The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  “Get some rest,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She tapped Sonia on the arm of her thick uniform sweater. “You need to be tougher,” she advised. “Girls like you. There’s not a thing wrong with you. We feed you good food here.”

  Sonia’s voice was nearly a whisper. “Yes, madame.”

  “And less French, please. This is America.” The nurse turned to Roberta. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Peabody and get you the next hour free to make sure she doesn’t faint again. Since you’re on the field hockey team, she’ll likely agree.”

  Roberta kept her eyes downcast. “Thank you, Miss Hedmeyer.”

  She took Sonia’s hand as they left the room. She thought vaguely of putting the girl’s arm around her shoulder and half carrying her to their room, but Sonia stayed upright, even climbing the dorm stairs, though she kept her cold, clammy hand in Roberta’s, her gaze down on her feet.

  In their room, Roberta helped her take off her mud-soaked stockings and shoes. They worked in silence, Roberta hanging the stockings over the doorknob to dry—dried mud was easier to get out in the sink than the wet kind—as Sonia pulled back her covers and lay in bed, still wearing her skirt and sweater. Sonia folded her hands over her chest.

  Roberta kicked her own shoes off and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at her friend’s pale face. “Tell me,” she said.

  Sonia stared at the wooden slats that made up Roberta’s bunk above hers. “It is a sad story,” she said.

  “We all have sad stories,” Roberta countered, thinking of Uncle Van. Without thinking, she added, “Please.”

  The word seemed to surprise Sonia, who glanced at Roberta, then away again. Dutifully, she spoke. “My mother distributed pamphlets during the war,” she said. “For the Resistance. She helped smuggle the pamphlets from the printers to the places they needed to go. I helped her.”

  Roberta bit the side of her thumb again. In France? she wondered. What sorts of pamphlets? Resistance against Hitler? Already she was lost. She knew so little—no one talked to girls their age about the war. Some girls had brothers and cousins who went away, and either got killed or came back again, like Uncle Van. No one had ever taught any of them about a Resistance. But she wanted Sonia to keep talking, so she nodded, silent.

  “We knew it was dangerous,” Sonia said. “Papa was already gone to Dachau—he was a writer. He was outspoken. They took him early, but they left us, because Mama’s father had once worked for the government. But they arrested us in early 1944. I was nine.”

  Roberta breathed as quietly as she could, listening.

  “We were sent to prison first,” Sonia said. “It wasn’t so bad. Mama tried to get us kept there because of her father. But her father was dead by then, and they put us on the train. We went to Ravensbrück.”

  “What is Ravensbrück?” Roberta finally said, unable to help herself.

  “It was a prison camp.”

  “Like Auschwitz?” That was a name she knew—there had been a newsreel at the cinema once, before the movie started, that showed the gates in black and white, the train tracks. Something about liberation. That had been in the last days before Uncle Van came home.

  “Yes, but only for women,” Sonia said. “And children.”

  Roberta blinked, shocked.

  Sonia didn’t seem to notice. “We were put in a barracks,” she said, “Mama and me. We were made to work. There was a work detail that dug all day. There was never an end to the digging—we weren’t even making anything, just moving dirt back and forth. Still, they made us do it. In the heat, in the cold, without food or water. Whoever fell during work detail was left there to rot. Women fell every day.”

  Roberta felt her heart rise up and start beating in her neck, squeezing it in dread. I’m not ready to hear this. I’m not.

  “We stood every day in the Appelplatz,” Sonia said. “That was the main square in the camp. They lined us up and made us stand, for hours and hours. It was supposed to be a roll call, but of course it wasn’t. We froze or we sweated under the sun. Whoever fell was left. Mama was all right at first, but as the days went by, she got quiet. Quiet, quiet. I thought it was a good thing, because when you were quiet, you got by and no one noticed you. Then one day, as they made us stand in the Appelplatz, she started to scream.” Sonia twisted the edge of her bedsheet softly between her fingers, dropping her gaze to it. “She screamed and screamed. She said they were murderers—they would all go to hell. She said the war would be over one day and it would all come out. She said there would be justice, that there would be no silence in the end. She said that the murderers would someday see, that they would someday face their Maker. They took her away and I never saw her again. I heard one of the women say that they executed her, they shot her in the back of the head, but I didn’t know if it was true. If she’d just stayed quiet . . .” She dropped the sheet. “If she’d just stayed quiet. But she did not. And then it was just me.”

