The Guineveres (12 page)

“Who do you think he is?” one of us asked.

“I'll find out when he wakes up,” she said. “I bet he lives in a huge house, an estate even. I bet I'll have my own room right next to his.”

At the thought of this, our new homes, the rest of us scrambled toward Our Boys, for that's what we called them from that point. Our Boys, Our Boys, as though to claim were to possess. We fought over who got to pick next, and Ginny, after a particularly fierce game of Roshambo where she threw three rocks in a row, won the honor. She chose the one whose clipboard read “No. 25,” the one with the scabbed face. She said even if the scabs scarred, they'd probably just look like freckles. “I have freckles, you know,” she said, as though we'd never taken notice. “My dad had freckles, too.” Here her eyes turned downward. “
Has
freckles,” she corrected herself. Her Boy had a thin, aquiline nose, dark, bushy brows, and his face was patched with hair because someone had tried to shave around his injuries. “He seems sensitive,” she said. “Not brutish like your normal soldier. Maybe he comes from a family of artisans. I wouldn't even care if they lived in an apartment.”

“They're not all brutish,” Win said. The two of us then had a thumb war to see who'd pick next, and she beat me easily, nearly crushing my hand in the process. Despite her claims, she selected the most boorish-looking soldier of the bunch, “No. 93,” according to his clipboard, the one with the broken, bandaged legs raised in a traction splint. His casts were as thick as tree trunks around the thighs, and his hands were big enough to crush a human skull. He still had traces of dirt deep beneath his fingernails. Or maybe it was blood. “Apartment living isn't so bad. I'd take a tenement house to here, anyway.”

I didn't tell them that I'd never lived in a house, not once, had only ever lived in rented rooms, or worse. There were some things I couldn't tell The Guineveres, not even if I wanted to. They wouldn't understand. “I don't care where he lives,” I said. I was the last to pick, so in some ways My Boy chose me. “No. 22,” the one with no visible injuries, except dark circles beneath his pitted eyes. He had brown hair, parted and combed to the side. His mouth curved, two pink peaks with a plump lower lip. His forehead scrunched a bit, set with lines, little seismic waves that I imagined traveled throughout his body to his soul that was still very much awake. I sat down beside him, half thinking he might startle and open his eyes, but he didn't. Of course he didn't.

Yet something strange happened in that moment as I claimed him as My Boy: Deep inside me, something moved, almost imperceptible at first, like a small fish in the darkest part of the ocean. Then it swelled through my stomach, as though I had swallowed a whale, whole. I felt a longing to keep him safe, to protect him. For the first time in my life, I could claim someone as mine. “Don't worry. I'm here,” I said to him. I'd never sat so close to a boy before, had never felt one's breath on my skin, the way it left both warmth and moisture, which reminded me of a summer day. “Wake up,” I whispered. “So we can go home.”

Our proprietary relationships made Our Boys seem more human to us, their wounds less repugnant. We no longer held our breaths when we were near them, nor adjusted their bedsheets with pinched fingers. The Guineveres began wondering about Our Boys in the most general sense: what kinds of sights they had seen in battle, if they'd been afraid, how they had received their injuries. We wouldn't have wanted to know the answers to most of these questions. We wouldn't have wanted to know about blood and mud and marches with rucksacks slung on their backs and blisters inside their boots. Or about days camped out in ditches, with rain so heavy the world felt like it was ending. Instead, while they slept, we gazed at them with awe and curiosity, believing that our destinies lay in these beds somehow, in these sleeping soldiers covered with thin blankets.

Sister Fran spoke frequently of the War Effort, which meant we were occasionally asked to do an additional chore that seemed unrelated to war altogether. In the Rec Room, Sister Margaret had set up a basket of yarn and needles, and some, like The Specials and The Poor Girls, spent their Rec Time knitting scarves and socks to send overseas. But not The Guineveres. We had more important work to do, a higher purpose than knitting.

During Rec Time, The Guineveres dangled upside down from our bunks, our hair spreading out like fans, speculating about Our Boys, or, if not about Our Boys, about where we'd go to live, how we'd convince their families to let us stay, even after Our Boys recovered. We'd be the daughters they never had, or, if they had daughters, we'd behave even better than their biological ones. We'd never leave our dirty clothes on the floor or our shoes in the hallway, as our parents complained in our Unholy Lives. We wouldn't take liberties with our freedom. We'd clean all of the dishes after dinner and do exactly as they said, even if it meant being quiet all the time.

