“I asked for a roll,” Peter answered, and pushed his seat farther from the table.
“We didn’t believe in waste in the GDR,” Michael said, Cindy’s creaky voice returning.
Her children kept talking, about their shared and separate pasts. Michael told a story Beate had never heard about a friend who’d gotten sick and died young. Adela touched his hand, the sun spotlighting their faces.
As Michael made more jokes about Cindy, Peter asked, “Why is he talking like that?”
“He’s imagining what Cindy’s voice would sound like,” Beate answered.
“I know. Why?”
Michael spoke of inheritance. Peter asked for the word’s translation, though he didn’t know it in any of his languages. As they talked of AIDS orphans and bar patrons, Beate ate salad off Peter’s plate. Peter asked for more translations, and Beate told him. Michael refilled Adela’s glass again.
While her children cleaned the kitchen, Beate and Peter watched a nature show about deep-sea creatures. “Spinnenkrabbe?” Peter asked, and she answered, “Spider crab.” Water turned off and on. Beate toggled between wanting to be alone and wanting them together, herself part of it rather than on the side. She felt angry, embarrassed at her anger, and remembered Kate when they’d been friends telling Beate she took things too seriously because she was an only child.
Above the clatter of cleaning, Beate heard her children say “the German Lady.”
“Just a lady, since we’re in Germany,” she mumbled.
“What?” Peter asked.
The screen showed a deepwater shark with twice the normal number of gills. “It stays on the seafloor during the day,” the narrator explained. At night, it moved to the surface to feed. Peter’s body was warm. The shark’s gills flapped as it ate its dinner.
“Trying to remember a word in English,” Beate said.
Adela checked on them from time to time. Perhaps she didn’t trust Beate with her son. Maybe she still imagined her mother out at bars, cutting ex-Stasi hair. Annoyance warmed Beate’s cheeks, and she wanted to understand why Adela was back, why Michael—after ten avoidant days—suddenly acted as if her visit were just what he’d wanted. Soon Peter was asleep, his tiny feet on Beate’s lap. The television cameras moved through ink-dark water, and Peter took a breath. More clatter in the kitchen. Beate wrapped her fingers around one of Peter’s feet, so small it disappeared when she held it in her hand.
* * *
Beate spent the morning meeting with an orderly who’d upset three residents in as many days. The woman told one man he wasn’t allowed to leave, as if they were running a prison. She informed Arnie Böttcher that his radio was too loud though no one had complained, and tried to create a sign-up sheet for a common-room television. Getting back, Beate slid into Ingo’s office. He handed her a coffee, joking that he’d spiked it.
“Still dealing with invaders?” he asked, and Beate realized she’d talked of Adela and Peter’s visit only in terms of the dishes they left in the sink, their clothes everywhere.
Ingo’s mustache was remarkably even. He showed her new pictures of his dogs, which looked the same as the last ones. A summer shower peppered the window before the sun prodded it out of the way.
“Frau Garrin told Sabine yesterday that she was going to hurt herself,” Beate said. “Now Frau Garrin is only allowed plastic utensils.”
The two of them took sips at the same time.
The receptionist buzzed. “Is Frau Haas there?”
“Why would Frau Haas be here?” Ingo answered.
“Let her know that an Englishman keeps calling for her. Can I transfer him to you?”
“The Englishman?”
“Frau Selig told me that Frau Haas is with you.”
“In that case, then,” Ingo answered.
“Beate Haas,” she said, picking up the phone.
“I forget you’re using your old name,” the caller answered.
It was Paul. She hadn’t heard his voice in years.
“Just my name,” she said.
Ingo moved out of his office, though she gestured that he should stay.
“Well,” Paul said. “I don’t want to worry you.”
“When you say that—”
“Yes,” he answered.
“I get—”
“Yes,” Paul answered. “It’s about our daughter.”
When Beate left that morning, Adela’s bathing suit drooped over a chair. The core of an apple she’d eaten browned on the counter. Peter had been up. He’d stared at Beate as she’d eaten a yogurt.
