“Several hands being other nationalities? All military?” The attorney paused and looked at Grandpa. “A woman, even?”
“As I said, an American soldier evidently at each end. The Germans claimed a woman may have been involved, but that was never proven.”
“What was this list?”
“It was supposed to be US military names, those supporting Hitler’s growing regime. Sympathizers to his Aryan army.”
“Aryan. Tall, blond, above average.” McCoy’s attorney stared at Grandpa. “No further questions.”
Chapter 61
“Hallo, Oma.” Dietrich waited and listened for the tone of his grandmother’s reply.
“Dietrich.” Her voice carried a rich quality, courageous like she said he was. “You are home?”
“Soon,” he said. “Your writing, Oma, you have done it well.” Too well.
“You liked it.”
“I confess, I’ve read some of your other books. You haven’t lost your touch.”
“Some of my old love stories?” Maybe there was a blush now. “You must think them foolish, a star journalist like you.”
Dietrich would have smiled, writing being one of their favorite discussions. But this conversation wasn’t about his grandmother’s return to what they shared. It was about the one thing they shouldn’t.
“This was not quite so frivolous—maybe light—as those stories.”
“The story I’m writing now would be nearer to the war. A different tone.”
He could hear it in her voice. The difference between comic book love and what was lived. Love that had nearly cost someone…probably her…their life.
“It felt real,” he ventured. “Like the war must have felt. Innocent victims caught in danger they didn’t belong in.” He was putting words in her mouth, words she would need if this trial exploded.
“I missed much of the war.”
“You did?” He gnawed the inside of his cheek.
“I wasn’t well, as you were sort of aware already.”
She never spoke of that time, the same way she never spoke of her furnace injuries that were apparent.
“Your story sounds like Berlin, even if it wasn’t during the war. Tell me more about it.”
“It is about love. You have no interest in a woman’s love story, but thank you for reading some of it.”
“There was an explosion or something. I have plenty of interest in that.”
There was a laugh in the silence. “The story wasn’t about the explosion and what it destroyed. It was about what survived.”
What might have survived—that absence beside her, the gaunt man who looked too frail to fill it—wouldn’t survive the trial. “You’re right, Oma, I’m a man and uninterested in romance stories. I’m curious about the damage. Humor me. Why the explosion, and what did it destroy? Give me the violence, the mystery, even if it doesn’t belong in your story, and I promise I’ll read the rest and do my best to suffer through the romantic parts.” But don’t give me the list. It couldn’t be what was behind what happened. Oma was an ordinary woman, a romance writer, not a German spy falling for an American traitor, with a resultant daughter.
“Every love has an explosion, something that tries to change the way things are by destroying the way they look, but when love is real, an explosion only mars the view. What’s real and important survives.”
The mirror. Oma was talking about the mirror along with all the passion associated with it. She’d tried to preserve both in the explosion, coming away in the end with scars, disfigurement beneath her dress, only one burnt lily, and ashes. The mirror was in New York, though. Somehow Crawley had managed to get it out of Berlin. Through an accomplice? The English-speaking person in Oma’s new writing? He wouldn’t allow Oma to end this way or let that absent presence that had always been at her side come to life here in New York with a confession.
Crawley was a traitor, at the very least in love. And if it wasn’t Amabile he tried to save in the explosion, it was the mirror. Where the list may have been hidden.
Chapter 62
Grandpa wasn’t in Berlin. Grandpa wasn’t a real runner. Grandpa wasn’t fast enough—but I was.
I bent my leg back and grabbed my ankle behind me as I balanced on the other foot. I pulled, my thigh muscles protesting, already out of shape.
“Excuse me.” Runners around me were doing the same thing and more, all of us nearly knocking each other over. So many, and all so tense, where the marathon was about to start. I stepped away from the start line and lowered into some squats.
“Cate?”
I looked up at Frank, standing for once without a bicycle between his legs. I wondered if he remembered how to walk the way I was remembering how to run. With a finish line in front of me. I straightened and jogged in place on my toes.
