Tangled Ashes (31 page)

“Well, what if I tell you that . . .” He paused, panic-stricken at what he was about to say. He cleared his throat as they passed through the gates, Jade still pushing her bike and Beck trailing behind. “What if I tell you—and believe me, it’s against my better judgment—that I’m attracted to you and that—”

Jade froze, then began to laugh. Beck walked around her, ready to lay into her for mocking him, but the look on her face held no hilarity. The tears coursing from her eyes held nothing but pain.

“You’re . . . attracted to me?” she asked, her voice high-pitched and sharp. Her bicycle fell to the ground as she covered her face with both hands, her laughter dying into sobs. She stumbled blindly toward one of the small guard towers and leaned against its wall.

Beck was at a loss. The topic he’d chosen to distract Jade from his drinking had led to the kind of brokenness he’d never seen in her before, and he blamed himself—his cowardice—for pushing her into such emotional turmoil. Unsure of what to do, he stood there for a few moments, then moved to where she stood, undone. “I’m sorry. I pushed too hard. I—”

But Jade didn’t hear his attempted apology. She turned weakly, her tear-soaked face blotchy, her eyes impossibly dark and huge, her voice broken when she said, “How can you be attracted to me?” Her eyes filled with fresh tears. She swiped at them with both hands. “I’m a freak—a breastless freak with a death sentence hanging over her head.”

“Jade . . .”

She held up a hand to halt him. A sob spasmed in her throat. “I’m just a walking, deformed corpse. That’s what I am. . . .” She sank slowly to the ground, her hands over her face.

Becker stood motionless for a few moments before sitting down across from her. He sat there while her sobs receded and her breathing slowed. He sat there until she took her hands from her face, looking everywhere but at him. He sat there until she drew in a deep breath, rolled her eyes, and attempted a tremulous smile.

“You wanted honesty? You got it. Happy now?” she asked.

Becker felt the wind knocked out of him. “You really think I’d be happy about—” he motioned to her—“this?”

She shrugged, biting her lip, eyes downcast.

“Jade—”

“No,” she said softly, looking up at him. “Just once, can you not say anything?”

Something in Beck understood. There were some emotions that tolerated no commentary.

Minutes passed.

“Boy, that’ll teach you to go to church, won’t it?” Jade finally said, wiping the last remnants of tears from her face, traces of her old feistiness back in her eyes.

“You didn’t give me much choice in the matter,” Beck said, smiling.

Jade cocked her head as her eyebrows—what remained of them—came together in question. “What are you talking about? You walked into that church on your own steam. No one was more surprised than me to see you standing there.”

Beck didn’t like the reminder. He cursed the impulse that had doomed him. “You made me stay.”

“I made you stay? You’re really going to put this on me?”

Beck stood and held out a hand to help Jade up. “We’re not talking about this.”

“Oh, come on. . . .”

“No.”

“I’m just curious.”

Beck was amazed. “Don’t you ever tire of arguments?”

“What happened in there that scared you so badly, Becker?” Jade asked, standing just in front of him, eyes red, arms crossed.

“Nothing.”

She smirked. “Care to be more specific?”

“You were there—you figure it out.”

“I’ve been there every Sunday for years and haven’t gone running from it, so you’re going to have to help me out.”

Becker considered the sincerity of her expression and wondered what self-destructive purposes pushed her to ask questions she knew would cause contention. “The whole religion thing is a load of . . . garbage,” he finally said.

“But you didn’t always think so—you told me you used to go to church.”

“I haven’t always questioned the Easter Bunny’s existence either.”

Jade smiled and walked slowly toward the bicycle that still lay on the grass at the edge of the drive. “I know that I haven’t exactly been the poster child for sanity since you’ve been here, but I assure you that if I’d gone through all of this without . . . without faith in someone bigger than this disease . . .”

“The Native Americans have their totem poles, the Hindus have their cows, and you’ve got your God. It’s a pretty predictable cry for help, but that doesn’t make it real.”

Jade picked the bike up and pulled some blades of grass off the handlebars. “He’s very real.”

“Let’s not talk about this, okay?” Beck said, holding up his hands. “It’s a topic I tend to get a little riled up about, and there’s been enough of that today.”

Jade ignored his plea. “What do you have against God?” she asked.

“You really want to get into this?”

“I do.”

“Fine.” Beck paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. The shots he’d had at Marcel’s hadn’t been enough to inebriate him, but they’d softened the periphery of his consciousness. “How many times did you pray for healing?” he asked, looking into Jade’s weary eyes. “I mean—with what you said earlier—I have a bit of a better idea of what you’ve gone through . . . what you’re going through. How many times did you ask your God to heal you, Jade? And how can you still believe in him when he hasn’t come through for you when you needed him most?”

