Caroline Woods - Fräulein M.

Janeen shook her head. “That’s not it. I’m worried about her and Erik. What if Klaus found out about her plan and… did something to her?”

“So you still believe she will do what is right. How, Janeen? How can you be so sure?”

Janeen opened her mouth, but only a few sputtering sounds emerged. After a minute, Anita went with a sigh into the tiny bathroom to brush her teeth.

Rain washed over the hotel through the night, and though they didn’t speak to each other, Anita knew neither of them slept much, if at all.

The bathroom window, like a porthole on a ship, revealed fair skies the next morning as Anita showered. Branches and debris littered the motel parking lot, and a few men stood beside a truck with a smashed windshield.

“Tracks south are clear—” Anita began, trying to sound cheery, but when she came into the room she found Janeen sitting on the bed, phone to her ear, a piece of scrap paper in her lap. She looked up at her mother with worried eyes.

“Well, when’s the last time you saw him?” she said into the receiver, then nodded a few times, rubbing the little piece of paper between her finger and thumb. “Okay, thank you. Would you tell him, when he comes home, that his cousin called?” She hung up. “Erik’s not at his apartment, Mutti. His roommates haven’t seen him in more than a day.”

“We hardly know him.”

Janeen’s spine stiffened. “He’s our family. I don’t care what Grete did. He is.”

“You misunderstand me. I mean we do not know this boy’s habits. He could have spent the night out, with friends or a girl. Or a boy!”

Janeen shook her head, brown eyes solemn. “They said he doesn’t normally do this.”

Anita went to her suitcase and turned her back to Janeen. “Tracks south are clear,” she repeated. “Now, let us get our belongings up from this awful floor, nicht ? I fear there are fleas here. I am going to bathe everything in Lysol when we are finally home.”

She began zipping bags, shaking out clothes, and slamming suitcases loudly, aware of Janeen’s complete silence behind her.

The station in Trenton wasn’t built to handle such a crowd. Locals glared from the pay phones at the tired travelers sitting on their luggage in front of the counters, waiting to be reissued tickets that had been canceled because of the storm. Janeen went to buy a candy bar from a vending machine beside the police station. Anita found herself staring up at the flip board above the tellers. In white letters on a black background: train number 72, Palmetto to Charleston, leaving at 10:32 A.M.

Train number 358, Federal to Pennsylvania Station, New York, would depart at 10:10 on the opposite track. The clock on the wall read 9:52. She watched the letters flip as another train left the station, the remaining schedule bumped up one notch.

“Excuse me?” the man behind her whined. “You going to move up?”

“Maybe sometime soon,” Anita said to irk him, then pushed her suitcase forward with her foot. She wasn’t sure why she felt so edgy, but it might have had something to do with the dog. The policeman beside the ticket counter wore knee-high, shiny black boots and held the leash of a dog, a massive German shepherd with ears erect, big as a man’s hands. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, draped on jagged teeth.

The police in Anhalter Bahnhof had dogs that day, when she and the three children awaited the train that would take them away from Germany forever. And at Gronau, dogs boarded the train with the guards, hunting for deserters.

That day, too, she had been preoccupied with thoughts of Grete.

When Janeen returned, her chocolate bar half-eaten, Anita handed her some change. “Go to one of the pay phones,” she said, gesturing toward the cluster of shady characters hanging around the booths. “I’ll watch you. Go and call your cousin’s roommates again.”

Janeen turned the dimes in her palm with her thumb. “What should I say?” she asked, but in the quickening of her eyes, Anita could tell she already knew.

“Tell him we will not be going home quite yet.” The line had cleared in front of her; she was next at the counter. Anita reached for the handle of her suitcase. “Tell him we must make a detour, back to New York.”

Anita wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see at Margaret’s building: signs of a struggle, or blue police lights whirling outside, but the place appeared exactly the same, the same two homeless boys camped at the base of the façade. Dark puddles, full of cigarette butts and trash, streamed toward the drains in the street.

Janeen shivered. “He could still be in there, Mutti.”

“We do not know her telephone number,” Anita repeated. They had gone over this during their brief train ride and in the taxi uptown. “It is a risk we must take.”

They waited a little while in front of the doors, their reflections distorted in the glass, legs wide, mouths pulled even deeper into frowns. The doors reflected the sun’s attempt to burn through the clouds, a weak gray circle.

On the train, Janeen had asked how Anita knew Margaret and Erik were in trouble, what she’d thought happened to them. Anita shook her head. “I have never been able to read my sister, to know what she’s done or will do. All I feel is a pull on myself.”

Eventually a young man came out of the building with a pair of skates knotted over his shoulder, and he held the door without question as the two of them dragged their suitcases inside. They rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, anxiety so thick between them Anita could feel it buzz, like the beginning of a storm.

At Margaret’s door, Anita knocked loudly, Janeen standing behind her, wringing her hands. “Margaret?” Anita called. “Open the door, it’s me.” She found she couldn’t say her name. “Open the door, Margaret,” she said, her voice cracking.

Janeen chewed one of her knuckles. There was no answer. They could kick down the door, or find the superintendent, tell him they thought the people inside needed help. Anita felt blood pounding in the hand she used to steady herself against the door. What would they find inside? What devastation, what trauma? She knocked again, harder this time, and heard a small dog begin barking in the apartment next door. “Margaret,” she tried to shout, but what came out was mostly air. She needed a paper bag to breathe into. Margaret was her sister, her own flesh and blood. Despite everything, how could she have walked out on her once again?

A hesitant voice came from inside. “Who is it?” A boy’s voice.

“Erik?” Janeen came forward, put her fingertips to the door. “Is that you?”

“Who’s there?” he said, sounding fearful. “Why are you covering the peephole?”

“Mutti!” Janeen cried, moving Anita’s hand.

“It is Anita and Janeen,” Anita said, looking straight into the peephole. “What’s going on in there—is your mother safe?”

“I—” Erik said. “Something happened with… him. I think she might need a hospital, but she won’t let me take her.”

“Let us in, Erik,” said Anita, trying hard to sound as if she were in control. “Let us see if we can help.”

She heard him undo every lock. When he pulled the door open, he looked young and scared in his socks. Janeen took his forearm and held it for a second. “I thought you were going home,” he said, shutting the door behind them, relocking the deadbolt, the knob, the chain. “I tried asking her what happened. All she would say is they took him. They took him early in the morning, yesterday, I think—that’s all I could get her to say.”

“Where is she?” Anita said softly, and he pointed, swallowing, toward the bedroom.