PART 2: FIFTY YEARS OF SILENCE
For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of the words.
“Alive?”
Daniel nodded.
I asked where Thomas had been found, how long he’d been missing, whether he had been imprisoned.
Daniel answered slowly. Thomas had survived an aircraft failure, been captured, and held prisoner until he was released in 1973 with other American servicemen.
“Then why wasn’t I told?”
Daniel hesitated.
“I don’t know. He told us you lost touch after the war.”
“Lost touch?”
“That’s what he said.”
I stared at Daniel.
“How did you find me?”
“Granddad kept your college picture. He remembered your town. I found a school newsletter with your retirement interview, then an article about your memorial visits.”
“How did you know I’d be here today?”
“The article named the memorial and said you visited every year on his birthday. This is the closest airport, and there’s only one arrivals exit. I didn’t know which flight you’d take, so I came early.”
“And you recognized me?”
“There was a recent picture of you in the retirement interview.”
I looked at the photograph again.
Thomas had kept it all these years.
“Does your grandfather know you’re here?”
“Yes. He asked me to bring you to him.”
I waited for more.
Daniel lowered his eyes.
“He’s very sick.”
I thought about all the years I had waited for someone to tell me Thomas was coming home.
Now a stranger was telling me he’d been home for decades.
“Did Thomas send you because he was too frightened to face me himself?” I asked.
Daniel shifted uncomfortably.
“He said you’d be happy to see him. That you’d both lost so much time.”
“Did he ask whether I’d married? Whether I had children?”
“No. He mostly wanted to know if you still visited the memorial.”
I looked past him at the people embracing their loved ones near the exit.
“I need to call my sister.”
I phoned Ruth from the airport.
“Thomas is alive,” I said.
She went silent.
Then, very quietly, “Eleanor, are you safe?”
I laughed. It was an awful sound.
“I don’t know.”
Ruth begged me to come home. I told her I needed answers first.
Before we left, I asked Daniel for his full name, his phone number, and the address where he was taking me. I sent everything to Ruth.
Daniel drove me to a house forty minutes away. On the way, he told me Thomas had married a nurse named Margaret. They’d had two children, one of them Daniel’s mother. Margaret had died three years earlier.
“Did he remember me?”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“Yes.”
“Did he ever mention me to your mother?”
“Not until recently.”
I turned toward the window.
Daniel seemed to sense that I didn’t want to hear anything more about his grandfather.
The house had flowers lining the walkway and a wooden sign reading GRANDPA’S PLACE.
Thomas sat beside the window with a blanket over his knees.
He was eighty, with thin white hair and trembling hands. But I knew his eyes.
“Eleanor,” he said.
I had imagined hearing my name in his voice a thousand times.
None of those imagined moments included another woman’s family photographs on the walls.
He reached toward me.
I stayed standing.
“Tell me when you came home.”
He glanced at Daniel.
“Could you give us a moment?”
“No,” I said. “He brought me here. He can hear the answer.”
Thomas swallowed.
“1973.”
I did the math in a heartbeat.
“You’ve been home more than fifty years.”
“I have.”
“Did you try to contact me?”
His face tightened.
“At first, I meant to.”
I waited.
He explained in broken pieces. After his release, he spent months recovering in a military hospital. Margaret was a nurse there. She stayed after her shifts and listened when he couldn’t sleep.
“She understood what I’d survived,” he said.
“Did you tell her about me?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
He looked toward a photograph on the mantel.
“She became pregnant and I proposed.”
I sat down so my legs wouldn’t give out.
“So you decided not to come back.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“Did anyone forbid you from writing?”
“No.”
“Were you unable to use a telephone?”
“Eleanor, please.”
“Answer me.”
“No.”
“Then it would have been simple enough to send one letter.”
Thomas wiped his eyes.
“I thought you’d hate me.”
“I might have, but at least I wouldn’t have spent my life waiting for someone who had no intention of coming home.”
He said he had written letters he never mailed. He assumed I must have married someone else by then. The longer he waited, the harder it became.
“I couldn’t bear to ruin the life I’d built,” he admitted.
I looked at him.
“So you let me keep mourning, for 50 years.”
He began to cry.
But there was still something I didn’t understand.
“Your parents knew you came home. They knew where I lived. Why didn’t they tell me?”
Thomas stared at his hands.
“They were notified when I was released. You weren’t listed as my next of kin.”
“That doesn’t explain why they never called me.”
He looked away.
“I told them I’d written to you.”
“And?”
“That you knew I was alive. That you’d told me not to contact you again.”
