The cafeteria was closed. By the time Lorna returned with two more bags of pretzels from the vending machines on the first floor, Adam was asleep in the chair by his grandmother’s bed, mouth ajar, the brown cardigan draped across his chest. Marika was also asleep, nose pointed toward the ceiling, mouth sternly set.
Lorna laid the pretzels on the tray table by the bed and then stood in the doorway, watching the two sleepers. Here they were, her mother and her son, her nearest relatives in the world, together in this small room where they would stay all night, wrapped in their separate mysteriousness. She would have liked to whisper something, some kind of benediction. But nothing came to her except Take care, and finally she closed the door.
Outside in the parking lot, she took her cell phone from her purse as she walked to the car. No messages, nothing from Roger, and the battery was nearly dead. She’d charged her phone at the cottage only long enough to get her voicemail, call all the area hospitals until she located the right one, and use Google Maps. Then, unthinkingly, she’d given her charger to Adam so that he could use his phone. There might be just enough battery to get her onto the highway.
Knowing that she’d mostly have to find her way back on her own put her in an oddly positive mood. Unlike all the other challenges of the last few days, this one was purely practical, and she felt somehow ready for it, like a Girl Guide who had learned to navigate by the stars and would now have to prove herself. She was in the North Country, she knew that much. All she had to do was head west toward the lake. Even in the dark she could stay oriented if she read the signs, and paid close attention to landmarks and geography. Just as she’d found Marika’s dock that evening by studying the shoreline and counting flagpoles.
Above were the moon and the open night sky. Somewhere in the distance lay the vastness of the rest of the continent, Canada, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, all the way to the Arctic Circle.
In the car she turned on the ignition, her thoughts once more with Adam, preparing to spend the night in a chair in that chilly hospital room, keeping watch over his grandmother. Then she wondered where Roger was right now, and what he would tell her when they spoke again.
How are you feeling? he’d asked, this man who didn’t like to talk about feelings, who considered unhappiness a phase. Who had once said that childhood was not worth talking about because it was pre-rational. How are you feeling? There had been that note of self-conscious apology, which usually indicates some sort of revelation.
Lorna had figured it would be about Angelica: that they might be getting married, or they might be breaking up. But now as she replayed Roger’s question, she detected something more tentative, something that may well have to do with Angelica but also went beyond her. Was it possible Roger was asking for advice? As in: How do you go about it, this feeling business. How is it managed?
Proceed slowly. That was the only advice she had for him. Or for herself. So much had happened recently that she’d barely sorted through any of it, and the days ahead would be just as unpredictable and difficult. Yet, sitting in her car in a mostly empty parking lot on a clear starry night, it also seemed to her that she was living in a period of great innocence, as before wartime, and that not long from now she would look back in amazement at how easy her life had been.
Driving along dark roads back toward the lake, Lorna fell to thinking once more of where she had been born. Of the old house surrounded by pastures and old stone walls, its small, low-ceilinged rooms, the cane chairs on the veranda, the warm gloom of the stables, the spring-fed pool under the cedars with its tea-colored water. Down in the creek, where they often went wading, Wade once found a brass button embedded in the mud banks. He’d pried it out and washed off the mud, and told her about Gatling guns firing and horses screaming as they fell to their knees, seen in a filmed reenactment on a school trip to the Manassas Battlefield. For months one winter, soldiers from both sides had camped on those pastures, divided by the creek. Sleeping, eating, cleaning their guns. Fitting brass buttons through stiff buttonholes, never guessing that a hundred years later one of those buttons would find its way into a boy’s pocket.
All of that had shaped her, whether she knew about it or not. She should have asked more questions of her father and grandmother. She should have asked about her grandmother’s great-aunt, who had turned her back on Lincoln as he rode by on his white horse, and about who was buried under those unmarked slates in the family graveyard. She should have asked about her father’s weeks in the Ardennes, where he had lost more than his hearing, and what he had seen as he marched across Europe. But by the time she’d thought to ask them questions, her father and grandmother were gone, and even if she had asked, they might not have answered.
Water under the bridge, her grandmother might have said.
