Water Song (18 page)

Emma stepped off the ship in Dover. She hadn't been back in England in over a year, not since she signed up to join the U.S. Army Signal Corps and had gone back to the Western Front in France to help with the war effort.

The Americans had joined the war in 1917 and formed the Signal Corps, recruiting women who were fluent in English and French to work the switchboards and relay messages between the advancing American, English, Canadian, and French troops.

How ironic,
she'd written in one of her many letters to Jack.
You're serving in the British army and I'm in an American unit with other women who are, for the most part, Americans. It doesn't matter, though; we're all on the same side. The conditions are very hard here though I am sure they are worse for you. We sit at our switchboards for long hours and relay messages, often having to interpret.
We
even have to
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know about military terms and weaponry in order to make sure our interpretations are understandable. Helmets and gas masks hang behind our chairs and make me think of you and all you are going through. How I long to see you again.

They were able to see each other for a day in Paris in 1917. It was July 6, her nineteenth birthday! The greatest birthday gift she could imagine was being there and sitting in a café on the Champs-Élysée with him. When it was time to read the menu, he took out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and hooked them on. "The eyes never fully came back the way they were," he explained. "I suppose I got off easy, all things considered."

"I like the way they look," she assured him sincerely. He looked so tired, though. The endless fighting was taking such a toll on him. He was thin and pale.

"It can't go on forever, Em," he'd said that day as he kissed her good-bye outside the café; but she'd begun to wonder if maybe it could. "When this is over, I'll come find you wherever you are," he promised.

"That might not be possible," she pointed out.

"Leave it to me," he'd assured her. She'd come to trust him completely. If he said he'd find her, he would.

Finally, though, on November 11, the war ended. It took almost two weeks more before she could get to Calais and get a boat across the channel to Dover Beach. In the two weeks, she kept searching for him among the lines of moving troops plodding home, hoping for a message or for his sudden appearance.

She kept pushing the thought out of her mind that he might be dead.

He couldn't be dead.

It would be more than she could stand if he was dead. And yet so many were.

The crowd disembarking from the boat had begun to disperse as their friends and relatives arrived to pick them up. She'd sent her father a telegram telling him that she had a friend who would bring her home, as she wasn't sure exactly when she would be arriving. Once she'd booked passage on the boat, she'd sent one telegram after another to the Fourth Army trying to tell Jack where she was. Every day she'd gone to the telegram office in Calais hoping for a response, but none ever came.

She spied a stand of motorized taxi cabs over by the tariff house. When she'd left, horse carriages were still in use. Though she'd seen motorized ambulances in the war, the motor cabs reminded her too much of the armored tanks both sides had begun using toward the end and she didn't welcome the thought of getting into one.

It didn't appear that she had much other choice.

With a sigh, she began walking toward the stand. She was nearly to the taxi when someone stepped into her path. "Welcome home, Em."

Emma blinked hard, not sure at first that he was real. Then he smiled at her and her sense of unreality gave way to a wave of nearly overwhelming joy. Throwing herself into his arms, she showered him with 
kisses, holding him tight as if to make sure he'd never go away again. Tears of happiness flooded her eyes.

"Hey, now, no crying," he said softly.

She wiped her eyes. "It's all right," she assured him. "I'm just so glad to see you--so glad."

"I know. Me too," he replied, and she saw a glint of wetness in his eyes, as well. He enfolded her in his arms, an embrace she never wanted to end.

Only afterward did she notice the medal on his chest. It was a bar from which hung a gold cross with a round middle. In the golden round center of the cross a crowned lion posed proudly with the words FOR VALOUR underneath.

"The Victoria Cross!" she cried. It was England's highest honor for gallantry in the face of the enemy. "It's wonderful, but what did you do to get this? I'm so glad I wasn't there to see it."

He laughed his familiar, raspy chuckle. "But you were there, Em, every step of the way."

"I was?"

"I got this for crossing enemy lines to warn the Allies that the Germans already knew the timing of the advance they'd planned. They figured we saved a lot of lives by doing that. By rights, you should have one of these too, so let's say we share it."

She entwined her fingers through his and laid her head on his shoulder, so happy that he'd come back to her, healthy and strong, with his love for her still alive in his heart.

SUZANNE WEYN is also the author of
The Night Dance,
a retelling of the Grimms' fairytale "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," intertwined with Arthurian legends. Her other young-adult novels include the romantic comedy
South Beach Sizzle,
written with Diana Gonzalez. Suzanne's science-fiction thriller for young adults,
The Bar Code Tattoo,
was selected by the American Library Association as a 2005 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers.
The Bar Code Rebellion
is the sequel.