Girl in the Blue Coat(75)

“A room, then?” The woman is still waiting for me to respond.

“I’m interested in—” I’m still not sure what to say. Should I ask for Amalia straightaway? Or should I wait until I have a room, and I’ve come down for dinner around a cozy fire? But it turns out I don’t have to worry about it, because all at once, there she is.

A girl a few years younger than me, petite, fine-featured, comes down the stairs carrying an armful of linens. On her right shin, visible even in the dimness of the indoor light, a thin pink scar jags down from her knee.

“Amalia,” the older woman instructs. “It looks like we’re going to have a guest tonight. Can you show her up to room three?” She turns to me and winks. “It’s the largest we have, with the most comfortable bed.”

She’s changed a little from her birthday picture. She’s older in the face, and her body has curves that the girl in the picture didn’t. I let her take my suitcase, this dream girl come to life in front of me, and follow her up to the second floor. Upstairs, room three is decorated in pale blues and seashells, and the window is opened a few inches so the sea air can come in, even in the cold.

“We serve dinner at six,” she says, the first time she’s spoken to me. Her voice is lower-pitched than I expected. “It’s not fancy, but there’s usually fresh fish.”

“I know.” This is what escapes from my mouth. Not a grand speech, but the simple declaration I’ve waited days to deliver.

She smiles. “Have you been here before, then?”

I shake my head, and her name breaks from my mouth. “Mirjam. Mirjam, I know.”

Color drains from Mirjam’s face. She looks over her shoulder, seeing if anyone heard the secret name. The door behind her is closed. The streets outside are empty. “Who are you?”

“I wrote you a letter. I folded it into a star.”

“I never got a letter.”

Of course, Christoffel would have passed it to the real Amalia, not the girl pretending to be her in an inn by the ocean. “I’ve been looking for you,” I say, and then I realize that if she never got the letter, she doesn’t know any of what happened, and I am going to have to be the one to tell her, from the beginning.

It takes me a long time to explain everything: Christoffel, Amalia, the Nazis, the bridge. I keep repeating the things she doesn’t seem to understand, because she assumed Amalia would be coming to visit her soon. She assumed Amalia was safe. She listens to me with a frozen, stunned expression and her lower teeth biting her upper lip, a habit I never imagined for Mirjam. I spent a week trying to learn about this girl, but I really don’t know her at all. Everything I heard was an amalgamation of her and Amalia. I knew people’s memories of each of them, and I stitched them together to form a person, but it’s a different person than the one standing in front of me.

Mirjam sinks down in a chair next to the doorway. “Are you sure?” she asks when I’ve finished. “Could you have made a mistake?”

It’s the same thing I asked Ollie, when he told me someone named Roodveldt had arrived in the theater, wanting deeply for there to have been a mistake.

“I’m sure. She died because she was acting like she was you,” I say. I didn’t mean for it to sound harsh. I said it because I’m still trying, so desperately, to understand how it happened.

Her eyes fill with tears. “Have you ever had a best friend?”

I nod. My throat is tight. “Once. Not anymore.”

“Then you know. You know what it’s like to love someone like you love yourself and then lose them.”

I don’t know whether to leave her with her grief or to push on, but I’ve come this far and I can’t help wanting to go further. “What happened on that night, Mirjam? The night you changed places?”

She drops her head. She doesn’t want to tell me, or she doesn’t want to remember, and for a while I think she’s not going to answer me at all.

“We only had a few minutes. I was running from the furniture store. I didn’t know where I was going, and then Amalia was there, with me, in the street. She was already crying; her hair was undone and her blouse was untucked, and when she saw me, she grabbed me so hard I could barely breathe. It was before curfew, and the streets were so busy with people rushing home that nobody paid attention to us. I told her what happened—that my family was dead—and she didn’t even have to think before she took off her coat. She said that I would become her, that there were identification papers in the pocket, and money. She was supposed to be on a train that night anyway. To come here. The ticket was already booked. Her aunt hadn’t seen her since she was a child. So she told me to go to her aunt’s house, and then she promised that she would never reveal where I was or what had happened until I told her it was safe.”

“And that was it?”

“Almost.” She looks at me again, but her eyes are harder now, somehow, closed off and protective.

It’s the almost that keeps stopping me, that has stopped me all week. I’ve had so many occasions of thinking I almost understood something only to realize I didn’t understand anything at all.

“Mirjam, Amalia had a secret. She told it to Christoffel. It’s why he made her leave his house. It made him so angry that Amalia was afraid of him. Do you know what it was? What Amalia could have told him that would have upset Christoffel so much that he sent her away from a place where she was safe?”