12. Helene
12
HELENE
Helene woke with a start. She blinked as sunlight peeked through the edges of the blackout curtains.
Her memories of the previous night were hazy and fragmented, the long truck ride back to Rouen, supper surrounded by a cacophony of voices, everyone talking at once. The entire hospital had transformed. Where before the long halls were heavy with a numb, tedious boredom, the entire H?tel-Dieu had become infused with sound and movement and purpose. The landing was all anyone could talk about, different accounts of what had happened, of the arrival of the soldiers in the wards, chirps and whispers of news.
Helene had sat silently through supper, staring down at the deep red stains underneath her fingernails, resistant to all attempts to scrub them clean. Elisabeth sat beside her. Unlike some of the other girls, she hadn’t pestered Helene with questions when she’d first returned that afternoon, as if she could sense Helene had neither the energy nor will to answer them.
“Matron Durand told me to let you know that you have tonight off,” Elisabeth said when they’d reached the dormitory afterward.
Helene had climbed into her bed, fully dressed. “Fine,” she mumbled. It felt like years had passed since news of the landing hit that morning. Whatever joy had been on her friend’s face was gone now. “Sorry,” Helene said. “I know you thought…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elisabeth said. She hugged her arms to her chest. “I have to go get report from day shift. We’ve been given a temporary transfer to one of the new wards.”
Helene looked up. She wasn’t due to change ward assignments for another three weeks.
“They want all the staff nurses and sisters assigned to the German soldiers. Probates like us can take care of the prisoners. They’re expendable, after all.”
Helene knew her friend was disappointed by the failed landing, as was she, but this felt like a glimmer of good news. “At least we’ll be away from the Germans?”
“Yes, of course,” Elisabeth said dully. “Good night, Helene.”
Helene turned onto her side and burrowed into the thin pillow. Instinctively, she reached for her mother’s journal, which she kept hidden underneath the mattress. She couldn’t use it in the hospital, but on the days she was most homesick, or whenever she needed comfort, she clutched it in her hands for a few moments, just to feel the solid weight of its presence. Yet, even with the journal, she couldn’t close her mind to the events of the day. In the silence of the dormitory, she heard the sound of engines, the cries of wounded men, softly at first, but then building, until it was so loud she wanted to squeeze her hands to her ears to shut it out.
Breathe, Helene.
Thomas’s calm, kind voice cut through the din. Helene held onto it, and the journal, like life rafts.
* * *
In the light of morning, Helene watched Elisabeth from her cot. Even in sleep, her friend was restless. Her hands twitched and mouth moved, as though she were having an argument with someone who wasn’t there.
Helene knew she should try to sleep more in preparation for the night to come, but her mind revved to life like an old engine, playing the events of the previous day in an endless loop, each image sharper than the last. Before she could replay it all again, she grabbed her slippers and a clean uniform from beneath her bed and left for the washroom.
An hour later, Helene walked into the east wing. She had only ever visited this part of the hospital for supplies or to attend lectures in one of the spartan classrooms, outfitted with a few wooden benches and a chair for whichever elderly French physician had been chosen to speak to them. Now, the corridor was full of a charged, frenetic energy as nursing students and sisters streamed past, carrying stacks of linens or boxes of supplies in and out of doors. No one even glanced at Helene as she headed toward the nearest ward.
“Name, if you will, please,” the guard at the door said in broken French.
“Helene. Helene Paré.”
The young soldier checked his papers, then looked up and nodded. “Eintreten.”
Nearly every inch of the ward’s stone floor was occupied by a cot, one after the next stretching from wall to wall with only narrow aisles in between. Some men sat on the sides of their beds, talking and playing cards, and some struggled to test out crutches in the aisles or limped back and forth from the makeshift lavatory set up behind a curtain in the back. Others were still in their beds, covered in bandages, hands folded, eyes fixed on the cracked, peeling ceiling.
