Page 39 of Walking Wounded

Will put his arm around Finn’s shoulders, felt the fine tremors of suppressed emotion.

“Will, I want to go to war,” he whispered, fierce and heartbroken. “I want tokillthem.”

“You can’t,” Will reasoned, as gentle as possible. “There’s too many of them.”

“Just watch me.” He reached into his pants pocket and came out with his father’s knife. “Watch me.”

The snow whispered against the window. Finn took deep, ragged breaths, shoulders heaving beneath Will’s arm. They sat like that for long moments as the somber party shifted and talked in low tones below them.

“You wanna go outside?” Will asked finally. “You can borrow my coat.”

Finn dashed his hand beneath his nose and nodded.

They crept quietly down the stairs and went the long way around to the kitchen and the covered porch beyond. Finn was able to wear Will’s snow boots from last year, and they bundled themselves into coats and scarves and hats pulled low over their ears.

Outside, the topography of the garden lay buried under a soft layer of white, a treacherous obstacle course that they navigated with the effortless grace of boys used to climbing and leaping. The field stretched before them as a tidy white blanket. They turned back at intervals to marvel at their boot prints in the virgin snow. Fat flakes sifted down in drifts, like when their mothers dusted cakes with powdered sugar – of course that had been before the war, and rationing. The cakes inside for the funeral goers didn’t have any sugar on them, or maybe not even in them. But here…just the two of them…the world was made entirely of sugar. And Finn, no matter his sadness, wasn’t immune to the magic.

He flung his head back suddenly, mouth open to catch snowflakes, and let out a roar of a laugh.

Will tipped his head up to the sky, tasted the sharp cold on his tongue, and watched his breath plume like smoke.

They spun in crazy circles until they fell down, laughing, too-warm beneath their coats. Will felt the prickle and itch of sweat sliding down his spine.

“You think they have snow in France?” Finn asked, still breathing hard. “You think James got to see snow one last time?”

Will found his friend’s gloved hand with his own and laced their fingers together awkwardly. “I know he did,” he said, with feeling, and Finn murmured an approving sound.

May 1947

Finn met Leena when they were fourteen, but didn’t ask her out until they were sixteen. She frightened the hell out of Will.

Eileen Chambers was a woman where they were boys. At sixteen, she was always completely put together: flattering dresses and skirts, hair in perfect victory rolls, makeup flawless. She was built like a woman, and she walked like a woman, and she had a mysterious little smile she canted at Finn sometimes that put a matching smile on Finn’s face, the sort of expression Will neither understood nor wielded himself.

Because Will didn’t understand her, because she spooked him, he wanted to dislike her. He really did. But she was too sweetnotto like. Too sweet for Finn in all reality.

“All I’m saying is, I woulda been the best fighter pilot,” Finn said, stirring his milkshake with his straw, that fevered look in his eyes again. He’d ordered an extra cherry on top, and he was going to waste the thing making ice cream soup, overcome by one of his bursts of patriotic excitement.

“I’m sure you would have,” Leena said, her voice both soothing and indulgent. That’s what she always said in response to Finn’s declarations of greatness, and she always smiled and shook her head a little, like oh boy, here he goes again. But she always looked on him with obvious fondness, like now. “The very best.” She plucked the second cherry from his shake and popped it in her mouth with a conspiratorial wink across the table at Will.

Will felt himself blush, and felt it go all the way to the tips of his ears.

“So, Will,” Leena said to change the subject. “We know what fly boy here wants to do after graduation.”

Finn made an offended noise.

“What about you? You got any plans?”

“Oh, uh…” He hated that he couldn’t talk to girls without choking up like an idiot, but, well, there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it. “Georgetown, probably. Like Dad.”

Leena nodded and gave him an encouraging smile. “That sounds perfectly lovely. Perfectly responsible,” she said, and turned to give Finn a meaningful look.

“Why do you gotta look at me when you say that?” Finn asked, affronted, but there was a grin tugging at his mouth.

Leena shrugged. “I’m just making an observation is all.”

“That’s what does it for you? Responsible?” he teased. “Maybe you oughta marry Will, then, doll, because I don’t even know what responsible looks like.”

A lie: responsible looked like his three little sisters whom he still bounced on his knee, and a father he had to heave out of his chair and up the stairs each night, and a frazzled mother he kissed on the forehead and called beautiful just to win a bare smile out of her. Leena knew all of that, but she played along, rolling her eyes.

---