“You’re running after all? Were you training on your own?”
“Only mentally.” I wiped my forearm against my brow. It was a runner habit, and I did it to convince Frank more than me.
“Mentally?” He cocked his head and glanced down at my legs. I could see the concern of atrophy cross his face. “Jill’s running.” He nodded to the very front, where Jill’s bobbing ponytail could be seen flapping above the crowd.
Overachiever. “Tell her good luck.” I dropped into another squat.
“You know Jill. She doesn’t need luck when it comes to this sport.” Frank had that look on his face that told me he wanted to drop down to where I was, look me in the eye, and talk. His knees kept him from maneuvers like squats. I scrunched even lower but saw his face suddenly in front of mine, upside down as he bent to talk without squatting. “What do you mean mentally?”
I shot up out of my near-ground position, past Frank, who looked startled and relieved as he straightened in front of me. “Let’s just say I won’t be hammering the pavement with my feet anymore. I’m not running like I did.” I trotted away before he could talk more or laugh at me, and moved toward the start line as far from Jill as I could get. I was done running futilely and away from things I couldn’t change. Today was a race, and I had a goal—I was going to run to win.
I took my place near the start line, a hand raising in the crowd, waving as cameras pointed its way instead of mine. Emerson—his race was more important to them.
Voices amplified by megaphones roared over the excitement, but it was Emerson’s voice I heard. Not what he was saying, as he spoke to a reporter who was jotting notes, but what he said when my mental training first began. Probably good you stopped running and that your grandfather can’t.
A whistle blew and the pistol fired. Emerson’s profile as he spoke to the reporter fell behind me and was gone. It was only me now, in the midst of arms and legs, grunts and measured breathing, feet hammering around me while mine lifted and flew.
We were a sea of elbows and shoes, waves of motion moving ahead and falling behind, jetting forward and lagging off to the side. One head in particular stayed above and in front of us all, a hallmark—Jill.
The crowd around me thinned as the race advanced, not just the number of runners but the spectators also as we loped into the middle miles, the long stretch where oxygen and glucose shouldn’t be wasted on thinking. Grandpa was not a runner. It’s probably good you stopped running. Jill and two others were in front of me as we entered the last quarter. Amabile loved a runner. You’re not the runner I’m looking for. I heard the hammering of my feet as the runner in front of me pulled farther ahead. Good thing your grandpa can’t run. But I could. I lifted my feet the way Jill’s husband had taught me and left behind what I’d been told.
The crowd thickened as the finish line drew near. Voices roared. A light flashed, and then another, an immense flash close to the street. Emerson? His reporter? I glanced to the side and I saw myself. And a journalist instead of a reporter—tall, blond, the arms of his corduroy jacket holding the mirror and a sign: See Yourself—A Runner And A Winner.
Dietrich may have been smiling over
the mirror, but it was me in the darkened glass. I saw myself running ahead, a runner and a winner, and…
The man in front of me fell behind, as did another one who had managed to slip past. It was just Jill and me now, and a finish line not far away. I felt the dampness of my shirt, the light yellow likely looking orange now that it was wet, the way rain enhanced otherwise nondescript clothing. It made us see what we really wanted, what we knew was probably there.
Bye, Jill. I ran harder, and Jill faded behind me. So did the finish line as I sailed over it to my own, past the cheers. Grandpa, Grandma, Emerson, and even Dietrich and the mirror, all left behind. The announcer shouted after me, but I couldn’t stop. “This is a race and I want to win.” From Last one Home is a Green Pig.
Chapter 63
My hair hung in perpetual wet, my face in a permanent smile.
I’d run beyond the noise of the throng, the shouts of the announcer, the voice that said it was good I wasn’t a runner, until I’d gone far enough the afternoon sun flashed in my face. Like the sun in the mirror my enemy held and the words his sign had claimed. I stopped, then, at the truth of “See Yourself—A Runner And A Winner.” I turned around and ran all the way back to where Emerson stood holding my trophy in the air, making excuses to a ring of reporters—but no journalist—why I’d kept running the way I did. He held the trophy higher as I approached. With one arm he gripped my wet waist and with the other he kept my trophy above him where everyone could see it.
