The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  He put his palm against his mouth and slowly let out a long breath of air. He wouldn’t raise his head to look at me.

  ‘It’s for June. I had to get it at least twenty-one days ahead of time to get the discount. Is that all right? Can you get off at the garage?’

  ‘Oh Lessie, you shouldn’t have done this,’ he said again. ‘How are we going to pay for college now? What will we do?’

  ‘Well, like you’re always saying, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ll get by. I’ll work. I’ll go and I’ll manage. But for now I just want you and Mama to go back to Forest of Flowers.’

  I wished he would speak more. I’d been prepared for him to go into a tirade. I had not been prepared for him to sit, speechless.

  ‘Dad, I had to do something.’

  ‘I just wish you had told me about it first.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I replied. ‘You wouldn’t have let me do it.’

  It was purely by accident that I went back up to my room the next morning. I should have already left for school, but a few steps up the sidewalk, I recalled that I’d left my French essay on my desk. I went running back.

  My bedroom was right next to the bathroom, a facet of the room I hated because I could hear everything that went on in there. So, when I came back to get my assignment that morning, I paused. I could hear someone in the bathroom, vomiting.

  Going to the bedroom door, I looked out. Megan had been downstairs at the kitchen table when I came through. However, for some reason I assumed it was she. ‘Megs?’ I said at the bathroom door. ‘Are you sick? Let me in.’

  No answer. I tried the door. It was locked.

  Running back to my room, I got a coat hanger. Our bathroom locked only with a hook and eye because Dad worried about what a dangerous room it was. Someone could slip in the bathtub or have some other accident, he was always warning, so he made certain that you could push the door ajar and easily unlatch it in an emergency. I knew the system worked because Megan was always breaking in on me.

  Mama was in there, sitting on the edge of the bathtub beside the toilet. Her expression was wary. The toilet had been flushed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sudden realization dawned on me. ‘You threw up the goddamned pills, didn’t you?’ Anger roared into full flame.

  Her cheeks were flushed. She was running her tongue around the inside of her mouth.

  ‘Oh, honestly, Mama,’ I said and flapped my hands in frustration. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  ‘They make me too sleepy. I can’t think.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to think, goddamnit. We don’t want you to think. That’s what causing us all this trouble, your thinking. Damn it, Mama, those pills were for your own good.’

  She was incredible. Always one step ahead of us. Contrary to what my father had said, there was a vital difference between caring for Mama and putting diapers on Kenny or Perry Edelmann’s autistic son. With Mama it wasn’t custodial. She was all too willing to take care of herself. So looking after her degenerated into one long, futile battle of wits.

  I blew out a heavy breath. ‘Just wait until Daddy hears. Wait till I tell him about this.’ I looked at her. ‘I’ll have to, you know. I’m not going to school either. If you think you can do things like this, that you can deceive us and get away with it, then you got another think coming.

  ‘Just what did you have in mind to happen next? A trip out to the Watermans, I bet. Were you planning to see Toby?’ I folded my arms over my chest. ‘Well, you can just unplan it, Mama, because you aren’t going to get away with it. I’m not going to let you.’

  Still furious, I stormed out of the bathroom and back into my bedroom. Yanking off my school clothes, I threw them on to the bed and pulled on a T-shirt and a dirty pair of jeans. When I came downstairs, Megan, who was still at the table with the morning paper, looked up in surprise.

  ‘Aren’t you going to school?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said and I couldn’t keep the unspent anger from echoing in my voice. ‘But you better. Right this instant, if you know what’s good for you.’

  She gave it a moment’s consideration and then rose. ‘Yes, I think I will.’

  While I was standing in the kitchen doorway, I chanced to notice the slip of paper I had discovered while cleaning the living room the previous day. Going over to pick it up from the far counter, I puzzled over it. What had Mama had in mind when she wrote this? It was just a list, written in blue felt-tipped pen, but it grew sinister as I regarded it. Was she planning to run away? Abduct Toby and go somewhere?

