Out of Splinters and Ashes Read online

  “A pillow, sir?” A stewardess, German like Dietrich, spoke English to the American passenger beside him as Dietrich closed the small book. “Kissen?” she offered Dietrich as the man next to him took one for the long flight to New York. The soft light highlighted the wave in her hair, brown hair like his Oma’s had been. Dietrich nodded as she smiled. He tucked both books into the inner pocket of his corduroy jacket and accepted the pillow she held. “Danke,” he said as the American said, “Thank you.” The stewardess moved away, and the two of them settled back in their seats.

  “Gute Nacht.” Dietrich nodded to the man next to him, noting the expensive but finely comfortable attire. A business man? It wouldn’t be difficult for a man like this to crush some impressionable young German girl and leave her behind. Even Dietrich could likely enjoy his sort of company, the passenger looking cultured and intelligent enough they could talk the whole night, condense the lengthy flight to mere minutes. The man might have thought the same if Dietrich had said goodnight in English instead of his native German. Not this time. The man nodded and burrowed deep into the hard pillow.

  Dietrich settled farther back. A different American man needed his attention. “He”—the man in the stories—noticeably tall, lean, and blond. Dietrich fished a charred lump from the pocket of his trousers and turned it over in his fingers. He rubbed his thumb over the rough and splintering wood he’d found in his grandmother’s attic with the books.

  Passengers rustled around him, settling into sleep. He looked toward the window—a mirror now, with night outside and soft lights illuminating the plane’s interior. His grandmother was easy to imagine in the reflection, her face alongside his own, the way they’d always been as he grew up. Dietrich stared at the glass, then leaned close and searched for that other face, “his” face next to hers instead of Dietrich’s, that presence that had never been. The face that had never returned in the stories, not even to see if Amabile had survived.

  Dietrich sat back in his seat. He stuffed the lump of burnt wood back into his pocket and stared straight ahead. No wonder he dealt in facts instead of obscurities. Vagaries were terrifying, the fodder of hacks and menial reporters to stir up alarm. He would find the facts to Amabile if there were any, find “him” if he existed, find the American who had destroyed her heart, or prove it all fiction, especially fiction Erika Müller hadn’t written but merely been fascinated with, and rid his family of Monika forever.

  Chapter 2

  My grandfather’s eyes were strangely alert.

  “Cate?” He gazed through his screen door, first at me on his front porch, then at the large envelopes tucked under my arm, and lastly to the yard behind me. He seemed even thinner and taller than usual as he stood peering over my head.

  Grandma’s at her bookstore. She’s not coming back. I looked at Grandpa Crawley’s lean face through the screen. Grandma had done this before, started to move out of the back of Non Bookends where she’d set up a little home-away-from-home, to return to living with the man her parents had insisted she marry. But she had yet to make it all the way.

  I could tell him I was sorry for all of it—sorry Grandma’d broken their engagement when he returned home to New York from overseas right before the beginning of World War II. Sorry she’d said he wasn’t the same man she’d become engaged to before he was sent off months before. Sorry I was standing here telling him his wife wasn’t coming back home. Again.

  Grandpa continued to gaze through the screen, his quiet blue eyes focused over the top of my head. I really was sorry for this man who’d spent his life here and alone but never complaining. My mother called his house the eye of the storm and Grandma the gale that blustered around it. Grandpa’s quiet seemed more than relief the storm had momentarily blown past. He likely longed for her. There was an absence around him, an empty space so evident it took the form of a presence. A place she belonged that hadn’t been filled by the long hours he bent over sticks and pieces of wood, carving and whittling each one to nothing. Grandma probably longed for him, too, otherwise her store, Non Bookends, its authors and their platitudes, would have filled her emptiness and kept her from occasionally blowing back his direction.

