Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

speaks without opening her eyes (though glints of green light glow through translucent eyelids) and without opening her lips. "The time has passed. Wait for another. The boy's father had a flash of the true sight, but he is not long for the world. Wait for him to pass, and his protection with him. Awake again. Take the boy then."
    There's no need to acknowledge the command. I'm a fragment of Death's will. Her right hand... no, not even that. The trailing touch of her littlest finger. I have no free will, no choice. In God's hands.
    I just hope that Joseph won't suffer in the waiting.
    But by sunrise, his breathing is less tortured, his body less racked by spasms. When his mother wipes his forehead with a handkerchief soaked in warm, weak tea, he cracks open his eyelids and smiles.
    It's the most fragile, beautiful thing I've ever seen.
    ****
    September 1941
    "You should be dead right now," a gratuitously stern-looking nurse says. I wonder if her disapproval extends to all her patients—all young men, all injured in the fighting—or if she reserves it just for Joseph. "Stupid foolhardy American."
    The latter, apparently. I watch her as she stands by his bedside, giving his chart a perfunctory once-over before fitting him with a blood pressure cuff. There isn't much for her to do, not after my intervention. Joseph's horrible accident has left him with some bruising, is all. For now he's under observation, but she'll soon declare him stable and send him away again, perhaps sooner than she would have before the war. She needs the bed for her own countrymen. Hell, for any man who had orders or at least permission to follow the front.
    Joseph rests for a few hours on the narrow cot. I wait, not sure what I am waiting for now. The other shoe to drop, maybe.
    He springs awake, triggered by nothing in particular, and casts around, looking very much like his father in that moment. We have to go now , I tell him. A hospital is no place for a rebel like me to hide from Death.
    He sees right through me, but my influence has, perhaps, touched something deep in his mind, below perception. He nods (to himself?) gathers up his possessions, and leaves quietly, cautiously, edging his way between rows of men in cots. Their faint groaning and heavy breathing fades away as he reaches the last door. Sunlight creeps in from the cracks in the frame.
    Is this really it? Have we won free?
    Of course not. It's war. Death is everywhere.
    He walks away from the big stone hospital, taking very small steps. I don't know if his slow, hesitant pace means he's timid after what happened to him—and just what, exactly, does he think happened to him?—or if it's simple exhaustion, his polio-afflicted calf muscles pushed to the brink and failing after the last long hours.
    There's a pile of wreckage on the hospital's side street, swept into a neat mound. Joseph picks through the mound until he finds what he's looking for: a long stave of wood with one end smooth enough to lean on. Ugly cane in hand, he begins the long walk home through the cobbled streets of Helsinki.
    I remember what he wrote in his notebook when we first arrived: The Karelian refugees would give me such strange looks, though never to my face; rather, they looked down to my feet. Someone told me they envied my shoes. Joseph's salary from the news service is not generous by American standards, but most Finns live on far less.
    Joseph's approach to life has always been characterized by the balance between luck and lack. He knows he has two loving parents, a strong and resourceful family; he knows he was granted a miraculous reprieve from the most feared disease of this century. His father's last name protects him from the hatred often directed toward his mother's people. This disturbs him constantly.
    He won't deny it, if pressed, but he refuses to be pitied as a cripple.
    By the time he reaches his apartment, the upper palm of his right hand is bruised and rubbed raw from the rough makeshift cane. But not bleeding, at least. Once he closes the door behind him, he sinks to the floor, hugs his knees to his chest, and takes a long, shuddering breath.
    Joseph lives in this one bedroom apartment with three other men his age. Even so, it's quiet and empty now, a relief for us both. Two of the men are American citizens of recent Finnish origin, Markku and Antti, both returned to fight in the Winter War. They're in the army. The third is a regular Finn, a distant cousin of theirs who actually