  What intruded into my thoughts as I held the paper was the realization that even now, even here in Kansas with her own family, everything was in a state of war for her. She had survived the experiences in the hostel; she had survived the camp; she had survived the SS; and she was damned well going to survive us. It was a courageous trait, that kind of perseverance, but a ruthless one, wholly without mercy. She was killing us. Yet this wasn’t Germany. The war wasn’t on. We weren’t the enemy. Taking the list with me, I went over to the table and slumped into a chair.

  A short time later, my mother came into the kitchen. Apparently, her stomach was still upset, because she kept a hand tenderly over it. Taking down a glass from the cupboard, she went to the refrigerator and poured herself some milk. She said nothing to me, did not even look in my direction. Her feelings were hurt. There was that kind of injured rawness to the silence between us, so evident it was palpable.

  Still slouched in my chair, I watched her. What did she have to feel hurt about? I was the one whose day had just been ruined. I wasn’t feeling at all charitable toward her; in fact, I wanted to keep afire the devouring fury I’d felt coming into the kitchen so I could confront her again about the stupid list, about how she was mucking up my whole damned life with her ridiculous ideas. But within seconds of her arrival in the room, my anger slipped away, dissipating like smoke into darkness.

  ‘What are we going to do with you, Mama?’ I asked, chin braced in my hand as I watched her.

  She turned and we regarded one another across the infinity of a table, two chairs and maybe four feet of floor space. The anguished, unhappy silence persisted. She turned back, took up the milk carton and poured herself a second glass of milk.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ she said, looking not at me but at the glass. Her voice was heavy with feeling.

  Suddenly and with a startling lack of warning, I was overpowered by a truly daunting sense of hopelessness. The magnitude of the feeling was incredible; it might as well have been a physical blow. My mother still stood beyond the table, the extent of her own misery showing plainly in her expression, and in that split second the amount of damage that these events had wreaked on our family was profoundly evident to me. My world had gone upside down, completely topsy-turvy. We were being destroyed.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time in recent days, I realized I was going to cry. There wasn’t much I could do about it, other than let the tears come. This sudden, desolate moment of insight had overwhelmed me to the point that all my energy was used up just staying upright on the chair.

  My mother raised her eyes to me. She continued to hold the glass of milk in one hand. Lifting it to her lips, she drank slowly, watching me over the rim of the glass. It left her momentarily with a milk moustache before she wiped it off. But her expression was wary, as if she distrusted my abrupt loss of composure. I think I had caught us both unawares by bursting into tears.

  ‘How did we ever come to be like this?’ I asked. My voice cracked. I brought a hand up to wipe away the tears. ‘Mama, what is happening to us?’

  Guarded concern remained in her eyes.

  ‘This is too much for me. I hate it like this. All I want is for us to be a normal family again. I don’t want to keep hurting you. I don’t want you to hurt me. I just want things normal. Like they used to be. But I don’t know what to do any more. I’m scared to death by all this, Mama. I don’t u
nderstand what’s happening, and I don’t want it like this, but I just don’t know what to do.’

  Compassion suffused her features, the way water does dry soil. The cautious hesitance that had governed her earlier movements melted away. Pushing aside the chairs between us, she came to me, and with both her hands she clasped my face for just a moment before opening her arms and enveloping me. She pressed me deep into her breasts in an embrace that was strong and reassuring and solidly maternal.

  ‘O mein liebes, liebes Kind,’ she whispered as I clung to her. ‘Liebes, liebes Kind.’ She kept me tight against her, her fingers entangled in my hair, her lips against my head so that I could feel the hotness of her breath.

  Then very gently she pulled back and with both her hands she lifted up my face. ‘I do love you,’ she said and smiled. She kissed my lips.

  I could see the tears in her eyes too.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I told my father. I said I had discovered Mama vomiting the tranquillizers. I told him about the list and said Mama would not say what it was for. I said I bet she was planning to snatch Toby Waterman. Mara, he called when I was finished. Mama’s head appeared around the door. Come in here, he said, I want to talk to you.