  “Is this a good time?” I lifted the envelopes I held, fanned them like a wing under my arm. He would know these were books Grandma had ordered to read—or have me read—before she allowed them on Non Bookends’ shelves, careful to choose only books that suited her crusade…something that involved weapons and war more than love. I’d snatched them from Grandma’s table after her march from here back into Non Bookends, announcing she refused to move anything else to their house. He’s expecting someone, she’d thundered as she stormed past. But it’s someone else, not me. I didn’t bother to argue or tell her she was wrong…again. I’d grabbed these three new arrivals and run the same two blocks I’d always been running between the two of them, ignoring her shouts of leave things be as I left.

  I couldn’t leave them be, no matter what Grandma said. I battled my grandparents’ mayhem instead of escaping it like my mother had, moving herself and my father to the other side of New York City. I was going to fix my grandparents and my mother, fix all of us so we could live like a normal family and not look like spectacles to everyone else. Especially to the public Emerson Cosnik, the attorney I’d been dating, hoped to win the approval of as he ran for the New York Senate.

  I fanned the packages again, catching Grandpa’s attention, his gaze traveling from them to my forehead and the evidence I’d run. I swiped the sweat with my forearm and waited for the You shouldn’t run, Cate, he always said.

  But he didn’t. He looked again to the street and yard behind me. He was supposed to acknowledge the envelopes, assume I had books to read, and let me in so I could say Grandma wasn’t coming back in a way that wouldn’t feel like a hammer crashing down on a heart and face normally so expressionless I could only guess what was there. But he wasn’t expressionless. I glanced over my shoulder where he was looking. Maybe this morning had been different for him and Grandma. Maybe the two bags of her belongings she’d moved here from her little home-away-from-home ignited something. I turned back to the screen, leaned to the side, and peered into the dark of their living room. Those bags should be somewhere behind Grandpa. Maybe he was waiting. Maybe in spite of what she’d told me, he was expecting her to bring more and move back home like she’d started to.

  I peered again through the screen at the empty living room while he looked over my head at the empty sidewalk and street. Grandma was wrong. There was no “someone else” in his house. And if it was her he was expecting, he was wrong too. There was no “someone else” in their yard, no repentant wife behind me, coming home.

  “Kind of early to be reading.” He glanced down at the envelopes, and I could hear the Kind of early to be running that he wasn’t saying. My running bothered him, probably because I’d worn thin the two blocks of sidewalk between Non Bookends and here over the years, first with a small pair of girls’ tennis shoes and now with a women’s size seven, relaying messages back and forth between them, fictitious messages so they would each think the other one cared. I’d reinterpreted Grandma’s snarls when I ran to his house, and brought back from him what I imagined I saw in his face as he sat whittling nothing. I’d played Cupid, set up dinners for the two of them, made up warm notes and passed them from one to the other, laughed and smiled alone during family nights no one wanted except me.

  “I told Grandma I’d look these over for her.” I prayed the screen masked my lie. “I thought I’d read them here where it’s quiet instead of at the store. Maybe you and I could have a glass of tea and talk a little first.”

  He frowned. I studied one of my mother’s two parents she loved so much she hated them. “I’m coming in, Grandpa.” I opened the screen door and walked through it.

  He looked past the envelopes, at me, then behind me when the screen door closed. I planted myself in front of him, warding off any chance he’d say what Grandma had sai
d—just leave things be. Leave him be the same way he always let Non Bookends be, never entering her store.

  And leave the two bags she’d moved here from Non Bookends be, not because she’d change her mind and decide to move back into her real home after all, but because that “someone else” she thought he expected had upset her. It upset her, but what she’d said was an explosion—It’s not who I expected…

  Grandpa continued to peer over the top of me, a good two heads taller than I was, staring into the empty sidewalk and street with blue eyes dulled by the reflection of the gray weathered screen, white hair that used to be blond hanging in limp strands over his forehead. “Maybe you should just go on and read them at your place,” he said. “It’s quieter there.”

