WEST

THERE WERE NINE PASSENGERS IN THE STAGECOACH from Apache Pass. They’d all managed to eat the by-now-expected station grub of bacon, beans, potatoes, hardtack, and coffee, and were set to head off once more into the dry heat. Outside it was springtime, but inside the coach, with eight other warm bodies (plus Henriette), it was summer. Since she’d come on board in Mesilla (with her name restored to Eva Frank—who knew how far Abraham’s debts ran?), this coach had stopped at a number of stations, exchanging old faces for new ones, and usually, as the stage left the station, she was too tired and uncomfortable to feel much more than the immediate and frustrated desires for sleep and clean air, but this time she had an onset of panic and guilt as the carriage jolted from side to side in its efforts to move forward. She was also tempted (as she was during countless times in the day) to open the letter and the crate.

Every now and then, their existence introduced the kind of silvery thrill she had thought these past months would have surely put an end to. Unopened, unexamined, the content went unproven, and in this secreted state could continue to exude sheer promise. The crate was a plain-clothes deity, capable of transmogrification: Inside could be bottles of French champagne; a valise full of money; detailed, concerned instructions from Abraham; or perhaps a novel-length missive from Heinrich the painter, evoking a revision of the past. And, furthermore, none of these options was as sad and amazing as what she knew, with fair certainty, to be the truth.

She pictured tearing open the crate while she heard the foot stomping of boisterous young men up above. She held Henriette tightly and struggled to see out the small windows as if, like some other passengers, she too had someone waving on the ground in one last frantic goodbye.

While she was more than grateful to Levi Ehrenberg and to Feliz the freight-wagon driver, to the freight-wagon burros as well as her daughter who hardly ever screamed, she also chided herself for such a rushed and ill-conceived escape. She had left her husband; she had taken their child. She had nothing more than this letter and crate, the clothes on her body, and the jewels she had sewn as snugly as she could, soon after Henriette was born. What had Abraham done when he’d discovered not only the jewels but also she and Henriette were missing? This she had tried to imagine since leaving town hidden in the covered freight wagon, and what she kept coming up with was this: He would be far too busy trying to save his own life to care what had happened to theirs. Most likely—and it gave her no relief to think it—the loss of the jewels would far outshine the loss of a wife and child.

Her breath was heavy and scant in her chest as it always was when she was battling the poisonous cocktail of competing anger and fear, until she imagined Levi Ehrenberg standing with the other well-wishers at the depot, his weight resting on his good leg, his crumpled hat in his hand. She pictured how he’d smile briefly while offering a wave, how he’d squint with the evening sun in his eyes, never taking his gaze from the stagecoach or shielding his forehead with his hands. As the wheels gathered momentum, she could see him walking, following alongside them, and if he could have run she was sure he would have run; he would have run until there was nothing left of the coach in the distance, not even a ghostly after-image. She could see him. He stopped and stared into the distance and kicked at nothing but reddish dirt, and at the hopelessness of this sight (in addition to the fact that she knew it was, after all, imagined), she began to cry; no dignified set of tears but a heaving, weeping mess. Henriette watched her with those curious, candy-black eyes, eyes that seemed unafraid of her mother’s unhappiness, which, in fact, as her mother cried, looked positively delighted. But even this did not stop Eva from crying, and she only managed to stop when she saw that the black woman was watching her.

Eva had seen her come on at this station stop (alone—which Eva couldn’t help but think was a bad sign) and the sight of the black woman reminded her to be constantly alert instead of consumed with a flimsy fantasy. “Excuse me,” Eva stuttered, and without much thought, wiped her eyes on the faded sleeve of what she still thought of as her sister’s blouse.

The new face looked back blankly—this young dark woman, the first she’d ever spoken to. She had seen Negroes before—just a few—in New York and Kansas City, but she’d never heard one speak, and though she was downright afraid, she thought it was important to pretend otherwise.

The black woman said nothing, but Eva didn’t like being the object of her gaze. Leaning against the hard leather curtain, she was very conscious of being watched but as Henriette fell asleep in her arms, Eva—despite her best efforts—felt her eyes closing.

She woke in a panic with her arms not weighted but flailing and she nearly screamed when she heard a loud “Shhh.”

There was the black woman, rocking her daughter. She had taken Henriette.

“How dare you?” cried Eva.

