Erich made promises, and so did she. What were they? She feels suddenly ashamed of things she can’t remember. She wishes she could start again, rewind, change whatever it was that happened. And suddenly she is crying. And she is perhaps where she thought she would be, deserves to be. She is so alone.
She hears the rustling of branches that hang across the pathway to alert of any intruders. She can sense that someone is standing outside. The door creaks open slightly, and she closes her eyes. It is the Russians, she thinks. They know her deeds. She will be taken away. She can’t look. They will shoot her like they did Georg.
The door makes its final squeak, and Rosalind’s name is spoken in a husky voice that she recognizes. A hand, firm and gentle, touches her shoulder. She opens her eyes, and Monique is there, crouching down beside her. She wears a red dress, white satin piping around the collar, and a small black beret, her hair pulled back, as if to display herself better. A shopwindow display, she suddenly thinks, but there are things that mar Monique’s beauty. She has a cut above the eye that is swollen, pink, and shiny. The bottom of Monique’s dress brushes the dirty floor beside her, and Rosalind worries that it will be stained.
“Rosalind, I will help you.”
“Why would you do that?” croaks Rosalind, surprised at the sound of her own voice in the stillness, and she worries it might carry far down the river.
“Because you need me.”
Rosalind says nothing. She blinks slowly, but Monique is still there.
“I’m sorry about Georg,” she says.
“But you were right,” says Rosalind, her voice in a tunnel, far away, as if it weren’t hers. “I knew you were right. I knew he didn’t love me, but I refused to believe it.”
“I was wrong,” says Monique. “I was torn every time I saw you together. It pained me to look at your happiness after he proposed, knowing I should have told you about Georg long before then.”
“I wouldn’t have believed you anyway,” Rosalind says, the kindness of Monique’s voice forcing her to tears. “It is I who has wronged you!” Though the reasons are still unclear in her mind.
“The war did bad things,” says Monique. “Hitler did worse things. He made people suffer unnecessarily. I suffer because I was part of it, not willingly, but that I am called a German now. We all carry that.”
“But you always tried to help others,” says Rosalind, remembering vaguely. Faces jump in her mind, faces of people she was too ashamed to be around. Though she cannot remember their names. They are somewhere, bobbing in and out of her head, like they are drowning, and she is not quick enough to reach for them.
“Someone had to do something,” says Monique. “But I wasn’t the only one. There were so many who risked their lives.”
Monique looks through the window to the river. Rosalind sees the tiny mole that sits just below her mouth to the side, against skin that is clear. She is an angel, Rosalind thinks, perhaps come to save her, to take her to heaven.
“I hated you and loved you at the same time,” says Rosalind, trying to find more words, willing forth those drowning, ghostly images that she can almost see. “I thought you were taking everything from me.”
“You had as much as me, except you just didn’t notice.”
She is right, Rosalind is thinking. She is right, and Rosalind can see that now. There is no one to blame. The past is done.
“Monique, I’ve felt so alone for years.”
Monique puts her arms around her, and Rosalind cries then on her shoulder. She likes the feel of Monique’s arms and the floral smell of her, not like herself, harsher, acidic.
“You weren’t yourself. I know that,” says Monique, her voice soft, syrupy. “I should have tried to understand you better. You were always looking for the faults in people, in things. You were always living in shadows, under clouds. I’m sorry I didn’t see that until it was too late.”
“I should have been there for you, too,” says Rosalind.
“You were. You practically raised me. You lent me your wings.”
Rosalind laughs, pulling away from Monique to wipe away her tears. “You grew your own wings. You would have grown them without me.”
Rosalind suddenly notices the bandages on the arms that hold her, and then she is thinking, remembering. There was more: Monique in the attic.
Images rise to the surface now: Monique injured, Rosalind watching, angry.
Why?
CHAPTER 29
STEFANO
Stefano is slapped awake, water thrown in his face. He coughs and spits out water, eyes opening, stinging from the light, and a throbbing pain in his head. He comes around slowly to the stillness in the room, to the man who still has him tethered, elsewhere now.
He is told that he will feel better in a few minutes.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Stefano,” he says, eyes fighting to stay open.
“The photo of Monique . . . Why do you have that?”
Stefano’s head feels clouded as he tries to put his thoughts in order.
He remembers Erich reaching into Rosalind’s medical bag, a cloth over his face, something odorous, and fighting the feeling of being smothered under the force of Erich’s weight against him. And the memory that came just before that, of Rosalind staggering toward the barn door but never reaching it, falling to the ground, her hands flat on the earth at first, before submitting to it fully, and Erich carrying her outside. Stefano did not see that coming, the tables turned so brutally.
He leans back, nauseated with the sweet, sickly smell of the drug still in his nostrils.
“I told you already.” His head rolls slightly on a bar of metal behind him.
“Tell me again.”
“I found it in the house.”
He is tied to the leg of a large iron bed in another house, his wrists bound again behind him, the ropes anchored to the rim of the bed.
“Where are we?”
“It doesn’t matter where.”
Stefano looks out the window. They are on the top floor of a house in a valley, the sun low, almost gone but burning brightly. He can see a road twisting upward, and beyond that there is nothing but rolling green hills and the faint sound of a helicopter. He has been here before, just before Dresden. He had chosen it specifically, searched it for clues.
“I underestimated Rosalind,” Erich tells him. “She said that she didn’t trust you on sight. And I convinced her otherwise. She told me the first night, after she saw you in the wood, that I had to get rid of you. For once she saw things that were there instead of things that weren’t.”
“And you rewarded her with an injection. I would hate to see how you treat your enemies.”
“You should know that Rosalind wanted me to give you an overdose, then bury you dead or alive. I was not ready to give up on you yet. I feel there is unfinished business between us, more words to be said.”
“I never found talking worked with Nazis.”
Erich looks at him. At first Stefano thinks he will hit him, but he breaks into laughter and wags his finger at him.
“That is why I first trusted you. You wear a cynically honest view of the world. I understand what you are feeling,” says Erich, stepping closer. “But now I need the whole truth. I worked for Hitler’s protection squad. I interrogated people, I listened to them beg, and most times when I’d had enough, I would order them killed.”
He tilts his head and looks at Stefano curiously.
“But you knew all that before you came to the river, didn’t you?”
Stefano notices that there is a slight tremble to his voice that he didn’t have before. Events haven’t worked out quite as they should. Though it could also mean that he is unhinged, that he will not control himself, and may not be prepared to negotiate.
“You don’t need to do this. I do not care who you were in the war. I just want to go home.”
“To Italy? To your family? To your mamma who is waiting for you?”