I stood, climbed into my running clothes, stepped outside my apartment—and ran.
Grandma was busy when I reached her store, her voice a familiar part of Non Bookends’ atmosphere, the air feeling good since I’d barely broken a sweat. I threaded my way through the sounds to the back, inhaling the familiar and drinking it in. Switching to spare clothing Grandma insisted I keep in her little home-away-from-home so I wouldn’t offend her flock, I stepped out of the back in real clothes and wended my way toward the front, through faded book spines, authors and their stories, Ibsen’s women strong even when they were weak.
“There is Joachim.” My grandmother’s voice came from near where I stood. There was acquiescence in her tone, something different, something I wanted to slip around the shelving and see. “Mann wrote about a soldier becoming heroic in his defeat. Things don’t always turn out as we planned. Those battlefields we imagine ourselves victorious in aren’t where we truly shine…according to Mann.”
I envisioned a customer taking Joachim from Grandma’s hands, flipping through pages of a life turning right side up in an upside-down situation. Grandma’d never spoken of Joachim before. I frowned, listening for her to right herself from the opposite of all the characters she touted.
“You’ve read this?” the customer asked.
“Last night,” Grandma said. “It’s new. I just received it.”
“You read this in one night?”
I heard Grandma nod in the silence.
“I’ll take it. Thank you.” Another satisfied crusadee.
I tipped my head around the shelves, footsteps leaving and making their way to Grandma’s table. I eased to where the two of them had been and scanned the spines, my finger in a race to find Mann. If only Grandma would at least put her authors in alphabetical order. Name after name ran by, everything except Mann.
“You looking for something?” Grandma asked from behind me.
I dropped my finger from her books. “I heard you…”
Grandma nodded. “Mann.”
“You were up late last night…”
She nodded again. I wanted to ask her about Joachim, about Mann, about heroes in unexpected situations.
“I went to Grandpa’s…”
“Maybe you could tend the store for a little bit while I run an errand? We’re out of coffee. I should have bought some last night, but I read, instead.”
I thought of the photos I had to take and finish for my display. Of the real running I thought I’d try again. Of Emerson and the mirror. “Of course, go ahead. I’ll be happy to watch the store for you. Can you do something for me?” I asked before she walked away.
Grandma didn’t offer me a “yes” just because that was what grandmothers should do. She was a “no” sort of grandma, but she looked my way.
“Come with me to the next hearing. Please.” I willed Joachim into her thoughts. “They will begin questioning witnesses and bringing out evidence. It will be good for you. And for Grandpa…”
“My being there won’t do him any good.”
“It will. Grandpa won’t even look at me, but if you were there…”
“I would make things worse.”
“How can you make things worse? He has a chance. He has a case. There is no proof against him, yet. Nothing solid.”
“Then I am definitely not what you want there.”
“But…” It felt cliché to beg the back that walked away from me. Like a literary scene written far too many times. I watched her go, her gait rigid, and then she was gone.
I glanced up at the mirror I really didn’t want to see or touch, the dark lump that looked far too much like the one Dietrich had handed me, the two of them scorched versions of the one from Grandpa’s garage. It was impossible, pure foolishness, that fiction would have any merit at all. “Pure foolishness,” I whispered as I retrieved Grandma’s ladder from the back and set it close to the wall. “Fiction is fairy tales.” One step at a time, my hands like suctions on the wall, I made my way to the top and put a foot on the final platform.
“There’s no solid proof. There won’t be imaginary proof, either.” I stretched, inching the fingers of one hand toward the mirror’s frame, my other hand bracing me.
“Can I help?”
Please, God, no.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
I glanced down at the devil himself, blond hair and a tan corduroy jacket. Leave us alone. This is my family’s battle. “Cleaning. I’ll get back to it later.” I slid my palms down the wall, feeling for each step down with my toes. Leave us be, leave us alone. A hand broke my descent, steadied my ankle, while another gripped the ladder. “What are you doing?”
