Two days before her departure to Paris, Bridgette put in a telephone call to her best friend. He lived in California, across the country from her home in New York City. She was surprised to reach him so quickly, since he was a senior homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and was often out on assignment. Even at his desk, though, if he was busy, he’d ask the dispatcher to take the party’s name and number, and he’d get back to them, but he always answered if the caller was Bridgette.
He snatched up the phone immediately. “Hey, Slugger, great to hear from you. What’s up?”
Years ago, Bridgette had ceased to be annoyed by her ex-husband’s nickname for her. She understood that then, now, and always, Bridgette Loring was the love of his life. Their marriage had been a mistake, entered into because the sight of Steve Hammett, solid, stable, and steady, a reminder of her unadulterated childhood, walking into her office at Paramount Pictures wearing a chest full of medals and ribbons, a master sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, and the Forty-fifth Infantry Division’s gold Thunderbird patch on the left sleeve of his uniform, made her fall in love with him.
“Hey, Slugger, remember me?” he’d said.
She’d whirled around from the cutting table with a cry of disbelief and all she could say was, “Do you still carry my yearbook picture in your wallet?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s right here.” And he’d pulled out the photo, limp and faded, to show her. “Your letter to me, too, written from Stephens College.”
She’d asked him how he knew where to find her.
“Your pal Gladys told me when I was in Traverse City on furlough this week. She happened to be home, too. Imagine clingy, insecure, stay-at-home Mommy and Daddy’s little girl, Gladys Bradbury, an American Airlines stewardess traveling the world.”
“Yes, imagine that,” Bridgette said. “And you flew all the way to California to…see me?”
“Who else? I had to make sure that you were okay.” His gaze probed her face. “Are you okay?”
“I am now,” she’d said.
She still possessed the letter Steve had written to her at Stephens College informing her of his coming deployment overseas with the Forty-fifth Infantry Division. His unit had been first on the scene to liberate Dachau concentration camp in April, so when she’d gone against orders and told him about her incarceration in Drancy prison to explain the cause of her nightmares and disinclination for sex, he had understood.
In the end, love was not enough. He had his needs and she had hers. Their worlds collided. Steve loved California, and after his discharge from the army he applied to and was accepted into the LAPD academy. A year into the marriage, Bridgette was offered a job in New York City working for the widely acclaimed fashion designer Norman Norell, the first in his ranks to see the need for a line of clothes created for the petite woman.
They were divorced after eighteen months, parting in sorrow and tearful embraces on the courthouse steps but united in a friendship that had withstood the erosion of time and distance, other loves and losses, and the incompatibility of their interests, tastes, and pursuits.
So her ex-husband and best friend listened with a heart gone cold when she told him that she was flying to Paris the following day, the city of her nightmares and aborted youth. She had not wanted him to worry when she missed their Sunday phone call that weekend. During their marriage, she’d mentioned her special friend who’d been reported executed. She had been a part of the OSS group in which Bridgette had served but never elaborated on. He and Bridgette had been married when she came back from their reunion in New York City wearing a small dragonfly tattooed over her left breast, right over her heart. “Don’t ask,” she’d said, and he never had. He figured the tattoo had to do with “the boys” and the old man she called “the major” that she’d gone to meet. Steve approved of their close and abiding ties. Bridgette needed a family.
“So even if she is alive, what if the woman you remember has changed and…she doesn’t feel as warmly about you after all these years?” he said.
“Then she won’t show up at the café,” Bridgette said.
Point taken, Steve thought. She’d always been one step ahead of him in the rationale department, but he still didn’t want her to go. “Yeah, but to go back to that city, Bridge… Do you know what you’re risking?”
“I do,” she said.
“If she’s still alive, can’t the boys bring back the information that will put you in touch with her again anywhere but Paris?”
“They could do that, yes.”
“Then why the hell are you going?”
“To go forward, Steve, sometimes you have to go back,” she said.