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“Hi, Edna, how are you doing this evening?”
“Good, good.” She forced herself into a sitting position as she saw me, actually showing a bit of pain as she moved. I raced to her side and tried my best to help her, but as stubborn as she always was, she didn’t need much of it. “I feel really refreshed after our talk, but I don’t expect you to stay again, you know that, right?”
“No, I want to.” I surprised myself with how much I wanted to. I knew that I’d done my duty now, there was absolutely no need for me to visit with her, but I’d been growing more and more excited as the day went on, thinking about speaking to her again. “I just realized that I still don’t know how you met your husband.”
“It’s a tale I don’t tell much,” she admitted, averting her eyes. “I guess it’s silly now, considering we’re all long past that, but I can still feel a stigma, you know?”
Weirdly, I did know. There was a definite stigma with regards to my feelings for Aron, and it was that which held me back more than anything else.
“But he’s been gone a long time now, and I’m stuck in here.” I didn’t like the implication of that statement, it weighed heavily upon me. “So, it seems silly to continue not talking about it. He was a German prisoner of war, that was how I met him. He’d escaped one of those camps, and he was scared, you know? Living out on the streets.” A small smile played on her lips, and I couldn’t help wondering what was going on in her mind. “I knew he was the enemy, but to me he just seemed like a scared young lad, who’d been dragged into something he didn’t quite understand. I snuck him food, I took him water, we struck up a friendship.”
I leaned into the story, resting upon my elbows as I lost myself in the most romantic tale that I’d ever heard.
“Then my daddy found out, and all hell broke loose. The war had all but finished, but he couldn’t let it go. He went mad, he tried to lock me in my room and he wouldn’t let me out.”
“What happened?” I gasped, horrified. I knew that this story must have had a happy ending somewhere along the line, but right now I was consumed by the moment.
“I ran away. We ran away. It was hard, we scrimped, we saved, we worked lots of jobs for the people who would employ us and we made it.”
“That’s...wow.” I didn’t know what to say, that made my predicament seem absolutely ridiculous.
“We were happy, so that was enough, and eventually Hank’s accent fell away and people seemed to forget that we were anything but a couple in love.” She lightly touched her cheek, as if she was remembering him there. “It was hard, but I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. Life is too short to not be with the one that you love.”
I fell back in my chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment, allowing all of this to wash over me. It wasn’t simple for Edna, in fact she’d been through hell and back, yet somehow through all of that it seemed that she’d managed to make it work.
Maybe love was enough.
“Hank loved me fiercely, right up until the day that he died, and even now I can feel him around me. It’s like I haven’t had to spend a single day without him.” Edna paused for a moment. “So, how about you? Do you have any great love stories to share? These chats can’t only be about me, can they?”
“No, no,” I stammered awkwardly. “No great love story from this end. I just...I work hard then I’m too tired for it.”
“Oh pish, that’s just an excuse. Maybe you haven’t found someone who gets your heart pounding yet, that’s all. When you find that person there’s always time.” I didn’t answer, I wasn’t sure how to. “You know who came in here asking me all about you this morning? That very sexy Dr. Turner.”
“Edna!” I blushed as she discussed him far more bluntly than I would ever dare to.
“What? He is! I’m just lucky enough to be at an age where I can say it without shame. He’s gorgeous, and I think he likes you a lot.”
“Oh no, he’s just...er, interested in my work,” I garbled idiotically.
“No, no, it’s more than that. And you like him, right?”
“Am I that obvious?” I couldn’t see any point in denying it to Edna, she was my friend now, and she could clearly see right through me anyway.
“No, it isn’t that, he’s just very gorgeous. Why wouldn’t you?”
“Well, because he’s my boss, and he taught some of my classes when I was still in school, because it’d be wrong.” My excuses sounded utterly pathetic compared to what Edna had been through, but that didn’t make my situation any less complex. “I don’t know, it’d just be wrong.”
Edna leaned in and I half expected her to yell at me, but she smirked instead. “Doesn’t that make it all the more exciting though?”
I laughed loudly, a little too loudly, which was probably a pathetic attempt to hide how true that was. “Yeah, maybe,” I giggled, while clutching onto her arm. “I dunno.”
Admittedly I felt freer just talking about it. Having someone else listen to my crush and to not judge me took some of the weight off of my shoulders.
“If you and that very handsome Dr. Turner like one another, then maybe you should just go for it. Yes, there will be hardship, it probably won’t be easy, but if it feels right then it probably is.”
But would it feel right, or would the reality be nothing like the fantasy that I’d concocted in my mind?
There was only one way to find out.