North Sea

Oda’s daughter refused to carry her own suitcase.

“You put too many of your own things in it,” Hanne said.

Oda got out of the car. “I put in a beach towel for each of us and snacks in case they don’t sell anything on the boat. That’s all.”

Hanne remained in her seat. She hadn’t wanted to come, and the sight of the sea as they came down the hill into the village of Harlesiel had not moved her as Oda hoped it would. It had not, in fact, moved Oda either. She hadn’t known she’d expected a lift, a change, until it didn’t happen. But Hanne was young, twelve and a half, and had rarely seen the open sea like this.

Perhaps it was all the clouds racing to hide the sun, great bright globs of them as if blown like glass from a fat straw and shorn flat on the bottom by the wind. They muted the hard blue of the water. They stole the show.

Across the parking lot, a man in a green jumpsuit unhooked a long chain at the start of the ramp and signaled a truck to move forward.

“The ferry does too take cars,” Hanne said. “Look.”

“Just trucks. For construction and such. Get out now. People will be next and I don’t have our tickets yet.”

Hanne did not move. The man in the jumpsuit walked backward in front of the truck, flicking his hand left and right as the truck dipped down the ramp with a clank and onto the boat. It was a tight fit. The man patted the hood of the truck as one would a dog and came back up the ramp. He nodded at the pedestrians.

Oda opened the passenger door and pulled on her daughter’s upper arm.

It was so slight in her hand, a slender bone wrapped in skin. She felt how easily she could dislocate it from its shoulder socket. Hanne yanked free.

“All right,” Oda said. “I will carry it from here to the terminal, but you must take it onto the boat yourself.” She put the strap of her purse over her head so it crossed her chest, a style she did not like and associated with women twenty years younger than she was, and lifted the two suitcases.

Neither was particularly heavy, but this short walk to the ticket shack required all her energy.

It was their first vacation together, just the two of them. Oda had been saving for it for nearly two years.

The woman in the ticket house, having assumed she’d have some peace until the three o’clock boat, was eating a mustard sandwich. “Better hurry,”

she said through a mouthful and slid the red tickets to Oda.

Oda left Hanne’s suitcase outside the little house and showed the two tickets to the man in the jumpsuit. “One is for my daughter. She’s on her way.” Hanne was still in the car.

The man held up the chain that he would soon reattach to block the way down the ramp.

“Please.” She wanted to tell him Hanne was in the bathroom, but the ticket shack was too small for a bathroom. “Her father’s dead,” Oda said.

The man lowered the hand with the chain. Its fat links clanked against each other. She was ashamed to meet the man’s eye but she had to if she wanted her daughter to make the boat.

“That’s hard.”

A horn blew. A younger man up in a small window of the control room was pointing and exclaiming something you couldn’t hear through the glass.

“You get on the boat now. Find a seat inside where she can’t see you.” He had a Low Saxon accent she could understand, but just barely. “She’ll come when you do.”

There were a few plastic seats, a bench, and a series of windows streaked with salt. She was the only passenger inside. Everyone else was either standing in the space in front of the truck or up the stairs on the small deck.

Oda put her suitcase with the others by the door and sat on the bench.

The horn blew again, angrier. A metal crank hissed and thudded. She leapt up and looked out the doorway. The ramp was rising off the stern. A jolt, and the boat pulled away from land in a rush of white foam. Hanne’s suitcase was still outside the ticket shack.

“Mutti! Look up!”

Her thin arms were waving with others on the deck above.

“Don’t lean over so far,” Oda said, but it wasn’t what she meant.

A few miles out and the sky lowered and the sea rose and there seemed barely enough room for the ferry to squeeze through the two planes of solid gray. People on the upper deck got cold and came inside. But not Hanne.

When the island came into view, a dark slanted veil hung over it. Oda pressed her forehead against one of the windows. Nowhere else in this wide span of the North Sea was it raining.

