“Mom,” I said. “Mom.”
But she kept at it and then she took out her rings, which were now loose on her, and one after the other she slipped them on until they locked her fingers straight. Her hands were suspended in front of her as she gazed into her mantle mirror. The strange gathering of chains and pearls about her neck was a layered coil of subtle light. Something ungovernable in her heart had saturated her mind. She looked at me then but her eyes were unfocused and didn’t meet mine. She stood up so her ornament-weighted robe fell back off her shoulders, and looked at herself in the mirror as if alone.
“Honey,” she said, turning to me in the dark hallway. Tendrils of jewelry hung off the side of her blank face. Her fingers could not bend from all the rings so she held them spread out and facing the ceiling like they’d been cast in bronze.
I turned and fled downstairs, taking three steps at a time. She was at the top flight by the time I slammed onto the first floor.
“Honey,” she called. “Honey,” she said, like she’d found the word she needed.
The manic energy and guilt that rose up in me made me want to sprint or mount some ten-legged chariot and fly over a sea of fire again. Stepping through the glass door into the backyard, I grabbed a shovel from the shed and started furiously scooping mounds of loose dirt back into the pit. I dug and dug, taking wild strikes into the dirt and flinging it until my arms burned and my whole body pulsed with one intention. There. There. There. That beat, beat, beat of a body doing the work of still living. I wanted to cry and weep and confess about Edwin, as if doing so would expunge my guilt. But I held it all in where it became something solid I’ve quietly carried with me until this day—a cancerous pearl.
When I was too tired to move, I leaned on the shovel’s handle. Above me my mother’s shadow filled her bedroom window. She’d been watching me. What must she have thought of me then? Her son. Her only son. It was very dark out when she stepped back from her window. I hoped she would sleep. It was strange to look up at the house. It seemed like I’d been buried and was only now working my way loose of the earth.
The next morning my father and Uncle Martin returned.
“There are Germans everywhere,” Uncle Martin cursed as he walked into the door. “We have to get you out of here.”
“We didn’t find anything,” my father told me.
My mother came down the stairs, heard him, and stopped. “Then I’m not going anywhere. Not until we’re sure.” She turned around and went back to her room.
“We’ll go back. I’ll keep looking,” my father called after her. He walked past me like he was about to sink into the ottoman. “Hello, Jacob,” he said. Then he saw the letter from Mr. Gunnelburg on the piano where I left it.
“Oh. Thank god,” he sighed and picked up the envelope. “They paid.”
His long fingers tore the seal back. With the paper folded back in front of him I saw a dark drawbridge slam shut over his face. He crumpled the letter and threw it across the room.
“They can’t do this,” he said. “Oh no. They can’t do this.”
He got up and went into his lab where I heard glass shattering against the walls. He spent the rest of the night at home wandering the house, in and out of his lab. He passed me a dozen times without noticing me or seemingly unaware, muttering to himself. When he was in the lab, I snuck up to the crumpled letter like a thief, smoothed it, and read.
Dear Mr. Koopman,
In light of recent events, we will be rescinding our initial payment and not placing any further orders. Thank you for your interest in working with Volkswagen.
Trevor Gunnelburg
I sensed that disappointment must have tipped my father then. I knew how hard he’d worked on the order, but didn’t know then how much capital he’d invested in the project, or the practical, day-to-day stresses of the business that still required his attention despite our own family being shut down.
After that my father became immobilized by grief. Over the course of two days he emptied the brandy decanter and several other bottles of liquor in the house. Instead of careening room to room, he sat in his library alone and mumbled to the books. When he sobered up, he went days without eating and lost weight. During the darkest parts of the nights that he wasn’t spooking through Rotterdam, the sound of his crying rose through the vents. It became as steady as one of the noises the house made: the wood settling, popping and cracking behind the walls, or the low groan of water flushing through the pipes. Waking to this sound sent a sadness through me that reached out from my chest and got lost in some unbearable emptiness.
When I did sleep, my dreams had become a frightening stranger that leaned against me and made me toss the covers off so the cold woke me. My trembling fingers felt for the edges of the blanket. Fergus rested his head on my bed. When I finished petting him, he’d go to Edwin’s bed, sniff the sheets, then jump on the covers and curl himself into a ball. Until morning I would stare at the exquisite cobwebs tucked in the corner of my room and the shadows of tree branches that bent across the ceiling.
When the long days of summer came it was a blessing. It was easier to spend less time in or close to the house. The first tulip and forsythia blooms lining the front and sides of the house shriveled into dull little fists of petals from a lack of water and tending. But so much time off on my own or with Ludo and Hilda created the constant desire to talk to Edwin. When the need for this got too burdensome, I started talking to him in my head. At first, a short calling out of his name, then, slowly, as if Edwin became my own sounding board, I began to hear myself talk of my own grief. I wanted so terribly for some soft shiver of my brother’s subterranean drifting song to find me.
At my loneliest moments, I walked around the outskirts and through the center of town, keeping Edwin’s invisible presence next to me. I wondered what tragedies were held in each home on my street alone. One of the houses belonged to Liddy Robinson’s family. Liddy and Edwin were in the same grade and she was the first girl to kiss Edwin. However, later she told Hilda that his breath smelled like cabbage cream soup and she didn’t want to kiss him again.
Edwin had been gone for three months. He had missed two thunderstorms that shook the house. One storm came marching over our house on legs of lightning, dragging its heavy dark clouds overhead like a wet tarp. Each night after those storms, the clear sky of stars bloomed into sharp-angled shapes etched across the sky. Orion threw his leg over the horizon, climbed atop our world, and sat perched, steadily gazing upon everything we were losing.