“I have no idea. This is all I’ve known and done for years now.” Since she was fifteen, when her father died and her mother got sick. “Maybe I should enlist, like you did.” She had thought of it a few times, but there was no question of it while her mother was alive. “I have no one left, no family, nowhere I have to be. I was thinking of getting a job as a nurse. I need to take some classes to brush up. I’ve only been doing what Mom needed. I’m a little rusty on the rest.”
“You can catch up in a month or two,” Lizzie said. “I wish I could be sure we’d be stationed together.” The armed forces kept fathers and sons and brothers together, when asked to do so, but friendships weren’t always respected.
“Maybe I will anyway. I’ll sign up for some classes. I need to do that anyway. I can’t just sit here in an empty house and do nothing.” She knew her mother had left her a little money, and she owned the house now, although she didn’t want to live there alone. She was thinking about closing it up and getting a nursing job in Baltimore, or enlisting in the army. It was too soon to say. She hadn’t even buried her mother yet.
“Let me know what you’re doing,” Lizzie said, and told her again how sorry she was. She would always have precious memories of Ellen and how kind she had been, and welcoming, when Audrey first brought her home from nursing school for Sunday dinners, which had become the mainstay of her student life, and a second family for her, warmer than her own.
* * *
—
The funeral was three days after Ellen died. Only Audrey, Mrs. Beavis, and two of their neighbors were there. Audrey arranged for burial in the naval cemetery at Annapolis, next to her father. The minister Audrey and her mother knew read from the Scriptures and spoke briefly about Ellen. Then her casket was lowered into the ground. It was a bleak November day, and Audrey went home alone. She started packing the next day. She didn’t know where she was going. But she knew she couldn’t stay long-term in the house that had become a hospital for her mother. It had served its purpose, but too many of its occupants were gone now. Audrey couldn’t bear the thought of being there alone any longer than she had to.
She signed up for a refresher course at her old nursing school. It was scheduled to last for four weeks, and she was surprised how quickly the material came back to her. She hadn’t forgotten as much as she had thought, even if she hadn’t used it. She was halfway through the class on Thanksgiving weekend, still living at home in the silent house, when Lizzie called her. Audrey had decided to ignore the holiday. She had no one to spend it with and didn’t want to celebrate. Lizzie sounded excited when Audrey answered.
“A whole group of us just signed up as flight nurses yesterday. They’re sending us to Bowman Field in Kentucky. We’re being reassigned as flight nurses with the Army Air Forces, and sent for Medical Air Evacuation Transport training for six weeks. We’ll be learning field survival, ditching and crash procedures, parachutes, and some classroom hours related to flying. They need nurses and corpsmen to evacuate the wounded from the battlefields by air transport, in planes, and bring them back to hospitals. I knew a couple of girls who went to North Africa last year, as medical air evac flight nurses. I think they were the first to go. They didn’t get much training. We don’t know the details yet, but we’re hoping we get sent to England. Another group got assigned to hospital ships in the Pacific. I like our assignment better. Alex got assigned to the same squadron I did. We start classes on January second, so I guess I’ll be in Boston for Christmas. You can come up if you want. But I was thinking, if you enlist, you could volunteer for the Army Air Forces Flying Nurse Squadron and ask for Medical Air Evacuation Transport duty. Aud, I’d love to have you with us.” Audrey thought about it as she listened. It sounded perfect to her, and just what she needed. It was exciting, and a real chance to do some serious nursing and help the boys at the front. And if she’d be with Lizzie, it felt like an answer to her prayers.
“Okay, Lieutenant, I’m in. I’ll go to the recruiting station tomorrow.” She wrote down everything she needed to know to volunteer for the right squadron if they let her. “I hope I don’t flunk the physical or whatever they ask me, if they have an entrance exam.” Audrey was so excited, she was shaking. It was a huge leap into an unknown future, but as she hung up the phone with a trembling hand, she knew her parents and her brother would have been proud of her.
* * *
—
Audrey went to the recruiting station in Annapolis the next day, and did what she had told Lizzie she would. She wrote down all the details of the training class she wanted to join. She had her physical a week later and passed with ease. She still didn’t know if they would approve her for the training class she’d requested. It felt strangely appropriate that she had had the physical on the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor, two years after her brother’s death.
She received her acceptance letter into the army on the fourteenth of December. Her request to volunteer for the Army Air Forces Flying Nurses had been approved, and they had granted her request for Medical Air Evacuation Transport (MAET) duty. She had been assigned to the same training class as Lizzie and Alex, and had to report to the base on the first of January, and start classes with the other nurses on the second. She let out a scream when she read the letter, and rushed to the phone to call Lizzie, who had just woken up in California.
“I got it! I got it!” Audrey shouted into the phone. “I’m in the same unit you are.”
“Oh my God! That’s fantastic!” They both spoke at once, and Audrey’s mind was racing. She had two weeks to pack up her parents’ house as much as she was going to. And she had to find someone to check it from time to time to make sure no pipes had burst or were frozen. She asked a neighbor, who was impressed that she had enlisted and agreed to visit the house periodically. She didn’t even care about Christmas now, she had so much to do before she left. Lizzie invited her to Boston again for the holiday, but it was only ten days away. She wasn’t sure she’d be finished by then, but said she’d try. All she could think of were all the things she was going to do and learn in the coming months, and the missions she would fly on, and that she would be back with her best friend. They were both hoping to be stationed in England. There was nothing to keep her in Annapolis now, or the States. She had something important to do for the war effort, and lives to save. Her life suddenly made sense again. She was going to be a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, in a Medical Air Evacuation Transport unit. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. Her life had a purpose, other than just keeping her mother alive through the agonizing years of her illness. She was grateful she had gone to nursing school. It was going to serve her well with the men she would be assigned to care for.
All she could think about as she hung up the phone was how exciting her life had become, and this was just the beginning.