Second Fiddle

by Rosanne Parry

  Dad hated it when I moped about army life. “We have good memories in a thousand places,” he’d say. “You can find your way in any size city or town. You can make a home for yourself anywhere, and that makes you a thousand times richer than those hometown Hannahs who’ve never gone a mile on their own.”

  He was right about getting around. My cousins in Chicago weren’t allowed to ride their own commuter train, even though the whole system was in English. I’d been riding the Berlin trains alone since I was ten, and Mom didn’t even check up on me to see if I’d made it to my music lesson.

  That’s it! I stood up and tapped Giselle on the shoulder. Vivian’s stop was coming up. “I’ve got an idea!” I said. “Get off here and we’ll talk.”

  Giselle grabbed her backpack and followed Vivian and me out onto the platform. The train door hissed shut behind us, and the train rumbled off to the south. I motioned them over to a bench.

  “We can say we’re going to Herr Müller’s,” I said. “To practice for the competition. It’s perfect! Our parents want us to win, and they hate to talk to Herr Müller on the phone because of his accent.”

  There was a moment of silence while the girls digested my plan.

  “Plus they don’t know Herr Müller’s canceled yet, because he’s telling them in the letters he gave us,” I said, tapping the folder where I kept my sheet music.

  “And if we don’t give them the letter, they’ll still think we’re going,” Vivi added. “And it gives us a reason not just to get together, but to head back down in the direction of our wounded soldier’s bridge. Jody, you are a genius! Mom doesn’t care where I go, so long as I’m with people she knows.”

  “Ditto,” Giselle said. “Oh my gosh, this could really work. You two could leave your violins at home and fill your cases with clothes and other stuff our soldier needs.”

  “Look,” I said, “I can only bring food. Kyle and Tyler eat constantly, so Mom will never miss a jar of peanut butter, but no way am I stealing Dad’s clothes.”

  “No problem, I’ll get the clothes,” Giselle said. “My dad’s bigger than him, but better too big than too small.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about foreign soldiers and if they have any protection from their own army,” Vivian said. “There are lots of law books in Mom’s study, and her secretary helps me with my homework all the time.”

  That would explain why her papers were always perfectly typed and mine were full of cross-outs and my brothers’ jammy fingerprints.

  “Great. So we’ll meet after school tomorrow,” I said.

  Giselle and I hopped back on the train to Zehlendorf. It was even more crowded than before, so we stood without talking, but my head was buzzing with plans the whole way home.

  walked the dozen blocks from the train stop to the enlisted apartment buildings. Usually I stopped at the PX for my favorite candy bar, but that day I went straight home. I strolled past the familiar places on base: the army hospital, the post office, the day care, and then the motor pool. All the HAZMAT trucks were lined up by the gate with their engines running, and a bunch of guys stood around in those horribly hot-looking rubber suits. Seems like they could have picked a less sunny day for a chemical weapons drill.

  There was no way I’d be able to sneak anything out of the house with Dad around. Dad was all about the routine and kids having responsibilities, even my little brothers. He monitored my homework, my chores, my music practice, and my phone calls. If Mom didn’t stand up to him every once in a while, he’d probably be monitoring my height, weight, and blood pressure. I’d have to wait until everyone was asleep to pack up some food.

  “Hi, Mom! Hi, guys!” I hollered as I walked in.

  “Jody!” my brothers shouted in unison. I set down my violin and braced myself for impact as Tyler and Kyle thundered down the front hall in their mismatched socks and threw little-brother hugs at me. This was a lot more fun back when they weighed twenty pounds apiece, but I kissed their grimy little heads anyway, thankful that they were ignoring the smell of river water coming from the wet jeans in my bag.

  “Hey, Kyle, how was kindergarten? Let’s see that loose tooth, Tyler.” They ignored me in favor of measuring themselves on tiptoe against my arm, in case they’d grown since breakfast.

  “How was music?” Mom called from the kitchen.

  “Mmmm,” I said, which wasn’t lying. I swung my backpack off my shoulder and held it in front of my gym shorts just in time.