  I listened to the silence that had done nothing but grow since Grandma first moved out ages ago, felt the fragile alarm in his gaze that warned me he could stop watching for her and slip back into accepting she was never coming if I left him be. “I want to sit here with you, Grandpa.”

  His eyes passed to me for a moment, then back to the outdoors.

  “You sit. I’ll get us some tea.” I laid a hand on his arm and glanced around their living room at décor straight from the 1940s—floral wallpaper, tufted sofas, and chintz drapes that other couples their age had left behind for newer furniture and more modern designs. I loved this house, but it was a victim in Grandma’s war, a casualty of her reluctant “I do.” Grandpa had done his part for the two of them, buying Non Bookends for Grandma right after they were married. “He had to appease your grandma,” Mama had told me, waving her arms about the engagement Grandma had broken, and her insistence Grandpa wasn’t the same fiancé she’d seen off, and that if Grandma’s parents hadn’t forced Grandma because of the shortage of available men if the US ended up in a war, neither Mama nor I would ever have come to be. But we had come to be. My grandparents had made a family, somehow, and they’d made this home. It had been a constant, instead of the progress most couples made, but it was a cozy constant that suited them and me.

  I squeezed Grandpa’s arm and let go, catching then what I hadn’t through the screen or in my quick scan. Something was different. Grandpa had changed their cozy constant. He’d straightened what never was messy by squaring everything, aligning each object or stack as if he and Grandma decorated on a grid. The normally comfortable area looked sterile, as if someone had died, personal items stripped away, even the two bags she had brought here, until signs of life were completely gone. He’s expecting someone all right, just not me. Grandma had paused in her march past me this morning, pivoted a half turn to the left at the last tier of books hiding the way to her room. Her simple belted dress and gray hair had made her deceptively matronly above the fierceness that exploded from her lips, capped the knuckles of her fists with white, and bleached her usually hale complexion. I glanced again around the living room that had changed, something about it having changed her to the point her fierceness had faltered. It’s not who I expected, but the truth is, it’s not me.

  But Grandpa never expected anyone. He had spent most of their marriage alone. Even as a younger man, when not at work packaging and delivering meat for the local butcher, he was at home, either in his favorite chair in the living room or in his rocker on the front porch, whittling sticks to splinters.

  But what I saw in their living room, this change, this sterile rearrangement Grandpa had done, didn’t look at all like the woman I hoped he was expecting. It looked nothing like Grandma’s little home-away-from-home in Non Bookends, the cot she slept on, her overstuffed chair and lamp nearby, and the tiny kitchenette across the room. That room was a miniature of what this house had been, the way she left it and Grandpa had always kept it.

  “Grandpa?”

  He looked toward the door. I followed his gaze to where three US military officials stood, their green, brass, and stripes staring back at us from his porch. “Grandpa?” I gave what I could see of them through the tiny squares of the screen a long stare. A hard stare that tried to penetrate their bulletproof exteriors.

  There was no answer as my grandfather opened the door. He didn’t welcome them, but he ushered them in. As if he had been expecting them.

  “I came here to work.” The lie popped out, surprising me more than it did the looks on their faces as they stood in a line staring at me. Grandpa’s face joined them. Not alongside and not as cold, but with the same command—I should leave. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t leave him be. I wasn’t expected, just like Grandma said she wasn’t. But to me, neither were they. The military, the war, or anything pertaining to either had never been spoken well of in this house, and I wouldn’t let it start now. “I’ll be in that room if you need me. Working.” I waved the envelopes that felt twice what they’d weighed before, nodded toward and disappeared into what had once been my grandparents’ bedroom—just my grandfather’s now—across a small hallway from where they stood, leaving the door ajar enough I could hear, but ignored, my name followed by my grandfather’s protest.