LORNA HAD FORGOTTEN to leave a light on for herself. As she pulled into the driveway, she could just make out the roofline of Marika’s cottage, and behind it the lake, where the moon cast a lit path across the water. Inside the kitchen Freddy was waiting, his tail a plumy metronome. She let him out into the driveway for a few minutes before calling him back inside. It was too late to go back to the motel, and she didn’t want to leave him alone again. The sofa had done for Adam and would do for her.
On the counter by the stove sat the bottle of cognac she’d brought, almost empty. She took a glass from one of the cabinets, poured what was left of the cognac into it, and carried the glass into the living room, where she switched on the lamp by the armchair.
Immediately the lamp began flickering. Nothing else moved in the room, and yet in the unreliable light, she thought she saw a small shadow crouched in the corner by the woodstove. She did not feel frightened. Whatever this presence was, it seemed somehow familiar, as if it had been waiting a long time for her to admit that it was there. When she turned fully toward it, the shadow was gone. She switched off the lamp and waited a moment in the darkness, as if to invite it back, and then turned on the light above the picnic table.
“There you are,” she said to Freddy, who had come to stand beside her.
Carrying her glass, she walked slowly around the living room, looking closely at first one thing then another, objects that over the years had become Marika’s nearest companions. The lamp, the woodstove, the yellowed map of the lake thumbtacked to the wall. She stopped by the armchair and then, hesitantly, turned over the cushion.
From the doorway of Marika’s bedroom, she confronted the threadbare coverlet and the laundry hamper with its biscuity smell. Freddy had followed her and now stood in the hallway.
“You want to know what am I doing?” she asked.
He wagged his tail uncertainly.
“Snooping,” she told him. “That’s what I’m doing.”
The top dresser drawer was full of underwear and white socks. The next held a few folded knit shirts and turtlenecks; in the third were several faded cotton nightgowns. But toward the back of that drawer, Lorna discovered an old metal Band-Aid box containing a gold wedding ring and two snapshots of Adam, one as a toddler, speaking into a toy telephone, and one from his high school graduation, wearing a jacket and tie. At the very back of that drawer, wrapped in a dish towel, were stashed three or four doughnuts, already quite stale. Saved, apparently, for after Lorna and Adam had left.
As she was pulling out the doughnuts, she felt something underneath them. At first she thought it was just a sheet of liner paper. It wasn’t until she had pulled it out that she saw she was holding a stiff manila envelope. Inside was a letter, folded in thirds.
It was handwritten, in a large confident feminine hand on a sheet of onionskin. Lorna sat down on the bed to examine it. The paper was not particularly yellowed—not as yellow as the map on the wall, for instance—and the ink had not faded, so it must have been kept in that manila envelope, out of the light; the creases at the folds were sharp, suggesting the letter had been unfolded only once or twice, before now. She got up again to search the rest of the drawer and then carefully searched the other three drawers, and the fourth she had not opened, but found no other sheet of paper.
In memoirs, people were always discovering boxes left in an attic or at the back of a closet that revealed family secrets: boxes full of old journals and letters, passports with surprising stamps, photographs, newspaper clippings. Even after staring at the letter for several minutes she couldn’t escape feeling that it was not real, but a trick, something that had been planted for her to find, knowing that this was just the sort of discovery she would have hoped for.
She recognized that the letter was in Dutch, and she could tell that there must have been at least another page, since the last line at the bottom seemed to break off mid-sentence. Why had Marika kept only the first page?
15 juni, 1968
Beste Rika,
Ik heb de afgelopen twintig jaar zo vaak geprobeerd contact met je op te nemen en deze brief te verzenden met weinig hoop op een antwoord. Jouw adres is aan mij verstrekt door een particulier onderzoeksbureau dat ik heb ingeschakeld. Ik wil je geen pijn doen, gewoon om erachter te komen wat er van je geworden is. Ik begrijp wat je
Who had called her Rika? A nickname. Something you would call a child. Of all the things Marika might have saved along with her wedding ring and those snapshots of Adam, why this one sheet of a letter in Dutch?
