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It takes a few years, but they do it: they manage to end up in Louisiana after the war.
Eugene was the first one to make it south. Babe follows suit, after some weeks of correspondence, and moves down there. Well, he doesn’t move. He’d get hell for that, if he left home, but he says he needs to go down there a while, to visit, to clear his head, and people don’t question that. Not much.
Babe and Eugene are permanent, however temporary that permeance may seem, just in a little place a ways away from New Orleans: down a couple dirt roads and around a bunch of swampy bends is all Babe’s gonna remember about the directions Gene gave him—where the neighbors can’t see each other through the trees or hear them for the distance between them.
He splits his time between Philly and Gene’s place. Namely, he doesn’t spend any more of the winter than Christmas and New Years with his family. The wind, the snow, the bite of it all—it makes him clench his teeth. When he goes down south, he’s relieved when he has to start shedding his layers.
Eugene and Babe are comfortable, but, at one point, Babe says, “so, are we ever gonna talk about Renée, or—”
They’re smoking in the kitchen, in February, and Babe’s due back in Philly in a week’s time. Eugene frowns, not looking at him, and Babe kicks him under the table. Lightly, of course, but it gets Eugene’s attention nonetheless.
Babe doesn’t want to say it, but it’s been nearly a year, and they’ve both been thinking about it.
The house is too goddamn empty. The two of them can’t fill it, no matter how hard they try to. It’s just not right. They miss her; she’s become a ghost that only visits them in letters. In Eugene’s dreams, the church collapses on top of her and Babe’s dead on the snowy ground. In Babe’s dreams, Eugene has been blown away by German artillery and when a girl turns around, it’s never her.
“You wrote her, right? Last month.”
“Haven’t gotten one letter back.” His drawl is thick in the early morning. The sun’s not up yet; neither of them slept well during the night.
“She’s all the way in France. Of course it’s gonna take a while to get a letter over here.” Babe leans back in his chair. “I bet you my Lucky Strikes that she’ll write an’ she’ll say she’s comin’ over.”
Eugene smiles at that. “The pack on the table, or the pack you ain’t tellin’ me about?”
“I have my methods, Gene,” he says like he’s taken offence, “don’t doubt me here.”
“I never said I was.”
Sure enough, a letter comes four weeks later. It finds Eugene alone in the house after the sun goes down. He’s thumbing through the letters that came in—one from Babe, a few others from Spina—when he catches it. With great care, he opens it and slides the letter out.
Her French is mixed in with English, the scrawl light and flowing, and he puts it with the rest her letters that have a place of their own on a shelf in the bedroom. Babe will want to see it for himself when he comes down again.
Babe was right. Eugene never doubted it, but he smiles so wide it’s a wonder his lips don’t split.
About a month later, Babe comes down, sees the letter for himself, and says, “told ya’ so, didn’t I, Gene?” He’s got that look on his face as he’s pulling out a cigarette to light it by the sink.
“Shut up, Heffron,” Eugene tells him, but they’re both smiling, both blooming, their eyes dancing in the dim light of early evening.
Renée saves up and makes plans to leave Europe. It takes a long while, but Eugene’s a reasonably patient man, and, while Babe’s really not, he’s got no choice but to sit tight, too.
She arrives in Louisiana at the end of summer. The three of them have gone without correspondence for two weeks, but that’s all right: she’s got directions an address from Eugene and direction from Babe, and they’re expecting her anyway. She told them what train she planned on taking, so they know when to expect her when she steps out into the humid air, it’s like half-inhaling water, she thinks, and then she sees them: out of uniform, but very much alive and in the flesh: Babe Heffron and Eugene Roe, walking towards her. Their eyes, she thinks, could have put the sun’s reflection on the water to shame.
It takes time to readjust, to reconnect since they’re so close together in such a small house after such a long time being spent apart from each other. No one sleeps the first night: they’re in the bedroom, on the floor, looking at each other with fast-blinking eyes.
Renée wonders if they dreamt her. She knows she dreamt them. Eugene and Babe, swallowed up by the blood and the war and the dying bodies in the basement of the church. She’s seen them shot in the throat and her hands, caked in blood, frozen-down-to-the-bone numb, can’t save them, can’t even ease their passing.
The rising sun finds them that morning in the kitchen, silent, exhausted, but at ease. For the first time in a long time, Renée doesn’t feel like she’s alone. For the first time ever, Babe feels like the house is finally full. For the first time since that moment in the bombed-out church back in Bastogne, Eugene feels warmth lighting pathways under his skin, threading blue and gold through him.
While Babe and Eugene are smoking, Renée asks from the hall, “you kept my letters?”
“Sure did,” Babe says breezily, not looking up from the scratches on the tabletop.
“All of them?”
Eugene’s looking at the both of them softly.
Renée’s not saying anything, but her shining eyes speak for her.
There’s love in there. All of them can feel it. It’s like she brought her own springtime with her, and her hands—
At night, she allows Eugene to examine her hands. Sometimes she still thinks there’s blood dried under her nails. It’s odd, feeling his fingers touch hers, carefully, like she might break, but, in this moment, if she’s glass, then she’s a thing cutting into this new world, bit by bit, edging through fabric while avoiding any causation of injury, and the young men in front of her are porcelain.
Here’s the thing: they’re each a bit chipped and faded from the war, but they begin to put each other back together, piece by piece. Babe leans forward and lets his lips brush her cheek. Eugene’s still holding her hands, gazing intently down at them, and she’s full, full, full.
Around midnight, they fall asleep in Eugene’s room, at odd angles that leave them tangled when they wake while it’s still dark out, but all three of them blink awake, coming out of a dark, heavy sleep.
Renée kisses both of them both on the forehead head, and goes back to sleep, curling deeper into the bedsheets. When they wake up, the sun is shining, and the world is full of the kind of light that she can only imagine came from her heart becoming two halves joined together again.
It's the first time she wakes up without tasting snow and blood on her tongue. She wonders if this is what being a little bit closer to becoming as whole as she'll ever be feels like. When she looks at Babe and Eugene in the morning light, she thinks it just might be.