Sergeant Joe Garrison wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. The buttons of his uniform shirt were open in an effort to catch a breeze. His finger ticked against his M1 rifle next to him on the hot sandy ground, the Philippine Sea ahead of him. A large bug crawled on his canvas-top jungle boot. He kicked it, sending it several feet, hitting a squad buddy, Corporal Toby Fielding. Fielding hollered and hopped up trying to get it off. Everyone laughed.
“Dumb walking cigar.” Fielding hated the insects in the Pacific worse than anyone else. He usually called the long, black, shiny insect something other than a walking cigar.
Garrison stopped laughing when he heard buzzing above him and grabbed his M1. The muscles in his back tightened against the mound of sand as he leaned into it, preparing himself. It wasn’t an attack but a sudden swarm of insects that flew at him, pelting him relentlessly.
They were larger than normal and were dive-bombing him, as if he was the only one on this death trap of a beach. He started swatting at the bugs as they landed on his arms and chest and sucked up every bit of sweat on his sunburned skin. He fell back, and the damp sand stuck to him. The more he swatted, the more they came. They pinched his skin, and the buzz in his ears got louder and louder. They didn’t relent.
What began as the familiar clamor of mortar rounds became the sound of a train whistle. Why was there a train whistle in the small lump of sand and jungle that the general called Saipan?
Joe startled awake.
Where was he?
He blinked rapidly to force his eyes into focus, and a row of train seats brought him back to reality. He was on the train to Dover. The woman in black who sat across the aisle looked at him cautiously. He glanced down and found he’d made a mess of the sandwich he’d been eating as he’d fallen asleep. As he stood, bits of the bologna sandwich fell around his feet and into the aisle.
When he brushed away the lingering crumbs, he realized that his uniform wasn’t as stiff as it should be. His shoes needed polishing too. With a huff he sat back down.
He needed a drink. A quick shot of scotch to help clear his mind.
But it was too late for a scotch: the train was screeching into the station. His hands went over his ears when the engine released a long scream. A tap on his back startled him, causing him to drop his arms to his sides and turn around.
“After the first war, my husband had a hard time with loud noises too,” the woman wearing black said. “Welcome back.”
She smiled warmly at Joe, like a grandmother would to a naughty grandchild she can’t help but love.
Was he that pitiful?
“Ma’am,” he said and touched the woman’s arm ahead of him. “How is he now? Your husband.”
The woman’s head tilted and she looked out through the window. “He killed himself.” Her tone of polite affection made the words all the more eerie, especially when her hand reached out to Joe. She patted his arm then walked away. He watched as she walked the length of the rail car. She didn’t turn around before she exited.
Heat crept between his clothing and his skin. He needed a scotch.
Joe wished that he could be anywhere but his home of record. That’s what the military called it. It was impersonal to be sure, but it sounded more official than just calling Sunrise home. He wasn’t sure the small town was home anymore. Hadn’t it been only weeks ago that he’d buried Irene? Hadn’t it only been days ago that he’d gone to tell Esther that he was going off to war? He’d found her standing in the garden with newly turned soil. But that hadn’t been only days ago. It had been four years.
Joe could close his eyes and put himself back at the Whites’ dairy farm. Daisy was at his side, Esther kneeling in the garden. When she stood, dirty knee marks soiled her gray dress, and she crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her fingertips out of view. Her face was wet with sweat, and a spray of damp curls framed her forehead.
Esther, his wife’s dearest cousin, was the most unusual Amish woman he’d ever known—not just because she was unmarried at her age—over thirty—but also because Irene often spoke of how Esther was too strong-minded for a husband and unwilling to even consider dating in order to find one. Still, she did follow the Amish church’s lofty rules, the Ordnung, without question.
Everyone was off the car now except him. The few other servicemen who had been on the train with him were greeting their families. He’d intentionally sat far from them. He didn’t want to reminisce about his Marine days, which often happened when a few servicemen were gathered. Even when you’d accomplished good things for your country, you’d sooner forget it all than relive it again and again. The memories would revive in his nightmares. He felt no shame about his work as a soldier, but they had been painful days. He was ashamed of some of the missteps he made, especially because those mistakes had cost lives. In his wildest ideas of war, in all of the history books he’d taught his students, he never could’ve imagined the reality.
He shook his head and leaned against the seat, trying to forget the way the shrapnel scraped against his heavy helmet and ripped his uniform. He never again wanted to see another irate Jap running at him, dagger in hand. His eyes squeezed shut, remembering the sound of a cracking neck and the gurgling of his fellow Marines as they tried to breathe but couldn’t.
“Oh, I thought the car was empty. This ain’t your stop?”
Joe’s eyes snapped open. A man in a conductor’s hat approached Joe. A cigarette bounced up and down when he spoke. His name tag read Roger. Roger pulled the cigarette from his mouth and looked around for a place to extinguish it. “Not supposed to smoke in front of passengers.”
“I’ll take it,” Joe said. He extended his hand toward Roger’s cigarette.
“I’ll do better than that,” the man said and pulled out a new cigarette.
Joe took it and put it between his lips. Roger popped his smoke back into place and promptly lit Joe’s. “Welcome home, Sarge.”
“It’s ‘corporal,’ actually.” Joe mumbled the correction then nodded as Roger walked past him and left him standing in the aisle. He took a long pull from the cigarette. It tasted good. The burn in his lungs reminded him that he was alive. He blew out slowly, then walked through his own smoke toward the exit. It was time.
He stood on the bottom step of the train car for several long moments. The sun was bright. Was it really the same sun that had poured over him and his fellow Marines in the Mariana Islands? There was no comparison, however, about the heat and humidity. The train station looked permanent and American to him. After living in temporary buildings, tents, and foxholes for four years, he’d forgotten how American America looked.
