by Sylvia True
Tanner was more than capable of following through on a threat.
“If you get the house and the money, will you put in writing that you won’t tell some judge about me being in McLean?” Sabine asked.
“And how are you going to take care of yourself?” His words were tight.
“I’ll figure it out.” She just needed to know she wouldn’t lose the baby.
“So it’s done then? Us?” His voice cracked. “Did you ever love me?”
“Of course,” she said, glancing at the clock above the sink.
“You can’t even look at me.”
“I was just checking the time,” she said, forcing herself to look at him, realizing that she didn’t find him sexy or charming, that she hadn’t for quite a while. He was right, they were done, and of course he’d seen it, and she’d been the one in denial.
“What about when your grandmother dies?” he asked.
She sat back. “What about it?”
“If we get divorced, I don’t think it’s fair that I get nothing. If you add up all of the hours I’ve worked so you didn’t have to.”
Sabine felt something snap. “For fuck’s sake,” she yelled. “I haven’t been at some spa. I’ve been in a hospital. And I’m sorry it’s been hard on you. I’m sorry you’ve had to do so much. Believe it or not, I do feel guilty. But Omama isn’t about to die, and I have no idea how much money she has. And whatever she does have will go to my mother, not me.” She stared at him. “You greedy bastard.”
“How dare you,” he said.
She stood. “You’re right. We are done. You take what’s yours and I’ll take what’s mine.”
She turned, walked upstairs, lifted Mia out of her crib, and dressed her. Mia would sleep at McLean tonight. Fuck the rules.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Inga
Belmont, Massachusetts 1985
When Inga woke, it was still dark outside. She carefully moved her feet to the floor. Then even more carefully, she stood, keeping one hand on the night table. After counting to ten, she felt strong enough to walk. She took solid steps, and knew she was improving. She pulled aside the curtains and sat on one of the ugly hotel armchairs, covered with a material that felt plastic to the touch.
Sunrises anywhere were glorious, although nothing compared to the Rigi—to watching a small dot of light grow larger and eventually spread like a palette of melting colors across the sky. But even here, overlooking a parking lot, there was beauty, and as the sky transformed from gray to pinks and reds and oranges, Inga cried. She had no reason to stop herself. No one could see what a silly, sentimental old woman she really was.
When the sky announced its brilliant winter blue, Inga returned to bed. She needed one more day to recover fully. In an hour or so, she would phone Sabine, find out how things went with Tanner, and get an update of the ward.
Sometime later, she woke gasping, unsure of where she was. She needed a minute to orient herself, to recognize the mediocre hotel room with the unregulated heating system. She picked up the phone and called the front desk.
“The heat in my room,” she began and stopped for a breath. “It is much too hot.”
“I will send someone up.”
A few moments later, there was thunderous banging on her door. She thought of the morning the Nazis came to inspect their home in Frankfurt, looking to confiscate artwork.
“Come in.”
“Hello,” a man’s voice called. “I’m here to check the heat.”
She glanced down at her chest and saw that her dressing gown was open. She tugged it closed. “It is too warm.”
“I’ll take a look.”
They were never far, those stupid brutes. She spoke with as much strength as she could muster. “You are in the wrong house.”
“We’re in a hotel,” he told her.
Of course he was lying. The wise course of action was to play their game. “Yes, yes.” She smiled, wishing her head did not feel as if it were two meters under water. “And you are here, why?” She reached for a tissue on the bedside table and wiped her forehead.
“The heat.”
“The heat. Yes. The heat is too high.”
He stood next to a small box on the wall. “Ma’am, it’s at sixty. We can’t make it lower than that in the winter. We don’t want the pipes to freeze.”
“Sixty,” she repeated.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
She saw two of him. Two men with uniforms, telling lies. A room at a temperature of sixty Celsius was practically an oven.
She pointed to the door. She was not going to be tricked into being gassed. “Get out,” she told him.
“You don’t look so good. Want me to have them call a doctor or something?”
If it wasn’t so frightfully warm, she might have laughed. A doctor. They were the most dangerous of all. She remembered when she learned Bohm had been executed by guillotine for his crimes against humanity. It was a moment of vindication.
“Out,” she said now. She meant to sound forceful, but instead the word seemed suffocated in a thousand feathers.
She could breathe a bit better after he was gone. She wrapped her fingers around the glass of water on the night table, but lost her grip as she tried to bring it to her lips, spilling water over the front of her robe.
She reached for the phone, touched the smooth plastic of the receiver, and thought about calling Arnold. Not because she needed him, or wanted his advice, but because it would be nice to talk to a friend. But she was too weak to pick up the phone again, let alone get a call through to Switzerland. She imagined sitting in the green room with him. She would explain how she had only recently understood that what she felt most of her life was emptiness. She had confused that with loneliness.