Wade ran across her mind, holding an envelope.
Lorna looked up at the pine walls. A letter in code, that’s what he said he had found. A letter in code had been the reason why Marika had beaten him in the cellar. Was it possible this sheet of paper was from that envelope? She could not recall what became of the envelope that night, or its contents. The timing of that terrible scene and Marika’s departure, a week or so afterward, could not have been a coincidence. But there was no one now but Marika to ask, and she would not remember, or would not say.
Lorna sat down once more on the bed, looking more closely at the letter. Beste, probably meant “dear.” She recognized a few other words: contact, adres, bureau. Je, as in French, might mean “I.” If she could use her phone it would take no more than a few minutes to scan the letter and translate it. But her phone was useless until tomorrow when she drove back to the hospital and recharged it.
She continued to examine the sentences in front of her, trying to puzzle some meaning from them. It seemed that someone had wanted to contact Marika, had found an address for her, through a bureau, perhaps an investigative office. Someone who knew her as Rika. Relative? Old friend? Had Marika held on to part of the letter as a memento, or as a warning? Either way, it would have been a reminder that someone was looking for her.
Who would have wanted to find Marika as late as June 1968?
Lorna stood up and replaced the letter in the dresser’s third drawer, telling herself she would translate it tomorrow, once she could charge up her phone. Tomorrow, I’ll figure this out. But now it’s late. I’m tired. My head hurts. I need to make up the sofa and get some sleep.
She carried the doughnuts to the kitchen and, after hesitating at the garbage can, put them in the refrigerator. But instead of getting ready for bed, she drank some of her cognac and began opening drawers and cabinets, pushing back cans and looking again into the dark jumbled recess under the sink. She slid her hand into the pockets of a yellow rain slicker hanging on a hook by the door and moved the umbrella also hanging there. Figures seemed to gather outside the room as she searched, pressing against the window, as real and insubstantial as the mist that had enveloped her on the lake.
The letter, the armchair facing a picture window. Clues, Wade would have said. Somehow they revealed the workings of Marika’s mind, and why she had left her children without saying goodbye. Why she had fled across the country, had not wanted to see them, had tried to distract herself with a series of men, and why eventually she exiled herself to this little house, as if she’d no other choice. It couldn’t be guilt alone that did such a thing to a person. Guilt carried at least the hope of making amends.
Lorna leaned against the refrigerator, feeling its quiet electric current.
Marika had done something. Something shameful, added to the shame of surviving when the rest of her family had not. She would have been hardly more than a child when it happened. She was only eighteen or nineteen when she left Europe; her crime, if that’s what it was, would have been committed earlier. A teenage girl who had done something shameful. Or had something done to her, but was convinced it was all her fault, and now her life was over. Not so different from girls Lorna sometimes saw in her office, brought in by anxious, bewildered parents. She won’t talk to us. She won’t say what’s wrong.
Like any teenager in the grip of self-loathing, Marika would have made vows: I will never speak of it. I will never tell. I will never want anything, care about anything, if only this can remain a secret. Usually with time shame grows less vivid. Someone is told, the offense fades, becomes something unfortunate, deplorable; yet not ruinous.
But if no one was ever told—
It was not uncommon, with traumatic episodes, for the brain to flicker out, like an overloaded electrical circuit. Lorna had seen it with men at the VA. Sometimes they’d done things they could not remember. Even when questioned in detail later, nothing came back. They did not deny they had done those things, once confronted with evidence, they simply could not remember doing them. But with Marika it seemed different. Whatever she believed she’d done was not gone; it had stayed with her, locked into a shut place her mind. How else to explain why she had never wanted anyone to understand her? How can you talk about something you’re keeping concealed from yourself?
She might, with time and patient encouragement, eventually have confided in her husband or his mother. They were well-meaning people, and proximity sometimes breaks down resistance; but one could not hear and the other couldn’t listen. And so, in her aloneness, she stopped talking.
Lorna took her hand from the refrigerator and looked at the kitchen’s closed cabinets, their black latches.