“I—”

“Why did you get sick? Why does anyone get sick, for that matter? And look at this place,” he said, pointing toward the burned-out shell of the stables. “Does it look like God protected it? The Fallons are good people—why did this happen to their property?”

“You came out alive. So did Jojo and Thérèse. That’s good enough for me.”

Becker nearly laughed at the simplicity of her faith. “You’re way too easily satisfied,” he said. “This world’s circling the drain, and you’re . . .”

“Grateful for what doesn’t happen. Things could always be worse.”

“You’re naïve.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Are you seriously saying that to a woman who has breast cancer? I’m naïve?”

Becker attempted a sheepish smile. “Would
deluded
be a better word?”

Jade shook her head. “We live in a world where people get sick and buildings burn down and memories force us into habits we can’t break,” she said calmly, her gaze unflinching. “I’m not enough of a fool to believe that praying will always change the course of life on a broken planet.”

“And yet you just keep at it,” Beck said, trying hard to control the sneer the thought evoked.

“Sometimes my prayers get answered,” Jade said. “And sometimes the praying gets me through the rough patches. Either way, I win.”

“Either way, you’re putting stock in an illusion.”

“If you want to believe that, it’s your choice. But this thing you call an illusion—it changes me. It strengthens me and comforts me, whether it’s answered or not. Even when . . .” She looked over her shoulder at the guard tower that had witnessed her grief. “Even when life throws me some unexpected punches.” She cocked an eyebrow and smiled with some of the old fire back in her eyes. “You ought to try it sometime. Larger-than-life challenges require larger-than-life assistance.”

“Whatever.”

Jade laughed, though it was tinged with sadness. “Now you sound like Philippe.” She shook her head. “There are mile-wide cracks in your bravado, Mr. Becker. Pity you can’t see them as clearly as the rest of us do.” She turned her bicycle toward the gates. “I’ll be by tomorrow with the children.”

“What—so we can do this again?” Becker demanded. “We spend way too much time getting into each other’s face.”

Jade smiled and straddled the bike, placing a foot on its pedal. “But it’s an effective distraction from your demons, isn’t it? I can put up with this for a few more days if it’ll keep you out of Marcel’s.”

A muscle pulsed in Becker’s jaw as he took a step closer. “You know what really galls me?” he said, his eyes narrowing.

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You get under my skin like nobody’s business, but much as I’d love to cuss at you and order you to stay away—” he leaned in, his face inches from hers—“I can’t seem to stop thinking about kissing you.”

Jade pulled back abruptly, nearly toppling her bicycle in her hurry to put distance between her face and Beck’s. “Oh—well . . . ,” she stammered. “Oh,” she said again, eyes averted and cheeks flushed.

Beck raised his eyebrows. “Really?” he said. “That’s what it takes to stop your preaching? If I’d have known, I would have broached the topic a long time ago.”

Jade still wasn’t meeting his gaze. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and pedaled off toward the gates.

“Who’s the coward now?” Becker yelled after her, hating himself for the impetuous and childish tone in his voice. Jade didn’t look back.

Becker stood glaring after her, refusing to let anything she had said take root in his mind. He turned slowly to make his way to the castle and came up short when he found Jojo standing a few feet away from him. He didn’t know what to say. Just a few hours before, they’d braved the flames and the stables’ treacherous hallways together, but in the light of day, though there were myriad questions in Beck’s mind, he couldn’t seem to find a way to ask them.

Jojo stepped forward and extended his hand. Becker hesitated to take the object the older man held out to him. It was large—about the size of a football—and all smooth, carved lines and polished sheen. Jojo insisted by shoving the work of art at Becker again. Beck took the intricate piece into his hands and turned it, observing the workmanship that had caused a perfectly executed horse’s head to emerge out of the block of cherrywood that was still partially rough-hewn. But it wasn’t the exquisite detailing of the sculpture that gave Becker pause. It was the hand, carved out of the same block of wood, that lay across the horse’s snout. It rested there with a weight and a warmth that Beck could nearly feel.

Jojo leaned in close, the smell of his dirty clothes and unwashed body stinging as Becker breathed them in.

“You rear up like a horse,” Jojo said in French, his voice raspy and broken but his gaze direct. “Be still,” he said. “Accept the hand.”

“What, Jade’s hand? Jojo, you don’t understand. She isn’t in any shape to—”

“Not hers.”

“Then—”

“The one you scream for from the forest floor in the middle of the night. That hand,” Jojo said, his wizened eyes piercing.

Becker racked his mind, trying to understand what the old man was referring to, and he finally remembered the midnight run that had ended in his screaming expletives at the sky. He laughed, though there was little humor in the sound. “Jojo, I wasn’t asking for help. I was telling him off.”

The old man closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “We yell at those we need the most,” he said.

As the old man turned to leave, Becker called after him. “Wait! Jojo!”

He turned.

