by Sharon Potts
She crawled down the hallway, a few inches at a time, expecting Graeber to jump out of the shadows at any moment.
She reached the kitchen and grabbed one of the chairs to pull herself up. Her body was shaking badly, her vision blurry. Holding on to the chair, she reached for the wall, then made her way to the étagère that blocked the door to the storage rooms. The smell of cat musk was very strong.
The cats would keep him away.
The room was pitching and rolling. Lillian held on to the étagère. Her fingers touched the bag of cat food. She turned it over, watched it pour out over the floor.
Wulfie was terrified of cats. She was safe.
Kali was safe.
Her head was spinning, shadows moving up and down.
A large shadow coming toward her.
The scream froze in her throat.
“Is that why you feed the cats?” the shadow asked. “Because you believe they will keep him away?”
Her hands grasped the étagère behind her. The shadow came closer. Not a shadow, a man.
She heard the click of a light switch and the room exploded in brightness. She covered her eyes.
Her legs could barely hold her up. He was so close that she could smell his cigarette smoke and sweat.
“Nothing can keep him away,” the familiar baritone voice said.
She opened her eyes and looked into his pale green ones. At the distorted iris, like a keyhole to hell.
“And so we finally meet.” He smiled and his lip jerked downward.
“Graeber,” she whispered.
“You think my father’s still alive, old woman?”
Not Graeber. Graeber’s son. Of course.
“But don’t worry. My father told me everything. I’ve come for his painting, Ilse. And for his granddaughter.”
He was standing near the back door, leaving the hallway unblocked. She seized the bag of cat food and scattered it toward him.
He laughed. “I’m not afraid of cats, old woman.”
She grasped the wall, propelling herself forward, toward the front door.
He made no attempt to stop her. Maybe he would let her go. An old woman. What use was she to him? But she had to warn Kali. She had to save Kali.
Get outside. To a neighbor, a phone.
She reached the front foyer, panting like a dying dog.
He strode past her and blocked the door. Just like Graeber.
But not Graeber. His son. And he wanted Kali.
She turned toward the stairs, falling forward, banging her knees against the steps.
Get him away from the door, up the stairs. Maybe Kali would hear the commotion and wouldn’t come inside.
Lillian clutched the step and pulled herself forward. She felt him watching her as she climbed on her hands and knees, up, up, up.
Her arms and legs were about to fold beneath her, but she had to get him upstairs, away from the door. Away from Kali.
The upstairs hallway came into view.
A pain cut through her chest. Weak, so weak, she could hardly move. One more step. Her hand gripped the edge and she held on. Held on tight.
She could hear him climbing the stairs, getting closer, closer.
She clung to the top step.
He was behind her now, stepping around her trembling body like she was a sack of dirty clothes. In the next instant, he was standing at the top of the stairs. He looked like a monster that had risen from the blackest depths.
He stared down at her with his hellish eye. Then he smiled. “For you, Vati.”
She felt his shoe slide under her chest. He flipped her.
Ilse flew through the air, then bounced down the stairs.
Shadows and light and angels and her dear mama reaching for her.
Reaching for her, singing,
Oyfn pripetshik brent a fayerl,
Un inshtub iz heys . . .
61
Kali had nowhere to go. Nowhere but her grandmother’s house. She pulled into the driveway. Her arms ached and her fingers were blistered and bloodied from her rampage in her studio. But the physical destruction of her paintings hadn’t changed who she was—a monster’s granddaughter. Or the painful realization that her mother had killed herself when she’d learned the truth.
Kali hated Lillian for that. For her grandmother’s role in this bizarre, inescapable nightmare. But then Kali thought about the bits and pieces she’d heard of her grandmother’s story and wondered if perhaps Lillian, like herself, was a victim. All Kali knew for certain was that she hurt. And she didn’t know whom to turn to for comfort.
She closed the door of her Volvo and glanced across the dark yard at the house next door. Neil’s car was under the awning. He was back from visiting his mother. He’d been phoning Kali for the last hour, but she hadn’t answered. She had made her decision to tell no one her secret, not willing to chance any latent hatred her admission might release. Kali wasn’t worried for herself, but her baby had to be protected at all costs.
The lights in and around her grandmother’s house were out. Kali stepped onto the portico and reached for her keys, remembering as she did that she had run out the front door earlier without locking it. How could she have left her grandmother alone? Then she calmed herself. The man Lillian was worried about would be in his nineties. He couldn’t possibly still be around to hurt them.
Kali tested the knob. Locked. That didn’t make sense. She stepped back from the house and looked around at the hedges, trees, cracked sidewalks. Out here, everything appeared quiet, ordinary.
She unlocked the door, noticing a rank smell as she stepped inside the foyer. Cat musk? She flipped on the overhead light and gasped. “Oh no. Please, no.”
Her grandmother was lying on her back, her floral housedress up around her waist, her neck and limbs twisted in unnatural positions.
Kali doubled over, as though hit in the abdomen with a powerful one-two punch. The room blurred, went black, then came back into focus. Kali straightened up as the dizziness passed. She breathed through the pain until it subsided. Until she felt nothing at all. Then she crossed the foyer and crouched down beside the crumpled shape.