“What about Adela?”
“It seems,” he said, “that she’s missing.”
“Missing from where?”
“She was living in Pretoria,” he said. “Which is in South Africa.”
“Yes, with Amahle the babysitter and best friend.”
Paul paused, to take in information or register surprise.
“Her phone’s no longer connected,” Paul went on. “I called the clinic where she works and they said her last day was weeks before.”
Beate rested her head on the desk as Ines had, her laughter startling even her. Frau Selig across the hall looked up.
“B,” Paul said.
Ingo came back in and appeared startled, too. Everything turned funny—the plastic forks Frau Garrin had to use. The orderly expecting the old to acquiesce as if they hadn’t once made hundreds of decisions for themselves and others.
“She’s not missing,” Beate said, and more things took on a comic gleam, even the moment from decades before, in bed in their tiny apartment, when Paul told her he was leaving.
* * *
The next night, the family had dinner at the beach. Michael found out that the pommes frites were vegan and met them at their blanket with an entire tray full.
“Don’t you have to be at the bar?” Beate asked. He answered that it was dead this early.
Peter and Michael walked to the sea’s edge. High clouds slid across the sky. Without pause, they moved into the water. A few days before, it had taken Beate minutes of coaxing just for Peter to dip his foot in. Part of her admired the progress; another part wanted this progress to be made with her. Michael lifted Peter, whose face widened with what Beate assumed was fear.
“Do you see that?” Beate asked.
“Who knew,” Adela said, “that Michael would be good with children?”
Instead of walking home with Beate, Adela and Peter climbed onto Michael’s bike. He’d added a seat in the back for Peter, whose inability to ride a bike at nearly seven was something Michael waxed catastrophic about.
“For a minute I thought you’d found a bike for your sister,” Beate said. “Like Udo did when we got here.”
Adela strapped Peter in. Michael looked at his watch. Bringing up Udo left Beate feeling foolish, also like a child. The only other family left on the beach played Frisbee. Nearby hotels twinkled with light and sound.
“See you at home, Oma,” Peter said.
“Not if I see you first,” Beate answered. Peter fell into his regular expression of perturbed confusion.
Adela thanked Michael for the bike and he hopped into his car. He didn’t offer Beate a ride, though she didn’t exactly want one. Adela thanked Beate, too; for what, Beate wasn’t sure. She said, “You’re welcome,” and felt small, as she often did when left orbiting outside her children. She’d been alone for so long that she didn’t know how to be something else. When she tried, she felt worse or foolish, or retreated instead, though Beate once told Kate that she didn’t feel like she was retreating, but being herself.
“Exactly,” Kate had answered, and Beate felt that she couldn’t win.
* * *
Four nights later, Beate came home to an empty house, adding her shoes to the detritus her daughter and grandson had scattered across the floor. Michael might have taken a night off, he and Adela and Peter on some adventure. He’d recently purchased a booster seat so Peter could travel in his car. M
ornings, he took the boy swimming—Peter’s flip-flopped feet thwacking against the path, Michael asking if he was ready. A towel snaked across the rug. A message from Liesl crowded the answering machine. She went on about how busy she was, offered unwanted updates on Ines’s job search. “Oh,” Liesl’s message went on, “Heinz says hello and wants to know if you want our television. We’re getting a bigger one.”
Beate turned on her smaller television. Obama was on the news, then an explosion in some desert city. She tried to focus on the world’s larger calamities but imagined her children and Peter at a restaurant that Beate would like to have gone to, on a friend’s boat as it bobbed across the sunset-studded sea.
They didn’t return until after ten. Peter—who usually walked in first and loudly—was carried by Michael. Her children looked tired and pleased, as if they’d hiked up a mountain together and were rewarded with vistas. Peter’s hand was fattened with bandages.
“What happened?”
“Bad Cindy,” Peter mumbled.
“Painkillers,” Michael added.
