The Thing I'm Most Afraid Of

by Kristin Levine

  “What?”

  “She’s probably just in the bathroom. Right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I left and started walking quickly. I’m known for overreacting, aren’t I? I mean, her shirt was covered in coffee. She probably stopped to wash it out. But my heart thumped in time with the clatter of the train on the tracks. Sara would not have left us alone for so long unless . . .

  Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.

  CHAPTER 32

  Polizei

  I pushed the button, and the door between the cars whooshed open. The ground spun by beneath me, but I barely noticed this time. Sara will be waiting in the café car. She probably decided to buy us a chocolate bar or something, and the line was longer than she expected. I walked through the next car and pushed the button to open the final door. I took a deep breath, stepping into the café car.

  There was no one there.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. The saleswoman behind the counter was still there. And the old woman who’d had the newspaper. A completely bald man with a briefcase sat in one corner. That was it.

  Where’s Sara?

  “Excuse me,” I said to the saleswoman. “Have you seen my au pair, Sara?”

  Oh, shoot! I wasn’t supposed to call her my au pair.

  But it didn’t matter, because the lady just shook her head and said, “Ich spreche kein Englisch.”

  “My friend Sara! We were just here. We spilled our drinks and—”

  “Tut mir leid. Ich verstehe dich nicht.”

  The train went around a curve, and it felt like my world was suddenly completely off kilter. What was going on? I realized we’d been to so many touristy places, I’d begun to think everyone in Europe spoke English. But I was wrong. I was in a foreign country. Alone.

  “Sara!” I looked around the room. “Has anyone seen her?”

  The businessman ignored me, focusing on his papers.

  Is there another café car? Did I go the wrong way? Someone grabbed my elbow.

  It was the old woman. Her eyes were wide and worried. She began to speak in German, quick and fast.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  She kept talking, gesturing now. I knew she was trying to tell me something important, but I had no idea what. “I don’t speak German,” I moaned.

  “Polizei,” she said. “Polizei. Polizei.”

  Wait. I knew that word. “Police?”

  “Ja.”

  My skin broke out in goose bumps, as if I had walked into a freezer. I felt light-headed and clutched the table to stay upright. The police! Something happened to Sara.

  I needed Felix. “I’ll be right back,” I said to the woman. She nodded, but I wasn’t sure she understood me.

  As if in a dream, I walked through the two train cars, stopping in each bathroom, checking for Sara. In the last one before our compartment, I splashed some water on my face. I was reaching for a paper towel when I saw it.

  A bit of green strap peeking out of the trash bin.

  I grabbed the strap and pulled. Paper towels fell onto the floor to reveal Sara’s little green purse. The strap had been cut, as if with a sharp knife. The straps lay like limp pieces of spaghetti to either side of the small green pocket.

  I opened it quickly and looked inside.

  The money envelope from my father was gone. Sara’s passport was gone. It was completely empty, except for an old ponytail holder and a slip of paper. I pulled them both out.

  The notebook paper was folded and worn. It was Sara’s list!

  I clutched the list in one hand and the purse in the other and ran back to our compartment. “Felix,” I called out before I had the door fully open. “Something’s happened to Sara!”

  “What?” He was sitting extremely still, the book still unopened on his lap.

  “I found her purse in the bathroom. Someone cut the strap and took the money and her passport.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe it just broke and Sara threw it away.”

  I held up the piece of notebook paper. “Sara would never throw away her list.”

  Felix touched the paper carefully, as if it were gold leaf that might dissolve on his hands. “No,” he whispered. “She wouldn’t.”

  “And the old woman saw something,” I said.

  “Which old woman?” he asked.

  “In the café car. When the little boy ran into me, I spilled soda on this woman’s table. We helped her wipe it up.”

  “Becca, what are you talking about?”

  “She tried to tell me, but I didn’t understand. She kept repeating, ‘Polizei, Polizei.’”

  Felix got even paler.

  “That means police, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  Felix nodded.

  “Come on. We have to talk to her.”

  We ran back to the café car, skipping over the gap between the doors like it was no more than a crack in the sidewalk. The man with the briefcase was gone, but the old woman was still there. She gestured to the empty seats, and we slid into the booth across from her.

  The woman started to speak quickly again, in German. Felix listened, interrupting her every now and then to ask a question.

  Time seemed to slow down as they talked. I felt so helpless and stupid. I started to notice random details: a patch of sticky soda on the table that we’d missed, an empty glass on a nearby table with a lipstick stain, a child’s greasy handprint on the window.

  Finally, the woman stopped talking. Felix’s face was gray.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “In a minute,” Felix said.

  The woman murmured one more thing.

  “Nein, nein,” said Felix. “Unsere Eltern sind hier. Danke nochmal.”

  He stood up. I followed his lead. “Danke,” I said too, even though I wasn’t sure what I was thanking her for.

  Felix practically ran back to our compartment. He was shaking.

  “What happened?” I demanded, slamming the compartment door.

  “The police took Sara!”