She would make Hanne tell the person in the ticket house on the island (Oda pictured the woman eating a mustard sandwich, though she knew of course it would not be the same person) about the suitcase and arrange to have it brought over. She would make Hanne pay for it out of her small allowance. She would not be soft about it.

But when the boat slowed and she and Hanne stood in the pelting rain with the other passengers waiting for the boat to connect with shore, she could see there was no ticket shack here.

“I’ll bring over your daughter’s duffel on the late boat,” the man in the jumpsuit said, as if she had asked him.

“It’s not a duffel. It’s a suitcase.” She didn’t want him to bring the wrong bag.

“And you tell me not to be rude,” Hanne said and walked ahead of her up the ramp.

Over the phone she’d had the innkeeper describe in detail the one room he had left. A double bed, a green desk, blue walls, cotton rug, a view of the water from two of the three windows. And a floral armchair. What colors?

she’d asked. He’d paused. Burgundy and pink. She was certain he was making it up. He’d already put the phone down twice to answer her previous questions. He’d tried to hide his disappointment when she said she’d take it for two weeks in July.

The room was precisely as he’d described it and nothing like Oda had imagined. He’d told her its dimensions and she’d measured it out in her living room as she spoke to him. But the actual walls made it seem much smaller.

“Everything all right?”

They were still standing in the doorway.

“There’s only one bed,” Hanne said.

The innkeeper looked at Oda. He’d explained on the phone that there wasn’t room for an extra rollaway and she’d lied and said they were used to sleeping in the same bed. “It will be fine,” she said.

He was also not how she’d imagined, younger, bearded, in tight padded shorts.

“Sorry. I’ve just been out for a ride.” She must have been staring.

“On a horse?” Hanne said.

He laughed. “A bike.”

“I saw a horse on the ferry,” Hanne said in a tone Oda thought she reserved just for her.

He laughed again. “There was a horse on the ferry?”

“I saw it from the ferry.”

Her tone didn’t seem to bother him. “There’s a stable on the east end.

They rent out, if you’re interested.”

“I don’t know how to ride.”

“She’ll teach you. Her name’s Pilar. She’s from Sevilla but her German is excellent.”

“Pilar,” Hanne said.

“I could give her a ring and arrange it.”

“I’d like that.”

Oda couldn’t afford to rent a horse for an hour let alone pay for a series of riding lessons. Surely Hanne knew that. All her savings for the year would be eaten up by this holiday. She would have to slip downstairs before he made that call.

He left and they were alone. Oda snapped on both lights because the afternoon was so dark, but it only made things worse so she put them out again, and it was even darker than before.

It was true that the armchair was burgundy and pink. It was also true that two of the windows faced the sea. But the sea was indistinguishable from the sky, rain, and fog so what did it matter? Fritz would be laughing now, at the expense, the effort, the view of nothing. But she only felt guilty that she was looking out at wet blots and blurs of gray he would never see. He’d planned all their trips, always south, toward the sun. Now she understood why.

“You don’t want me riding,” Hanne said.

In one way she was lucky her daughter was only twelve and could only imagine that Oda was brooding about horses.

“I’ve always wanted to learn, you know.”

Fritz had left her with debts on three credit cards, large debts that she had only just paid off this spring. She wasn’t going to fall behind for something as frivolous as riding lessons.

When Oda went downstairs, the innkeeper was setting tables. He asked if they had everything they needed.

“Where is the nearest shop for crackers and such?” She did not want to tell him she would be buying the food for most of their meals and fixing them in her room. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day she might dare to ask for a small spot in his fridge for sliced meats and cheeses.

“Back down the hill, take a right, and it will be on your left. That place is expensive, though. If you like, I can add what you need when I place my order on the mainland. Delivery comes every other day on the morning boat.”

“Thank you,” she said, embarrassed. Kindnesses like that could strip her naked and she scrambled to cover herself up. “Perhaps another day. Today I’ll just run out for a few things.”

“Closed today. Sunday.”

“I see.”

“Shall I set your table for supper?”

“Yes, please.”

She went back upstairs without having mentioned the horses.

