For a moment, the recognition of her own bodily youth scares her. But there’s no reason for fear. She’s never been weak, even as a girl of nine or ten. She’s just been confused and unaware. For years, she blamed herself for not standing up to him. It sickens her to remember him moaning and pressing into her, whispering in a hoarse, oddly high-pitched voice that she liked his attentions, that he wouldn’t keep coming back except that she was such a little tramp. He accused her even as his dribble ran down her trembling, pinned leg and into her skirts. He claimed that she liked it more than he did. In time, he became even more bold, asking the question out loud. “Do you like me, girl? Do you?” He yanked her head back by the hair until she answered, not with what he wanted to hear, but only with a gasp. That seemed to be enough. He just wanted to hear a voice, any voice. “I’m so lonely, Annie,” he said once, catching his breath as he lay, collapsed on top of her, not yet fully spent but resting, panting. She lay, stiff and silent, waiting for him to remove his bulk so she could slip away, caring not one whit for his so-called loneliness. Then she felt him harden and start again.
And the She-wolf knew. She had to know. Especially when, just as they were stoking the fire the first time or the tenth, he told Annie to follow him out to the woodshed—said it right in front of the She-wolf, as she put away her sewing and shifted the baby’s crib closer to the fire—and they did not come back for an hour, carrying a handful of kindling. Once he fell asleep lying on top of her. Her toes started to tingle inside her too-tight boots; she was losing feeling in her legs, but still he didn’t move until hours later, when he woke with a start and stumbled out of the shed with her trailing behind, silver light marking the path. She hated everything at that moment: even the creaking oak tree, even the full moon that had risen over their heads, tracking slowly across the cold sky. Everything went about its own business, pretending not to see. That was what she had learned, living at the house. In the end, nothing and nobody cared.
Except, perhaps, for one person: Mrs. Edington, the lady who ran the infirmary in Greenville and had loaned Annie out as a laborer to the strangers in the first place. But it didn’t take much for the Wolves to fool her. Annie had seen a letter arrive from Mrs. Edington, and a few days later, saw the He-wolf bent over a piece of paper, scribbling a half-literate reply. No doubt he told her that Annie was getting her wages and being taught to read and write. No doubt Mrs. Edington believed him. One day, Annie would escape back to the poor farm where she’d be taken back in. But not yet, and meanwhile every day was an eternity.
Creeping up to the cabin now, Annie remembers it all. Biting her lip to stop her teeth from chattering, she stalks closer, wishing for the world to be quiet for her, to aid her quest. Her boots silently grind the dry leaves into frost-speckled mud. Everything is dying with the season. One more pathetic old man won’t shift God’s balance terribly much.
Then suddenly, the little cabin’s door swings open. A woman stands there, hand over the front of her shabby checked brown dress, drawing in a breath of welcome surprise. “Oh, Phoebe Ann.”
The Missus takes a step forward, hand raised over her brow. It’s a bleak autumn day, clouds streaking by, but still bright compared to the shadows of the dark home. “I’m so glad you’re back. Come quick.”
Annie hesitates, trying to match this moment to what she pictured, and that is the problem. She never pictured it in enough detail. What to do about the woman, the baby and the mutt, who runs out the door and past her now, stumpy tail wagging, happy to escape the nag who hit him just moments ago.
Seeing her balk, the woman misunderstands and calls out reassuringly, “He’s gone to town.”
It doesn’t feel right to call her the She-wolf in her own cabin, as the thin-faced Missus bustles from woodstove to narrow kitchen table, hurrying to fill two chipped mugs with water from the kettle. “I saw you’d taken the rifle. I was afraid you were gone for the whole day.”
Annie doesn’t know how to answer.
“Even if we need the grub, even if he told you to stay out for a good spell,” the woman says, “I’d rather have your company. Jack was crying so long and hard I really thought he was going to stop breathing. I tried everything you do, but he wouldn’t quit. Walking and rocking and cold air until he was gasping and every bit of my milk was gone, so I wetted the cloth with sugar water for him to suck on, and I even went looking for that little blue bottle the doctor gave us . . .”