  “Could you get away?” Roberta whispered.

  Sonia turned her head and looked at her. “When we arrived, they told us that if we wanted, we could see the last woman who tried to climb the fence. Because she was still there.” She turned back to looking at the wooden slats again. “She was.”

  Roberta could not speak.

  “Today, it was like I was back there,” Sonia said. “It doesn’t happen often. The war ended, and they brought us all out of there, and I came here. I’m fed and taken care of. I don’t think about it. But today, it was like Weekly Gardening had never existed. I was ten again, on work detail. It’s hard to explain. It was more real to me than you are right now.”

  Roberta put her head in her hands. Her temples were throbbing, and she wished now she’d gotten her own chalky white aspirin pill from Miss Hedmeyer. Her eyes were hot and she wanted to cry, but the tears were jammed in her throat, hard and painful. Had Uncle Van seen these things? Was that why he’d tried to use his gun in the garage? She made herself take a breath. “And the other day? In the dining hall?”

  “That was . . .” Sonia searched in her mind, tried to find the words. “We had blockovas,” she said, “block leaders. They were prisoners who were promoted, assigned to oversee other prisoners.”

  “Women?” Roberta asked, shocked again.

  “Yes. A few were nice, and tried to sneak us things, but most were not. They wanted favor. They had leave to beat you, report on you. If you misbehaved, you were sent to the punishment block. Solitary confinement, and worse.”

  Roberta thought back to that day in the dining hall, Alison punching Sherri, Sherri’s nose bleeding, the chaos and the noise, Lady Loon shouting, It’s Special Detention for you, my girl. Do you hear? Get moving. Move! It made sense now. A horrible, nightmarish kind of sense.

  She circled back to the main problem. “What are you going to do?” she asked the other girl. “This can’t keep happening. You’ll get sent to Special Detention.” Katie, the strongest and boldest of them, had been sent to Special Detention, and she’d been so shaken she refused to talk about it. Roberta wasn’t sure Sonia would survive it. “You could be expelled,” she said. “You have nowhere to go.”

  Sonia’s chin went hard; her eyes clouded. “It won’t happen again.”

  Roberta wasn’t sure about that. But as Sonia drifted to sleep, she sat still, her mind dwelling on the problem, poking at it from all sides. Sonia was tired, drained, but Roberta was resilient. So was CeCe. So was Katie.

  They’d gotten this far, all of them. Without breaking, without dying. Sonia wasn’t alone.

  Together, they could do something. Together, they could carry on.

  * * *

  • • •

  They sat on the floor of their room that night, all four of them, gathered around CeCe’s radio. With the sound low so Susan Brady wouldn’t hear, they listened to a show about cops chasing a murderer, and a rendition of “Three Little Maids” that made them al
l laugh. Then another show, this one about cowboys, before it got late enough that everything went off the air and CeCe turned the radio off. And then they talked.

  In the dark, when they’d all been listening for hours, already relaxed, it suddenly became easy. The words flowed, weaving over one another, making up the pattern as they went along. Roberta told about Uncle Van, about the day she had opened the garage door and found him, sitting on a wooden chair, weeping, a pistol in his mouth. She told them of the days afterward, the silence in herself that she couldn’t break, the doctors, Uncle Van’s bloodshot eyes. He hadn’t been able to look at her. Roberta felt a new lump in her throat as she told it, remembering. She wished now that she’d crawled into Uncle Van’s lap and put her arms around his neck and never let go. But she’d been thirteen, and everyone had been horrified and silent, including her, and she hadn’t known what to do.