Hanne had strewn the contents of Oda’s suitcase all over the floor. “Why don’t you have my shampoo?”

“Because you said you’d pack the little bottles we got in Genoa.” We meant the three of them, a different we.

“And you brought that gross deodorant that makes you smell like rotten vegetables.”

Above them light footsteps traveled the length of the ceiling, another heavier pair close behind. Silence. A wild howl.

“Great,” Hanne said. “Children.”

She went down the hall to shower and Oda sank into the pink-and-burgundy chair. She didn’t want to be here, spending money on this room and its view of fog. She wanted to sleep in her own bed and go to work in

the morning. Her friends, her sister, and the whole culture had pushed her into this vacation. She didn’t want it. Hanne didn’t want it. Why were they subjecting themselves to it?

She went to the window. It had cleared slightly. She could see the sea and it was not placid. The waves were churned up white and whipped by the wind. Far out, great fishing vessels vied for territory. The horizon line was broken by several oil rigs, jagged prehistoric creatures on strong legs. She felt the ferry’s rumble before she saw it curve around the east side of the island and pull into the harbor. People were shimmering in their raincoats.

Hanne was back and combing out her hair.

“The ferry’s nearly in.”

“I can see it.”

“Go get your bag then.”

Hanne put down the comb.

She appeared below and ran down the street in bare feet with wet strings of hair rising up behind her.

The kind man met her with her suitcase. They spoke, a surprising number of back and forths that Oda could not fill in, and then Hanne came back up the hill, slower, with her bag.

They were Australians, the people above them. Their three long-haired children streaked around the dining room in their pajamas, grabbing decorations off the table and books off the shelves until the father caught up with them and they all disappeared in a flurry of giggles and flailing limbs.

“You were never like that,” Oda said.

“You tamped me down early.”

“Crushed your free spirit, did I?”

They ate in silence like the couple from Belgium beside them. The Australian man returned, the three children trailing soberly behind him.

“Do you remember the song you used to sing me about the girl in the polka-dot dress?”

For a time Hanne had begged for that song every night.

“Polky Polky I used to call it.”

“Dot Dot, actually.”

Hanne smiled. “Dot Dot. I thought you were the most beautiful singer in the whole world.”

Oda felt pitched up onto the crest of a wave, like one of those boats far out at sea.

Back in their room there was nothing to do but get into bed. Cold air, much colder than it ever got in Munich in July, came through the lifted windows.

The quilt on the bed was heavy, the sheets tucked in tight. Hanne took the right side, closest to the wall. The bed cracked and creaked when Oda got in. She shut off the light.

Here it was, the moment, the reason for the vacation, the one thing that had convinced her to spend this money. After Fritz died, Oda’s friend Frauke told her that when she lost her husband the children had slept in her bed for a year. But Hanne, even that first night, wanted to sleep in her own bed. If Oda tried to cuddle with her in her room, Hanne said she was too hot and asked her to leave. But here they would be together in the dark, where perhaps it would be easier and safer to talk to each other.

“Are you comfy?” Oda asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Sleepy?”

“Not really.”

“We could tell each other stories.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could tell you a story about something. About me or you when you were little, or Grandmother. Or Papi.” She let that hang there a moment.

“Then you could tell me one.” Oda rolled onto her side to face Hanne. She hoped Hanne would turn toward her but she did not. She remained on her back, in profile, her face dark against the last blue light of the day.

“I’m tired.”

Oda woke up several hours later. The room was black, the kind of dark that had terrified her as a child when she slept at her grandparents’ in the country. It still made her uneasy. She turned sideways on the bed so she could see through the window. Out on the water there were specks of light from the oil rigs. Metal things clanged on boats moored in the harbor.

Against their hulls the water sounded like dogs lapping, quick and frantic.

She lifted her head off the pillow and found a few green lights closer in, running lights on the ferry in its hold. She didn’t know it slept here at night.

It made sense, in case of an emergency. It wasn’t rumbling now, but she

remembered what its rumbling felt like, and the thought of that comforted her.

