A/N: Thank you for all the support! It's been quite wonderful.
Here is chapter five. Lots of smoking. Mild spousal abuse, but you had to know that was coming.
(www . youtube . com/watch?v=oJJe7pk_svs)
Inspired by Jon Bon Jovi and Sigmund Freud.
V. Dying Ain't Much of a Living
the ghosts appear as i fall asleep
to sing an outlaw's serenade
Lorena jolted awake in the middle of the night again. Instead of gripping cotton sheets, though, her hands clamped down on cold grass, which had her convinced she was still dreaming for a second or two. But the feeling of dread and terror was gone and her skin didn't ache from the black-and-blue bruises… and she was alive.
She always died in her dreams, killed by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Parker Hollis. He pushed her down a long, narrow flight of stairs and she died. He poisoned the coffee and she died. He stabbed her with a knitting needle; he tripped her into incoming traffic; he tossed the radio into the bathtub; he strangled her with a garden hose; he impaled her with an icicle; he smothered her with the cat… some were silly and others were somber. Either way, she ended up dead and there was no way for her to escape.
Lorena stood and tried to regain her bearings. Holland. Work. Army. 1944. September. Lieutenant Speirs? Lorena cocked her head and looked at the silhouette of the man in the moonlight. He had shed his jacket, but stood in his still-laced boots, bloused trousers, and simple cotton shirt. Lorena overlooked gun at his feet and walked over, her gait poised and quiet.
"Having a nightmare?" he asked, still gazing out across the fields.
"Not really. More like memories turned into Salvador Dali paintings. I'd give anything to not have to be inside my own mind for a day."
Speirs held out a package of cigarettes. Lorena stared at it, her face void of any expression.
She was no stranger to rumors. In Boston, there had been speculation about her marriage.
I heard that her father wants to tap into the fortune that that Hollis boy is making down south.
I heard that she's mentally unstable and the family finally saw an opportunity to hand her over to someone else.
I heard that she's expecting and now they have to get married as soon as possible.
Atlanta was no different.
She said she was clumsy with a kitchen knife. Of course I believe it. You know how those Yankee women are in the kitchen.
Chasing down a man for some newspaper story. According to her, that's how she got that limp. Well, she looked me right in the eye when she said it. No, Parker Hollis would never do that. He doesn't seem like the kind to hit his woman.
Apparently, she's been lying to us for the past two years. Poor girl finally snapped. I'm not surprised, though. She is a Yankee.
They say she went crazy. Starting drinking whiskey. There's no coming back from that.
But this was a new set of rumors, one of a man who had given a group of German POWs cigarettes before hosing them with bullets. And there he was, beside her, offering her a smoke. She reached for it, knowing that she'd probably regret it later.
"You're not going to shoot me now, are you?" she asked, using her own lighter.
"I could ask you the same question."
Lorena inhaled and exhaled the smoke, savoring the essence of a Lucky Strike. Although she wouldn't admit it, Speirs' stoical presence comforted her. Something about his silence proved that he was secure enough in his manhood that he didn't feel the need to express every thought that crossed his mind. Lorena had found that the most insecure men were the chatty ones: the ones that bragged and boasted and made a lot of dumb show to attract attention. Speirs, though, gained notice through simply being. And she sort of liked it.
Then, quite out of the blue, she started to laugh. At first, it was a low chuckle, almost internal, but it began to grow and she was practically doubling over. It was years of pent-up laughter, decades of jokes that she had heard, a lifetime of suppressed feelings that came spilling out in waves. Ron watched her and felt as though there was something he was missing. A part of him thought that he should join her. Wasn't that was one was supposed to do around maniacal people? Go along with the crazy so they didn't get hysterical? But Lorena was beyond hysterical, until she finally wound down.
"I'm sorry," she said, wiping tears away. "It's just… you're the first person to have a comeback. Thank you for that. I appreciate it."
"You're better now?"
