The New Neighbor by Stewart Leah

Author:Stewart, Leah [Stewart, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2015-07-07T07:00:00+00:00

Blood on My Hands

I was once a girl named Maggie Jean being driven on a truck next to a girl named Kay through the war zone of France. Soldiers trudged along the road on either side, and when they noticed us it was with a wonderment that girls of our average prettiness weren’t used to provoking. In the war, we were more beautiful than we had ever been, and everything that should have been beautiful was not. Some places the trees grew together over the road and you couldn’t see any place but exactly where you were, worse than being in a maze because you couldn’t even see the sky. Imagine being trapped in there with somebody shooting at you from the other side. A lovely green arch under a summer sky is a death trap. Topsy-turvy. When you’re in a war, everything is topsy-turvy. Men in blue overalls and berets are smoking at tables outside a café, even though the buildings on either side look like they’ve been punched in from the top by a giant. You put up a hospital in a cow pasture. At first it feels exciting and ridiculous, like you’re players in the world’s biggest game of make-believe. You’ve gone out in the backyard with your tent and your toy medical kits and now you’re busily pretending that sooner or later the patients will arrive.

That first place, the more time passed, the harder it became to believe we ever would get patients. It rained. The latrine trench filled with water. You had to brace yourself very carefully not to slip in the mud. Ants crawled into our bedrolls. All night long we heard shelling in the distance. A whistle. A distant boom. We got up out of bed and brushed off the ants. I tried not to watch Kay for signs of her back injury, because she was alert to the slightest hint that I might be doing so. She snapped, “What?” at me more than a few times when she caught me looking at her. She always said she was fine. But then we’d be walking somewhere, and suddenly her breathing would quicken, and I’d glance over to find her staring straight ahead with a startled, almost panicked look, her mouth slack and her face pale. “I just got a little twinge, that’s all,” she’d say, when she was able to look round and smile and talk normally again. I’d promised to protect her, and I was itchy with the fear that I wouldn’t be able to, with the fear and the boredom and the anticipation.

A few times each day I went and wandered through the tents, as if I were checking on things, though I wasn’t really. There was nothing to check on. Everything was at the ready. In the shock ward and the OR, the sawhorses were lined up just so, awaiting stretchers. Two-foot locker boxes with shelves inside held the supplies. In the empty post-op tent there was one GI blanket folded neatly at the foot of each canvas cot.

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