  I staggered across the bedroom and dropped onto his bed. Sentence fragments I took for military formalities spouted from the living room. The officers hadn’t expected me, but they were going to ignore me, and they wanted Grandpa to do the same. I tossed the envelopes from Non Bookends to the side, then snatched one back and stared at it, listening to the stilted conversation in the background. They shouldn’t be here. Grandma should. I ripped the package open and yanked out a booklet while formal and informal words filled the other room. Those officials might be there because Grandpa expected them to come, but I expected them to go. Soon.

  The officers and Grandpa settled into chairs and the sofa in the next room. I could tell by the sounds—by the shuffling, the creaking, and the intermittent blocks of silence—that they were preparing to really talk. The sooner they did, the sooner they could get this visit over. Grandpa shouldn’t expect men like that; he should expect my grandmother. And she should be here instead of me, to shoo them out.

  I held what looked like a short story on my lap as I imagined Grandpa in his favorite chair staring at the men, wishing them away so Grandma could join him later—expected, and sitting in her nearby chair so she could turn her nose up at this too-brief tale. Grandma chose novels or full-length plays for her crusade, and Grandpa never entertained or expected anyone.

  I gazed at yellowed pages of words I cared nothing about as voices rose from the living room, men’s voices, forming more distinctive words I did care about.

  I sat straighter on my grandparents’ bed, perched nearer its edge, and listened, the scent of my grandfather wafting up from his pillow—from my grandmother’s pillow, nothing. The voices lowered, became too muffled to understand. Masculine mumbling I could only guess at as I gazed at the story.

  The Forever Meeting

  After the rain comes clarity—that moment when thousands of tiny, reflecting droplets finally go away, and color emerges, vibrant in its new sodden state.

  So it was the first time she saw him, and he her in return. The shower pelted around them, blinding them to what was there, and what they should have seen—his shoulders, too square and sharp as if at attention, the lean strength of a man built to compete and then leave, and the simple style of dress she wore that was unlike what he was used to but typical of young women in Berlin.

  His look split the torrent enough their imaginations took over, allowing them to see what they’d always dreamed they’d someday see. His hair was blond, although it hung in icicles of dripping brown. Hers was dark with curls, but it lay flat and heavy under the wet. The colors of her dress exploded into a life it never really had, emboldened as the fabric melded to her skin. And the insignia that gave him the right to be there shimmered against a soaked jacket different from others in her city.

  His accent silenced the assailing drops as he led her to shelter where they’d be safe. She understood his words, though not perfectly. They were foreign, but the language of his eyes was the same as hers,
speaking exactly what she’d always imagined she would someday hear. “This way,” he said. “Ja,” she said in return and nodded. His smile had no accent, and with it he took her by the elbow and steered her to shelter.

  My grandfather’s voice broke above the story and through its rain, his words turning the ones on these pages back to nothing. “Lieutenant McCoy led our unit with all diligence. He was a solid force that never wavered.” Grandpa’s normally soft-spoken tone rose, each word deliberate, as if fired from a gun. I’d never heard him speak that way. I closed the booklet. The silence following his statement was long, leaving his mark feeling unsteady.

  “Mr. Crawley, it’s Lieutenant McCoy’s communications before and during the war that we’re investigating. Where they originated, and in whose hands they ended.”

  My grandfather remained silent, as quiet as I was. I ran a finger along the frayed edges of the heavy parchment that made up the small book’s cover as I listened, traced its faded frame that was tied with a golden cord binding everything at a creased center.

  They spoke again. Louder now, saying names I couldn’t understand, a string of them, to which Grandpa said nothing in return. I stared at the thin booklet on my lap as the list was repeated like a ceremony outside the door. I fingered its cover and pages as I listened for Grandpa’s response, this story a contrast to their cold conversation, and far too romantic for Grandma’s usual preferences. She’d told me once romance had its place, just as all genres of fiction did—a place in time through which we all had to pass, and a place on Non Bookends’ shelves only as it pertained to her crusade. I glanced at the trashcan not far from their bed. If Grandma had passed through a time of romance, it was as gone as yesterday’s rubbish. Like this booklet was going to be. This one would never make it to her shelves.