"In times of war, you do what you must, become what you must. Some embrace it, some try to resist it, and others abuse it. I am guilty of all three."
Virginia Carroll has been fighting her whole life, against herself and against what she is drawn to...
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December 7th, 1941.
I didn't think that my world would change that day. The broadcast marked the beginning of a war that I was told would never come. I was promised that fighting would never be in my future so the lessons had seemed needless. Dad had been insistent, since I was a young girl, that I would never see the horror of war. And when Allen Carroll spoke, God listened. His words were stronger than the law and his wishes almost guaranteed. But Dad must not have prayed hard enough for me. A war in December, when the streets were dusted with snow and the storefronts were red and green. No one could think of a war in December, no matter what brewed in Europe and the horizon.
December was the one month of the year that both of my parents inhabited the same city for more than a few days. Miriam would return from whatever hole in the alleyways and underground of the city she had invaded that week to the place I called home and she rarely rested her head. Dad would drag his black Ford into the driveway, parking it for longer than three days, dusty with the roads he had seen. My birthday, having just passed wasn't cause for such an occasion but the anniversary of something darker brought them back to Chicago and together.
My mother carried many burdens, weighing down her forehead and lining her cheeks, but she never breathed a word of their weight. She didn't drop them, resting her shoulders and mind, save one night of the year. The sixth day of December would find Miriam at the kitchen table, a cup of mint tea in her hand. She would sit there late into the night, long after the steam had stopped curling around her face. Dad would sit with her and I would sit on the stairs, watching their shadows flicker on the wall.
It was a ritual, a dance, and the one reprieve I had from the usual demeanor of my mother: stoic, sharp, and commanding. The one night where the lights of the kitchen would ease the lines on her face and make her seem younger, nearly erasing the scar that split her face into the two separate identities that very few knew lurked beneath. Even when Miriam had taken her desk job in the Chicago office and became a more prominent feature in my late childhood, she wouldn't crack the mask. She couldn't, save that one night. It was a ritual that I knew, after seventeen years of the same song and dance.
The morning would dawn, cold and smoky, the candles left burning in the kitchen long since extinguished by the wax. Dad would be waiting at the foot of the stairs with a cup of coffee that I really shouldn't have learned to drink dark and bitter so young and we would sit together, looking over Miriam slumped at the table. This December 6th had fallen on a Saturday and, out of habit and no religious obligation on my part, I put on the dress that wouldn't earn me glowers from the elder members and accepted the coffee as usual.
"Good morning," I muttered to Miriam whose shoulders were still slumped but her head was lifted from the wood of the table. I wracked my brain, trying to remember if this was normal behavior for December 7ths. It wasn't. This was new.
"You've been keeping up with your German?" Miriam asked. No good morning. Just straight to business.