  Mom stuck her head out of the kitchen door and looked me up and down. “You’re a little late.”

  “Sorry, Mom, we stopped for gelato, and then we, umm, walked down by the river.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, such a pretty day. Did you bring enough money?”

  “Yeah, I had some from when I babysat the Smith kids last weekend, remember?” Mom would make such a big deal if she knew Giselle treated. She doesn’t believe in that sort of thing at all.

  “You’re remembering to put half your babysitting money in the bank, right?”

  “I know. College.” I lifted up Tyler’s chin and gave his remaining front tooth a wiggle. “You better get busy on this—college is expensive.”

  “If I wiggle my toes and they come off, can I get money for ’em?” Kyle asked. He sat down in the hall, yanked off his socks, and got to work on the largest of his toes.

  “Don’t be gross, Kyle.”

  “What’s college?” Tyler demanded. “Is there bowling?”

  “Yes, there’s bowling. College is just like an army base but everyone is your same age.”

  “Whoa!” Tyler was so amazed, he held his body still for an entire ten seconds. “That would be awesome!” Then he got that worried little eyebrow wrinkle that made him look like a tiny old man. He was the most serious seven-year-old I knew. “How many teeth does it take to get in?”

  “I’m pretty sure you have just enough,” I said, rubbing him on the head. “But you better read a lot of books—tricky ones. Now, who is a big-enough boy to carry my enormous backpack and my violin case full of gold bars?”

  “Me! I can! Yes, ma’am!” Kyle and Tyler shouted, snapping off eight or ten salutes each.

  “Be careful with them. They weigh five hundred pounds each!”

  Kyle grabbed my violin case and was panting and groaning with fake effort before he’d gone three steps.

  “Race you!” Tyler said. “Ready, set …”

  “Don’t mess with my stuff!” I hollered after them as they ricocheted down the hall to my bedroom. “Hey, Mom, mind if I grab a shower before dinner? It was all hot and sweaty on the train.” I headed down the hall, hoping she’d stay in the kitchen and not notice that I smelled like sewage.

  “Whatever,” Mom said. “No rush.”

  Dad must be working late again. I hustled down to the bathroom before she could see I was wearing my PE shorts. My skin was itchy with tiny red dots where I had been in the river. Looking out the bathroom window, I could see a smudge of pink in the sky to the west. I thought of the soldier watching the same sky from under his bridge, with no way to clean up and no one to make him a warm dinner. Even though it wasn’t a cold night, I shivered. A few minutes of hot water and the girl soap Mom kept for just her and me worked wonders. The red spots went away completely, and the lavender smell covered up the river-water stench.

  I slipped into my room for pajama pants, socks, and an old army T-shirt of my dad’s. I dug my wet jeans and shirt out of my backpack, tossed them into the hamper, and dragged it to the laundry room. Then I put my stinky clothes in the wash with a load of my brothers’ jeans and joined Mom in the kitchen.

  “Hey, Jody,” Mom said. “What do you want with burgers?” Mom was standing with her back to me working a pound of ground beef into patties.

  “I don’t care. Salad? Peas and carrots? How was your day?”

  “Surprisingly quiet,” Mom said. She slid the skillet onto the stove and turned on the heat. “They must have been expecting something that didn�
��t happen. They staffed up the emergency room today and even had the Life Flight helicopter ready to go.”

  “I wonder what’s up,” I said. When the base went on alert, Dad always worked a ton of overtime like he’d done last night, but they didn’t always put people on extra shifts at the hospital. I opened the fridge and set a head of lettuce and a cucumber on the counter.

  “Where’s the colander?” I said after I’d checked in all the usual places.

  “Sorry, honey. I packed it already.”

  Mom was an early packer. We weren’t moving for two and a half weeks, but she already had a stack of sealed and labeled boxes in the dining room. I could always tell when Dad got PCS orders, because the house smelled like moving boxes. I hated that smell.

