I held the picture for a while and stared into my lover’s eyes, his mother telling friends, “Back in college, he and Carrie went together for a while.”
I sought the blueness of his eyes reflecting back with sparkling tears unlike those I remembered. We used to lie in bed and body length to body length, watch the war and listen to the body count, and feel the bitterness and outrage grow as one until we almost puked together; only cried instead.
I hand the picture to another friend, who shakes his head and hands it back to me.
The letter came and called him to a war and his first battle was won within a day. “How can you go?” I screamed, emotion showing in my love for him and me and our ideals. “How can I not?” was all he said, and brushed away my brushing off his kiss goodbye. He marched, I marched, our battles fought on different fields of paddies, congress steps and ours alone on paper. Losing touch, losing sight, finally losing what we had because we disagreed.
“Mother, she’s a whore, he wrote,” I heard her say, a tight tinkling mother’s grieving laugh attached to words. And only then could I shift away and notice her, the wife and child, the smiling family of the photo. She, small with long black shining hair and happy almond eyes. A little one, the same, but almond eyes of blue.
“She’s only nineteen there,” his mother said, “and Joseph’s one. We hope to bring them here before he’s two. She hid him in the bar and bandaged up his wounds. He moved her to a village that was safer, away from city streets and what she had to do, and what he fought them for. She had a garden, he had written once, and the beans were due the same time as their son.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told his mother. She smiled and nodded, sad but proudly taking back the photo of her family. And I, defeated, turned away from honor, crumpling thoughts of outraged indignation and at last I understood the wounds and wounded.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology