I felt better having visited her. I knew I’d been rude—obnoxious, even. I’d intended to be. It seemed that until I figured out what was going on with my brother, the best way for everything to settle back down was for Sofie Rhodes to stay the hell away from us.
I gave up tossing and turning and poured myself a cold glass of water, then went onto the front porch, where the air was at least moving a little. I rested my head against the back of the porch swing and closed my eyes.
“Can’t sleep either?” Henry said. He walked along the edge of the porch and took a seat beside me.
“It’s hot in there,” I sighed.
“I’ll wager it’s worse upstairs.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he chuckled, but quickly sobered. “You left the back door unlocked.”
“Did I?” I said, wincing. “Oops.” He’d been checking every night before he went to sleep, and this was the second time I’d forgotten.
“You’re not taking this seriously, Lizzie.”
“I am,” I protested. “It’s force of habit, that’s all. We’ve been here for a year and I’ve never locked that door. And besides…”
“You haven’t seen him,” Henry surmised. “So you’re not as scared as you should be.”
“Haven’t seen him?” I said hesitantly. I shot Henry a concerned look, concerned at his use of present tense. Henry sighed impatiently, then lit a cigarette. He stretched his legs out, settling into the seat, and then drew in a deep breath.
“I checked myself into a VA neuropsychiatric hospital in January after I was here for Christmas. I lied when I said I was working at a fair in Nashville. Christmas was the lowest I’d been for a while.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, startled. My heart ached at the thought of him going through that alone.
“Do you know that in all the time you’ve been married, even after all the shit I’ve put you through in the last five years, I’d never seen you and Cal argue until the last time I visited? I figured if your marriage was in trouble and you were stuck here in backwater Alabama with a bunch of Nazis, you’d need me to have my head right if it all hit the fan.”
“Huntsville isn’t so bad. And me and Cal are fine.” I hadn’t realized he noticed us bickering. Henry was always more perceptive than people gave him credit for.
“I love Cal. I really do. But your husband is a part of all of this. He’s working with them.”
“He’s just doing his job.”
“Isn’t that exactly what half of those bastards at Nuremberg said?” Henry asked. I winced. “Anyway, it doesn’t even matter right now. That’s not what we need to talk about. We need to talk about Bobby.”
“We do?” I asked, surprised. I remembered the friend Henry made in his unit in Europe, even though he’d never told me much about him.
“Yeah,” he said. He stared down at the glow of the cigarette in his hand for a moment, drew on it, then exhaled. “I need you to understand something.”
“Okay,” I said, anxiously.
“That camp we liberated. There was a sign over the gate. One of the guys in the tanks knew a bit of German—he told me it said every man gets what he deserves. They called that camp Buchenwald.”
“Was this in April of ’45?” I asked. Henry wrote me regularly when he was in Europe, but just before the war ended, his letters abruptly stopped. He finished his cigarette and flicked the end onto my grass.
“I knew right away that this was something different from the other awful shit we’d seen already. There were cartloads of bodies stacked outside of the crematorium near the entrance and there was nothing left of those people—just skin and bones.”
“That’s awful, Henry. I’m so sorry.”
“The captain sent us to clear buildings. I was with Bobby and we’re just walking through these buildings looking for Nazis and all we’re finding is dead people and half-dead people. Sometimes their eyes were dead, even if they were still breathing. Bobby opened a storage room and it all happened so fast. In just a few seconds, the Nazi in that little room shot Bobby and I shot the Nazi and they were both dead and I was just standing over my dead best friend and this dead stranger wondering…who won just now? You know what I realized?” His voice cracked, and the anguish on his face nearly broke me. “We all lost, Lizzie. Every single man and woman and child touched by that war lost.”