  “Hey, Mom, some of these oranges are rotten. Do you want me to run them out to the garbage before the boys get into them?”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  I bagged up four perfectly good oranges and took them outside. I set them in a corner of the boot box Mom always kept on the right side of our front door so Dad wouldn’t track his muddy boots into the house. I thought about my soldier sitting alone in the dark eating our chocolate bars for dinner. I wondered what the officers who’d tried to kill him were doing. Did they feel guilty? Were they afraid of being caught? They hadn’t even posted a lookout or acted very sneaky on the bridge. What made a person so hard-hearted that they just threw a human being away like he was garbage? I hugged my arms across my chest and headed back inside, making a mental list of the things my soldier would need.

  “So is it the usual no-Dad routine tonight?” I said when I got back to the kitchen.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Mom turned away from the skillet to pop hamburger buns into the toaster.

  “Well, what kind of cake did you get?”

  “They were all out of chocolate Sachertortes and the kind with cherries, so I got the Mozartkuchen instead.”

  “With the hazelnuts?”

  “And whipped cream.” Mom smiled.

  She ate sweets when Dad was gone. It was her thing, sweets and reading grocery-store novels in bed. The boys got a story from me instead of Dad, and they got to fall asleep on the sofa. I got to stay up late and listen to any radio station I liked.

  Here’s the secret I never told anyone: I liked it better when Dad was gone.

  After supper, Mom ran a tub and tortured the boys with hot water and soap. I didn’t know exactly what went on in there, but it involved four towels, a bucket of toy whales, and a lot of yelling. But at least when I got them on the sofa, they smelled like toothpaste, and they were wearing clean pajamas.

  Kyle was first out of the bath, and he always picked Green Eggs and Ham. I hated Dr. Seuss! Would it kill the man to use a two-syllable word? But Kyle was the snuggler in the family, and I could put up with the doctor for ten minutes of babybrother snuggles. Kyle dragged along his old blanky from back when he loved bears more than anything. He was too big for a blanky now, but last Thanksgiving, Dad was in the field and Kyle was missing him really bad. So I sewed an extra set of Dad’s name and rank patches to the corner of his blanket. Whenever Dad worked past his bedtime, Kyle got out the blanket, tucked it tight around his body, and carefully traced our name and the three stripes up and three stripes down with a star in the middle for Dad’s rank.

  I opened up Dr. Seuss, and Kyle wiggled his bony shoulders under my arm and rested his head under my chin. I read and pointed to the words and made him say the last word in each line. I stopped the story to yawn a couple of times toward the end, because it made him sleepy, and then after the story, we prayed. But I secretly changed the words, because what idiot put in the part about dying? Somebody who hates kids, I bet. So we ended the prayer, “If I should sneeze before I wake, oh, what a goopy mess I’d make.” Much better. Kyle settled deeper into my lap and twirled his fingers in the ends of my hair. A minute or two later he was making little-boy snores.

  Meanwhile, Tyler was at the bookshelf worrying over which of his five hundred volumes of Encyclopedia Brown we should read tonight. Tyler was not a snuggler. When Dad was gone, he slept with Dad’s compass hung around his neck on a green bootlace. Tyler handed me Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man and sat at the far end of the sofa. He flipped open the compass and lined it up with true north. He stretched his legs out straight and pressed the bottoms of his bare feet up against mine, because we were secretly sole mates. I would totally not do this, but it was kind of sweet, and he had just had a bath. I read him a mystery, and he told me the solution and every fact in the story that had a clue in it.

  When the story was done, Tyler tucked himself in with one of those green army blankets that everyone has a hundred of. He cradled the compass in his hands and took bearings on the TV, the dinner table, the desk, the stack of clean laundry in the corner, and the painting Dad got for Mom in Venice. Sometimes Tyler took forever to fall asleep. Tonight I had to get him out of the way before Dad got home, or I’d never get anything packed. I picked up my science book and read out loud in my sleepiest voice about igneous and metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. In just over ten minutes the magic of science had done its work.

  “Did we win?” Mom walked into the living room with another basket of laundry to fold.

