Forty-Six

Helen cut through the alley and let herself into the back door of Rose Cottage. “Grandma?” she called. “I’m home.”

No answer. Helen walked through the kitchen and looked out the window. Yep, there was Grandma, bending over a dormant rosebush in her teensy yard. It didn’t matter that the forecast called for snow. The old woman checked her gardens every day, murmuring to the plants, encouraging them to hang on until spring.

Helen hung up her coat and put the teakettle on. Gardens outside, she thought, and gardens inside. She regarded the framed wycinanki gracing the walls. No one did more delicate paper cuttings than her grandma.

Not that she was a slouch with the scissors, either. Helen’s earliest memories of this house centered on the old Polish folk art. There had been more women coming and going in those days, long before Eve’s House and other social groups emerged to provide refuge for battered women. As a child, Helen had watched the women creep inside, often in the middle of the night. “You’re safe here,” Grandma told them, but the women had nothing but fear to fill time while Grandma and a few trusted friends figured out how to spirit them out of Milwaukee.

So Grandma set them to paper cutting. Although she made traditional motifs to sell in a shop near the basilica, she set new rules for the women starting new lives. “No roosters,” she’d say, and their tradition of cutting hens and flowers had begun. The design had become Grandma’s secret calling card. Her trusted allies carried small cards made by the women in hiding, and if they managed to convince a threatened woman to flee, they gave her one to present upon arrival at Rose Cottage.

Years later, after Helen had become director at Eve’s House, they’d modernized by having the cards printed. Now, most of the women she counseled sought help through restraining orders, housing assistance, job-training programs, subsidized childcare. But when that wasn’t enough … Helen took one of the cards, wrote her name and the desperate woman’s name on the back, and sent her to Rose Cottage. The few allies Helen trusted to help with their feminine underground railroad did the same …

The back door opened. “Oh, Linka!” Grandma said. “I didn’t know you were home.”

Helen kissed the old woman on the cheek. To the outside world she was Helen. In Rose Cottage, she was Halinka—Linka for short. “I saw you in the garden.”

“I’m going to plant a rose for Officer Almirez, as soon as spring comes.”

Helen nodded. “That’s a lovely idea.” Officer Almirez had stopped by their house shortly before the shooting. She and Grandma would always be haunted with the knowledge that he had died helping them.

She searched for something more uplifting to say. “I was just admiring your art.”

Grandma flapped a dismissive hand. “No, no. You should have seen my Grandmother Magdalena’s fine paper cuttings.”

“Grandma Lidia,” Helen said firmly, “you do fine work yourself. In many ways.” Even in the old days, after Helen’s mother died young, Grandma had managed to teach at the Settlement House, raise her granddaughter, and help the women who had nowhere else to turn.

The kettle whistled, and they sat down at the table. “I got a letter from Erin today,” Grandma said.

“You did?” Helen’s eyebrows rose. Communicating by postal mail was against the rules.

“She said she asked someone getting on a plane to mail it.” Grandma squeezed her teabag against the spoon. “She wanted us to know that she’d left the state safely. And she included a letter for Officer McKenna.”

“Really?” Helen leaned over the table. “Grandma, I don’t think it would be wise to pass that on. We made an exception when Officer Almirez wanted to help our network, even let him come to the house once, and … he ended up dead.”

“I know,” Grandma said sharply. “But this is an unusual situation. I hated lying to Officer McKenna that day he came looking for Erin. The least I can do is pass along her letter. After losing his best friend, Officer McKenna deserves whatever peace of mind he can find.”