The Broken Girls(54)

“We stood every day in the Appelplatz,” Sonia said. “That was the main square in the camp. They lined us up and made us stand, for hours and hours. It was supposed to be a roll call, but of course it wasn’t. We froze or we sweated under the sun. Whoever fell was left. Mama was all right at first, but as the days went by, she got quiet. Quiet, quiet. I thought it was a good thing, because when you were quiet, you got by and no one noticed you. Then one day, as they made us stand in the Appelplatz, she started to scream.” Sonia twisted the edge of her bedsheet softly between her fingers, dropping her gaze to it. “She screamed and screamed. She said they were murderers—they would all go to hell. She said the war would be over one day and it would all come out. She said there would be justice, that there would be no silence in the end. She said that the murderers would someday see, that they would someday face their Maker. They took her away and I never saw her again. I heard one of the women say that they executed her, they shot her in the back of the head, but I didn’t know if it was true. If she’d just stayed quiet . . .” She dropped the sheet. “If she’d just stayed quiet. But she did not. And then it was just me.”

“Could you get away?” Roberta whispered.

Sonia turned her head and looked at her. “When we arrived, they told us that if we wanted, we could see the last woman who tried to climb the fence. Because she was still there.” She turned back to looking at the wooden slats again. “She was.”

Roberta could not speak.

“Today, it was like I was back there,” Sonia said. “It doesn’t happen often. The war ended, and they brought us all out of there, and I came here. I’m fed and taken care of. I don’t think about it. But today, it was like Weekly Gardening had never existed. I was ten again, on work detail. It’s hard to explain. It was more real to me than you are right now.”

Roberta put her head in her hands. Her temples were throbbing, and she wished now she’d gotten her own chalky white aspirin pill from Miss Hedmeyer. Her eyes were hot and she wanted to cry, but the tears were jammed in her throat, hard and painful. Had Uncle Van seen these things? Was that why he’d tried to use his gun in the garage? She made herself take a breath. “And the other day? In the dining hall?”

“That was . . .” Sonia searched in her mind, tried to find the words. “We had blockovas,” she said, “block leaders. They were prisoners who were promoted, assigned to oversee other prisoners.”

“Women?” Roberta asked, shocked again.

“Yes. A few were nice, and tried to sneak us things, but most were not. They wanted favor. They had leave to beat you, report on you. If you misbehaved, you were sent to the punishment block. Solitary confinement, and worse.”

Roberta thought back to that day in the dining hall, Alison punching Sherri, Sherri’s nose bleeding, the chaos and the noise, Lady Loon shouting, It’s Special Detention for you, my girl. Do you hear? Get moving. Move! It made sense now. A horrible, nightmarish kind of sense.

She circled back to the main problem. “What are you going to do?” she asked the other girl. “This can’t keep happening. You’ll get sent to Special Detention.” Katie, the strongest and boldest of them, had been sent to Special Detention, and she’d been so shaken she refused to talk about it. Roberta wasn’t sure Sonia would survive it. “You could be expelled,” she said. “You have nowhere to go.”

Sonia’s chin went hard; her eyes clouded. “It won’t happen again.”

Roberta wasn’t sure about that. But as Sonia drifted to sleep, she sat still, her mind dwelling on the problem, poking at it from all sides. Sonia was tired, drained, but Roberta was resilient. So was CeCe. So was Katie.

They’d gotten this far, all of them. Without breaking, without dying. Sonia wasn’t alone.

Together, they could do something. Together, they could carry on.

They sat on the floor of their room that night, all four of them, gathered around CeCe’s radio. With the sound low so Susan Brady wouldn’t hear, they listened to a show about cops chasing a murderer, and a rendition of “Three Little Maids” that made them all laugh. Then another show, this one about cowboys, before it got late enough that everything went off the air and CeCe turned the radio off. And then they talked.

In the dark, when they’d all been listening for hours, already relaxed, it suddenly became easy. The words flowed, weaving over one another, making up the pattern as they went along. Roberta told about Uncle Van, about the day she had opened the garage door and found him, sitting on a wooden chair, weeping, a pistol in his mouth. She told them of the days afterward, the silence in herself that she couldn’t break, the doctors, Uncle Van’s bloodshot eyes. He hadn’t been able to look at her. Roberta felt a new lump in her throat as she told it, remembering. She wished now that she’d crawled into Uncle Van’s lap and put her arms around his neck and never let go. But she’d been thirteen, and everyone had been horrified and silent, including her, and she hadn’t known what to do.

“Where is he now?” Katie’s low voice came through the dark when Roberta finished.

“He’s still at home,” Roberta said. “He sees doctors. Mother says he isn’t well, that Dad wants to put him in a hospital.” She forced the words out. “They’re fighting. Mother and Dad. I could see it on Family Visit Day—they wouldn’t look at each other, talk to each other. They’re ashamed of me and Uncle Van both. I know Dad works a lot. Mother’s eyes were red, and she says . . . she says it isn’t a good time to come home.”