Whereas the German military ward had always felt calm and orderly, enough so that Helene spent most of her time folding linens or organizing supplies, the chaos here was overpowering. There were too many voices: English from the soldiers, French from the nurses and sisters who made their rounds, occasional loud barking from the German guards stationed at the front and rear of the ward. It all blended into one indistinguishable wall of noise.
Helene had no idea where to even begin.
Before she could ask, Matron Durand strode toward her with a large crate. “They’ve had nothing to eat today,” she said, her face flushed underneath her white veil. She shoved the crate into Helene’s arms. “Go on now.”
Helene took a breath as she approached a soldier lying on a cot near one of the massive arched windows that ran the length of the ward. He was naked from the waist up, his abdomen wrapped in a large bandage.
“Hello,” Helene said in English with a small smile. “You are hungry?”
The soldier propped himself up on his elbow. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, please.”
Helene handed him an apple and ripped off a chunk of bread from a dense loaf. He stared down at the food with an almost childlike awe before tearing hungrily into the bread.
“Thank you,” he said, crumbs flying out of his mouth as he spoke. “Merci.”
The soldier’s dressing was covered with old blood. He needed a change, clean linens, soap and toothpaste, pain medicine.
“I will return,” she said in her halting English. She motioned to the bandage. “When I give all the food.”
The soldier smiled gratefully.
For the next hour, Helene offered what little she could. The men were appreciative, most in a state of shock as they accepted their food from her with dirty, bloodstained hands. Helene tried not to look at any of them too closely. It was strange, after what had happened in Dieppe, to be back in the role of a probate nurse. She felt as though a hundred days had passed in that one afternoon, and yet at the hospital time had stood still.
When she reached the far side of the ward, Helene’s crate of meager food was nearly empty, save for a misshapen last loaf of bread and a few apples so brown and dented they were mostly mush.
“I thought maybe I made you up.”
Helene’s hands slipped slightly on the wooden crate as she turned.
Thomas sat up on his cot, his wounded leg propped on a pillow. He seemed even younger without his full uniform, his wavy brown hair unkempt. But his gray eyes were instantly familiar as they found hers. “But here you are.”
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” she managed to say. “I thought you’d already have been…”
“Shipped off.”
Helene nodded toward Thomas’s bandaged knee. “I thought you’d be okay to leave as soon as they removed the shrapnel.”
He shrugged. “So did I. But I guess it was more complicated than they anticipated. Damn thing was lodged near an artery.” He glanced toward the crate she carried. “Is that food you have there, Helene?”
Helene set the crate down and picked out a small portion of bread and a tiny, dented red apple. “It’s not much. I’m sorry.”
Thomas smiled as he leaned forward eagerly. “I’ve only had water since yesterday. It’s more than enough.” He devoured the food in large bites, stopping only occasionally for air.
Helene looked toward the front of the ward. There was an endless amount of work to be done, and she would be scolded if she was caught talking to a soldier instead of performing her duties. “I should report back to the ward sister.”
Thomas wiped his mouth. “Now why would you do that, when we just found each other again?”
Helene’s cheeks flushed. She was almost sure she had imagined Thomas as well, or at least the way he’d looked at her, the way he’d made her feel. “You’ll want a proper nurse. I’m not much of one.”
“I don’t really believe that. You saved my life yesterday, after all. I don’t think I even said thank you.” The lightness in his voice was gone.
Since the war had broken out, so many people had been willing to look away from brutality as long as they were safe. Even her mother and grandfather, the two people she most admired, had been shockingly complacent. Whenever Helene murmured about resistance, her mother had silenced her immediately, warning it was too dangerous. But, as terrified as she’d been on the beach, she couldn’t be passive any longer in the face of so much suffering.
“What else could I have done?” she asked.
“Let him shoot me,” Thomas said. “You could have just stepped aside.”
“I couldn’t have done that.”
“Some would have.” Thomas rested back on his cot and stared at the ceiling. “I know how I can thank you,” he said abruptly. He sat up again, his mouth turning up into a grin. “Practice on me.”
Helene blinked back at him. But he just smiled wider at her confusion.
“Sorry?”
