Chapters (25)
“After what happened to Pru and Audrey, you can’t count on anything until the war is over. We’re not making any plans. We both want to go to medical school after the war and become doctors, but he lives in Dublin, I live in Boston.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Alex encouraged her. She was thinking that about her own life too, and Dan. Meeting him had been unexpected, but it had seemed so right, and still did, no matter how different their backgrounds were.
“Everything in wartime is strange,” Lizzie said, “and maybe afterwards too, good and bad. The only thing I do know is that you can’t count on anything while we’re here and the war is still on.” They both knew it was true. Alex nodded and left the room after delivering the message about Alfred.
Lizzie went to see him the next day and found him much more delusional than he’d been before. She had no experience with psychiatric nursing, nor training for it, unlike Alex, but his mind was all over the place. He recognized Lizzie immediately, but then he wandered off into dark corners of his mind. He told her in detail about his meeting with Hitler, and that a German officer had shot him in the foot. She saw the notes in his chart about the nightmares he had every night. He had to be sedated and restrained when he had them. When she mentioned that he would be going home soon, he said that no, he was being sent for duty in North Africa as an aide to General de Gaulle. He didn’t mention being engaged to her, although the head nurse on the psych ward said he spoke of it all the time, and that he was fixated on it. They were recommending electric shock treatment for him when he got back to the States. The military wasn’t going to release him until some semblance of sanity had returned. Lizzie wondered if it ever would or if his mind was blown forever by the rigors of war.
She went to see him another time, and he thought she was his mother, and then he said he was Jesus and she was the Virgin Mary. She wished him a good trip home when she left the ward and didn’t go back to see him again. There was no point. He didn’t recognize her some of the time, and he came in and out of lucidity. It tore at her heart to see it. The war had destroyed so many minds and bodies and lives. She hoped they could put him back together, but it didn’t seem likely. Nothing was sure anymore. They had all been through too much. And boys like Alfred couldn’t find their way back from the terrible things they’d seen and done in the war.