The Pieces We Keep(78)

A mumbled phrase drifted from Jack’s mouth. Nothing she could make out. Typically she would let him be, but now she couldn’t afford to ignore it.

She spoke just above a whisper. “What’d you say, Jack?”

“Yeah, yeah . . . ,” he said, resembling a three-beer slur, like the day he’d ingested laughing gas before having a cavity filled. On the car ride home, he had rambled on and on, sharing every thought that entered his head.

Perhaps once more she could benefit from his narrow interim of consciousness.

She leaned closer to his ear. Against her dwindling skepticism, she pushed out the name that consistently eased his nightmares: “Jakob.”

Not seeing a reaction, she tried again, more pronounced. “Jakob Hemel.”

Jack didn’t answer, but his breath hitched.

“Buddy, is that who your dreams are about?”

A hum indicated agreement and sent Audra’s mind spinning.

Vivian’s necklace. Isaak’s letter. Was it possible Jakob and Isaak knew each other? Served as pilots in the war?

She tempered her volume, so as not to wake him. “Jack,” she said, “do you know who Isaak is?”

He shifted onto his side, angling his face away. But she couldn’t let up. She sensed a window open between them. She would have to hurry before it closed.

“Could you tell me why he—” Not he. To make progress, she would have to buy in fully. As Dr. Shaw had told her, what she believed didn’t matter right now, only what Jack did. “Why are you here? Is there a reason you’ve come back?”

At that, he resumed his mumbling.

She held her ponytail aside and hovered her ear over his mouth. The response came in jagged pieces: “So ... finally ... she can ... be with him....”

When he trailed off, Audra pressed, “Who is she?”

No reply.

“Jakob? Please, tell me who ‘she’ is.”

A long exhale confirmed his deepened level of sleep, leaving Audra to review her approach.

This was ludicrous. She was speaking to him like a psychiatrist treating a patient with split personalities. She needed air, needed to ground herself in reality.

Quietly she retreated to the kitchen and opened the window over the sink. She inhaled crisp breaths through the screen, wishing the netting could filter her thoughts.

None of this could be real. If it was, it meant an afterlife existed. That a higher power, too, could exist. That something touted as good and holy stole lives on a whim, inflicting pain on those left behind. And for what purpose? There wasn’t one—which was why Audra had taken the reins of their lives into her own hands.

How quickly those reins were slipping from her grasp.

“No!” Jack bellowed from his room. “Let me out!”

He was peaceful only minutes ago. Rarely did he start so early.

Audra raced to his bed to find him wildly flailing. She called him Jakob several times, but he just screamed with renewed intensity. She clasped his upper arms, taking care not to press too hard. Repeatedly he broke free.

Which would be worse? Incriminating bruises or another trip to the ER—where, incidentally, a nurse might recall their previous visit, wine-stained shirt and all? None of these factors would help keep Audra and Jack together....

Wait.

That was it.

The figures in his drawing, the couple who held hands while falling toward the waves—they were never Audra and Jack. But they, too, wanted to be together.

“I’ll bring them back to each other,” she said over his yelling. Distantly, something about it made sense. “I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way.”

Just like that, he went eerily silent. The fright left his eyes, his muscles gone lax. She guided him to lie down and offered the usual assurances until his eyelids lowered again. Another dream he would forget by morning.

“It’s all right,” she soothed, rubbing the back of his shirt. She felt both clearer and more confused about what was happening. “Everything’s all right.”

His pajama collar, misshapen from the struggle, exposed the birthmark on his shoulder. Or rather what remained of it. Originally bright and solid red, the hemangioma had once been a perfect strawberry. Over the years it had faded to pink, gone soft around the edges. Yet only now did Audra notice the shape.

His birthmark had become a heart.





36


Vivian sat on her bed, writing fiercely in her diary. Her heart still thudded as she described the torturous walk from her switchboard chair to the Army major. Only a march to the gallows could have felt longer. Her legs had prickled with a thousand needles as Mrs. Langtree shut the door, confining the three of them in the hall.

There was no arrest, however. No interrogation. No accusation of treason, a crime Vivian hadn’t fully realized, until that second, that she was committing. Rather, due to the prestige of her father’s work, backed by Mrs. Langtree’s surprising endorsement, the major was offering Vivian a job. The newly formed WAAC, or Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, would soon overtake the base’s switchboard, requiring a uniformed staff of operators.