Gretel

by Christopher Coleman

  And if it turned out not to be the repository of danger and mystery that Gretel suspected it was, the nagging curiosity of the whole thing would at least be settled.

  Odalinde’s only routine outing each week occurred on Thursdays, when she left precisely at four in the afternoon and returned sometime around eight; this according to Hansel, who hadn’t a clue where she went. Gretel mentally added the uncovering of that mystery to the list of things she would attempt to tackle this week.

  But that was a problem for later. Gretel’s concern now was to discover the contents of the cabinet, and how, if at all, they affected her family. If, in the end, it turned out Odalinde was only storing photos of her dead grandmother, or some ancient love letters from a teenage sweetheart, then so be it. But Gretel knew instinctively it was more than that.

  The current lock on the cabinet was formidable, and, in fact, was a replacement for the one Gretel’s father had put in originally when Odalinde first arrived—Odalinde declaring that lock to be ‘perfectly unsuitable.’ She had made some reference to ‘Back Country burglars,’ but Gretel had never heard of such a thing and concluded ‘Back Country burglars’ was just code for ‘Hansel and Gretel.’

  Gretel’s first idea to access the cabinet was to go in through the side of one of the adjoining cabinets, removing it, or even cutting a small hole that could be glued back once the contents were known. But the walls of the cupboard were solid wood, oak probably, and to go through them would have required more destruction than she’d be able to cause and repair in one short evening.

  Her other idea was to go in from the top, through the sink above the cabinet; but, similar to the walls, the basin was heavy, and would have been far too difficult for her to remove, especially with all the attached plumbing. And she hadn’t the time to find someone with the skills to deal with all that. No, the only way in, she decided, was through the door. And that meant she needed the key.

  This conclusion sat well with Gretel, and she was filled with hope. Getting the key would surely prove difficult, but not impossible, and she’d have to plan the thing carefully. But that it could be done, she was more than hopeful.

  Gretel ruminated on the framework of a plan for a while before dropping the subject entirely and spending the remainder of Monday rowing on the lake, clearing her mind of any plans or plots or fantasies of the future. She’d only recently learned the sacredness of quiet, and the cleansing properties of it, and considered this new exercise in nothingness—she thought of it as having a ‘white mind’—to be no less valuable than engaging her brain in the throes of work. The natural marvel of trees and water and untarnished air that had surrounded Gretel since birth were suddenly awakened to her, and she now basked in their stillness whenever possible. There was a time for designing and scheming, obviously, and she took pride in her industrious and conspiratorial inclinations, but she also had no doubt that peril awaited the unrested mind. And, in fact, it was often in the times of total clarity and peace that the ideas she needed most came to her.

  And here it had come again, just as she began to turn the small boat that had become her sanctuary back toward home: the keys to Odalinde’s cabinet were always kept in her bag, and her bag was never left unattended. If Gretel could pull her away from the bag, distract her for just a minute, she could grab them.

  She had an idea, and she would need Hansel’s help. It was by no means an infallible plan, but it was something.

  ***

  The next day Gretel decided to walk with Hansel from school, which was something she hadn’t done since she started working at the orchard. She needed to discuss the newly-devised plan with him, and this, she figured, would be the safest time. Other than her erratic shopping jaunts, and the Thursday night outing, Odalinde always seemed to be around, and had a knack for appearing from the shadows of a tree or the back of a dimly-lit room during a conversation, or entering a room just when the gist of a thought was being spoken. She was sneaky—it was always the first word that came to Gretel’s mind when she thought of her future stepmother—and she, Gretel, was taking no chances of being overheard.

  But Gretel also regretted the pretense of ‘catching up’ with her brother as the reason she was walking with him today, and despite her eagerness to construct the plan, and the reasonable explanation that she was off work for the week, she aborted the discussion for the time being. She realized the time together should be used to catch up with him, to rediscover Hansel’s life; the plot against Odalinde could wait a few hours, even a day if necessary.