She is rambling without a breath, as if she won’t get it all out otherwise and she can’t decide if she should laugh or cry. The woman’s whole body is trembling with what she has almost done just to make the cabin quiet again. It’s hard not to throttle a child who is screeching in your ear and punching your sore breast with those mad little red fists. “But you know, I think someone in this house went and drank that solution? I guess my husband has trouble sleeping, too.” And she laughs again, the most unnatural, unmusical laugh Annie has ever heard: a stuck window forced open, screeching.
But here’s the thing that Annie forgot. The She-wolf did not, in fact, despise her. Did not, in fact, always mistreat her. Even the He-wolf, bad as he was, didn’t always do wrong by her. It’s been hard enough to remember the pain and the sorrow. It’s equally hard to remember this: that Annie felt, at moments, that she could almost belong here, if he would just stop the worst of what he was doing.
Does a sheep ever refuse to run from a wolf, not just from the paralysis of fear, but from stupid hope?
That thought makes Annie angrier, and the rage, turned inward now, makes her confused. She knows what happens when she gets confused. The face of the She-wolf fades. The view of the cabin flickers. The smell of apples lingers. Darkness falls.
“Give her water,” says Sitting Bull’s gentle voice.
26
Ruth
The Greyhound bus would be leaving at the undignified hour of 6 a.m., and while Ruth was gone, the home inspector would be coming. It would be smart to go to bed early, but Ruth was too wired to relax. Reece had left last night at 7 p.m., having done as much in three hours as she could have done in a day, moving items so fast Ruth barely had time to classify them.
When they took breaks, Reece showed her videos of his Rockets team rehearsing. He apologized repeatedly—we don’t have this move down yet, we’re missing two of our guys here—but he needn’t have bothered. It all looked impressive to Ruth: all those young bodies flipping, lifting, balancing, rolling and jumping back up, unhurt. Reece showed her a few still shots, naming some of the members: Gerald, Caleb, Courtney, Justin, Raj. She asked about one child who seemed too tiny to be a high schooler. At first, Ruth thought she was a boy, with her close-cropped hair, thin arms and flat chest. That’s Mikayla. Her parents are from Kenya. She can’t weigh more than ninety pounds. Flyers are hard to find. She subs for Caleb when he blows off practice.
Reece’s mood soured then, but just as well—there were more heavy boxes and small pieces of furniture to move, music blasting again. Then he went home, leaving Ruth to manage another round of sorting on her own.
Dinner hour, with a chance to do more online research, was her reward, with more housework to follow. The house was quiet with Reece gone. The frozen burrito turned slowly in Gwen’s ancient microwave.
Before Ruth had told him not to bother anymore, Nieman had asked in his email, Could you posit a provenance and chain of custody?
She knew the word “posit” of course, but she’d never looked it up. Synonyms: To speculate, conjecture, imagine . . .
Well, of course she could imagine a provenance, if that was all he’d wanted.
In recent decades in Vienna, apartment renovations had turned up a number of surprises, like the eight hundred Holocaust-era cardboard boxes of documents found in an empty apartment in 2000. Whether hidden or in plain view, war-era documents continued to emerge, especially as real-estate values skyrocketed and new owners and contractors opened
doors, pulled up flooring and drilled holes through walls.
Josef Breuer, still her best guess as the author of the journal, had died in 1925, years before the Nazis gained power. However, Ruth reasoned, his papers must have gone somewhere—and not all to the Library of Congress archives, which had only 425 items related to him, far fewer than the library’s Freud archives, with over 46,000 items.
According to a genealogy website, the oldest of Breuer’s children was Margarethe Schiff, born in 1872 and dead in 1942—murdered, as were other Breuer family members, in the camp at Terezín outside Prague in what was now the Czech Republic.
