The Orphan's Tale(96)

Only now I found the belly box empty.

I lean against the side of the train car, pressing my head flat against the worn wood. Like holding up a shell to hear the sea, voices echo that are no longer there. Then I take a few steps farther along the exhibit.

There is an oil painting I have never seen before of a young woman on a trapeze. I gasp. The pale, slim figure is undoubtedly Noa, the sequined costume one of my own that I had given her. Where had it come from? If someone had painted her portrait while she was at the circus, surely I would have known.

I move closer and squint at the small plaque beneath the painting:

Oil painting found in the possession of an unidentified young man who was killed when the Germans bombed a resistance stronghold near Strasbourg in May 1944. His connection to the circus and the subject of his painting are unknown.

I freeze, my blood running cold. Noa had told me once that Luc wanted to be a painter. I had not known he was so talented. The image had been rendered with great skill, the artist having the clearest of affection for its subject. Taking in Luc’s work, I am certain now that he would not have abandoned Noa.

She had told me, too, that he planned to join the Maquis, and that he had gone to a resistance location not far from the fairgrounds. I hear then the bombs that rained down the night of our last performance and know then why he had not come for her. Noa and Luc had died the same night, just miles apart, neither knowing. Tears fill my eyes and run over.

I stare at the painting of Noa, which has been encased in glass to protect it from age and wear. “He didn’t leave you after all,” I whisper.

In the reflection of the glass behind me, something moves. A woman stands there behind me with hair a dome of white. Noa, I think, even as I know it is impossible. I spin toward the image, fantasizing that she is here and I can ask forgiveness for all I have done.

“Mom?”

I turn. “Petra.” My beautiful girl. There she stands, the child whom I was supposed to have lost all those years ago. I raise my hand to my stomach, feeling as I have so many times over the years the blow that almost took her from me. My miracle.

“Now, how did I know that I would find you here?” There is no anger in her voice. Just a smile about those full lips and the dark eyes that I will always see as if behind a sheet of white greasepaint. Performing.

At first, my losing the pregnancy had not been a lie. There had been a sharp pain and bleeding that terrible night when the guard struck me. I had assumed after the blow that I had lost the child. But a few days later as I stood atop the trapeze, considering whether to jump, I felt that familiar nausea return. I recognized instantly what it was: my child, defiant, insisting upon life.

I had not told Noa—she would never have taken the pass if she knew I was still pregnant. It was not that I did not want freedom or to live for my child. I did, so much so I could taste it. But Noa was younger, not as strong. She needed to go, and to take Theo with her. Without the circus, Noa would have nothing. I could manage, get by, find somewhere else to perform and survive. But she could barely take care of herself and Theo with all of our help. She would not make it on her own. So I had lied.

My plan was a good one and it might have worked if not for Luc and the fire. If it had been given a chance. How had the fire started, though? Across the years I wondered if it had been set deliberately by a disgruntled circus worker or even Emmet, wanting to be free of it all. Or perhaps a stray piece of shrapnel from one of the bombs. To this day I do not know.

In the end, it hadn’t mattered. The fire, not the war, had taken Noa, just as arbitrarily as Herr Neuhoff had been felled by his heart. I had no choice but to take the pass and save Theo.

And my daughter. Petra has her father’s features, but she is petite like me, a four-foot-eleven surgeon for Doctors Without Borders and a force to be reckoned with. I reach over the roped stanchion and brush her bangs from her eyes instinctively as though she is six. Only her hair is almost completely white. How odd it is to see your own child age! Petra, shielded on the inside and born in America, knew nothing of the hardships we had lived. Almost nothing. My daughter had been born blind in one eye, the sole injury the guard’s club had inflicted the night Peter was taken.

As Petra steps forward to embrace me, someone taller appears behind her. “Mom, come out of there.” I obey and reach up to hug Theo, who stands a full head above his sister, his own hair gray and wiry. Though they are not blood siblings, their features look remarkably the same.

“You also came?” I ask chidingly. “Don’t you have patients to care for?”

“We’re kind of a package deal,” he replies, putting an arm around his sister’s shoulders. It is true—the two couldn’t be closer.

They had both become doctors. Petra, who had not escaped the travel gene, circled the world in her practice, and Theo, ever content to stay, was a surgeon at a hospital in the same town where I had raised them, with his wife and my three beautiful granddaughters, themselves now grown. My two children, cut from different cloth, yet so very alike in shape. And medicine a kind of family business to them as much as the circus had been to my brothers and me.

I push the belly box shut with my backside so Petra and Theo will not see and let her lead me from the exhibit back to the other side of the ropes.

“How did you get here so quickly?” I ask Theo. “I only left New York two days ago.”

“It was dumb luck that I was at a conference in Brussels when I got the call from the nursing home,” he replies. “I phoned Petra and she flew in from Belgrade.” Petra spent most of her time in Eastern Europe helping refugees. She had been drawn, it seems, back to this part of the world from which we had worked so hard to escape.