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“Is he alive?”
“No.”
The word hit harder than it should have.
I had believed James was dead for most of my life.
“Is he alive?”
But for a few minutes that morning, he’d been alive again.
And Adrian had just killed him a second time.
***
I shoved the card against his chest.
“Then who wrote this?”
He looked down at it.
“I did.”
I stared at him.
“You wrote this?”
“Yes.”
Adrian had just killed him a second time.
“You made me think my husband was alive.”
“I’m aware.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed you to come.”
“You have my telephone number.”
“You wouldn’t have come if I’d told you it was me.”
Adrian looked at the roses.
“I’m sorry, Mary.”
“Stop.”
He fell silent.
“You made me think my husband was alive.”
I pointed at him with the card.
“You don’t get to say that yet.”
I could see his hands trembling around the duffel strap.
I didn’t care.
“I waited 56 years,” I said.
He just stood there, totally tongue-tied.
I held up the ugly paper rose.
“What is this?”
“I waited 56 years.”
He reached out a trembling hand. “That’s…”
I pulled it closer to myself.
“Don’t touch it.”
Adrian lowered his hand.
“James made that,” he muttered.
My anger sharpened.
“James supposedly died in an explosion.”
Adrian looked past me toward the station tracks.
“That’s what I lied about, Mary.”
“James made that.”
For a crazy second, I actually thought James was alive.
“The attack was real,” Adrian recalled. “James was there. So was I. Our unit was scattered afterward, and for a while nobody knew who had made it out.”
“Made it out where?”
Adrian looked at me again.
“We didn’t.”
“James was there. So was I.”
I stared at him.
“We were captured. James was badly hurt before they took us. I was with him afterward.”
The station noise seemed to move farther away.
“How long?” I asked.
“A few weeks.”
My eyes went to the paper rose.
A few weeks.
Not an instant.
“We were captured.”
Not one explosion.
James had lived after the moment I’d spent 56 years imagining as his last.
“You saw him?”
“Every day I could.”
“And he made this?”
James had lived after the moment I’d spent 56 years imagining as his last.
Adrian nodded.
“From a scrap of paper. He folded it one night and told me it was awful. He gave it to me before he died. Told me if I got home, it belonged to you. I kept it inside my field notebook when I came back.”
“He gave it to me before he died.”
A sound escaped me that was almost a laugh.
“It’s awful.”
“I told him that.”
For one brief second, I could picture two young men insulting a terrible paper flower somewhere I couldn’t imagine.