"Much."
Lorena continued to stare forward, a fresh glow to her face. The first time Ron saw her, he thought that he had her figured out. She was the typical matriarch and the perfect high society daughter. He imagined that she belonged to the DAR, drank rose tea at four in the afternoon, and had gotten through the Depression without a scratch. The second time he met her, he saw a woman that wore her vulnerability on her sleeve, in her eyes, in the words she spoke. Thank you for catching me. As if no one else had ever done so before. The third time they met, though, was an entirely different story. She was cold in ever way a person could be: her tone, her appearance, her fingertips. It was as though she had been carved from a glacier. She had learned how to lock the doors of her soul without keys and keep them closed without glue or cement. It was a talent, like painting or tap dancing.
But, slowly, like snow melting in a weak winter sun, Ron found that she was all of his presumptions of her. The DAR darling, the unsteady wonder, the ice queen… she was all of it, and he wasn't sure how it was possible.
He stomped his cigarette out with the toe of his boot and inhaled as the wind blew, finding himself enraptured with the scent of raspberries and caramel that swirled around him. Then guilt flooded him. He had a wife back in England, a widow of a British soldier, with a baby on the way. There was no sense in his interest in the reporter and he felt horribly embarrassed for ever admiring the way that the uniform hugged her breasts. But before the feeling had a chance to settle in, it was washed away by the urge to hear her speak, because Lorena Carlyle, with her ritzy Boston accent and her scars, was more interesting than his bride had ever been.
"Tell me about yourself, Lorena."
Lorena panicked again. She hoped that her trembling wasn't too noticeable in the moonlight. "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not talk about me. You probably have better stories to tell anyway."
Although she had been out of practice for a considerable amount of time, Lorena still knew perfectly well how to stroke a man's ego. It was almost second nature to her.
"Where are you from?" she asked.
He offered her another cigarette. She took it. "Scotland. But my parents relocated to Maine when I was young. And I lived in Boston for a short time before that. We heard a lot about your family there."
"Why did you join the Airborne?" Lorena asked, changing the subject.
"I wanted to fight with the best, same with everyone else."
"What would you be doing if there was no war going on?"
Ron smiled and lit another cigarette. "This. Some men are born to be painters or writers or businessmen or farmers. I was born to be a soldier. It's as simple as that."
"Is it?" Lorena said with a sigh, watching the lights flicker in the windows of the town across the field.
"Weren't you born to be a journalist?"
"Probably, but I'm not so sure I believe in fate anymore."
Ron looked at her, at her face in the orange illumination of the cigarette, at her straight pose. It took years of practice to have posture that flawless.
"What do you believe in, then?"
Lorena put out the cigarette and turned to meet his gaze. "In not allowing history to repeat itself."
Tanks rumbled through the Dutch landscape on a gravel road, lined by power lines and grassy fields. Lorena refrained from taking notes, knowing that she wouldn't be able to read them later anyway. Instead, she tried to enjoy the scenery while trying to soak up as much as she could from the men around her. Webster sat to the left of her and Sgt. Randleman, who the men had nicknamed Bull, was seated to her right. At her feet was Hoobler, who had spoken at lengths to her about German guns and his intentions of getting a hold of a particular one before the war was through. He, although she lacked a large capacity for it, amused Lorena.
"Vincent Van Gogh was born in Nuenen," Webster said, grinning cheerfully.
"Yeah," Cobb, a stone-faced soldier, said. "So what?"
"Undoubtedly one of the greatest Post-Impressionists of all time. His use of arbitrary color is astounding," Lorena rambled on, unknowingly adding to the smile on her friend's face. "Nothing makes sense and, yet, it does. So, maybe he was a little eccentric, but that's what added to his artistic genius. His work was unorthodox, why shouldn't his apologies?"
Webster laughed. Bull cocked his head in confusion. "What'd you mean 'his apologies?'"
"Supposedly, Van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to a woman he loved as an apology," she explained.
