EDGE

A HALF HOUR OR FOUR HOURS MIGHT HAVE PASSED— Eva hadn’t any idea—but she realized she’d dozed off and that for the first time, when she awoke to the sound of the whistling wind and rain, to the dwindling twilight, she was not only uncertain where she was, but for a moment she thought she was on the trail with Abraham, that it was years ago and she had yet to see a town called Santa Fe. “It’s raining?” she wondered aloud. It was so dark inside the stage she could barely make out anyone’s faces; she didn’t know who was awake let alone who was inside. “Where are we?”

“Driver says it’s a shortcut. Arroyo’s certain to be dried up this time of year so’s it’s worth goin’ out of the way for.” One of two long-faced brothers relayed this information as if it was his job. “Driver says we’ll cross in no time.”

“He’s a right idiot,” said the other brother. “That ain’t no rain out there,” he said, insistent. “Y’all realize that, doncha?”

“Mother of God,” someone whispered. “It sure is dark as Egypt in here.” The wagon came to an abrupt halt.

Pauline hummed a gospel, which she did when she was nervous. Henriette pulled at Eva’s loose hairs. When the sound of flowing water was unmistakable, everyone, as if it were a contest, clamored to look outside, and it was immediately clear that the driver was mistaken and the arroyo was anything but dry. “We’ll make camp here,” Will said, and though of course there was at least one voice of dissent—a sound argument that Indians could be near—within an hour the driver unharnessed and fed the horses as the sunburnt young men built a fire and Pauline spread blankets over the cool, hard ground. Eva offered to make the coffee but Will said, “You kidding me? You can’t do anything but talk. I don’t trust your coffee, no ma’am.” And he refused to let her do anything besides attend to Henriette. When Pauline found a spot on the river hidden by sage brush, she and Eva stole sips from medicinal whiskey they’d found hidden in the boot of the stagecoach before stealing away with Henriette, giggling as if they were a couple of girls who never knew the meaning of sorrow. Eva hadn’t washed since well before leaving Santa Fe, and she took her turn first, carefully stepping out of her jewel-lined skirt and shedding her sister’s shirt like one of those molted snakes Abraham had pointed out on their journey years ago. She was almost shocked to find she was flesh and blood and that her own pale skin glowed brightly.

She waded, stiff and frightened, into the achingly cold river, but as she lowered down into the glassy deep, as her toes gripped fiercely onto nothing but mud, she heard Pauline singing to her daughter on shore, and she felt as if she were drowning and flying all at once. She dunked her sister’s shirt in the river, making sure not to scrub it clean for fear that it would disintegrate right there. But as she took such care she also realized that the shirt would fall apart soon, there was no way to stop it, no matter how careful she was. She was thinking about how she oughtn’t to have washed it, how she must be supremely careful not to wring it dry, when she felt herself gradually loosen her grip and the fabric moved like the Orient’s most delicate silk, like strands of Henriette’s hair. As she appreciated her sister’s shirt more and more—a touch so soft it was painful—she let it go, and away it slipped, slowly and as quietly as fishes wriggling through reeds.

“If I don’t get in that water soon”—she heard Pauline cry out—“you know I’m gonna lose my nerve.” Pauline sang something to Henriette about a fat old man, about a dog.

“It’s gone,” Eva said, but she knew Pauline couldn’t hear her.

Pauline hollered, “You come on now. You’ll catch your death and who do you think is gonna end up takin’ care?”

“Shein!” she cried out, although she wasn’t sure why.

“What?”

“My name.”

“I can’t hear you right, but I know you’re talking nonsense again. Get on out now!”

Henriette squealed, and she might have even been crying, but Eva wasn’t worried. Who was going to collect Abraham’s debts from her here? In such a barren place where a river wasn’t even a river for much of the year and there were parts of wagon wheels and axles strewn about, skulls littering the trails like buffalo chips, fated to be as much a part of the landscape as sage bush and brier? How many people, she wondered, had ended their journey in this spot instead of farther west or east as they’d planned? How many bathed in this very place, only to die just a shade farther to the right or the left, their hair still wet from the river? As she realized she had handed over her sister’s shirt—not only her prized possession but her only shirt—as if the river had asked for it in exchange for a chance at traveling safely, the water threw her off balance, but she gasped and caught herself on a group of rocks, caught her fast and jagged breath. Bent at the waist, holding on to slippery stone, she listened for her own breathing the way she might listen for the sound of a coyote in the distance or any of her daughter’s new sounds.

“You comin’ out now?” cried Pauline, maybe worried, maybe entertained, and Eva waited just a moment longer before she regained her balance and stepped out of the water.