When it was light enough she read in bed, turning the pages quietly, careful not to wake Hanne. Down below, plates were being placed on tables. The smell of fresh bread and sausage filled the room. Oda felt a racing in her body, an urgency that had no reason to exist now. She didn’t have to get up for work or make Hanne’s lunch or get her to her Saturday lessons or to church. She wondered how other people adjusted to vacations.

It was such an unpleasant feeling, like gunning a car in neutral. It pulled her from the book she was reading. Her eyes could not take in the words. It was like the months after Fritz died all over again.

But he had been dead nearly two years. He’d gone to work at the hospital on his bike and been hit by another doctor in a car. The ambulance had traveled less than half a kilometer to reach him but he was already gone.

He’d died with less than two thousand euros in the bank. She’d been certain there was another account somewhere— he’d mentioned wanting to set one up after Hanne was born—with savings for her. He’d trained to be a doctor, but instead of going into practice as he’d planned, he’d taken a postdoc residency with a hematologist he admired, which led to another in infectious diseases and another researching the typhus outbreak of 1847.

He’d had so much curiosity. There was always the promise of a solid regular salary just ahead, one more year, one last itch scratched. Oda hadn’t minded, not really, not for a long time. She did the books for several of Fritz’s medical school friends who had started their own practices and that brought in some extra money. It also made her feel safe, going over his friends’ numbers. Fritz wasn’t earning that kind of money, but he could be.

At any moment he could have an income like that. Instead he died. And there was no other bank account.

Or a life insurance policy—another thing she couldn’t quite believe. She sat in the office of the company where she had hers and asked the man to look again at his computer screen. She was sure they’d filled out the papers at the same time. Hadn’t they had a joint policy? Sometimes names get dropped, she explained to him. It had happened with the same computer program he was using. One of her clients had it. Could she have a look? She expected the man to rebuff her, but he let her come around his desk, seize the mouse, and click away. She explained what she was doing, where she was searching. She never found a policy in Fritz’s name, but a few days

later she got a call from that insurance agent suggesting she apply for a full-time position that was opening up there. She was good at her job. She told people her story, the lack of a policy for her and her young daughter, and it moved them. It made them her customers.

Above her in the center of the ceiling a steady banging began, deliberate blows with a hard object against a bare floor. Footsteps. A voice that got louder—muffled words Oda could have understood had they been in German.

Hanne slept through the chaos, the banging, yelling, stomping. Finally they all went down for breakfast, clumping down the stairs for so long it sounded like a family of eighteen, not five. There wasn’t exactly quiet after

—they made a racket in the dining room—but Oda was able to return to her book. The racing feeling was fading, disappearing. The words started to make sense.

Hanne rolled onto her back, then over again on her stomach, a sure sign she was coming out of sleep.

“All your page turning woke me up,” she said through her hair.

“It was the people upstairs. They were louder than a marching band for the past two hours.”

“I didn’t hear them. Just you. Can’t you lift the book up so the pages don’t drag against the sheet?”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“We need to get up. I don’t know when they stop serving.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“It comes with the room so you’ll eat now.” She never imagined she’d be using this tone on their vacation. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, before Hanne claimed it. “You can take one after we eat.”

When she returned from the shower, Hanne was dressed. “You took so long. I’m starving.”

At breakfast, Oda threw out some ideas for the day. They could go to the beach or walk into town or out on the breakwater to the red-and-white-striped lighthouse they saw from the ferry. They could go to the public pool or hike up the hill in the center of the island. Hanne made a face after every idea. Oda would have liked to ask the innkeeper what other sullen, ungrateful twelve-year-olds did on the island to amuse themselves, but she feared he’d mention the horseback riding. She worried that even without

her asking this he would mention it, so she let him deliver their food and coffee without making any eye contact or saying anything but thank you.