I answered questions, posed for pictures, and shook Jill’s hand, all the time watching for that glint of sunlight, the one in the mirror alongside the sign that saw the finish line no one else had.
Emerson drove me to my apartment afterwards, his car and the light meal we shared filled with his excited chatter. “I wish I could stay,” he said as he cleared a shelf for my trophy. “You rest. And congratulations. Don’t worry about being at my speech tonight.” I thanked him, but I didn’t rest. I showered and went to Non Bookends instead.
The store was quiet, the bells heralding my smile and slick hair, bringing an explosion of excitement when a customer spotted me and clapped her hands. Others joined, like the crowd at their finish line, as I wended my way to Grandma’s table where she sat. I thanked her flock and spread my smile the way Emerson did. The way he would continue to do as he ran his race.
“Well, you did it.” Grandma looked up at me. “I figured you’d be out celebrating. Or on a stretcher somewhere.”
“Were you there? Did you see any of the race?” My grandparents had rarely come to any of my high school events. I hadn’t seen Grandma standing near Emerson, and she would never have been near Dietrich…and her mirror. I glanced up at the empty spot where it had hung.
“I saw the most important part,” Grandma said. I looked down at her. “I saw Jill eating your dust.”
My smile turned to a laugh then, to an open-mouthed gale that broke all of Grandma’s store-voice rules. I leaned against her table and held onto my chest, imagining Jill’s face as I burst past her and the line and the accolade she ran for that chased after me instead. “Tell me. How did she look?” I wiped tears from my eyes and rubbed the happy soreness from my cheeks. I wasn’t used to smiling. Or winning. I bent down and rubbed my legs.
“ ‘My sad heart foams at the stern.’ ”
I could see that. I could imagine Jill’s face a mixture of misery and rage. “Who said that?”
“Rimbaud.”
“I’m not familiar with him or her.”
“Him. And that’s probably okay. But that quote suited Jill’s expression.” And it suited Grandma’s…in the past. Tonight she had the rare smile…very rare. A sad heart peering from beneath the gaiety, making me realize it had always been there, sad beneath angry foam.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her thin smile above the rage-coated hurt. “Tell me, Grandma. Please.”
She peered at me. She glanced around Non Bookends, past her books and the quotes she had attached to the shelves. “There’s one love. If it’s not you, you’re the enemy of that love, and his enemy as well.” She braced herself on the table and stood. Her hands trembled as she did, possibly for a man who may have carved wood into lilies for her enemy, and into splinters for his.
“I had to stop running, Grandma. Today I raced for the first time, and I did it to win.” I glanced around Non Bookends. “Like you’re doing here.”
Grandma shuffled instead of marched away from her table to the back of Non Bookends. The door to her little home-away-from-home closed softly behind her.
I walked to the center of the store, where Ibsen reigned. I glanced at his plays, at Nora, at his women who were strong even when they were weak. At the questions I’d come to ask and the answers I’d come to learn, about enemies and about hearts.
The seventh lily would be hers someday. She saw it in the mirror and in his eyes. He would carve it and he would bring it, and he would run when he did. The mirror showed him running when he claimed running really wasn’t what he did. It showed the lily in his hand, close and then far. And finally, her non-runner crawling, crawling, the love still in his eyes.
Grandma—nonfiction.
Chapter 64
Dietrich had seen a runner, not his own reflection, as he lifted the mirror from Non Bookends’ wall where Mrs. Crawley had had it rehung. He teetered at the top of the ladder, and he stared. He held onto the charred wood and the singular flower that framed the runner as he guided himself to the floor. Mrs. Crawley had gone to watch Cate run, and when she did, Dietrich took the mirror.
He’d snatched paper as he ran, a large piece, and a marker, hurrying to his car and toward the finish line.