The black woman put her finger to her mouth, shushing Eva again, and then she came closer on the bench. “You fell asleep,” she whispered unapologetically. Then she returned Henriette with what even Eva had to acknowledge was remarkable care. Her daughter stirred, seemingly perturbed to have left such a comfortable spot. The black woman sat back and gave Eva another appraising look.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Eva said.

“Shh.”

In spite of herself, she adhered to the woman’s instruction and took her voice to a whisper. “I wasn’t asleep.”

“Oh yes you were. You were dead asleep, too. I thought you were going to drop the poor creature.”

“I was not asleep.”

“Dear, you were snoring. You were dead asleep. You understand?”

Eva stubbornly shook her head and rocked Henriette, but her daughter was fussing now and Eva suddenly felt as if she were doing it all wrong. She glanced at the black woman who was fanning herself with a leaflet from the station. Eva felt as if she should be shocked by the chocolate hue of her skin, but it was as if, unexpectedly, there were no more shocks to be had. Maybe people were no longer capable of being all that strange, no matter what they looked like, because she was no longer able to be so removed. She supposed that her conception of herself was fading, just as she supposed a soul faded slowly from this world to the next. Being different, she now realized, was a luxury as well as a curse, and though she could tell herself that plenty distinguished her from any other poor soul on this journey, she also knew she belonged exactly nowhere, and she increasingly submitted to the meaning of this as she allowed herself to be carried forward and forward and forward by the swaying rumps of horses.

“That was the first time she’s been out of my arms in days,” she explained, as Henriette continued to squirm. “I may have reacted excessively.”

The black woman nodded. “You want me to take her for a while?”

It was hard to believe, even as she was doing it, but she handed Henriette back to the woman and all at once she felt a tremendous and weightless relief.

“There’s a good baby,” the woman cooed.

Eva breathed deeply into a nervous sigh. Her arms and shoulders were more cramped than she’d realized. “She is a good baby, isn’t she?”

“Don’t you seem surprised!”

“I am surprised,” Eva said, reminding herself to breathe. “I’m surprised by nearly everything.”

“Well I don’t see how that’s possible—a lady traveling with her baby alone. You must have some fine story.” She shook her head, clucked her tongue. “Some fine story to be riding this coach right now.” Eva couldn’t tell if there was hostility in her voice or if it was simply her usual tone. The black woman kept her gaze on Henriette, bounced her gracefully on one of her knees while keeping Henriette’s chin upright.

Eva wanted to thank her but she only wrapped her arms around herself, staring first at the strange sight of Henriette in this woman’s plump arms, but then, for a moment, out at the horizon. They were never going to make it. The ubiquitous thought invaded completely almost every hour or so. But if it was impossible to imagine that she and her daughter would actually make it as far as San Francisco, more accessible was the notion of heading west. West. She said it to the ticket master and to anyone who asked. She said it so often in her head that it sounded meaningless.

“You must have seen aplenty already,” the dark woman continued. “Lord knows I have. I must confess that I like it, traveling alone. Everything’s too strange to be lonesome.”

“I suppose,” Eva conceded, although she would have said she was often lonesome, traveling or no.

“Where you coming from? What’s that accent?”

“German,” she said, “I am German.” She decided against saying more. Where had she been coming from? Surely not Santa Fe, not when she’d left not only a husband (who might very well have set out looking for her) but a husband whose life was now measured by debt, a debt that his creditors would surely be happy to collect from anyone, if, after they’d squeezed the very life out of him, Abraham proved truly insolvent.

“Well, that’s quite a ways, isn’t it? Me, I’m coming from New Jersey. And believe me, that’s plenty far.”

Eva nodded politely, having never heard of it. “This is a Yankee place?”

The woman laughed again in that edgy way. “You tryin’ to figure out if I was ever a slave? No, ma’am. My daddy’s a minister.” Henriette started whimpering, and with one sudden motion the woman flipped Eva’s baby sideways.

“What are you doing?” Eva gasped.

The woman ignored her and shushed Henriette.

“Whatever are you doing? Please,” Eva cried—crazed with how stupid she’d been to give her baby over to a stranger—“give her to me right now.”

But Henriette had already stopped fussing and was now looking terribly pleased.

“Ma’am,” she said, once again returning Henriette to Eva, “I am a nurse by trade. A nurse. You understand? You believe me?”

“I only—”

But she waved Eva off, made a click of her tongue.

“Is that why you’re headed west?” Eva asked, irritated by how awkward she sounded. “For employment?”

