“Leave her alone,” Ursula said. “If you wake her, she’ll never go back to sleep.”
“Oh.” The tension in the car had distracted her. Anna felt stupid that she hadn’t sorted this out. Of course. It was understood. Polly was going to stay the night. “Ursula, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” She hadn’t been. But fetching Polly Jean was as good an excuse as any to get away from Bruno for a while.
Ursula rose, shook her head thoroughly as if to jostle something loose. “Not thinking is one of your worst habits.” Then she walked Anna to the door, directed her unceremoniously through it, and locked it behind her in the space of no more than fifteen seconds. Anna walked home without the baby she came for.
“GHOSTS,” DOKTOR MESSERLI CONTINUED, “aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you’ve been or done that you cannot escape.”
6
TWO WEEKS LATER, ON A SUNDAY, THE LAST DAY OF THE MONTH, Anna, Bruno, Ursula, and the children boarded a 10:00 A.M. train. They were on their way to Mumpf, a town in Kanton Aargau near Switzerland’s north border, where Daniela, Bruno’s sister, and her partner David lived. It was Daniela’s fortieth birthday.
Taking a train often made more sense than driving. Today the choice was made by circumstance: with Ursula along they couldn’t all fit inside the car. The only inconvenience of the plan was two transfers. David would gather them at Bahnhof Mumpf when they arrived.
On the InterRegio, Charles took the window seat facing forward and Victor, the seat turned toward the back. These were their permanent assignments when the family traveled by train, much to the vexation of Anna’s eldest. Charles had a tender stomach and was prone to motion sickness. A window seat helped his equilibrium. Sure enough, five minutes into the trip, Charles’s face took on the color of a small sour pickle. “Watch the horizon, Schatz,” Anna counseled. “Draw deep, slow breaths.” This seemed to help.
Anna sat next to Victor on the aisle, facing Bruno who, like Charles, always took a forward-facing seat. Ursula settled into the bank of seats across from them, her eyes closed lightly as if in prayer and Daniela’s birthday gift in her lap. In his own lap, Bruno held Polly Jean.
The question had never been asked. Not by Bruno, not by Ursula, not by Daniela nor Hans nor Margrith nor Edith nor Doktor Messerli nor Claudia Zwygart nor the postman nor the cashier at the grocery store nor Mary nor Archie nor anyone who knew Anna either casually or closely, acquaintances old and new. None had asked. And had they asked, Anna would have lied.
But there isn’t any reason to ask. Anna always went back to that.
Nevertheless, the facts were chiseled into the exquisite alabaster of Polly Jean’s face where anyone who wished to challenge the fiction could have and the facts were these: Polly in no way resembled Bruno.
Polly Jean was not a Benz.
“ANNA, WHO IS STEPHEN?” This was the third time Doktor Messerli had asked her.
A man I could never love, but did, Anna thought but didn’t say. Doktor Messerli didn’t ask again.
THE WEATHER PLAYED TRICKS. A cold front that had blown through Zürich the night before had left Dietlikon windy and wet. But halfway to Mumpf the skies were clear. The Benzes were outrunning the elements.
IT WAS A STORY she’d told only to herself, but had repeated so often it was rote. The only thing that ever changed was the tenor by which she told it: sometimes with a sympathetic bias, others with hysteria’s rancid theatrics, and yet other times with a harlot’s detached sangfroid. Occasionally it brought her comfort. More often than not it made her queasy, it hurt her heart (everything always hurt her heart). But whether through sorrow’s shiny tears or memory’s glazed and hazy panes of glass, Anna was resigned to a progression of unalterable facts.
“THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS, Anna. Everything correlates. Everything connects. Every detail bears a consequence. One instant begets the next. And the next. And the next.”