Don't Wait for Me

Her head swiveled around the room, talking to all of us. "What can I say, it was the war years; we were young, and we knew he might never come back, and I wanted to have his babies," she said, grinning happily at Beth, before looking back at me, her grin disappearing into a more somber look. "And he never did -- until now." She released my hand, taking it back to hold and look at the picture two handed for a moment.

"He asked me to marry him, but we didn't have enough money for a ring. We were going to wait to tell everyone once we got the ring. He figured we'd have enough saved up by January, so we said if he didn't get shipped out first, we'd get married on Valentine's Day." She paused in her tale, obviously tired, but I suspected also reliving the memory again. Moments later she continued, "The last thing he ever said to me was the night before he left. He was walking to the bus to go back to base; he turned around, pointed his finger at me and winked and said "Don't wait for me!" Her reminiscing done, we all just sat quietly for a moment.

"You never married?" I asked. "You were Miss Shaw when you were my teacher."

"I still am Miss Shaw." She shook her head, "No, somehow getting married never felt right." She paused for a few moments, and then continued. "I could have. I didn't date anyone seriously for years; I kept feeling like Jimmy was going to come back some day. I dated some guys in college, but every time they started getting serious I broke it off. One of the other teachers and I saw each other for a few years before Beth went off to college, but he took it pretty hard when he asked me to marry him and I turned him down." She shook her head sadly, "he never understood."

"Understood what, Mom?"

"He never understood that I'd already found my true love, and it wasn't him. I cared for him a lot; he was a great lover -- but I could never love him."

"Mom!" Beth interjected again, glancing at me, to see my reaction. I just kept looking at Liz Shaw.

"Beth, I'm an old lady, and I don't care what anyone thinks anymore. I never pretended to be a nun, just a single woman." Beth obviously had more trouble with the discussion than I did. "And of course, Robert asked me to marry him too, but he understood. We moved in together and lived together for almost 30 years, until he died, almost 10 years ago." Turning to me, she passed the story back. "How did you find my Jimmy?"

I told her the story, as unbelievable as it seemed; about how I'd found the plane, returned and called for help and that when we got back, on what had seemed to me to be the following day, everything had changed -- but somehow she knew that. She accepted the rest of the tale at face value, up until I told her it was just by chance that I was in Victorville at all. I explained the chain of coincidences over the last few hours that had brought me here, to her bedside, when she reached back over with her hand and put it on the back of mine.

"Oh now, you really don't believe that do you?" I stopped and looked her in the face. She smiled and patted my hand understandingly. "Some things you just can't explain -- so don't try." Her eyes closed for a moment, obviously tired. I started to remove my hand from hers, but she gripped down on it, keeping me there. Her eyes opened, but she was looking past me, past all of us, to some place far away where only she could see. Her gaze shifted to me, her focus pulling back to the here and now. "Thank you, Terry. Thanks for bringing my Jimmy back to me. You don't need to worry, there's nothing wrong with your plane." Her gaze shifted to her daughter, then to the rest of us. "We were going to get married on St. Valentine's Day, 70 years ago tomorrow. I always felt that somehow he'd come back to me, but I guess now maybe it's him that's waiting for me."

~

She was right about the plane. I'd just spent two hours watching as the mechanic had tested the plane, found nothing wrong, and then proceeded to tear the magneto apart anyway -- only to find nothing wrong. He was just putting it back together when my cell phone rang. It was Beth, she was crying. At first I couldn't even comprehend that it was Beth that I was talking with, but once I figured out who it was, I knew what had happened before she told me.

She was found in her bed, one hand holding Jimmy's picture to her chest - the other beside her as if she was holding someone's hand, a smile on her face. Lizzie Warshawski died peacefully in her sleep, sometime in the early morning hours of St. Valentine's Day on what would have been her 70th wedding anniversary. Lizzie and Jimmy were finally together again, her long wait was over.