  For the umpteenth time my parents argued over Mama’s behaviour. Only this time it was my father’s voice that rose and my mother did not reply. When they came out of the study later, Mama was not crying. Her face was flushed with emotion but instead of running off in a spell, she came into the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee. Then she sat down at the table alone and drank it, while tracing invisible designs on the tabletop with one finger.

  I stayed clear of both of them. Megan wanted me to French braid her hair, so I went up to her room with her and we both remained in there until bedtime.

  I was in a deep, dreamless sleep when my mother woke me. She lay a hand on my shoulder and, startled, I jerked up. She was leaning close to me, her hair loose and trailing against her cheek.

  ‘What is it? What do you want, Mama?’ The bedside clock said 3.47.

  ‘Come down and be with me,’ she said. She had a deep voice, husky from all the smoking, and when she spoke very softly, all you could hear were the explosive letters in the words. She said her r’s and t’s strangely anyhow.

  Sleepily, I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  When I came into the kitchen, there was a cigarette still burning in the ashtray on the table, so I realized her decision to wake me must have been impulsive. The teapot was out. She had brewed a pot of the black India tea that she drank with milk. Without asking me, she brought another mug to the table and poured me a cup too.

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ I asked as I sat down.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said, still softly, although there was no need to be quiet down here. I could detect the tightness of unshed tears behind her voice.

  She puffed thoughtfully on the cigarette and stared off across the kitchen. I wondered what had prompted her to get me up. That was unusual. Generally, one of us would hear her and get up, but if we didn’t, she very seldom woke us. Particularly lately. And particularly me. If she felt she needed company, it was normally my father’s. So I wondered. Perhaps it was because of the argument. Perhaps it had hurt her more than was apparent, and she couldn’t sleep but was afraid to wake my dad. I didn’t know and I couldn’t tell. She sat silently smoking. Dressed in a worn, well-washed print nightgown, she had pulled a cardigan over it for warmth. The front of the gown was untied, and I could see the outline of her breasts.

  ‘What am I doing?’ she asked softly, speaking to the cigarette. ‘I ask myself that. I say, “Mara, what are you doing to them?” O’Malley, he’s so mad at me. Furious. I’m afraid he’s starting to hate me. I’m afraid everyone is. I ask myself, “Are you wrong?”’

  She looked over at me. ‘Am I wrong?’

  She was beginning, at long last, to lose heart. She said that in quiet, hard German syllables, struggling to hold back the emotions behind them. She continued to speak mainly to the cigarette. We still had not convinced her that Toby Waterman was not her son; but, for the first time in all these weeks, her courage was beginning to fail her. The cost of getting Klaus back was becoming apparent to her. She could see what was happening to all of us because of it and she was losing heart.

  Relief washed over me like cold, fresh water. These were the words I had been waiting to hear from her. I had dreamed of hearing her say them. My muscles sagged with sudden relaxation, as tension began to give way.

  She pulled out one of the long ties on her nightgown and wound it around her finger. ‘I don’t know what to do now,’ she said.

  ‘It’s time to just forget it, Mama. To go back to the way we were.’

  She looked over, took a deep breath, reached for another cigarette. ‘I wish it were that simple, baby. God in Heaven, I do.’ Again, there was the heavy weight of unsaid things behind her words. She shoved a hand into her hair.

  I rose to make another pot of tea.

  ‘It’s the guilt really,’ she said.

  I turned from the stove.

  ‘It’s living with the guilt.’

  ‘What guilt’s that, Mama?’ I asked. I assumed she meant what had happened to József. Or maybe just the destruction she had wrought in the last few weeks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Of just being.’

  Bringing back the fresh pot of tea, I sat down again.

