Girl in the Blue Coat(74)

He’s allowing me this, this one kindness, the ability to put the final pieces together myself. If I don’t want to, I can tell Mrs. Janssen that it was Amalia in the pantry and now she’s dead, and it will be true, and how she escaped won’t matter. Or I can put the pieces together and everything will hurt more.

I have to put them together. Because without even meaning to, I’m remembering the way Mina cheerfully handed me a baby’s bag filled with firewood and I carried it on my shoulder for more than a kilometer without realizing that I was transporting an important part of their ruse. I’m remembering the fact that the carriage was really a camera. I’m remembering the fact that Ollie didn’t love me or Judith; he loved Willem. I’m remembering the fact that nothing in this war is what it seems, and I have spent too much of it not seeing what’s in front of my own face.

Amalia was folded up in the opklapbed. Christoffel rolled it out of the house on his pushcart. While I was trying to figure out whether I should help Mrs. Janssen find her missing onderduiker, she wasn’t missing at all. She was just a few feet away.

“She was waiting in the opklapbed for you to sneak her away. That was the plan all along.”

I am weary. He is weary. We both want this to be over, finally, completely. “She waited for hours,” he said. “She let herself sit in the office while Mrs. Janssen slept, but once she heard Mrs. Janssen wake up, she climbed back in. I told her I would come as early as I could in the morning.”

“And then you left. With her. While I sat here. Did you know I had been hired to find her?”

“A friend asked me for help,” he says finally. “That’s what I was thinking about.”

I try to figure out how to respond. Should I tell him about Mrs. Janssen’s desperation when she first learned the girl in the pantry was gone? Should I tell him about what it looked like when Amalia’s knees buckled and she crashed to the ground?

In the silence, he’s crying again.

“Shhhhh,” I say to him. “Shhhhh,” because it’s what people said to me when I cried about Bas and because, at this moment, there aren’t any other words.





THIRTY-THREE





Saturday


When things come to an end in a way you don’t expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don’t keep you up at night? Or does it mean it’s time to make peace?

It takes me two days to find a space on a train to Kijkduin.

The train goes to Den Haag first, a city that seems like it’s swarming with even more German soldiers than Amsterdam. I transfer to Kijkduin, a suburb on the sea, and as the train gets closer, the air becomes briny. Today I’m the only person to get off at this station, holding my small suitcase, looking like a mad vacationer who has elected to come to the sea in the middle of winter. My hair is whipped by the wind coming off the water, and my eyes burn in the salty cold. The town had been a resort destination, new and planned, for only a decade or so before the invasion. Now the beach has a fort near it, taken over by Germans and used for training.

I pass only a few people on my way into town, locals who live here year-round. The second, a young boy, tells me I’m a long walk yet to my destination and offers to give me a lift. I climb on his bicycle carrier while he pedals us into the small downtown.

“Here you are.” The bicyclist coasts to a stop, and he nods to a cluster of buildings across the street. The middle one is pale green.

I thank him and smooth down my skirt. Amalia’s aunt’s guesthouse has a painted porch and a cheerful sign hanging out front, assuring guests that they’re open for the winter. I know what’s behind this door, or I think I do, at least, but I still feel like an interloper. I didn’t send any word before I came. I’d dealt enough in speculation and fog this week; I wanted proof I could see. The black marketer in me, I guess, seeking reassurance and finding value in the tangible world.

When I knock on the door, a middle-aged woman answers eagerly. Off-season business can’t be easy to come by, especially not since the Germans have blocked so much of the coastline with barriers against the invading Allies.

“Are you interested in a room?” The woman I assume is Amalia’s aunt is already extending her hand to take my suitcase. “Come in. There’s a fire going in the parlor, and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

I follow her inside and think of what I should say and how much I should tell her. I didn’t come with any script today, either. What I’d come to do, after all I’d experienced, seemed too real for games.

In the end, this is what I told Mrs. Janssen, when she came home that day at her house: I told her that the girl she sent me to look for was dead, but the girl she wanted me to find might not be. I told her that I could never bring back the girl who she had grown to love over several weeks of hiding, but that I might be able to find the girl whose family was all gone, just like Mrs. Janssen’s son and husband were gone. I showed her the picture, and I told her that I knew it didn’t make sense. I told her I would try to find a way for it to make sense, but it maybe never could. I told her I was sorry.

Christoffel refused to tell her anything. He left before Mrs. Janssen returned. He said he couldn’t handle the guilt. I wanted to tell him a lot of things: How he’d caused destruction. How he’d been unthinking. How he needed to give me Amalia’s secret. But when he said he was crumbling under the guilt, I couldn’t bring myself to say any of that. Because I understood what that felt like. Because I’d spent more than two years and all of a war feeling that myself, certain that my actions had caused the death of someone important to me.