AFTER

AFTER THE MIRRORS WERE COVERED AND CLOTHES WERE torn, after Father took out his grandfather’s ancient prayer book and began to pray relentlessly, after Mother had been carted off the train from Karlsbad and inserted back in her old feather bed as if for all those seasons of taking the waters she had merely been taking a nap, after Father stopped praying and drained six bottles of wine before sending word to Julius in Breslau and Alfred in France, Eva finally rose from the corner of Father’s study where she had been sewing and sewing—if only for an excuse to prick herself with a needle—and excused herself, making her way toward Henriette’s bedroom, Henriette’s bed. She lay down beneath her sister’s sheets, inhaled the orange-water, sourbread, violet smell, and understood the fact that she would maintain this shame for the rest of her life. This shame wasn’t going anywhere and if she was to keep breathing day in and day out, she would need to make some room. It would be living undiluted inside her now, inside her heart and bones.

They knew nothing. They all knew nothing but Eva became convinced that somehow, in some way, they did. She could not speak for two full days, but on the third day she looked into her sister’s gilt-painted vanity mirror and said, “I am sorry.” She smeared the glass with her fingers and said it again. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.” Her hands pawed at her appalling reflection as the words I am sorry were like knives on the tongue. She wished she could say it to the rooms full of mourners; she wished for that sharp pain again and again, but she knew that to articulate her guilt would be, beyond anything, selfish. Her parents stood at risk of losing not one child but two, and only she possessed the power to contain their loss.

And she knew there was no end to I am sorry, to this small, incessant sentence. There was nowhere it could possibly go.