Mrs. Crawley stood opposite where Dietrich was, her eyes the direction the runners would come from as he watched from behind the first layer of spectators.
Dietrich faded farther back into the crowd, found a place where he wouldn’t be jostled, and worked the back off the mirror. Wood splintered around the old nails, loose nails that he worked out with his fingertips to remove the board. The back of the cracked silver was opaque and dull, blackened where the scorching had penetrated. He ran a finger over the glass. It was clean. He held the mirror to the light, studied behind the glass—nothing, no list, no hidden compartment, just empty and clean. If there had been a list there, it was gone.
The noise of the crowd intensified, and shouts and clapping hurried him as he refitted the back and worked the nails at slight angles in holes that were too large. He penned what he’d seen in the mirror, and keeping it and the poster close, he threaded himself through the crowd.
He watched where everyone watched, over their heads, stretching above them to see but not enough to catch Cate’s grandmother’s eye. He saw her, then. The little runner, a small dot, a growing figure, tiny but powerful, maintaining a position near the front. More than just a runner. She really was a winner. He glanced down at the mirror as the excitement grew, the noise increased, the runners neared. A runner and a writer, there they were, together in the glass, one waving to the other.
“Go! Go!” The noise was deafening, and Dietrich looked up, he broke free from the crowd’s yells, slid through the wall of spectators, and held the mirror where Cate could see.
And she did. She saw something in the mirror that reflected on her face. Every muscle glistened, hardened, and transformed the tiny runner into a thing of beauty. He held onto what he saw as she sailed past. The noise was deafening, thunderous as she cleared the finish line and ran on. That thing of beauty disappeared. He stared after her, where she’d gone. A beautiful enemy.
Chapter 65
“Private Crawley was never assigned to Berlin.” Lieutenant McCoy spoke without emotion, never taking his gaze from Grandpa’s attorney.
I watched McCoy. I wanted to glance over my shoulder at Dietrich. I’d tried to ignore him when I entered the trial. If I turned now, would what I didn’t want to hear, what was being denied on the stand, be there in his eyes…eyes that ha
d held the mirror and the sign and smiled at me? I fidgeted with my fingers until Emerson laid his hand over mine.
“Therefore, it is your belief he was never there,” Grandpa’s attorney implied a conclusion.
“He was assigned to France and Poland. No other place.”
Two men—one a traitor to the United States, the other a traitor to a lover. Two different countries, also, so one wasn’t Grandpa. Maybe neither was. Emerson pressed harder as my fingers twitched.
Grandpa’s defense attorney rehashed Grandpa’s time in Poland, the evidence he was there based on work he accomplished and the explosion he suffered. McCoy affirmed everything the defense said. But the list…and its presumed trail from Poland…McCoy’s stolid composure took on an air of apology for what might have happened under his watch, any tainting on the army. Yes, there was evidence information leaked from Poland and made it to Berlin, and likely through the hands of an Aryan-looking American.
I glanced at Grandpa, at his back, at the mountain ranges his shoulder blades created in the shirt he wore. I thought of Amabile’s runner and of the runner in the mirror Dietrich had held. I could feel Dietrich behind me, over my left shoulder, far to the back, yet close, close enough to hold a mirror and a sign encouraging me to look and win. I slid my hand from beneath Emerson’s.
It was the army officer in him that gave McCoy enough backbone to not give in to slumping as more and more evidence something had happened within his unit came out. No finger pointed at McCoy, but the invisible charge was there. Failure showed in his bearing as Grandpa’s attorney drilled it in. McCoy was no match for the indications one of his soldiers had let our country down.
“Where is the proof?” Grandpa’s defender charged. “The list? A direct tie from Private Crawley to this supposed channel from Poland to Berlin?”
It was McCoy’s attorney who ended up answering that question with his witness who had been slow to arrive. The man from Poland who had identified Grandpa in an old photo. “Please bring Mr. Borowski to the stand,” the prosecutor said when it was his turn to show evidence.
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