Read Home Leave: A Novel for Free Online Page B

all—but that had been limited to girls running across campus in shorts, paper bags over their heads to hide their identities from the dean. Elise had never joined in, but she did get kicked out of the talent show for singing “All You Need Is Love” in front of a map of Vietnam, which had brought a swift end to her phase of political activism. She contemplated telling Sandra about the road trips she’d taken with her band, Jericho!, with Elise as lead singer, but didn’t want to admit to her that it had been a Christian singing group, and she didn’t feel sober enough to lie convincingly about psychotropic drugs she’d never taken.
    During her Blue Mountain days, Elise would have seen Sandra as an “unsaved,” her naked body a cry for help. Elise would have felt her pulse rise, her eyes begin to warm with an empathetic glow, and she would have taken Sandra’s hand, walked with her to somewhere the two of them could sit alone, put a blanket around the woman’s narrow shoulders, and murmured to her about Christ’s unconditional love, His plan for Sandra, and Elise’s own journey. Next to singing, witnessing was one of Elise’s great talents. The other members of Jericho! had always teased her, claimed she could never last a Sunday service without responding to the preacher’s call to come forward and testify. But tonight Elise was drunk, and she didn’t feel the Holy Spirit; she felt tired and cold. As Sandra droned on, Elise held her cup out to a young man passing through the crowd with a bottle, and the secretive smile he gave her, as he filled her cup and toasted her with his own, felt as good as Communion ever had. After taking a long sip and looking around, marveling at her presence at such a party, Elise let out a wild, private giggle that made Sandra shut up and turn to her suspiciously. Elise suddenly felt a throbbing missing for Ivy, and threw her arms around Sandra’s bare frame, rubbing the woman’s bony, goose-bumped back before abruptly walking away.
    Driving home that night, Chris was wildly enthusiastic about the party and about Germany. Elise, already consumed by guilt for her drinking, wasn’t so sure. The next day, sitting by the same lake, with a picnic basket filled with cheese, bread, and a bottle of Prosecco, Chris had proposed. Elise had a flash of the party the night before, a terror that saying yes now would mean a life of debauchery and drunkenness and scant-to-no clothing. Then she looked at Chris, in his buttoned-up shirt, and the gently lapping lake, so innocent in noon light, and the kind diamond resting in red velvet, and acquiesced.
    *  *  *
    Elise’s child will arrive in three months, according to her gynecologist, Frau Liebmann. Drei Monate. Elise knows these are the last three months she will have to herself and that she should be relishing them somehow, according to the advice of women’s magazines, but instead she craves the baby’s arrival like the promised visit of a best friend. In Hamburg she knows only a few people; it is nothing like London, where she and Chris lived prior to moving here. And the people in German classes don’t count.
    Unfairly, the water is already cold. With her big toe, Elise turns the hot water faucet, then sinks lower and lower as steam rises from the surface, the way fog would sift over Wolf Lake, near Vidalia. She closes her eyes, slides deeper, although she must compromise for the melting mercy of bathwater covering her torso and stomach by sticking her knees out of the water in two Vs.
    Why had she agreed to this move, away from what she loved in London, where she and Chris had lived for the first two years of their marriage? Away from British dinner parties filled with wine and dripping wax and pork roasts and the tiniest, exhilarating hint of misbehavior—much more subtle, and thus more dangerous, more delicious, than German nakedness. Away from Elise’s best friend, Mina; away from stubborn, fragrant sprigs of lavender and the