“Drika,” my father said. “Drika.”
She turned to him. His eyes welled up and he shivered. Then he shook his head.
“What do you mean?” she said. “What does that mean?” She looked back at me. “Where’s your brother, Jacob? Where’s Edwin?”
Uncle Martin walked across the lawn. Fergus ran circles around me, sniffing at the ground, the reddish brown gloss of his coat in constant motion. Our house, so big and well placed in the center of all our land, looked peaceful. The monument of success my parents had intended it to be, with dark tar panels of roof layered on top of one another, as neatly pleated as feathers on a wing.
“Oh god, no!” my mother screamed.
The little yellow and blue cloth cap she wore wrapped tight over her hair had a strap that squeezed her skin forward into a second chin. Her eyes widened as she knelt down in front of me. The faint smell of cinnamon carried on her breath. Tears gathered at the corners of her hazel and gray eyes, each a bowl of seawater after a storm. She grabbed both my arms and squeezed to the bone. I watched her face redden and thought she might have a heart attack as she let go a piercing cry: a hand in open flame, a brutal wind on a rotten tooth, the last breath of a pained creature. Then she clutched her fingers at the hem of my shirt, buried her head into my stomach, and began heavy, uncontrolled sobs that shook both our bodies.
I went numb.
I became a stranger to her and she to me. Everything settled into my mind like a stack of photographs of each second, but something inside of me went cold—the deepest part where language and feelings form. If I looked at her, her pain would have sunk me and ended me in that driveway. I didn’t want anything to be mine: no love, no longing, not hurt, nor disappointment, guilt or responsibility; just to live beside strangers or nobody at all.
I ignored her nose tucking into the soft middle of my stomach, ignored Uncle Martin and my father picking her up and leading her to the house. I stood in the driveway for a moment, a cold, unfeeling creature. Then, when they were all inside, Fergus doubled back and barked, which snapped me out of it and all those feelings of shame and endless hurt rushed back in.
Inside the house Uncle Martin sat my mother on the couch in the living room. As soon as she was down, she shot up and started screaming at my father.
“What happened? Tell me what happened!”
Fergus had followed me inside but now ran from the room. Uncle Martin kept his giant hands gripped on my mother’s shoulders. “What did happen, Hans?” he asked. “She deserves to know.”
My father leaned against the mantel and rubbed his palms over his cheeks, drawing the skin down. He seemed impossibly tall at that moment, though his spine had already started to curve.
“There was a flood the first day of the attacks,” he started.
I leaned into the old ottoman as he told them about Edwin being lost underground. It was where I’d often sat and watched my mother dance with the men of our family. When everyone stopped talking, my mother curled up fetal on the couch. Uncle Martin’s teeth clenched so tight the muscles in his jaw bulged. Blood flamed up from his neckline until his skin went scarlet.
“And did you get your account?” my mother whispered. “Did you get your precious Volkswagen account?”
“Drika.”
She stood up and screamed into his face. “Volkswagen. Volkswagen. Volkswagen. Is our family all set up for the future, Hans?”
“Drika, please.”
“Please nothing,” she made a deep warbling sound like swallowing vomit from her throat. Bilious is the word, I thought.
My father took a step closer to her and she reached up and slapped him hard. Her handprint spread like sunburn across his jaw and cheek. My heart was a rush of sparrows, as for a moment, I thought he was going to hit her back, though that was not my father. My giant father stood where he was without moving, as if inviting her to strike again. Neither said anything. My father stood dumbfounded in a dust-mote-filled shaft of light by the piano, and stood there like a statue long after she turned and left the room.
I turned away. Out the window I saw a giant crater of upturned earth in the backyard.
My uncle saw me staring out there. “That happened last night. Some plane must have dropped it by accident. A few landed in town. One knocked out all the church windows.”
The pit appeared to be about a meter deep and twelve meters wide. There was a twin-trunked sessile oak tree in the backyard that Edwin and I climbed on. My father had tried to take a picture with us sitting in the two wedges, but neither of us could sit still long enough to get a good photo. There were a few blurry photos of us when we were younger looking squeamish while cradled in the oak. The bomb’s blast had snapped one of the limbs off from the thick trunk and it lay across the yard. I pictured myself walking into the yard and lying down in the middle of the pit so my family could bury me there, suddenly longing for the pressure of earth to pack me away into some long, quiet darkness.
In the days that followed, Uncle Martin went to Rotterdam to hunt down any traces of Edwin. My father walked around handicapped by guilt over the loss of his son. Some part of him shriveled up like a salted slug and he no longer walked as tall. He went those first days home without sleeping, and then he collapsed across the bed and fell asleep, his clothes still on, one long arm dangling to the floor.
Father Heard came to our house every day. “I’m so sorry, my friend,” he said and hugged my father, then my mother, then me. Despite all his efforts, he brought little comfort.
When my mother urged my father to talk about what happened, probing for more details, he gave the facts, stripped of any emotion as if he pulled some birdcage down over himself to lock that all away. Though parts of it bulged out between the iron gating. His voice cracked. His eyes glassed over.
“The road flooded. The water knocked a manhole cover loose. The boys were . . .” He paused and glanced at me for a moment. “They were trying to find me. I should have gone to them. To the hotel.” As soon as he finished repeating the story, he left the room.
My mother screamed after him. “You were supposed to protect them. Keep them safe.”
She and I remained sitting in the big, vacant stillness. The large wood-burning stove inhaled and cracked, breaking the silence; it seemed as if the house was already opening its doors to ghosts who moved in the distant corners of each room.
Over the next week, she threw a bowl against the wall, then pulled a blanket over her head. She walked up to my father, silent as a knife, and he braced himself to be hit, his body straightened for a moment and went hard, but she reached up and wrapped her arms around him.
“You poor man,” she whispered.