No Place I'd Rather Be

by Cathy Lamb

  Gisela had trouble getting pregnant, had one miscarriage, then Mary Beth arrived. There were no more babies after that, but Gisela and Oliver adored Mary Beth. She would teach her how to cook, but they would not use the recipes in the cookbook from Odessa, Munich, or London. Those recipes would stay in the attic, hidden. How could she make the recipes written by the women in her family whom she would now have to live without forever? It was too much.

  Gisela left her faith behind, too. She had seen too much suffering. She doubted there was a God at all. And, if there was, He had chosen not to intervene. He had chosen not to stop the killing. But what kind of God refuses to intervene in a Holocaust? Why had He let the Jews suffer? Why hadn’t He helped other innocent people in a world war that killed tens of millions? She couldn’t follow a God like that. And yet she believed in an afterlife. She believed in heaven. She knew it didn’t make sense. So maybe, somewhere in her soul, she still believed in God. Maybe.

  Oliver built her a gazebo. “For when your memories are too much to bear, my love. You can sit in the gazebo, watch the river, stare at the mountains, and hopefully find some peace.”

  And that’s what she did.

  It was all she could hope for.

  * * *

  On the fifth morning of Lucy and Stephi’s abduction, still pacing, hardly eating, our house filled with law enforcement people, news reporters bunched outside, I tried to think through the bubbling panic in my head. Devlin must have stopped somewhere after she picked up the girls. She had to be nearby and hidden. If not, with the Amber Alert, wouldn’t someone have seen her car, reported her? But how would she know where to go? She was from Portland, not Montana. She didn’t know anyone here, did she?

  And then I remembered a tiny, tiny fact. Annabelle had told me when I first met her that Devlin had run away from home when she was seventeen, to go back to a boy she’d met in Montana on a family vacation. Devlin was furious when the vacation was over and Annabelle said she had to go back to school. Devlin actually hit Annabelle, then stormed out and went back to Montana on a bus . . . the town was named . . . named . . . argh!

  And then I knew. It was the town of Bellington. The boyfriend’s name was Hatch. Annabelle and I had chuckled at that. Hatch. Was his real name Howard? Harry? Henry? It was Henry. I remembered. Could Devlin be with him?

  “Kyle.” I whipped around and told him what I knew. I told the police officers and FBI in our living room, then Jace and I ran out to his truck, followed by the police and FBI. Bellington was a half hour away.

  Within ten minutes Kyle called. “Aunt Olivia. In regards to the situation of your missing daughters, and in conjunction with the information that you provided me about Sarah Lacey, aka Devlin McDaniel, birthday June 16, I have located eight Henrys in Bellington. I decided, for expediency’s sake, to remove all minors and men who would be too old for Sarah, aka Devlin, to be attracted to them. I now have four Henrys.

  “The first Henry is forty-eight, probably too old for Devlin. I have ascertained that he is a principal at the local high school with five children. Birthday December 14. The second Henry is a priest. Age thirty-six. Unlikely that he had a romantic affair years ago with Devlin, but still quite possible. He can be located at St. Andrews Church on the corner of Main and Hubbard Streets. Birthday November 12. The third Henry is a woman. Real name, Henrietta. Birthday October 31. Age twenty-six. As you gave me no reason to suspect that Devlin is a homosexual, I believe we have to cross her off our list.”

  “And the fourth?” My voice wavered, my throat tight, strangling me. Jace was flying as we shot down the road. In front and back of us were other police cars.

  “The fourth Henry is thirty years old. A mechanic. Birthday April 16. He also has the nickname of Hatch. I have cross-referenced his Facebook page. He is not unattractive. He is single. He likes hunting, cockfights, which is illegal and abusive, marijuana—”

  “What’s his address?”

  “One moment, please.” He told me.

  “Thank you, Kyle. Thank you.”

  “A thank-you is unnecessary.” I could tell Kyle was crying. “I feel extremely unsettled with the girls missing. I am trying to control myself so that emotion does not cloud my thinking in my quest to rescue Stephi and Lucy and return them safely home in the most expedient manner.”

