Into the Darkest Day: An emotional and totally gripping WW2 historical novel

by Kate Hewitt

  “Okay.”

  “But I didn’t want to that morning.” Saying just that much had the memories rushing back, so Abby could see it unwinding like a reel of sepia-tinted film in her head: her mother at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a couple of ibuprofen, looking exhausted; Abby, in the doorway, hands on her hips, anger flaring at the seeming injustice of her mother’s weary request. I have plans, Mom. You know Jason and I are going to Milwaukee, to shop for college. We’ve had it planned for weeks. Can’t Dad do it?

  Her mother’s tiny sigh and tired smile. Yes, she’d known Abby had plans. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I wouldn’t ask if I felt better…

  Fine. A single word hurled like an insult. She’d grabbed the keys off the counter, making sure they jangled angrily in her hand, an accusation. I’ll do it. The voice of a manipulative martyr, still hoping to be excused.

  And she was. Her mother rose from the table and held her hand out, smiling wearily, utterly unfooled by Abby’s theatrics. It’s all right, sweetie. Give me the keys.

  For a second Abby had hesitated. She’d felt guilty for her petulant outburst, and she could see how unwell her mother looked, even though she didn’t want to. I really will do it, Mom… Uncertain, though. Craving reassurance. Still wanting an out even though she knew she shouldn’t take it.

  Her mother’s smile had been both tired and tender. Understanding, sympathetic even. Her hand was still stretched out.

  “Abby.”

  She blinked Simon’s concerned face into focus.

  “I gave her the keys,” she whispered. “I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

  A frown creased his forehead as he studied her face as if looking for clues. “Why shouldn’t you have?”

  She realized she’d been replaying it all in her head, but she hadn’t told Simon any of it. And so she did, in halting, haunted sentences, jumbled thoughts forming into a sobering whole. “She was sick… Luke’s piano… I had plans with my boyfriend… I knew I should have driven him.” Her throat thickened and she shook her head, unable to say any more.

  “So she drove your brother to his piano lesson,” Simon surmised quietly. “And they were hit by a trucker who had fallen asleep at the wheel.”

  “We don’t actually know that,” Abby felt compelled to point out, her voice sharpening like a lawyer’s. “It was just what the police decided must have happened, because it was a head-on collision on a straight road, on a perfectly sunny spring morning, but there’s no way to tell what really happened. Maybe the trucker didn’t fall asleep. Maybe my mother did, or maybe she felt so sick she swerved into the opposite lane…”

  Simon pursed his lips. “Who told you that?”

  She blinked at him, startled. “No one.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Still, it’s true,” she persisted. It felt like a point of honor somehow. “They did say they could never know for sure.”

  “Even so, there seems like a most likely outcome, which was what the police described.” Simon was silent for a moment. “But you blame yourself.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” It was a challenge.

  “Yes,” Simon said, surprising her, hurting her, “I probably would.”

  Abby sagged back against the pillows, shocked, gratified, and deeply wounded by his response all at once. If he’d said anything else, it wouldn’t have been honest. But to admit it, to as good as say she was right to feel guilty… that felt worse.

  “Abby.” Simon tugged her hands from her knees where she’d locked her fingers tightly together. “That doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to think or feel. I’m just empathizing with you. I understand, at least as much as I can, considering I haven’t lived it, why you feel guilty. Why this has haunted you for so long.”

  “I’m not haunted.” Now she sounded huffy.

  “Tormented, then? Tortured? Troubled?”

  “Why don’t you get a thesaurus out while you’re at it?”

  “Actually, I’ve got one on my phone.” He smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make light of things. Tell me to shut up if you need to.”

  “Shut up.”

  He looked startled, and she let out a wavery little laugh.

  “Not really. I just couldn’t resist.”

  “Oh, Abby.” He leaned forward until their foreheads were touching, their breaths mingling.

  Abby closed her eyes, squeezed them shut tight, but a tear stupidly slipped out anyway.