  “Where is he now?” Katie’s low voice came through the dark when Roberta finished.

  “He’s still at home,” Roberta said. “He sees doctors. Mother says he isn’t well, that Dad wants to put him in a hospital.” She forced the words out. “They’re fighting. Mother and Dad. I could see it on Family Visit Day—they wouldn’t look at each other, talk to each other. They’re ashamed of me and Uncle Van both. I know Dad works a lot. Mother’s eyes were red, and she says . . . she says it isn’t a good time to come home.”

  The others talked now as Roberta subsided. A weight had lifted from her chest. Each girl spoke while the others were quiet, listening.

  It went like that, night after night. Katie, with CeCe as an accomplice, began pilfering extra food from the dining hall at supper, sneaking through a door into the kitchen and taking it while CeCe kept watch. They snacked on the extra food every night after dark; they pretended that it was for all of them, but by tacit agreement they gave most of it to Sonia. With the lights out and the cold winter coming outside, they ate and listened to the radio and told their stories, one by one, detail upon detail. Katie and Thomas, the boy who’d attacked her and told her to hold still. CeCe and her mother’s accident at the beach. Roberta told them, hesitantly, about the song she’d heard on the hockey field, the same song Uncle Van had been playing in the garage that day, as if someone or something had drawn the memory straight from her mind. And the next night Katie told them about Special Detention, and the spiders, and the messages in the textbooks. And the scratching at the window, the voice begging to be let in.

  Sonia spoke rarely, but when she did, the others went silent, listening, from the first word. She told them slowly, doling out piece by piece, about Ravensbrück—the layout of the barracks and the other buildings, the women and the other children she’d met there, the weather, the cold, the food, the day-to-day comings and goings of the prison, the stories the women had told. It was slow and it was hard to hear, but the girls listened to all of it, and as Sonia spoke, Roberta fancied that perhaps she felt better. That sending the experience out of her head and into words made it less immense, less impossible. They set up a signaling system for her to use if she felt another episode coming on, but Sonia didn’t use it.

  They were trapped here at Idlewild. But Idlewild wasn’t everything. It wasn’t the world.

  Someday, by God, Roberta thought, I’m going to get out of here. Someday we all will. And when we do, we will finally be free.

  chapter 18

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  Jamie’s parents lived in a bungalow that had been built in the 1960s, covered with vinyl siding in the 1970s, and never touched since. It sat on a stretch of road heading out of downtown Barrons, where the houses had been built close together with neat square yards crowned by wooden porches.

  Jamie’s father, Garrett Creel Jr., opened the door as they climbed the front steps. He was still massive at sixty, broad-shouldered and tall, his ruddy face emphasized by his short-cropped sandy hair. He could have worn a sign around his neck that said I AM A RETIRED POLICEMAN and no one would have batted an eye. He clapped his son on the shoulder and gave Fiona a kiss on the cheek. His lips were dry and chapped, his hand clammy, and Fiona gritted her teeth and smiled as she greeted him. The house wafted with the radiant smell of roast beef.

  “Come on in, come on in!” Garrett bellowed. “Diane, they’re here.”

  She came around the corner into the front hall, a small woman in a helmet of permed curls that had been in vogue somewhere around 1983, making a beeline for Jamie, who had just handed his coat to his dad. “There you are,” she said, as if he were somehow delinquent, even though he’d obediently answered her summons to dinner and arrived right on time.

  She pulled Jamie down to her—he was much taller than she was, mirroring his father’s height, if not his heft or his looks—and kissed him with a loud, possessive smack, then held his face so he could not look away. She did not look at Fiona yet, and the way she held Jamie’s face, he couldn’t look at her, either.

  “Your hair is still too long,” she said to her son, patting his dark blond strands. “And this beard. What is this?” She touched it with possessive fingers. “Your father spent thirty years on the force with a haircut and a clean shave.”

  Jamie smiled, waited her out, and straightened when she let him go. “Mom, you remember Fiona.”