Oda had a clear view of the Australians across the dining room. It was a struggle to get all three children to stay in their seats. None of them could have been older than six, yet none was a baby you could strap down. The parents looked like tired zookeepers, not angry, just overwhelmed by the physical demands. He was a tall, skinny man with a thick batch of blond ringlets and a nose that came to a sharp pencil point. His wife was probably his age, early thirties, but could have passed as a teenager in her sari and long unbrushed hair. She looked like the older girls Oda remembered from school, the girls her brother had liked but could not get, who never had rides home and whose eyes were pink and slitty from smoking pot and whose lips were always red and puffed up, like they’d been kissing all day.

The Australians’ children required so much of their attention that they were turned away from each other for most of the meal. But Oda caught one moment when he gave her a spoonful of something from a bowl, and he watched her reaction and smiled after she nodded that it was good.

“How are your eggs?” she asked Hanne.

“They’re okay.”

“Would you like to try mine?” She cut a corner of her waffle and added a strawberry to the fork.

Hanne looked horrified. “I know what waffles taste like.” After a few more bites of egg she said, “You’re being really weird, you know.”

Oda asked for a second cup of coffee, then followed the innkeeper back into the kitchen, startling him when he turned back around with the coffee pot. “I’m wondering if you have the name and number of the woman with the horses. For my daughter. For lessons.”

That afternoon, Oda made tea in the kitchen and brought it up to the room.

She turned the pink-and-burgundy chair around so that it faced the two windows that faced the sea and sat in it. The ferry came in. Oda watched it empty out— day-trippers with bicycles, repairmen in work outfits, islanders carrying crates of groceries—and fill up again. Her man was there. He guided the mail truck onto the boat then stood chatting with people boarding and with people who had no plans to board. There were many of these, folks milling about simply because the ferry was in, not because they were coming or going. The sky was still gray but not as low and

compressive. Gulls skimmed the water then rose up so high their bodies evaporated into cloud. Up from the harbor came the sounds of men on boats talking over the engines and the rumble of the ferry as it pulled away from shore. The air through the windows came in gusts of hot and cold and after a while she could not smell the tang of the sea that had been so strong when she first sat down.

When Hanne came back, Oda had not yet sipped her tea or lifted her book from her lap.

“What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you back so soon?” Oda looked at her watch. Three hours had gone by. “Oh,” she said, confused.

“I rode a horse.”

“You rode a horse?” Oda said but with too much surprise.

Hanne scowled. “That was the plan, wasn’t it?” But she couldn’t cover up all her pleasure. Oda could see it in the flushed streaks across her face.

“How was it?”

“It was okay.”

She wasn’t going to share any part of it. A few years ago she would have told Oda everything, wide-eyed and shrill, spinning around in what she and Fritz used to call her happy dance, unable to contain her joy. Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.

“Are you wearing my socks?” Hanne said.

“My feet were cold and these are so fuzzy and warm.”

“Take them off. I was saving them.”

Also, there was no correlation between happiness and kindness.

Hanne rode every afternoon that week. More than half a month’s salary.

Oda put it on a credit card she had only recently paid off. But those hours were Oda’s respite as much as Hanne’s, her vacation from her vacation. She didn’t walk to the lighthouse Hanne refused to visit or go the maritime museum or have a beer in the lovely garden of the pub she heard the innkeeper tell guests about. She sat in her chair with her book and her tea and looked out the window. The sky rarely cleared and never for more than an hour or two. The ferry came in and out. Sometimes if she leaned all the way to the glass and looked far to the left at just the right moment she saw

Hanne on the back of a horse on the long East Beach, hooves flashing through shallow water.

After a week, Hanne became more amenable to excursions in the morning.

She even came back from the stables with ideas of places she’d like to go.

