Free Sirens by Janet Fox

my hands holding the package began to tremble. The pinched handwriting was Teddy’s.
    “Well, close enough, doll. I have no idea what’s inside. He made me promise not to look, and I owed him, so…” And she held up two fingers in the pledge gesture. “It’s yours now. To do with as you will,” she added, leaning toward me conspiratorially. “Because we both know about Teddy, now, don’t we?”
    My mouth felt like it was full of sand.
    “Okeydokey! Back to fun and games!” She looked at me straight in the eye and said, “So, whatcha think of him?”
    “Who?” I asked, my voice warbling. “Teddy?”
    “No, no, no. John. You know. Rushton.” She waved her free hand.
    Mean, I thought. Cold. Irritating. But I lied. “Oh. He’s, um…He’s, well, he’s nice enough.”
    She pointed her finger at my face, the glass in her hand. Fumes from the alcohol wafted to my nose. “Exactly. He’s a bore.” But her eyes shone. “But a nice bore, doncha think? There’s something kinda sweet about him. He’s all right. I mean…I don’t know what I mean.” She drifted out the door. I closed it behind her.
    I stared at the package for all of ten seconds before I ripped it apart to see what was inside.
    It was a journal. I sank onto the bed with the journal in my lap.
    Soft, worn leather, tied with a cord to keep the loose contents from spilling all over, the journal was about two inches thick. I ran my fingers over the cover, knowing that it must have been Teddy’s, knowing that he had left it for me. Left it for me, to be opened ayear after he’d disappeared. A year after I’d helped him fake his death, pretending to find his clothes on that Long Island beach, and said good-bye with the promise that he’d return.
    Was this journal what Danny Connor and my uncle and John Rushton wanted? Well. They wouldn’t have it from me.
    My hands shook as I tugged at the leather cord that tied it shut. I pulled the cord apart and leaned forward with the journal in my lap, and opened it.
    His tiny, cramped handwriting with the tight vertical slope tugged at my heart. Oh, Teddy. How I wanted him back right now. The journal was full and well used; every line was covered with print; the words and the writing were hard to make out. Most all of the pages were loose; I had to take care not to let the entire journal fall apart and scatter into a mess. Some of the sentences crawled up the margins; some had little stars and led to thoughts at the bottom. It would take me a long while to read the entire thing, to be able to decipher it.
    The first entry was dated just after he’d shipped out to France.
August 20, 1918
Off to fight in the noblest of causes…am both excited and nervous. Pops wants me to come home a hero. I just want to come home.
    The next few pages were, as near as I could make out, about arriving overseas, being assigned to his unit, learning where he’d be deployed. Then some waiting, and then Teddy and his troop were off, and then the following:
September 11
I lay in the dark trying to remember the sky at Lizzy’s. It was so big, so blue that summer. Here there’s nothing but gray, and rain. It rains every day. I’ve got foot-rot, and the medic has given me something for it. But Lizzy’s place, the ranch, it was so dry, and I want to remember how the dried-out grasses poked me in the back when I lay down on the earth and stared up at that blue. I sure wish I was there now.
Seventy-seventh. That’s my battalion. Hope it’s my lucky number, too.
    Lizzy’s. That was the summer he’d gone to Great-Aunt Elizabeth’s, out in Montana. I was way too little to know much about it. But he talked about it all the time, how he wanted to go back someday.
    The pages after that recounted his arrival at the front. They were filled with entries so grim that I felt sick. Entries that began when Teddy arrived in the field and what awful things he saw. More than once I skipped through the notes, picking up bits and pieces from