Girl in the Blue Coat(34)

Upstairs he leaves his coat on until I gesture for him to take it off and hang it in the coat closet. He’s wearing his architect’s uniform of rolled-up shirtsleeves, smudged around the cuffs. My father has left a note on the table telling me that some neighbors took pity on him with Mama out of town, and invited him for dinner. I wish I’d known the house was empty before I asked Ollie up.

“Tea?” I quickly add, “It’s not real.”

“No, thank you.”

I was already heading to the kitchen when he declined, and now I pause, unsure, in the middle of the room. If he’s refusing tea, then what are we supposed to make forced conversation over?

Ollie paces around the apartment, looking at my father’s books, craning closer to see the titles but not removing any of them from the shelves. “I used to have this one.” He points to a collection of essays, mine, out of place among Papa’s foreign dictionaries. “I don’t know where my copy went.”

“I think that probably is your copy. Bas gave it to me.”

“Probably to impress you. I don’t think he read it himself.”

“I heard the German army isn’t doing well in Stalingrad,” I say, quietly so the neighbors won’t hear, my contribution to this awkward dialogue. “On the BBC.”

“You speak English?”

“Some. Papa’s teaching me.”

And then we’ve run out of conversation again, and it’s so strange the way an ill-timed kiss can make someone feel like a stranger. “Ollie. About last night.” He doesn’t say anything, and so I keep talking, as if I think he doesn’t remember when we kissed for the amusement of drunken soldiers in the street. “With the soldiers. What we did. When we…”

“When we were lucky,” he fills in quickly. “Lucky to think so quickly on our feet.”

“You did a good job with the soldiers. You hide from them better than I do.”

He shrugs. “It’s a skill with practical applications.”

“Do you get tired of the acting and pretending?” I ask.

“Not if it keeps me alive.”

I’m relieved by the matter-of-fact way he dismisses the incident, but also annoyed. It makes me feel like I’m a girl who made too much of a kiss that meant nothing.

“Did Mina help you with Mirjam?” Ollie asks, changing the subject like a gentleman.

“I need to find a boy named Tobias. His father is a dentist. I’m going to start visiting practices tomorrow.” Ollie nods but doesn’t say anything. “I feel like I’m racing against an alarm clock, but I don’t even know when it’s set for,” I confess. “For everything I figure out, there’s another problem to solve. I feel like I’m running out of time.”

“We all are,” Ollie says. “For us, for our little group, for the whole resistance—this war is a race against how many people we can save, and whether we can do it faster than the Nazis can take them.”

“If Mirjam ends up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, she’ll never get out. I just know it. It smells like—” I start to say uitwerpselen, but realize that excrement is not a strong-enough word.

“Like what?”

“Never mind.”

Ollie pauses in front of a family photograph tucked on one of the shelves: the three of us on vacation in the country, Mama and I on either side of Papa, each with a hand on his shoulder. You can’t see from the photograph how red my nose got that day from the sun, but I remember it. It burned, and the skin peeled for days afterward. “That dress looks so familiar,” he says, pointing to the photograph. “Why would I remember that dress?”

The dress is gingham with buttons at the collar. I look at it and feel my face turn red. I know exactly why he remembers it. “I don’t know,” I lie. He picks up the photograph to look more closely, and when he does, the little wrinkle on his forehead is so familiar it takes my breath away. “You look like him,” I blurt out. “You look like Bas.”

He winces, almost imperceptibly, before answering. “Not really.”

“In this light you do,” I insist. “In the light of my apartment you look like him.”

“Maybe your family should trade apartments with mine. My parents would probably pay a lot of money for that light.” His voice is somewhat bitter, but mostly sad. “They just miss him so much. We all do. That was why—” He breaks off.

“Why what?”

He sighs. “When I came here the first night, I was hoping I could get you to join the resistance. And I was making sure you weren’t working for the NSB, putting Judith in danger. But I was also just worried about you. When Judith told me what you said about Bas, I just felt so sorry for you. I thought you might be really… damaged.”

“Damaged,” I repeat, and it doesn’t hurt to hear him say that. It’s almost a relief, to have someone else speculate over the things I think privately.

“But it’s normal to miss him,” Ollie says. “Pia and I talk about him all the time. Him and his obnoxious jokes, his laugh, what he would have become.”

The apartment seems very still all of a sudden; I lean forward to hear every word coming out of Ollie’s mouth. “What would he become?” I whisper.