Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  “Kai,” Mitzi repeated, never taking her eyes off the girl. “This is above us. This is for the Council. We’re just Runners.”

  “I know.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “But don’t you want to know?”

  She shifted, uncomfortable. “It’s not right.”

  She wasn’t wrong. The magic that involved time travel was so illegal that it was blacklisted. The balloon makers could be stripped of their magic for it. And to be stripped of magic wasn’t a pleasant experience. But before they found out who did this and sent this girl back to where she belonged, I had to know.

  “The wall,” I said. Mitzi hissed. She liked rules much more than I did. I just needed to be careful. If the girl thought this through, she’d realize that it wasn’t the year she thought it was. “What year did it come down?”

  “I knew you weren’t German,” the girl whispered. “Your accent. It’s weird.”

  “Oh my god, we are in so much trouble. This is so bad,” Mitzi murmured. She shook her head as if to clear it and shot me a sharp-edged look. “Enough questions. Where are you taking her?”

  “I’m not letting you take me anywhere but home.” The girl’s voice pitched wildly, nearly screaming the words. She backed up from us. She yanked the balloon. It made a small sound of stress, wobbling above us, then straightening again.

  “Oh, shut up,” Mitzi and I said at the same time. Then all three of us fell silent, listening to the cars approaching on the road. Headlights splashed against the walls.

  “Go,” Mitzi told me, her eyes moving back and forth between the girl and me. She squeezed my arm with a thin hand. “I’ll lead them elsewhere. Take her to the safe house.”

  I gripped her coat as she started to step away from me. “See you in an hour.”

  She stepped back and rose on her tiptoes to press a kiss to my cheek. “One hour, and we’ll make a plan.”

  As she gave us a wave and a smile, dancing off through the shadows to draw away the attention of the police, I shouted after her, “I’m not getting your ass out of jail again!”

  She yelled back over her shoulder, “I got myself out, you asshole! Don’t forget that!”

  I grinned, relieved, because there was something a little frightening about letting your best friend dance off to keep the police from getting you. I offered my hand to the girl, who took it, but didn’t move at first. She twisted, looking over her shoulder.

  “They’re going to catch her.”

  “She’s fine,” I said, which was a nonanswer that the girl didn’t seem to catch. “Come on. The farther away we are, the better chance we give Mitz.”

  I didn’t drop her hand as we walked through the city into a nicer neighborhood with housefronts in pale pastels with shutters and window boxes full of snow. We were both so cold that we had stopped shivering, never a good sign. I dropped her hand to get the key out of my pocket, and then her head dropped to her chest, her eyes closed, and she shook so violently that the balloon was waving in the air. I shoved the key in the lock. “Don’t die before we can get you home.”

  “Can you get me home?” she asked me. And finally, she sounded as tired as I felt.

  I opened the door and gestured her inside. “We’re going to try.”

  The safe house was one of three we had in our sector of the city for Passengers. This was the one Garrick had been in, so it hadn’t been cleaned up yet. Dirty dishes sat on the table, the smell of stew lingering in the air. Garrick’s balloon had been tricky, I remembered now. Aurora had struggled with the magic, and Garrick had been in the house for ten days, instead of the typical seven. I shut the door behind us and locked it again with the key. Mitzi had her own. It’d be impossible for anyone without the heavy key to open these safe houses. Otherwise, we couldn’t guarantee the Passengers’ safety.

  The balloon bumped against the ceiling, and the string hummed in the girl’s hand, like the balloon was speaking to us, like it was confused. Balloons were meant to go over walls, just as the girl had said. I had never seen a balloon inside a house. I had never heard a balloon hum. I’d moved through the sparsely furnished house to the kitchen before I realized the girl remained in the hallway, looking stunned.

  She said to me, “It’s impossible. This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.”

  “I’m not sure you’re dreaming.” I didn’t want to talk to her about it until Mitzi was back and she and I could figure out what the hell we were going to do with this girl from—wherever. “Come upstairs. You can stay here. We’ll get you home in the morning.”