They walked several kilometers to a place called the Burger Meister run by Americans. Instead of the whaling museum, Hanne showed her the graveyard of whalebones in the woods behind it. Every few weeks, Hanne told her, people from the museum removed the pile, but after a few days another stack of bones took its place. If their morning together went well, Oda would tell herself that tonight, tonight she would insist that they talk in the dark, that Hanne listen to one of the stories Fritz used to tell her about his childhood in Fürth or about their courtship or the strange trip they’d taken to Luxembourg before Hanne was born. She felt like a suitor, a seducer. She bought Hanne a bracelet and gave it to her at dinner. She encouraged her to have coffee or caffeinated tea with dessert. But no matter the good mood she might have lured her daughter into during the day, once in bed if Oda tried to start a conversation, Hanne shut it down. “Can’t we just listen to the sea,” she might say, or more violently: “I cannot listen to your voice anymore today.”

At lunch one day, Oda tried to explain herself and the stories about Fritz she wanted Hanne to hear. “We don’t talk about him enough. Or about his death. I don’t want you to think I can’t talk about it. I can. I will. I want to.”

“Okay,” Hanne said.

“So would you like to?”

“I don’t know. Not right now.”

“Tonight?”

“No.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I don’t want you to say anything in particular. I just don’t think the silence is healthy. I grew up with parents who never talked about the things that mattered, the things that pained them.”

“The war?”

“Yes, the war was one of those things.”

“So Papi’s death is like the war and I’m like a Nazi who won’t talk about it?”

“Hanne. You know what I’m saying. I don’t want you to believe when you’re older that you had a mother who didn’t want to talk about things, because I do.”

“Okay, if I promise never to say that you didn’t talk about things can we stop having this conversation?”

“I met him in French class.”

“Yeah, I know. He thought it was a history class but he didn’t leave because he saw the back of your head.”

Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration but she let it slide.

“I know the stories. I have a ton of photographs. I remember him.”

“Do you miss him still?”

“I guess.”

“Do you feel it was unfair that he died?”

“Of course. He only got half a life. Maybe less.”

“But unfair to you.”

“I guess so. But it’s not like I knew him all that well.”

“What do you mean?”

“He worked a lot.”

“He was home for dinner nearly every night. He helped you with your homework.”

“Once maybe.”

“Hanne, no. Many nights.”

“And on weekends he went to conferences.”

“A few times a year. And sometimes we went with him. To Barcelona, remember?” She had a memory of the three of them in a park near their hotel, but she also had a memory of buying Hanne a doll made out of palm fronds, because Hanne had stayed home with Fritz’s mother. Which was true? She wasn’t sure.

“Is this talking? Because it feels like you’re telling me what I should remember.”

Three days before she and Hanne left the island, Oda had her first real conversation with the Australians.

She’d come downstairs without Hanne, who’d told her the night before she wanted to sleep in. Oda took her seat at the table they always sat at, then wished she’d chosen the other chair instead. Without Hanne in front of her she faced the Australians without obstruction.

“Guten Morgen,” the husband said. He had a fine but exaggerated accent, too bouncy.

“How are you?” Oda said in English.

“Ah, as well as can be expected in the third week of vacation with these ankle biters.”

She understood the gist, if not every word. The oldest child was pouring a packet of sugar into his hair. His father grabbed it out of his hand and swiped away the sugar on the boy’s head. Some crystals pinged against Oda’s plate. “Sorry,” he said. “And you? How are you?”

Did he know? Of course he didn’t. But for so long now when someone asked how she was they loaded it with pity and braced themselves for her reply, as if she had the power to hurt them with the truth.

“I’m fine,” she said lightly, because for once she could. To him she was just a woman with her daughter, not a tragedy. “I sleep well by the sea.” Or was it at the sea? She could never keep the British and American prepositions straight, and who knew what the Australians did.

“I do as well.” He smiled at her, a charmer with his wild hair and flashing green eyes. And that long lean body. He reached over to take a slice of ham from his daughter’s plate and his torso stretched the length of the table, the ribs of his back in relief through his thin T-shirt.

“Does your daughter babysit?” his wife asked, getting most of the ham back for the daughter who had begun to scream.

“No, she doesn’t.”

Imagine Hanne trying to control this brood.

Her own breakfast came then and she tucked in, keeping her eyes down.