  We hung up and then I called the police, gave them the address.

  * * *

  We headed to Henry’s, aka Hatch’s, home. It was outside of Bellington, down a gravel road, way back in the hills. It was a rusting double-wide that had seen better days. Law enforcement stealthily surrounded it, and we were told to stay back. They knocked. Identified themselves. Hatch answered, gut sagging, shirt off. Devlin sprinted out the back. The police on that side of the trailer easily caught her. She swung at them and swore. She was facedown on the ground in seconds.

  The police yelled at Hatch to put his hands up, now, guns pointed at him. He did so and yelled, “What the hell? I ain’t done nothin’. If this is about the cockfight, it wasn’t my idea!”

  When he was down, I sprinted to the trailer with Jace, following the police inside. We found our daughters cowering in a dirty, shadowed corner, dazed. They were emotionally gone. I could tell. They had their arms around each other, but their eyes were blank. They were still. They were filthy. They were thinner and wearing the same clothes they’d gone to school in days ago. They had been crying, I could see the streaks down the dirt on their cheeks. They were pale and had dark circles under their eyes.

  “Stephi.” I held their limp hands. “Lucy.”

  They did not respond, hardly moving. Jace kneeled and leaned toward them. “Girls. Everything is okay now.”

  They turned to him, blinked, turned to me, blinked again, but I could tell they didn’t see us. They were shut down.

  “Hi, darlings,” I said, my voice catching on tears. “It’s Aunt Olivia.”

  They still didn’t move.

  “Your giant is here,” Jace said, his voice choked. “Waiting to play Candy Land with you.”

  And that did it. It was as if they finally woke up. Returned to the world. They blinked again and I could see them focusing, seeing us, for the first time. Their faces crumbled, and they fell into our arms, their bodies shaking with sobs.

  * * *

  After a check at the hospital, which found no sexual abuse but did find them dehydrated, starving, traumatized, and hardly able to talk, Jace and I took the girls home and made them macaroni and cheese. They ate and ate, then cried and cried.

  They took showers, and Jace and I brushed out their hair. The police talked to them when they were in their pink bunny pajamas, oh so gently, and we heard things we didn’t want to hear, but at least we knew, then we tucked the girls into bed, and thanked, once again, the FBI and the police as they left. My mother handled the media with her usual efficiency and ended with, “Now off you all go. No more talking tonight. You leave these people alone. Don’t make me get a tractor out to shovel you off this property.”

  Jace and I took a shower together. I leaned against him and cried. That tough guy cried, too. We toweled off, put on sweats, and went to lie on the floor in the girls’ room. An hour later we fell into bed, holding each other. So grateful. Eternally grateful.

  * * *

  The next morning I thought the girls would want a day off of school, but they didn’t.

  They wanted normal. They wanted to go to school and do math and writing, skip to music class, and play with their new friends.

  But underneath the courage and bravado was a deep sadness, a jagged brokenness. It was their mother who came to get them at school and invited them to ice cream. They love their mother. They will always love their mother. Even though Devlin was a crappy mother, she was still their mother. Parker was still their father.

  That’s why they got in the car. Devlin was Mommy.

  Their tie to her, and their father, who both failed them, will cause a cascading amount of pain in their lives for
years to come, and we will hug them and help them through it as best we can.

  Devlin was arrested and charged with kidnapping, custodial interference, endangering minors, assaulting a police officer, etc. She was high on cocaine and meth.

  Henry, aka Hatch, said he didn’t know Devlin had kidnapped the girls and said he didn’t watch the news. “It don’t got nothing to do with me.” The police were inclined to believe him. One of them told me, “I’ve met raccoons smarter than him.”

  Devlin is now going to jail. I don’t know for how long, I don’t care. By the time she’s out, the girls will be older and can figure out what kind of relationship they want with her, if any.

  Jace and I hugged Lucy and Stephi after we walked them to the bus stop outside the ranch. We waved. They waved back, their faces worried at first, but then they turned to their friends.

