Page 33 of If You Were the Only Girl in the World
“A part of me works to help those men who have lost their faces. Their identity. Their self-recognition. One must live with other people. It is what marks us as human. To live in community and companionship. Paul would approve.”
Katrina nodded. What Aurore did each day was construct a means for a man whose identity was destroyed by the mischance of war to build a new life. In that, she served her husband and her love for him.
Aurore bit her quivering lip. “I look at the wounded and I see him as he was, in pain and needing to cure himself.”
“Were those with him men in the medical corps?”
She cleared her throat of tears. “No. He was taken as he administered to a forward line of cavalry who had been cut down by infantry. He was alone, I am told, the only doctor among a hundred or more soldiers. He was doing his work as they took him.”
* * *
In early February, Katrina received a short letter. It was the third she’d received from Nate and the posted date was more than ten days prior.
Darling Katrina,
I arrive in Paris soon. Three days to my duty and one day in Paris. I will come to you early on the fifteenth. Make no plans for us in case I must rearrange. If you cannot have the day off, we’ll capture what we can of time.
Yours, Nate.
The fifteenth came, but Nate did not.
The following Saturday Katrina left the hospital to lead her usual music class with the orphans. She walked into the class room where the old upright piano stood and she had to sit down. She was suddenly so tired her head spun. She’d not had breakfast at the hospital because of a vague nausea roiling her stomach all through the night. She usually ate in the canteen each morning after her shift.
But after the short walk from the hospital, she was also winded. Inhaling, she noted she breathed easily. She bore no signs of bronchitis or pneumonia. The winter had been harsh and she had been careful to dress warmly. As a child, she had many colds in windy Chicago and she was always careful to dress warmly in winter. Plus, she couldn’t stay in her apartment to fight illness when she had a growing number of patients to tend at the hospital.
“You don’t look well,” Father Pierre said to her in French when he entered the room with his little charges trailing behind him. “Should you go home?”
She took one look at the eager little faces of her pupils and rallied. “One song this morning, perhaps, eh?”
A chorus of “Oui, Mademoiselle” and claps met her ears.
Afterward, she closed the top of the battered old upright, donned her coat and hat and gloves and walked the two short blocks to her flat and her bed. She did not rise until the evening. Ordinarily, she’d had few challenges to her night schedule. Now she worried about her general health.
But she went to work again.
Two days later, she was still exhausted and hurried home to bed. When she awoke the sun had already set and her flat had gone cold. She hurried to stoke the furnace and do her ablutions but once more felt the aura of fatigue swamp her. Her stomach growled, but she envisioned anomelet fromageandcafé au laitwith a wince.
She sank to her kitchen chair.
She put a hand to her forehead. She had no cough, no fever. Her symptoms were unique. Fatigue, nausea and…
She counted on her fingers and sighed. She’d not had her monthly since early December.Before Nate’s visit.
She was pregnant.
Pregnant.
Two and a half months.
Soon she’d show.
What could she do?
She had to save herself, her career, her love for Nate and her baby.
First, she had to write to Nate. She would ask him to come see her as soon as possible. But she would not tell him he was to become a father in such an impersonal way. He deserved to know but from her lips. That brought tears to her eyes. She loved him. More than any man she had ever known, he was the epitome of her perfect man. Able to accept her as a woman and a person with professional desires and expectations, he could be the only man she would ever marry. But she would not ask him or expect him to do it.
He had not declared he loved her. But that night they spent together proved it. This interminable war had prohibited him from that, even though it could not stop them from expressing the love they bore each other.
