Three days later a couple of Papa’s friends from the lab at Boyer AgriChemical helped us move our furniture out of the gray and white house. These two men, George and Stan, were Papa’s closest friends at work, and their wives had always been friendly to Mommi. But my father’s arrest had changed their opinion of him. I could see this in their eyes. Papa had no doubt reached out to them and begged them to help us move, and they had done so, but even I could see they helped us not so much because Papa asked them to but because they pitied Mommi and what Papa’s actions had done to her.
Mommi had sold enough things, like the empty china cabinet, that there were fewer boxes and pieces of furniture than there might have been if the war had never come and we’d just decided to move to a different house on our own. One with a wraparound porch, perhaps.
The cottage was on the outskirts of town, and it wasn’t really a cottage. I’d pictured a storybook house with ivy shoots trailing up its stone walls and teacup roses in its window boxes, but the place was just a minuscule house with two small bedrooms and a kitchen and living room that had no wall between them. One tiny bathroom. The front yard was a tangled mess of dead weeds, last year’s tulip stems and a lopsided peony bush that no one had trimmed in years. The backyard was an open stretch of crabgrass that looked out onto a row of distant poultry barns. You could hardly call it a backyard except that there was a weathered clothesline arising out of a patch of dirt, suggesting there was a house with people in it a few feet away. The cottage’s inside walls needed paint and the kitchen stove looked like someone had butchered and barbecued a whole pig on top of it. The curtains on the windows were thin and gray. I was pretty sure there had been a time when they were white.
After George and Stan brought in the last bed and put it together, they hightailed it out of there, probably to go home and tell their wives what that dirty German Otto Sontag had done to his family, how awful the pigsty was we were living in now. I wanted to shout after them that they were terrible friends to think what the FBI said of Papa was true. I wanted to throw rocks at Stan’s truck and scream at them both that my father would’ve stood by either one of them if they’d been falsely accused of something.
Mommi told me I could sleep with her in her room or share the second little bedroom with Max. She was sorry she couldn’t give me my own room. She was very sorry. Very, very sorry. I wondered if maybe she wanted me to sleep with her so that she wouldn’t have to be alone every night. But when I asked her which room she wanted me to choose, she just stared at me for a moment and shook her head. She couldn’t answer me. She didn’t want to have to make any more decisions. About anything.
“I’ll sleep with Max,” I said, too afraid to be in the dark with her and her dark thoughts.
Max and I had room only for our beds in the second room. We put our bureaus in the front room where Mommi might have set up the china cabinet if we still had it. Anything we didn’t need or use or play with anymore we had sold or given away, but even so, the little house filled up quickly. Max held on to his cowboy book pretty much from the time Mommi told us we were moving until he and I crawled into our beds that night, and even then, he put it under his pillow. He surely felt the same tug on everything that was ours that Mommi and I did, even upon our very identities. Whatever it was that was taking everything from us would not get the cowboy book. Not that.
I awoke to a strange sound that first night in the cottage—a scraping and moaning noise that was all that I’d imagined a ghost would sound like. For several seconds I just lay there in my bed listening, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. We had moved into a haunted shack, I thought. That’s why no one else had been living in this dump. The previous occupants had been run off by the ghost and everyone but us knew that they’d charged out of here screaming at the top of their lungs.
The terrible sound stopped for a moment and then started again, and the second time, it sounded less like a ghost and more like an animal caught and struggling in a metal trap. I looked over to Max, but he was fast asleep, his mouth slightly open, his blond curls tousled about his face.
I got out of bed, padded over to the door, and opened it as quietly as I could. The strange sound was coming from the front room just beyond the tiny hallway. Mommi’s bedroom door was open, too, her bed empty. I peeked around the corner and stopped. Mommi was leaning over that horrible stove with a spatula in her hand, hacking away at the burned remnants of surely every meal that had ever been cooked on it. The flecks were flying everywhere. And she was both crying and grunting with the force she had to exert to separate the splattered whatever from the stove’s top. The cries and the grunting were like one sound that there is no word for. From my bed it had sounded like a ghost’s wail or a hurt animal’s keening, but just a few yards away it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before.
I needed Papa in that moment. I needed to ask him what I should do. Should I go to Mommi and tell her not to worry, that everything would be all right? But what if she’d hate forever that I had seen her this way? Maybe she wanted my arms around her. Or maybe she wanted instead to have just a few private minutes of brutal honesty about how she was feeling. If I went to her, she would stop what she was doing, and the rest of what she was letting out right now she’d have to suck back in. She’s a tender soul, Papa had told me.
“What should I do, Papa?” I whispered so quietly I barely heard the words myself. What would be best?
In that moment I began to see that there are times when there is no best choice. There is only this choice and that choice, and both are terrible. Mariko and I used to lie on our backs on the basketball court after the sun had gone down and look at the unfenced stars in the Texas sky—Mariko loved looking at the sky, night or day—and ponder how we were going to get Calista out of that sorcerer’s tower. It seemed like there was no best way to get her out, so I suggested Mariko write a new character to rescue her. Mariko told me Calista wasn’t a girl waiting for a prince to rescue her. She was a warrior. She had to find the way herself. The best way. “There has to be a way,” Mariko had said. We just hadn’t been given enough time to figure out what it was.
In the end I went back to my bed and let my mother have it out with that beast of a stove. In the morning, it looked a little better and she looked a little worse. That night I slipped into bed with her after she turned out her light and told her I thought maybe I would take turns. One night with Max, one night with her, and so on.
In the moonlight that swung low over our pillows, I saw a hint of a smile tug at Mommi’s lips. “You look like your Papa, you know,” she said.
I had heard that before, but always from other people. Not from her.
“I miss him.” Those sad words fell off my tongue as easy and quick as raindrops from the sky. I wondered if hearing me say those words that way would make her jump out of bed and start up again at the stove. But she just touched my face with her hand and said she missed him, too.
“It’s not fair,” I said. And I didn’t have to explain what I meant. She knew.
“No, it’s not,” she said.
And we didn’t say anything else to each other. We both fell asleep, and as far as I knew, we both slept until morning.
Max and I lived far enough away now to need to ride the bus to school, which became a new kind of humiliation for me. Most of the kids on the bus figured out pretty quickly who Max and I were. My brother probably could have sat with one of the other boys his age, as they seemed more forgiving, but he chose to sit with me. He had asked me a few weeks earlier why we didn’t have friends over to the house anymore and why no one was asking us to come over to their houses, and I’d explained as best I could that people are afraid of what they don’t understand.
“It’s because Papa got arrested and sent away, isn’t it? Everybody thinks he’s a bad man,” he’d said.
I had only been able to nod. Because he was right. That was the reason, plain and simple.
“Everybody’s wrong,” he’d said, and then commenced to draw a picture of a palomino horse. The question between us had been answered as far as he was concerned.
I think he knew I’d be sitting alone on the bus if he sat with someone else. That first day he and I sat up front, in the seat with a tear in it so no one else wanted to sit there. Over the next few days it became our seat. There are no averted or accusing eyes to put up with when you take the first seat on a bus because you don’t ever have to walk down that long aisle, past people who think they know you.