She shrugged. “I have an uncle who’s real sick and he’s got an extra room. Says he’ll help pay for more schooling.” Her voice quieted as Henriette continued to smile, and the woman continued, almost as if speaking to Henriette alone. “My sister promises she’ll send along my chemistry books as soon as I’m settled. I was in school in New York though. And I’ve seen an operation performed. The patient was a lady and her womb was injured and in two hours time, a piece of flesh was cut off and the injured parts were sewn up and I tell you I enjoyed it. Everything was so scientific, and you wouldn’t think it, with all the blood and whatnot, but everything was so neat. I assisted the other nurses with holding her vagina open. The only problem was the smell of ether; it made me awfully sick. I’ll have to get over that though, won’t I?”

“That’s astonishing,” Eva said, not knowing to what exactly she was referring—to the fact that here was a woman (a black woman with over-plucked brows, full lips, and fuzzy, pinned-up hair) who was a nurse, who, as the stagecoach rocked its nauseating rhythms, and as mosquitoes buzzed steadily in and out of dust clouds, was seemingly unperturbed about much, or to the fact that this woman had just said vagina.

“It isn’t really. What’s astonishing is just how difficult it is to be independent.” She looked out the dust-flooded window.

In that moment Eva saw her frustration and thought: Nobody is ever satisfied.

“I had a husband,” the woman offered, as if she knew that Eva was wondering. “He died.”

“I am sorry.”

“No,” she said, “you needn’t be. I never want to get myself married again. And I don’t want to be anyone’s domestic. That’s what makes it so difficult, you know, getting out on my own. I’m so tired of being dependent. Always worrying over how much food I’m eating, how big a helping of beans, how fat a piece of pie…”

“My husband died too,” Eva found herself saying. She wouldn’t let herself think of him dead though, couldn’t bear the idea of Abraham cold and lifeless, without his ever-infuriating drive, however gravely misguided. Despite his terrible choices, the cheating and the lies, she could never wholly hate him, no matter how she tried.

“Is that right?”

It occurred to Eva that this woman might have assumed that little Henriette was fatherless, that Eva was unmarried, and she felt her face flush at the thought. “He was a wonderful man.” And then, without thinking about it: “He was an artist.”

“Well now that must have been something.”

Eva told herself she was one of so many women traveling alone, that really she was nothing unusual. Here she was riding overland into yet another different world, but it was different mainly because she had no protector. She could be anyone; her daughter could be anyone’s daughter. Out the window: red rocks like enormous edifices set against streaming skies. Out the window the vision was dramatic but building inside her was nothing but a whispering dread—a dust-coated, plummeting sensation, too persuasive to be considered a mere mood. The feeling was familiar, like the journey from the east five years ago, except now—though she was more alone than ever, still unquestionably running from something and getting farther from any life she had ever envisioned for herself—she knew she was strangely less afraid.

“MRS. PAULINE HARBER,” THE WOMAN SAID THE NEXT DAY AFTER breakfast, touching a hand to her chest.

Eva nodded and introduced herself, embarrassed that they had waited so long to know each other’s names.

“Mrs. Frank, do you think you’d mind looking after my bag? Those ruffians up top, they”—and here she interrupted herself—“if they come inside…I…I’d just like to take a little rest.”

“They’re just boys,” Eva said, dismissively. She was so used to young American men now; there were so many of them and so little of anyone else.

“They’re white boys,” Pauline said, with sudden meaning. “And bored out of their skulls like the rest of us. And like I said, you seem like a real lady, a lovely one, but I’m sure you know all too well what some white folks have to say about someone like me.”

“I—” said Eva dumbly. “Of course I’ll mind your bag.” What else could she possibly say? Something else, surely. Something kind and noble and good. Beatrice Spiegelman, she imagined, would have engaged this Pauline on the topic of oppression and injustice, perhaps leading into the controversial topic of the Red Man’s better qualities. All Eva came up with was: “Go on and close your eyes,” and, quite happily, that is what Pauline did, as Henriette stared at the greenish light coming in through the windows.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed before both Pauline and Henriette were asleep, but all she knew was that she couldn’t imagine ever sleeping again. She shifted Henriette gently and reached for the letter and Levi Ehrenberg’s piece of paper, both tucked into her waistband. She looked at them the way she might any kind of treasures: as surrogates for those she loved, and she realized she’d memorized not only the name and address on Levi’s paper but the exact amber color of the ink, the smudge of dirt in the upper, left-hand corner. She tried to picture this family and wondered if Levi Ehrenberg had carried a similar piece of paper on his own overland journey from the east, paper scribbled with the Shein name. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what a store in San Francisco might look like. As often as she reminded herself to check her expectations, she saw rows of gloves, strings of pearls, soft-spoken Germans behind a counter. And in the family home: evenings around a lively table, a perfectly tuned piano, a comfortable guestroom where she and Henriette would be invited to stay.

