The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  We lifted our glasses to our lips, and after another deep breath, I downed a second swig along with him. I then braced my hands against the table and pushed the burning air from my lungs like a fire-breathing dragon—or a woman panting through the throes of labor pains.

  He laughed again. “It gets better soon, after you get used to the bite. Keep trying.”

  Once the heat settled, I raised my snifter again and said, “To your brother, Albrecht.”

  “And to your brother—”

  “Billy.” I took a third swig, a deep one that burned with a little less ferociousness, and then I lifted my glass even higher, above my head, and said, “To Wilhelm Daniel Schendel.”

  Ah, that particular sip tasted divine. My tongue tingled, and I delighted in the sensation of running the tip of it across my slippery teeth. Daniel tapped the neck of the bottle against our snifters and topped off our drinks.

  “And to Ivy . . .” he said. “Ummm . . . to Ivy . . .” Daniel held up his glass and blinked at me. “Oh, Scheisse.” He snickered. “I don’t even know your last name.”

  “You don’t? But what about—” I quickly shut my mouth before any references to that damned newspaper article flew out of it. As I remembered Daniel saying, the paper didn’t mention one word about Frank and Peter Rowan. “It’s Rowan,” I said. “Ivy Anne Rowan.”

  “To Ivy Anne Rowan, then.” He smiled and brought his glass to his lips. “And all her lovely loveliness.”

  I closed my eyes and enjoyed another swallow just as the band across the way switched to a familiar song. “Oh!” I straightened up tall in my chair. “To ‘Livery Stavle—’”

  “‘Stable,’” Daniel corrected me.

  “‘Stavle—’”

  “To ‘Liberty Stable Blues.’”

  Our glasses soon sat empty.

  Daniel poured again.

  I planted my elbows on the table and wiggled my shoulders and hips to the rhythm of the music. “Do you know how to dance, Wilhelm Daniel?”

  “I haven’t danced since before the war.”

  “You haven’t? Do you know how to fox-trot? Or do you just polka?”

  “Oh, Gott.” He rolled his eyes. “Miss Ivy Anne Rowan, we don’t just dance the polka in Deutschland. Shame on you.”

  I laughed louder than necessary and flopped back in my chair. “I don’t know these things. I’m a naïve American, remember?”

  “Well, I can one-step as well as any Yank.”

  “I think maybe we should dance.”

  “I think maybe I’ll need to drink a little more before we do that.”

  We imbibed several more sips, and before long we were standing in his living room with my left hand atop his shoulder, his right hand snuggled up to my waist, and our other fingers locked firmly together. He counted to three, and we rocked our torsos side to side while our feet stepped to the beat of a song from across the way.

  “‘Gun-Cotton Rag,’” he said over the horns, “by Merle von Hagen.”

  The music increased in tempo, so we sped up our steps and the rate of our turns, and we ended up spinning straight into a table lamp. The poor thing crashed to the floor with a shatter of cobalt-blue glass. Shards scattered across the rug. All we could do was cover our mouths and laugh at the damage.

  “We killed it,” said Daniel, and he slung his arm around my waist again. We kept right on dancing.

  We stopped between songs for another drink, and the next thing I knew I was dancing in my undergarments, with May’s gauzy butterfly wings strapped to my arms and back and Daniel in just his trousers and his suspenders. One of my black stockings dangled down his naked chest like a necktie, and his hair was all mussed from my hands. His shirt and vest and the rest of my clothing buried the wreckage of the lamp, and we avoided the mess and giggled like children, and then another lamp broke, and before long I was straddling him down on the floor, gripping his shoulders, watching him close his eyes and moan while we both struggled to find some sort of relief. None was to be had, so we yanked our undergarments back up our legs and drank again, and a pistol somehow made its way into my hands. A pair of safety goggles protected my eyes, and Daniel stood behind me, his warm torso snug against my back. He helped me point the silver barrel toward one of the glasses on the table, but my target wobbled and blurred into two brandy snifters.

