to live, but you’ll be pleased to know that I chose death, too. Every morning when I wake up, I die when I remember that my son is not with me and never will be.”
She stood there, silent, wondering if Captain Dunklin had taken their coats to the opposite end of the parade ground. Breathe in and out, she ordered her body.
After what felt like years, Captain Dunklin returned with the coats. In absolute silence, Major Randolph guided her arm into each sleeve, since she could barely move. He pulled on his own coat and took a firm grip on her, coaxing her into motion in that forthright way he probably used to get patients ambulatory.
She didn’t think she could manage the steps, but she did. She got as far as the board sidewalk. For the first time in her life, she fainted.
She returned to consciousness almost at once, embarrassed and terrified to be lying in the snow at the foot of the Dunklins’ porch. Major Randolph had gathered a handful of snow and placed it on her forehead, which did the duty of smelling salts. And there was Nick Martin, helping her to her feet.
“Can you walk, Susanna?” Joe Randolph asked.
“I think so. It’s not so far,” she said, embarrassed. “Forgive me.”
“Don’t apologize for something you cannot control,” he said promptly. “Forgive me for not taking you out of that den of vipers immediately.”
“As you say, it hardly matters,” Susanna reminded him. “If it hadn’t been tonight, it would have been tomorrow.” She sobbed out loud, and put her hand to her mouth. “I swore I had cried my last tear over this!”
Without a word he clapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close as they walked along, him holding her up more than she was standing. He seemed so furious she was almost afraid to look at him. When she did glance his way, she saw all the anger in his face, and knew it couldn’t be just for this alone.
She stopped walking, and he was forced to stop, too. Gently, she disengaged from him.
“I was wrong to think I could escape this.”
“Now you’re going to blame yourself?” he exclaimed.
She shrugged out of his grasp and continued on by herself. She looked back at him standing there, puffs of winter steam coming from his nostrils. He was angry, but she knew in her bruised heart it wasn’t at her.
“Will it ever warm up here?” she asked in a normal tone of voice. She went into the Reeses’ house and closed the door behind her, wanting to lock it and never allow anyone in again, except it wasn’t her house, and the enemy was here, too.
Standing right in front of her, in fact. Susanna regarded her cousin’s white face.
There was so much she could have said then, none of it pretty. Suddenly Susanna was more weary than she been in months, tired of accusing faces and dead ends that brought her no closer to her son and toward no path leading back to respectability.
Frederick had seen to that. If there was a greater evil than alcohol, she had no idea what it could be. All these thoughts went through her tired mind as she started up the stairs to her space behind an army blanket, the only refuge left to her in the world.
“Did you tell them I started that little untruth?” Emily asked as Susanna neared the top of the stairs.
Susanna shook her head, sad that her cousin felt no pity and no concern for her, beyond her own wish not to be part of her ruin. Susanna turned around to take a good look at her cousin, and mourned the loss of what could have been a friend. Perhaps Emily had meant well. Someone more intelligent would have understood how terrible a lie like that would appear to veterans of the Civil War, and that person was not Emily Reese.
“No, I did not tell them you started that lie. If I had even a little money I would be out of here tomorrow, to spare you any further embarrassment.”
She knew sarcasm was wasted on Emily Reese, who probably thought she was serious. Susanna pulled aside the blanket, then let it fall behind her. She lay down to stare at the ceiling. She thought of how Joe Randolph had questioned her decision to remain silent. Obviously, neither of them had known how bad this would become. I haven’t a brave bone left in my body, she