  “Are you going to try for any teams next year? Soccer maybe? You like soccer, right?”

  “I’m not good at soccer,” Hansel replied flatly, “I’m not fast enough.”

  “What? That’s silly! You’re plenty fast for soccer! And besides, you don’t need to be fast for all the positions.” Gretel was giving it a go, but it felt forced. Clearly she was rusty at engaging her brother. And she really did want to encourage him to go out for a team!

  “I don’t like it anyway,” Hansel said, and that was the end of that. The boy was going to play or he wasn’t, and what she said wasn’t going to change anything.

  The siblings walked the road in silence for several minutes.

  “Do you like her, Hansel?” Gretel finally said, “Odalinde, I mean.”

  Hansel looked over at his sister, trying to gauge the answer she wanted. But Gretel kept her face as casual and neutral as the tone of her voice.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess,” Hansel answered.

  Gretel nodded, maintaining her breezy air.

  “I know you hate her though.”

  Gretel stopped walking and Hansel followed suit, sheepishly avoiding his sister’s eyes in the process. She scrunched her forehead and smiled weakly at Hansel. “What? No. I…I don’t…I don’t really hate her.” She glanced at the sky. “No, that’s not the right word. I just…I guess I just don’t trust her. And that’s only because I don’t know anything about her.” Her voice became shrill. “And now, all of a sudden, she’s marrying Father, moving into our house for good, and we don’t really know anything about her.”

  Gretel stopped, and then dropped her voice to its normal pitch and slowed her tempo.

  “I know that Odalinde and I have had our conflicts, but we’re both women, Hansel, and sometimes…I don’t know, sometimes women take a little longer to get along. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s true.”

  Gretel felt she was losing control of the conversation, and in doing so making Hansel feel more insecure, which was the opposite of her intention. If she wasn’t going use this time to pitch her brother on being an accomplice to some future cabinet raid, she wanted at least to restore some stability to his psyche. Maybe even make him laugh a time or two. What she didn’t want was to get him thinking that his future stepmother was out to steal their home and Father, and that she couldn’t be trusted. And that seemed to be right where the conversation was headed.

  They both started again toward home and Gretel stayed quiet the rest of the way, disappointed at her clumsiness. She decided she may not ask for Hansel’s help at all. It meant she would have to come up with another idea since her original plan called for his diversion, but so be it. If he wasn’t ready, then it wasn’t fair to involve him. But either way, Hansel or not, Gretel still had every intention of finding out what was in that cabinet.

  The children reached the long, dusty driveway that led to the Morgan house when Hansel finally spoke. “I know something about her,” he said.

  From the tone of her brother’s voice, Gretel could instantly tell this ‘something’ was not insignificant, and she stopped quickly, grabbing Hansel’s arm lightly and turning him toward her. She studied his eyes and could see that he had struggled with this knowledge for a while now, and probably had more than one internal debate about whether to share it. Gretel felt a bit angry at first—that he hadn’t trusted her with this information—but the feeling fell away as quickly as it developed.
The truth was if he had known this thing two months ago—this secret—there was no doubt he’d have confided in his sister. But Gretel’s work at the orchard had abruptly snatched her out of his life, and with the new figure of Odalinde now tending to Hansel’s daily needs, as cold and neglectful as that figure may have seemed to Gretel, Hansel’s loyalties had become less defined.

  “Is it something you want to tell me?” she replied.

  Hansel nodded.

  Gretel was careful to take it slow. “I understand if you’re scared, Han, and if you don’t want to tell me, whatever it is you know, or you want to tell me some other time, that’s okay.” She placed her finger under her brother’s chin and lifted it to meet his eyes with hers. It was a move her mother had perfected with both her children. “But no matter what,” she said, “I’ll never let anything happen to you. Okay?”

  Hansel nodded again, this time more contemplatively. “What about you though? I don’t want anything to happen to you.” He looked away, embarrassed.