  “You just squeeze,” he said near my ear, his breath hot on my skin, and a thrill of danger surged through me, followed by another loud fit of laughter.

  “Squeeze,” he said again, and I pulled the trigger and fired a bullet into a wall, hoping to God no one lived next door.

  He helped me fire a second time, and the snifter burst to thousands of pieces before my eyes. Brandy bled across the table and trickled down to the floor in a thick stream of red. I started to think of the flu and nosebleeds, so I took the barrel of the gun and smashed the second glass to pieces, just to hear it shatter.

  The music played faster and faster, and we ran our tongues all over each other and climbed on top of each other, and somehow we damaged more of that apartment. Glass kept breaking. Booze stained the floor. End tables collapsed on their sides. I bit Daniel’s neck and clawed his back and howled with a primitive roar.

  The last thing I remember of that bacchanalian night was lying on my stomach in his bed, with him on top of me, and I was crying into his pillow. I sobbed for the dead, and for him and me, and he crawled off of me and ran his hands through my hair, begging me not to cry, pleading with me to stay with him.

  Chapter 20

  A man’s voice called out, “What the hell happened in here?”

  I jolted awake and found the midday sun plowing through the striped curtains of Daniel’s room, heating my bare feet, which dangled over the strings of his guitar at the end of the bed. I moved my leg and accidentally strummed an off-key chord with one of my big toes.

  Daniel slept on his back beside me, not moving.

  I attributed the voice to a dream. Or maybe a passerby on the sidewalk outside.

  Nothing to worry about, I told myself. Go back to sleep.

  I tucked myself under the covers and nuzzled down inside a pocket of heat and safety.

  Just as I got myself good and cozy, the floorboards outside the bedroom door whined with the weight of footsteps. Glass clattered and tinkled, as if someone were cleaning up our wreckage from the night before.

  “Was ist das?” asked that unknown voice I’d heard before. “What the hell happened?”

  I shrank down under the covers and whispered, “Daniel! Oh, God. Daniel, wake up! Hurry!”

  Daniel didn’t stir, and my chest nearly burst, for a man suddenly edged his way inside the room. His face and brown hair matched that of Albrecht Schendel in the wedding photograph, and I knew it was happening again.

  No, no, no, no, no!

  I struggled to breathe and stay stock-still at the same time. My heart burned as though it bled throughout my chest.

  The man meandered across the bedroom floor, his neck tense, eyes narrowed, but, to my relief, he didn’t seem to notice his brother and me lying in the bed. He slid the guitar off the end of the mattress, spilling an aching-cold chill across my feet, and positioned the instrument in the corner where it usually rested. I heard the plunk of the neck bumping the juncture in the walls.

  He turned and walked over to Daniel’s desk. With the softest whisper of his fingers, he rubbed his hand across the wood, his back toward me. No matter how much I told my eyes to stop seeing him, Albrecht Schendel would not go away. He refused to become a figment of my imagination.

  I drew another short breath, rolled over to Daniel’s side, and struggled to burrow my body into the small slip of space between him and the mattress. Daniel’s skin felt as frigid as a block of ice next to mine. He didn’t move. I shuddered with the fear that he lay dead beside me—the flu or the alcohol had killed him. His murdered brother’s spirit stood in the room with us, while Daniel’s stiff and lifeless body sheltered my left side.
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  Albrecht retreated, and I stayed in my paralyzed state, my cheeks sopping wet and my lips salty with tears. Footsteps retreated down the staircase. The front door shut down below.

  I sat up in bed and squeezed my nails into Daniel’s left arm.

  His eyes shot open. “Autsch! Scheisse!” He grabbed his damaged skin. “What are you doing?”

  “I saw your brother.”

  His face went still and pale. “What?”

  “He came into the room with us, just now.” I peered over my shoulder to the parts of the room where I’d just seen Albrecht, half-expecting him to manifest again. “He rested your guitar back in the corner where it belongs.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Daniel without a trace of doubt in his voice. He didn’t even sit up to look at the guitar. “You imagined it.”