  I was glad to have my back to her when I said that. I was a terrible liar. Not that she was all together right now, her eyes all vacant and confused as they slipped around the house, but I didn’t need to be questioned on that.

  She jerked the balloon. “And what about this?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to see what happened when she let the balloon go, but then again, I did. If the balloon was truly dysfunctional, if its magic had been tampered with or written incorrectly, it shouldn’t do anything if she let it go. It could take the next person’s bare hand and yank them somewhere else, perhaps, but a normal balloon disappeared when the person for whom it was written let go. No bare hand, no skin on the string, then the balloon was gone. Theoretically. Balloons shouldn’t do what this one did.

  I leaned on the railing. “Let it go.”

  She stared up at it. “Can I get home without it?”

  An astute question. And that was a bit of a shame. It’d be easier to lie to someone who wasn’t so quick to catch on. I said, “We can make you another one.”

  She let go of the balloon. It floated to the ceiling, collided with the plaster, and rolled sideways. We both held our breath, but the balloon remained.

  I glanced at her and found her studying me with careful blue eyes. Now that she was in the house and the light, I could see she was quite pretty. Her long, curly brown hair crept out of her hood on either side of her face and tangled at the ends where it looped into her scarf. She was underdressed for the weather, but that I understood. We didn’t usually get blizzards in March, that was for sure.

  “In the morning,” I found myself saying, “I promise you. We’ll have a plan to get you home.”

  She sagged, defeated, and nodded. She followed me upstairs and went silently into the room I showed her. I shut the door behind her and slumped back down the stairs. So much for sleep.

  Chapter Three

  LEAVING BERLIN

  Berlin, 1941

  Benno

  The morning air clung to our jackets and cheeks, damp and hungry like our empty stomachs. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and Ruth’s hand kept slipping out of mine. Her hand was fat and chubby, like it had no bones in it, and I kept holding it too tight. When she cried, Mama glared at me. Papa didn’t look at us. Not once. He just kept his arm around Mama’s shoulders. I scanned the crowd, looking for Rebekah, but I couldn’t pick out her short, dark, curly hair in the crowds. My heart beat low in my chest. She knew how to keep Ruthie happy. I was never good at this.

  Papa rubbed Mama’s shoulder and said, “B’ezrat HaShem, we will be safe there. There will be only Jews. It will be safer than Berlin.”

  Mama leaned her head on his shoulder and said, “Maybe Ernst is there.”

  Papa didn’t say anything to that. None of us did. A few months ago, the Gestapo came to the house and demanded my brother, Ernst. They took him away for questioning, and he never came home. They turned him into a ghost at the snap of their fingers. Mama went to the police station to ask where he was, but then the Gestapo came around with a few questions about Papa. Mama stopped asking questions, but I heard her crying at night.

  Papa used to tell her that Ernst was fine, wherever he was. “He’s a strapping boy,” Papa would tell her. “He can take care of himself wherever he is. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. He got that from you.”

  The day by the trains, Papa told her nothing. He just tightened his hand agai
nst her shoulder and stayed silent. He did not think that Ernst would be waiting for us, wherever we were going. I could tell by the way he’d rather be quiet than lie to Mama. They told us they were taking us to a ghetto, a place for Jews to live separate from others. I was lucky, Mama said. They had turned a lot of the Jewish boys my year into ghosts. Like Ernst. Disappeared. I guessed Ruthie and I were lucky. At five and sixteen respectively, we stayed with our family. They moved us as a unit first to the staging ground at the synagogue on Levetzow Street and then to the train station. They’d taken Ernst only a few days after his eighteenth birthday. All alone, and he’d never come home.

  “Benno,” Mama had said as we were packing. She whispered, so Papa wouldn’t hear. “You must be good there. You know how Papa is. If we listen to all the rules and we stay together as a family, G-d willing, we’ll come through this.”

  G-d willing. B’ezrat HaShem.