  When the bus turned the corner I said to the cowboy, “I’m ready to go back to bed.”

  “So am I, baby. Lead the way.”

  * * *

  On Saturday afternoon we gathered at the blue farmhouse, the whole family passing through the red door, the color Ida chose to symbolize freedom. In the summer we all—my mother, my grandma, me, Chloe—would plant red geraniums to celebrate life.

  We had each decided to make a treat from a recipe in Grandma’s battered cookbook, tied together with a stained pink ribbon, in honor of her family, our family.

  Chloe and Kyle were making a black forest gâteau with cherries.

  My mother and grandma were making a German apple cake.

  The girls and I were making Kuchen bars with vanilla custard.

  It was Martindale Cake Therapy. We laughed and chatted.

  Jace, Zane, and other friends, including Michael, Ryan, and Jordan, and their wives and kids, would come over when we were done to eat.

  My grandma held the cookbook to her chest, the leather beaten, the pages burned by fire, the words smeared by the tears and blood of our ancestors, before we started. She spoke in Yiddish, Ukrainian, then German.

  “What did you say, Grandma Gisela?” Stephi asked.

  “I told my family I missed them. I would see them again. And I said the same thing I’m going to say to all of you. I love you. You are my heart. You are my life.” We told her we loved her, too, then we were silent while Grandma gathered herself back together. “Now let’s bake. In honor of my mother, Esther, oh, how wonderful it feels to say her name again, for my sister, Renata, my grandmother, Ida, my great-grandmother, Sarrah, and my great-great-grandmother Tsilia, who all have recipes in this book.”

  As we baked, Grandma told us one more chapter of her story.

  * * *

  When my grandma arrived in Montana in 1945 she did not feel welcome by the people here.

  Though she had been taught English, with a British accent, in Germany, and was completely fluent in English before she left on the Kindertransport, and further corrected her German accent in the years she was in London working as a nurse, a bit of that German accent still rang through.

  The United States had been through war. Many had lost sons in Germany. They, rightly so, blamed the Germans for the war and, by extension and by mistake, my grandma. The people in Kalulell could not believe that my granddad would marry a German woman, no matter how precise her English, no matter how pretty her face. He had been a soldier himself, attacking the evil Germans as a fighter pilot! And here was the enemy!

  “Your granddad heard the talk in town about me, none of it flattering,” Grandma told us, “and so did his parents. People were angry, they were grieving. They were furious that their country had been bombed in Pearl Harbor, that their loved ones were locked up, tortured, and starved in prisoner of war camps, that their family members were coming home in coffins or with lifelong injuries.

  “And there I was. A woman from Germany. They didn’t know my story, they didn’t know me. They didn’t know that I was Jewish and escaped Germany, that my entire family had been gassed, tortured, and starved in concentration camps. They didn’t know my sister had died, bombed by the Nazis. They didn’t know that I had tended to American and British sons and daughters, as a nurse, in a hospital, for years, part of that during the Blitz.

  “I remember being in many an operating room with critically injured boys from Montana, often in the basement to protect ourselves from bombing raids. They had been evacuated to London from the front. Some didn’t make it, calling for their mothers at the end. I had their blood all over me. I sewed them up. I assisted doctors who dug deep into their bodies and pulled out bullets. I took the leg, or the arm that was amputated. I held their hands. I listened to them, made sure an infection didn’t kill them.

  “Then I came to America, in love and married to your granddad. I was soon in love with his parents, who were always loving to me, but I faced hatred here. Part of me was so hurt, so furious that they judged me to be like the Germans, the Nazis, who had started the war. I was German, I was Jewish, and I was on their side. But the other part of me understood why they hated me.

  “I, however, had no energy for hate. I had lost everything. I had lost everyone.” Her voice wavered. “I decided to be kind, not bitter, helpful, not angry. Hatred had almost killed the world. I decided to stand for my family and honor them. To be strong and courageous. I felt such guilt for surviving. Why me? It should not have been me, but it was. There was no undoing it. I wanted to make my family proud of me, and I was determined to make the life that I lived, that they should have lived, worthwhile. How to make it worthwhile? I would continue being a nurse. I would heal.”

