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“Paige Williams harbored a restless kinship with the living dead. Sleep, that nurturing, blessed state of subconsciousness, eluded her again this night. Almost 2:00 a.m., and rather than slumbering bliss, old memories nibbled at her like ragged-toothed wraiths.
With a defeated sigh she rose from the bed.
Wrapped in a large towel, she moved through the darkened house, bare feet faintly scuffling across worn wood floors. Out of her room and down a short hall, passing the second bedroom—barren and needing to be filled—and the one bathroom, into the small kitchen.”
Noah looked like his father, and she hadn't seen it before. But here in the backseat of a van strewn with skateboarding magazines and CDs, there was time enough to see it in the young man whose long legs stretched from the seat. To see the freckles dusting her grandson’s cheeks, the way his hair poked like a hayfield and his eyes grabbed at everything.
Up front, Oliver asked Shane to adjust the radio, the static reminding Clara of the white noise she used to make with a vacuum or a fan to calm her newborns. The first one being Shane, her eldest, the one in the passenger seat turning now to laugh at his father, who wrinkled his long nose as Shane tried to find a classical station. Then, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Clara could see Oliver smiling, pleased, and she remembered the way he’d looked over at her in church so long ago with the same expression: as though he’d finally found what he’d been looking for.
Noah was playing a game on one of those Nintendo machines. He noticed her watching him, said, “Do you want to give it a try, Grandma?” He looked so eager. Gone were the days of Hardy Boys and marbles.
“Sure!” Clara said, mustering enthusiasm as she took the tiny gadget. Then she saw what he was playing. Some kind of shooting game with uniformed men and guns and she nearly dropped it. “I’m sorry, it’s too complicated for an old woman like me,” she said, handing it back and turning to stare out the window, at Maryland passing by, wondering what a kid in high-school could know about war.
They were taking the George Washington Memorial Parkway, one of Clara’s favorite drives, which would carry them from her home-state into Mount Vernon, Virginia. They were just passing through Glen Echo, north of Washington, DC. And Clara remembered the story her Daddy had told her on one of their summer holidays about the woman who’d spent the last 15 years of her life here. Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, who tirelessly provided aid to wounded troops during the Civil War, and she had dedicated her life to serving those in need, Daddy said.
That was when Clara—only eight years old at the time—had decided she would do the same. After all, this woman shared her name.
“Something wrong, Grandma?” Noah said, then. Shane turned in the front seat. His green eyes met hers, and it seemed only yesterday she had brought him home wrapped in that quilt—the one cleaned, pressed, and folded, sitting in the trunk of their Caravan.
Shane’s eyebrows rose and Clara shrugged, feeling cold in her white cardigan even though it was late May. It had been 50 years. “Fifty years,” she said, more to herself than anything, and the van was quiet. She’d had these moments before, many of them. Moments that landed her in the past, amongst broken and dead bodies, for there hadn't been enough beds in Normandy.
Oliver peered at her now, too, in the rear-view, through his glasses, and she should give his hair a trim, she thought. It sprouted silver around his ears, and when had her soldier-husband aged? At what point between them marrying and adopting Shane and giving birth to two others had his hair turned gray?
Noah was tucking the game away, now, saying, “I don’t need to play this right now. What are you thinking about, Grandma?”
And she wiped at her eyes, moist, and cleared her throat and told herself to smarten up. It was 23 hours to New Orleans, where they planned to visit the National World War II Museum, and she should make the most of the time she had with this boy who knew nothing of the miracle of the quilt in the trunk. Who knew nothing of loss, and this was good. But there is a need for history to plant itself in the hearts of its children. And so she began.