But then she pictured Schwefel the bird flying out of his cage and out of the house, into the clear blue distance. She wondered who would find her commonplace book and if anyone would even glance through its tender pages before using them to feed a fire.

         

DEAR ALFRED, SHE COMPOSED IN A LETTER IN HER HEAD AS THE days went by. I am writing to let you know that Santa Fe is no longer my home. Abraham Shein is no longer my husband. I have a baby girl and we are headed west. She is a good girl, Alfred, and I have named her Henriette. We are bound for San Francisco.

A fellow traveler told me that a cottonwood tree grows along the banks of the Mississippi River, and when the river swells with spring rains, it sometimes carries away part of its riverbank and a tall tree falls into its current. The spirit of this tree can be heard crying and crying as its roots cling to the soil and its trunk floats on the water. I feel like that floating trunk, Uncle Alfred, those clinging roots—nothing but a watery and divided ghost.

She would not include in this letter how that same traveler (a young engineer from Hannibal, Missouri, who had grown tired of riding overhead) had later announced, after a good deal of whiskey, that he “wouldn’t sit next to no nigger lady,” and how his formerly sensitive voice turned hard and mean, especially after Eva had responded without hesitation that perhaps he should return to riding up top, that Pauline was her dear friend. She fiddled with a shard of glass she’d found at the last depot, watching her face appear and disappear, both compelled and repelled by her reflection:…Uncle Alfred, I wonder if you would recognize me. I am freckled, yes, and I am both thinner and fuller on account of my recent pregnancy, but there is something else that I wonder if you’d see, something subtle and dark, like a patch of earth after so many fires, ruined but also primed.

Out the window the light grew molten as the heat wrapped its cloak around the day. Once in a while Eva heard the boots of those young men overhead, and she couldn’t help but listen differently now, as she watched Nurse Pauline. They gave some whoops once in a while, but mostly it was horse hooves and squeaking leather straps and the driver’s whip, silver-quick through mosquito-heavy air.

         

NIGHTS WERE DIFFERENT, AS MOST PASSENGERS WERE ALL CROWDED inside, pressed up against one another. Eva had never before traveled in such close quarters with strangers and was reminded only of the steamship from Bremen, when the weather turned and she had mistakenly joined the third-class passengers. One night the sky crackled with lightning and even the most boastful and reckless of young men had claimed a seat inside upon the upholstered leather cushions, which somehow felt harder than the benches themselves. The canvas curtains were pulled shut and as the passengers dozed off into sleep, strangers had leaned into strangers with their mouths agape or their chins pinned primly to their chests; winged ants and mosquitoes swarmed inside the stage; folks slapped each other with an aim toward murdering the dreaded bugs and soon there were no more strangers. Once, in the middle of the night, she saw the engineer from Missouri sound asleep, his head resting comfortably on Pauline.

Once a fight broke out between two men over something which neither Eva nor Pauline could understand. Henriette screamed—wailing and writhing until a man named Will with a down-turned mouth fashioned her a rebozo from a piece of burlap he’d been saving so that Henriette could stay snug against her mother’s chest without having to be held. Then, with Eva’s tense permission, he blew tobacco smoke into her daughter’s ear until either the pain lessened or she had cried herself out, but either way it seemed no less than a miracle. It seemed impossible that they could ever make it through each night but morning came again and again like a faded sepia likeness of itself, exploding into whatever the new day uncovered.

Pauline rarely spoke when the “boys” were inside the coach, but one evening, as rain came down in torrents, Will listed other sworn remedies besides tobacco smoke for an earache: Sore throats could be cured by wrapping a dirty sock around the neck, the dirtier the sock the better; scraped buffalo horn in a drunk’s whiskey bottle would cure him of the habit; dried chicken gizzard mixed with clean sand from a river would grind ulcers right off of any stomach; a cold door key dropped down a shirt without warning would stop a nose bleed immediately. Poor Pauline couldn’t hold her tongue any longer and argued against all of them. She was so proud of science, so sure of its authority, and to her great shock (and to Eva’s) Will was a sudden and patient listener, interested in her rebuttals. Awkward silence followed the surprisingly elevated discussion, and this silence led Eva to real sleep for the first time in days, while Henriette lay suspended, wrapped up tightly in her brand-new burlap sling.

