“Stiefmutter and Stiefvater,” she says.
“Silly,” I say. “They can’t both be your stepparents.”
“They are.”
I shake my head, certain she’s just misunderstood the term. “Is your mother married to your stepfather, or is your father married to your stepmother?”
She looks back down at her doll, rebuttoning a pinafore over the dress. “Mommy’s not here. She said she would be back for me later.”
“Where is your mommy now?”
Hannelore adjusts the pinafore again, longer than she needs to, and suddenly she looks much older than eight. “I don’t know where she is. She hasn’t come back yet. I couldn’t talk about her before, but Stiefmutter says now I am allowed to because the Nazis lost.”
I swallow hard. “Did your mother leave you because it was safer? Is that what she said?”
“Yes. She didn’t want anyone to take me. And I have light hair, so I’d be easy to hide.”
Is this what we should have done with Abek? Beg a childless couple to keep him safe? If we’d done that, would I have been able to knock on their door now and find him in a cozy attic bedroom decorated with his drawings?
“I have a photograph,” Hannelore says. She’s gone back to the bureau, opening up the bottom drawer and taking out a box. From it she removes a book, and she’s now riffling through the pages, pulling out photographs hidden between them. “I don’t remember her very well, but she was so pretty I think she could have been a film star. Don’t you?”
She hands me the photograph. “She’s very beautiful,” I agree, looking at the young woman with big eyes.
“Her name is Inge. Isn’t that a pretty name?”
My voice cracks. “Very pretty.” I suddenly don’t want to hold the photograph anymore, hastily handing it back to Hannelore, only vaguely aware that I might be scaring a little girl.
“Hannelore, it’s been very nice playing with you, but I should probably go.”
“Nobody said we had to stop.”
“I know, but—my friend, he wanted to start early, and we have a long trip!”
I’m on my feet, moving quickly toward the door, down the stairs, grabbing my bag from the foot of the stairs, where I’d never retrieved it from last night. Outside, Frau and Herr Wölflin admire the fence, now completed and straight, and Josef is rinsing his face off in the spigot.
Hannelore’s mother, Inge, was beautiful enough to be a film star. But when I looked at that photograph, I could think only of another woman named Inge, a nothing-girl from the hospital who wasn’t beautiful. Who was covered in scabs, and whose teeth and hair had mostly fallen out.
It’s not the same person, I tell myself. You know it’s not; the stories don’t match up.
But so much of it does match up; so many of our stories are the same. The Inge I knew talked about her daughter, living with a kind German couple. She sat on the windowsill of the hospital and sang songs into the night sky, and then one night, in a way that looked like a graceful lean, in a way that almost looked like an accident, she leaned farther out until she tipped through the windowsill.
Her real name was Inge, but we all called her Bissel. Bissel. “A little bit,” in Yiddish. Because of the time one of the nurses had tried to tell us none of us were crazy, but then she looked at Bissel and said, “Her, maybe. A little bit. She is maybe a little bit crazy.”
I’M READY TO GO,” I TELL JOSEF. HE RISES FROM THE SPIGOT, using a faded cloth to dry his hair. When he looks at me, he can sense something is wrong.
“I’ll just go get our bags,” he says.
“I already have them.” I point to where I’ve set them by the wagon.
“We can’t leave without saying goodbye to the Wölflins.”
“You do it. I’ll wait here.”
I spent the ride yesterday trying to convince Josef I wasn’t crazy, and now I’m undoing it with every sentence, with my abruptness, and with the off-kilter way I climb onto the wagon without waiting for a hand.
Josef is polite enough for both of us. He goes back inside to offer our thanks to the Wölflin family, telling them—I don’t know what he’s telling them. That I feel sick, or we’re late, or I’m unspeakably rude. They make gestures that I can see are offers: Do you have to leave so soon? Can we send you away with anything? And Josef refusing, No, thank you. We’ll be fine, but how kind of you to ask.
Back in the wagon, the horses hooked up and plodding, I watch the little white farmhouse recede until it looks like a postcard. Josef lets it disappear from the horizon before he turns to me. “Did something happen?”
“Everything,” I choke out.
“Everything?”
“Everything happened,” I say again, because right now that seems the best way to describe it. Sister Therese, and a mystery boy stealing money from a convent, and Inge falling out the window, and another Inge leaving her daughter, and Hannelore showing me a photo, and the similarities of their stories, of everyone’s stories. All of it is cumulative.
“Zofia, I already said yesterday that I don’t think you’re crazy. So do you want to explain more?”
I twist the handle of my valise. The clasp seems even more broken than when I picked it up. “That girl. Hannelore. She’s not the Wölflins’ real daughter. She was in hiding.”
Josef looks surprised that’s what’s on my mind. “I know. Herr Wölflin told me. Her mother was the daughter of good friends of theirs, the couple who used to own the feedstore. They were taken.”
“Inge,” I say. “Inge is dead.” Just then, the wagon goes over a rock, so the word comes out as a stab. Dead.
“Zofia.” He jerks the horses to a stop. “What are you saying? Did you know that girl’s mother?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I knew an Inge, but we called her Bissel.”
I tell Josef, in messy fits and starts. I tell him how I barely knew Bissel at all, that none of us really did, except that she slept in a bed next to me for two months and talked all the time about her daughter, whom she was going to find when the war was over. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat on the windowsill and leaned backward.
“And her daughter is waiting,” I say. “Bissel’s daughter is waiting somewhere like Hannelore is, thinking she’ll come home for her. But she’ll never come home. She’ll keep waiting, but Bissel will never come home, and I know that, and she doesn’t.”
“Hannelore’s mother isn’t coming home, either,” Josef says. “Hannelore might still believe her mother is coming to find her, but the Wölflins know better. Herr Wölflin told me; they’re writing letters, but they already assume she’s dead.”
“They assume, but they don’t know,” I say. “And that’s the worst of all. The worst possible thing.”
“The not knowing?”
My mind is spinning. “Suppose you could learn the answer to a mystery you wanted solved. But of all possible terrible answers you’d imagined, this one was even worse. Would you still want to know?”
“Zofia, I’m not following,” Josef says, confused but not impatient. “Hannelore’s mother, Inge, reminds you of another woman named Inge, and both of them left their daughters with families who don’t know what happened to them? What are you asking?”