"Now, that's what I call contrite!" Webster shouted over the noise.
Hoobler rolled his eyes. "Sure teach you a lot of useful stuff at Harvard."
"That they do," Lorena said, more to herself.
One of the shamed women from earlier in the week stood, cradling a baby, on the side of the road. The wind blew back her homemade coat, exposing her bare legs and short dress. One of the soldiers handed her a box of something, which she took with a smile before nuzzling against the infant. As they rode by, Lorena could clearly see the scabs and patches of hair that hadn't been fully cut. Her eyes locked with the woman, brown on a dark blue, and she offered a weak smile. It was the best that Lorena could do.
The tanks reached the edge of a small town by mid-afternoon and the men who were unable to fit onto the vehicles quickly leapt into the ditches that ran along the sides of road. Lorena, unsure of where to go, stayed put and watched on as Lieutenant Brewer, a man she had only spoken to once or twice, moseyed forward.
"Get a load of General Patton," Hoobler quipped. "Makes quite a target, don't he?"
Bull stepped off of the tank and leaned on the gun. He called out to Brewer, who then turned, rather nonchalantly by Lorena's standards, toward the company and the artillery. But before he could answer the sergeant, a shot rang out and Brewer, clutching his wounded neck, dropped to the rocks beneath him. Lorena froze, her eyes darting between the speeding German tank and the man lying motionless in the middle of the road.
"Clear the track!" someone shouted as Webster yanked Lorena off of the tank and into the ditch.
The men around her starting popping off rounds and the medics raced toward the front. Lorena, without a weapon or a bandage, suddenly felt terribly useless. Was she really meant to sit and write while all hell was breaking loose around her? McGalahan had told her to become a soldier and experience war through their eyes. Through their hands, not their eyes. She reached down to her hip and pulled the handgun out of its brown leather holster, quickly loading it as though she had done so a million times before.
Webster raised an eyebrow. "Well, I'd ask if you could fire that thing…"
"But you like living. I understand," she said with a smirk.
Bull dragged one of the replacements forward, yelling. They had to keep moving. Lorena, then, was up and running with the rest of them, a cool gun in her hot hand. She paid little attention to who she was with and eventually caught up to Bull, who was surprised to see her there, and remained close to him, knowing that whatever mistakes she made would simply blend in with the other replacements that followed. And as she gracelessly slid into the side of an oil drum, it couldn't have been truer.
As Bull rounded the corner alone, Lorena and the others remained perfectly still. They were statues, posed with drawn guns. In the distance, she could hear the tanks coming up the adjacent road. A feeling stirred deep inside of her, womanly intuition perhaps. This skirmish would not turn out well.
"Stay low," one of the men whispered, causing all of them to grip their weapons tighter.
The engines rumbled, but made no movement across the rocky path. Immediately after they did, though, a mechanical whirring came from the opposite direction. Not well at all. The gun from a German tank boomed, sending a round through the center of the British artillery. The blast knocked Lorena forward, face first into the oil drum. She stood, wobbling, as flashbacks of a bruised face came thundering to her and the vertigo set in.
"Fall back!" Bull shouted as the tank rolled forward.
He grabbed the teetering woman by her pack and ran with her. Another round was fired, smashing the side of the building they had been hiding behind to pieces. The gust pushed the two of them to the ground, making Lorena even more disoriented, until bullets rained down behind them. She quickly got control of her legs, keeping ahead of the line of rapid machine gun fire. Bull, following close to her, shoved her forward into another one of the ditches that ran alongside the road as the retreating British tank exploded, hoping to shield her from as much of the shrapnel as possible.
But the pieces went everywhere. A large sliver of metal lodged into the back of Bull's shoulder, sending a burning sensation coursing through him, and a small shard pierced Lorena's upper leg. She gasped at the pain, but struggled out of the way of the blazing tank.
"Crawl!" Bull said.