When she awoke, coughing from the ever-present dust and steamy heat, Eva saw that it was not only dawn, but that they were at another station stop—as crumbly-adobe grim as the last one—with only a few empty corrals as potential places to rest. After eating a miserable bowl of half-cooked, over-spiced kidney beans, she entered one of these corrals and lay her daughter down atop a fairly fresh pile of hay. Then she placed her crate safely against one patchwork lumber wall before leaning back against the opposite one, not much minding the knotty wood kneading into her spine. After staring and staring at the unopened crate (one hinge had come a bit loose), she took Levi’s torn piece of paper from her waistband and rubbed its edge like a magic lamp, while she placed Alfred’s letter on her lap, lingering on his penmanship as if it were sacred text inscribed on an ancient shard. Mrs. Abraham Shein.

The very name had grown strange.

It was getting more difficult to imagine that those men would ever let Abraham live, and she dreaded hearing news of his death as much as she feared being chased and found. She imagined a foggy day in San Francisco—a faceless man approaching her, hat in hand, outside a synagogue or in a park—Are you Mrs. Abraham Shein?

But she couldn’t picture a life beyond the station stops, beyond the terrible hardtack that tasted like bark, beyond the beans which sent her into a fit of cramps each time she risked a mouthful. She saw San Francisco in her dreams and she knew it was conjured from outdated issues of Godey’s and Harpers, or from Beatrice, who’d relayed a secondhand tale or two about the city, as her cousins had traveled there when she was a young girl for a family member’s wedding. Also, Pauline had read aloud letters from her uncle, which mentioned planked streets equipped to resist the iron shoes of city horses, the temperate climate invaded by foggy afternoons, and how the wind often brought showers of sand from dunes so close by. She envisioned a cartoon version of a vast metropolis—a circus of South Seas sailors, turbaned Arabs, Australian con men, and street foods hot off vendors’ burners, tasting like nothing she knew. All of this in addition to fashion—she had gone so long without—the puffed-out bustles and swansdown boas, elaborate gigot sleeves. She knew enough to know that different worlds existed—worlds of French restaurants and theater, of Chinese laundries and Polish butchers, and yet she had trouble believing that she might some day find herself in the middle of any of them.

Dearest Eva.

“Uncle Alfred,” she said out loud, as if he had come, right then, out of the sun and into the corral—as if he’d bent down and picked up a piece of hay and was running it elegantly between his fingers like a rolled cigarette—wondering what tone to strike, instead of having already struck it in the letter, the letter she now held in her hands—Dearest Eva.

She read on and felt her stomach cramping and twisting with such perversity she was immediately reminded of giving birth and her hand instinctively went to her daughter, as if for immediate assurance that her labor had not been for naught.

After reading the first two sentences, she let the letter—dated months ago—fall to the straw-covered ground.

At the time Alfred had written the letter, her father had passed away and her mother hadn’t been expected to live out the week. No, was her first thought, followed by the realization that, despite Mother’s elusive health and Father’s stern despondence, there was a part of her that had believed absolutely that upon her leaving Germany, her parents would have another chance at life with each other, if only because they had lost so much. There had to have been some kind of fruitful result born from her retreat, and she’d imagined their reunion was it. That they might die this soon after she’d left them had not played a part in her imaginings. In fact, though it was unbelievably childish and she wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, it had not occurred to her in any significant way that her parents would ever die.

She sat upright, and—never taking her hand from Henriette’s narrow belly—she vomited over the side of the stall every last frijole she had fought so hard to keep down. And only when she was all cleaned out and gagging on nothing but dusty air could she finally take her hand away from Henriette and let her baby sleep, let herself cry for her parents as she hadn’t done since she was young and blameless and they alone could ease her fears.

She had no mirrors to cover and her sister’s sleeves were already torn and had she a gun at that moment she’d have shot it off, if only to create disturbance. When her sister had died she had sewn and sewn, solely for the needle’s comforting prick and sting. No one in these states or outlying territories knew her father’s patience or her mother’s arch smile and as distressing as this was, she wept because what stirred her the most—more than any of the lessons her parents had taught her—was the single image of her father’s bald and shiny head.

She picked up the letter and read on.

Alfred intended to move his family back to Germany and continue Father’s business, to travel all over Europe and enjoy the social aspects of the banking trade rather differently than Father ever had, using business dinners as opportunities to further his politics, even if it meant losing a client or two along the way. As far as Eva could gather, he was oddly cheered by these potential financial losses; they seemed to give him solace in the face of so much death and to signify, at least to him, that he would not be changing too greatly.

