She had told me, too, that he planned to join the Maquis, and that he had gone to a resistance location not far from the fairgrounds. I hear then the bombs that rained down the night of our last performance and know then why he had not come for her. Noa and Luc had died the same night, just miles apart, neither knowing. Tears fill my eyes and run over.
I stare at the painting of Noa, which has been encased in glass to protect it from age and wear. “He didn’t leave you after all,” I whisper.
In the reflection of the glass behind me, something moves. A woman stands there behind me with hair a dome of white. Noa, I think, even as I know it is impossible. I spin toward the image, fantasizing that she is here and I can ask forgiveness for all I have done.
“Mom?”
I turn. “Petra.” My beautiful girl. There she stands, the child whom I was supposed to have lost all those years ago. I raise my hand to my stomach, feeling as I have so many times over the years the blow that almost took her from me. My miracle.
“Now, how did I know that I would find you here?” There is no anger in her voice. Just a smile about those full lips and the dark eyes that I will always see as if behind a sheet of white greasepaint. Performing.
At first, my losing the pregnancy had not been a lie. There had been a sharp pain and bleeding that terrible night when the guard struck me. I had assumed after the blow that I had lost the child. But a few days later as I stood atop the trapeze, considering whether to jump, I felt that familiar nausea return. I recognized instantly what it was: my child, defiant, insisting upon life.
I had not told Noa—she would never have taken the pass if she knew I was still pregnant. It was not that I did not want freedom or to live for my child. I did, so much so I could taste it. But Noa was younger, not as strong. She needed to go, and to take Theo with her. Without the circus, Noa would have nothing. I could manage, get by, find somewhere else to perform and survive. But she could barely take care of herself and Theo with all of our help. She would not make it on her own. So I had lied.
My plan was a good one and it might have worked if not for Luc and the fire. If it had been given a chance. How had the fire started, though? Across the years I wondered if it had been set deliberately by a disgruntled circus worker or even Emmet, wanting to be free of it all. Or perhaps a stray piece of shrapnel from one of the bombs. To this day I do not know.
In the end, it hadn’t mattered. The fire, not the war, had taken Noa, just as arbitrarily as Herr Neuhoff had been felled by his heart. I had no choice but to take the pass and save Theo.
And my daughter. Petra has her father’s features, but she is petite like me, a four-foot-eleven surgeon for Doctors Without Borders and a force to be reckoned with. I reach over the roped stanchion and brush her bangs from her eyes instinctively as though she is six. Only her hair is almost completely white. How odd it is to see your own child age! Petra, shielded on the inside and born in America, knew nothing of the hardships we had lived. Almost nothing. My daughter had been born blind in one eye, the sole injury the guard’s club had inflicted the night Peter was taken.
As Petra steps forward to embrace me, someone taller appears behind her. “Mom, come out of there.” I obey and reach up to hug Theo, who stands a full head above his sister, his own hair gray and wiry. Though they are not blood siblings, their features look remarkably the same.
“You also came?” I ask chidingly. “Don’t you have patients to care for?”
“We’re kind of a package deal,” he replies, putting an arm around his sister’s shoulders. It is true—the two couldn’t be closer.
They had both become doctors. Petra, who had not escaped the travel gene, circled the world in her practice, and Theo, ever content to stay, was a surgeon at a hospital in the same town where I had raised them, with his wife and my three beautiful granddaughters, themselves now grown. My two children, cut from different cloth, yet so very alike in shape. And medicine a kind of family business to them as much as the circus had been to my brothers and me.
I push the belly box shut with my backside so Petra and Theo will not see and let her lead me from the exhibit back to the other side of the ropes.
“How did you get here so quickly?” I ask Theo. “I only left New York two days ago.”
“It was dumb luck that I was at a conference in Brussels when I got the call from the nursing home,” he replies. “I phoned Petra and she flew in from Belgrade.” Petra spent most of her time in Eastern Europe helping refugees. She had been drawn, it seems, back to this part of the world from which we had worked so hard to escape.
I look at my children adoringly. In their faces, I can see the past as surely as Drina once read the future: Peter is so readily visible in our daughter, most days it is like having him walk with me. Theo was not born to Noa, but somehow he absorbed so much of her looks, as if by osmosis, her expressions and even her manner of speech. She had loved him so in the few short months she cared for him and he could not have been more hers if she had given birth to him.
Then there is that other face always in my mind, though I never met him, never had a photograph. Noa’s child, taken from her at birth. I see him next to Theo, wonder so often what he would have been like as a man.
“Mom...” Theo’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “You just took off from the home. We were so worried.”
“I had to see the exhibit,” I offer weakly.
Theo steps back, noticing the portrait of Noa. “That’s her, isn’t it?” he asks, a catch in his voice. He and Petra both know about Noa. I told my children when they were old enough the truth about Noa and the way she had saved Theo. But the details of how she had come to be with the circus and the other sibling who might be out there still—well, some things are better left unsaid. I nod. “She was beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” I repeat. “In more ways than you will ever know, I think. It was painted by a young man she met while she was with the circus. She only knew him a short while, but they loved each other very much. I never knew what became of him—until now.”
We stare at the picture for several seconds without speaking. “Are you ready to go now?” Petra asks gently.
“No,” I reply firmly. “I’m not ready to leave.”
“Mom,” Theo says patiently, as though speaking with a child. “I know the circus was a huge part of your life. But it’s all gone now. And it’s time to go home.”
I clear my throat. “First,” I say, “there’s something I must tell you.”
Petra’s brow wrinkles in that way so reminiscent of her father. “I don’t understand.”
“Come.” I gesture to a bench alongside the exhibit. I sit and take their hands, pulling a child down on each side of me. “There’s more to the story than either you or your brother know. Before she found Theo, Noa had a baby.”