Dead. Her grandmother was dead.
Kali stared at the open blue eyes, at the upturned lips that seemed to be smiling.
She waited for the grief to hit her. Tears, a primal scream. That’s what had happened when Kali learned that her mother was dead. But Kali felt nothing. It was as though she had discovered a stranger’s body.
In a stranger’s house. Everything seemed off. The smells, the chill in the air. But even a stranger’s dead body would cause some emotional reaction, not this feeling of dislocation.
Maybe she was in a nightmare. She’d wake up and all of this would dissolve. The frightful painting, unfathomable revelations, Kali’s destruction in her studio, her grandmother’s body lying here twisted and broken.
Kali squeezed her eyes shut. Let this all be a dream, and when I open my eyes—
A knock on the door caused Kali to practically jump out of her skin.
“Kali?” Neil called from outside.
Kali could feel her heart pounding against her chest.
Her grandmother was still lying on the marble floor.
Not a nightmare.
There was something in her grandmother’s hand. Glittering. A thin gold chain. Kali eased the clenched fist open and took out the heart-shaped locket.
The knock again. “Kali?”
She slowly got up and put the locket in her pocket. Her body felt stiff and unfamiliar. She opened the door.
“Where did you go? Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Neil took in Kali’s face. “What’s wrong?”
She stepped aside so he could see.
“Oh, my God.” He rushed to the body. “What happened? Did she fall? Did you just find her like this?” He checked the body, then got back up and went to Kali. He rested his hands on her shoulders. “You better sit down. You’re in shock.” He led her toward the kitche
n. “I was worried when you didn’t answer your phone. Then I saw your car in the driveway, so I came right over.”
The smell of cat musk and rotting vegetation became stronger. Her feet crunched on something on the hallway floor. Small brown pebbles. They were everywhere.
“What the hell?” Neil said. “Cat food? She was feeding the cats?” He pulled out a kitchen chair and guided Kali into it. She heard him turn on the sink water. “Drink this. He handed her a glass. “I’ll call 9-1—” He stopped abruptly. “What happened to your hands?”
He took one in his own, and turned it over, examining the torn fingernails, the sharp cuts, the open bloody blisters from the scissors. “What is this, Kali? Did you go to see Seth? Were you fighting with him?”
She shook her head. She felt emotionally dead, but some part of her mind was alive and fighting furiously. The front door locked, even though Kali was sure she’d left it open. The smell of cat musk. Her grandmother’s broken body at the bottom of the stairs.
Someone had gotten into the house while Kali was gone, she felt certain of it. The man Lillian claimed was after the tiny painting. Had Lillian come downstairs, trying to keep him out? She would have locked the front door, maybe poured cat food all over the floor so she’d hear an intruder’s footsteps as they crunched down the hallway.
“Something happened,” Neil said. “You wouldn’t have left your grandmother alone. Tell me what’s going on.”
The house smelled like cat musk, so an intruder had likely gotten in through the back door. Had he found the key beneath the planter?
Kali got up and went to the back door. She unlocked it and went outside.
“Where are you going?” Neil asked.
“I need to check something.”
The smell of cat musk was very powerful. If the door had been left ajar, the smell would have gotten inside, permeating the house. Maybe the smell had roused Lillian from her bedroom. Kali bent over and shifted the planter away.
“What are you doing, Kali? If you think someone broke in, then we need to get the police out here. You can’t go around touching things.”
She slid her fingers under the planter. Gone. The key was gone.
“Come on, Kali. You’re not yourself. Get in the house. You’re making things worse for when the police get here. They’re going to ask questions.”
She followed him back inside. Thoughts were shooting around in her brain like stray fireworks. She could see everything clearly, like a picture she was composing in her mind. Someone coming in through the back door. Her grandmother, alarmed by a sound, terrified that he had come for the painting. The painting lying on top of the blanket where Kali had left it. Her grandmother panicking, thinking where to hide it.
Kali’s footsteps crunched as she stepped through the hallway toward the stairs.
“Now what are you doing? Talk to me.”
She continued into the foyer.
“Damn it, Kali. I have no idea what’s going on here, but the police will think you and I have been up to something.”
Against the yellowed marble floors, a floral housedress, a puff of white hair, arms and legs in a Picassoesque pose. Kali caught it in her peripheral vision as she averted her eyes from her grandmother’s body and climbed the stairs. Not her grandmother. Just a stranger.
“Kali?” Neil called from the hallway.
Kali could see it in images—the layout for a montage. A looming shadow at the top of the stairs. Her grandmother struggling past it. A push. Her frail body flying backward, bouncing down the stairs, smashing against marble, her neck twisting and breaking.
“I’m calling 911 now,” Neil called.
Kali was on autopilot, some part of her brain in strategic-survival mode, calling out instructions. Find the painting. Hide it. Protect the baby. No one must know the truth.
At the doorway to Lillian’s bedroom, Kali felt a shift in the air and a foreign smell, as though someone who didn’t belong had been here.
