The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

85: The Ghosts

Charlie shook her head. "Dutch civilians, actually. I don't know if you ever met Trigger the dog?"

"Heard about him," Vest told her. He held out a hand for the envelope and she passed it over, all the while she realised she should probably write another letter to her own parents. The last one she'd written had been in Foy, just after they'd left the Bois Jacques, and it had been filled with doom and gloom even though she'd tried her best to keep it light. It simply hadn't been possible to keep any of that light. But now she knew she should update them to let them know she was back on R&R and still in one piece, even if that piece was a little more hollow than it had been before.

"Well, that's everything," Charlie said as Vest put the letter into the appropriate pile. "I'll see you."

"Yeah," Vest agreed, nodding, avoiding her eyes.

Charlie turned and headed for the door, all too eager to leave, before Vest tentatively called her back.

It took a moment for her to turn around. For a split second she debated pretending she hadn't heard him, but that would have been ridiculous and rude because the room was small and he'd spoken loudly enough that it would have been obvious she'd heard, so she turned back to face him.

"I wanted to apologise," Vest said, taking Charlie genuinely by surprise. "For what I said in Haguenau." The expression on his face betrayed that he really did feel guilty about it and that he'd been fretting about it ever since. "I didn't mean any of it but I'm still sorry for saying it. You didn't deserve that and I hope you know that none of it was true."

Charlie didn't know what to say. She should thank him and accept his apology, she knew, but she was too stunned by the earnestness of it.

"You do incredible work and I admire you a whole lot, and I'm ashamed I ever said anything to contradict that. I'm really sorry, Lieutenant."

Charlie took a moment to look back at him as he stood there, his hands fluttering for something to occupy themselves with and his eyes remorseful, before she sighed. "I accept your apology," she told him, and gave him a whisper of a smile. "It was a lot, what happened that night, so don't blame yourself too much. I'm not losing sleep over it, so neither should you."

Vest nodded and the expression of anguish on his face finally eased, though as Charlie bid him goodbye and made for the door again she couldn't help but become conscious once more of the leaden weight in her stomach, always present and waiting to be acknowledged. What she'd told Vest hadn't been entirely true; she was losing sleep over what had happened in Haguenau, though not really because of him. She had just added it to her collection of memories which haunted her, added Eugene Jackson's blood streaked face to the portraits that lined the hallways of her mind, his ghost joining all of the others in the periphery of her vision.

Increasingly, she saw the ghosts everywhere. This time she hadn't even been safe from them in Paris. As she'd walked the Champs-Élysées at night, her arm linked with Mabs' as she tried to keep from both grinning and cringing at the memory of the time she'd been there with Floyd, she'd caught glimpses of faces in dark shop windows as they closed up for the night: the man with the baby on Utah Beach, James, Hoobler, Skip, Alex, Jackson - all of them watched her every move, but all of them vanished the instant she turned her head to face them head on.

Sometimes she wished they'd let her look at them properly. She wanted to see James' face in motion again, worried constantly that with each passing day she was forgetting the gradual brightening of his eyes as he was about to laugh, or the deepening of his dimples. And she wanted to watch Skip and Alex grin at each other, or slap each other upside the head, or even just stand there opposite her in such a way where she could pretend they were still alive, still close, still there when she needed them.