She panted, reaching and pulling at the grass at her fingertips, trying so desperately to escape the inferno. But then she saw it: an opening. She lunged toward it as more of the tank came toppling down near there. Lorena, gripping her soaked thigh, slipped over the rusted grate of the concrete drain.
"Bull! Hurry!" she yelled, grabbing his hands and pulling him through just before the vehicle crashed down into the trench.
They watched from their cylinder as the Americans retreated, the sounds of German gunfire at their backs. Lorena, woozy and in pain, turned to the soldier next to her. Baptized by fire, indeed.
"So, Sergeant, what do we do now?"
Bull winced. Shrapnel, first. Finding Easy, second. Don't get captured by the damn Krauts. "We wait until the sun goes down. And then we figure it out from there."
Lorena nodded. Another pain came, and then another.
Her eyesight blurred.
Everything became hazy. Everything became black.
Her mother had always said not to trust a man with two last names, but her father thought that she was just being silly and superstitious. "Why is it that when you marry a Sicilian, you also marry their nonsense?" he'd say, to which her mother always had a response.
"And why is it that when you marry a Scot, you find that they always want to fight what they cannot understand?"
But her mother had been right. Parker Hollis was a menace and Lewis Nixon (as far as Lorena could tell) was trouble, but Dick Winters was a saint and David Webster had become her first actual friend since their meeting in the pub only weeks prior. The only person the theory didn't coincide with was Ron Speirs. Speirs, Ron. One first name, one last name. He didn't fit and therefore, she wasn't sure how to deal with him and how he made her insides twirl.
Mama would have told her to forget it, and so she did.
So often, Lorena reveled in knowing that she was her mother's daughter. She had Lilla Fanciullo's dark hair and dark eyes, her wit and her ingenuity, her complexity and her impulsiveness. But she also inherited her mother's passive-aggressive nature and her ability to betray. From Charles Carlyle, she received a freckled face and his meticulous attention to detail, his need for control and his incapacity to forgive and forget.
Her mother, though, wouldn't have put up with half of the things that Parker Hollis dished out, and it had the first strike of a hand against her that awakened the sleeping dragons that were her anti-social qualities.
"You're late," Parker slurred, spilling his whiskey on their brand new carpet.
"I tried to get away, but McGalahan insisted that I finished that piece on the gas station crisis. It's getting worse, you know. The amount of money that these people are losing is just incredible," she rambled on as she tore through her purse looking for a lighter, ignoring his stupor as she had been taught to do long ago. "Oh, I hope Jack saved our reservation. I mean, we're only a half hour late. I'll just go freshen up and we can be on our way."
"We ain't going anywhere," he said as slammed the now-empty tumbler down.
"Parker, what are you talking about? Of course we're going. It is my birthday after all."
He stumbled drunkenly toward her. "You think that you can come home late without callin' and expect me to get all gussied up and spend a bunch of money on you?"
"Parker, please. Can we go one night without fighting? I didn't come home late on purpose and I promise it'll never happen again."
"Your damn right it won't. I want you home by six o'clock from now on. Got it?"
Lorena's jaw tightened. She had drawn a lot of lines in her marriage to Parker Hollis, but letting him treat her like shit on her birthday was one she wasn't going to let him cross.
"Six o'clock? For God's sake, Parker, I'm not a child! And if you think for a goddamn second that you're going to keep me from doing my job, then you've got another thing com--"
Before Lorena could even register what was happening, she was on the floor, clutching her stinging cheek and wiping away the blood from her lip. She had expected the insults, the ones that he had been hurling since their arrival as newlyweds in the South, but the violence was something she hoped would never occur. No one ever told her that it would ever be like this and she was too stunned to fight back.
From that moment on, it was always skin on skin, leather on skin, glass on skin, blood, bruises, scars, broken bones, lies, long sleeves in the summertime. The threats didn't seem so empty anymore. It was the point of no return.
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