  “It’s not as if I’ve wanted this to wreck my life,” she told him in a suffocated whisper. “You know I’ve actually done my best to forgive and heal and all the rest of it. I really have, but I guess it wasn’t very much.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s not as if I haven’t been happy,” she felt compelled to say, although she knew that in saying it at all, she was indicating the opposite. “I really do like working at Willow Tree. And my dad…” She stopped then, because she did not know how to begin to explain her dad, even to herself.

  Simon eased back, forcing Abby to open her eyes and stare at him unhappily. He was going to ask questions, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for them.

  “What about your dad?”

  Abby shrugged, opened her mouth, closed it again. A tug-of-war was taking place in her head. “He blames me,” she said at last, and then she felt guilty for saying even that.

  Simon’s eyebrows rose. “He doesn’t…”

  “He does. At least, he did. After.” Another memory reel spun out: her father in the hallway, a policeman in the kitchen, Abby blurting out her guilt, seeking absolution even then. She asked me to drive her… I should have been there… The look on his face; she’d felt as if she were watching him age in seconds. Oh Abby, what have you done?

  Six little words that had absolutely felled her. Six words she had never been able to forget. He’d turned away from her then, talked to the policeman in a monotone. Abby had hovered in the kitchen doorway; she had no real memory of that conversation, or even that whole afternoon, except her father’s silence.

  After the policeman had left, her father had walked past as if she didn’t exist. He hadn’t so much as turned his head. Abby had stood there, feeling as if she were the ghost, rather than her mother or Luke, and then she’d gone up to her bedroom and curled up on her bed, hugging a pillow to her chest, sobbing silently until she’d felt as if she’d been turned inside out.

  “He didn’t speak to me for a week,” she told Simon matter-of-factly. “While we were getting ready for the funeral, accepting a million casseroles, people in and out of the house all the time. He didn’t say a single word to me.”

  Simon looked torn; he wanted to comfort her but he’d met her father. “He was grieving,” he said at last.

  “Yes. I know. And after a week, after the funeral, when everyone had gone back to their homes and it was just the two of us, he spoke to me. Well, I spoke first. I said I wouldn’t go to college, I’d stay and help, and he just said ‘All right’. That was it.” She shrugged, amazed that the memory could still hurt so much, all these years later. The finality of that moment, of realizing this, and only this, was what her future was going to look like, and it was no more than she deserved. “And then we carried on as we have been ever since.” She held up a hand to stem the response she expected him to give. “Look, I know it’s dysfunctional, okay? But it’s a functioning dysfunction, if I can put it that way. My dad was never a chatterbox, and so it didn’t feel all that different. We’ve talked about the farm and the weather—”

  “The weather?”

  “I just mean, it’s been normal,” she clarified. “Mostly. Sometimes.”

  “Which is it?”

  “A bit of both.” Abby sighed, grateful that the threat of tears seemed to have passed. Maybe she wouldn’t cry, after all. “It hasn’t been great, I can admit that, but it hasn’t been terrible, either. At least, not all the time. Not even a lot of the time.” She caught Simon’s eye, jolted by the look of utter, s
orrowful sympathy on his face, and somehow it made the thin veneer of matter-of-fact acceptance she’d just about managed to cover herself with crack right through. “It has…” she began, but her voice wobbled all over the place. And then, to her own amazement and shock, she was crying—not a few trickly tears to dab from the corner of her eye, but from-the-gut sobs she was horrified to hear coming from herself—and even more so that she couldn’t stop.

  “Abby,” Simon said, and then his arms were around her, her head against his chest, and still the sobs kept coming, right from the bottom of her, deep down, the ones he hadn’t even realized she’d been suppressing.

  But I’ve cried, she thought, even as she continued to soak Simon’s shirt right through. I cried so much, back at the beginning.