She remembered a time, many years ago, when Lisbet visited the chalet with the children. One afternoon when Fred had taken the boys to hunt for fossils, Inga planned to take Lisbet and Sabine to town for lunch. It was a sunny day, with a few white clouds that looked as if they’d been painted on the sky. Lisbet and Sabine held hands, swinging their arms as they walked down the hill, and Inga, without thinking, reached for Sabine’s free hand. Maybe they could play, one, two, three—up. The boys loved that. But Sabine pulled her hand away and tried to hide it, and Lisbet pretended she didn’t notice. It was such a small moment, and silly as well, yet the thought that came to Inga was Lebensunwertes Leben—life unworthy of life. The doctors had used that term, and then the Nazis took it for their own, declaring the mentally ill, the Jews, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, and the deformed children unworthy of life. Inga had never thought herself unworthy until she watched Lisbet and Sabine happily skip on without her. Her mother, her daughter and even her granddaughter pushed her aside.
Now she lay on the hotel bed with her eyes closed. She had tried. She had always tried, and finally the winds of her life had shifted. She was no longer unwanted and unworthy, and with that thought she drifted to sleep.
Then suddenly, she was being shaken. A hand held her arm. This time she was absolutely sure the Nazis had come to take her away.
“Omama, you have a fever,” a woman’s voice said.
The voice sounded distant. Inga turned toward it, and there in front of her was Rigmor. At last.
“I’m going to call 911,” Rigmor said.
It made no sense. But that didn’t matter. They were together.
“I think you have to go to the hospital.”
“No,” Inga told her. “Out.” She took a shallow breath. “Out of the hospital.”
“You’re burning up.”
Poor, dear Rigmor, so confused. “Time to dress.” Inga felt around for her glasses. “We will get a train in Dresden.”
“We’re in Boston, Omama.”
Inga blinked and in front of her stood Sabine holding a glass of water. The wall seemed to ripple and blur. And then there were two. Two women, both young, both with dark curls, one more of a shadow.
* * *
> Before driving to the hotel, Sabine had dropped Mia off at daycare. Now Sabine followed the ambulance that took Omama to Brigham and Women’s Hospital—to the medical intensive care unit.
“Is there someone you need to call?” a nurse asked Sabine, and pointed to a beige phone in a beige-looking hallway. “That phone is for family of patients in the ICU.”
She knew she had to call her mother, but she hesitated. They hadn’t spoken since the day before Sabine went into McLean.
It was ten in the morning, a time her mother should be home. Her students came to the ice rink before and after school.
Sabine dialed.
“Hallo,” her mother said.
Sabine stared at the plant standing in a wicker pot and thought it was odd that the green leaves, plastic and fake, also seemed beige.
“Who is there?” her mother asked.
“It’s Sabine.” She wrapped the cord around her wrist. “I wanted to let you know that Omama is in the hospital.”
Her mother gulped and said, “Oh.”
“It’s probably just the flu,” Sabine said.
“When did it start?”
“I’m not sure exactly. Two days ago, she said she had a sore throat.”
“Do you think she could have caught something from the plane?” Panic pierced the words.
“It could be from anywhere,” Sabine answered.
“But, you know what they say about planes. How colds and flus live in the air ducts. She should have stayed here for longer. I should have—”
“Stop,” Sabine said, sounding angrier than she had intended. “It is not your fault.”
“She had a nasty fight with Gerald when she was here.”
“I’m sure it has nothing to do with the flight.” Sabine had imagined a number of ways a conversation with her mother might go. This was not one of them.
“Should I come there?”
Sabine couldn’t answer. She had wanted her mother more than anyone when she first was admitted to McLean, but now the thought of having her mother around—of having to assuage the guilt and assure her that she hadn’t done anything wrong—felt like a burden.
Dr. Lincoln had asked Sabine if she fought with her mother. The answer was no. Never. Not even a little. There was no reason to. But you must have felt angry at times? Again, no, not that she could remember. And now here she stood feeling her hand tense around the receiver.
“Come if you want,” Sabine said coolly. “I’ll call if things change.”
She called Tanner next, to ask if he could pick up Mia while she stayed with Omama in the hospital. Tanner sounded concerned and asked if he could stop by, bring some flowers. Had he forgotten their conversation last night? Sabine thanked him and said it would be best if he took care of Mia and didn’t come to the hospital.
Next, she called the ward and told them she would most likely be staying with her grandmother. Nurse Nancy told Sabine that she was required to come back, that she had to take her medication, that they had a group meeting. It was unheard of, she said, that a patient would just walk out in the morning and not return.
“I’m not leaving my grandmother.” As soon as those words came out, Sabine remembered something Omama had said when she first came to McLean, about how people shouldn’t be left alone in a hospital without family.
Omama lay on a bed with a mask over her mouth, an IV in her arm, machines beeping, and screens with red and green lines bumping along. A blue curtain separated her from someone on the other side.
Sabine pulled her chair closer to the bed. “Omama,” she whispered. There was no response, not even a flutter of the eyelids.
A nurse came in and asked Sabine to fill out some forms. There was almost nothing Sabine knew, except name, address and age. She handed back the forms, and asked the nurse what the prognosis was.
“Has she suffered from pneumonia before?” the nurse asked.
Sabine shrugged. “Not that I know of. Will she get better?”
