Girl in the Blue Coat(36)

Mrs. Janssen looks up at me. “Should I go on?”

“No. No, that was very helpful.”

So much happened today: the hidden camera, and Ollie, and the horrible red glow of the barren stage at the theater. I almost haven’t had time to work through how it all made me feel. And when I do think about it now, I feel ashamed.

Because when I first told Mrs. Janssen that I would find Mirjam, I had been viewing her as a discrete puzzle that I could try to solve. A way that I could put order back in my corner of the world. A way that I could take revenge on the Nazi system—a missing girl, like a missing pack of cigarettes. A way of finding the person I used to be. But in that horrible theater, and now in Mrs. Janssen’s kitchen listening to her talk about Mirjam uncomplainingly eating beets, I am finally thinking of her as what I know she has been all along: a life, a scared girl, one of many.

“Should I burn this paper now?” Mrs. Janssen asks, holding up the notes she just read from.

I hesitate and then nod. “Yes, probably.”

“All right.”

She searches for the matches near the stove but doesn’t seem to see them, even though they’re less than a foot from her hand.

“Mrs. Janssen, where are your glasses?”

Her fingers fly up to her nose, where two deep marks are still indented on the bridge. “Oh. I dropped them. Behind the armoire.”

“When?”

“The morning after you left.”

“That was a couple of days ago.”

“I know where everything is in this house, for the most part.”

I feel nauseated with this thought of her, bumping around the house with her cane, half blind, ordering almond pastries on the chance that I’ll come over to eat them, wishing that she still had someone to ask about her son. She’s so alone now.

I brush the crumbs off my fingers. “Take me to the armoire. I’ll get your glasses.”

She leads me through the house to her bedroom, talking. “I’m just getting used to living alone. The boys or Hendrik would have helped me with my glasses. And then Mirjam, she would have. There’s just always been someone around to help me. You know, I used to be a career girl, like you. Forty years ago, when almost no women worked, I met Hendrik because he hired me to be his shop assistant. I thought I was so independent, but then my life became about caring for other people, and now I don’t want to be alone. I never would have thought.”

Mrs. Janssen’s armoire looks clunky and heavy, made of oak. I won’t be able to move it on my own. Underneath, I can see Mrs. Janssen’s glasses, but the space is too slim for my arm to squeeze through.

“I was going to ask Christoffel, the next time he came,” she offers. “It should be tomorrow.”

“We don’t need Christoffel. Do you have a long rod?” I ask. “Something very thin, maybe for closing the drapes?”

After several minutes of us both searching for something, Mrs. Janssen finally disappears into her back garden and returns with a flat wooden stake, slightly dirty at the bottom, and a seed packet affixed to the top depicting beets. “Will this work?”

I use the rod to push Mrs. Janssen’s glasses out the other side. She thanks me profusely while dusting them off, and then adjusts them across her nose, and a minute later we’re sitting back at the table.

“It could be that all this means nothing,” I tell her, “but I do have a few names. People who might have known Mirjam well. It’s all far-fetched, but did Mirjam ever talk about her friend Amalia?”

She purses her lips. “I don’t think so.”

“Ursie? Zef?”

“Ursie, maybe? But I could be confusing her with my seamstress. Her name is Ursie, too.”

I’ve saved the most promising for last. “Tobias? He might have been her boyfriend?”

“She did talk about a boy she liked, but I don’t remember.… Let me think.”

It seems strange, to think of Mirjam talking about a boy while she was in hiding, mourning her family and fearing for her life. But I suppose love doesn’t stop, even in wars. There’s only so much time a day that you can spend being terrified of something before your instinct to feel natural human emotions would kick in.

“Oh!” A light has gone on in Mrs. Janssen’s eyes. She reaches for her cane, scooting her chair back from the table. “I’ve just remembered something.”

“What? What is it?”

She stands and goes to the pantry. I hear rustling and the sounds of jars clanking, and when she returns, she’s carrying several jars of food.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, confused, but Mrs. Janssen shakes her head; she’s brought the jars over for a different reason.

“The day before Mirjam disappeared, I asked her if she would help me by wiping down the dusty jars in the pantry,” Mrs. Janssen explains. “I had to let go the woman who used to clean for me because I worried she’d hear Mirjam. Anyway, Mirjam had gotten most of the way done when my neighbor stopped by, so Mirjam stopped dusting and went to hide. This is what the ones she finished look like.” Mrs. Janssen pushes forward a jar that is wiped down and smooth. “Now look at these.”

At first, they appear the same as the ones Mirjam finished dusting. But when the light in the room shifts, something looks different. Someone has drawn a design in the dust, with an index finger probably—it reminds me of the designs I used to make on the windows before I cleaned them.