The Wreckage (25 page)

MERCEDES

S
HE WAS SITTING BESIDE
J
OHNNY
B
OUSTANI
in the music listening room at the USO.

They’d been meeting there every Thursday lunchtime for two years now, playing jazz and classical records on the hi-fi. Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong, Debussy, Beethoven, Chopin. Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band.

Every drop of summer warmth had been wrung from the sunlight through the windows and it lay in pale squares on the floor. Two full months had passed since the Japanese surrender. Mercedes knew from Johnny and from accounts in the local paper that POW camps on the Japanese islands were liberated when the Americans landed at the end of August. And she still had no word from Wish.

Johnny had been making informal inquiries through friends and knew that the prisoners who survived the camps on Kyushu, including those nearest Nagasaki, were evacuated on American navy ships, most of them passing through San Francisco on their way to being decommissioned. But there was nothing he could learn from the British army to say that Wish had returned from overseas or died there before the liberation.

“Everything’s in a shambles,” Johnny said. “There’s still hundreds of British POWs in Germany unaccounted for.”

“If Wish was alive,” she said.

“Letters get lost, Mercedes.”

“Not telegrams. Not phone calls.”

They were listening to a recording of the Brandenberg Concertos. In the weeks after the Japanese surrender it had been all Duke Ellington for them and they sometimes cleared a space of chairs to jitterbug. But as the time without news of Wish dragged on, Mercedes lost her taste for the nicotine buzz of big band jazz and insisted on classical music instead.

“Any official word would probably have gone to Renews. To his aunt.”

“Lilly knows how to reach me.”

They were quiet for a while, billowing cigarette smoke to the ceiling.

She said, “Hiram is betting on the week of November fifteenth for the first snow this year.”

“That would suit me just fine. I hope never to see another day of winter in this place.”

“What are you going to do when you get home, Johnny Boustani?”

“Don’t know. Find a girl. Start a family.” He cleared his throat to stifle the stupid giggle.

It occurred to her she would never come back to this room. That it was likely she’d never hear most of the music she’d fallen in love with here again. Movies at the base theatre, the dances for American servicemen. All of it was coming to an end, her life about to change completely for the second time in her twenty-one years.

“I hope you’re happy,” she said.

Johnny looked at her with a sour face and went across to the hi-fi to flip the record. The hiss and pop of the needle before the music started up again like the sound of a fire in a kitchen stove. He turned to Mercedes. “I’m going to tell you this,” he said. “And you won’t say a word until I’m done telling you.” He waited to give her a chance to protest and when she said nothing he carried on. “I know you don’t feel,” he said, “you don’t feel for me what I do for you.” He took a breath. “But if things go bad for you. If you hear what I expect you’ll hear. I want you to consider.” He looked down at his feet.

“You’re some smooth talker, Johnny Boustani.”

He smiled at his shoes and shook his head.

“Sure can play that trumpet, though. I’ll give you that.”

“You’ll know where to find me,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

She hid her face behind her hands and Johnny looked away from her. He turned up the volume on the hi-fi so she wouldn’t have to worry about anyone in the hall hearing her while she bawled.

The farewell meal for Johnny Boustani took place the following Saturday. Mercedes spent most of the day with the Basha women in the kitchen, chopping and stirring and cleaning pots. They made
tabouleh
and
kibbee
, and Mercedes diced handfuls of the season’s last wild spearmint that she and Amina had picked on the banks of the Waterford River.

Dozens of people crammed into the house that evening, spilling out of the kitchen into the single aisle of the storefront, where chairs and tables were set up for guests. All the Lebanese families in town and Johnny’s closest friends in the Intelligence office were there. Mercedes sat between Johnny and a Major Dumbrowski. They chatted aimlessly about the weather and what would become of the U.S. servicemen still in town now that the war was done. There was a burst of laughter down the long table and Sammy called Johnny to him, waving both arms. Johnny excused himself and Mercedes turned to the major. She said, “I’ve been reading about these atom bombs.” The language in the newspapers a mix of comic book hyperbole and the biblically apocalyptic.
The Allies’ new super weapon. A rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth
. Mercedes had asked Johnny what more he could add to the accounts in the
Evening Telegram
, but he pleaded ignorance, which simply fed her desire for details.

“It really is astonishing,” the major said. “Nothing like it in the whole of human history.” He lowered his voice, leaned a little closer to Mercedes. “This is all classified information, you understand.” He tapped her hand with his index finger. “And there’s a lot still to learn over there. They estimate the temperature at the hypo-centre reached somewhere between fifty and a hundred million degrees. Blast winds of six hundred miles an hour. Everything at ground zero flattened in a matter of seconds. There’s one particular area in the hypo-centre called the vaporization point, everything within that area, the buildings, the people, they would have simply disintegrated.” He made a magician’s motion with his hands, as if to say
poof
. “Not a trace left behind.”

Mercedes had been playing out scenarios in her mind for weeks in a kind of harrowing make-believe. It was obvious that nothing she’d imagined came close. But she felt curiously detached from the truth of it, watching the major’s mouth as he spoke. His teeth seemed too big and too white to be real.

Dumbrowski said, “Just over two miles away from ground zero in Nagasaki there was an office building staffed by five hundred women, and the force of the blast catapulted most of them through the windows. They were laid out in the grass like dolls, not a bruise or a burn mark on them.”

He noticed the expression on Mercedes’ face then and checked himself. “It’s the end of war we’re talking about, Miss Parsons. All wars. What the world has been through the last five years will never happen again. Think about that. The demise of warfare. What a
feat,”
he said.

