Out of Splinters and Ashes

by Colleen L. Donnelly

  Everyone turned at the sound of the doors in the back. I turned also, as did Emerson. A beige spot to the far right had to be Dietrich as I watched the guard escort an almost slovenly, bent, older man to the front, followed by a well-dressed man I assumed to be a translator.

  “What do you think about this?” Emerson leaned into me.

  I looked at Emerson, the black of his hair, his concerned profile, and shook my head.

  The Pole was led to the front and shown how to be sworn in, the process slow and in duplicate as his translator repeated and interpreted what we saw. Our love story told in many tongues as I read into the night. Once he was seated, the questioning began. I listened as McCoy’s attorney created the setting, established credibility, and zeroed in on a photo different from the one we’d already seen, one of Grandpa’s unit, a sea of gray with creamy-white faces, tiny circles amidst the blur of uniforms and background. The Pole was offered a magnifying glass. He took it but didn’t use it as he studied the picture for a long time. At last he pointed.

  “Szybki.” Mr. Borowski looked up, his finger on the photo. The attorney twisted as he looked where the man pointed.

  “Fast,” the translator said.

  Fast, like a runner was. Like I was in the mirror Dietrich had held. My image had stood out, even against the sunlight’s glare, even within the mottled silver. I ran as a winner, and I ran fast, someone in the crowd cheering me on. Someone like the one holding the mirror. Someone smiling, like the face above the mirror, here to write about a runner. I’d looked ahead then—saw the finish, felt the medal, heard the encouragement, and ran.

  “Mr. Borowski has indicated Private Crawley.” McCoy’s attorney took the photo, thanked Mr. Borowski, and laid the picture in front of the judge, showing him which face was Grandpa’s. “And Mr. Borowski has referred to this person as fast.” The attorney looked at Grandpa. “Fast enough he could cover a lot of ground without being missed. So fast, it was impossible for even his commanding officer to know he’d gone. So blond, you will note, that he would be admired instead of suspected in or by Germany.”

  “Speculation.” Grandpa’s attorney stood.

  The judge was speculating in the silence as he stared at Grandpa’s photo. I could see the deliberation in his thoughts, feel it in the pregnant pause. “Strike those comments from the record.”

  I couldn’t. And neither could Emerson. His shoulder edged away from mine. He was running, running for the senate and running to outrun what Dietrich said he couldn’t. It was me Dietrich had said should run, should run away.

  McCoy’s attorney fell into a litany of questions that painted a historical picture of my grandfather back then—according to this Polish man’s memory, tall, quiet, blond…and szybki.

  The runner raced across my mind, the one in the mirror.

  “I need to go,” Emerson whispered. “That talk I’m giving.” We’d driven separate cars. The shoulder that was already far away disappeared.

  The runner kept going, the glint of the medal catching the light as she did.

  Chapter 66

  I focused on my feet, aware of Dietrich, as I filed out of the trial. I glanced up, then down. I couldn’t see it, I didn’t want I told you so to be on his face—now that Emerson had left and my grandfather seemed a criminal. Up, then down, I looked and then didn’t. Up again, until he was there. My feet stayed to the center of the aisle and moved me toward the courtroom’s door, my jaw clenched, a horrid fascination at seeing what I couldn’t stand to see…the man above the mirror, his smile for someone’s triumph.

  “I would like to speak with my grandfather.” I hurried out of the courtroom and spoke to the guard.

  He stared down at me. “I will check.” He summoned another officer, and I was led away before Dietrich could appear behind me. I hurried after the guard’s long stride, knowing I could outrun him, no matter how difficult it was to keep up with his walk. He led me through hallways, desks, and other army officers stationed at every juncture until at last I was stopped, checked, questioned, and stripped of everything except my clothing by hands and faces without warmth or life. No camera, either, but even it couldn’t have penetrated the stony expressions I passed as I was led into the last fortress that kept Grandpa from the rest of the world.

  This room was different from his other in location only. Otherwise it was the same as that one, and as his living room the day the army first came—square, plain, with no signs of living or life. Even Grandpa’s demeanor had taken on what the walls and the soldiers outside his door had.

