Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

S tanley ate his second orange while standing at the counter. Slice by moist slice, he worked his way through it, enjoying the sweetness on his tongue, the stickiness of his fingers. Not to mention it was the biggest orange he'd ever seen and the easiest to peel. As he ate, he noticed that Devon, who was frying steaks on the stovetop, was watching him eat.

Devon might have been laughing at him for enjoying the orange so much, and he'd not quite believed Stanley when he'd said he'd not had an orange since he'd enlisted earlier that year. In spite of this, Stanley felt comfortable and safe, and that feeling was growing with every passing moment.

Rain continued to fall outside the windows as the sky grew dark, and the cottage was filled with the smell of hot butter and salt. Those scents wafted through with the crispness of citrus and the sound of frying steak, and the war seemed very far away. If he never had to leave the cottage, never had to leave Devon, and could always feel the way he felt right now, he would be happy for all the days of his life.

"Here," said Devon, interrupting Stanley's reverie. "Sit down and eat this."

Devon brought over a platter with the steaks, and a bowl of sliced potatoes layered with cheese, which Devon had put in the oven to heat rather than the microwave, and which now bubbled contentedly in front of Stanley. There was also a dish of cut lettuce that glistened with olive oil, and though Stanley didn't care much for vegetables, he was going to have some, out of courtesy.

"You old enough to drink, soldier?" asked Devon, jocular even as he poured red wine from a bottle into two short glasses that looked suspiciously like old jelly jars. "Well, here you are anyway."

They sat down and ate together for a companionable while, each appeasing his hunger, both focused on their own plates, but it did not feel solitary. Every now and then, Devon would glance up at Stanley through his dark lashes, as if contemplating his presence at the table, or the truth of his tale. As Stanley drank his glass of wine, the taste of which curled like butter on his tongue, and ate the warm food, he grew more relaxed and felt more at ease. And began to feel that he might be safe here in the future, and that he would not get yanked back into the past.

Devon didn't look like he meant to throw Stanley out anytime soon, and had made no calls to les gendarmes in the hopes of finding out where Stanley had come from. Whether or not he believed that Stanley had come from 1917 was another matter, but for the moment, Stanley was safe, though in the wake of his earlier panic, as his body relaxed, the clamps in his brain relaxed too, probably from the wine. His mouth opened and words began to come out.

"I killed them, you know," said Stanley. When Devon sat up straight, his eyes wide and all of his attention focused on Stanley, he nodded. "I mean, I didn't kill kill them, but if I'd asked them to sit on the other side of me when that shell hit this morning, they'd be alive now. You know? But that shrapnel, it just cut through them, tore through them—"

"Was that the blood on your uniform?" Devon gestured to the bedroom where the uniform was stored, safely out of sight. "Did this happen in the trench?"

"Yes," said Stanley. He blinked at the remains of his supper and licked his lower lip, finding traces of salt. In that warm room with food in his belly, the war seemed far away. "It all happened so fast. One minute, Lt. Billings was standing there in front of the bunker, about to go up, you know, to get the lay of the land. He had a map in his hand to consult that I guess Commander Helmer had left behind—"

"Commander Helmer was the one who deserted?" asked Devon. He drank the rest of his wine in one large gulp and then waggled his glass at Stanley as if to ask him whether he wanted some more. Stanley nodded, and Devon poured them both more wine.

"He was the commander of our battalion," said Stanley. He was a little surprised that Devon already knew about the desertion, but then he remembered that the last battle of the 44 th Battalion was the focus of Devon's research. Plus, it was nice to talk out loud about his troubles because in the trenches you had to keep your doubts to yourself. "He deserted in the middle of the night, at least that's what we think, what the lieutenant thought."

Devon drank some of his wine as if to fortify himself against the fact that Stanley might be lying. Stanley drank as well, taking a large gulp, and almost choked, and Devon laughed at him. It wasn't a cruel laugh; there was sympathy in it, and Devon moved his hand in the air as if to wave the laugh away.

"Go on, the lieutenant had the map."