“You said you’re a terrible nurse.”
“I don’t think I used the word terrible …”
Thomas held up his hands. “Fine, maybe not in those words. But from the looks of it, you might be the best they’ve got.”
She followed his gaze as he surveyed the room. A few cots down, Dominique, a teenager only a few weeks ahead of Helene in training, was bent over a soldier, her forehead drenched in sweat. The soldier in the bed grimaced as she fumbled to apply antiseptic to his wound.
“My bandage hasn’t been changed since they operated. I don’t know much about medicine, but I imagine it’s not supposed to look like that.”
Helene peered closer at his leg. He was right. There was blood seeping onto the fabric near his knee. “I’m not sure what we have in the way of supplies,” Helene said as she checked over her shoulder. “I can try to find a clean bandage, some iodine.”
“Perfect. This way you don’t have to go away again.” Thomas’s cheeks were slightly pink. “At least not yet.”
She wished more than anything she could put her hands on his wound and fix it with her touch. But his leg wound was far deeper than the simple scrapes and bruises she had mended with her mother. And in the crowded ward, with Thomas’s eyes on her, there was no way to do it without revealing herself. Helene could feel the echoes of her mother’s warnings in her body, the constant vigilance to not be seen for who she truly was.
Helene took a deep breath in through her nose. After Dieppe, she could no longer make excuses, or tell herself she wasn’t equipped. She had survived a battlefield. “I’ll go and get supplies then.”
“You promise you’ll come back?”
Helene nodded. “Promise.”
* * *
The next day, Helene sat at the breakfast table and picked at the bland food on her plate. She had lost her appetite the moment she read her mother’s letter, which arrived that morning. Helene withdrew the note from her pocket and read it again, trying to parse further clarity from her mother’s vague phrasing.
Your grandfather isn’t at home right now. All is fine. There is nothing to worry about. But he’s been sent away for a while, for reasons that are difficult to explain in a letter. I’ll write more when I can, and I’m sure he’ll be back home with us soon.
Helene traced her mother’s handwriting, the crisp precision of her elegant lines. He’s been sent away for a while.
He had done something stupid. Or said something stupid. Broke curfew. Fear clutched at her chest. If she had been home, this never would have happened. Her mother was too distracted, too busy with her work. And now her grandfather was gone, in some prison or work camp.
Helene carried her plate to the bin. She knew it was useless to try to eat, and even though her shift didn’t start for a few more hours, she decided to head back to the prisoner’s ward. She needed a distraction from her mother’s news. And if she were completely honest with herself, she also wanted to see Thomas again, to hear his voice once more before he was sent away. No one would question why she was on duty early. Since Dieppe, nurses and doctors were working twenty-four-hour shifts, scouring the hospital for what was left of dwindling food and supplies. The rigid order had dissolved, and they could use all the help they could get.
Helene was almost at the entrance to the hospital wing, when she heard her name called from behind her.
Cecelia stood near a door that led to the convent. She was dressed in a clean, pressed habit, her hair pulled back into a tight bun beneath her veil. But as she stepped forward into a beam of bright afternoon sun, Helene noticed how pale she was, her eyes lined with inky blue circles. Cecelia, like most of the other sisters, had been working nonstop in the German military ward.
“I was hoping to find you,” Cecelia said. A few nurses walking down the hallway looked up as Cecelia’s shoes made sharp clicks on the stone floor. “I tried your dormitory but you were gone already.”
It felt strange, to see this cold, intimidating version of Cecelia again. She’d thought something fundamental had shifted between them in Dieppe. She was hopeful there might be an understanding, a truce of kinds, and Cecelia might even allow Helene to use her gift to treat the Allied soldiers on the wards, take away the pain from shrapnel wounds, ease the burns caused by explosive devices.
But Cecelia’s expression was stern. “Can I speak with you a moment?”
Helene nodded.
“In private,” Cecelia said as she motioned toward the door. “Follow me, please.”
Helene trailed Cecelia into a small chapel within the convent that was off limits to the lay nurses. Compared to the vast, echoing église Sainte-Madeleine, with its soaring stone arches and enormous windows, this chapel was modest and plain. Save for one lone stained glass window, the walls were made of rough, hand-carved stone. The space was tiny, but in a way that felt comforting instead of claustrophobic, as if the world had been contained to this simple room.
There were two small stone statues at the front of the chapel, of Mary and another saint Helene didn’t recognize. Beside them a row of candles flickered, casting an orange glow. A few simple wooden pews lined either side of a central aisle.
“Sit,” Cecelia asked, gesturing toward one of the pews.
Helene genuflected briefly at the aisle before she sat down on the wooden pew. Cecelia sat beside her, so close that the soft white fabric of her habit brushed against Helene’s fingers.
“I feel I owe you an apology,” Cecelia said, looking straight ahead.
Helene followed her cousin’s line of sight to the candles. Did Cecelia regret her decision to bring Helene to Dieppe, or think Helene hadn’t been ready for it? “What for?”
Cecelia clasped her hands. “I never should have… You see, I lost control of myself, in Dieppe.” She was completely still, like the statues at the front. “I was wrong, to ask of you what I did. To do what I did. What we did. I meant what I said when you arrived here. These…what you and I share, it is not of His making. And when I was tested, I not only failed, I failed you as well. And I am sorry, deeply sorry for that.”
Helene felt the wind knocked out of her. She knew her cousin forbade healing when Helene first arrived, but she was so sure that had changed after the beach.
“We helped those men,” she said. “It wasn’t wrong.”
Cecelia shook her head firmly. “What I did on that beach…what you did, is nothing more than blasphemy.”
Helene could barely believe what she was hearing. Those men had been in so much pain, and so scared. The horror of the afternoon had felt all-consuming, and yet she could cling to the work she did, the men she comforted, the way they died in peace. After years of its absence, she was acutely aware again of the power of her gift. And Cecelia was trying to turn it into something ugly. “How could you possibly feel that way?”
“I didn’t,” Cecelia said quietly. “When I was your age. When I so freely sinned, following my mother’s lead. But I…” She gathered herself. “I found my salvation here. They took me in, when I had nothing. This place saved me, Helene, and I owe it to the other sisters, and to my God, to abide by their laws.”
Helene didn’t understand what Cecelia was talking about, what she needed to be saved from, how an institution that had persecuted women just like her could be her deliverance.
But Cecelia raised a hand to silence her. “I didn’t bring you here to discuss it,” she said tersely. “I only wanted to apologize, for my lapse in judgment. What I said when you arrived remains the truth. These abilities are unnatural and have no place within these walls. And I forbid it. If it happens again, you will be dismissed from this hospital.” She stood and moved out of the pew, pausing briefly to kneel in the aisle.
Helene rose, her heart pounding in her ears. She couldn’t accept this. “I saw you out there. You helped those men.” She had spotted Cecelia again and again that day, crouched beside the soldiers, her hands on their bodies. She didn’t understand what had changed. “Why did you ask me to come?” Her voice wavered slightly. “You didn’t have to bring me to Dieppe. There was no reason to choose me.”
Cecelia lifted herself up from the floor and turned to face Helene. All of the formality was gone, and there was only a naked plea in her eyes, as though she had asked herself that same question. “I didn’t choose you, Helene. I didn’t chose any of this.”
She held Helene’s gaze for a moment before she pivoted and left. The distant thunder of church bells echoed through the convent, crashing into the silence.
* * *
Helene had spent the night in near-constant motion. Despite the transfer of a dozen soldiers to prisons in Germany during the day, the ward was still over capacity. Perhaps the chaos had become familiar after a few days, or perhaps she so desperately needed the distraction, but for the first time, she felt in control.
Elisabeth too worked with a new kind of efficiency. Even though she remained withdrawn, she seemed less tense as she tended to the British and Canadian troops. Their mere presence offered a sliver of hope, proof that beyond their occupied world, the war raged on.
When most of the men were asleep, as Elisabeth and the other probate nurses began to stock and organize supplies to prepare for the next day’s shift, Helene quietly made her way to the far side of the ward to find Thomas.
“I was hoping you might come say hello.” Thomas was wide-awake, his gray eyes watchful.
“I’m only making my rounds,” Helene lied, careful to keep her voice low.
“Of course,” he said with fake solemnity. He pushed himself up into a seated position. “Can you stay for a little while?”
Helene glanced toward the other nurses. She knew she should go assist them. Thomas followed her gaze and tilted his head thoughtfully. Then he loosened the edge of his bandage, unraveling it.
“What are you doing?” she asked, reaching out to stop him.
“You needed to redo my dressing,” he said, as the unwrapped bandage fell into a pile beside his leg. “So now you can stay.”
Helene crossed her arms, but she felt the tension in her chest release ever so slightly. “You shouldn’t do that,” she said.
“It’s already done, isn’t it?”
She sat down at the end of his cot and gathered up the bandage. Secretly she was pleased, grateful to have an excuse to stay with him, to live a little longer in the precious place they had created. It felt like standing in the sun when she was with him, a bright radiance even in the dark of night. “How are you feeling?”
Up close, his face was paler than it had been earlier in the night. His forehead was beaded with small drops of sweat at the hairline.
“Better now that you’re here.”
Helene rolled her eyes. “You don’t really talk like that, do you?”
“You don’t like it? I thought I was being charming.” He smiled.
Helene straightened out the bandage. “Charming, maybe. Sincere, no.”
“I feel okay,” Thomas said, his voice less practiced. “Thanks.”
“I thought maybe you’d be gone, when I got back today.” She considered her next words. He had been so honest with her, about his home, his family. She wanted to be honest with him too. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
“Better than the alternative, isn’t it?”
Helene shook her head. “That was a stupid thing to say.”
“No,” Thomas said. He looked down at his knee as Helene began to roll the bandage in slow circles. “It was a kind thing to say.”
They lapsed into a comfortable silence as Helene worked. The skin around his knee was warm, almost hot. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
Thomas sighed. “The doctor looked at it earlier. The skin is a little red around the wound, but he put some sulfa powder on it. Said it should be better by the morning.”
Helene felt a prickle of worry. She knew from shadowing her mother how quickly minor wounds could progress to sepsis. In her mind, she could see the pages of her mother’s book that dealt with infection. If she were at home and had access to the ingredients, she could use dried oregano and sage to make a poultice, or brew chamomile tea. She tried to reassure herself that Thomas had been seen by a doctor, that modern medicine was just as effective as her mother’s remedies, but she didn’t like how pale he looked. “I should check your temperature.”
Thomas waved his hand. “It’s really nothing, no need to worry. Can I ask you something, though?”
Helene frowned.
“I’m fine, Helene, really. But I would like some distraction.”
“Okay, but if—”
“I promise I’ll ask the doctor about it, when he comes in.”
“Fine, ask me your question.”
“What do you want to do after all of this? If you could do anything?”
She fought to keep the skepticism from her expression, but all she could think of was her grandfather, likely in prison somewhere, of her shuttered hometown. “How do you know there’ll be an after?”
“You don’t really talk like that, do you?” he said kindly.
Helene wanted to be like Thomas, believe in a better future, but when she searched inside of herself, all she found was vacant space. “I didn’t used to.”
“What changed?”
“Everything.”
Thomas shifted in the bed. “Has it been terrible here, since the war started?”
“Some of it. When it was new, especially.” She began to wrap the bandage around his leg. “I remember my grandfather crying at the kitchen table the morning the Germans came to our town. I was fifteen and when I saw that, I knew with certainty that the world was ending.” The thought of that same table empty, of her house without her grandfather in it, gripped Helene with such force that all the air left her lungs.
“And the rest of it?” Thomas asked.
