“They have a bad guide who tooks them wrong. Too much water.”
“They drowned in a cave?”
“Yes.”
Once the older boy started to cry the others did, too.
“Come here,” Hanne said. “Come up here to my arm. All of you. Come. Let me hold you.”
Oda had gotten the call about the accident in the morning while Hanne was at school. She went to identify the body and sign the first batch of so many papers, as if death were just another business deal to push through. When Hanne came home she led her to the sofa and wrapped her arms around her and told her she had to tell her something she didn’t want to tell her. Hanne had leapt up and run to her room. Don’t tell me, she’d screamed. But Oda did. She sat on Hanne’s bed. Don’t touch me, Hanne said when Oda tried to stroke her hair. So Oda had sat in a chair beside the bed like a visitor in a hospital room. She’d ached to hold her. To be held. Let me hold you, she’d asked again and again.
She went up the rest of the steps. She knew she had to stop Hanne, but she was lulled into place outside the door by her tender voice, her soft cooing. “It’s going to be all right. We will be all right. I will take care of you.”
It was almost like hypnosis, like Hanne was playing Oda’s part in a trance.
“Where will we live?” the older boy wailed.
“You’ll come live with us.”
“Here? In this house?”
“No,” Hanne said. “But we can move here. Would you like? I could teach you to ride horse.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like that,” the girl said.
“I can teach you German. We will be fine.”
From the foyer, Oda heard the Australians’ voices. The wife said something and the husband laughed. Oda’s limbs went cold, as if she were alone with ghosts.
They came up the steps quickly.
“Oda,” the wife said. “I’m sorry we’re so late. How did it go?”
Oda could find no words for them. But she didn’t need to. The three children sprang out of the apartment, shrieking at their parents. Oda slipped around them into the apartment. Hanne was still on the sofa in the new bright light. Her skin had a feverish sheen.
Oda sat beside her.
“Mutti,” Hanne said, and fell sideways and heavy into her mother’s arms.
TIMELINE
My brother was helping me carry my stuff up to his apartment. “Just don’t talk about Ethan Frome, okay?”
“What?”
“It’s a thing of hers,” he said. “She gets drunk and we fight and she says, ‘Just because I haven’t read Ethan Frome.’ ”
“Wait, seriously?”
We’d stopped on the landing. He could see how delicious I found this detail.
“C’mon. Just don’t,” he said.
If the situation were reversed, he’d be memorizing passages from that book already. “ ‘Okay,’ she said, quite reluctantly.”
He made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “This may be a complete disaster.”
We headed up the next flight. They were outdoor stairs, like at a motel. We dragged my garbage bags of clothes and books in. My room was straight through at the back. His and Mandy’s was off the kitchen. I never went in there the whole time I lived there, so I can’t tell you what it was like. From the kitchen, when they left the door ajar, it looked like a black hole. My room was bright with two windows looking out onto North Street, not the parking lot, and plenty of room for my desk. He thought it was funny I’d brought a desk. It was a table really, no drawers, with legs I had to screw back on.
I’d moved a lot but this time it was more like self-banishment. I didn’t have the same feeling I normally did, setting up my room that night, twisting the legs back into the underbelly of the plank of wood and pushing it against the wall between the windows. That fresh start, clean slate, anything’s possible feeling. I didn’t have that. I knew I was going to write a lot of stupid things that made me cry before I wrote anything good on that table.
My brother came in and laughed at my only poster. It was a timeline of human history. It was narrow and wrapped around three walls and went from the Middle Paleolithic age to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a few years earlier. It comforted me.
He put his thumbnail on a spot close to the end. “There I am. Born between the first manned spaceflight and the construction of the Berlin Wall.”
We hadn’t lived together since I was seven and he was thirteen. Now I was twenty-five and he was ancient. He sat down on my bed. “Does that guy know where you are?” he said.