Without even thinking, I dive fully into the linen closet, squeezing myself next to the laundry hamper, Rolf’s rumpled uniform clutched in my fists. I ease the squeaking closet door shut, all but a sliver—I’m too afraid of the clicking sound to close it all the way. My heart is pounding so loudly in my ears I’m sure anyone could hear it, and I tell it to slow down, but it won’t obey.
“I can’t believe you forgot the cake. Dinner is not worth having without cake.”
Yet another thing that hasn’t changed: Elsbeth’s voice, teasing and bouncy and hitting me like a punch in the gut. My mouth opens in a whimper. I stuff Rolf’s evil uniform against my lips.
“Apparently life is not worth living without cake, if you’re my wife,” he teases her.
“So I like the sweeter things in life.” She laughs.
“Is there anything else you need while we’re here?” Rolf asks.
“I might as well grab a sweater, since Granny’s house is an icebox.”
They’re so normal together. I wasn’t expecting that. They don’t sound like war. They sound like jokes and kisses, like the friends I should still have. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, the squeak on the fourth tread. Her bedroom is the door before the linen cupboard; she’ll have no reason to walk past. Next door, I hear her opening her wardrobe, riffling through hangers, humming something tuneless. Elsbeth never could sing.
“Have you seen my yellow sweater?” she calls downstairs to the kitchen.
“Didn’t you put it in the hamper?”
Saliva pools in my mouth. I see Elsbeth’s slim ankles approach, closer, and my nose is tickled by her talcum powder. She puts her hand on the knob. What will I do when she finds me? I run through the escape scenarios I do with every Nazi, except that in this case they’re insane. I could hit her. I could hug her. I could greet her like the past two years never happened. But they did happen, and now I don’t just hate and love and miss Elsbeth; I also have to fear her.
“Elsbeth, it’s in here,” Rolf calls. “Your sweater was on the chair.”
She moves away again, heels tripping on the floor. My heart pounds out of my chest, both nerves and anger and grief. And then she’s gone again, my old best friend.
When I get home that night, Mama and Papa are already in bed. It’s too early for them to be asleep, but they don’t bother to come out. For years I’ve begged them for this—to just go to bed without waiting up for me—but now I picture them in their nightclothes, listening to me hang my coat, and it makes me feel unsettled. Something shifted between us, after the last fight when I left with Willem. I’m still their daughter, but I’m no longer their child.
There’s a letter propped against a book on my bedside table. I don’t recognize the handwriting on the envelope, and when I open it, a small, star-shaped note falls out. Christoffel must have dropped it off while I was out, after his father returned from Den Haag. A response from Amalia. Just what I thought I wanted a couple of days ago, and now it doesn’t matter at all.
Dear Hanneke, I read as I unfold the crisp notebook paper. I don’t know where she is. I wish I did. I miss my friend, too.
I picture Mirjam joyfully reuniting with her friend, carrying a stack of magazines, carrying weeks’ worth of thoughts and feelings to share, having the reunion that Elsbeth and I will never get to have.
When I fall asleep I have an old nightmare again, the one I used to have all the time after Bas died. He comes to me in his uniform with the letter I’d torn up. In the dream, he’s pieced it back together and is angry that I never read it. “It means you’ve forgotten me,” he says. “It doesn’t,” I try to tell him. “It doesn’t mean that at all. I think of you every day.
“Look,” I say to him. “I’ll read it right now. I’ll read it this very minute if it’s important to you.” But for every word I try to read, Bas turns a little paler and a little more gray. By the time I’m halfway through, he’s a corpse standing in front of me, and I can’t finish the letter, because I’m crying. When I wake up my eyes are dry—my eyes are always dry—but my sheets are twisted around my body and drenched with sweat. The next night, just before curfew, Ollie knocks on my door. When my mother answers, he explains: His mother isn’t well. He and his father need to take her to the hospital. Pia is afraid to stay home alone; might I come and spend the night with her?
My mother doesn’t agree or disagree; she doesn’t even look at me. She turns her head and says, “Do what you want to, Hanneke.”
“I should go, then, for Ollie’s mother,” I say.
Except, of course, Ollie’s mother is fine and Pia is probably home right now obliviously doing her schoolwork. Mirjam’s transport is scheduled to begin in two hours.
TWENTY-FIVE
Monday
We have to stand very close and stay very quiet, underneath the awning of the butcher shop. It’s a good spot, though. The awning and the ridiculous cow cover us as much as I hoped they would: Two pairs of soldiers have walked past without noticing we’re there. I just hope the sky stays clear. If it starts to rain or snow, one of them might duck under for cover.