She’s two years ahead of me, but she never shut me out. We shared everything, told each other everything.”
Two little girls in grass-stained summer dresses, playing tag and climbing trees and waging furious battle against our combined brothers. Then two older girls, Rose with the beginning of a bosom and me still scrape kneed and gangly, both of us warbling along with jazz records and sharing a giggly crush on Errol Flynn. Rose the daring one with one outlandish scheme after another, me the devoted shadow she shielded like a lioness when her schemes got us into trouble. Her voice came at me, so suddenly it was like she was standing in the room: “Charlie, hide in my room and I’ll stitch your dress up before your mother sees that rip. I shouldn’t have taken you climbing over those rocks—”
“Please don’t cry,” Eve Gardiner said. “I cannot stand crying women.”
“I can’t either.” I hadn’t cried a drop in weeks, I’d been too numb, but now my eyes burned. I blinked fiercely. “The last time I saw Rose was the summer of ’39. Everyone was worried about Germany—well, except us. Rose was thirteen and I was eleven; we just wanted to sneak out to the movies every afternoon, and that seemed a lot more important than anything happening in Germany. Poland got invaded right after I went back to the States. My parents wanted Rose’s family to come to America, but they kept dithering—” Rose’s mother, convinced she was too delicate to travel. “Before they could make the arrangements, France fell.”
Eve took another sip of whiskey, her hooded eyes unblinking. I took another steadying drag on my cigarette.
“I got letters,” I said. “Rose’s father was important, an industrialist—he had connections, so the family could get word out now and then. Rose sounded cheerful. Kept talking about when we’d see each other again. But we had the news, everybody knew what was happening there: swastikas flying over Paris, people getting carted off in trucks and never seen again. I’d write her begging to know if she was really all right, and she always said she was, but . . .” In the spring of ’43, we’d traded photographs since it had been so long since we’d seen each other—Rose had been seventeen and so pretty, striking a pin-up pose and grinning at the camera. I had the photograph in my pocketbook now, worn and soft at the edges.
“Rose’s last letter talked about a boy she’d been seeing on the sly. She said there had been much excitement.” I took a shaky breath. “That was early in ’43. I heard nothing from Rose after that, nothing from any of her family.”
Eve watched me, her ravaged face like a mask. I couldn’t tell if she pitied me, had contempt for me, or didn’t care at all.
My cigarette was almost down to the nub. I took a last deep drag, and stubbed it out in a tea saucer already overflowing with ash. “I knew it didn’t mean anything, Rose not writing. Wartime mail is hell. We just had to wait for the war to be over, and then the letters would start getting through. But the war ended, and—nothing.”
More silence. It was harder than I’d thought it would be, saying all this. “We made inquiries. It took forever, but we got some answers. My French uncle had died in ’44, shot while trying to get black market medicine for my aunt. Rose’s two brothers died in late ’43, a bomb. My aunt’s still alive—my mother wanted her to come live with us, but she wouldn’t, just walled herself up in the house outside Rouen. And Rose—”
I swallowed. Rose sauntering ahead of me through the green haze of trees. Rose cursing in French, yanking a brush through her unruly curls. Rose at that Provençal café, on the happiest day of my whole life . . .
“Rose vanished. She left her family in ’43. I don’t even know why. My father put out inquiries, but Rose’s trail after the spring of ’44 came to a dead end. Nothing.”
“A lot of dead ends in that war,” Eve said, and I was surprised to hear her gravelly voice after speaking myself for so long. “Lots of people disappeared. You surely don’t think she’s still alive? It’s been two years since the bloody w-war ended.”
I gritted my teeth. My parents had long concluded Rose must be dead, lost in the chaos of war, and the odds were they were right,