All too soon they arrived at the train platform. So many people jostling, so much noise—crying, reaching for each other, weeping. “Don’t forget there are cheese sandwiches in both of your rucksacks,” Mutti said as a pair of SS men strode past. “And I want to hear that you are working hard on your schoolwork, harder than you would at home. And you must be polite, no matter what. You are good children.” A boy tripped, fell onto Rose’s suitcase. “What did you do that for?” he cried accusingly, but Papi scooped up Rose—his wiry arms, his smoky smell, his rough cheeks, Papi hugging her so hard that it didn’t feel like a hug at all but something more. And yet it wasn’t enough; it would never be enough. Then Rose was clinging to Mutti, burrowing her head at her chest, in the warmth of her wool coat, stroking her rabbit-fur collar. “We will see you soon,” Mutti promised, her cheeks aflame. “We will see you in no time at all.”
This was not good-bye. Rose held on to her mother. She didn’t want an English adventure. She didn’t care if it was safer. Why were they sending her away?
A mittened hand tunneled into hers. “Rose,” Gerhard said as he tugged at her. “We have to get on.”
“We will be here, watching the train,” Mutti said, pressing her hot cheek against her daughter’s, desperately kissing her brow, her lips. “We will not leave.”
Blindly Rose followed her brother. They stepped inside the train. The group leader pointed them into a compartment where several children were already gathered, including the ginger-headed girl who had been weeping earlier, now calm, and a pair of older boys, playing a card game. Gerhard moved close to the boys. Rose went to the big window beside the girl.
“I’m Anita,” the girl said, tugging at the window. “I’m twelve.”
“Rose,” Rose said. “Eleven.”
“Can you help me, Rose?” And the two of them pushed the window as high open as it would go, letting in a swoop of cold air, and used the leather sash that hung from the ceiling to secure the window into place.
She and Anita leaned out. Rose saw a pair of SS men conferring near the train door on the platform. Anita saw them too. “Soon we’ll be leaving them behind,” she said. Rose nodded. No more Nazis, this was true. This was good. But where were her parents? She scanned the crowded platform. They had promised that they wouldn’t leave. There! She alighted on their worried faces, carved out and distinct from the others. “Mutti, Papi!” At the sound of her voice, they rushed toward her, waving furiously.
“Papa!” Anita called. Her father pushed his way through the knots of people to a spot beneath the train window. Anita leaned out more and her father grasped her hands. “My baby,” he moaned.
The engine coughed and began to shudder. It was happening, they were leaving, Rose thought, shocked. They could not be leaving. How could her parents do this? “Mutti! Papi!” she cried.
Lights flooded the platform—Mutti’s face was an awful purplish hue. “We are coming.” Mutti choked the words out. “We are.”
Slowly the train began to move. The crowd along the platform moved with it. Anita’s father hurried alongside, held on to her hands. “No, I can’t let you go,” he moaned. “No.”
“Papa,” Anita cried.
“No, no.” He grasped at her elbows, tugging, yanking. “Papa, no!” she shrieked as he pulled her torso through the window. Suddenly Anita was neither in the train nor out of it. Rose watched in horror as she tumbled onto the platform. Adults rushed over as Anita’s father, weeping, hugged her tight. Out the window, Rose leaned, frozen, the air lashing against her face, her neck—Take me, she wanted to cry out. Grab me too! But the train picked up speed, and the platform and everyone on it—Mutti’s contorted face, the heap of Anita—was receding. “No!” Rose cried. She felt pressure on her legs, a tugging at her waist. “Rose!” Gerhard, pulling her back.
“I don’t want to go,” she cried inside the warmth of the train. Gerhard jammed the window closed as she scooted feral-like to the farthest seat on the bench, away from the others. The train clanked and careered down the tracks and her brother was hugging her and she wanted none of it. “No,” she howled as she buried her face against her brother’s side.
“I know,” Gerhard kept repeating, “I know,” as the train chugged west and left everything they cared about behind.
By the time Rose woke up a second time that day, it was late morning in Los Angeles. It took her longer than usual to get herself dressed. She made an egg scramble—slowly, over a low flame, just as Thomas taught her. She sat down to eat it with buttered toast and coffee, surprised at how hungry she was. She tunneled the food into her mouth automatically, with little pleasure.
The images kept shuttering through her mind: her mother’s slick fingers grasping her own, the chaos and pushing on the platform, Papi’s rush of words, that distant chilly moon, Mutti’s contorted expression, that poor girl pulled from the train. The memories tumbled forth, unbidden. That night on the platform had split her in two—everything that came afterward felt like an accident, one that she was never wholly present for.
But Rose grasped on to every shred of memory that muscled through. She was still the little girl leaning out that window, and yet she was now at least twice the age her parents had been then. She saw herself on that train, bereft, wanting more than anything not to leave, but she also saw herself standing on that platform as her parents had, her heart wrenched from her body, watching in agony as the train pulled away.
It was after dinnertime in England by the time she dialed. “I spoke to Harry already,” Gerhard said, “but I want to hear it from you: Is The Bellhop as ugly as I remember it being?”
Rose laughed. It was a relief to hear Gerhard being Gerhard. “I will not lie to you: it is ugly, but beautiful too. Once I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking of things. Do you remember, at the train station, the girl who got pulled out?”
“Of course,” Gerhard said, with unmistakable impatience. “That was nothing you can forget.”
Alone in her apartment, Rose blushed. “What do you think happened to her?”
“What do you mean? Mutti wrote that the girl was bruised and a little cut up, but basically okay. It was a miracle that she didn’t fall to the tracks, die on the spot. Bloody madness, pulling her out like that.”
“No,” Rose ventured. “I meant—what happened to her during the war? Do you think she survived?”
“Oh,” Gerhard said, and sighed. “I don’t know, who knows. The odds aren’t good.” He paused and she wondered if he too was thinking of their parents. “What made you think of that? I haven’t thought of it in a very long time.”
“I don’t know,” Rose said, and then: “I had a dream.”
“Oh, dreams,” Gerhard said. “Did I tell you that Isobel is now keeping a dream notebook? She’s on a kombucha kick, she’s convinced it’s improving her memory. And her eyesight. And keeping cancer at bay. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to see her scribbling away in her notebook.”
“I miss Isobel,” Rose said with a rush of warmth. “And I miss you too.” It was true, and she didn’t say it nearly enough.