“We’re doing everything we can.” The nurse glanced at the partially filled out forms and walked away.
Sabine stayed next to Omama for three hours, as nurses came in and out to listen to her heart and lungs, check the IV bag, and make sure the oxygen was working.
At around five, Sabine closed her eyes and dozed. She woke when she felt something skim her wrist.
“Omama,” Sabine said, looking down at the bowed fingers gently raking her hand. “Do you feel better?”
Omama tugged off her oxygen mask.
“I think you’re supposed to keep that on,” Sabine said.
She shook her head. “Listen,” she wheezed.
“Don’t strain yourself.” Sabine stood, ready to help put the mask back on.
“The baby.”
“Mia is fine,” Sabine assured.
“No.” She held up a finger. “The other one.”
A nurse hurried in. “She needs to keep on the mask.” She lifted Omama’s head off the pillow and moved the elastic, but in a sudden show of force, Omama pushed the nurse’s hand away.
“The baby did not die,” she gasped. “Tell Arnold.”
“That’s enough.” The nurse adjusted the mask, and Omama’s head sunk into the pillow. She slept.
Sabine went to the gift shop and found some lavender lotion. One of her favorite things about Switzerland was the smells. Omama made sachets from lavender that she grew in her garden and put them under the pillows. The linens were always crisp and air-dried. Everything smelled fresh—the shrubs, the raspberry jam, and the milk that came from the farm down the road.
When Sabine returned to the ICU, she took out the lotion and began to rub it on Omama’s hands, one finger at a time. Her grandmother’s bones felt light and fragile, and her skin was cool. Sabine talked about the chalet, about each room, about the golden hedgehog that stood on the mantel, and the locked glass cabinet in the dining room. She talked about the gardens and the fruit, and the cherry trees. She talked about the open windows, about the purple hue of the foehn from the mountains. Then she stopped for a moment and glanced around. She felt something. A slight draft, but there were no windows, and the door was closed. She glanced back at Omama and imagined her at the chalet, standing on the balcony, waving as a light breeze glided by. As quickly as the image came, it was gone.
Omama died that evening at seven fifty-eight.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Arnold
Arlesheim, Switzerland 1985
At six in the morning, Arnold’s door at the nursing home flew open, and there stood his favorite nurse, Erika. Her large shoulders blocked a good amount of light. He had asked her once if she was a swimmer. It was, he thought, a delicate way of learning why she had such an unusually muscular body.
Erika clapped. “Are we ready to greet the day, Dr. Richter?”
She entered the room like a large gust of wind, and then moved him swiftly and yet with great care to the bathroom, where she had the loathsome job of cleaning him and changing his diaper. She talked about her brother, the trouble he’d gotten into for staying out drinking and vomiting on the front lawn, where god forbid the neighbors could see. Her mother had attacked him with a frying pan. Wearing her yellow bed jacket, with her black hair, she looked like a large bumble bee, chasing him down the street. All of this Erika told Arnold as she sat him in the shower stall and ran a soft stream of warm water over him. She kept up her storytelling until he was dressed. She made the whole morning humiliation (as he called it) invisible.
“I am having a visitor today,” he said, before she could begin a story of how she told off one of her boyfriends. “Do my eyebrows look too bushy?”
She seized his chin and studied his face. “They could use some neatening. I think a little trim of the hair as well.”
After draping him with a black cape, she began her work. They talked about Inga, about how everyone in the home missed her, and then he told Erika that his visitor was Sabine, Inga’s granddaughter, a woman he had never
met.
Fifteen minutes before Sabine was due, Arnold asked to be taken to the green room. There he sat by himself, looking at the painting of the Matterhorn that Inga so often complained about. The perspective was wrong, she insisted. It looked as if the mountain was sitting on air. And the colors were too bright. The grays should have been more shaded and the purple more bruised.
The clock in the room chimed eleven, and Arnold felt the pulse of his heart in his neck. Aside from Inga, he never had visitors.
At ten minutes past the hour, Sabine arrived, carrying her baby.
“Hi,” she said, her cheeks glowing with color. “I’m sorry I’m late. I turned left when I should have turned right.”
“You are hardly late.” Arnold grinned as he looked at the woman in the peach-colored dress and flat sandals. “Would you like something to eat or drink? Something for the baby?”
“We’re good, thank you.” She sat with Mia in the same chair Inga always chose, fishing a baby bottle from her large carpetbag that resembled something his mother used to carry.
“It was such a great surprise to get your call yesterday,” Arnold said. “I must tell you that I had a stroke a few years ago. Hence my compromised position.” He gestured to his wheelchair.
“I’m sorry,” Sabine said, as Mia drank from her bottle.
“I was deeply saddened to learn of your grandmother’s death,” he said. “I was very fond of her.”
Dark ringlets cascaded over Sabine’s shoulders, and he noticed that she wore no wedding ring.
“Were you good friends with my grandmother?”
“Yes.” Arnold hesitated, unsure of how much he should reveal.
“For a long time?”
“Well,” he began, and sighed. “It would seem an easy question, yes?” He smiled at her. “But in this case, it is not so simple.”