“The ship I paid to take us across has left,” my father said as he stared at the empty slips in the harbor. He turned back to me. “We’re going to be trapped here.”
Past the harbor we found a huge drainage pipe opening up along the shore. The giant pipe led into a dark hole tunneled under the street. A stream trickled out. In his wet and ruined three-piece suit and sopping shoes my father walked right into the blackness and disappeared. I ran after him and yelled out my brother’s name, which echoed away from us in the darkness. I followed after the splash of my father’s sunken feet as we walked under the city. The passageway ran into smaller grated-off pipes that I put my head against, calling for my brother.
All that night and into the next day we searched. We wandered the city in a stupor for several days after that, following and backtracking along the city’s canals and eventually ending up at the morgue, where people already began cataloging the new dead. My father made me wait outside while he walked the corridors and looked into the blued faces of strangers.
I sat on the bench, pulled the rumpled flyer of the woman from my pocket, and felt a bloom of shame and disgust in my gut for wanting something so physical. Vomit rose to the back of my mouth. I crumpled the paper into a wet ball and tossed it into the street.
At night in the city before the raid, nothing was shrouded in darkness. Streetlights and lights up in the buildings had cast shadows on the city where something was always happening. “Those lights up there feel like glowing money,” my father had said. But since the raid, all was dark. Night came much earlier. The buildings’ shadows slipped away. That darkness seeped into me as we passed those few nights, stopping only to let me sleep in a doorway or on a park bench for an hour here and there when exhaustion set in firmly enough to overpower the wild feeling of wanting to keep following my father, to constantly call out my brother’s name, my phantom hands ever grasping fistfuls of water.
It was still dark when I woke on a bench outside the morgue. My father sat on the ground against the seat where my feet were. He rubbed the sleeve of his jacket across his face. When he turned to me, his eyes were red and inflamed. If he’d been crying it would have been the first time I’d ever seen it. A distant expression pinched his brows close together. Resignation, perhaps. When he saw my eyes open, he shook his head.
“I found nothing inside. Your mother is going to be worried to death. We have to at least get you home safe. At least you,” he said again.
We crossed the bridge out of the city and looked for someone who would drive us all the way back to Delfzijl.
We found another shop to wire a message. My father looked at me as we stood at the counter. “I have no idea what to say to her.”
I thought of my mother then. My poor mother waiting for heartbreak.
Late on the evening of the fourteenth, we found someone to drive us home. It was getting dark outside, and despite all the houses the driver passed in his old Fiat, almost none of them had their lights on. The world had gone dark and I sensed then that the world and I moved in different directions—separated by complicated crosscurrents, soon to be strangers.
“I don’t want you thinking this was your fault. This is bigger than you,” my father said while we drove. He tried to be kind but his words confirmed my own conclusion, that this was completely my fault. I had made Edwin leave the hotel. “Much bigger than you,” my father said, his familiar hand reaching out to cup the back of my neck.
The Germans were going through with their invasion.
By the time we reached the outer limits of Rotterdam, it was pitch-black, and we heard what sounded like a large machine engine digging into the road ahead of us. The driver pulled the car over at the easternmost side of an expansive field. We all got out of the car and listened to the sound getting louder.
“Let’s find cover,” the driver said.
We followed him to the tree line as wave upon wave of airplanes swooped over our heads, barreling toward Rotterdam. Then suddenly we heard the sounds of firebombs exploding in the distance. We hid away from the car in the trees and watched the fiery, orange glow in the west, rising out of the pale darkness where Rotterdam—where we—had been. From the edge of the field the subtle percussions in the distance, I felt like the world shifting to make some great change.
The sky emptied of plane noise. Then, leaving behind the angry, red gloaming of the firestorm, we started the car back up and headed east without our lights on to avoid whatever else might be coming. We headed east, back to our home, our lives, missing one.
6
When we arrived in the village of Delfzijl, my father and I had the driver drop us off in the harbor so we could see if Uncle Martin’s boat was in. The Lighthouse Lady was moored to several other boats. All of the fishing fleet was now docked. A group of fishermen talked by the pier. My father went up to them.
“What’s the news?” he asked.
“Didn’t you hear,” Dieter Clapson said. “We surrendered this morning.”
They all kept talking over one another.
“Germany wants our country for our airfields.”
“Soldiers crossed the River Meuse at Maastricht on the eleventh.”
“Luxemburg went right away. The Belgians had help from French and Brit soldiers, but couldn’t hold up. Louvain was destroyed.”
“I have a cousin there.”
“They rolled through Flanders.”
“Are you okay, Hans?” Stevens Von Heller, a fisherman and one of our neighbors, asked. “We heard about some excitement up at your house last night.”
My father pulled my wrist and turned me toward home. We walked quickly but with a mounting dread of facing my mother. I wanted to run ahead, to keep going past our house, even past Hilda’s family farm, out of town, anywhere to avoid being there when she found out about Edwin. I didn’t want the conversation to land on who persuaded him to leave our hotel.
In the driveway we crossed the stepping-stones from the side of the house to a square frame used for beating carpets clean. The front door of our house opened and my mother ran out to us. I stepped toward her and instinctively knew, but could not articulate then, that this was the first step on the trail that led right out of childhood. Right behind her was Fergus, who sprinted past her and headed straight for me. Then Uncle Martin appeared in the doorway.
“Hans, you had me terrified this whole time,” she said as she ran across the lawn. Fergus jumped at my feet. She hugged my father and reached out to pull me into her. She grabbed both sides of my face and looked right into my eyes. Fergus’s frenetic body crashed into my legs.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked.
I lifted my hand and covered her eyes so not to see them the moment she heard. My throat constricted from the full burden of the last five days; from not sleeping, not eating enough, the crushing blow of guilt and loss that had been wracking me since Edwin slipped below the surface of the road.