"And that was it," said Stanley. "He was standing there for just a minute, and the shells came. The Germans had been testing the distance for days, and Isaac and I—"

"Who's Isaac?" asked Devon, taking another sip of his wine, which made his mouth moist and red, and Stanley had to jerk his attention away.

"Isaac was one of the fellows I met when I enlisted; we went all the way through basic together."

"What was that like?" asked Devon, in a way that told Stanley that Devon was about to get out a pencil and a pad of paper and start taking notes. His eyes had lit up, and he leaned forward. "Had they started training with gas masks when you came in? What kind of canvas were they made of? How did it feel when you put one on? "

"That doesn't matter," said Stanley. He felt soothed by Devon's interest, and the fact that Devon seemed entirely sympathetic to what Stanley had gone through. "We lost ours in transport, anyway."

"I'm sorry about all the questions," said Devon. "It's just hard to deal with an obsession that nobody else can understand. Here you are with all that you know, so it's hard to stop." He looked down at his fingers curled around his little jelly jar of wine. "And I might be a little drunk."

"Maybe I am too," said Stanley, his heart warming to the idea of it, that Devon could feel comfortable enough around him, with a small dose of wine, to be himself. He tipped his glass to Devon's so they could clink a small toast because it was good to be able to talk about his fears and self-doubt, and Devon was a good listener.

"What really matters is that Isaac was my friend, and I let him get killed," said Stanley. "He was sitting right where I'd been sitting. It had started to rain, but my spot was dry and his feet were aching, so I let him sit down. Right where I'd been sitting was where the shell hit. The three of them, they were nothing but pieces. Isaac was looking at me when he died."

"You liked him," said Devon.

"Yes, I liked him," said Stanley, and that was okay to say; a fellow could like another fellow without anything being read into it. "He was good to me, always giving me his chocolate, saying he never really liked it, though I knew he was lying because his eyes did this thing—" Stanley gestured near his own eyes, hands on either side of his head, swirling his fingers to describe what he meant. "They would twinkle, you know? How eyes can do. He was always so sweet to me."

"You were in love with him," said Devon. "That must have made it very hard—"

"I wasn't in love with him." Stanley sat up straight and shook his head. "We were just friends, buddies, you know."

"Oh, damn it," said Devon. He clenched his fists for a second, then spread his fingers out as if they'd just been smacked by a ruler. "I forgot that it was against the law to be gay in 1917." He looked at Stanley with some sympathy, his brow furrowed. "That is, if we're going along with the premise that you really did come from then."

"It wasn't against the law to be gay," said Stanley, now completely confused. "We laughed all the time; Isaac would pretend to be very serious and I would make him laugh, anyway."

"No, I mean—" Devon stopped, running his hand through his hair, making it messy. "Being gay's what we call it now when you're a homosexual."

Stanley knew what the word meant. He'd avoided thinking about it for so long, even in his own head, that it was like a slap in the face to hear it said the way Devon said it. Casually, as if there were no sting to be found in it, no shame, as if he had no idea that the word was wrong and that to say it out loud was to bring unwanted attention.

"I'm not a ho—" Stanley stopped, his mouth trembling. He pressed the back of his hand against his lips. "I'm not , do you hear? Isaac and I were friends, and that's all there was to it."

"Seriously, it's not against the law now," said Devon. "Well, in some countries, stupid, vile, backwards countries it is, but not here in France. Not in the States, not in England, not anywhere you might want to go. Like Iceland." Devon smiled like it was some big, wonderful thing. "Gays can get married in Iceland, you know. Australia, too."

The thought of marrying Isaac made Stanley go very still. The thought of marrying another fellow, someone like Devon, say—Stanley was warm all over and his heart was racing.

Devon was looking at him, his eyes wide open, as though waiting for a response to his statement. Perhaps he was waiting for Stanley to admit who he was. To admit that he was a homosexual himself, as Devon had just seemingly admitted with the use of words like we and you . Stanley had to make sure, so emboldened by the wine and his own exhaustion, he dipped his head to look up at Devon, completely unsure of the response he would get.

