“I wish she didn't love that man so,” Elizabeth said to Clarke when she finally came to bed. He was so worried about Kate that he had waited up for his wife. “There's something between those two that frightens me.” She had seen it the year before in Joe's eyes, and she could see it now in Kate's. It defied reason and time and words, it was like a tie between their souls that even they did not understand. And what frightened Kate's mother now was if the tie proved to be unseverable by death as well. It would be a terrible fate for Kate.
Kate was silent and grim at the breakfast table the next day, and any attempt to speak to her went ignored. She said nothing to either of them, drank only a cup of tea, and then drifted back upstairs like a ghost. She stayed home from school, and for the rest of the weekend, never left her room. Fortunately, she only had one more week of school, before the Christmas break.
But on Sunday night, she dressed and went back to Radcliffe, and never even said goodbye to them. She was like a disembodied soul. She spoke to no one in the house, and when Beverly came to say hello to her and ask if she'd been sick over the weekend, Kate never told her that Joe's plane had been shot down. She couldn't bring herself to say the words, and she cried herself to sleep every night.
Everyone in the house at Radcliffe knew something had happened to her, and it was several days later that someone saw a small article in the newspaper that he had been shot down. Military Intelligence had decided to keep it as low key as they could, so as not to demoralize people at home. They said he was missing in action, and the newspaper was noticeably vague. But it told them all they needed to know. All the girls in her house knew that Joe Allbright had visited Kate.
“I'm sorry…,” some of them whispered as they passed her in the hall. And all she could do was nod and look away. She looked terrible, lost weight, and she looked tired and ill when she went home for the Christmas break. And all her mother's efforts to comfort her were in vain. All Kate wanted was to be left alone, as she waited for news of Joe.
She asked her father to call his contact in Washington again before the holidays, but there was no further news. There had been no sign of Joe, and no word through underground sources. The Germans had not reported capturing him, and in fact had denied it when they were asked. No one identified by the name on his papers had surfaced anywhere. And if they knew they had captured Joe Allbright, they would have said so and counted it as a real victory against the Allies. And no one had seen him escape, or alive since he'd gone down. There was no sign of him anywhere.
There was no Christmas for any of them that year. Kate hardly did any Christmas shopping, didn't want any gifts from them, took forever to open the ones she got, and spent most of her time in her room. All she could do was think of him, where he was, what had happened to him, if he was still alive, if she would ever see him again. She thought constantly of the times they had, and she regretted even more bitterly now having lost the baby they had conceived the year before. She was inconsolable and unreachable, she hardly ever slept anymore, and she was rail thin.
She scoured the newspapers for some word of him, but her father had already assured her that they would be called before anything more appeared in the press. And he suspected that there would never be. He had probably been dead for weeks by then, and was lying somewhere in Germany in a shallow grave. To Kate, the thought of it nearly drove her insane. It was as though part of her very being had been cut away, or some deep internal piece of her that she didn't even know was there had been gouged out. She either lay on her bed, staring at the wall, or paced her room at night, feeling like she was about to explode out of her own skin, and nothing helped. She even got drunk one night, and her parents said nothing to her about it the next day. They were desperate, and had never seen anyone as grief-stricken. She was keening for him, and nothing was going to help her now except time.
When she went back to school, she failed an exam for the first time. Her advisor called her in, and asked if something had happened over the holidays. Kate looked terrible, and in a strangled voice she explained that a close friend of hers had been shot down on a mission over Germany. At least it explained her grades. The woman expressed her sympathy, and hoped that Kate would feel better soon. She was very kind and very sweet, she had lost her own son in Salerno the previous year. But nothing anyone said to her offered any solace to Kate. And when she wasn't feeling devastated, she was consumed with rage, at the Germans, at the fates, at the man who had shot him down, at him for letting it happen to him, at herself for loving him so much. She wanted to be free of it, but she knew nothing would ever free her of him. It was too late.
And when Andy saw her after she got back from Christmas break, at first he felt sorry for her, and then he scolded her. He told her she was feeling sorry for herself, that she always knew it could happen to him. And in Joe's case it could have happened anytime, anywhere, while he did death-defying stunts in planes, aerobatics, or raced. Thousands of other women were in the same boat she was in. She and Joe weren't married, they didn't have kids, she wasn't even engaged. But what Andy said to her only made her furious with him.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? You sound like my mother. Do you think a ring on my finger would make any difference to me? It wouldn't mean a goddamn thing to me, Andy Scott, and it wouldn't change what happened to him. Why is everyone so obsessed with social rituals? Who gives a damn? He's probably in some goddamn awful prison camp being tortured for what he knows. Do you think a ring on my finger would make a difference to them? Of course not. And it wouldn't to Joe. It wouldn't have made him love me more, or me love him more. I don't care about the ring,” she started to sob, “I just want him to come home.” She folded into Andy's arms like a broken doll.
“He's not going to, Kate,” Andy said as he held her, while she sobbed. “You know that. The chances that he'll come home are a million to one.” If that.
“It could happen. Maybe he'll escape.” She refused to let hope die.
“Maybe he's dead,” Andy said, trying to force her to face the truth. More likely than not, he was. Kate knew it too, but she didn't want to hear it from anyone. She couldn't face it yet. “Kate, I can only imagine how hard it is, but you have to get over this. You can't let it tear you apart.” The worst thing was she had no choice. She was doing the best she could, but she was drowning in her fears for him, her own sense of panic and loss. She had no idea how she was going to exist if he was gone. And yet, even at her worst, she had an inexplicable sense that he was still alive. It was as though there were a part of her that hadn't let go of him yet, and she wondered if she ever would. She felt bound to him for life.
She and Andy went to dinner at the cafeteria, and he forced her to eat. And that weekend he insisted that she come to watch him at a swimming meet against MIT. She actually had a good time, in spite of herself, and forgot her miseries for a short while. And everyone was excited when Harvard won.
She waited for him afterward, and they went out to eat, and then he took her back to the house. She looked better than she had a few days before, and he felt sorry for her when she told him that she'd had a dream about Joe. She was convinced he was still alive, and Andy was sure her mind was playing tricks on her. She wasn't willing to accept the possibility that he had died when he was shot down.