  “I tend to see spirits—harbinger spirits—before people close to me die, and—”

  “You imagined it.” He pulled me back down to the mattress beside him, and my right cheek fell against the cold sheet. “Get some more sleep. We’re both just exhausted.”

  “But—”

  “Go to sleep, Liebling. We need to rest so we don’t feel sick as dogs when we come to again. You’re probably already in the grip of a hangover. There’s no such thing as ghosts. You imagined him.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to the stark silence of the streets outside, which should have been bustling with the sounds of bicycles and Model Ts and the chatter of workers and shoppers. Instead, the world resembled a music box that had wound itself all the way down and breathed its last chiming note.

  WHEN I AWOKE AGAIN, the darkness of night had settled back over the room, and the band lulled the town with a piano-heavy piece that reminded me of childhood nights, when Mama soothed me on her lap after nightmares spoiled my sleep.

  Daniel’s eyes blinked open beside me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Are you?”

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I don’t feel as sick as I thought I would. Maybe, after that monster flu and the migraines I used to suffer, a hangover feels like nothing more than a dull headache.”

  “Or maybe”—he smiled and stretched an arm above the pillow—“your body is simply built to enjoy German imports.”

  I barked a laugh and propped myself up on my right elbow. An object lying in the bed next to his head immediately caught my eye and dampened my mood.

  I shrank back. “Why is that gun in the bed with us?”

  He tilted his head to peek back at the weapon, which lay halfway under the pillow behind his head, the barrel and wide-open mouth exposed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember which one of us brought it in here. God knows what we were doing with it.” With a rustle of the sheet, he flipped himself onto his stomach and clicked a lever on the gun.

  “Daniel!” I scooted away on the mattress. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s all right.” He plunked the pistol in the upper corner of the bed and rolled onto his back again. “God, I haven’t had that much fun while drunk since before the war.”

  “Why do you have a pistol?”

  He shrugged. “Albrecht kept it, to protect us and the store. He stored it in one of the drawers by the cash register.”

  “Was he not able to reach it, then?”

  Daniel blinked. “What?”

  “Was he up in his room when they came the night of the murder?”

  “He was at his girl Nora’s house, but—”

  “Then how . . .” I wrinkled my brow. “Did he walk in on them vandalizing the place? Is that what happened? How did it happen?”

  “Oh, Christ, Ivy.” Daniel wrapped a hand around mine, and his eyes turned damp and bloodshot. His nostrils fluttered. “Stop asking me questions like that. I don’t want to say anything more about the murder. You’ve already heard enough.”

  “I can’t stop asking.” I lowered my head against his chest. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let it go. They didn’t hurt you, too, did they? Were you here? Did you see it happen?”

  “No, they didn’t hurt me. Stop talking about them.”

  “I hope you’re able to forgive me.”

  “Forgive you for what? You weren’t the one who did anything.”

  “Their names . . .” A sharp ache rippled down my throat. “Their names are Frank and Peter Rowan.” I squeezed my eyes shut and felt Daniel go rigid beneath me. “I don’t know if you ever learned that information about them, but they were drunk and angry about Billy’s death in the war. They had no right to come in here and kill anyone. I still can’t bear the thought of what they did, and I keep seeing them beat your brother over and over inside my head. Please, I need to know, do you forgive me for sharing the same blood as them?”

  “I forgive you, but there’s honestly no reason to, Ivy. Stop bearing their guilt for them.”

  “Don’t kill yourself because of them.” I lifted my head and winced yet again at the sight of the gun at the head of the bed. “Please, I’m still so worried you’ll do something to yourself.”

  “I’m not going to kill myself.”

  “Do you promise? Swear to God. Swear upon your brother’s grave.”

  “Ivy.” He pulled me down close to him. “Come here. I want to tell you something.”

  My heart lurched. I readjusted my hands against both his chest and the mattress to steady myself. “What? You’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t be nervous. I just want to tell you that this poor world would actually be better off without me. I’m not saying that because I’m planning to commit suicide, but you should know, I’ve killed . . .”