  I never thought I’d miss school, but I did. A fraying yellow star clung to the jacket I used to wear to school. It was too small for me now, but we didn’t have money or fabric to make me a bigger coat. We were trying to keep Ruthie warm, since she was growing like a weed. She was at that age where her hands and face were all soft and round, but her legs were longer than all the rest of her. In pictures, you couldn’t tell the difference between Ruth and me at that age. We had the same dark, curly hair, the same round faces, the same dimples. Ernst had been more like our father with his chiseled jaw and strong chin. Girls loved Ernst. I didn’t get much from girls, but I had Rebekah.

  If it weren’t for Hitler, I’d be walking with Rebekah home from schule, not waiting in line for a train.

  “Is there going to be school there?” Ruth asked, tugging my hand. She hadn’t even gone to school yet. She knew all her letters though. Sometimes she forgot who Ernst was. It didn’t take long. Like forgetting what ice cream tasted like.

  “No, Ruthie. No school. Mama will teach you, just like always.” I squinted up at the gray sky, full of so many clouds that they no longer had shapes but stretched out for as far as I could see like gray blankets. The sky was sad. The air inside my chest was heavy. I shivered. Mama had made us wear all our winter clothing, but I still couldn’t get warm.

  “Benno,” whispered Ruth, tugging my hand. “Can we play a game?”

  I didn’t want to play a game. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be out here in the damp, miserable November cold. And I wanted to know where Rebekah was. What if we’re sent to different places? But then Mama gave me a look over her shoulder, and I swallowed back my resentment. Ruth was just a child. She didn’t know any better.

  So I bent my head to her and sang a Yiddish alphabet song to her, followed by a song about two poodles. She sang along to the first and jumped up and down, splashing in the mud, to the second. Her joy, despite the fear and exhaustion and uncertainty around us, made me smile. I picked her up, even though she was too old for that, and swung her around in a circle, making her shriek with laughter. Around us, the families smiled at us, but then one of the Gestapo shouted at me—at us, and Papa hissed. I landed Ruthie back on her feet.

  Putting my mouth right next to her ear, I said, “New game, be as serious as the soldiers.”

  She giggled and stood ramrod straight as we began to walk forward, being loaded onto trains like animals. She was the happiest girl getting onto that train.

  We’d heard that the first train from Berlin had been a nicer train. Everyone had seats, and though there’d been a guard, they’d stopped overnight to let people relieve themselves on the side of the tracks. Something had changed then, because that wasn’t our train.

  This train smelled like ass and sweat, like the gym where I used to watch Ernst box, like sickness. There was a baby who hadn’t stopped crying in the corner, and I could hear people coughing. Someone whispered tuberkulose, and someone started to wail. It took a few shouts from some of the men in the car to calm everyone down again.

  I couldn’t see Papa’s face, but he never shouted, never turned around. He just kept us in his own little world. Maybe he could not hear them. Maybe he couldn’t feel the heat of too many bodies in too small a space. Maybe he couldn’t feel the weight of the tears when the baby stopped crying on the other side of the car. The piss and fever, hopelessness and fear, they rattled like the wheels of the train against the tracks.

  The train went on forever. I didn’t let go of Ruth’s hand. Not once. Through the cracks in the side panels, we breathed in fresh air and watched the world whip by, turning from gray to green to darkness and then to green again. In the morning, as the sun rose—sending slivers of light slashing through the train and cutting our skin, lighting up the sweat drying in patterns across our arms and faces—I saw a glint outside the train.

  “Look, Ruthie,” I whispered, shaking her.

  She climbed up on my knee, pressing her eye to the crack, her fat fingers pushing against the wall. “What?”

  “A balloon,” I whispered. “A luftballon.”

  A red balloon, alone, without even a string, and then, just a glint. It was gone before we could even gasp. But Ruth and I whispered stories about it the whole way to the ghetto.

  Chapter Four

  ZEITREISENDE

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, March 1988

  Ellie

  I woke and breathed in slowly. It took me a moment to realize I didn’t recognize the sheets or the pillow or the crack in the plaster alongside my bed. I was somewhere else. It was the only way I knew how to tell myself what had happened. It wasn’t a kidnapping or an elaborate ruse or a head injury. I had just ended up somewhere else. The room was the same as it had been the night before. I was still in the bed, still under a quilt, still in the world that couldn’t be real.