“When you were at work,” Adela said, “Cindy bit him.”
The carrying crate was empty. When she’d explained Adela’s story to Paul a few days before, he’d been annoyed that she hadn’t let him know. He’d also talked about a mudslide in another part of Africa as if it were Adela’s duty to pull people from the wet, whirling earth. Thoughts of being buried alive—sludge in her throat and ears—crowded Beate’s thinking.
“You didn’t think to call?” she asked.
“Michael was with me,” Adela answered. “Could be my translator.”
“Allergien,” Peter said. “Versicherung. Fieber is fever.”
“Where’s Cindy?” Beate asked.
“Sleeping somewhere, I imagine,” Michael said. He sniffed; Adela held down a smile.
“Yes, the cat smells,” Beate answered.
“Mutti,” Michael said.
The German Lady, she thought. Peter’s eyes fought to stay awake.
“What was he doing?” Beate asked.
As Beate’s question came out in defense of her pet, her kids must have been reminded of her badly ordered priorities. Beate at that bar. The days she slept while Michael brought home bread and pillows.
“I used to do that, too,” Beate said. “Take you to the emergency room with every fever. There was a time,” she went on, wanting to hold up a mirror to their sameness, “when, Adela, you were two or three. Michael, we’d moved and you’d been given your own room and were so angry that you and Adela were no longer sharing one.”
Peter shifted on Michael’s shoulder. The bandage on his hand was thick and round and gauzy.
“So you’d sneak into her room each night,” Beate went on. “Your father even put a hook on the outside of your door, but you found a way out. With a coat hanger, I think. You snuck into your sister’s room and somehow, when you were getting into bed next to her, she fell off and hit her head on the corner of something. It wouldn’t have been a desk, since you were young. Anyhow. Your father was at work, so we had to take a cab. Michael, you were the upset one. You cried and cried and, when you looked at your sister, cried harder. The cabdriver kept saying how much over the speed limit he was going, in hopes of calming you down. And when we got to the ER, Michael, you were so upset that I had to carry you in, while the driver carried your bleeding sister.”
Adela and Michael yawned in tandem. Beate wondered where Cindy was.
“It was my fault, then,” Michael said.
“I don’t think. I was just remembering,” Beate answered. “Let me make us some food.”
Michael answered that they’d eaten already.
“We’ve been thinking, too,” Adela said, and looked at Michael. “About what makes sense, because of Cindy.” She and Peter would stay at Michael’s, Adela went on, Cindy and Peter an untenable pair. When Adela had hit her head, she’d gotten four stitches. They’d had to wait for hours until Paul picked them up. Beate felt relieved that her children hadn’t returned Cindy to the shelter, though it might have felt the same to her cat as the crate where she spent most of her days. They picked up Peter and said good night. Their clothes were everywhere. Beate wanted them to stay, was also glad they were going. Wanted some version of things she wasn’t able to consider.
Beate found Cindy in Udo’s former room. She went to sleep in the guest room that had been Peter’s hours before, when he did or didn’t do something and the cat reacted with her teeth, her children rushing him to the hospital where a nurse asked if they were the parents. They might have smiled at that question, each waiting for the other to answer it.
17
Peter turned avoiding the linden’s shadow that spread across the living room floor into a game. He and Michael had just come back from the beach. Their hair dried in salty curls. As Adela cooked something with cumin for lunch, Michael told stories about the trio of young drunks who always showed up at the bar. “The week before, one of them passed out in the bathroom,” Michael said. “Another cried after being dumped, though he couldn’t seem to remember his girlfriend’s name.” He left out stories of the fight they’d started a few months before, in part because it didn’t fit with his other anecdotes, also because Udo had been there to stop it.
“There was a man at the beach,” Peter said, in German.
Adela chopped. Parsley’s piquant scent filled the room.
“A friend of Uncle’s,” Peter added.
“‘Michael’ is fine,” Michael answered.
“He was running and saw Michael and stopped to wave.”
“Did Uncle wave back?” Adela asked.