  “I know. You told me that. The war . . .”

  “I’ve killed women and children.”

  My lips parted, and a shaky stream of air pattered out of my mouth and rustled through his hair.

  “On my twentieth birthday, in the summer of 1914”—his hand trembled on my shoulder—“the German army put me on a train with all the other new recruits without telling us where we were heading. We traveled for well over a day and eventually found ourselves at the Belgian-German frontier. A few days later, we marched into Belgium with orders to make war against the Belgian armed forces.” He stopped for breaths of air, his chest expanding and contracting below my palm. “Even though they instructed us to shoot only soldiers, they encouraged us to defend our lives and the Fatherland against any citizens who rebelled against our invasion. We killed farmers and young men wanting to protect their towns and their country, and the regular part of my brain shut down. We had to turn into unthinking killers. One of my friends couldn’t do it—he panicked and tried to run—so they made us shoot him, to teach us all a lesson. I stood in a firing squad and shot him to death, my own friend, and I forced myself to feel nothing.”

  I dug my teeth into my bottom lip and made no response, aside from a soft whimper I hadn’t intended to produce. I myself attempted to feel nothing, but a terrible weight pushed down on my lungs and my heart.

  Daniel turned his face away from me and blinked with a long and dreamlike movement, as if succumbing to sleep. “And then we invaded homes. Attacked civilians. Men. Women. Children. We had to show them we were in charge, and it felt good for a while, turning off that human side, reaping the spoils of a victor. But then, sometime later, I’m not even sure which date it was or how long I’d been in Belgium, we came upon a farmhouse, and my commanding officer wanted me to bayonet a girl, no more than eighteen, while he watched.” Daniel closed his eyes and swallowed with a sharp bob of his Adam’s apple. “We were in her family’s barn, and I think he was testing me—making sure I wasn’t one of the weak ones about to turn on the army.”

  His breathing weakened to a choppy sound. He grimaced and, with his free hand, he rubbed the pink line encircling his throat, as though the mark still burned and strangled. “I had to stab her,” he said, “several times, to get her to die. Blood spilled out of her mouth as she lay there bene
ath me, her life draining away, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, Gott. How can I keep fighting for the Fatherland—how can I ever kiss the lips of a woman again—after seeing what I’ve done to this poor girl?’”

  I rose up to a seated position and rested my elbows against the sheet on my knees, not looking at him, not touching him. The band played on, teasing of normalcy and mirth, but each note of the piano became an unseen hand that wrung my heart—squeezing it, pulverizing it—until I couldn’t stand to breathe.

  Daniel reached out and rubbed my lower back, which stiffened at his touch. “As I told you before,” he said, “I risked my neck and escaped. I wanted to start my life over with my brother in America, knowing he started over when life soured for him in Europe. But it’s never quite worked. I’ve never felt needed or whole or redeemed”—he swallowed loud enough for me to hear, and his hand went still on my back—“until you showed up and asked me to ease your pain.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t stop imagining him stabbing a Belgian girl with a bayonet, even though I knew, deep down, that our dear Billy must have killed people, and that beautiful Eddie Dover showered men with bullets from his flying war machine. I saw her, though—a dying girl with a mouth and chin covered in dark-red blood, like all those poor, suffering victims in agony from the Spanish influenza—while he stood above her with the stained tip of his bayonet.

  He withdrew his hand from my spine. “This is why I didn’t want to share my secrets.” His voice hardened. “You won’t even look at me now, will you?”

  “I don’t know what to say. I know it’s war and you were following orders, but—” I tossed the sheet off my legs. “I don’t know what to say.”

  I fetched clean clothing out of my luggage and made a beeline toward the bathroom next to the kitchen, past the broken lamps and all the other damage we had hurled upon the place in our hedonistic idiocy. I washed my face and dressed myself while my legs shook with the urge to run.

  I passed back through the apartment to fetch my shoes.

  Daniel, fully dressed and cleaning up one of the lamps in the living room, stood up straight with a shard of blue glass in his hand. “Where are you going?”