Find the painting, the voice in her head said.
Kali crossed the rug to her grandmother’s bed and ruffled through the blanket, sheets, and pillows. No painting.
Lillian would have hidden it when she heard someone in the house. But where?
Kali had a pretty good idea. She went through the hallway into her bedroom. Something off. Her bed was pushed over a few inches and the white bedspread was crumpled. She checked if Lillian had stuck the painting beneath the mattress, but there was nothing there.
Kali straightened up. She sniffed the air. The strange, unfamiliar smell was in here, as well.
And then Kali noticed her mother smiling at her from her customary place on the wall, not on the floor where Kali had left the framed portrait. Kali let out a breath of relief. Lillian would have put the small painting back in its hiding place, so that Kali could find it, but no one else.
She listened for sounds, hoping that Neil hadn’t decided to follow her. No footfalls coming up the stairs.
She took the portrait off the wall and turned it upside down, expecting to catch the postcard-size painting. But nothing came out.
Gone. The painting was gone.
Kali hung the portrait back on the wall and sat down on the rocking chair.
The frozen feeling spread.
Her mother was dead. Her grandmother was dead. The tiny painting was gone.
There was no one and nothing to connect Kali to her genetic roots.
Except for Kali herself.
And whoever had the painting.
62
Javier watched from behind a tree as his son packed up his paintings and folded the easels. Most of the other artists had already cleared out, leaving behind the empty booths, their canvas sides flapping in the breeze.
There were people milling about, children racing to-and-fro with their faces painted like clowns, balloons bobbing behind them, but Javier had planned it this way. He thought it less likely that Gabriel would make a scene in public. And that would give Javier more time to explain.
The smell of steamed hot dogs wafted toward him. Javier remembered a day in the park with his own father, eating hot dogs with sauerkraut. Soon, Vati, he thought. Very soon now.
Gabriel was almost packed up. He jogged the canvases into alignment, then zipped them into a portfolio case. There were several framed oils leaning against the side of the booth. Javier doubted Gabriel would flee and leave his precious paintings behind.
He stepped around the tree and slowly approached his son, feeling a bit like a fox sneaking up on its prey.
Gabriel spun around, his blond hair flying across his forehead. “What the fuck!”
“I won’t stay long,” Javier said, holding up his hands. “I promise. I just wanted to tell you that I found the old woman. I have the painting.”
Gabriel’s head turned wildly from side to side, as though he was searching through the passersby for a cop.
“Don’t worry, Gabriel. We’re out in the open. I don’t know what you fear, but I obviously won’t do anything to hurt you.”
Gabriel went over to the framed oils and started stacking them up. They were ugly modern paintings with angry bursts of red and black.
“Please, just hear me out,” Javier said.
“I have no interest in anything you have to say.”
Gabriel’s movements were fast and jerky. It would take him several minutes to gather up his paintings and clear out. Javier started talking.
“First of all, I want you to know,” Javier said in a soft voice, “I am not a kook. I have nothing in common with those puerile neo-Nazis who parade around like children on Halloween. My goal has always been to right the wrongs of a society that has unfairly condemned an entire race for crimes they never committed.”
“Go away,” Gabriel said, trying to tie a rope around the paintings. The rope kept slipping out of his shaking fingers.
“Millions of good, loving, innocent Germans like your grandfather have been spat upon and treated like lepers. It
isn’t fair.” Javier’s voice rose as he smacked the folding table. “It isn’t right.”
Gabriel turned to face him. “They weren’t innocent. They knew what was happening. They should have intervened.”
“Really? What exactly was happening, Gabriel? Do you know for certain? There was a war going on. People were dying from disease and starvation.”
“They were murdered.”
“Some were. But weren’t the Russians murdering plenty of their own? Why weren’t they persecuted after the war?”
“I don’t want to listen to this.”
“What they teach in history books is all wrong. The victors have a way of making up lies to benefit their own purposes.”
“Oh, and you know the truth?”
He’d gotten his son’s attention. Javier held back a smile. “I believe I have found it beneath the ocean of lies we spend submerged in every day. I believe that the world has cast Hitler in the role of the murderous, ruthless devil as a means of uniting the masses in a common fraudulent cause.”
“He was the devil.”
“Really? You’re an artist, Gabriel. You understand how one’s paintings are an expression of what we’re carrying inside ourselves.” He gestured toward the slashes of red and black on the canvases. “Can you tell me that your work doesn’t reflect your anger and hatred of me?”
Gabriel took in a deep breath. His shoulders went back and his nostrils quivered.
“Let me show you something,” Javier said, reaching into his pocket and taking out the painting. He slid it out of the velvet sheath he’d put it in. “Does this look like the work of some maniac?”
Gabriel turned away. Javier pushed the painting in front of his face. “Look at this, I said.” He’d raised his voice and realized that people had stopped and were staring at him. “Please, Gabriel,” he said quietly, “can’t you see the compassion and humanity of the man who has been vilified?” He moved in front of Gabriel. His son’s face was contorted as though he was in pain.
Javier touched his shoulder. “Won’t you join me in spreading the truth?”