  But she hadn’t cried like this—in someone’s arms, offering her comfort, understanding her pain, giving her the acceptance and understanding she had never found before, not in fifteen years of both suppressing and searching. Before, she’d always cried alone, and she realized now that it wasn’t the same thing at all.

  “I’m disgusting,” she choked out after what could have been five minutes or an hour. “I’m all snotty.”

  “I don’t care.” There was a smile in Simon’s voice, even though his tone was serious.

  “You should.” Urgh, she really was gross. Abby wiped her eyes and felt her nose running, but she didn’t really want to wipe that, at least not without a tissue. Simon was going to have to change his shirt.

  “Here.” He scooted off the bed and went to the bathroom, returning with a bunch of scrunched-up toilet paper.

  Abby managed a wobbly laugh.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking it, and then she blew her nose heartily.

  A silence stretched between them, and she didn’t know how to fill it.

  “I didn’t realize I was going to cry that much,” she said eventually. She felt empty now, but not in a bad way. Exhausted, too. “I thought maybe a few artful tears, you know, glassy eyes, a hitch in my voice, that sort of thing. All very dignified.”

  Simon shook his head, smiling. “Nope.”

  “Nope,” Abby agreed. She felt absolutely spent, as if she’d run a marathon. She stared down at the balled tissue in her hand. “What now?” she asked eventually. “Is this where you tell me I need to forgive myself?”

  “No, because you already know that.”

  She sighed. “Yes, I do.”

  “If you want me to tell you something, then it would be to talk to your father. Honestly.”

  “I’ve tried,” Abby said, although she knew she hadn’t. Not properly. “It’s hard.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  She glanced at him uncertainly. “So have I freaked you out, Mr. Emotionally Unavailable?” she made herself ask. “Or is this removed enough from your life that it’s not making you uncomfortable?”

  SIMON

  Simon would have laughed, except it all cut a little too close to the bone. “You haven’t freaked me out,” he said, but Abby wasn’t fooled.

  “But?”

  Simon hesitated. All the while he’d held her in his arms, longing to give her comfort, he’d painfully felt his own shortcomings. His own silences. Because if Abby was going to lay herself bare for him, then surely he had to do the same?

  But was now really the time? This was about Abby—her grief, her past, her problem. Not his. And yet even as the thought flickered through him, Simon knew it was a cowardly cop-out.

  “But you’ve made me feel that I should be as honest with you as you’ve been with me,” he said with a heavy sigh. Even now he didn’t want to do it. He knew it might change things between them, and not for the better.

  Abby’s reddened, swollen eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

  “For fifteen years you’ve struggled with guilt and regret over one moment,” Simon explained slowly, “one decision you made in an instant that you wished you’d done differently. I’m the opposite. I’ve had fifteen years of moments, of decisions I wished I done differently.”

  “Do you mean your divorce?”

  “No,” Simon answered, and it almost, but not quite, felt like a relief. “I’m talking about my daughter.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Boizenburg, June 1945

  “Captain to see you, Lawson.”

  Matthew gave a terse nod as he turned from the window and its view of the pretty main square of the town of Boizenburg, on the banks of the Elbe, thirty miles west of Ludwigslust.

  After the war had officially ended, after Wobbelin, he’d been assigned to this small military government office to round up and interrogate local Nazis, some of whom desperately denied their involvement, others who, in their terror or defeat, were all too eager to help.

  Matthew felt absolutely nothing for any of them—not pity, not hatred, not even disdain. Something had frozen hard and solid inside him and would not be shifted, which at least made interrogation rather easy.

  There was no question of him losing control; he would not be moved by anything these wretched men said—not by their clear-eyed arrogance or their pathetic sniveling; not their recitation of unimaginably evil facts without a shred of emotion or their absurd denials of even knowing about the camps they’d already been identified as running. There had been a camp right in Boizenburg, until the very end of the war.

  Before being posted here, Matthew had been granted three days’ leave to return to Fraustadt, to find what he could of his family.