  I smiled and slid Kyle off my lap. “Victory is ours.”

  Mom had let her hair down and was wearing her favorite sweats and fluffy socks. “Tea and cake?”

  She was in a mood to chat; I could tell.

  “Gee, Mom, I’m sorry, but I’ve got stuff to do for science, and I need to practice tonight, too. Can you just wrap up my half? I’ll have it at lunch tomorrow.”

  “Sure, sweetie.” Mom went over to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the row of romance novels. She pulled a paperback from the shelf and set it on the coffee table. She scooped Kyle up off the couch and carried him into the boys’ room.

  I opened the door to my room, tossed my science book on my desk, and unlatched my violin case. I plucked each of the strings. Figures, Kyle knocked my E string out of tune. I spun the fine tuner to the right, plucking until I heard it hit the right pitch. I tucked the violin under my chin and started in on Pachelbel’s Canon. I loved the sound of the piece. In my mind’s ear I could hear all three of us playing, Vivian four measures ahead and Giselle an octave lower and four measures behind. I stopped before my favorite part with all the runs of sixteenth notes, because I didn’t want to think about never playing that piece together again.

  I switched over to the canon I had composed for Giselle and Vivian. I ran through the first violin part thinking of the soldier and why his officers would try to kill him. Dad’s known a few mean officers, and one or two lieutenants who weren’t very smart, but murder? There had to be something behind it.

  I played my canon again a little bit faster. Maybe he’d done something wrong or committed a crime? Or maybe he’d witnessed a crime, and they were covering it up. That’s how it would go if this were a movie. I glanced up at my notebook on the music stand. The trickiest part of the composition was coming up. When it was done, I rosined my bow again and flipped pages to the second violin part. Was it against the law for an American to help a Soviet soldier? Could it be like treason or aiding and comforting an enemy? Or maybe it was a crime not to help. Germans had a Good Samaritan law that said you had to stop and give aid if you saw an accident on the road. I couldn’t just let him drown, but now what?

  When I came to the slow part of my piece, I worked on my vibrato. Maybe tomorrow we could get his side of the story—if he made it through the night. I had to find a few minutes at least to get together some food, but what if Mom decided to stay up for Dad? Then they’d get to talking about whatever was on her mind. They might stay up late and watch the news and the Johnny Carson show. I’d never get anything done.

  I switched back to the opening of Pachelbel’s Canon and practiced it even slower than the music called for. I projected my sleepiest thoughts into the living room. It worked
. After ten minutes, Mom tapped on my door and said, “I’m going to turn in now, Jody. Your cake is in the fridge. Don’t stay up too late, sweetie.”

  “Okay, Mom, good night.”

  Mission accomplished! I wrapped my violin and bow in a spare pillowcase and slid them under my bed. I tiptoed down the hall and got the box of MREs that we kept in the bottom cupboard for emergencies. There was room for maybe six ready-to-eat meals plus the oranges in my violin case.

  What else would he need? I went into the bathroom and rolled up half a roll of toilet paper as small as possible. There was a spare toothbrush in the back of the drawer, and Mom bought Band-Aids in bulk for my brothers, so I snagged a handful plus the sliver of soap that was in the soap dish. I set out a fresh bar so no one would miss it.

  What else would a guy with a broken leg want? Duh, something for pain. I got out the bottle of Tylenol, but what he really needed was the Tylenol with codeine that Mom kept locked up. I got the key out of the hiding place in the kitchen and unlocked her rolltop desk. The pain medicine was in the drawer on the right, but my hand froze over a stack of house ads.

  Mom must have picked them up from the base housing office. I turned on the desk lamp. Houses, real houses, with yards. I flipped through pages and pages of ads. They were all colors, three bedrooms mostly, with garages and gardens. One of them had four bedrooms, and toward the end of the stack there was one with a tree house in the backyard. I would have committed murder to have a tree house of my own when I was seven. That one was in Killeen, Texas. It sounded familiar; there must be an army base nearby.