"Are you—are you one?" Stanley asked. Then he added hurriedly, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"Yeah," said Devon, completely casual about it while he waved his hand over the plates as if they could confirm his statement. "I'm one of the quiet, stay-at-home ones. Too geeky to leave the house, too wrapped up in my studies. I barely qualify." He laughed, at the statement, perhaps, or at himself, or at the idea of being one kind of homosexual instead of another, as if it were all quite easy and natural and accepted. "I mean, there's all kinds; I'd be geeky, regardless."

Stanley opened his mouth, but found that he could not articulate the whirl of ideas in his head, how it might have been if he could have told Isaac how he really felt. How it might have been to kiss Isaac on the mouth, to trace the little pencil scar on Isaac's chin with his thumb. To wrap his arms around Isaac and keep him safe. Except Isaac wasn't safe. He was dead, and Stanley was in the same cottage that, while building trenches, they'd taken breaks in to get out of the rain, to have a smoke, using bars of chocolate in barter like they were made of gold.

Swallowing, Stanley fiddled with his empty glass, swirling the dregs of wine around, red ribbons at the bottom of a jelly jar. He felt almost too warm in the heat that came from the white radiators along the walls. In Stanley's day, radiators were brown or black or tinged red with rust. If there was any evidence that he was in the future, it was that everything was so clean and orderly, and it was these thoughts that helped him stay calm instead of bursting into blubbering tears, like he so much wanted to do.

"I'm sorry," said Devon, his eyes grave and still. "Whether or not you came from 1917, you miss him, don't you."

"I never told him," said Stanley. He was somewhat shocked at his own honesty, but Devon had done nothing but be kind and sympathetic to everything Stanley had gone through, so perhaps he could be trusted with this. "It's nothing I could ever do, and he just seemed to like being my friend, so telling him would have ruined it. Maybe."

"Maybe," said Devon.

He got up from the table, grabbing the plates and bowls before taking them to the sink. He puttered around for a bit, doing ordinary things, making the moment seem as normal as it could be, given the circumstances. Stanley sat at the table, too tired to move, still feeling shell-shocked, as the fellows in the trench would have said. All he could do was watch as Devon brought to the table a little cardboard box with grease stains on the bottom.

When Devon opened the box, Stanley saw that inside were French pastries, crumbling and brown, flecked with delicate curls of frosting, the merest bits of sugar. He, Isaac, Bertie, and Rex had taken a trek into the nearby village when the frost had first hit the ground. It had been wonderful to walk in a foreign place with strange coins in their pockets, pretending that there wasn't a war on, and Stanley and his buddies had gone into a bakery, just like back home. Maybe that had been the same bakery the pastries had come from, though that was impossible, as Devon had said the whole village had been wiped out.

"If you really did come from back then," said Devon. "Or even if you didn't, maybe I could get you some help."

"For what?" asked Stanley.

"For the look on your face, the way you're remembering," said Devon. "I can see it in your eyes. I could find someone for you to talk to about it."

It was disconcerting to be looked at the way Devon was looking at him, in that focused way he had, but usually that had been when Stanley had mentioned something about the war. Now Devon was looking at him as though Stanley was what he was now studying, and wanted to take notes about.

"You don't believe me anyway," said Stanley.

"I might," said Devon. "Let's just assume that you are telling the truth, even though time travel is impossible—"

"Is that what happened to me?" asked Stanley, more stunned than he'd thought he could be because he'd not considered it in those terms. "I keep thinking I'm just a ghost or something that shouldn't exist."

"I don't know," said Devon. He shook the box at Stanley and made the pastries rattle. There were three pastries and a grease spot where the missing fourth one had been. Stanley wondered whether they would each have one and split the remaining one, the way he and Isaac had done when they'd gone into the bakery .

"Have one," said Devon. "Sugar is good for shock, they say."

Stanley took a pastry, the nearest one to be polite, and bit into it, sighing at the taste of the sugar and the tender feel of the flakes coated with frosting. He ate it quickly, and watched while Devon ate his slowly. Then he realized he was staring and looked away. He was only a little surprised when Devon picked up the last pastry, tore it and held one half out to Stanley.

