Chapter 28 #2
“Don’t come to the house,” I said. I thought of the construction workers across the street.
Russ was friendly with some of them. “I’ll walk down to Paradise Boulevard and meet you there.
You know where that is? When you come off the Treasure Island Causeway, it’s on the right.
” Of course it would be on the right, I thought.
If he turned left he’d drive into the water.
“I could be there, at Paradise and Treasure, in half an hour.”
“Paradise and Treasure,” Leonard said, and he laughed a little. I got that he was laughing at the words, how happy they sounded, how wrong for the occasion. I couldn’t laugh, but I told him yes—Paradise and Treasure, that was where I’d be.
—
It seemed foolish to put on makeup, especially when it was so hot and sticky out, with a hundred percent chance that I’d cry.
My hair had grown out a little, but not enough that I could pull it back into anything but a little knob.
I told myself it didn’t matter what I looked like. This wasn’t exactly a date.
But when I slid into the front seat of the dented Buick, Leonard smiled at me as if I were Venus rising up on the half shell.
I think he might have reached over to embrace me right then if the car behind us hadn’t honked.
He put the car in gear, and we lurched forward, both of us silent as he accelerated.
Humid air rushed in the windows, and gulls sailed low over the causeway.
I was both tired from not sleeping and wide awake, hardly able to believe that this really was Leonard sitting beside me.
Leonard who was not cold, not heartless, and not the snake I’d told myself he’d become, but the same as he’d been when I’d known him.
When I loved him. Even with the thinned hair and the patchy eyebrow, it was still him, watching the road with eyes I still could have drawn from memory.
On the other side of the causeway, he made a hard right, and I caught sight of his injured hand, the pink nub and the half finger. My good feeling drained out.
“Sorry,” he said. “Almost missed the turn.” He parked in the shade of a pink stucco diner. “I ate here last night. They said they’d be open for breakfast.”
I said that sounded good, though I was shaky by then, getting nervous.
I didn’t know if Russ knew anyone on Treasure Island.
And I kept looking at Leonard’s hand, at the missing fingers.
It was fortunate he’d parked in the shade, because by the time he turned off the ignition, I was in no condition to go inside.
“Hold on.” He got out, went into the diner, and came out with several paper napkins. He got back in and handed them to me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh, Nora. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I hope you know that.”
That made me cry harder. He was right in front of me, saying the very words I’d so wanted to hear that winter in New Jersey. But it was like finding tickets for the circus that had just left town. His words, his sorrow, they weren’t worthless to me. But they were too late to do any good.
I asked him what happened to his fingers.
“Frostbite.” He winced as he said this, either because it hurt him to think of it, or because he knew it would hurt me to hear.
“What happened to your eyebrow?”
“Napalm. Our own. I was lucky compared to…” He shook his head, not wanting to continue.
“Oh, Leonard,” I said. I’d been so convinced he wasn’t suffering.
“Did you ever see her?” he asked. “Did they let you?”
No one had ever asked me this. But of course, if anyone in the world would understand the loss of her, and what my short time with her meant, it would be him.
I told him I’d spent almost a whole day with her, and I told her that she had his eyebrows, and that I’d loved her right away, and I still did.
I told him how her cheek had been injured by the forceps, and though the nurse told me she would heal completely, I could only hope that was true.
“I bet she’s okay,” he said, like he really believed it. But he didn’t know. He couldn’t.
I told him I was the one who should be apologizing.
I’d given our child away. I was crying so hard I could barely talk, but I tried to describe it—what was going through my head when I signed the papers.
I told him about Miss Berry, and how she’d told me not to be selfish, and how I’d been so tired, and so unsure of what would happen if I’d refused to sign.
Because I’d given up on him completely. I’d believed every lie.
By the time I stopped to catch my breath, I felt like his mother, not wanting to make excuses for myself, and going on to do exactly that.
“Nora.” He started to reach for my shoulder, then changed his mind. He put both hands back on the wheel. “Listen to me. You don’t have to apologize for that. I understand. Really. More than you know.”