  “Grandpa.” I entered, my escort coming with me. I turned to him as he planted himself in the doorway. “Can we be alone, please?”

  His gaze traveled from my empty hands to Grandpa’s empty room. He yanked back his head in what looked like an armless salute, then stepped outside, closing the door behind him.

  Grandpa. I only thought it this time, not trusting my voice, not knowing if it would break with tears or with violent accusations—tears at what the army said, accusations for what he may have done to Grandma…and my mother, and me, and Emerson. I glanced at the closed door behind me.

  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.

  “You didn’t need to come.”

  I turned at Grandpa’s voice, to the tall stick of a man who towered over me, the scarred hand that supported him on the cane.

  “I’m here, so let’s talk.” I waved an arm at one chair while I took the other, both cushioned but so hard they were like fabric-covered boards. Grandpa eased himself into his, repositioning several times. He was too thin. If the bed in here was the same, he’d be a solid bruise before he got out.

  If he got out.

  “Grandpa…did you do this? And I want a real answer this time.”

  He’d never had much life in his face, maybe none, but he had less than none now. I stared past the empty look, through the accusations and the question of guilt, beyond whatever they decided, to the man who was always on trial.

  “Like I said before, that is for the judge to decide,” he finally said.

  “So you did, then.” I kept the scream out of my voice, the slap out of my expression.

  He propped the cane in front of him, anchored two scarred hands over its top, and leaned into it, repositioning himself on the hard seat. “Did what, that’s the question.”

  “You tell me. You tell me what you did.”

  He stared at his hands. “I’ll tell you what I didn’t do, Cate. I didn’t do anything like they said. I did not generate, initiate, or forward any traitorous information in or from Poland. I did what I was supposed to, and that’s all. What I had to do. I’m not even sure who that man was they had on the witness stand. Of course, it’s been around forty years, and he was one of hundreds of Poles, while I was a single American soldier. Much easier to notice me, I suppose.” He looked up at me then, with his blue eyes, his white hair hanging straight over his forehead.

  “Why, Grandpa? Why don’t you stand up and make that clear?”

  He could be cleared of two charges—the US Army’s and Amabile’s, since he was innocent in Poland and never in Germany. I scooted to the edge of my seat in a resurgence of faith in him. There could be hope. Even for Grandma, if everything everyone said was a lie, fiction, stories other people told, tales that suited them.

  His face didn’t change. His expression remained staid, but his eyes spoke. They whispered. Choices flitted in their glistening sheen of blue. The love still in his eyes. Even as he crawled. Grandpa shook his head, glimmers of life fading with his focus back on his cane and his hands, and the scars that striped their backs.

  I stood. I wanted to touch those mountain ridges of shoulders beneath his shirt. I wanted to slap them, too, and jar to the surface what I’d seen in his eyes. “I’ll be back, Grandpa.”

  In. His. Eyes. In.
His. Eyes. Amabile’s words marked each of my steps as I left Grandpa’s room and marched down hollow tiled halls. In. His. Eyes. In. His. Eyes. I’d seen it. I’d seen something the night Grandpa told Emerson and me to make our marriage right, and now I’d seen it again, even if for only a second.

  “Thank you,” I muttered to the guard I passed as I stepped outdoors. It was sterile, cold, lifeless, just like the inside…except for whatever had shown itself deep inside Grandpa. I resumed my cadence down the sidewalk and to the parking lot, listening to the slap of my shoes on the pavement.

  White paper, like a flag, fluttered beneath my car’s wiper. Emerson, an excuse wrapped in an apology, most likely. I snatched the paper and wadded it in my fist as I climbed into my car. The engine roared as I hammered the accelerator, the growl settling to an even purr as I let off the gas. Grandpa’s eyes…I had seen love. Love that hadn’t died along with everything else. It was still crawling.

  I dropped my head against the headrest and stared at the bland fabric covering my car’s ceiling. The fabric melted into a colorless pool of tears.