  “Yes, of course.” Diane tore her gaze from Jamie and turned to Fiona. “Finally. I’ve made pot roast.”

  Fiona nodded. She could do the girlfriend thing. It just took some practice, that was all. “It smells delicious,” she said.

  Diane gave her a tight smile. “Catch up with your father,” she told Jamie. “Dinner is almost ready.”

  Garrett was already handing them each a beer and shepherding them into the living room.

  “So here you are,” he said, squeezing Fiona’s shoulder. “Jamie’s mother has been asking for this forever. You two have been together for how long now?”

  Jamie shook his head. “This isn’t an interview, Dad.”

  “Of course not. Just never thought I’d see the day I had Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter in my living room, that’s all.”

  He said it jovially, with an unmissable undertone of disbelief, and there it was. The history that always pressed down on her, the past that never left. She was with Jamie partly because she never had to talk about it with him, but that was when they were alone. She realized now, standing in this outdated living room, listening to Jamie and his father swap news of the force, that with his family the history would always be thick. She also realized that she’d known it for the past year, which was why she’d put off coming to dinner.

  As if to prove it, Garrett swigged his beer and turned to her. “I hear you were at Idlewild, Fiona. Trespassing. Climbed the fence and everything.”

  Fiona clutched her untasted beer. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Dad,” Jamie said.

  Garrett laughed. “You look surprised. I’m good friends with Jack Friesen, who owns the security company they hired out at Idlewild. He told me about the little incident with you.”

  “I’m writing a story,” Fiona managed before Jamie could take up for her again.

  “Are you, now?” Garrett asked, and when he looked at her, she saw the face of the man who had testified in court twenty years ago. He’d been younger then, thinner, but his face was the same. He’d been hard then and he was hard now, beneath the florid good-old-boy look. “That seems like a strange story for you to write.”

  She shrugged, keeping it light. “Not really.”

  “I’d think the last place you’d want to be is at Idlewild when they found another body. But I guess I’m wrong.”

  “Dad,” Jamie said again. “Enough.”

  They adjourned to dinner, which Diane was serving in the small formal dining room, set with nice china. Outside the window, the Vermont night settled in, and in the darkness all Fiona could see was their own refle
ctions in the glass.

  “I talked to Dave Saunders today,” Garrett said to her as he put pot roast on his plate. “He did the autopsy on that body you found.”

  Jesus, she’d thought he was retired. Retirement obviously meant nothing to Garrett Creel. “What did he say?” she asked him, sipping her beer and watching Diane’s face pinch. She likely hated talk like this at the supper table, but with a cop for both a husband and a son, she would have to put up with it in pained silence.

  “There isn’t much,” Garrett said, sawing unconcernedly at his meat. “Died of a blow to the head, almost certainly. Something long, like a baseball bat or a pipe. Two blows that he can see, probably one to knock her out and one to make sure she was dead. No other injuries. She was a teenager, but small for her age. Dead at least thirty years, based on the decomposition. Has been in the well all this time, as far as he can see, since there was no evidence of animals going at her.”

  Diane made a small sound in her throat that her husband ignored.

  “Anything else?” Jamie asked, spooning potatoes onto his plate. He was as inured to this kind of conversation at dinner as his father was. “Did he mention any old injuries, things she might have suffered years before she died?”

  “Nope,” Garrett said. “Why?”

  Jamie glanced at Fiona and said, “We found some evidence that she may have been in a concentration camp during the war.”

  Garrett paused and looked up, surprised. Then he whistled as Diane made another displeased sound. “Really? When did you learn this?”

  “Just before we came here,” Jamie said. “I thought maybe the autopsy would show—”

  “I’ll ask Dave to look again, but he didn’t see anything,” Garrett said. “Concentration camp, maybe you’d see broken bones, broken teeth.” He stabbed his fork into a bite of meat. “She would have been a young girl then. If she was starved, maybe that’s why she didn’t grow very big. Malnutrition. It’s amazing she wasn’t gassed.”