She brushed past me and I heard her swallow a sob at the back of her throat.
I came home from school that afternoon still dazed by the sting of Collette’s words to me in the library. I wanted Mommi to put her arms around me and tell me to hold tight for just a few more days. Just a few more. Because then Papa would be home and we could put this terrible time in our lives behind us and go back to being who we had been before those two black cars pulled up alongside our house.
When I stepped inside the kitchen from the laundry room, I was surprised to see the breakfast dishes still sitting unwashed in the sink. A frying pan with shriveled remnants of fried egg clinging to its side still sat on a cold burner on the stove. Bits of a broken water glass glistened on the floor. The house was eerily quiet.
My first thought was the FBI had come for Mommi this time. They’d come for her before she’d had a chance to wash up the breakfast things, and had pulled her out of the house, just like they’d taken Papa, with handcuffs around her wrists. Max and I were alone. Our parents had been taken from us and now we were alone. Not only did we not have anyone; no one would want us, either.
Max hadn’t had the reaction from his classmates at the elementary school that I was having; his friends were more curious than appalled. But he had gotten the same accusing looks at the market and post office that Mommi and I had received. Even at the little Lutheran church where my parents were members, the predominantly German congregation avoided us for fear of guilt by association, and yet Max hadn’t seemed troubled that he, Mommi, and I could attend church and barely have a word of greeting spoken to us. But now he would know how terrible our situation was, when someone from the child welfare office came for him and me, as surely one would. I could already imagine that person coming up the front walk: a dour-faced older woman with pulled-back hair, a pinched face, a clipboard in her hand, and clunky black shoes on her pudgy feet that clicked when she walked. She would ask Max and me with a frown if we had any family who could take us in.
No, I would say.
No one? No one at all? she would reply, staring at me with condemning eyes.
All our family is in Germany, Max would probably say, and I’d wince, and the child welfare worker would shake her head in disgust and mark something on her clipboard.
I can’t promise I can keep you together, she was going to say. No one is going to want either one of you.
“Mommi?” I cried out, my voice dispelling this horrible vision. I moved through the kitchen and into the living room. A load of laundry half-folded lay on the sofa.
“Mommi?” I said, quieter this time, now afraid to shout her name and announce to the world that both my parents had been taken from me.
I took the staircase slowly, wanting to see for myself that the house was empty and dreading it at the same time. “Mommi?” I whispered as I climbed.
I peeked into my parents’ bedroom, my heart flip-flopping in my chest.
There was Mommi on her bed, sleeping in the middle of the day, a balled-up handkerchief in one hand. A sheaf of papers lay flattened under the elbow of her other arm.
Relief coursed through me but only for a moment. Somehow I knew those papers explained the unwashed dishes, the broken water glass, the sleeping form of my mother at three o’clock in the afternoon.
I walked toward her, willing her to awaken and tell me what those papers said. But she lay unmoving, except for the rise and fall of her chest. I leaned over and gently pulled the papers out from under her arm.
They were rumpled and tearstained and I could see right away they were official government papers. They included the warrant for my father’s arrest, the accusations against him, the results of a hearing he’d had in Des Moines—he’d been deemed a credible threat to the safety of the United States—and a declaration that he’d been remanded to Fort Lincoln, an internment camp outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, where he would be kept for the duration of the war. He could appeal. He could have visitors. But his bank accounts would continue to be frozen so that they could not be used to fund any kind of enemy activity on his behalf while he was incarcerated. Appeals could be directed to the attorney general of the United States, Francis Biddle.
I sank to the floor by the bed with the papers in my hand, my back resting against the mattress. I could feel the nubby chenille flowers on the bedspread through my shirt, like little fingertips tapping me on the back as I slid down to a hooked rug composed of all the prettiest shades of blue.
I didn’t know how far away Bismarck was, but I knew it had to be hundreds of miles. Hundreds. Mommi didn’t drive. We would not have the money for train tickets if Papa’s bank accounts were frozen. There would be no way of visiting Papa. He might as well have been sent to the North Pole. Even though it would be six months before I saw my father again, he never felt so lost to me as in that moment. Tears slipped unchecked down my face.
I was still sitting there many minutes later when I heard Max come into the house, slamming the side door as little boys tend to do when they come inside. Mommi stirred for a second and then relaxed.
I rose, folded the sheaf of papers, and set them neatly on her bedside table, rather than back under her arm. I wanted her to know I had seen them, that she didn’t have to find the words to tell me what they said. Then I scrubbed at my cheeks to whisk away the evidence that I’d been crying and headed downstairs.
Max had pulled off his stocking cap, and his curly blond hair was all askew, making him look as if he’d been caught up in a whirlpool. He was at the kitchen table, pulling papers, and then an apple core, and then a book out of his school satchel. His eyes brightened when he saw me enter the kitchen.
“Look!” he said, extending the book toward me so that I could see its cover. “It’s about cowboys! My teacher said I could have it. She got two by mistake.”
“How nice of her,” I said numbly, briefly looking at the cover and then bending down to carefully pick up the pieces of the glass.
“It has pictures and everything,” Max said, looking at the cover adoringly and not even curious about the broken glass. “I’m going to be a cowboy when I grow up.” He looked at me as though there was no question at all that he’d be a rancher astride a horse someday. “Where’s Mommi?”
I tossed the shards into the trash and then turned on the hot-water tap at the kitchen sink. “She’s resting.”
“I want to show her my book.”
“Later,” I said, squirting dish soap in the stream of water. “Let her rest.”
“Is she sick?”
I swished the soapy bubbles and slid the breakfast dishes into the water. They disappeared into the suds. “She’s just tired.”
Max pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. “Can I have cookies?”
I wiped my wet hands on my skirt and opened the cabinet where Mommi kept the cereal and oatmeal and crackers and Nabisco gingersnaps. There was hardly anything in it. A box of Cream of Wheat. A package of rice. A tin of saltines.
I just stood there and stared, realizing what I should have grasped from the get-go. Papa wasn’t bringing home a paycheck. He’d been gone for two weeks already. His bank accounts had been frozen. Mommi hadn’t had many sewing jobs lately, and now she might not be able to attract any. The earth seemed to shift a little beneath my feet as all these truths fell over me. Mommi would run out of money. Maybe she already had.
“Look, Elise,” Max was saying. “This cowboy has a palomino. I want a palomino someday. I’m going to name him Peter Pan.”
As I turned to look at my brother, I closed the cabinet door. “How about toast and peanut butter?”
At that same moment, I saw Mommi at the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She was looking at me, watching me close the cabinet door. She had the sheaf of papers in her hand. Max saw her, too.
“Mommi, look!” He held up his book. “Teacher said I could keep it.”
Mommi turned to look at Max and the gift, at the evidence that apparently good still happened in this world. Without a word, she sat down by my brother at the table to look at his book with him. The sheaf of papers she placed upside down next to her. I reached for the bread bin and pulled out the loaf Mommi had made yesterday and plugged in the toaster. Soon the kitchen was filled with the aroma of the toasting bread, nutty and sweet. I washed up the breakfast dishes as Max ate the toast and looked at the cowboy book with Mommi silent beside him.