After wrapping herself in a musty blanket, she was still breathing heavily. She took her daughter from Pauline. “My name is Eva Shein,” she said, with no immediate explanation. “I was—I am married to a man named Abraham Shein. He isn’t an artist. He’s a debtor. He’s a cheat.” And even though Pauline looked at her as if she was foolish and might have even temporarily lost her mind, she also didn’t seem too bothered. Eva had an unwelcome flash of Abraham by candlelight, undoing the tiny buttons of her blouse, his gruff hands suddenly tender. “I used him first,” Eva continued, unbidden. “I used him to escape and I wonder if he knew—no, I think he did know.”

“Fine,” Pauline said, before undressing down to her bloomers and removing a thin gold necklace with the smallest of small gold charms. “You think I got no secrets? We ain’t got time for that kind of talk right now.” She made a dismissive sound with her tongue. “Hold this,” she said, and she put the chain around Eva’s neck, making doubly sure it was fastened. “Mrs. Eva Shein, Mrs. Eva Frank, Mrs. Billy the Kid—I’m goin’ in.”

         

AS DARKNESS FELL, EVA’S ONE THIN SHIRT, HER DEAR SISTER’S shirt, did not lie carefully over the rocks, drying out in front of a fire that Will had built just for her and Pauline, but instead it was somewhere at the bottom of the raging arroyo. What a fool she was. After she’d thanked Will for the fire, he looked at Eva—with her wet hair, in Pauline’s unflattering calico blouse—and waited a moment before saying: Nobody wants ladies’ disapproving glances ruinin’ a good and liquored-up campfire. Maybe it was because Pauline’s blouse was many sizes too large, or maybe it was simply the unusually humid air but she was reminded of the one other time she wore another woman’s clothing besides her sister’s or her own. The dress that Heinrich had insisted she wear—the dress he’d claimed belonged to his sister—where was it now? How many had worn it since? The thoughts disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived, and her skin felt tight and clean as if the years had vanished, and after Will walked off toward the men’s larger fire, bowlegged as any illustrated cowboy in the pages of Harpers Illustrated, Pauline divided up a portion of ham and slightly wormy crackers over a stone that seemed created for eating on, and while baby Henriette lay awake but content in the snug, burlap rebozo, Eva realized it was strange but for at least one moment—one sudden flash—she felt she’d never enjoyed herself quite so much. Not only Eva but the night sky, the world—they’d all been stripped like springtime beds of summerhouses—the summerhouses of her youth—overturned and beaten out into being if not brand-new then honestly revived.

A violin half-played and half-screeched by the men’s raging campfire, as voices sang songs she had come to—if not enjoy—then at least recognize: “The Red, White, and Blue” and the strangely specific “Hang Jeff Davis in a Sour Apple Tree.” At first it was difficult not to sing along—at least in her head—but then the voices tapered off into speech, and the sound rose and fell far enough away so that the drunken talk became a blanket of sound, a kind of cheerful bonhomie to cushion the fact that they were, in fact, a good day away from getting back on the trail.

But that was for tomorrow.

The ham was not too salty and the crackers not too wormy, and the women spoke of peaches and potatoes, currants and turnips, hens and black-tailed deer. Within minutes it became a kind of game—to name a potential ingredient found along the trail and compare the preparation. She felt certain that Pauline won each time, although Eva had come out ahead on the game hens, having not only tweaked her recipe for goose with blackberries but also told Pauline about the time she’d cooked the goose, how she’d worked so hard to make it her way, how she’d wanted so desperately to impress the bishop. And as she described these moments, these recent small struggles, she was surprised to find that Pauline was laughing. “It’s funny,” Pauline admitted, and Eva was certain she must have looked surprised. The humor in these humiliations hadn’t ever crossed her mind. “Oh Lord,” Pauline said, laughing still. “Sometimes I wonder how I’ll have any strength left in me once we finally do arrive.”

“I wonder if we will,” Eva mused in a more earnest voice, as she lay her daughter gently down atop a pile of blankets, this fine night’s accommodation.

“Oh we’ll arrive,” Pauline said, nodding.

Eva’s fingers rose to her throat as if in response to all the reasons why they wouldn’t, and she felt Pauline’s thin, gold chain. “Oh,” Eva said, unclasping it. “I almost forgot.”

Pauline nodded, and for a moment Eva was surprised at how she didn’t seem to want it back. Pauline ignored Eva’s outstretched hand, and glanced down at Henriette before touching the top of her tiny head so slightly and with a touch so tender that Eva understood at once. “Oh Pauline.”

“It belonged to my girl,” she said simply. “Can you see the little charm? It’s a pansy, I think. I always thought it was a pansy. That was her name. Pansy Elizabeth Harber. Do you see it?”

“I do,” Eva said, with both blinding guilt and a crude, fierce urge to keep Henriette awake. “It’s lovely,” Eva said, shaking, as she leaned over and fastened the clasp easily behind her friend’s long neck. She smelled the silty river, faint salt, and oil from the ham and crackers, along with something like eucalyptus. Eva noticed that Pauline had not washed her hair, and she found herself reaching out for it with a curious if cautious touch; it was springy and softer than she had expected. “There,” she said, “there.”