  “What? Took her where?”

  “Off the train. They arrested her!”

  “Arrested her? Why?!”

  “They said she didn’t have papers.”

  “But she did have papers! She had her passport. It was in her little green purse.”

  “She couldn’t find her purse,” Felix reminded me. “That’s why she went back to the café.”

  “But she had it when we paid for the drinks the first time!” I said.

  “They didn’t believe her. They saw her necklace and knew she was Muslim and figured she was a refugee trying to illegally enter the country by avoiding passport control, sneaking from the bathroom to the café car and back again.”

  I looked at the little green purse on the seat. “But what happened to her passport?” I wondered. “It was in her purse. I saw it when she bought the sodas. And then the little boy ran into us and . . .”

  I had a horrible thought. Did that family rob Sara?

  “The woman said something about a little boy and a woman and a man,” Felix said.

  I described the scene to him quickly. “Do you think the woman told the little boy to run into her?”

  “Maybe. In the confusion, she or her husband could have quickly cut the strap on the purse. And grabbed it.”

  “And if anyone noticed, they could have just said they were trying to help.”

  “And maybe they knew where the border was, knew the train would stop soon, so they could jump off.”

  “And hopefully, she wouldn’t even discover the loss until they were gone.”

  “But why target Sara?” I asked. “Surely that businessman had more money.”

  “They must have heard you speaking English,” Felix said. “American passports
are worth a lot on the black market. They must have figured Sara had your passport in her purse.” He shook his head.

  “And when they only found a Bosnian one, they took that and the money and dumped the purse in the trash.”

  “That’s what the old woman thought.”

  “Why didn’t she speak to the police?”

  “She did,” Felix said. “But it all happened so fast. They wanted to get Sara off the train before it left the border.” He paused. “They thought Sara might be a little crazy. She was yelling something about hair as she left. ‘Green hair!’ It didn’t make any sense.” Felix started to shake. “What do we do, Becca? What do we do?”

  “Go talk to a conductor?”

  “What can he do? All he does is take the tickets!” Felix was panting now, his breaths short and shallow. “I feel sick,” he said. “I can’t breathe!”

  “You’re just panicking,” I said.

  I sat down next to him and passed him the bag the sandwiches had come in. Felix took it and retched into it. I patted his back.

  “Sorry,” he said when he was done.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I’ve thrown up lots of times when I was stressed.”

  “Becca, what are we going to do?!”

  Sara’s coffee was sitting on the ledge, untouched. I picked it up and took a sip. It was only lukewarm now, but the taste was bitter and familiar. “I don’t think we can do anything,” I said. “I think we have to wait until we get back to Vienna.”

  “We can’t just wait!” Felix protested.

  “What are we going to do . . . jump off the train?”

  “I don’t know,” Felix wailed.

  My mind was spinning. I didn’t have a page for this in my Doomsday Journal.

  “I feel dizzy,” Felix said.

  “You’re in shock,” I said automatically.

  Shock! I did have a page on shock. And I had my journal in my backpack. I stood on the seat and got it down. Quickly, I flipped through the pages.

  “What to do in case of shock,” I read. “Step one: Lay the person down and elevate their feet.”

  Felix and I looked at each other. Then he shrugged and sat down, putting his feet up on the seat across from him.

  “Step two,” I read. “Begin CPR (if necessary).”

  “Not necessary,” said Felix.

  “Step three,” I said. “Treat obvious injures.”

  Felix looked at his hands. “I have a paper cut.”

  I nodded, rummaged in my backpack again, and pulled out my first aid kit. I found the antibiotic ointment and a Band-Aid and put both on his finger.

  “Step four,” I read. “Keep person warm and comfortable.”

  “It is kind of cold in here,” Felix said.

  I unzipped his backpack and pulled out a sweatshirt. I handed it to him.

  He put it on.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  The strange thing was, I felt better too. Going through my list had given me something to do. Something I could do. I took another sip of Sara’s coffee. “We’ll take the train back to Vienna,” I said. “Then get off with all our bags. Then call our parents.”

  “Okay,” said Felix.

  We sat in silence for a while after that.

  “Becca?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I lied,” Felix said. “I did like the opera.”

  “I know.”

  “If something like this had to happen . . . I’m glad I was with you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  I reached out and took his hand. It wasn’t romantic, ’cause Felix, ugh, he was sort of like my brother. It was more like, let’s hold hands so we don’t feel so scared. And maybe it worked, because we held hands like that all the way back to Vienna.

  CHAPTER 33

  Words on a Page

  It took two more hours, but at last the train pulled into the station. We gathered up our belongings and stumbled down the steps. Felix practically ran to a pay phone. He dialed and spoke in German a couple of times, with long pauses in between, before finally hanging up the phone. “Mama’s not there,” he told me. “She’s out doing an interview.”

  I tried my father then, at the work number he’d given me for emergencies. I’d never called it before. My fingers trembled as I dialed.