“Just come on down.”
I stared at his fingers, his blond head, the face that had dared to suggest I was my fiancé’s enemy. “Let go of my foot.”
There was power in looking down on him, strength even with height that made me weak. I kicked at the warmth his hand left behind as he stepped back, and I slithered down. “When are you going back to Germany?”
“Soon. My grandmother is…”
“Your grandmother? You have a grandmother, and you have the audacity to be here torturing mine? Both of my grandparents?”
He was around me and up the ladder’s steps without an answer—the second step from the top—stretching and clasping the mirror’s frame I’d merely touched. He lifted it from its nail and brought down to me what I’d never wanted to see.
“Is this what you wanted?”
“It needs dusted.” I wanted to touch the scorched glass, the blackened frame, the lump that caused my breathing to stop. “They all need cleaned.” I swiped an arm above my head. “You can just put it near the wall. I’ll get to it later.”
He carried the mirror to my grandmother’s table, my protests mum as I followed and watched him set it on the table’s edge against a stack of books. Apologies coursed through my mind as I stepped in front of the mirror. I’m sorry, Grandpa, sorry Mama…Grandma. Arched but rectangular, charred, with a burnt lump hanging at the side. I looked inside the frame at the broken silver that had turned coppery.
Dietrich stood beside me, the mirror a vision of the tall and the short, the blond and the brunette, the writer and the runner. Grandma’s books filled the background, dull and faded colors barely visible in the glass as I studied us. And then her, Amabile, her smile, her confidence, the love she had for an enemy, the stories that still told of it behind her…along with him. Tall and blond, fine hair falling toward blue eyes. Eyes that loved fiercely from a face that looked furtive. I leaned close, the snaky fissures that turned the background into a puzzle exploding. Color flew at me, outward then inward, pages and flames filling the air. I fell back, I grasped and flailed, grabbing at pieces of our and their lives, fragments that burned as they left my hands and re-sorted themselves into something new. Grandma’s books were gone when I looked again. Amabile’s stories were gone also. Enemies, instead of being disfigured, were also gone. I leaned close to the glass, to just Dietrich…and me, resting against his arm.
Chapter 54
“Cate!”
I ran hard, my loafers and slacks slowing me and making real speed impossible.
“Cate, slow down!” The voice was closer, and I ran harder, my shoes clapping against my heels. A bicycle pedaled vigorously beside me as Frank pulled ahead. “Are you crazy?” He hammered his feet in a circle as he kept up with my blouse, my slacks, and my loafers.
I was crazy. There were no runners in our family. He leaned into his hand brakes as I slowed then stopped, he coming to a halt not far ahead.
“Is this how you’re training now? With some crazy handicap so you can catch up?” He lifted his bicycle and turned it to face me, planting his feet at both its sides.
“I’m not training.” I looked at Frank. He felt like a stranger, an enemy instead of a friend. “I’m not running the marathon.”
“Because of Jill?”
“No.” I soun
ded twelve instead of twenty-six.
“Good. You weren’t supposed to quit because of her.”
For her, not because of her. “I have to go. I have some pictures to take.” Don’t tell Jill hello. “See you later.”
“When?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. After the marathon, maybe.” But probably not.
“You could still run in it, even if you’re not training…properly.” He eyed my shoes and clothing again.
There are no runners in our family, so you shouldn’t run. They need solid evidence. If it’s solid evidence they need, you don’t want me there. The mirror, him and Amabile, me and Dietrich…there was too much evidence, things I needed to run from, not to. I shut my eyes against tears, against the finish lines I’d never been able to run to…because I’d been running from more. Eighteen years of exhaustion roiled and began to heave in my gut.
I’d run from Non Bookends, from Dietrich, from his image and mine in the mirror. I opened my eyes and clasped both hands across my stomach. “I have to go.” Not my store voice, but not the inner scream that had begun with the explosion.