The stars: They were bright, close, and endless. The Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt—it seemed difficult to believe they wouldn’t all come tumbling down.

She finally noticed Pauline’s uncompromising gaze land first on Eva’s crate and then on neither the fire nor Henriette but on her, and Eva didn’t even wait for the question.

The hinges were loose now, and it didn’t take much to pry the crate open with the knife Pauline had used for the ham. Inside the crate there were so many layers of stiff, brown paper and her fingers didn’t shake as she peeled them back. She heard Pauline say, “My my my,” when she first glimpsed the gilded frame. It looked wildly out of place in this untamed landscape, and Eva was briefly embarrassed, as if she’d come to a party wearing too much rouge. She unwrapped both packages, ignoring a cut on her thumb from the paper’s sharp edge. As the paper piled up beside the fire, it looked like a strange, important object in itself.

There they were. Not on a library wall, not lining a gallery of a warm and familiar home, but here, under Pauline’s gaze, under a western sky, the western sky, with a moon that she could no longer distinguish from the one she’d always known. Here, by the light of a quietly raging fire, she let herself look. Their frames were thinner than she recalled, not quite as heavy or as elegant outside the context of her father’s library. As she remembered, the palette was moody—foggy grays and cobalt blues—but she also identified not a button exactly but black and green and white paint that comprised a familiar circle. She saw not hair nor lips immediately, but chestnut butter, pink candy. Light and shadow, shadow and light; color like spices in a market stall. Nothing accumulated, not right away, certainly not into two whole girls. She needed a moment or two of seeing only paint to stave off pure recognition. But she looked at the portraits until she finally saw them. She noticed that the paint itself was thin, almost as if the painter had been trying to conserve his resources. They were the work of a romantic, slightly overwrought. They were not, by any stretch, great.

“Who is that?” asked Pauline, as casually as if she were asking the time of day.

Eva realized Pauline was pointing not to her sister’s image but to her own.

Heinrich the painter had captured her exact likeness. Everyone had said so. And so it seemed that she had, after all, achieved what she’d set out to do when she left Bremen on a steamship, when she left Santa Fe only weeks ago, hiding under a blanket in a freight wagon with Levi Ehrenberg’s money between her corset and beating heart.

She was unrecognizable.

Eva pointed to the other painting, to Henriette dressed smartly in blue, and—tasting the river in her mouth, in her throat, her chest, her lungs—she said proudly: “That’s my sister.”

“And the other?” asked Pauline stubbornly. “Who’s she?”

“The other?” Eva asked, looking directly into her own dark-painted eyes. She had come all this way so that she’d never need to tell this story. There was certainly no reason to do so now.

“Yes,” said Pauline, “the other,” with a touch of impatience. “She also your sister?”

Two portraits of two sisters—her two bonny sisters—both alive and well in Berlin. Two sisters with husbands and children and gardens—blissfully ignorant of what two charming though unexceptional paintings could set into motion. Eva’s two lucky sisters. And why not?

“No,” Eva said, and once she said that one word, she knew the rest would follow. She knew she would start at the very beginning and that it would take some time. After tonight she would choose more carefully. After tonight she would choose which stories to tell and which would be forgotten.

The dresses she and Henriette had worn while sitting for the paintings, Heinrich’s tins of paint, the cups used for drinking Father’s strong coffee, Mother’s linens, Alfred’s shoes, the bottle of violet perfume, Abraham’s cigars, and even Levi Ehrenberg’s elegant handwriting—inked on a piece of paper placed carefully in her shoe—it would all be ground down to nothing but dust, and eventually even the dust would be gone. But something essential would always remain, and she would make sure of it. For although memory had always been such a tireless source of haunting, it was also some kind of paradise: the only place she understood and from which she could never be exiled.

Henriette was sleeping already; her head was thrown back like an opera diva hitting her highest note, and the warmth of the fire had softened her breathing. The air was dry, good for burning. They were somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, but this meant little to her. She didn’t know where the Sonoran Desert was, and it didn’t matter because wherever she was at any given moment was only a place on a map she knew she wouldn’t study for years. She would look back on this journey as a necessary one, but she also knew she wouldn’t describe it. She felt certain of this and, with the same odd certainty, she knew that should this stagecoach arrive at its hallowed destination, California was where she would stay. Her daughter would be an American.

Thank you, she would write to Uncle Alfred, upon settling into their first—and likely terrible—San Francisco lodging, you couldn’t have any idea of how dearly I appreciate your offer.

Eva lay down and Pauline did too. They were no longer looking at the paintings. “The other,” she said, “is me.”