We stayed in the car, in the shade, and he told me what he meant, and what those years had been like, for him.
—
He’d been captured in Osan, forty miles south of Seoul.
It was July, hot, and he was wearing his summer-issue uniform.
Their dog tags were confiscated at gunpoint.
They all knew what that meant. They could be killed without any consequence, without any record, without even a grave.
In the daytime, they were locked in houses or schools, or watched over in open fields.
Thirst was always with them, as was hunger.
They would see UN planes overhead and hear the whistles of falling bombs.
Artillery fire often sounded close, just a few miles to the south.
Night after night, the guards marched them north, using bayonets and rifle butts to encourage speed.
In early November, when I was on the train to New Jersey, feeling like a shunned cockroach and still hoping he would write, Leonard and over eight hundred other prisoners were staggering through the mountains of North Korea in the last and deadliest stretch of the march.
Leonard was still wearing his summer uniform, now ragged and filthy, and too big, the belt tightened, then tightened again.
The steep terrain turned slick with ice and frozen urine and shit and blood from the prisoners ahead of him, most sick with dysentery, some injured in battle.
Men slipped, got back up, or didn’t. You helped someone if you could, if you could do it without stopping, without holding up the line.
Every mile or so, a prisoner wouldn’t get up, couldn’t, and the rest of them would keep moving, then hear a gunshot from the back.
If a Good Samaritan got involved—or a pleading friend, a defiant officer–they’d hear two shots. You either kept up or you didn’t.
Leonard had the lucky bell I’d given him pinned to the laces of his right boot, and it glinted in the moonlight as he stepped double time.
Even as men dropped around him, even as he heard more shots from behind, he told himself he could make it just a little farther, then a little farther, then a little farther after that.
Their destination, a prison camp near Pyoktong, North Korea, was where most of them would die.
The camp was just south of the Yalu River, and on the other side of this river was China.
Leonard’s group arrived nine days into November, just after China entered the war.
The Yalu was already frozen solid, and every day, Leonard and the other prisoners watched Chinese tanks roll south across the ice, one after the other, with so many Chinese soldiers marching behind them, their uniforms clean, their guns ready.
Leonard understood, with everyone else, they wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.
When he told me this, he wanted to make one thing clear: The prisoners who would die in the camp that winter, and there were a lot of them, didn’t die from giving up, from giving-up-itis, whatever people who weren’t there wanted to call it.
Those men froze to death, or succumbed to illness or starvation, or any combination of the above.
Despairing or not, Leonard said, they did their best, and worst, to survive.
When a man in Leonard’s tent died in the night, they told the guard he was just sick so the rest of them could split up his daily ration, a bean ball the size of a fist. They kept that up for over a week, Leonard said, sleeping next to the man’s frozen body.
Most prisoners had dysentery, and were too weak to even stagger through the snow to the latrines.
The ones who could were put to work. Leonard was assigned to the crew that dragged the bodies of deceased prisoners to a cove where they were stacked like wood in a cord, every one of them naked.
They had no shovels to dig into the snow and the frozen ground, and the clothes couldn’t be wasted.
Leonard said for months, he wore somebody’s shirt over his head, just his eyes showing through the collar.
He used the leg of somebody’s trousers for a scarf.
But he’d never forget the sound, he said, of the back of a man’s head getting dragged across ice.
These were the bodies of their friends, their commanding officers, or men who’d helped them stay upright on the way to the camp.
He said that when his fingers froze off, it didn’t hurt.
His pinkie turned black first, and one day, when he gave it a little tug, off it came, easy as a petal from a flower.
A few weeks later, the same thing happened with the end of his ring finger.
Hunger was a scream inside him, unrelenting.
He ate his own scabs, and half a bean ball tugged from a dead man’s pocket.
He ate lice, mostly for vengeance. Apparently, lice do just fine even in freezing temperatures, drawing warmth from human skin.
Pretty soon, he figured out if a man stopped picking at lice, he was on his way out.