She glanced across at Wolf. He had finished his painting and was chatting to the boy in the seat next to his. He looked like someone who didn’t have a care in the world. And yet he’d lost both his parents. There were no ifs, buts, or maybes. They were dead.
She love me now.
Suddenly she grasped it: in those four words lay the secret to happiness.
Charlie’s face was lit up by the glow from the fire. Stars as bright and sharp as nails pierced the velvety blackness of the sky.
Looking up, Kitty saw a strange glimmer. Over the tops of the trees, there was a faint, greenish light that seemed to move as she looked at it. “What’s that?” She pointed. “It looks like headlights or something—but there can’t be anything on the road: not with all this snow.”
“I think it could be the northern lights.”
“Really? I’ve heard of them—but I thought you had to be up in the Arctic to see them.”
“Usually, you do. But sometimes you get a glimpse of them farther south. It depends on the weather, I think. It probably has something to do with all this snow—reflecting stuff back into the atmosphere.”
“Have you seen them before?”
“A couple of times. Last winter, when we were lying in wait for the Germans in a forest up near the Belgian border, we were sitting in a dugout in the dark, keeping watch, and I saw a flash above the trees. We thought it was tanks coming our way. But there was no sound, nothing at all. One of my buddies—a Canadian guy—said it was the northern lights. He said where he came from, folks call them the ghost riders.”
“I can see why.” Kitty could see that the green glow was swirling and changing color. The patch of sky was shot with streaks of yellow and orange. Then shapes began to form in front of her eyes. Spectral riders with flaming hair appeared on crimson horses. They raced across the sky like a wildfire. “It’s magical,” she whispered. “Like something from another world.” She watched the figures dissolve into a faint, misty halo of golden light. “You said you’d seen them more than once—when was the other time?”
“It was the night before we liberated Dachau. We were camped about a mile away, but you could smell the incinerators, even though the Nazis had cut and run by then. And when we saw the lights in the sky, I swear, it looked like some great green-eyed demon was hovering over the place.”
“You’ve never spoken about it,” Kitty said. “Not since that time on the phone, when you told me you were there.”
“I wouldn’t have mentioned it then if I’d known you were searching for your parents.”
“It must have been horrific, going in there.”
“I can’t even describe it. Things get bad in war, I know, but this was beyond anything you could imagine.” He looked into the fire, the light casting deep shadows across his face. “I threw up when I saw the state of some of the prisoners. They were like living skeletons.” As he moved his head, Kitty caught the glint of tears in his eyes.
She moved closer, reaching out to draw him to her. “I’ve been very selfish,” she whispered. “Always going on about myself and my parents—never thinking about what you must have been concealing for the sake of my feelings.”
“I wouldn’t want you carrying those pictures around in your head. There are some things best kept inside.”
“Do you ever talk to your friends about it?”
He shook his head. “We don’t have what you might call deep conversations. It’s mostly stupid stuff. If you let on about what’s bugging you, they think you’re weak.”
“People in England could be like that,” she said. “There was a boy I went out with. His name was Fred. He hated me talking about my parents. If I ever mentioned how terrible it felt, not knowing what had become of them, he’d tell me to toughen up and just accept that I was on my own in the world.”
“I think when guys say things like that, it’s because they’re bottling something up. Maybe he had bad parents who didn’t care about him.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“In a weird kind of way, he might have envied you—being part of a family that loved you so much they went through the hell of putting you on that train.”
She kissed the skin above the collar of his jacket. “You’re so different from him. Before I met you, I thought all boys were like that.” She traced a path with her lips, up to his ear. “I love you, Charlie.” She felt him twist in her arms, his mouth finding hers. “Come on,” she whispered, as she broke away. “Let’s go inside.”