by Hart, Joe
John pulled the truck around the short loop and stopped in line with the front door. He breathed in and let out a shuddering breath. The nausea he had pushed away the night before crept back in. He hadn’t had a drink since the night he told Lance everything he knew about the young man’s origins, and it was beginning to catch up with him. He hadn’t gone this long without alcohol in well over fifteen years. The shaking in his hands and the unsteadiness in his legs he could handle, but the roiling sickness of his stomach was almost unbearable.
He breathed in a few more times, rubbing the webbing between his thumb and forefinger with his opposite hand. May had done this to Henry when he came down with the stomach flu. She’d said it was an Old-World cure, that she’d read it in a natural medicine book somewhere. John hadn’t put much faith in it then, but it had calmed his son, and it seemed to be doing the trick now. The nausea eased enough for him to open his door and get onto his feet beside the truck.
The air felt like a wet blanket over his shoulders as he shuffled around to the bed of the pickup. His shirt dampened further, and he felt a bead of sweat drizzle down the middle of his chest. He reached over the side of the truck and grasped the handle of the gas can and slid it to the rear of the bed. The can in the shed was beginning to get a little light, and he hated running out when there was work to be done.
The tailgate stuck when he tried to open it and he cussed out loud at it, willing it to release. After another tug, it did. He slid the can out and set it beside him on the ground, then slammed the gate shut. He would have to start thinking about a different vehicle soon; the old Ranger was beginning to fall apart.
“You and me both,” John muttered as he bent and picked up the can from the gravel.
The sky looked lower, and waves had started to beat a steady rhythm on the rocks below. He decided that he’d better hurry if he was going to get any work done before the rain decided the day.
“John.”
He heard the whisper just as he took a step toward the shed. The door to the house had swung open. John watched the entry for movement, but when no one emerged, he moved closer, peering into the dim interior.
“Lance? You here?” John took another step before the voice from within the house stopped him dead in his tracks.
“John. Your lies have finally caught up with you. May and your son are here with us.”
The low, guttural speech pattern couldn’t be mistaken. He had heard it too many times over the years when collecting his check, the German accent hiding beneath layers of years speaking English, but still there.
“Erwin?” John croaked, his throat cinching shut. The air in his lungs was too warm, as if he’d breathed dishwater instead of oxygen. He couldn’t have heard the voice, it must’ve been the heat finally getting to him. He squinted at the door. Something moved deep within the house. A fluttering of whiteness, like someone lunging between the rooms, trying to be seen and not seen at the same time. John turned and started walking toward the truck, certain he had the beginnings of a heat stroke.
“John.”
The voice froze his guts solid, and for the second time he stopped, his muscles rigid while his heart punched at his ribs. The gas can dropped from his hand. He turned. The doorway still stood empty.
“May?”
“You killed me, John. Killed us both. You left those pills out on purpose, I always knew you thought Henry was a burden.”
John’s mouth had turned into a cottony desert without words. His mind reeled. “No, May, I loved Henry, both of you. I woulda never hurt him, you know that.”
“Liar.” May’s voice sounded cold and distant but still full of malice. “You killed us both—Henry with the pills, me with the cancer. You helped it grow, like your precious bushes and shrubs, and nurtured it along with your emotionless soul.”
John took a shaking step toward the house and saw another flit of white near the living room. I’m speaking with my dead wife. The thought sped through his mind, but he answered anyway. “May, you know I loved you, still love you. I—”
“Da.”
John stopped again. “Henry?” His voice crumbled as tears ran with the sweat down the sides of his face. His heart ached, and he had to restrain himself from bolting toward the house. He could almost feel Henry in his arms, the smell of his hair after a bath, his smiling face mirroring his own. The forty-five years since he had last seen his son melted away.
“Henry?” John pleaded again.
“They’re here with us, John,” Erwin’s voice answered. “They’re waiting for you. Come inside.”
John felt himself moving, the heat pressing on him from all directions. His vision narrowed to the outline of the door like a hazy tunnel pulling him inexorably forward.
“You come in here and make this better, John Hanrahan. You atone for what you’ve done.”
John halted. Something in May’s voice made him pause. It had sounded like there was liquid in her throat, her voice thickening. John blinked and his vision expanded, and he looked past the doorway.
The rictus of Erwin’s ruined face hung in the shadows, suspended there without bodily form supporting it. John watched as the teeth parted and a wet chuckle escaped from the thing’s disembodied mouth. The face dissolved into nothing and everything became still again.
John backed away, his breath hitching beneath his soaked shirt and his white hair hanging across his forehead. His mouth opened and closed like a fish asking for air. His hands clenching painfully, disturbing the arthritis within. The gas can bumped against the side of his foot and he stopped. John looked down at it, as if he had never seen it before, and reached to pick it up. It felt heavy in his hand, a good feeling. There was plenty of gas within the red plastic.
John walked toward the house and up the few stairs, unscrewing the cap as he disappeared inside.
The nurse’s key spun within the lock and Lance heard the tumblers falling away.
