Lone eagle

She tried calling late that night, but the operator said it was impossible to get through. She sat in her room instead, looking out at the moonlit night and thinking of him. All she could remember now was how sure she had been for so long that he was still alive. It was only in the past few months that she had actually begun to believe he was dead.

She felt as though she were moving underwater for the next few weeks. She went to work on the docks every day, and in the Red Cross facility between ships. She went to visit men in hospitals, wrote letters for them, helped them eat and sit up and drink. She listened to a thousand painful tales. And when Andy called, she sounded vague when she talked to him. She didn't want to tell him on the phone that Joe was alive, and she didn't know what to say. She had tried so hard to talk herself into loving him, and she might have one day, but in the face of Joe coming home, she could barely talk to Andy anymore. But it didn't seem fair to ruin his trip by telling him while he was away.

She went to work at five in the morning the day Joe's ship was due in. She knew they were expected at six o'clock when they came in with the high tide. They had been just offshore the night before, and had radioed in. She wore a clean uniform and her cap, and her hands were shaking when she pinned it on. She couldn't even imagine seeing him. It was all beginning to seem like a very strange dream.

She took the streetcar to the docks, reported in to her supervisor, and checked their supplies. There were seven hundred wounded men on the ship, and it was one of the first from Germany. The others had been coming in from England and France. There were ambulances and military transport vehicles lined up all along the docks, and they would be sending the men to military hospitals over a range of several hundred miles. She had no idea where they were going to be sending Joe. But wherever it was, she was going to be there with him as much as she could. She had never been able to get to him by phone in Germany in the past few weeks, and she'd been told that even a letter wouldn't make it in time. They had had no contact at all since October, nearly two years before.

The ship steamed slowly in, and the decks were lined with men, on crutches, wearing bandages, and you could hear them shouting and screaming and whistling and see them wave long before the ship reached the dock. It was a scene she had seen often by then, and it always brought tears to her eyes. But this time, she stood watching them, straining her eyes, scouring the decks for him, but she doubted if he was in any condition to be standing up. From the sound of it he would be one of the men on stretchers lying flat on the deck. And she had already spoken to her supervisor about going on board.

“Anyone you know?” Usually, the volunteers waited for the men to be unloaded on the dock, but now and then they went on board to lend a hand. But the retired nurse in charge of the volunteers could see how anxious Kate was. With her dark red hair framing her face, she had never seen anyone as pale and still standing up.

“I… my… my fiancé is on board,” she said finally. It was too complicated to explain what he meant to her and where he had been for two years. It was easier to just tell her a diplomatic lie.

“How long has it been since you've seen him?” she asked Kate, as they watched the ship come in. She had already given Kate permission to go aboard.

“Twenty-one months.” And then she looked at the young woman with her enormous dark blue eyes. “We thought he was dead until three weeks ago.” The woman could only imagine what that must have been like for her. She had lived through her own private hell, she was a widow and had lost three sons.

“Where did they find him?” she asked, more to distract Kate. The poor girl looked like she was about to break in half.

“In Germany. In prison,” she said simply. The nurse could only guess at the kind of damage that had been done. “He was shot down on a bombing raid,” Kate still had no idea what kind of injuries he'd had. She was just grateful he was alive.