  It hadn’t been an easy journey, for the country was in complete chaos, soldiers everywhere, of every stripe, fraternizing, arguing, and enjoying what paltry pleasures a conquered Germany could offer them.

  Matthew had heard stories, and seen things too—soldiers breaking into homes, taking what they liked, including the women. He’d heard of the suicides of high-ranking Nazis, and how Berlin, along with the whole country, would be carved up like a Christmas goose. He found he didn’t care about any of it; he couldn’t, because to let in so much as a flicker of feeling was to acknowledge the utter, awful vastness seething beneath, and to do that was unthinkable. Unbearable. Impossible. He needed to stay cold.

  Fraustadt and the surrounding area had been occupied by the Soviets since February, and so he’d had to ask, bluster, cajole, and sometimes bribe, his way back home. He owed particular gratitude to a sympathetic Soviet officer who spoke German, respected Matthew’s uniform, and allowed him passage on a military transport all the way to Dresden.

  When he’d finally arrived in Fraustadt, he saw the town was remarkably preserved, and he was reminded of his childhood with a ferocity he forced himself to suppress. As he’d walked the street, looking for familiar faces, no one seemed to want to meet his eye. The house where he’d been born, where his father had been kicked to death, and where he’d been spirited away in the gray dawn like a thief, had stood abandoned and empty.

  When he’d knocked on neighbors’ doors and explained who he was, they shook their heads, gazes skating away, a look of fear on their faces. Perhaps it was his uniform.

  “We don’t know anything,” one woman, he couldn’t remember her name, had said piteously. “Your mother left years ago… before…”

  Before. Such a terrible word. Before the Jews were rounded up like cattle, before they were herded onto trains, before they were sent to their deaths in ways it was nearly impossible to comprehend.

  Already, just days after the war, details of the death camps had begun to filter through military channels. Matthew had heard about Auschwitz, and Majdanek, and Treblinka, about Dachau and Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, among others. So many others.

  He’d read matter-of-fact reports, and heard low, horror-struck voices describe scenes like those he’d seen at Wobbelin, and even worse.

  He’d heard how prisoners were told they were merely on a transit stop, to rest and wash, before they went on to a labor camp. How they were made to strip and taken into a chamber that looked like a shower but in
fact became a tomb. He’d heard it all, and he had accepted it and understood it even as he refused to let it affect him. He couldn’t.

  All he learned in Fraustadt was that his mother had left with his brothers and sister before the worst, maybe in 1941. No one could quite remember, or perhaps they didn’t want to.

  It gave him not quite hope, but the approximation of it, to know that they hadn’t been deported, at least not then. His mother was smart, he reminded himself; she’d got him out, after all, and he knew she’d been squirreling away valuables for years. Before he’d left, before he’d run away like a child, she’d promised him they would all get out.

  “Don’t worry, mausi,” she’d said, using an endearment he hadn’t heard since he’d been a little boy. “I’ll keep them safe. I know what to do.”

  He’d believed her. He’d believed her for her sake, and for Franz’s and Arno’s, as well as for dear little Gertie’s, but most of all he’d believed it for his, because he could never have gone as he had if he hadn’t taken his mother at her word, if he hadn’t looked into her brown eyes and seen the sincerity, accepted the firmness of her tone, her smile. We’ll be all right. I promise.

  In mid-May, when Matthew finally left Fraustadt, and any answers, behind him, he wondered if he should have taken his mother at her word, or if she’d simply been saying what she’d known he’d needed to hear.

  “Sergeant Lawson.” Captain Betts, the officer in charge of this small military governance in Boizenburg, was a kindly man who had come over on D-Day, unlike the new recruits who had plenty of military intelligence training but no combat action, and had just been shipped in after V-E Day for the cleanup job.

  Matthew had little time for any of them, although he tried to hide his visceral disdain for their know-it-all attitudes, their buoyant sense of confidence without any experience, like children on a holiday. They talked more of going to Paris than what the Nazis had done. He liked Captain Betts well enough, at least.