“He was swimming,” Peter answered.
“I was coming out of the water by then,” Michael interjected, imagining his sister’s chopping intensifying as she announced that Peter shouldn’t swim with him anymore. Adela’s surprise return had brought Michael a surprise excitement, also the worry of toes stepped on and jokes she wouldn’t find funny. Her chopping stayed measured. Her eyebrows lifted into an expression he remembered: There is certainly a larger story.
“He laughed,” Peter said.
“And Peter threw sand at him,” Michael answered.
“It fell out of the shovel.”
It had pelted Markus’s—the runner’s—legs. Had Peter not been there, they might have gone to one of Markus’s preferred places, an empty road or Einkaufszentrum bathroom. When Michael asked Peter why he’d thrown sand, he said, “I didn’t know him.”
Adela appeared amused. Returning to Germany, she thought nothing of leaving Peter alone in the front yard. One afternoon, Michael had stopped by the house to find Adela napping while Peter turned lights off and on and left the refrigerator open.
“A friend,” Adela said.
“I have friends,” Michael answered.
“That I don’t doubt.”
“You make me sound…” he said, switching to German when he didn’t know the English for sordid. She didn’t know its German equivalent, and for a minute he tried to explain. “Wrong or filled with feelings.”
“Filled with feelings,” Adela answered, her smile a rodent creeping behind a wall.
In the kitchen, what she’d been cooking began to burn.
“Fuck a duck!” Adela called.
“A child in the room.”
“Sie hat einen schlechten Mund,” Peter answered.
He jumped into a new sheaf of sun. What had smelled sweetly of garlic turned acrid.
“Fucking fuck,” Adela whispered.
“We could always go to the bakery,” Michael said.
“Everything in this country is bread.”
“Asshole bread,” Michael said.
“Asshole yeast,” she added.
“Asshole yeast infection.”
Peter covered his ears. He hopped into a triangle of sunlight. Adela’s quiet cursing continued as she tasted the concoction, its char sticking to her teeth.
Michael tried it, too—chic
kpeas and onions burned to bitter—then spit it into the sink. Adela scooped up another spoonful.
“You don’t need to eat that.”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Adela said.
Her lips glistened, and a bug batted the windowpane. Michael slid the food into the garbage, tied its bag, and brought it outside. After dropping off the trash, he knocked on the German Lady’s door and went in, hoping to find something they might eat in her kitchen. Her house was quiet. Mutti was likely at work. As he walked through the house, he saw that all signs of Adela and Peter’s hurricane had been wiped clean. Michael saw their mother each day in her kitchen as she washed dishes, or sipped tea when she should have been asleep. She must have watched, too, as Adela left socks and clothes everywhere, as Michael moved up and down the stairs.
Through Mutti’s window, he watched Adela move through Udo’s house, pulling an apple from the fridge, taking a bite, then leaving it on the counter. Michael thought of the emails Udo had sent her that she’d never answered. Michael had gone through his cousin’s email after he’d died. In one, Udo had written, I don’t expect to be forgiven, but want you to know that I’ve taken responsibility. Another: Please just let me know that you’ve gotten my messages. Next door, Adela turned on the television. She lifted her legs on the couch’s cushions, though, even through two sets of windows, Michael could see the dirt darkening the bottoms of her feet.
Finding nothing in her house that Adela and Peter were allowed to eat, he walked outside and got into his car. Michael drove and texted the teacher, who was on summer vacation and often available. Then the concierge who could sometimes find them an empty room. No one answered. Michael got to work and moved behind the bar. He pulled down his pants and jerked off. A few minutes after he’d finished, the cleaning ladies arrived, using buckets as purses.
“Always working, Mr. Michael,” one said.
“Work is good for you,” Michael answered, though he didn’t know why he’d just said that.
Mops swatted the floor. Michael rinsed his mess from the prep sink, though one of the sisters—he always forgot who was Fortana, who was Dazana—urged him away with a, “We clean.”
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