  I wiped my eyes and reached for the gearshift, the white paper a ball between my palm and its handle. I leaned back in my seat again, stared at the paper, then opened the first fold. And the next, and another, until Emerson’s note lay open before me.

  There was the house they bought. The home she made for the two of them, but especially for him. He smiled at the way she lined his silver utensils beside his plate, thanked her for the way she organized his tools. She kept his favorite chair crowded with soft pillows and flanked by a place for his glass, his glasses, and whatever he chose to read. It was her stories he read if she laid them there, and when he did, she smiled. They lived this way, the years changing his blond strands to white, and her brown waves to silver.

  That’s what she saw when she looked in the mirror. It was all there. It was the looking glass to her heart. And his.

  Not Emerson.

  Chapter 67

  There was nothing significant in the newspaper about Crawley and his trial, not even something Randall had written…yet. Randall said the real evidence hadn’t made it to the courtroom yet, but he’d refused to elaborate. Dietrich rolled the paper like a club and stood up from the hotel lobby chair. The army wouldn’t make their business public, even though the trial was open to anyone now. Randall wouldn’t make it public, either, until the time was right. The little runner’s fiancé was no doubt grateful for this silence, a silence that might be short lived. Randall was waiting with whatever it was he wasn’t telling Dietrich. And he wouldn’t tell. Good journalists didn’t. Dietrich tapped an open palm with the tube of paper. That’s what made the good ones good—they discovered things without being told.

  Dietrich walked to the desk and asked that his car be brought up from the parking garage. He showed his ID and his International Driver’s License. “Yes, sir,” came the clerk’s response. Dietrich thanked him in German and strolled to the large glass revolving door at the front and waited. Crawley surely had that list. Or had once had it. Dietrich tapped the paper on his palm again, wondering if that was what Randall knew. That list could settle almost everything for Crawley…almost. That list could also destroy him—and Oma, if she knew of it…and Cate, the little winner.

  ****

  “Your mirror,” Dietrich said. It was early enough Non Bookends was open, but still empty other than Mrs. Crawley, at a new coffeepot sending a scent into the air that blended well with words on yellowed pages. She didn’t turn. He carried the mirror in one hand and her ladder with the other.

  The empty space on the wall above where he set the ladder was white, a rectangle that was whiter than the rest of the wall around it. He glanced back at her, the coffeepot sputtering. She looked, but didn’t have to speak. The white spot said what he wanted to know.

  “I’ll put it back.” Holding the mirror to one side, he worked his way to the top steps, where he balanced and ran the mirror up the wall until its wire caught on the nail. “There.” He came back down and glanced above them. “Good as new.” And it was. Inside, where it had been cleaned, and the wall that had been protected behind it for years.

  He returned the ladder and found Mrs. Crawley waiting for him near her table, a cup of coffee held in his direction.

  “Thank you.” He took the cup, and she held onto hers. They were enemies yet comrades, victims and warriors surrounded by the written word. “Cate did well in the race,” he said through a cloud of steam.

  “I saw you,” she answered.

  He took a swallow of too-hot coffee. He’d done it numerous times in similar situations, and he knew how to keep the wince from his eyes. “Guter Kaffee,” he said. “Good coffee.”

  “I always expected someone to come. And it’s you, not them. Not the military.”

  Dietrich looked at her—at the bitter exhaustion, the frustrated relief. An unsteady furrow that was anxious for the final thrust of the dagger.

  “I knew the moment I saw you and heard your accent. You are too much like him.” She eyed Dietrich, up and down, his tall and lean form, the crown of blond hair. But someone else’s waves.

  “I’m not your husband’s relation. I know that.”

  That didn’t assuage her anger. The look on Mrs. Crawley’s face burst into flames, the blaze in her eyes could have fired both of their cups of coffee to scorching temperatures.

  “And I have nothing to do with the German military.”

  She set her coffee mug on the table. “He expected the military. I didn’t see that, all these years.” She looked at Dietrich, her question there in her look—what did he, Dietrich, want?

  “The mirror…” Dietrich didn’t look up.