"Come on," said Devon. "Help me eat this or I'll need a new pant size."

Devon laughed at his own joke, and Stanley tried to smile as he took the half of a pastry, but it was hard. Devon was like Isaac in some ways, but in most ways, he was different. He'd been so honest and open in admitting he was a homosexual, something Isaac never would have done, that it made Stanley want to be near Devon, to stay near him, and to talk until the sun came up.

But of course, they couldn't do that. Devon got up, laid his hand on Stanley's shoulder, and let it rest there, warm and heavy and solid.

"It's going to be okay," said Devon. "Whatever the truth is, it'll look better in the morning. I'll fix you up a bed on the couch, okay?"

Stanley looked up at Devon, who moved away. Stanley closed his eyes, thinking he'd much rather sleep where Devon was going to sleep. Where he'd be as safe as a bird in its nest, drowsy in the dark, hearing Devon's even, low breath, sweet as a lullaby.

It was exhaustion making him think this way; even if the whole world were homosexual—gay, as Devon put it—there wasn't a chance Stanley would have the courage to speak up, or that Devon might think that way about him. They'd just met, after all, and Devon thought that Stanley was either crazy or a liar, and neither was a good starting point.

Not to mention, Stanley felt wired and numb at the same time. As he got up from the table and pushed his chair back, he became dizzy. He had to stop right where he was, his hand on the chair back, the room growing dark and gray, speckled with white circles.

"Stanley, are you all right?" asked Devon, his voice coming from the darkness. In a moment, Devon was at his side. "You should sit down. Here, I've made up a bed, and left a glass of water on the end table. Here."

Stanley felt Devon's warm hands on him, and let himself be guided across the room. His vision began to clear, bit by bit, until he was standing next to the couch with Devon looking at him, his anxious eyes wide, and nothing but kindness in his expression.

Stanley reached out to clasp Devon's hand in both of his. He held Devon's hand for a good, long minute, using it like a lifeline, taking slow breaths to steady himself.

"Maybe I'll wake up and it'll be 1917. Or maybe I'll realize I'm not a ghost and didn't come through time, but I'm just a crazy person who knows too much about trenches and shell shock and what a head looks like when it's sliced through by shrapnel."

"Maybe," said Devon. "But you look ready to drop on your feet, so here—"

Devon guided Stanley to lie on the sheet that had been spread over the couch. Then, when Stanley's head sank into the pillow, Devon pulled another sheet and a soft, fluffy duvet over him.

"Do you want me to call someone?" asked Devon. "Do you want me to call a doctor? I'll do it right now, if you want me to."

"No," said Stanley. "Maybe if I get a good night's sleep."

Devon sat on the couch and took Stanley's hand. Stanley kept his eyes closed in case he was imagining their closeness.

"I think you're exhausted, regardless of anything else," said Devon. "But I want you to know that whatever happens, whatever the truth turns out to be, I'll help you. You can stay with me. I'll take you back to Colorado with me. We'll get you papers, whatever it takes, okay?"

Stanley sank into the moment. In his whole life, nobody had ever offered to help him the way Devon was offering. In his neighborhood back home, or in the army, you fended for yourself, you did for yourself. You pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. And yet here Devon was, being kind. Stanley had barged in on his life, and Devon had every reason to not believe him, to even be disdainful of Stanley's claims. But he hadn't, and he wasn't, and here he was making promises to be there for Stanley .

"Thank you," said Stanley, his voice coming out a half-whisper. "I'm sorry to be so much trouble, but I'm so tired."

"You should sleep," said Devon. He squeezed Stanley's hand, then laid it over Stanley's chest, and patted it. "I'm going to work a little more, but I'll be quiet. If you need anything, you just let me know, okay?"

"Okay," said Stanley, in such a small voice that he could barely hear himself in his own ears. He felt safe and warm and still, and if Devon were nearby, nothing bad could happen to him.

Before Devon had taken two steps towards the kitchen table, Stanley clutched his ID tag, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.