Using digitized public-access records on Holocaust victims, Ruth did a search on Margarethe, unsuccessful at first. But then she found her in the database, thanks to the National Archives in Prague, with the correct spelling of her first name—Margarete. Off to one side of the webpage were statistics on others who had traveled to Terezín with her: 1,008 deported. Only 38 survived.
There was an image of her death certificate with the cause of death, written in uneven block letters: Suicid. No e at the end, followed by the German word: Selbstmord. Ruth clicked on the image to enlarge it, studying the fancier signatures in old-fashioned script not dissimilar to the handwriting Ruth had been studying in the journal. Ruth couldn’t help but think of these self-satisfied, monstrous concentration-camp doctors and bureaucrats wielding their fancy pens. Assholes.
There, too, were the specifics of her transport and her last known residence: Vídeň 2, Haasgasse 8. This was the street the seller had mentioned, but someone along the way had misspelled it. Not Hassgasse, or Hate Alley; not Hasengasse, or Hare Alley, but Haasgasse.
The seller hadn’t been lying. It had only been a typo, just as there had been an error in various spellings of Margarete Breuer’s name, which was why one had to keep digging and never look away.
Ruth copied the Vienna address into Google Maps. There was the neighborhood where Breuer’s grown daughter had lived until her deportation on Transport IV/9. There was the place, not far from a royal park and the Danube, where Breuer’s records of his visit with Annie Oakley might have been passed down to his daughter and carefully stored, perhaps even hidden. There was the residential address on a small lane where the journal—as well as any letters that the doctor had received later—had been forgotten and found again. Hypothetical at first, more likely with every detail found—a knowable, understandable thing.
Unlike, say, Ruth’s own sister’s life and suicide.
Type Kennidy’s name into a search box and you were rerouted to celebrity stories about the famous Kennedy clan and the suicide of RFK’s wife, Mary, in 2012. Never mind that Ruth’s mother had insisted on spelling her daughter’s name in an uncommon way. It made no difference. Kennidy McClintock, daughter of Gwen McClintock and sister of Ruth McClintock, hadn’t done anything worthy of fame, or lived in a police state that kept an obscene number of records, or died in an era tragic enough to inspire massive digitized documentation efforts. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t suffered. Only that she had suffered mostly alone, leaving few traces—or at least few that Ruth knew about.
But then again, Ruth had never wanted to look.
Ruth was in a clean, beige-and-white-walled room, sitting on the floor and staring into the calming geometry of metal tubular chair legs, the underside of blond, Scandinavian-style furniture. Beyond the chair legs: a blank wall. She was in the university library, no question, using a cell phone in violation of library rules. On the end of the line was her mother, Gwen, talking to her in a calm tone. But Ruth felt dread. Something was wrong. Something involving Kennidy.
“Mom,” she kept trying to say, but her mother wouldn’t listen, and now Ruth remembered why she was so desperate to get through to her, so that her mother could check on Kennidy in her closed bedroom so that something might be done before it was too late.
“Mom.”
The phone call hadn’t gone the way it should have. Her mother hadn’t listened. She hadn’t forced open Kennidy’s door. When Ruth’s phone rang again the next day, just past noon on a Monday, Ruth felt the wrongness in her gut. The caller ID said Gwen, but the voice at the end of the line was a friend of Gwen’s from work, helping to make the first phone calls while Gwen stood by, speechless and in shock.
“Come home, Ruth. Your sister . . .”
Now Ruth opened her eyes. She’d fallen asleep on the couch doing her Holocaust-era research. The clock on the wall read only 10:35 p.m.
The garage still awaited her. She returned to the chilly space, no longer enlivened by Reece’s playlist. She didn’t have to do any more sorting tonight, but the items she’d most avoided before now called to her. There were hatboxes full of costume jewelry, knotted chains and dead watches. She didn’t want most of it, but she knew this was her last chance to find the odd item or two that would bring back memories of Gwen dressed up, trying to look her best.