“Go right in, sir. Take as much time as you need,” the nurse said with a smile. She looked twenty years younger than any other worker in the nursing home, her blond hair curled and her uniform pressed in an almost obsessive way.
“I know you’re supposed to stand right outside the door, but could you give us a little privacy?” Lance asked as he motioned to the bench that sat a few feet from the elevator doors.
She smiled again and nodded in an obliging way. “She always seems so peaceful. I’ll be right over here if you need me.”
Lance thanked her and watched as she walked down the hall toward the bench. When he turned, he felt a flooding sense of déjà vu. The room looked exactly as it had during his last visit. The bed still made in the corner. The desk just below the high window. And the woman, who, for all he knew, hadn’t moved since he’d left. He stepped into the room and felt something change at once. It was like he had dropped several hundred feet toward sea level, the pressure of the air nudging against his eardrums. There seemed to be less air in the room as he crossed the space between the door and the desk, and he moved with effort through it.
Annette stared at the wall, her hair uncombed and her hands bundled beneath a light blanket resting over her lap. A new crossword along with a fresh pencil sat before her. The sharpened tip of the pencil pointed directly at Lance as he sat in the extra chair. The old woman remained statuesque, and for a moment Lance wondered if she’d died in the chair. He imagined her soul escaping without bothering to shut her eyes as it left, leaving her like an abandoned house with the windows open. He leaned closer and listened in the stillness of the pressurized room. Her breath whispered between her parted lips, and he sat back.
“Annette, I know you can hear me.” Lance watched for any reaction. Not a tremor broke the semblance of a painted picture. “Erwin killed Gerald Rhinelander, didn’t he? Along with all the other men who used to work for him. He killed them and dumped their cars in the lake, didn’t he?” Lance kept his voice low but increased its intensity. His eyes bored holes in the old woman’s face. H
e searched for an answer, some sign that she had heard him wherever she hid within herself. Even the blink of a wrinkled eyelid would have given him encouragement, but she did nothing. Her eyes never left the blank wall before her.
Lance reached into his back pocket and found the edges of the envelope there. He yanked it free and pulled the contents out into the dim light of the room. With a flip of his fingers, he turned the photo around and held it up several inches in front of Annette’s staring eyes.
“This man, Gerald Rhinelander. You’ve seen him before. He came to your house and Erwin killed him.” Lance’s voice began to shake. The emotional weight of the past few days, compounded by the squeezing air of the room, began to bleed through. His hand trembled, causing the picture of Gerald by his car in the sunlight to vibrate. Lance shook his head and dropped the photo onto the desk, covering the bulk of the crossword. He could see half of Gerald’s last name and the W in Wulf, and he marveled at the thought of this picture ending up here in this place of forgotten words and life, covering the name of the murdered man that graced its surface.
Lance looked at Annette again. Nothing could bring her back. It was clear now. The path she had taken had been too narrow to turn around and she was stuck somewhere in the inner sanctum of her psyche, unable to move one way or another.
All at once he felt defeat overcome him like a black shade being drawn. There would be no answers for him here; it was just another blocked alley in his life. So many times he had begun to hope that he would shed the skin of his past, that he would be reborn to pursue an existence without fear and suffering at every turn. He supposed it was too much to hope for. For some there could be no solace, only a constant weariness of what would come next.
He stood and swore quietly in his frustration and began to walk toward the door. He had to get out of this room. He needed to feel the sky above him, even if all it held for him now were thunder and the gray of forgetting. There was only one thing he could do now: run. Run away from it all, far enough to leave the souls of his father and grandfather behind to whatever malevolence they had planned. He had to leave this town, the house, his story, and Mary.
Mary.
A sound stopped him at the doorway. He turned toward an overhead vent, thinking the cooling system had unsuccessfully tried to start. It had been a keening sound, like air rushing over metal. It came again and his scalp shrunk tight to his skull. He turned and looked at the old woman, who still sat facing the wall.
“Heeeee.” Her voice was a breeze blowing through a rusty pipe.
Lance felt himself moving, and then the chair was beneath him again. A hand, skeletal with fingernails as black as sunflower seeds, had crept from beneath the blanket and now rested on the picture. Her eyes had shifted from the wall, and were examining the photo just as intently.
“Heee.” Annette made an attempt to swallow, and a tongue so dry Lance could hear it rasp against her lips came into view.
“He,” Lance said, willing the words forth from the withered form beside him.
“Heee didn’t.” Annette’s brow creased and she swallowed again. “He didn’t kill him.”
Lance blinked at the old woman, whose eyes ran back and forth across the picture like it was about to disappear and she was committing it to memory.
“Erwin didn’t kill him?” Lance asked, bafflement the sort he had never encountered before saturating his thoughts. Annette’s head shook from side to side in slow denial. Her head turned, and for the first time her eyes looked into his.
“I did.”
Lance sat back in the chair as Annette’s attention floated back to the picture.
“You did?” he asked, the disbelief so acute within his voice that he felt sure she would deny the statement. Instead, he watched her eyes begin to glaze over, and within seconds, the wall had become her focal point once again. Lance realized what was happening and sat forward.