  Those two words were all it took to turn her dread to truth, fiction into fact. Steadying herself with one hand on the table, she inched around its side to the upholstered chair behind it. She backed into the seat, halting as if age had suddenly come upon her, dropped to the cushion, and looked up. “Who is Amabile?”

  “She was a writer in Germany around the time of the war, and the 1936 Olympics. There is thought…” He paused. He couldn’t say it even if Oma essentially had. “She may have written under another name, her real name, but then her work changed. She must have, too, because she changed her pen name to Amabile.”

  Mrs. Crawley slumped in her chair. “I always knew fiction was that way. It’s an honest way to write, really. Not cowardly. The only lies are the truths we wished weren’t.” Like her marriage. Dietrich saw that on her face. Years of rage erupting, and she was letting it. She didn’t need him here. She wasn’t even looking at him. Her eyes were on the life she’d lost, the years she’d been robbed of, this store no balm for the rejection she’d suffered.

  Dietrich set his cup near the coffeepot, turned, and looked at the woman staring at nothing except the past. “Why did you let him hang it in here?” he asked.

  Her eyes refocused for a moment from the battle she’d been fighting for years. “He didn’t,” she whispered.

  Chapter 68

  Red swollen eyes stared back at me, dried out from reading—Amabile—every word of hers I could find. I bent over the sink and splashed water across my face, sorry eyes peering back at me over my towel. Too many words.

  I brought my face closer to the glass, brown eyes, not blue, not flickering like my grandfather’s had for that brief moment. The outfits Emerson had returned reflected behind me, hanging over my bedroom closet door.

  I left them there, showered and dressed, grabbed my purse and camera, and headed out the door. I had a deadline, one I was about to cross over like I had the finish line.

  Saturday mornings were quiet in the journalism building where my photo lab was. Bleary-eyed grad students, grasping coffee cups with unsteady grips, nodded as I passed. I disappeared into my lab, tossed my bags aside, and seated myself at the large table, where an array of faces stared this way and that, everywhere except at me, in angles intended to capture what lay
behind the eyes.

  They were children. She saw them in the mirror, each bent over opposite sides of a puddle. Blond strands hung down from his forehead as he gazed into the water. Brown waves framed her face as she stared down also. The puddle tremored at the surface, a tiny frog diving in and streaking across the middle, finally burrowing into mud at one side, a place he thought safe from the intruders. The reflection below them shimmered and waved, a vibrating distortion of eyes and noses, mouths, and hair. She didn’t look up, and neither did he, the water holding them there until at last it began to clear and features fell into place. She bent nearer the surface and the reflection that smiled back at her. Yellow hair, a faint smile, blue eyes offering a safe haven.

  I shook Amabile from my head and rearranged photos, saying their names out loud to keep Amabile away.

  Courtrooms, bookstores, and reflections all disappeared. I aligned Emerson’s black hair and his professional demeanor with a nearly hairless older man, one whose profile I’d snapped first and afterwards asked if it was okay to use it. I paired familiar faces with unfamiliar, matching and contrasting their expressions and hands, creating a cinematic swirl of New York, its inhabitants, their lives, past and present.

  I stood and stretched, looking down at the display. I stepped farther away until the photos blended and blurred, studied the shading more than the subjects, catching clusters of too-gray next to too-black, and thought how to re-sort to balance the scheme. I came back to the table and made my adjustments. I stood close, the way Amabile and “he” had stood over their puddle, looking down at the faces and hands below.

  Gazes stared around the room—my grandmother’s eyes, and my mother’s—amidst faces that were full or empty, hopeful or hurt. And Emerson’s—black holes for eyes, artificially livened by smile lines. I took a step back and panned the table’s surface. My grandfather was there, a three-quarter profile, a glimmer of what would be the blue of his eyes. And above his eyes and to the left rested my enemy, the one with the mirror and the sign, a quick shot of Dietrich I’d taken outside Grandpa’s courtroom, snapped straight on, without his permission, quick enough to catch what was there before realization set in. I stared at the face I wish I’d never seen—blond hair and no smile. I bent closer…in those hazel eyes, I saw something familiar—something I realized could have been blue.