“I—did you . . . ? This is your work, right? You carved this—and the other horse . . . from the woods?”

Jojo nodded.

“You’re good,” Becker said, admiration in his voice.

Hunching his shoulders, Jojo merely said, “I have time,” and turned to head toward the gatehouse.

“Can we . . . ?” Becker wasn’t sure how to proceed. Jojo turned back toward him. “The police were looking for you. They have questions about last night.”

Jojo nodded.

“If you’d like to tell me what you saw, I could probably pass it on to them. I know you don’t like talking much, and . . .”

“No.”

“They’re going to want to know. You were there. You rescued Thérèse. . . .”

“No.”

Suspicion sent a shiver down Becker’s spine. “Jojo . . . you didn’t set the fire, did you?”

The old man leveled a long stare at him. Then, in the voice that sounded like gravel, he said, “First, I must see my daughter.”

“Come again?” Becker wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“First, I see her. Then you can have details.”

Beck ran through the options in his mind. “Sure—we’ll figure something out. Maybe tomorrow morning? I could get you to the hospital tomorrow. . . .”

Jojo seemed to square his shoulders and force himself to stand a little taller. “Today. This afternoon.”

AUGUST 1944

M
ARIE FOUND
K
ARL
in the stables, crouched down in the corner of a stall, his face in his hands. It had been several hours since Frau Heinz had returned to the birthing room with his baby. She’d commented, as she’d examined the tiny infant, on the heart-shaped birthmark just above her temple.

“That’s a good omen,” she’d said to the stunned young man who stood nearby, his body visibly shaking. Her voice was as soft as Marie had ever heard from the usually gruff woman. “Birthmarks like this presage a strong constitution and a long life.”

Karl hadn’t answered. He’d watched, pale and mute, while Frau Heinz had wrapped the infant tightly in a blanket, barking orders at the younger nurse to clear the room and prepare Elise’s body to be taken. The order had sent Karl into a panic. Where would they take her? What would they do with her body? Who would bury her? Frau Heinz had tried to explain to him that there was no time for a proper funeral with the Allied forces moving closer and no family members nearby, but Karl wouldn’t hear of it. He’d finally begged, hysterical, that Elise be taken to the Catholic church and given over to the priest, and Frau Heinz had agreed, exasperated.

The rest of the night had passed in a blur. Karl had disappeared while Marie had gathered up her few belongings and tried to make sense of the events of the past hours. The younger nurse had gone about her business in sullen silence, covering Elise’s body with a sheet after she’d given it a perfunctory cleaning, and then had left the room, dropping the crumpled picture she had taken from Elise’s hand into Marie’s lap. It was the photograph of Karl her friend had clutched since the harrowing truck ride that had brought them to the castle. Marie flattened it against her thigh, Elise’s most precious possession now a wrinkled and somehow inconsequential relic. She drew a chair up to Elise’s side and sat—stunned—while minutes, then hours crawled by. The irrevocability of death was a vise constricting her lungs and crushing her skull. She forced herself to breathe. To blink. To swallow. She retraced the events that had led to her friend’s death and tried to imagine what might have saved her, what might have allowed her to meet her own child, what might have . . .

A hand on her shoulder had startled her out of her morbid fixation. The village priest stood behind her, flanked by two men who carried a rough-hewn casket. He stepped closer to the bed where Elise’s body still lay and pulled back the sheet, revealing the ashen face and sunken eyes of Marie’s closest friend. He pronounced last rites, waving his hand over her in the sign of the cross, then covered her again.

He turned to Marie. “It’s time, my child,” he said, fixing her with a look of such compassion that she burst into the sobs she had contained since the baby had been delivered. The priest continued to pat her shoulder as his two acolytes lifted Elise, sheets and all, from the bloodstained bed and placed her gently in the pine coffin. They lifted it off the ground by its handles and awkwardly exited the room, Marie’s sobs crescendoing as the priest gave her shoulder a final, firm squeeze and followed them out.

Minutes later, she stood in the shadows of the stables, listening to Karl’s breathing and wondering what she could possibly say to make sense of the night’s horror. All around them, soldiers went about their business, preparing for whatever the immediate future held—either battle or flight, depending on the Kommandant’s command. The tension and apprehension on the castle grounds were palpable. There was little talk and even less laughter. They were all strung tight in wait for the unpredictable and unfathomable. Only Karl seemed unmoved by the urgency.

Marie entered the stall, absentmindedly patting the horse’s flank as she moved past it, then crouched down next to Karl, her back against the stone wall. Karl didn’t move. He breathed behind his hands, his inhalations and exhalations amplified as they hissed through his fingers.

“Karl,” Marie said, her voice rough with brokenness. He took another deep breath. “Karl,” she tried again, a little more firmly this time, “the priest came and . . . and took Elise to the church. Just like you asked.” Karl nodded. “I went down to the ballroom,” she said. “They’ve turned it into a nursery. The baby’s . . .” Her voice broke.