She read of Bismarck’s successful war, and how although the liberal publisher Sonnemann predicted that such unity would come at the all-too-dear price of lost freedom, Germany would, in fact, unite under one black and red and white flag, and be far better equipped to protect its Jews than France, Austria, or England. Assimilation, he declared, was a real prospect. Leave it to Alfred, she thought in a moment of fierce and unfamiliar irritation, to scribble on about his career and politics—no matter how important the policies!—in the very same letter that contained the news of her parents’ deaths.

And there were endless paragraphs about Auguste, his elegant wife, how she liked nothing better than cheese and chocolate and yet she was as trim as her pretty daughter and rowdy son, how she spoke four languages fluently, how she baked a cake on Fridays. And how it had been her idea to return to Germany, how it was Auguste’s firm belief that Alfred too dearly missed his country.

Uncle Alfred, she realized, was a man who—despite his obsessive and political tendencies—deeply loved family life.

Eva was jealous. She was jealous of his family. She was jealous that his children would grow up in the same lovely house where she had spent her childhood, while her own daughter was lucky, at such a tender age, to sleep on a pile of hay. She was jealous that they had all lived in Paris, that they had met Heinrich Heine, that they could return to Berlin and change their lives dramatically without in fact traveling very far. She was jealous that she had not married a man like Uncle Alfred.

But her jealousy gave way to a more expansive emotion at the close of the letter, for at the end of many pages (which she knew she’d reread until they were as familiar as the Sabbath prayers that, if she didn’t recite for twenty years’ time, she’d forever have at the ready) this is what Uncle Alfred had written:

Auguste and I have spoken about it at length and at the risk of insulting you with such an offer, we would like for you to come live with us. I do hope that you understand, dear Eva, that I put this offer to you with the best of intentions and wishes for your happiness. I have taken from our correspondence the perhaps misguided impression that, even though by now you—G-d willing—have a child to consider, you may not have entirely reconciled living out your life in America alongside your husband, and, though such an offer is at worst offensive and at best decidedly unorthodox, I have never been one for orthodoxy and I would like to offer you—and G-d willing your blessed child—a passage home.

For now, I do hope the crate has reached you unscathed. Although Auguste promises that I am being terribly impractical, I have shipped these to you just as soon as I could. I knew you would want to have them.

And then, as if her uncle couldn’t quite help himself, and (she couldn’t help thinking) as if he knew everything about Heinrich after all: Father—bless his soul—never did have the most sophisticated taste.

Sitting in the corral, she let the scrappy wood dig into her back and her skin—right through her sister’s deeply threadbare shirt. She stopped crying. She looked at the crate but did not touch it.

Wherever she slept—in a corral, upright in the coach, in the rare shade of a tree—she woke to the sound of Henriette’s hungry cries, even when Henriette was sound asleep and emitting nothing more than breath. Her daughter—her miracle—sucked diligently at her breast as the days and nights blended together into one solid state of survival. She thanked God that regardless of how little she ate and how poor the food’s quality was, her milk continued to come.

“Folks don’t come this way to die.” Will told her whenever she was fretting. “They come to live. Mark my words: This baby will see California.”

The problem with California was that she couldn’t envision anything besides a child’s rendering in which everything was golden, everything was rich, and if she knew anything she knew this: Those words applied to jewels and food alone. And so she stayed current, starting small—picturing merely this stagecoach from a hawk’s vantage, going outside and beyond her scope without going very far. There it was: a painted green box rolling over the trail, slowly moving on. There it was, there they were—she and this group of eight other souls she’d likely never see after they disembarked. She hoped Pauline would find work as a nurse, just as she hoped to walk with her on those difficult-to-picture San Francisco streets, but even Eva knew that it was far more likely that Pauline would be working as a domestic in two years’ time, or opening the door for a better brothel, smiling a bitter-pretty smile. It was impossible to speculate on her own frightening fate; she imagined herself in that same dreaded brothel but quickly banished the thought.

Or she could return to Berlin. She and Henriette could gaze at birch trees while walking in the Tiergarten—the very same Tiergarten that was frozen in her mind, as was the entire city, in an icy world where time had stopped entirely. And as the stagecoach traveled west at its colossally slow pace and the trail offered no new distractions, Eva thought of her pristine, frozen world as she held Alfred’s letter. As she mouthed the word: home.