“I mean it, Cate,” Frank called to my back. “You could still race.”
I ran. I left behind him, the army, Dietrich, and everything that looked like evidence.
Chapter 55
“What are you doing with that?”
Cate’s grandmother appeared; she moved into the broken silver behind Dietrich in the mirror. Cate had been there. He’d seen her. And then she ran, her image lingering beside his until he touched the frame. He should shatter what none of them wanted to see. He should crush the vacuous wood with his hands, destroy any evidence of a love such as Amabile described.
Mavis Crawley stayed back, her image one-dimensional against a wall of books, dusty colors in rows as they had been before, her face and her hair almost ghostly.
“Someone has cleaned this recently,” he said to her reflection. He watched the background, waited, wondering how long the mirror had been here and if the reflection would dissolve into something different from what it had been with Cate.
“I…I keep a neat store.” Her face was fixed in the background. He turned to her, the real her, as she stared past him into the old frame.
“The pictures beside this had dust on them,” he said.
“I can’t be on the ladder great lengths of time. I work slowly.”
“You’ve handled this mirror, then.”
“Of course. I hung it there. Well, had it hung. I paid a young man to hang all of these.” She pointed above them with a broad sweep of her hand.
Dietrich turned back to the mirror, he in the foreground and she still in the back. “Then you’ve seen yourself?”
“Briefly.” She came to his side, set one hand on the mirror’s edge. “Now, if you’re quite done, I will hang this back up. Or have it hung back up.”
Dietrich let go and stepped aside. “Anything else there?” he asked.
Mavis stared at her image, her gaze traveling from her reflection to behind her, to the bookshelves and whatever else she could see in the mirror. A tiny gleam caught the light, a shiny dot traveling down her cheek.
“Nothing,” she said. “When I look in this mirror, I am always alone.”
Chapter 56
“I have a place.”
That was what he had whispered as he walked her from Hindenburghaus back to her apartment. Berlin’s streets were lit up with excitement even in the night. It was the competitions, the surge of pride and German power, the mixture of nationalities behaving as one. Her head spun. Never had her home been this way before, never had there been such brittle gaiety. Brittle yet unbreakable. That’s what she had thought, surely.
She stared at the mirror now, at the five carved lilies. There were to be six, he’d said, but then he’d said, no, there would be seven. And the seventh was to be a seal, a promise larger than the one already made, one that would be forever.
“I’ll admire it always,” she’d told him, but he had shaken his head.
“Carvings are a path to what’s more real. After the last carving, we leave this behind. We must. And then we become real. Unbreakable.”
She stepped closer to the mirror, searching for what he’d meant. She stared back at herself.
“But…” Number six was their seal of what already was. He said seven would give them what she wanted, he wanted, what no one could deny them forever, even without the mirror. She studied the five lilies, recalling each word he’d spoken with them. Every promise, every thought that had drawn her deeper and more fully into him.
“I won’t leave you behind,” she promised the five lilies and the mirror, recalling the words, the ties that bound them. “Even with the real, I’ll hold on to you. I’ll keep you with us forever. As a reminder of his promise, our love. For him.”
The seventh lily—the list…
The room reeked of developing fluid. I set Amabile down and looked away from her cover, her name and its namesake embossed there. I stared instead at the faces and hands around me. Some hanging to dry, others arranged on a board. New York faces and hands, my camera capturing what wasn’t visible to the eye, yet really there…like the mirror, like fiction.
I dropped Amabile into my camera bag and left the lab. I walked through the campus building until I burst through the doors to the outside. I glanced up. “Oh, that I could take wings and fly…” David. The Psalms.
“Catharine?”
I looked from the blue of the sky to black—Emerson, black hair and dark eyes four steps below where I stood. I needed warmth. Not a hand on my ankle or steadying a ladder beneath my feet. I needed Emerson’s warmth…a fiancé, not an enemy.