Marika had indeed been a spy, Wade was right. A spy by virtue of whatever secrets she carried. Sitting at her window, day after day, scanning the horizon, watching and listening in on a world she could not join. A spy with no passport, at home nowhere, with no past she could lay claim to, or future to count on.
In the living room Freddy settled heavily onto the rug with a sigh. Lorna walked around the room again, pausing to look at the box of safety matches on a shelf above the woodstove, the picnic table, the brown sofa where Adam had slept for the last two nights. She thought of the incomplete letter she had just tried to read, and the writer’s desire for whatever contact, adres might bring.
At last she stopped to stare at the old map tacked by the kitchen door. There were many dots that could have been the island where she’d spent so much of the day; on closer inspection some were not even islands, but flyspecks. She thought of a photograph of a map of Amsterdam in a booklet Adam brought home after his class visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, showing where Jews had been concentrated. Each dot on the map stood for ten.
Over a hundred and twenty thousand people were deported from Amsterdam during the Occupation. This fact had also been in the booklet. Eighty percent of the Jewish population, the highest percentage of anywhere in Western Europe. People had stood in lines at the railroad station, holding suitcases and the hands of their children, wearing in many cases their best shoes. Waiting to board crowded trains under a watery sky that has been captured so luminously in landscapes by the Dutch School, where often the sky is greater than anything else in the painting, to give an impression of infinite space.
Most never came back. Some vanished without being deported, according to the booklet, along with Dutch people who had tried to help them, buried in the dunes of The Hague, where German bunkers had lined the beaches. As far as Lorna knew, Marika had never tried to find her father and sister. Perhaps she had tried and failed, another of the many things she never said. But during those Thanksgiving visits over the years, Lorna had noticed in her a childlike fatalism toward things she mislaid. As soon as Marika couldn’t find something—her purse, her sunglasses, the car keys—she was convinced it was lost, and gone for good.
Was it possible that Marika’s sister had written that letter? That she had not died after being arrested, as Lorna had always assumed, but survived the war and then began hunting for Marika? And eventually found her—her Beste Rika—after more than twenty years of searching. Could being discovered in June of 1968 be the reason Marika had fled for Los Angeles a few weeks later? If so, whatever her sister knew about her (if her sister wrote that letter) must have been something Marika could not face.
Freddy lay on the floor, twitching his eyebrows from side to side as Lorna resumed walking around the room, holding the glass of cognac. Knowing something is not the same as understanding it—she often said this to clients. But perhaps the opposite could also be true. Perhaps you could understand something without knowing what had happened. Though why try? Why not leave it alone, as Marika would prefer, fold the page back in its envelope, slip the envelope back in the drawer. Because whatever was in that letter had shaped Lorna, too, whether any of it was ever explained, as it probably would not be. Lorna thought of Adam in the hospital corridor that evening, shaking as he said that explanations didn’t matter. Of course they do, she had said. Meaning, how could anyone learn anything without them? But now she found herself unsure.
Did she need an explanation for that heroic girl, for instance, cycling across Amsterdam, whom Marika had once conjured for her and whom Lorna in turn had conjured for Adam, a girl she’d spent years conjuring for herself. A girl in an alley doorway. A girl on a narrow back staircase, leading a child by the hand. A girl facing down soldiers and a pistol.
A better girl than any she could really have been.
Given in compensation, for company, after Marika herself was gone. Something to stash at the back of a drawer, for lonely afternoons. Because company, all these years, was what that girl had been. A slight figure in a gray convent skirt, cycling through a darkened city. Lorna had had that girl for comfort, for guidance, and in the end it probably didn’t matter whether she had been real or not.
However, the question remained why that girl had been necessary.
It was late. Lorna had hardly slept in three days. Her head ached. Still she kept walking. Past the map of the lake, past the picnic table. Past the dark picture window, which held her own pale reflection. At last she stopped in front of the woodstove.
A Vermont Castings iron stove, squat and black, with a stovepipe that ran up through the ceiling and a square black door with a handle like a latch. The door opened with a rusty complaint. Inside, mixed with ashes, was a small heap of bones.