Against the wall were wooden benches for people tired of standing. Not even minuscule specs of dirt remained on the swept sidewalks. The awning above protected people from the rain, snow, and even heat. America suddenly appeared the picture of protection.
So why did he feel more vulnerable than ever before? The pain of losing Irene and the baby, of effectively abandoning Daisy, poured into his heart like the sunshine that fell between the train and the station. The pain was too raw even after four years away.
It hadn’t taken long for him to realize that he never should have left his daughter. Irene would never have approved. But the idea of parenting Daisy on his own had been too much in his state of mind. He couldn’t understand her behavior and had no way of knowing how to help her. Joe left thinking he’d leave the pain behind as well and that he would return healed and ready to rise to the challenge. But the pain he was running from was made worse by the burden and intensity of war.
The fact that he’d abandoned Daisy was perhaps the deepest pain because it was the one thing within his control. Now that he was back, he would do everything to make it up to Irene’s memory. He would do all that it took to make Daisy happy.
He checked his hat out of habit and stepped down on the sidewalk. The light glared in his eyes and he squinted into the brightness. He went farther into the shadow of the canopy over him to let his eyes adjust. A woman stood just ahead of him. She seemed familiar—her height and the way she leaned on one leg. Irene had stood like that. He stepped toward her almost frantically and grabbed her arm. She turned toward Joe. Her face wasn’t familiar. He wished she’d never turned around. Of course she wasn’t Irene. Irene was dead.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Joe said. He nervously took a drag from his smoke.
The blond woman’s husband, an army officer also just returning home, glared at Joe. His chest puffed, and protectiveness was written across his brow and the tightness of his jaw. He put an arm around his wife.
Joe lifted his palms in surrender, and he offered a halfhearted casual salute as he backed away. He hadn’t meant any harm.
The stares of those around him invaded the personal space he coveted. He didn’t like the attention—having learned deep in the jungles that any attention was dangerous. Joe refocused and went to retrieve his sea bag, which was waiting next to the bench behind him. With the cigarette held loose between his lips, he scanned the train platform.
The two figures who stood ahead of him nearly blended into the darkness of the platform wall. He pulled out the cigarette, and the vision of Esther and Daisy in front of him turned cloudy behind his exhaled smoke. A thin breeze pushed the haziness away, and Joe settled his eyes on the pair. Outside of the fact that Esther had black hair and eyes and Daisy’s hair was a sandy color like his own, they appeared like two sides of the same coin. Esther had her hands on Daisy’s shoulders. Even from his distant view, he could see Esther’s skin was stretched white over her knuckles. Both of them were tight-lipped. He pulled out his cigarette and inhaled the clean air deeply, refreshing his mind, and moved toward them.
“Esther,” Joe said. He returned the cigarette to his lips so he could put his hand out to shake hers. He’d seen her often enough before Irene’s death that he was comfortable around her. Irene’s death, however, had changed all that. He was lost and ashamed of his actions. The last time he saw Esther, he couldn’t even look her in the eyes. But now as he looked at her, he was reminded of how lost he felt four years ago and how bold her eyes were, so different from Irene’s playful blue eyes. The magnetism in their gaze brought an intensity he wasn’t prepared for.
Esther’s eyes diverted, and she looked at the smoke blowing from his mouth, then raised an eyebrow. She did not take Joe’s extended hand. His eyes went to her unresponsive hands. They were well worked, dried, and cracked—so different from the exotic women he’d met in the bars and clubs that he’d gone to during his R&Rs. Almond-eyed women with skin like silk and soft slender hands who had offered themselves to him. If it weren’t for the aging picture of his ghostly wife tucked deep in his uniform, he was sure he would have dishonored more than one woman during his four years away. Esther’s hands didn’t have the beauty he’d been tempted by, but the intimidating strength they declared intrigued him.
When she recognized where Joe’s gaze landed, Esther curled her fingers into her palms. He looked up at her. She looked down and her long black eyelashes rested against her cheeks. Feminine yet mysterious. Joe’s insides turned over.
Irene had once said that while Esther was as pretty as the next girl, she was as adept and capable as a man. Joe had believed that, but he had never recognized that she was still fully woman. This secret acknowledgment provoked his frustration and his curiosity.
This silent and uncomfortable homecoming was not what Joe had imagined. Of course, he had imagined his homecoming with Irene, even though she had been dead and buried before he’d enlisted. When the imaginings of Irene came at first, he quickly stopped himself, but after barely surviving the first year overseas, those visions of coming home to Irene became the only way he survived. His dreamed-up visions were so vivid that he sometimes forgot they would never happen.
“Joe,” Esther spoke quietly and in the deep tone he remembered from before. Her voice was cool with an edge of nervousness. She nodded toward his smoke and eyed the nearby trash.
Joe pulled his hand back and took the cigarette from his lips. He looked at it and then at Esther again.
“Just a few more drags?”
Esther pursed her lips.
Joe sighed and threw the cigarette onto the sidewalk. When he let it smolder, Esther twisted her shoe over it. A man came around only seconds later and swept up the extinguished cigarette into a long-handled dustpan. He eyed Joe, who realized he should have thrown it in the trash.
“Sorry.” He didn’t mean to say it so lamely, but with his heart hammering in his chest and the shock it was to be home, he wasn’t sure he could muster more than that.
Joe turned back to Esther to see her tap Daisy on the shoulder. The little girl turned to look at Esther. Esther knelt down to Daisy’s level. She fixed his daughter’s hair, smoothing it back behind the white covering she wore. He couldn’t believe how Amish she looked. Esther’s eyes glistened, but her face did not dampen with tears as she blinked them away.
“Daisy. This is your dad.”