  Gretel gave a sad smile and sighed, a glaze of tears suddenly blurring her vision. She pulled her brother close and hugged him, resting her cheek on his dirty blond hair. Finally she said, “Do you still think about Mom?”

  Hansel paused for a moment, thoughtful, and then said, “I used to think about her every day, “but now sometimes I don’t.”

  “That happens to me too. That’s okay. But then I remember to think about her and I get happy. So it’s important that we don’t forget her, okay? She loved us very much. So very much.” And then, “And she wanted us to be happy.”

  Hansel let this sink in. “But what if thinking about her makes me sad?”

  Gretel squeezed her eyes tight and the tears began to drop on Hansel’s head. “Just don’t forget her, Han,” she said, and used all her will to stifle the sobs forming inside her.

  The children stood silently embraced for a moment in the openness of the faded gravel driveway, like two figures holding on for their lives in the eye of a raging storm.

  Hansel finally pulled away from his sister and stared coldly into her eyes. “I want to tell you what happened, Gretel. But I don’t want to tell you here.”

  ***

  Rifle Field rested just past the Weinhiemmer Cannery and derived its name from the late afternoon sounds of factory workers, ostensibly drunk, finishing their shifts and then honing their marksmanship skills on those containers deemed unsuitable for market. The cannery itself, once a Back Country pillar of capitalism, had long been abandoned as a result of short-sighted management and a debilitating class-action lawsuit brought about by the families of dozens of botulism victims, several of whom had apparently died.

  These days, in addition to being a blot on the landscape, the cannery, with its surrounding fence and sprawling rusted paneling, acted as a barrier to Rifle Field. And with the winding lake that swept past the opposite side of the large swath of land, the field could really only be reached by water.

  When Gretel was younger, the Morgan family often picnicked in the field, and occasionally had even kept the name relevant by taking target practice at the side of the cannery. At one point, Heinrich Morgan had even taken steps to maintain the landscape of Rifle Field, hauling the mower out on the canoe to level the grass as well as by planting shrubs and flowers. The constant demands of the farm, however, saw this practice die quickly.

  And now, after remaining deserted for so long, Rifle Field had been resurrected as an asylum for Gretel, her own private hideaway from the demands of family and employer. She had, in fact, only taken to land there twice since she began her rowing excursions (she usually couldn’t spare the time and preferred to be on the water anyway), but she considered the field ‘hers’ now, and by all accounts, she was the only person to step foot on it in years. Until today, when her brother disembarked from the canoe and helped lay down the tarp on which they both now sat.

  “It was a couple of Saturdays ago.” Hansel began. “Not that long after you started working at the orchard.” He paused. “I think it was Saturday…I know it wasn’t Sunday because you weren’t home.”

  Gretel smiled, struggling not to pressure Hansel to the point. He was only eight, after all, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings or embarrass him by pointing out irrelevancies. They were in no hurry, and if it took all day, Gretel had every intention of letting her brother meander his way to the crux.

  “Anyway, Odalinde was getting into her cabinet like she does; you know how she gets into that creepy stoop in front of it?”

  Gretel smiled and nodded. Oh, she knew all right.

  “I was on the porch watching her, and she knew I was there but she didn’t know I was watching. But she was still covering everything up and staying really close to the door. And then when she was done looking at her stuff or whatever she does, and she was about to lock the door, right at that second Dad called out to her, loud, like he was hurt or scared or something. Right when she was about to lock it.”

  He stopped for a moment and his eyes widened. “It was like it was supposed to happen. It was weird.”

  Gretel was rapt with attention, not at all surprised at the timing of her father’s call. “And then what?” she said gently.

  “And then Odalinde jumped, and almost fell off her heels onto her back. But she caught herself, and then got up and ran to Dad’s room.”

  Hansel stopped and looked at Gretel, waiting for the revelation to sink in.

  Gretel stared back and finally said, “So?”