“You all right?” Johnny asked when he came back to his seat.

“Fine,” she said. “Best kind.”

She helped clear the tables and took a turn with a dishtowel while the men set up their instruments in the store, but she slipped out the back door before the music started. She walked slowly over to Hiram’s and more slowly up the stairs to her room. She didn’t turn on any lights. The house was cold from standing empty all day but she lay on top of her blankets and seemed not to notice the chill at all.

She had never truly doubted him, not in all her time in St. John’s. She was convinced she would know if Wish was dead, that she’d sense it. That he would appear to her, the way her father’s fetch had, sitting in the chair outside her bedroom. But that notion seemed quaint and pathetic suddenly. Even her memory of seeing her dead father dripping water in the hall struck her as ridiculous, given the world she found herself living in. People disappear without a trace. She thought of the motion the major made with his hands.
Poof
.

Wish was dead. And she’d lost the strength or the will to believe otherwise.

She was somewhere between sleep and waking when a knock at the door startled her. It took her a moment to pick out the familiar shapes of her dresser, a wooden chair in the corner. She heard keys in the lock, the thunk of the bolt sliding. She lifted her head off the pillow. Hiram was on the Southern Shore, his last trip of the fall, and he wasn’t due back in St. John’s for days.

“Mercedes,” a voice called.

Johnny Boustani came up the stairs, calling her name again. She lay where she was and waited for him to find her. He went into the sitting room, flicking a light on and then off.

He opened the door of the bedroom. Mercedes said, “Don’t turn on the light.”

He stood in the doorway, looking in at her.

“Where did you get those keys?”

“Rania got them from Hiram. Just in case. She sent me over to check on you.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know.” His shape was coming clear in the darkness, leaning against the doorframe. “After midnight. No one knew where you went.”

She didn’t say anything more and he came across the room to sit beside her on the bed. She could smell alcohol on him.

“You’re missing the dancing.”

“He’s dead, Johnny.”

“Who?”

“Wish.”

“You don’t know that.”

“He’s dead, Johnny.”

She slapped her open hand against his chest, grabbed the material of his shirt. Pulled him down and raised herself to meet him at the same time, their teeth knocking together. She could taste blood as she kissed him and the taste of it set her head ringing. They sloughed out of as much of their clothes as necessary and Mercedes hauled him between her legs. Felt that first sharp tug like a stitch being tweezered from a wound. She bit into Johnny’s neck, bucking her hips against him.

She was never so furious in all her life.

He came quickly and lay still on top of her while she squirmed and pushed against him. “Come on,” she hissed. “You bastard.”

He arched up to look at her. “Mercedes,” he whispered.

She pushed him off before he could say another word. She rolled out of bed and stood up, fixing her underwear and hose, straightening the skirt and blouse.

Johnny sat behind her with his pants around his ankles, his shoes and uniform jacket still on. “Mercedes?”

“You have to go now,” she said. “Tell Rania I’m fine.”

Johnny Boustani left St. John’s on an American troop transport ship the following Wednesday on his way to a posting at Fort Lowell near Boston. He and Mercedes barely spoke when they met to say goodbye. Johnny gave her an envelope with his contact information at the base, and the address and phone number of his parents in Pennsylvania. They didn’t hug or kiss, only shook hands.

“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.

“I won’t leave here until I get word,” she said. “One way or the other.”

“You know where to find me.”

It snowed for the first time on November 19. Hiram collected seven dollars in winnings and handed it all to Mercedes. “Buy yourself something nice,” he said.

She used the money for a ticket on the coastal boat to Renews. She travelled there alone and made her way directly to Tom Keating’s house, where Patty sat her down with tea and the same molasses buns larded with pork fat.

“My lord, you’ve grown up since the last we saw of you,” she said. “You’re a proper woman now.”

“How are things with Lilly Berrigan?”

“She’s back in her own place. The Sisters keeps an eye on her there.”

Mercedes knew all this from Hiram, who carried the gossip from the Southern Shore home to St. John’s. “Have she had any news?”

“Not a word, as far as I know.”

Mercedes said, “Where does Lilly live?”

The building was as small as she imagined a goat barn would be. In the room that served as kitchen and parlour, a daybed was set along the wall beside a Maid of Avalon stove salvaged from a wreck by Tom Keating that the Sisters had talked off his hands. The only ornamentation was a Sacred Heart hung on the wall beside the stovepipe. One square of window opposite the bed, over a barnboard table. The only other room, a tiny space large enough for a cot and a chair that served as a nightstand, was Lilly’s bedroom. The place was empty but they could hear the sound of an axe thocking wood out behind and they walked around the shack to find her.

Lilly Berrigan was as thin and white as Mercedes remembered. She was wearing a pale okra dress and a scarf tied around her head and she stood watching them with the axe at her waist. A pile of birch and spruce junks around a chopping block.

Patty said, “Lilly, I told you to let that wood be and I’d send Billy-Peter over to split it for you.”

Lilly ignored her. “Hello, Mercedes,” she said. She let the axe head down to the ground and leaned on the handle, catching her breath. She watched the younger woman in a way that made Mercedes feel her face was transparent and everything beneath it visible to her. Lilly said, “You’re looking well.”

“I thought you might have news for me.”

Lilly walked over to her, touched Mercedes’ face and let her hand trail down across the front of her coat. “I think,” she said quietly, “you have the news you need.”

It was the waiting that infuriated Mercedes, the knowing and being forced to wait for proof. She felt that anger rising in her again and had to choke it off to speak another word. “You’ll let me know, Lilly? If you hears anything?”