The Secret of Raven Point (31 page)

“I never met a psychiatrist ’til you.”

Willard’s jaw clenched; he shook his head. With a final, defeated jab of his thumb, he clicked off the recorder. “When I count to ten . . . One, two, three . . .” He stopped, looking at Juliet, at the tears brimming in her eyes.

He turned his gaze to the broken mirror and blinked in long, silent contemplation. He cleared
his throat. “Christopher, Nurse Dufresne is here, and she’d like to ask you a few more questions. About her brother.”

Juliet clasped Willard’s hand in gratitude, and he set down his notebook and walked to the window. Hands plunged in his pockets, he studied the mountains through the billowing gap between the window and the sheet. Juliet moved to where he had been sitting. She had waited months for this chance.

“Christopher. The first day we spoke to you, I asked about Tucker Dufresne. You said ‘Forgive me.’ What were you asking forgiveness for?”

“That’s what Rakowski said he heard. Tuck saying ‘Forgive me’ somewhere in the dark. Those were the last words anyone heard from Tuck.”

Having hoped for months that somehow those two words were the missing link between Tuck and Barnaby, Juliet was now stumped.

“And they have no idea who he was talking to?”

“Rakowski didn’t see a thing. Just heard Tuck’s voice.”

Juliet wrung her hands. “Did he seem
okay
?” she asked. “Not when you last saw him, but before that, in the time you spent with him. He sent me a letter and sounded troubled.”

“It was hard to know Dufresne’s mind. By the time I got there, he was always off eating cold rations by himself. I don’t think the army suited him. Didn’t really suit anyone decent. He liked to do his own thing, cut his own trail. He had a temper about things.”

She remembered what Beau said about Tuck getting into a fight in a rest hotel. Her heart sank; she hated to think of her brother unhappy, lonely. Why hadn’t he shared more of his troubles with her?

“Did he get my letters? I wrote him every day.”

“Oh, did he love those letters. He’d go off near a tree and read them over and over again. It gave him his peace. We talked about that the night in the dugout. Both of us had sisters writing up a storm. I told him all about Tina and he told me all about how you
were a prodigy with science, winning prizes. He bragged about how you’d thrown off college to become a nurse. He said you were growing up fast, he could tell from your letters. He said you’d all been best friends but that maybe the war would make things different. He hoped you’d never know what he’d done over here.”

Juliet felt her stomach weaken; she could not bring herself to ask the next question:
What had he done?

Willard looked back from the window to see if she meant to continue, and Juliet shook her head. Crossing the room, he once again began his count. As Barnaby blinked himself out of the haze, Willard crouched and tested his reflexes.

“Christopher, can you tell me your full rank and division? Christopher, can you tell me where you are from?”

Barnaby was silent.

“Christopher, can you tell me where you are now? Can you tell me your sister’s name?”

As Willard pressed on, testing and challenging Barnaby’s muteness, Juliet’s mind plunged into a swirl of speculation.

Tuck,
she thought,
I would have understood and forgiven everything.
And yet she hadn’t asked Barnaby what he meant; she hadn’t wanted the details of what Tuck had done. Perhaps she already knew the answer. Day after day she’d watched the bodies carried in on litters. She’d helped carry some herself: American soldiers maimed and dismembered at the hands of Germans. Some twenty miles north, wouldn’t there also be a German field hospital? Where a young German nurse like herself would stare at the blood and gore inflicted by the Americans? By men like Tuck and Barnaby and Munson and Beau? He’d done what they’d all done: He’d shot and stabbed and charged and strangled. He’d lobbed grenades. It was the thing they never wrote about in their letters, the thing they never
could
write about, and it was everything; in between the details of food and weather
and camaraderie, they never said,
Dear Mom and Pop, I’ve become a killer.

Willard, disappointment evident in his expression, began leading Barnaby to the doorway. Barnaby had refused to speak, and Willard gestured impatiently for Juliet to join him. She touched the side of the bed, the green chair, the wooden floor. Tuck had been conjured up in that room, and she did not yet want to leave. But with great effort she finally stood and took Barnaby’s other arm.

In silence they crossed the long, dark hallway; they made their way down the stone stairs. On the ground floor, the light of the fireplace briefly warmed and lit them, and as they passed through the mess area, the nurses and doctors drinking hot chocolate at the long tables looked up eagerly, wondering if progress had been made. Willard shook his head perfunctorily, trying to rein in his despondency, and they continued out into the cold, black night.

A wet wind swept through the encampment, and the tents around them rattled and flapped. They led Barnaby back to the Recovery Tent and carried their gear to the Supply Tent. There, Juliet began placing things one by one into the metal cabinet. Her motions were jagged, unsettled. She was trying hard to compose herself. She wanted to get it done with and go back to her bedroll and curl up and sob. Willard stood at the threshold, staring for a long while at the starless sky.

“All done here,” she called, sealing the cabinet.

Willard slowly stepped into the tent and arranged two crates side by side.

“Sit,” he said.

She held her hands in her lap and did not look at him. She did not think he could possibly understand the despair she was feeling. He stared ahead as though carefully measuring his words.

“That’s not what you wanted to hear, I’m sure,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“You’re not going to lecture me about focusing
on the patient at hand?”

He smiled gently. “Shoot me if I do.”

She felt her self-possession falter; tears began to rush her eyes. It no longer mattered if he understood; she just wanted to speak, to get it all out of her. “Just hearing about him . . . just hearing another person, a person who knew him, speak his name . . . It’s all I have now, and it was wonderful, and horrible. . . . I’d give anything for another minute with him, another second. But I don’t think . . . I think it’s impossible. Barnaby was the last person to ever see my brother. And he knows nothing. Absolutely nothing. I thought I’d made my peace with not knowing, but now . . . To come this close and still not know if he’s alive or dead. And it’s still all so strange. It’s just so odd that Tuck never mentioned Barnaby in his letters. Not once.”