“My mother always told me I gave her a headache,” Win said. “Pfft.
She
gave
me
a headache, if you want to know the truth. Heck, she gave herself headaches. But I was never allowed to say so. I don't even think she liked me.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Gwen.

“They liked you. They
have
to like you,” I said. “They don't have a choice.”

“They have a choice,” Win said.

“I feel guilty that I don't miss my mom,” Ginny said. “I mean, I do, but when I think of home I don't think of her anymore. I think of my dad. I think of how happy I made him, how he painted me as Dorothy in a field of poppies, how he said that's my universal essence. That's the part I like to remember.”

“What about you?” Win asked me. “What do you like to remember?”

Blood rushed to my head, so I pulled myself up from the bunk and swung my body around. “I don't know. All of it, I guess. My mom never meant to hurt me.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Gwen said. “Maybe you'll eventually believe it.”

“In our new homes, of course, nursing Our Boys back to health will be top priority,” Ginny said, summersaulting off the bunk. She stood and shook her head to steady her balance, then straightened her skirt, which had twisted on her waist. “But we'll have to be careful. If they recover too quickly, they'll just send us back.”

“I'm never coming back,” one of us muttered.

Maybe it was all of us.

During mealtimes, we brainstormed ideas for getting Our Boys to wake, plans we executed with no success: We smuggled ice into the Sick Ward and slipped it beneath their bed shirts; we burned their fingertips with matches. “You have to hold the flame steady for at least three seconds,” Win instructed. But nothing. Recently, Lottie had come down with laryngitis and lost her voice for a week. She couldn't read the letters from her parents out loud in the Bunk Room. She couldn't sing at mass or volunteer to lead Grace in the cafeteria. We counted this among the abounding miracles, and we had faith that Our Boys would snap out of their comas if we kept on praying.

When we checked on Our Boys during Sick Ward duty, their pulses beat strong; their vitals were stable. They even seemed to listen when we read to them from the Bible, their faces relaxed, save the occasional muscle tic. The Guineveres believed it'd only be a matter of time. Junior had awoken, after all, so we didn't believe we were hoping in vain. But even if we were, isn't that what a miracle is? Isn't that why you pray for one—because you've run out of options?

While eating fruited gelatin at dinner in the cafeteria, we bragged of the smallest hints of bodily movement, proof that each of Our Boys was the closest to wakefulness.

“His lips pucker when I come near him, like he wants me to kiss him,” said Gwen, proudly stuffing a forkful of dinner in her mouth.

“That's just because his lips are swollen,” replied Win.

“I think it'd be weird to kiss him if he wasn't awake to kiss you back,” Ginny said. “Don't you think?”

“The body wants what the body wants,” Gwen said. She leaned in and whispered so the other girls wouldn't hear her. Or worse, Sister Fran. “Haven't you heard of a wet dream?” Win and Ginny covered their faces with their napkins.

“What's a wet dream?” I finally asked. I imagined it probably wasn't a dream about being submerged in water, a dream I sometimes had since coming to the convent. In this dream I was drowning in a river; my mother was missing, and I frantically searched for her. The water kept pulling me under. I'd come up gasping for air. A bridge hovered above me, and beyond that only black sky. Nobody could hear me when I called for help. But I knew this wasn't the wet dream they were talking about, and The Guineveres confirmed this. They burst into suppressed fits of laughter, and Win squirted milk through her nose.

“
That's
a wet dream, Vere,” Gwen said, pointing now to Win, who was wiping her upper lip. Ginny could hardly contain herself, either; she wiggled like a nesting bird trying to hatch an egg.

Sister Fran craned her neck toward us when she noticed the commotion. To this day, I swear that woman had a sixth sense, or compound vision like a fly. She stood from her table and walked toward us. The Guineveres all raised a forkful of gelatin to our mouths.

“The joyful will inherit the earth, girls. But the giddy shall not. What manner of foolishness is this?”

The Guineveres chewed slowly, each waiting for the others to say something.

“I'm waiting.”

“I was teaching my friends something I learned in school once, Sister Fran,” Gwen said. She set down her fork and folded her hands like a good girl.