  People here started treating her differently. It was hard to be hostile to a woman who sewed up Uncle Rigert’s leg after it was shot in a hunting accident. It was hard to be angry at a woman who so diligently cared for the Millers’ son, Tye, when he caught double pneumonia. It was difficult to be resentful of a woman who handled the care of three members of the same family who were in a mangled car accident on the highway, right in front of her, two of whom would have died had she not been there to render emergency aid and tell others there what to do to help.

  Plus, my grandma started cooking for others. Uncle Rigert was gifted with a blackberry pie. Tye got his favorite—lemon meringue pie. The family in the car accident received a salmon dinner.

  It took time. Years, my grandma said, for some, who had lost sons and daughters in the war. But time moved on, and Grandma’s gentle hands, her natural remedies, and generous soul brought peace and healing.

  “It is fine to be accepted,” my grandma told us, “but the most important person who needs to accept you is you. Don’t ever forget I told you that. If you don’t like yourself, it doesn’t matter what others think. Be a person who you like.”

  It is hard to find a more beloved person than my grandma in all of Kalulell.

  * * *

  The annual Kalulell talent show is a popular town event. Everyone goes unless you’re passing kidney stones. After the talent show we all have dessert together, waiting for the winners to be announced. My family always donates cakes. This year we made a fluffy four-layer coconut cake with pink buttercream icing, apple pie cupcakes, and a peppermint ice cream frozen pie with a cookie crust.

  The talent show is held in an old armory that’s been remodeled and cleaned up. The walls are brick, the floor is cement, lights hang from the rafters. A stage has been built from wood, complete with burgundy velvet curtains.

  I sat with Jace, my hand in his. Lucy was next to him, showing him how to draw “nice monsters, not bad monsters,” as she felt that the monster Jace drew was too scary, therefore, a “bad monster.” She added a smile to Jace’s bad monster’s frightening face. My grandma was beside me in a white silk scarf with blue irises, my mother beside her in silver cowgirl boots, with Stephi on her lap, then Chloe and Zane with the fine, manly shoulders.

  I usually love the talent show. It is truly amazing what people in our town can do. Some people don’t compete, or they would win every year. F
or example, members of our small symphony, many who have played in prestigious national symphonies, don’t compete, although they do open up the competition. Christina Angelli doesn’t compete, either, as an ex-opera star, but she does sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” And Gregory Sochia doesn’t compete, as a famous rock star, either, but he’ll sing a song.

  But we still had a bunch of talent. That night there was a bluegrass band made up of high school teachers who sang a song about a man named Kit who drank too much and “fell down the ditch, darn him, yes, he did.” There was a talented teenage ballerina, a trumpet player who had spent years in New Orleans, a juggler who juggled fire (the minister), several one-act plays, a six-year-old who played Beethoven on the piano, two comedy skits that were hilarious, and a group of moms who dressed up like showgirls and performed admirably as the Rockettes, among others.

  Kyle was last.

  Yolanda Marquez was the emcee and she finally called his name. “Next up, we have Kyle Razolli. Kyle’s talent is drawing.” We all clapped and screamed like crazy, but we stopped when Grandma got up and walked to the stage.

  “What’s she doing?” I asked my mother.

  “I have no idea. None. She confounds me, that secretive woman, even after all these years.”

  Grandma climbed the stairs and stood tall beside Kyle and smiled. People started yelling, “Mrs. Gisela! Mrs. Gisela!” She waved.

  Kyle pushed his glasses back up his nose, then held his hands straight down by his sides, which for him was impressive. There was no flapping.

  “Good evening. My name is Kyle Razolli. You all know my great-grandma, Gisela Martindale. Tonight she is going to tell you her story, which she has not talked about until recently. She has kept her past private. While she is telling her story, I am going to draw a picture of her.”

  My mother held my hand and I held Jace’s. I heard her suck in her breath and say, “My mother is a woman above all other women, and that is the truth.”