  “I didn’t think she locked it, Gretel. I could tell, just the way it happened and how she got so surprised. After Dad’s scream, she took the key out of the lock, but I could tell she didn’t turn it to lock the door. I could just tell. And then when she came out of Daddy’s room, she rushed out the front door and drove off in the truck.”

  Gretel felt a pang for her brother whenever he regressed to ‘Daddy,’ but she kept silent and her expression fixed.

  “I don’t know if she went to get medicine or food or what,” Hansel continued, “but she didn’t say anything. Or even look at me.”

  Gretel could see where the story was going, and she hoped more than gold it arrived there.

  “So I looked inside, Gretel. I opened it and looked inside.”

  Gretel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was this true? A grin the length of the lake formed on her face. She was so excited she wanted to grab her brother and squeeze him until he popped. All the elaborate thoughts of taking apart the cabinetry, and her plan of using Hansel as a decoy to pull Odalinde away from her bag so that Gretel could somehow steal the key and…and do what? She didn’t really know, and it didn’t matter! Hansel. Beautiful Hansel!

  But Gretel had to be realistic and temper her enthusiasm; what Hansel found only mattered to the extent that he could relay it to her. “What did you find, Han?”

  Hansel focused his stare in concentration, trying to get it all right. “I thought there was going to be all kinds of junk inside,” he said, “like loose papers and stuff. But when I opened the door, all I saw was that huge brown bag. You know the one?”

  Gretel nodded slowly, hanging on every word.

  “So I undid the clasp and started to open it, but then I saw the bag wasn’t all that was inside the cupboard. Behind it, all the way against the back, there was a book. A black book.”

  Gretel stared at her brother in astonishment.

  “It was your book, Gretel,” he said flatly, “except it wasn’t yours. I checked, yours was still where you always keep it.”

  Gretel’s throat tightened and a true fear took hold of her senses. She was terrified, speechless, trying at once both to understand how what Hansel was telling her could be, and what was to be done about it. Finally she managed, “Are you sure?”

  “I checked Gretel, your book was there. I know I’m not supposed to know where you keep it, but I…”

  Gretel cut him off, “I mean are you sure that it’s the same book? Maybe it just looked the
same. Maybe it was just another big black book. About something else.”

  “Orphism, Gretel, I read it on the cover. And all those crazy letters inside. It was the same book.” He stopped for a moment, remembering. “But there was something different about hers.”

  “What do you mean? Different how?” Gretel was losing her poise now and the shrillness in her voice was returning. She caught herself. “What was different, Han?”

  “There was lots of writing in her book—like handwriting, with pencil and ink. It was all over the pages, on every page, in between the sentences and at the tops and bottoms. Everywhere.”

  “Writing? Could you read it? Was it English?”

  “I could read most of it. It was definitely English, but a lot of it was sloppy and I didn’t really pay that much attention to what it was about. I just flipped through some of the pages—a lot of the pages—and the writing was everywhere.”

  It took a moment—longer than she would later admit—to occur to Gretel what it all meant, but when it finally did sink in, she gave a throaty giggle and then started laughing. It could only be one thing. A translation! The words had to be a translation!

  She quickly stood up on the tarp and walked off it into the tall grass where she began pacing in short laps, staring at the sky in wonder. Virtually every day for months she’d been looking at this book, trying to decipher a word here and there, hoping to get some idea what it was about. And had been utterly dreadful in doing so. And it turned out, apparently, that she’d been walking past the knowledge every time she entered or left the kitchen. Unbelievable!

  Gretel’s head was spinning with the fact that her father’s nurse—whom she trusted no further than she could toss her—was somehow in possession of the same book her grandfather had given her, and which had fascinated her for years. But even that mystery was superseded by the idea of finally knowing what the book was about, and Gretel quickly paced back toward the tarp.

  “Did you see at all what it said, Han, anything at all that might have told you what the book was about?”