The German Wife(112)

“Jürgen—” I whispered. I pressed my hands over his, trying to stem the bleeding. “You’re going to be okay. It’s going to be fine.”

“Sofie,” he gasped.

“Gisela!” I shouted. “Gisela, call for help!” Could she even hear me from her bedroom? She certainly would have heard the gunshot, but my daughter was smart. That sound probably drove her to hide. “Someone help us!” I called, and then I went weak with relief when Klaus appeared at the fence next door.

“Sofie? My God! What’s happened?”

“Please help us,” I said. “Jürgen’s been shot.” I was dry-eyed and my voice sounded stiff, almost emotionless. My hands, over Jürgen’s at his abdomen, were quickly becoming numb. I could hear my pulse in my ears—thud, thud, thud. It felt surreal, like I was watching a film.

Jürgen was still panting, but color was rapidly draining from his face. He was losing too much blood. My thoughts were muddled, but one suddenly seemed clear.

I had to keep him calm. I had to reassure him.

“You are going to be fine,” I said quietly, staring into his eyes.

“Love...you. The children,” he panted.

“Save your breath now and tell me later,” I said.

It felt like the ambulance took hours to arrive. I was vaguely aware of Klaus in the yard with us, but it sounded as though he was speaking from a distance as he told me that Claudia took our children to their house to keep them safe. Other neighbors were peering over the fences at us, but when I tried to look at them, my vision swam. I stopped trying after a while, and simply focused on Jürgen.

“You’re okay, my love,” I told him. Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe that was why it was so hard to speak and to concentrate. “Everything is going to be fine.”

The sun was on the horizon when I finally heard sirens in the distance.

Jürgen fell unconscious then, his eyes panicked as his lids fluttered closed, his hands growing limp beneath mine.

That was when the panic my shock had held at bay came rushing in at me.



44


Lizzie

Huntsville, Alabama
1950

Just about everything seemed a little broken when I woke up that Saturday morning.

Cal was trying to carry on as if nothing were wrong, but he seemed tender almost, as if I’d bruised him badly. I still had no idea what to do about it. And Henry had been so late home the previous night I started to suspect he wasn’t really “working late,” as he’d claimed all week. Calvin and I agreed to sit him down for a discussion over dinner, and I still wasn’t sure what we were going to say to him.

I had a lot to worry about with the two men in my life, and whenever I was worried, I was drawn to my garden. That was why I was up with the sun that Saturday morning, hoping to clear out the unwanted plants from a few of my garden beds before the sun grew too hot.

I was pulling on my boots when I heard the explosion in the distance—not so close that I felt I needed to run for cover, but close enough that it startled me. It was probably just a car backfiring—some laborer, leaving for an early shift to beat the heat. Nothing to be concerned about.

I started to work on the garden bed just off the laundry room, near the stairs to Henry’s apartment. If he was working that day, he’d be down those stairs soon. But just a few minutes later, Henry burst into the backyard through the gate that came from the street. He was wearing nightclothes, and there were sweat marks around his armpits.

“Lizzie!” he whispered frantically. “He was chasing me!”

“What on earth are you talking about?” I gasped. I scrambled to my feet and took my brother’s shoulders in my hands. “Are you dreaming again?”

“He came again last night, so I got the gun.” My breath caught in my throat. That sound I’d heard wasn’t a car backfiring. It was a gunshot? “He was coming every night! I had enough, that’s all. I told him if he came near you once more, I’d take care of him. I was going to fix it for you, Lizzie, but—” Henry suddenly seemed confused. “But when I got there, they were in bed together, and the little boy came in and...”

I brushed a lock of sweat-soaked hair back from my brother’s forehead, forcing myself to smile reassuringly, even though ice was running through my veins. I needed to calm him down. I needed to know exactly what had happened so I could figure out how to fix it.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said gently. “You can tell me the whole story, Henry. I’m going to help you figure this out.”

I’d never seen my brother cry before, not even in the very worst moments of our lives. He was sobbing now. He shook from head to toe as if he were freezing. Even his teeth were chattering.

“I still don’t know what he’s trying to do to us,” he said. He was seated on the edge of his unmade bed, rocking back and forth like a child. “But he kept coming around here all the time. And then she came too, with the cake! They are up to something. I know they are.”

Henry was generally tidy, but that was always the first thing to go when his mood was low. I was kicking myself for not checking his room. I had been trying to respect his privacy, but if I’d just come up to his room and seen the filthy way he’d been living, I’d have been able to stop all of this.

There was a tin of red paint sitting on spread newspaper on the floor, with brushes drying on the windowsill. I was confused about that, until I remembered Avril saying someone had been graffitiing the road outside of the Rhodes house. Plates of half-eaten food sat on the table, and scrawled notes were taped to the wall—a dozen or so slips of paper just like the one he’d dropped in my kitchen that day, each one covered with dates and times and seemingly random words. An open box of bullets sat on the little table I’d picked out for him when I was setting up the room.