Willard listened carefully as she spoke, responding with slow, measured nods. Then he cleared his throat. “I have to ask, is there any chance your brother was . . .”

She knew what he meant. “No.”

The swiftness of her denial seemed to displease him. “Because it could be a piece of the puzzle. It could even factor into Barnaby’s despair. Guilt over Tuck’s risking his life to save him. Perhaps there was an intimate emotional connection.”

Juliet looked at the ground and thought of what Beau had said that night in the cave about Tuck and Myrna:
If you ask me, they were never very serious.
She thought about his endless stream of insignificant girlfriends. Did it mean something? Was there something about him she hadn’t grasped? But after everything else, did it matter now?

“God, Dr. Willard, I don’t think so, but nothing feels certain anymore.”

“Well, we know your brother didn’t like McKnight killing prisoners. Perhaps that was the reason for his fraught letter.”

“They really do that? Kill prisoners?”

“And worse, I’m afraid.”

A dark shadow of possibility crossed her mind: if that was what
the Americans would do to a prisoner, what might the Germans do? Her great hope that Tuck had merely been captured suddenly seemed terribly grim.

“Whatever befell him, Juliet”—Willard put his hand on her shoulder—“the worst is probably over. I know this feels as though it is all happening now, as you hear about it, as you think about it. Tuck is through it.
You’re
feeling the trauma of it, not him.”

She was grateful for his words. It was as though her mind had erected a chamber of thought, brightly lit and thrumming, in which anything terrible could befall Tuck, in which every awful scenario endlessly played out. She finally wanted to shut it off.

“Did you know that if you prompted Barnaby about that first episode,” she asked, “he might talk about Tuck?”

“It had crossed my mind.”

Willard stood and shifted toward the tent flaps but made no headway. For all his bombast and talk of regulations, thought Juliet, he couldn’t stop himself from helping a person in need.

“Thank you,” she said.

He offered a half smile, fighting a blush.

“Will that session help the appeal?” she asked. “Will it help Barnaby with anything?”

“Doubtful. I suppose I’m learning what it feels like to be sent in to fight a battle that’s impossible to win. I find out my equipment doesn’t work, I was given the wrong maps. Barnaby should have seen a psychiatrist during his first admission. You can’t leave a man in a dugout, bleeding to death, and then nearly bury him alive without asking him how his mind is holding up. You can’t just send him back into the lines.”

“We only treat the ones who come in here and don’t want to kill anymore. But they
all
sound mad.”

“It’s impossible to ask men to do what they do out there and not
have it change them.”

In a flash, what Tuck said to Sergeant McKnight came back to her:
I’m getting tired of that shit.
Had Tuck been part of something similar before? “I think the killing—I think the violence—I think it drove my brother mad.”

“He wouldn’t be the first.”

“God, I hate it here,” Juliet said quietly.

“But I’m so glad you
are
here.”

She stood and faced him; his kindness had moved her, and she felt an impulse to touch him, a
right
to touch him. She stepped toward him now, stepped into him, as if he were a room that belonged to her. He did not retreat. She set her cheek against his chest and he placed his hand on the side of her head and they stood like that for quite some time. In the silence of the tent, she could hear his breath. She did not want to speak. She did not want to move. She felt something rise within her, something eager and aching; the thought pulsed and throbbed, and she shifted her head, slightly, suggestively, so that her face titled upward.
Please, please, please kiss me,
she thought.
Lift my chin and kiss me. I think you are wonderful, kiss me.
His hand remained on her head but he made no motion to change position, and slowly, nervously, Juliet looked up, hoping she might see in his face some reflection of her own yearning. His eyes had closed, but she could not tell if it was from longing or exhaustion. She moved her mouth close to his, so close she could feel his breath on her face, and suddenly his lips pressed into hers. Their mouths moved eagerly, hungrily. His hand roamed her hair. She felt him press into her, begin to lift her, and then as quickly as it had begun, he pulled away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He flattened the front of his shirt, then began to straighten hers.

“It’s okay,” she said.

She was aware of him shaking his head apologetically as he stepped away; he said nothing more as he hurriedly left.

As the division continued its assault into the mountains, patients arrived who had been stranded for days on ice-crested peaks, their faces blistered with frostbite, their limbs gangrenous and rancid. Word came that entire battalions were pinned in the mountains, stranded without food and ammunition, fighting for the fifth straight day without sleep. The wounded arrived on makeshift toboggans hauled down ice-lacquered cow paths. Patients were blue-lipped, frostbitten, drunk on morphine. They spoke of peeing on their rifles to loosen frozen chambers. Many, having received hasty amputations at the front, arrived with stumps bandaged with shirts and pants.

Some nights, when Juliet couldn’t sleep, she lay thinking of all the legs and arms buried across Italy. How many bodies could be stitched together from them? She imagined an army of creatures like Dr. Frankenstein’s, zombies sewn together from every nationality—a German leg on an Italian torso with American arms—all limping across Europe, trying to end the war.
Throw down your weapons!
Waffen runter! Getatte le armi!

A bone-chilling cold had arrived, sharp winds hurling through the mountains. Since trucks couldn’t navigate the terrain, mules carried supplies to the front: they left loaded with food and blankets and ammunition; they returned strapped with the musette bags of men who had been killed. Something had been done to the mules to make them deaf so they wouldn’t startle at the sound of gunfire. Juliet watched the animals lope through the snow as they were led past the encampment, a look of calm detachment in their eyes. She thought,
That is the way to survive this; I’ll stop listening, I’ll stop looking.