Free Here and Again by Nicole R Dickson Page A

both. I’d do both now if I could.” He smiled.
    “No regrets?”
    “I had a good life. I had fun. I worked. I loved. What’s to regret?”
    “So even though you are stuck in this bed with no chocolate, you wouldn’t change a thing.”
    “Not one minute.” He chuckled. “And I only got no chocolate right now.”
    Ginger squinted at him.
    “You gonna give me a dollar?”
    She shook her head.
    “I’m released tomorrow.”
    She grinned and turned to leave. “Well, Mr. Wolfe,” she said over her shoulder. “Find a candy bar with less salt. At least try to give one of your ailments a break while overloading the other. And before you leave, we’ll make sure your insulin levels are good, ’kay?”
    “I like Snickers.”
    Ginger chuckled and shook her head again.
    “Nurse Moon?”
    Ginger stopped and looked over her shoulder at him.
    “What was the tear?”
    She hadn’t even known she had a tear. She did, however, know why it was there and she also knew that she was a nurse and Mr. Wolfe a patient. She smiled and shook her head.
    “Ah, come on. You can tell me.”
    “No, I really can’t.”
    “Just me.” He looked around the room. “No one will know.”
    She looked into his chocolate brown eyes and thought that, even though he looked tired and drawn, his chest heaving from working so hard to breathe, his gaze was so awake.
    “It was my wrist you were holding, after all. Come on. I shared.”
    Ginger shrugged.
    “Come on,” he whispered. His eyes didn’t move.
    “I was just thinking—I was just hoping someone had hold of my husband’s wrist when his pulse stopped.”
    Jack leaned his head to the left. “I hope whoever held his wrist held it as tenderly as you did mine,” he replied.
    Me, too,
she mouthed and, flicking off his light, Ginger shut Jack’s door. Taking a deep breath, she headed back to the ER and slid next to Jacob’s gurney. He was shivering. Pulling out another warmed blanket from the cabinet, she laid it over the boy, tucking it under his legs and shoulders.
    “You need to go home, Jacob Esch,” she said softly.
    “I know, Captain. But I can’t,” he replied.

July 18, 1861
    Dear Juliette,
    A queersome feeling awoke me at dawn this day. It is July and spring has ridden away; her vibrant colors and new green leaves scattered in her wake. Now the world is turning deep, lush, and thick, as is the nature of summer in Virginia. Do you remember summers here? There were dances lit by a full moon and lightning bugs. I see you still in your pale blue dress as we spun around in a waltz for the first time. Are you remembered of the night we first met? Do summer nights in Sharpsburg hold the ebb of lightning bugs and the memory of our first dance not so long ago?
    The earth is always weighty as Virginia dons her summer shawl. Trees are heavy. Air is heavy. Yet I was light last night with the memory of you in my arms. But all levity vanished with the breaking day, for nothing should have been as heavy as it was this morning, which is what brought me from my blankets just before reveille.
    It had softly rained the night before, the mist of which stood like a ghostly wall all round. It neither rose nor fell, but simply hung as if waiting for us all to stand and crawl on top of it. The sky was violet-gray but the mist reflected no light and I stood in the silence. That is unusual since I am now always surrounded by my regiment but even their breath was still. And in that silence, I heard a solitary bird singing, if a song is what you could call it. The sound was less trill and more whistle, a punctuating sound inflected up as if it asked a question of me—the same short questionover and over. If I understood its language, perhaps I could have answered, but since I did not, I simply whistled back to it the same sound, the same question. As soon as I did so, the bird stopped and all was quiet and in that heavy stillness I heard someone calling my name. Not as if I was called to dinner or was