“Where have you been?” I stopped on the next to the bottom step.
“Everywhere. I’m exhausted, Catharine.” He stayed below me, hands invisible in his pockets.
“You’re exhausted…”
“Didn’t Miles tell you how much I wanted to be with you at the hearings? I would have been, but he told me to do double-time, spend twice as much time in the public eye, saying nothing about your grandfather but smiling and bolstering confidence in me.”
“Your values.”
“What?”
The distance between us was an ocean between two continents, keeping two enemies apart. If I stood in front of the mirror with Emerson, would the expanse disappear? Would he and I evolve into a couple? If I took a picture of him right now, would the truth show when I developed it?
“Miles said that customer has been there at the hearings talking to you. He’s not a customer, though. He’s a journalist from Germany.” Emerson didn’t need to say more. It was on his face, the link to Germany, the link that linked me to an enemy and severed me from him.
“I know who he is, and it’s not what you think. He’s not here for the investigation.” Or maybe he was. Maybe Amabile linked him to the hearing. I felt cold and hot, an eruption inside, the explosion of all I’d counted on. “But at least he’s there.” I needed Emerson to cross the ocean between us. I wanted his hands to help me make the last step. I needed him to be at the hearing, even if he sat behind me, several rows, unwelcome but understanding what was happening… like my enemy did. I covered my face with my hands, ran them up and over my forehead, dragging my hair back with them. Dietrich was the one there. Not an ocean away—even though I’d told him to be.
“That’s not fair. I would be there if I could.”
I stared across the expanse, at the uneasiness in his defense.
“Let’s go somewhere, Catharine, get something to eat. We can talk. We can be seen out and about, happy together. It would take the sting out of any rumors about your grandfather and keep sketchy journalists at bay.”
I saw his campaign. I saw red. I backed up the steps, no one holding onto my ankle or the ladder. “You look good in red. I’ll have that dress and the other things you’ve bought for me…no, for you…sent to your house.”
The ocean expand
ed between us, sending my enemy and his protests farther and farther away. At the top of the steps I opened the door and ran back into the building. This time it was Catharine I was leaving behind.
Chapter 57
I stood in the doorway of my grandparents’ house. I was the enemy now. I was Judas about to betray the one I’d always thought would save me, and Grandma, the one I always thought we needed saved from. I closed the door behind me and stepped inside.
The house was undisturbed since I’d seen it last, making it easy for me to retrieve and read the unopened letters I’d returned before. I should have asked my mother. This was a crime, opening another person’s mail, one more reason for Emerson to be glad he’d stayed on his own side of the sea.
Dad… I stared at my mother’s handwriting. Thank you for the note. I hope you’ll send more. And say more, too, but I know that’s not your way. I enjoy hearing from you, especially when it’s just the two of us. You and me, a pleasant conversation and not a battle.
I read on, my mother’s words like well-placed stones in uncertain waters. I was amazed Grandpa had written her. A note was probably accurate, since the sum total of what he’d ever said would probably fit on a postcard.
I laid the letter aside and opened the next one in line, written a couple of weeks after the first. Mama begged Grandpa to write again. She didn’t know he probably wasn’t seeing her requests, Grandma likely whisking them away when they arrived in the mail. Mama mentioned two soldiers’ names, men she claimed had served with him in France. She wondered if he’d like their addresses so he could write to them, since she’d located them nearby.
The third letter, nearly a month after the other, had her furtive cheerleader tone. She’d met with one of the two soldiers. The man remembered Grandpa, shared a couple of stories with her, and talked about how the accident in Poland made Grandpa a different man. I raced through the comments my mother shared—the hollow demeanor, the lack of Grandpa’s original laugh, the haunted look at leaving Europe, and the injuries that forced that. We called him Stilt, and boy could he make those legs move. Too bad about that broken leg. Fastest man I ever saw. Before the accident, that is.
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