The baby would be two years old now. Did he look like me? Did she tell him about me? Was he babbling a few words and taking steps yet? Margarethe had insisted the baby was a girl, but whenever I pictured her with our baby in her arms, it was always a smiling boy with my dark hair and her bright-blue eyes.
I’d hoped to stay in Europe long enough to find them on site, but because Ma was so unwell, I was discharged almost immediately after V-E Day. Dad had written to everyone he could think of, and apparently his pleas reached the right ears. I should have been grateful for the reprieve, but I couldn’t muster many feelings beyond regret. I considered staying behind, orders or no, but I couldn’t leave my father to mourn for my mother alone if the worst were to happen. I was decommissioned and sent back home with only a few days’ leave in Paris before returning to Los Angeles. I spent those precious few days contacting every refugee center I could manage and combed every lead I had in Paris while I could. The streets of Paris, now that the revelry was at an end, were somber. The people were gaunt with a hunger that food alone would not satiate. It was bizarre to see some of the streets completely untouched, while others were so heavily pockmarked.
The war was much like the massive wildfires that would erupt in the summer in the hills outside Los Angeles and the lush forests to the north. It might take weeks to get the blaze in hand, and there would be nothing but the charred memories of trees and wildlife left behind. Slowly, the green sprigs of life would sprout from the ruin, the birds and woodland creatures would reappear, and things would return to a state of normalcy. Not as they had been, but a new version of what once was. So would be the case in France, Germany, and everywhere else that had been trampled by this war. It would take a generation, but a new version of normal would emerge from the ashes again. Though in truth, saplings had only just begun to sprout from the horror of the previous war, so I still harbored the fear that another madman with a match would surface to ignite it all once more.
My days in Paris yielded no results, and I cursed myself for knowing almost no vital information about the woman I loved. She never even shared her surname, in service of protecting us both. I boarded the ship home and traversed the country by train. I returned to my parents having left more than a little of my soul behind. The only mercy was that my return spurred an improvement in Ma’s health, though an incomplete one.
“Son, you need to put all that away and get some fresh air,” Dad chided as he rinsed Ma’s dishes in the sink.
“I walked home from the office,” I said, not lifting my head from the envelope I addressed.
“Three blocks. A man like you needs more than that. You don’t want to lose your health like your poor mother.”
“Enough, Dad. You know what this means to me.”
“I’ve seen you spend hours every night at that table for two years. What has it amounted to, son?”
“Form letters. A lot of nothing,” I admitted.
“You fought in a war and lived, Max. You need to honor that gift and live your life.”
“But what about the baby? Am I to leave her to fend for herself?”
“It’s been two years, son. You’ve given your information to every organization from here to Berlin. If she wants to be found—if she can be found—she will be. In the meantime, seeing you brood isn’t doing your mother any good.”
“I’ll go and read to her,” I offered. She liked it when I read the Psalms to her, or occasionally an Agatha Christie.
“I think she’d prefer to see you go out, son. She’d love to know you’re settled before the cancer . . .”
“Dad, the treatments seem to be working. There’s no reason not to hope.”
“I know what my heart tells me, son. There’s no ignoring the ache that’s settled in there.”
I wrapped an arm around him and kissed the thinning hair atop his head and nodded. He returned to Ma in their bedroom and I sat again, tossing the pen aside. I leaned back, fingers laced behind my head, and stretched the muscles in my back that tightened into steel after hours bent over a dental chair and then the kitchen table.
I placed the letters back in the printer’s carton, stacked the envelopes on top of them, and tossed in the roll of stamps. As I placed the box with the last of the letters on the bookcase in my room, I felt hollow. All that was left was the same piercing ache in my heart that Dad felt in his.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
LEFT BEHIND
BETH
June 2, 2007
San Diego, California
Greg was out back scrubbing the built-in grill as he did every Saturday. Some men attended church on the weekend, others devoted themselves to watching sports. Greg tinkered in the yard each week with the same religious zeal. The half acre was Greg’s refuge, and only the heaviest rain would keep him from mowing the expansive lawn. Even then, he would still tend to the grill and everything else sheltered on the covered patio. It was the sort of patio that home improvement stores used in their advertisements to lure unwitting consumers into buying three tons of flagstone and stainless-steel grills large enough to cook meals for entire football teams. It was manicured and orderly, missing the element of tropical chaos that Dad’s little corner of paradise had had. Greg had allowed one plumeria—the deep-red kind that smelled of grape Kool-Aid—to reside in the far corner. It had been gifted from Dad to us after our honeymoon, and it was one of the few things I regretted having to leave behind. There might be another yard one day, though, and it could be one of my own design.
I hadn’t been back to the house in over nine months, but Greg’s routine hadn’t changed. Everything looked basically the same but for the lack of my personal effects. I couldn’t figure out if I should be sad that my absence should affect the atmosphere so little, or if it just meant I was never fully present in it.
“You didn’t answer the door, so I let myself in. I hope that’s OK,” I said. He looked up from the grill, wire brush still in hand.
“Beth, the day you’re not welcome in this house as your own is the day I’ve failed as a human being.” Greg set the brush down and closed the heavy stainless-steel lid to the grill. He meant it too. He probably still slept on the right side of the bed, leaving the left for me. He didn’t envision the day when he’d find someone else and my welcome would be rescinded. But I knew it was coming, and likely not in the distant future.
“It’s not my home anymore,” I reminded him, hoping I didn’t sound cruel. “I want to respect your privacy.”
“I suppose I deserve the frosty treatment. I’m sorry for how I behaved at the hospital. I’m glad Max is doing better.”
“You’ve never been at your best when you’re tired. I shouldn’t have texted you,” I said with a shrug.
Greg opened his mouth to retort, but snapped it shut. “Let’s go inside,” he said finally.
I followed him to the den we’d used as a communal study. My desk and books were gone, but he’d spaced his out to make the bare shelves look less spartan. He took his spot in the chair behind his desk and I sat in the guest chair on the other side. I felt like I’d been called into the dean’s office for a meeting, rather than having a conversation with the man I’d once shared my life with.