“And what, pray tell, is that?”

“About nocturnal animals.”

“That's very kind of you to instill such knowledge.” Sister Fran tried to dislodge a piece of gelatin with her tongue. As she did this, her open mouth revealed teeth the shape of gravestones, yellowed near the gums.

“But I was wondering, Sister. Do nocturnal animals sleepwalk during the day?”

“What a silly question, girl.” Sister Fran placed her hands on her hips, our only indication that she had a waist beneath her billowy habit.

“What I mean is, don't some animals do things in their sleep that they may not remember? Like a bear. Mustn't a bear relieve himself when he's hibernating?”

“This is not appropriate dinner conversation. Or conversation, period.” Sister Fran's lips snarled, and she took a few deep breaths. Up close, one could see veins beneath her gossamer skin. “You will say twenty extra Hail Marys at Lights Out.”

“Yes, Sister,” Gwen said.

“All of you.”

“Yes, Sister,” The Guineveres said.

“And God will know if you've not completed them,” she said.

“Yes, Sister.”

When Sister Fran returned to her own dinner, Ginny leaned in to the rest of us. “I don't know about wet dreams, but mine's eyelids flicker when he's asleep. I think he's trying to tap something in Morse code,” she said.

“What do you think he's saying?” asked Win.

“Well, I need to learn Morse code.”

“Mine senses I'm there,” I said.

“How do you know?” asked Ginny. She loved this game more than the rest of us.

“Because his face squints up like this,” I said, shutting my eyes and wrinkling up my face.

“That's just a wince of pain,” Gwen said.

“He hums beneath his breath. Only I can hear it when I'm close to him,” I said, wanting to believe Our Boys would wake soon. It was almost Thanksgiving. I'd been at the convent more than three years by then, and yet another holiday season would pass without my mother. They say the missing will fade, but not for me. I'd never get used to being without her. Despite the days that melted into weeks and months and years, I still held out hope that I'd hear from her. I still wanted to know she was okay. Yet Mail Distribution Days came and went, and nothing.

But we had Our Boys to think of now. Destiny had brought them to us so that they could bring us home. Their eyes zigzagged in their sleep, hidden beneath sealed lids; their faces seized involuntarily. Sometimes they'd sweat through their sheets, and we'd have to freshen their linens before Wash Day, an exception the Sisters made only for those in the Sick Ward. Sister Connie taught us how to change the fluids on their IV drips. We prayed. Gwen bit Her Boy on the flesh of his arm. Nothing, not even a subtle shift in his vitals. Nurses had special aptitude for patience, Sister Magda told us. We waited. And we waited. Ginny plugged Her Boy's nose and scratched his chest with the metal comb that was used for lice. Nothing. We waited some more. The War Effort required extraordinary perseverance, but we were up to the task. The Guineveres were a unified home front.

*   *   *

A few days before our monthly penance service, we had our usual conversation about what to confess. We huddled on the floor next to Gwen's bunk, and we flipped through the most recent
National Geographic
borrowed from the library. The glossy pages popped with color. We paused when we came to a photo of a man and a woman looking out onto a beach where a crimson-colored mountain jutted out into the water. That's where we wanted to live someday, on a coast where it would feel like we'd arrived at the edge of the world. But for now, we began the process of examining our lives for some semblance of sin.

Confession was awkward. We never knew what to say. The days leading up to it, we racked our brains or sometimes acted poorly toward the other girls—yanked their hair or hid their shoes—just so we'd have something to admit. Other times, we'd simply revert to our “Sister Fran Sin” and confess to the priest that we had somehow disrespected our venerated abbess. We'd detail the faces we made behind her back during Morning Instruction, or the impure thoughts we had when doing so, while she turned around to write the name of that day's saint on the chalkboard. Or we'd describe how we'd ridicule her pet parrot that she kept caged in her office. The bird's name was Pretty, but we called it Ugly. On occasion she'd bring the bird to class and perch it on her hand to show us how it could say the phrase “God doesn't make junk.” Then it'd take off, fly across the room, swooping down only inches from our heads. Sister Fran nodded contentedly when Ugly returned to her finger. “God doesn't make junk. God doesn't make junk,” it'd say. “That's right,” Sister Fran would reply in turn. “God doesn't make junk.” We hated that bird.