  A thin line of sunlight crossed the room carefully from behind the curtain, the way Kai had moved in the alley the night before. I sat up, rubbing at my eyes. My body moved like I had to slog through honey, and every motion from my eyes felt like a hammer inside my skull.

  The quiet, dimly lit room let the memories of the previous day trickle in, slow and unsure and cautious. I remembered Amanda wanting to talk to the guitar guy and finding the red balloon. I remembered falling down in the snow and Kai running into me. We ran away from the police and into…Mitzi. That was the blue-haired girl’s name. Mitzi. Teenagers without phones. A world, maybe, without phones. Was that possible?

  Something went wrong. This can’t be real. But I had the same feeling I had whenever Saba told me his stories: that somewhere, somehow, the impossible had happened and things that couldn’t be real were.

  My skin was lined with the marks of the folds and seams of my skirt and the wrinkles of my shirt, still damp against my skin. My hands felt pruney. My hair was a knotted mat of brown curls. I badly needed a brush, and a shower, and to get out of here. To get home. Get home. Like I could find it at a store. Like it’s something that could be gotten. I shook my head a bit, trying to clear the unsettled, restless feeling clouding the space behind my eyes.

  It didn’t help.

  The room was plain, with plain furniture set against gray walls. The light switch shocked me when I flipped it. I opened the door. The house was silent. Mitzi had called it versteck. Safe house. It was messy, but not in a lived-in way. I half expected to find someone sitting in silence around every corner, but the house was empty. I crept downstairs, my hand sliding along the banister, and stepped into the hall. The short hall led to the living room and the kitchen, an arched doorway between them. The couch and armchair were a muted shade of orange, with dark wood for legs. Like I’d walked onto a movie set.

  The kitchen felt like a morgue. Kitchens should have photos on the fridge, postcards, and reminder notes. There should have been oranges in a bowl on the center of the table, and homework from the night before. But everything was cold and clinical, smooth and metallic and too clean for a place where people lived.

  There was bread in a cabinet and butter on a shelf
in the fridge. I quickly pressed some frozen butter into the soft brown bread. I washed the knife off in the sink, then thought better of putting it back in the drawer. I tucked it into the waistband of my skirt and pulled my shirt down over top of it. I didn’t know how to use a knife as a weapon, but it couldn’t be that difficult. Pointy end should go into the person I wanted to stab.

  I’d imagined a thousand different things happening when I went to Germany. Whatever was happening—and I couldn’t even begin to unravel everything around me—hadn’t been on my list. I was beginning to regret listening to Amanda, complaining about my teacher, or worrying about what my grandfather thought. I mean, none of that mattered if I didn’t get home.

  I knew I should go back upstairs to the room, where I had been told to stay by someone who hadn’t yet done me harm. Something solid and quiet inside me told me to trust Kai and Mitzi. Besides, they had said they’d get me home this morning. Any trouble I’d be in—weeks of grounding, my car taken away, maybe even my phone taken—would be worth it.

  “You say that now, Baum,” I said aloud, because Amanda wasn’t there to say it for me. “But you can’t live without your phone.”

  At least for now, I’d have to. Amanda had it—and my purse, including my passport and my emergency credit card. Everything that could prove where and what home was before I grabbed that balloon.

  The balloon floated in the hall by the entrance to the living room, and I grabbed it on my way to the armchair by the window. This was my ticket out. Somehow. Just like I felt like I could trust Kai and Mitzi, I wanted to keep my balloon close. My balloon. It was good no one was here to witness this. My friends and family would never let me forget it.

  I idly bounced the balloon, tugging its string and watching the street outside from around the corners of the thin, white curtains. People tromped down the street, heads bowed against the cold, and a woman walked by, holding the hand of a small child who stomped his feet hard into every slushy puddle. For the most part, the street was quiet. It seemed nice enough. It just wasn’t my street.