Helene reminded herself to breathe, to concentrate on Thomas’s dressing change, the correct way to weave the bandage so it would be secure but not too tight. “So much is the same,” she said. “People go to work. And school. And if it’s warm and sunny and the trees are in bloom, for a second, it can almost feel like before, like you don’t even realize you’re holding your breath.”
“You’ll have that back, Helene. Your before.”
Helene nodded even though she didn’t believe him. Whatever hope she held that there would be an end to the war had broken on the rocky beaches of Dieppe. And it had only been further fragmented when she learned her grandfather was missing. Even if a miracle happened and the Allies won, even if the occupation ended, nothing would ever be the same again.
Thomas held her gaze. “But what if you pretend for a moment. That you’ll be able to do anything. Or go anywhere. Would you go back home, work with your mother?”
Helene grabbed the pin to secure his bandage. It had been years since she’d allowed herself to think of a future beyond Honfleur. When she was a little girl, she’d listen to her father’s stories about places that existed across oceans, cities and deserts and mountains he described with such clarity she was sure he had seen them all, and she had wondered if she would ever see them for herself. But her world had slammed shut the day they buried him. She could never abandon her mother.
“Of course. My life is in Honfleur.”
“Your life was there,” Thomas urged. “It doesn’t have to be always.”
At his words, Helene felt a fragile thread of possibility unspool between them, a life that could be full, and safe, far away from the ruins of her home.
Thomas took Helene’s hand, the movement effortless, as though he had done it a thousand times. “Close your eyes. Now picture what it is you really want, what you’d most like to do, what it is you want your life to look like.”
Helene felt silly but did what she was told. At first she could see only the reality around her, Rouen and Honfleur, France. She had always expected she would stay there her entire life, work with her mother as a healer, marry a fisherman in town. It would be a quiet life of service, but she would find moments for herself, as she always had before the war, drawing, or bicycling out to the sea. But the war had made Honfleur claustrophobic, tainted by the German soldiers in a way she wasn’t sure would ever fade. Now she felt the lure of the wider world, all the places that glimmered beyond them. She saw herself living somewhere new, across oceans, like America, a place that was expansive, with wide-open land that raced toward infinite horizons.
She saw herself as an adult. She wanted to live with the same kind of purpose as Agnes, to exist as a light for the people around her, but she wanted to be softer, more open to the world, less weighed down by duty.
“Is it beautiful?” Thomas asked. He gripped her hand tighter.
Helene nodded as more of her life played out in front of her, until she could see the same world Thomas saw, one where she could be happy, where everything could be whole again.
There was the bang of a door on the other side of the ward and Helene’s eyes shot open.
“That’ll be Dr. Weber for rounds,” she said, reorienting herself. “I need to get back to work. And you should get some rest.”
“Before you go, ask me,” Thomas said, his grip on her hand still firm. “Ask me what I want to do.”
“What do you want to do?” she said with a small smile. She wanted to share his optimism just a few minutes longer. “With your after.”
“Go home first, for a little while. See my mother, because she worries about me. And my little sisters.” He stopped, and Helene saw sadness pass through his eyes at the thought of his family. “I’ll tell my father that I’m okay, that this wasn’t the terrible mistake he thought it was. And then I’ll say what I never could before, that I don’t want to work for him, that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life managing a textile factory, stuck inside every day, arguing about things that don’t matter. And he’ll be angry, for a while, but he’ll understand, and then…and then I’ll go somewhere.”
“Go where?” she asked, wanting to stay in this dreamworld of possibilities.
“Everywhere. For a while.” He let out a huge yawn. “Mexico. Asia. Africa even. And then I’ll stop when I find somewhere by the ocean, where I can live on the coast, and it never gets cold.”
Dr. Weber was making his way down the rows now. “I have to go,” she whispered. As Helene released his hand, she could feel a resistance, as though there were a force holding them together. “Good night, Thomas.”
Thomas leaned back on his pillow and closed his eyes. “Maybe California,” he murmured. “You’ll like it there too.”
His features softened, and Helene sneaked away, careful not to wake him. As she left, she felt lighter, her body floating away on the strength of his hope.