  “He’s on his way back from a meeting,” his secretary told me. “They’re stuck in traffic somewhere. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Tell him to call me at home,” I managed to blurt out. “It’s his daughter.”

  Felix and I looked at each other once I hung up. We hadn’t thought any further than this. “Do you have your Monatskarte?” he asked.

  “Yes.” My pass for August was safely tucked away in my backpack. We’d taken a taxi to the train station, but it wasn’t hard to study the posted map and find the correct streetcar to take us back to the bus. Sara’s backpack got heavier and heavier as we lugged it along, taking turns holding it on our laps.

  It took us almost an hour to make it back to the Julius Meinl grocery store on the corner by our bus stop. We were just passing the recycling bins when Frau Gamperl called out. “No one took out your trash last night,” she scolded. “Tell your father he needs to remember to . . .”

  We turned to look at her. Frau Gamperl caught a glimpse of our faces and stopped yelling. I imagined we looked pretty disheveled after being on the train for hours and trekking across town. She noticed the third backpack. “Where’s Sara?”

  “Gone,” Felix whispered.

  “Gone?” she asked, surprised.

  I shook my head, desperately trying not to cry.

  “Your parents?”

  “At work,” I said. “We can’t get in touch with them.”

  Frau Gamperl nodded as if she understood. “Come with me. We’ll talk at my place.”

  Of all the people I’d imagined helping us, Frau Gamperl was not one of them. As she led us up to her front door, I glanced at one of her little gnomes in the grass. It had green hair and was riding a bike. I started to cry, big silent tears running down my face. Felix was crying too—from relief at being home or fear or frustration, I wasn’t sure.

  Frau Gamperl opened the door and gestured for us to step inside. “Please take off your shoes.” The house was tidy, with simple wooden furniture that was old but in excellent shape. There was a small round wooden sign that said “Willkommen” with little flowers painted around the edges and a cuckoo clock on one wall. “Sit down at the table,” she ordered. “I’ll make some tea.”

  The tea was good, black and strong, and she added milk and honey without asking. It was warm and sweet, and by the time we’d had a few sips, we’d managed to stop crying. Frau Gamperl put a few cookies with jam on a plate in the middle of the table. “Now,” she said. “Talk.”

  And we did. We told her about the train and Sara disappearing. Frau Gamperl was a good listener, nibbling on a cookie, stirring her tea, but not interrupting. We took turns talking, each telling parts, adding to and clarifying the story. Once or twice, Felix lapsed into German. I finished my tea, staring at the leaves at the bottom of the cup.

  “You mean to tell me,” Frau Gamperl said when we were done, “you two made it back here on your own?”

  We nodded.

  “Hmm,” she said. “You’re tougher than I thought.” She stood up and wiped her hands on her apron, even though they looked spotless to me. “Give me your parents’ numbers,” she said. “I’ll keep trying until I get through. Although it sounds like what we really need is a good immigration lawyer.”

  “Lawyer!” Felix said, suddenly looking up. “I have an idea.”

  * * *

  Dad, Katarina, and Rasheed’s mother, Frau Kumar, all ended up arriving at Frau Gamperl’s within five minutes of
each other. We had to tell the entire story again—only this time, Frau Kumar took notes.

  “I don’t understand,” Katarina said when we were done. “Sara had all her papers in order. What about the passport thieves? Why didn’t they arrest them?”

  “They were probably gone, jumped off the train as soon as it stopped,” Frau Kumar explained. “Maybe they had a friend waiting for them with a car. I’ve seen situations like this before. Sadly, the police rarely believe the refugee.”

  “What can we do?” I asked.

  “The first step is to locate her,” Frau Kumar said. “Are you sure she hasn’t called?”

  Katarina shook her head. “There’s no message on the machine.”

  Frau Kumar sighed. “They are supposed to allow a phone call. I’ll see what I can do tomorrow. The best thing now is for everyone to go home and get some rest.”

  We tried. No one ate much at dinner. My mom called while I was doing the dishes, but Dad talked to her for a long time first.

  “What a traumatic experience!” Mom exclaimed when Dad finally handed me the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dad and I are so proud of you,” Mom continued. “You didn’t panic. You and Felix figured out how to get home.”

  As awful as it had been, I was a little bit proud of myself too. Felix and I had handled it. “Mom, we have to find her!”

  “You will,” Mom said. I wished I had her confidence.

  I was exhausted by the time I finally crawled into bed, but I couldn’t sleep. My limbs felt heavy and achy, as if I had the flu, though I knew I didn’t have a fever. This is what it feels like to be Sara, I thought to myself. To not know where your loved ones are. To not know if they are safe.

  It was so awful, I wasn’t sure I could survive it. I was about to go ask Dad if he still had those pills from Dr. Teresa, the ones for an emergency. This was surely an emergency! And yet Sara had been in the same situation every single night since I’d known her. And she’d survived. But I wasn’t as strong as her.

  I got up and went downstairs to find Dad. He was still sitting at the kitchen table in his pajamas, nursing a cup of tea, listening to the radio. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.