  ‘When I was at Ravensbrück, I was so angry with Elek,’ she said. ‘Because I was there and he wasn’t. This is the way it’s been my whole life, I thought. He was such a rascal. Always thinking up these terrible things, always setting me up to get the blame. We’d do something and, every time, I’d get punished for it. Popi’s strap was for me. “Elek doesn’t know any better,” Popi would always say. “But you, Mara, you’re older.” For God’s sake, I was only thirteen months older! And I hadn’t even thought the things up. Elek had.’ She paused and touched the rim of her tea mug with one finger. ‘But they were little things, weren’t they? Children’s things. Nothing important. I didn’t think so then. When I was in Ravensbrück, I was furious with him. This is just like always, I thought. I am here and he is safe at home.

  ‘Then,’ she said, ‘I learned they simply shot him. I survived, and they simply came and shoved him against the wall in the mill house and shot him. The blood stains were still there, still on the stones when O’Malley and I went back. I can never forgive myself for being so petty.’

  I watched her. She sat, studying the tabletop.

  ‘You can’t imagine what it is like to wish people dead for silly little things and then learn they have died. Especially when you have done so many more evil things yourself.

  ‘I wanted to live so badly. You don’t understand that. You must be there in that terrible time to know how precious the ordinary world is. How much you want to live in it again and do ordinary things once more. I betrayed them because of it. All of them. Elek. Popi. Mutti. I have betrayed Hungary.’

  I leaned forward across the table and reached my hand out. ‘Oh Mama, I don’t think you betrayed anyone.’

  ‘I did. To stay alive I betrayed everyone.’ She looked at me. ‘I must have, mustn’t I? Because I survived and no one else did.’ Then a pause. ‘Why didn’t I see it coming? I ask myself that question a hundred times a day. I was there. Why didn’t I see what they were doing? Why did I let them take me away from Jena? I just got on the bus when they told me to. I never questioned it. Why didn’t I realize what was happening?’

  ‘Mama, you were sixteen. People a lot older than you never saw it coming.’

  ‘But why was I so stupid?’

  ‘Mama …’

  Pressing her fingers against the bridge of her nose, she expelled a long breath. ‘And then there I was. It was worse at the hostel than in Ravensbrück. My soul was gone before I ever got to Ravensbrück. I had betrayed everyone I loved by then. Just to survive. I should have done more than I
did. I am always thinking that. When the men came, I should have tried to kill them. They were important men, those officers that were in Lebensborn. They were all officers in the SS. And they had much blood on their hands. If I had killed them, I might have saved the lives of many people. Somehow, I should have killed them. Or killed myself. Or something. I am always thinking, How many Jews might I have saved, if I had killed one of them while he was with me? But I never even tried. But I was so scared. I was so scared of what they might do to me.’

  ‘Mama, that’s very understandable.’

  ‘I would sit in my little room before the night came. I would sit and think, Only I am real. Only my body, only my thoughts, only my feelings. Nothing else is real. The men would come and I would see them and know in my mind – mein Verstand – that they were there. But to me they became very unreal. I could make them have no importance. And it worked, you see, because it made me have no feelings about what they did to me.’ She shook her head. ‘But it was wrong. I see that now. I should have tried to kill them.’

  ‘Mama, you were only a young girl. What you did most people would have done. I don’t think you meant to betray anyone.’

  ‘They tied me. They took off my clothes and they tied me, like an animal. I let them. I let them piss on me. I crawled on my knees in front of them and kissed their boots. I was just too scared of them.’

  ‘Oh Mama, don’t. Please, let’s don’t talk about it any more, OK? Please? It’s over. It happened but it’s over, so let’s try to forget it. Please, for my sake?’

  ‘Popi would have been so ashamed of me.’ There was a pause. It grew long and heavy and she sat with her head braced in one hand. She looked over at me. ‘Do you know what? Shall I tell you a very terrible thing?’

  I did not move.

  ‘I did a very, very terrible thing,’ she said softly. ‘Such an evil thing. After the war when O’Malley and I were searching, I prayed.’ She glanced at me again. ‘You know what I prayed? I prayed we would not find Popi. It is the very worst thing I have ever done. I am still so ashamed, when I think of it. I prayed we would not find him. And he was my own father. He loved me.’ She touched the tabletop with one finger. Pensively, she regarded it. ‘I was afraid of him.’