Ruth’s mother had been stolen from her at the worst possible time. A mostly healthy woman should not have died at the age of fifty-one. Ruth blamed her mother’s bad habits: junk food, smoking, zero exercise. And she blamed Kennidy, the very embodiment of chaos and dysfunction. Or she had blamed her. Now things were looking more complicated.
Ruth stared at two gray suitcases, heavy and moldy-smelling, that had once belonged to her late grandfather. It was just like her mother to hide things rather than deal with them. Chances were, these hideous old suitcases contained her grandfather’s old clothes. Unless they held Kennidy’s.
She pulled a chair closer, old light fixture flickering overhead. The suitcases were brown in normal light. Now, in the bluish glow of the fluorescent lights, they were an odd shade of green, like a cold, algae-tinged lake. A color that called both “dive in” and “beware.”
To Ruth’s right was an old nightstand with a broken leg. She’d had Reece put it into the “don’t-know” pile because of its drawers full of miscellany: old concert ticket stubs, playing cards and matchbooks. In the back was a pack of ancient cigarettes, one of many Kennidy would have hidden around the house. Ruth gave it a sniff, pulled out a bent one and lit it up. Another dose of masochism. First, it tasted like how the rest of the basement-stored furniture smelled, like mouse droppings and damp plywood, but then the tobacco got burning.
And there it was: the smell of college parties. The smell of Kennidy and their drive to that cabin in the woods on a warm night, though the trees weren’t fully greened yet, so it wasn’t quite summer, but almost. That night when Kennidy had taken the golf club out of the trunk and started swinging.
Ruth, buzzed and squinting at the figure of her sister in the headlights, had called out to her through the window. “What the fuck, Ken?”
“What the fuck you. Are you coming?”
“What are you doing?”
It was clear what she was doing: wreaking havoc. Making a point.
“Why? Ken—come on.”
Kennidy shouted in the direction of the cabin, “Come out, you fucking coward! Give them back!”
So this person had taken something from her sister. She could’ve at least explained.
“Help me,” Kennidy said, squinting into the headlight beam toward Ruth, not waiting for a reply. She went to the door and pounded on it, screaming curse words. Seconds passed, time extending and dissolving and twisting, reshaped by panic and the alcohol coursing through their veins.
Ruth missed the moment when the door opened briefly, but she saw her sister bending to pick up something scattered just beyond the headlights’ reach. Kennidy walked back to the car, head down, hands pushing something into her back pocket.
“What was that?” Ruth asked when her sister slammed the door.
“Nothing.”
Ruth backed out fast, spitting up gravel, barely missing a tree. They bounced down the driveway, back toward the main road.
“Put y
our seat belt on at least. Damn it, Ken, I mean it!” Ruth was busy scanning the country road ahead for police cars that might be sitting on the dark shoulder, waiting to pull them over. She was begging her own brain to sober up.
When they’d made it a few miles with no one following, Ruth asked, “I take it an ex-boyfriend of yours lives there?”
“Something like that.”
“Does Mom know about this guy?”
“Pretty much.”
“You gonna tell me about him?”
“I would’ve, if you’d gotten out of the car and helped.”
“What was I supposed to do? Break windows? Clobber the guy?”
“Maybe.”
“So you’re saying I failed some test.”
“Yeah. You failed. We both did.”
“But you got what you wanted,” Ruth said. “What were they, pictures?” She was guessing. Who printed photos these days? Nearly all the ones Ruth had were on her phone. And hadn’t Ken’s generation grown up with more warnings than her own about the perils of sexting and images ending up in the wrong places?
Ruth asked, “Why’d you let him take photos of you in the first place?”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Not really.”
“So you were drunk, high, or passed out.” Ruth was starting to feel protective, but no less mad. “You realize worse stuff can happen then having your photo taken, if you’re regularly passed out around this guy. Right?”
Kennidy muttered, “We haven’t had sexual intercourse, if that’s all you’re worried about. I’m not even his type, exactly. Too fat, for one thing.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not taking my clothes off for him anymore. We’re done. And anyway, I have the pictures.”
Annie and the Wolves Page 19