“Why? Why did you kill Gerald? Did he do something to you? Were you seeing each other? What? What happened?” Lance’s eyes roamed over the old woman’s face, watching for a sign that she was formulating an answer. When her stare deepened, he began to panic. He reached out and snapped his fingers before her face, over and over.
“Stay with me, Annette. I need you to stay with me.” Frantically, Lance looked around for something that would help him keep her from falling back into the abyss from which she had emerged. The crossword was the only thing that stood out to him. He held it up in front of her face, along with the picture of Gerald.
“Do you remember him? Gerald Rhinelander?” Nothing. Lance looked at the crossword and an idea struck him. “Who is Wulf?” he asked, holding the black-and-white checkering within a few inches of her nose.
Several seconds crept by and then the wrinkled eyelids blinked in their sunken sockets. Her tongue scratched across her lips again.
“Wulf is Metzger. Heinrich is Erwin.” Her voice had cleared some, like an unused engine finally firing on all cylinders. “He told me that over and over before we crossed the ocean.”
“Who told you that?” Lance asked, his voice low and, he hoped, soothing. Annette seemed to slip away and then return, her eyes blinking.
“Erwin, Heinrich. Both the same. We came on the ship with the others. Heinrich’s face was still bleeding. I remember the bandages he would change, sopping with blood.”
Lance nodded. “Where the SS cut him?” Annette turned a surprised gaze in his direction, actually seeing him for the first time.
“He did it himself,” she said.
“What?” It was the only word that could articulate the confusion ravaging his mind. “John said that you’d owned land during the war. You employed Jews to keep them safe. He said the Nazis made an example of Erwin.”
Annette closed her eyes and shook her head in a quick movement. “Lies. His lies to keep us safe. To keep him safe.”
“What do you mean?”
Annette sighed, and it sounded like ancient tissue paper being crumpled. Her head tilted forward and Lance feared that she would succumb once again to the silence, but soon words began to float out from beneath the veil of translucent hair enclosing her face.
“There was something wrong inside him. I knew it from the beginning. Maybe it was what drew me to him. I thought I could change it. But it was too deep, like a splinter that only slips farther in when you dig at it. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he was.”
She paused, and Lance noticed that she had begun to rock in the chair. She reminded him of a child relating a particularly bad dream to a parent.
“He joined the army young. He told his family and friends that it was idealism. That he wanted to serve the Führer.” Annette raised her head so Lance could see her eyes through the curtain of hair. “He wanted to kill.”
Lance shifted in his chair. The pressure in the room felt nearly unbearable. He opened his jaw and tried to alleviate the discomfort in his ears, but to no avail. He was about to ask Annette if she felt it too when she continued.
“A blood lust. That’s what it was. He needed to see it. He loved to watch it drain from someone. He’d cut himself sometimes too, just to mingle his own with someone else’s. He never told me what he did at the camp he watched over. I can’t imagine. He had unlimited numbers to work on, to carve up, without anyone to answer to.”
Lance sat back in disbelief. “He was a war criminal? My grandfather? He presided over a concentration camp? Fuck me,” he said, putting his face in his hand and relishing in the darkness it brought, the oblivion. He wished that he could sink into it and out of the world without a trace. He wished none of it had ever happened. He wished his existence had been an idea never fully realized.
“The call came one day after I’d gotten home from the market,” Annette said. “It was snowing. I remember the flakes falling outside, and I wondered how something so beautiful could be, while something else so terrible happened around it. The phone rang, it was Heinrich. He told me it was time. We’d gone over it many
times before he’d left for his post. We had our story and Heinrich had documents forged before he left. Our pictures with different names he’d picked out. My name is Gisela. I never liked Annette.” She stopped again, her gaze clouding over and her brow pulling down into a grimace.
Lance watched her—an enigma of a woman from a time he knew next to nothing about, her words spilling out from deep within where they’d been held for years. She struggled with whatever memory plagued her, and at last she won out as she swallowed and spoke again.
“He came home in a rush that night. He said the allies were advancing and that we had to leave. The war was lost. I went to get my mother’s silverware from under the stairs, but he said there wasn’t time. A car that would take us to the coast was leaving in an hour for France, but I had to do something first. He took me into the bathroom and had me stand by the sink with my mirror. He told me to hold it steady and to not let it drop, no matter what. He had his knives.” Her voice fell to a whisper and Lance saw that her eyes no longer registered him, or even the walls surrounding her. She was back in that bathroom, her hands, white-knuckled, gripping a mirror while her husband drew a blade out and lifted it toward his face.
“He made me watch as he sawed through his nose. He cut it right off. I can still hear it hitting the floor like a dead mouse. And he took his lip too. He cut it from his gum, and he told me he would always smile this way.” A tear so delicate and fine that Lance thought it would shatter rolled out of one eye and into the lines of skin on her face. “They took one look at his face before we got on the boat and let us pass. He couldn’t be recognized. Besides, who would turn a man away with the proper documents and missing his nose? We came here and had just enough money to build our house and start a business.”
