Long Way Home(5)

I never saw her again. Pop came upstairs for lunch at noon and found her sprawled on the floor. He carried her to the car and raced to St. Luke’s Hospital, but it was too late. Mama and our baby both died a few hours later.

Tomorrow’s trip to the veterans’ hospital to see Jimmy was still heavy on my mind as I went downstairs to work in Pop’s cluttered office. The familiar scents of engine oil and exhaust fumes saturated the space. Buster lay at my feet like my shadow as I wrote up invoices and ordered new fan belts and spark plugs. A few bills needed to be paid, but business at the garage was good, and we had more money coming in than going out. All the while I worked, writing checks and adding numbers on our adding machine, I kept reaching down to scratch behind Buster’s ears, and I prayed that the doctors would tell us Jimmy was getting better and that he would be able to come home tomorrow.

Along with Buster, Jimmy had helped fill the hole in my life during those terrible, lonely years after Mama died and everything at home had started falling apart. Jimmy did chores alongside me at the clinic after I started working there, and even though he was four years older than me, he would still take time to say, “How are you doing today, Peggety?” He would always ask me about my day the way Mama used to do.

About a year after Mama died, Jimmy found me slumped in an empty horse stall one day, crying my eyes out. “Hey, hey! What’s wrong, Peggety?” he’d asked.

“Nothing . . . nothing.” I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve, but when I tried to stand up, he made me sit down again.

“Let’s just sit here a minute and you can tell me about it,” he’d said. He sank down in the straw beside me and waited. He just waited, as if he had all the time in the world, braiding a few pieces of straw together while he did. His patience won me over. My story spilled out with my tears.

“Some kids pushed me down in the mud on my way home from school, then they laughed at me. They always make fun of me, saying that I have cooties. Sometimes they call me ‘grease monkey,’ and they make ape noises at me because of Pop’s garage, and because I can never get the grease out from under my fingernails after I help him. But today they made fun of me because of Buster. They called me ‘dog girl,’ and they howled and barked at me all the way home.” I felt beat up all over again as I told Jimmy my story.

“Who are these kids?” he said when I finished. He was roaring mad. “Tell me their names, and I’ll take care of them for you.” There were too many to name.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Of course it matters!”

“Pop says I have to learn to stand up for myself.” He’d also said, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” But that wasn’t true. The names did hurt.

“Those other kids are wrong,” Jimmy said. “You’re a great kid, Peggety. And Buster is one of the bravest dogs I know.” Tears filled my eyes again at his words. “You should tell your teacher about those bullies.”

“Okay.” I had nodded my head so he would believe that I would do it. But my teacher that year was Miss Hastings, and she looked at me the same way all the kids in my class did. I longed to stand close to her because she smelled nice, the way my mama had. I’d started to forget my mama, and I didn’t want to. But whenever I got too close, Miss Hastings would back away a little bit.

I never told her about the bullies, of course. The kids still made fun of me, and Miss Hastings still kept her distance from me. But the fact that Jimmy had cared, that he would have stood up to all those other kids for me, meant everything. “You’re a great kid, Peggety. You’re a great kid.” I repeated those words to myself again and again. And I kept the little straw braid he had made to remind me of them.

That was years ago, but oh, how I wished Jimmy would open his soul to me now the way I had with him that day. I would listen to him and do anything I could to make things right. It was a terrible feeling not to be able to help my best friend.

I took Buster up to my room after Donna left for work. That night, I read through all the New Testament verses Jimmy had underlined in his little Bible, trying to see a pattern, but I couldn’t. I was ready to give up when I saw that the first verse of Psalm 22 had been underlined. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” In the margin beside it, he’d written Gisela.

I made up my mind that when we visited Jimmy tomorrow, I would bring his little Bible. I still had the braid of straw he’d made, and I used it to mark the page with Psalm 22. Jimmy used to believe in God and in prayer. I wondered if he still did.

I turned off the light, picturing the woman’s face in the photograph. “Who are you, Gisela?” I asked the smiling girl. “What happened that Jimmy can’t bear to talk about it?”





2


Gisela





BERLIN, GERMANY

NOVEMBER 1938

On the day that the world came to an end for my family and me, it didn’t happen through a flood the way it had for our ancestors in Noah’s days. It ended with fire. That day was November 9, 1938, my sixteenth birthday. We’d had a quiet celebration in our apartment in the Jewish neighborhood in Berlin where Mutti’s and Vati’s families had lived for generations. But unlike past birthdays when our apartment overflowed with aunts and uncles and cousins, only Mutti and Vati and my ten-year-old sister, Ruthie, were there to celebrate with me.