When they left, the husband said, “Cheers.” His wife handed him the little girl. Oda wondered if one of them would die early and leave the other stunned for a time.

That evening, Hanne announced she was going to watch the Australian children the next day.

“Why did you tell them I don’t babysit?”

“Because you never have. And because you can hear them up there.

They’re holy terrors. Plus, they don’t speak German.”

“I know English, Mother,” Hanne said, in English.

Oda laughed.

“What? That’s how you say it.”

“Your voice. It’s deeper in English.”

Hanne nearly laughed, too. “It’s because we’ve had Mr. Manfield for so many years and he can sing Osmin’s aria, which goes down to D-2.” When Oda didn’t respond, she added, “The lowest solo note in all of opera.”

Fritz’s father paid for piano lessons for Hanne, though he hadn’t visited since the funeral. He paid the music teacher directly by mail, as if Oda might try to skim off the top.

Hanne looked at her as if she should say something, but Oda was angry at Fritz’s father now and went down the hall to the bathroom.

The Australian couple had hired a boat to take them to some deep-sea caves. Oda had read about them. They sounded terrifying. It was an hour out and an hour back and they’d probably spend another hour splashing around, the husband told Hanne at breakfast.

They looked at the clock together. “So we’ll be back around eleven thirty, give or take a few,” he said. “The critters are a bit wild in the streets. Best to just keep them upstairs where they have their toys and their books.”

Oda chortled to herself. Those were not children who could sit down and listen to a book.

But she was wrong. Hanne took them up to the third floor and Oda, after waiting a few minutes, went quietly up the stairs and listened at the door.

“Which of this do you like?” Hanne said in her low English voice. “The ducks or . . . what one this called?”

“Ants!” one of the boys said.

“The ants? You choose the ants book?”

“No, the ducks,” the little girl said. The boys didn’t argue.

Hanne read to them about the ducks, then the ants. Then a story about a little boy in the city who collected animals on the roof without his parents knowing.

“I have a barn. Here. With lots of animals,” the girl said when that story was finished. “Do you want to have a look?”

“Yes, I do,” Hanne said.

“Here, here it is!” a boy said.

“I want to show her!”

“Here, look at the big fat cow!”

“I want to show her!” The little voice broke.

“You show to me, Muffin.” Muffin? Was that really her name? “I close my eyes and you take me.”

Close your eyes, Hanne used to say to her, I need to show you something special. How many times had she led a blind Oda or a blind Fritz by the hand into another room or across a playground? Like we were horses, Oda thought now.

“Okay, this way, this way,” the little girl cooed. “Okay, turn in here.”

Their voices dwindled in the far room and Oda went back downstairs.

Hanne would have children someday. She would have her own family and these future people were the ones she would give her heart and her affection to. Oda would be the old lady they were forced to see on holidays then laugh about in the car on the way home. This right now was probably the closest they would ever be.

Oda tried to sit in her chair, but it wasn’t like when Hanne went riding.

She could hear footsteps, chatter, laughter. She could distinguish Hanne’s deeper, slower voice from the children’s, though she could not understand what they were saying. At the little girl’s age, Hanne had loved cinnamon toast.

She went downstairs. Breakfast was over, the kitchen cleaned up. The innkeeper was gone, perhaps off on his bike. She cut four slices of her own bread, toasted and buttered them. In a cupboard over the stove she found cinnamon and mixed it with a few packets of sugar from a table in the dining room and shook the mixture onto the toast. She brought the slices on a plate up to the third floor.

“These smell good,” Hanne said.

It was an apartment up here, with a living room and two bedrooms and light coming through many large windows. Hanne led her into a little galley kitchen. If she and Hanne ever came back here, this was the place to rent.

But of course they would never come back.

“Yummy!” the older boy said. “Thank you for such a splendid treat.” It was hard to believe this was the miscreant at the breakfast table each morning.

“Is it going all right, Hanne?” she asked in German.

