Roberta could not speak.
“Today, it was like I was back there,” Sonia said. “It doesn’t happen often. The war ended, and they brought us all out of there, and I came here. I’m fed and taken care of. I don’t think about it. But today, it was like Weekly Gardening had never existed. I was ten again, on work detail. It’s hard to explain. It was more real to me than you are right now.”
Roberta put her head in her hands. Her temples were throbbing, and she wished now she’d gotten her own chalky white aspirin pill from Miss Hedmeyer. Her eyes were hot and she wanted to cry, but the tears were jammed in her throat, hard and painful. Had Uncle Van seen these things? Was that why he’d tried to use his gun in the garage? She made herself take a breath. “And the other day? In the dining hall?”
“That was . . .” Sonia searched in her mind, tried to find the words. “We had blockovas,” she said, “block leaders. They were prisoners who were promoted, assigned to oversee other prisoners.”
“Women?” Roberta asked, shocked again.
“Yes. A few were nice, and tried to sneak us things, but most were not. They wanted favor. They had leave to beat you, report on you. If you misbehaved, you were sent to the punishment block. Solitary confinement, and worse.”
Roberta thought back to that day in the dining hall, Alison punching Sherri, Sherri’s nose bleeding, the chaos and the noise, Lady Loon shouting, It’s Special Detention for you, my girl. Do you hear? Get moving. Move! It made sense now. A horrible, nightmarish kind of sense.
She circled back to the main problem. “What are you going to do?” she asked the other girl. “This can’t keep happening. You’ll get sent to Special Detention.” Katie, the strongest and boldest of them, had been sent to Special Detention, and she’d been so shaken she refused to talk about it. Roberta wasn’t sure Sonia would survive it. “You could be expelled,” she said. “You have nowhere to go.”
Sonia’s chin went hard; her eyes clouded. “It won’t happen again.”
Roberta wasn’t sure about that. But as Sonia drifted to sleep, she sat still, her mind dwelling on the problem, poking at it from all sides. Sonia was tired, drained, but Roberta was resilient. So was CeCe. So was Katie.
They’d gotten this far, all of them. Without breaking, without dying. Sonia wasn’t alone.
Together, they could do something. Together, they could carry on.
They sat on the floor of their room that night, all four of them, gathered around CeCe’s radio. With the sound low so Susan Brady wouldn’t hear, they listened to a show about cops chasing a murderer, and a rendition of “Three Little Maids” that made them all laugh. Then another show, this one about cowboys, before it got late enough that everything went off the air and CeCe turned the radio off. And then they talked.
In the dark, when they’d all been listening for hours, already relaxed, it suddenly became easy. The words flowed, weaving over one another, making up the pattern as they went along. Roberta told about Uncle Van, about the day she had opened the garage door and found him, sitting on a wooden chair, weeping, a pistol in his mouth. She told them of the days afterward, the silence in herself that she couldn’t break, the doctors, Uncle Van’s bloodshot eyes. He hadn’t been able to look at her. Roberta felt a new lump in her throat as she told it, remembering. She wished now that she’d crawled into Uncle Van’s lap and put her arms around his neck and never let go. But she’d been thirteen, and everyone had been horrified and silent, including her, and she hadn’t known what to do.
“Where is he now?” Katie’s low voice came through the dark when Roberta finished.
“He’s still at home,” Roberta said. “He sees doctors. Mother says he isn’t well, that Dad wants to put him in a hospital.” She forced the words out. “They’re fighting. Mother and Dad. I could see it on Family Visit Day—they wouldn’t look at each other, talk to each other. They’re ashamed of me and Uncle Van both. I know Dad works a lot. Mother’s eyes were red, and she says . . . she says it isn’t a good time to come home.”
The others talked now as Roberta subsided. A weight had lifted from her chest. Each girl spoke while the others were quiet, listening.
It went like that, night after night. Katie, with CeCe as an accomplice, began pilfering extra food from the dining hall at supper, sneaking through a door into the kitchen and taking it while CeCe kept watch. They snacked on the extra food every night after dark; they pretended that it was for all of them, but by tacit agreement they gave most of it to Sonia. With the lights out and the cold winter coming outside, they ate and listened to the radio and told their stories, one by one, detail upon detail. Katie and Thomas, the boy who’d attacked her and told her to hold still. CeCe and her mother’s accident at the beach. Roberta told them, hesitantly, about the song she’d heard on the hockey field, the same song Uncle Van had been playing in the garage that day, as if someone or something had drawn the memory straight from her mind. And the next night Katie told them about Special Detention, and the spiders, and the messages in the textbooks. And the scratching at the window, the voice begging to be let in.
Sonia spoke rarely, but when she did, the others went silent, listening, from the first word. She told them slowly, doling out piece by piece, about Ravensbrück—the layout of the barracks and the other buildings, the women and the other children she’d met there, the weather, the cold, the food, the day-to-day comings and goings of the prison, the stories the women had told. It was slow and it was hard to hear, but the girls listened to all of it, and as Sonia spoke, Roberta fancied that perhaps she felt better. That sending the experience out of her head and into words made it less immense, less impossible. They set up a signaling system for her to use if she felt another episode coming on, but Sonia didn’t use it.
They were trapped here at Idlewild. But Idlewild wasn’t everything. It wasn’t the world.
Someday, by God, Roberta thought, I’m going to get out of here. Someday we all will. And when we do, we will finally be free.
Chapter 18
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
Jamie’s parents lived in a bungalow that had been built in the 1960s, covered with vinyl siding in the 1970s, and never touched since. It sat on a stretch of road heading out of downtown Barrons, where the houses had been built close together with neat square yards crowned by wooden porches.
Jamie’s father, Garrett Creel Jr., opened the door as they climbed the front steps. He was still massive at sixty, broad-shouldered and tall, his ruddy face emphasized by his short-cropped sandy hair. He could have worn a sign around his neck that said I AM A RETIRED POLICEMAN and no one would have batted an eye. He clapped his son on the shoulder and gave Fiona a kiss on the cheek. His lips were dry and chapped, his hand clammy, and Fiona gritted her teeth and smiled as she greeted him. The house wafted with the radiant smell of roast beef.
“Come on in, come on in!” Garrett bellowed. “Diane, they’re here.”
She came around the corner into the front hall, a small woman in a helmet of permed curls that had been in vogue somewhere around 1983, making a beeline for Jamie, who had just handed his coat to his dad. “There you are,” she said, as if he were somehow delinquent, even though he’d obediently answered her summons to dinner and arrived right on time.