm. I remember making my way back through a soup of snow, seeing the lights coming from the house windows, and feeling the heat envelop my body as I walked through the door.

Ray stood before me. His voice was full of frustration, but gentle on me nonetheless. "What are you doing? Trying to kill yourself out there?"

But my lips were too cold to form words.

Ray gestured toward the radio, then stared at me. "I heard the news." Now he shook his head. "I couldn't find you anywhere. Why were you out in this storm? You could have froze to death."

As we stood in silence, finally warmth began to work its way back into my bloodstream. I looked out the window at heavier snow than I'd seen in years. I caught my reflection in the gla.s.s and saw a polar cap encrusting my hair. Now the snow was beginning to melt and drop big clumps of slush onto the floor.

I turned back to Ray and said, "I promise I'm not this crazy."

He took my arms. "Do you have something to tell me?"

With the storm screeching and swirling outside, Ray and I swam together in a calm sea. It's a difficult thing to do, once you've been deceived. But my time was now.

"His name was Edward," I said aloud. "He was a lieutenant from the Mountain Division. I let him sweep me away. He said he loved me, and after one night together, he disappeared."

Ray was looking over every inch of my face. In his eyes, I didn't see pity. Instead, in the colored strands of his eyes, I saw the soft seeds of something like hope. Finally, he asked, "Do you still love him?"

I stood still. "Is that what it was? Love?"

He blinked. "You got to answer that question."

Now I could feel blood making its way back into the skin of my face. "It wasn't love, even though at the time I thought so. And maybe it no longer matters."

I looked over his windburned face, those cracks in his lips that now I realized I wanted to smooth away with my own. Melting globs of snow continued to fall out of my hair, but I no longer cared how ridiculous or pitiful I looked.

"What does matter to you?" he asked.

In the past, I would've listed things such as common interests, mutual attraction, worldliness, and higher education. My freedom above all else. If I had found love, it would have had to be the kind that overwhelmed and overpowered all else.

I pa.s.sed a hand between Ray and me. "Once you told me that this," I said, "is a beginning." I searched his face. "But how do you know, Ray? How do you know it's the beginning of something good?"

"I know." His breath was warm on my face as he moved in closer. "Because someday, you're bound to forgive yourself."

Thirty-four.

In the safety of our house and the warmth of our bed, I got to know the fullness of Ray's lips on my face and the taste of his skin, the soft bend of his ear and the touch of his breath on my shoulder. I discovered the silky strands of hair at the base of his head and the feel of his shoulder blades beneath my outstretched hands. I discovered just how far around my arms could encircle his back. He touched me as if I were the curved and delicate handle of a china cup, but he held me tightly just as I was, flesh and blood and full of human flaws and fears. In his arms, I wasn't a girl dreaming of sailing the high seas, and I wasn't a farm kid jumping the train, either, but a fully grown woman riding the soft side of a crescent moon.

As we lay together under the covers, I told him, "I drove them into New Mexico, but I didn't know those men were German prisoners."

He smoothed away wisps of hair on my forehead. "I know you didn't."

And then, in his arms, I cried for Rose and Lorelei.

Under clearing skies the next morning, I listened to the news report. In Washington, the Cabinet had just announced an end to the exclusion and detention of j.a.panese citizens. The concentration camps had been deemed by legal resources to be against the law. Public Proclamation 21 outlawed the holding of loyal U.S. citizens of any ancestry; therefore the j.a.panese American evacuees would be allowed to leave the camps with their personal belongings, twenty-five dollars, and train fare.

After I listened to the report, I took that old hound dog Franklin galloping out into the fields covered in deep, flat snow. Before me, V-shaped animal tracks nicked across acres of topcrust, but I took the first human steps, each one sinking me lower into the soles of remembrance. Snow now covered all the dust lost from all the other b.u.t.terfly wings, all the shining human details from the previous green seasons, those from the past season and those from many other seasons before mine, too.

As the sun faithfully opened its bright bald eye, visions of the place where Rose and Lorelei might be at that moment, somewhere behind bars, sent me pain I couldn't bear. I had to refuse thoughts of them in that level of confinement. The camp they had been forced to endure had been bad enough. Instead, I would remember them as I chose to, walking the green fields, searching the canyon for b.u.t.terflies, and laughing in unison.

When Franklin and I returned to the house, I saw that the Otero County sheriff had made his way down the roads behind a snowplow to our farm. Ray and I sat with him at the table while he questioned me about the part I had played in aiding the POWs' escape. I told every ounce the truth, although I didn't altogether admire the way it rang in my ears. After the sheriff satisfied himself that I had known nothing of the men's ident.i.ties, he sat longer than I would have liked, slurping on coffee and chatting on with Ray about the aftereffects of the storm.

I couldn't listen to them casually converse about the weather, or anything else, for that matter, when the future of two valuable lives had so recently been forfeited. I knew what would happen next. Rose and Lorelei would be painted in the newspapers and on the radio as traitors by people who'd never met them, by people who could never understand what torments and desires had driven them to their sad, ill-fated decision.

Instead, I found my eyes drawn to the window outside, to that square of blue sky, where I could see white shafts of sunlight reaching down to earth, the fingers of G.o.d telling me that we could survive it. In only a few hours after the sheriff drove off, the news came out. I was portrayed as the innocent victim, the new-comer who'd befriended the wrong people, and who'd been duped into providing transportation after the escape.

By dinnertime, solace arrived in the form of Reverend Case and Martha on our doorstep. I hadn't spoken privately with the reverend since my arrival here, and the sight of that kind face gave me a sense of hope that someday these wrongs would be a.n.a.lyzed and prevented in the future. In church, he spoke so eloquently of forgiveness, so perhaps someday this country would give apologies for wrongs committed under extraordinary circ.u.mstances. And would the world ever count Rose and Lorelei among the casualties of the war? Perhaps someday they could be forgiven for their mistake, too.

"Olivia, dear," he said as he took my hand. "I came to see if you and Ray are in need of prayer."