Hanne nodded. Oda could tell she didn’t want her to break the spell of English. But Oda didn’t want to reveal to her or these children her rusty recall or her poor accent— she didn’t have Hanne’s musical ear—so she left.

She tidied their room a bit and sat back down in the chair with her book.

She felt something warm on her feet. It was the sun, two squares of it lying across the floor. Out on the water it began to dance.

The Australians didn’t come back at eleven thirty. Or twelve. At twelve fifteen she heard the phone ring up there, but she couldn’t hear any conversation. Perhaps Hanne would need help making their lunch. Perhaps they would need some of her bread. Halfway up the stairs she heard the banging of the first morning. She guessed it was the big fat cow.

“Now it’s twelve nineteen!” It was the older boy.

“Stop. My mother is below.”

He didn’t stop. “I don’t have to do anything you say. You haven’t even babysitted before.”

“I did.”

“No, you haven’t. I heard your mum say.”

“She doesn’t know. I did before.”

“Where. Are. My. Parents?” He gave a whack of the cow with each word.

The two other children were fighting over something.

“Stop it you both. Stop. Muffin has first, then you.”

“She’s had it all morning!”

“Where. Are. My. Parents?”

“You just like her because she’s a girl. All girls everywhere are like that.

They hate boys.”

“I don’t know where they are.”

The banging grew louder. The children were screaming to be heard above it. Hanne tried to placate them one at a time with no success. Oda knocked but no one heard.

“Stop it! You must stop!” Hanne was yelling, too, now. “I will tell if you stop.”

They stopped.

“Come sit,” she said. “I have to tell you something I do not want to tell you.”

Oda’s insides went cold.

The children fought about who would sit where on the sofa. Above the arguing Hanne said, “Your mami and papi, they have died.”

“No, they have not.”

“Yes, they have.”

“Like animals die?” the little girl said in a squeak.

“You’re lying,” the older boy said.

“The phone call,” Hanne said.

“You said it was the innkeeper calling about our grocery order.”

“I didn’t know how you to tell.” Her English was breaking down.

“They went to the caves. Just for a little while.” His voice grew higher and higher.

“They have a bad guide who tooks them wrong. Too much water.”

“They drowned in a cave?”

“Yes.”

Once the older boy started to cry the others did, too.

“Come here,” Hanne said. “Come up here to my arm. All of you. Come.

Let me hold you.”

Oda had gotten the call about the accident in the morning while Hanne was at school. She went to identify the body and sign the first batch of so many papers, as if death were just another business deal to push through.

When Hanne came home she led her to the sofa and wrapped her arms around her and told her she had to tell her something she didn’t want to tell her. Hanne had leapt up and run to her room. Don’t tell me, she’d screamed.

But Oda did. She sat on Hanne’s bed. Don’t touch me, Hanne said when Oda tried to stroke her hair. So Oda had sat in a chair beside the bed like a visitor in a hospital room. She’d ached to hold her. To be held. Let me hold you, she’d asked again and again.

She went up the rest of the steps. She knew she had to stop Hanne, but she was lulled into place outside the door by her tender voice, her soft cooing. “It’s going to be all right. We will be all right. I will take care of you.”

It was almost like hypnosis, like Hanne was playing Oda’s part in a trance.

“Where will we live?” the older boy wailed.

“You’ll come live with us.”

“Here? In this house?”

“No,” Hanne said. “But we can move here. Would you like? I could teach you to ride horse.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d like that,” the girl said.

“I can teach you German. We will be fine.”

From the foyer, Oda heard the Australians’ voices. The wife said something and the husband laughed. Oda’s limbs went cold, as if she were alone with ghosts.

They came up the steps quickly.

“Oda,” the wife said. “I’m sorry we’re so late. How did it go?”

Oda could find no words for them. But she didn’t need to. The three children sprang out of the apartment, shrieking at their parents. Oda slipped around them into the apartment. Hanne was still on the sofa in the new bright light. Her skin had a feverish sheen.

Oda sat beside her.

“Mutti,” Hanne said, and fell sideways and heavy into her mother’s arms.