The Broken Girls(62)

“No one wants to read about this.” Sonia gestured to the notebook. “It’s just the memories of some stupid girl. We could all be dead in a nuclear war tomorrow. It isn’t important.”

Katie looked at her for a long moment, thoughts moving swiftly behind her eyes. This was Katie’s calculating look; Sonia had learned to recognize it. “Then don’t,” she concluded bluntly. “You don’t have to write about Ravensbrück. But you can write. And you can draw. You could write a book about something else.”

“About what?”

“Anything you want.” Katie handed the notebook back to her. “You could write children’s tales, like Winnie-the-Pooh. Or something for grown-ups—I don’t know. You could write Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

That made Sonia laugh, which it was intended to do. She felt her cheeks heat at the same time; they’d read passages from the book in some of their late-night radio sessions. “I can’t write that,” she said, “since we just agreed I’m not going to get married. A writer has to write from firsthand experience.”

Katie rolled her eyes, which was also intended to make Sonia laugh. “Firsthand experience is nothing to write home about, believe me. Tom was sweaty and smelled like mothballs.”

Sonia laughed, though it was a painful story. She knew that laughing at it was one of Katie’s weapons, a way for her to make the experience smaller, easier to manage. “Do you know something?” Sonia said.

“What?”

“When I first met you, I was a little afraid of you.”

Katie shrugged; she was used to it. Everyone was a little afraid of Katie; she was beautiful, bold, impossibly strong. “And now?”

And now I love you very much, Sonia wanted to say, but instead she said, “Now I just think you like to read dirty books, so you want me to write them.”

That made the other girl’s mouth twitch, that perfect line of lips cracking briefly into an amused smile that she quickly pressed away. “Write about a girl in a boarding school,” she said.

The words were tossed off, but they hit Sonia with the unexpected force of a great idea. She thought about it for days, as she leafed through her notebook. She could start drawing her friends, the girls here. She could stop drawing Ravensbrück. She was almost finished drawing Ravensbrück anyway, at least for now.

So she did quick, furtive portraits of her friends, sketches at first when the girls weren’t looking, then others from memory. She did not write words, not yet. She didn’t know what the words would be. What the story would be. She knew only the faces. The words would come.

One day, she got a letter from the great-aunt and great-uncle who had sponsored her trip over the Atlantic. They wrote her from time to time, and they visited at Christmas, but they hadn’t offered to take her in. They were elderly, and they didn’t want children. But this letter was different, inviting her for a weekend visit.

Sonia read the letter over and over, shared it with her friends, trying to parse it. What had made them offer a visit so suddenly? What had made them want to see her? Was it possible they were considering taking her from Idlewild and letting her live with them? She was twisted with a crazy anxiety, mixed with a crazy hope. She could not leave Idlewild and her friends, who felt like sisters.

Her relatives had said that they didn’t want children. But to live in a house with a room of her own and a man and a woman . . . a yard . . . to get up in her own room and go to school every morning . . .

She accepted the visit and lived in anticipation, wondering what was to come.

It was November 19, 1950.

She would be dead in ten days.





Chapter 21


Portsmouth, New Hampshire

November 2014

Fiona stomped off the thin layer of slush from her boots as she entered the little café. A thin, wet ribbon of snow had fallen overnight, just enough to make the drive from Vermont hazardous and wet as it melted again. Still, she’d made it to New Hampshire on time for her meeting with Roberta Montgomery, formerly Roberta Greene.

Fiona had taken a chance and called her, asking if she was in fact the Roberta Greene who had once attended Idlewild, and the elderly woman had given a dignified, reserved agreement. Fiona had explained over the phone, her spiel about the restoration of the school and her wish to cover the story, and after a moment of silence Roberta had agreed to a meeting. Roberta was seventy-nine now, and Fiona easily picked her out in the small café, a white-haired woman who sat with perfectly straight posture and still resembled the picture that had been taken with the field hockey team when she was seventeen.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Fiona said, pulling out a chair and ordering a coffee.

“I’m sorry you had to drive in the mess,” Roberta said. Her voice was educated, naturally cool, as if she rarely got excited. “I don’t drive anymore, I’m afraid. I like to sit here, across from the firm.” She gestured out the plate-glass window, where across Islington Street a sign was visible on one of the old buildings: MONTGOMERY AND TRUE, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW.

“You were a partner?” Fiona asked.

“For thirty years. Retired now, of course.” Roberta tilted her face toward the window, and Fiona realized she had the quiet, stoic kind of beauty that defied age. “They still let me come in a few times a week and consult. They’re humoring me, but what do I care?” She turned back to Fiona and smiled. “Try the cheese croissants. They bake them here, and I eat them every day. I’ve stopped worrying about fat at my age.”