Karl whipped his head around, his hands finally falling as he stared into Marie’s face. “What?” he croaked. “What’s wrong with the—”

Marie held up a hand to quell his fear. “The baby’s fine!” she said, squeezing his arm to accentuate her point. “The baby’s fine,” she said again, new tears filling her eyes. “And she’s beautiful. Karl, your baby girl is beautiful. . . .”

The young man, barely more than a boy himself, nodded.

“Karl . . .” Marie hesitated. “Karl, she made me promise. Elise made me promise that . . .” She hesitated again, unwilling to cause the grieving young man any more pain, but determined to stand up for her friend’s last wishes.

“What?” Weariness muffled the word.

“She made me promise not to give them the baby. Not to let them take her.”

Karl stared at her, eyebrows drawn. “What . . . ?”

“When we were driving here—she made me promise that I wouldn’t let the Germans take her baby and place it in some Nazi home somewhere to be raised like . . . like . . .”

“Me? That’s what you mean, right? To be raised like me?”

She shook her head, flustered. “No. No, Karl. She never considered you a Nazi. You were . . . You were the man she loved. But she didn’t want her baby to be raised by strangers. I think she wanted her raised by someone who knew her mother, and—”

“My daughter is a child of the Führer. She was conceived for him and she will be raised by him.”

“Karl . . .”

“No!” he yelled, pointing his finger at Marie. “My daughter will be raised as I was. She will be raised by a good German family and will grow up to understand that only the powerful—”

“Karl!” The ferocity with which she said the word stopped him short. “Elise is dead!” she cried. “Elise is dead! Do you understand that? It doesn’t matter what you think—what matters is what she wanted before she died giving birth to your child!”

Stunned, Karl stammered, “But . . . she knew why we were having it.”

Marie leveled a disgusted look at him and threw up her hands. “Do you really believe that? Karl, do you really believe that Elise was having this baby for the Reich? She was having it for you! She was having it because she loved you and wanted that love to produce something beautiful. She might have played along with your loyalty to Hitler and your desire to give this child over to him for a while, but I assure you that the woman who rode in that truck with me yesterday had only one thing on her mind, and that was saving her daughter.” She let the words sink in before adding, “We’ve got to do that now. You and me. We’ve got to get your baby girl out of the castle before she’s shipped off to some halfway home with the rest of them.”

Karl hadn’t moved since the beginning of her diatribe. He seemed torn between anger, surrender, and grief. The emotional tug-of-war was imprinted in the dark shadows under his eyes and the creases in his forehead. “She’s a child of the Reich,” he said, the conviction he’d shown earlier gone from his voice. “She’s . . .”

“She’s Elise’s baby,” Marie finished for him.“You’ve got to help me, Karl.” When he didn’t move or answer, she said his name loudly enough to cause the horse to whinny. “Karl!”

He shook his head as if to clear it and covered his face with his hands again, running them up into his hair as he threw back his head and growled at the stall’s ceiling. “Fine,” he finally said. He turned his head against the stone wall to look at Marie, defeat in his gaze. “Fine. I’ll help you.”

“I need to be sure I can trust you. I need to be sure you’re not going to get some kind of attack of the conscience and turn both your baby and me over to your commander.”

Karl sighed. “I promise you,” he said after a moment. “If this is what Elise . . .” His voice caught and he swallowed hard. “I promise you,” he said again, his chin unsteady.

Marie stared at him for a while longer. She had no other choice but to trust him. “Okay,” she said. “This is what I’ve been able to figure out. According to the radio, the Allies won’t be here for three or four more days. I checked with the kitchen, and there’s a farm delivery scheduled for Friday. The farmer’s wife used to be my mother’s best friend. I’ll go over there tonight to see if they can smuggle all three of us out after the delivery.”

“Wait—”

“Getting to their farm will be the hard part. After that—I don’t know. We can try to catch a train to Bordeaux. My mother’s been living there with an aunt for a couple of months. She loves babies and will be able to help. . . .”

Karl shook his head, and his mouth tightened into a sharp line. “Not me,” he said, all traces of fragility gone.

“What?”

“Not me. I’m not running off like a coward.”

“But, Karl, this is your baby!”

“I’m not!” he barked. “You can take the baby if that’s what Elise wanted, but I’m a soldier. I’m staying with my comrades until we see this through.”

Marie was incredulous. “You’re a stable boy, Karl! Not a soldier.”

He hitched his chin up a notch higher as a muscle pulsed in his jaw. “I’m a soldier,” he repeated. “I—will—not—desert.”

Marie stared at him. “You’d abandon your daughter for the sake of the Führer?” she asked, stricken.

“I’ve devoted my life to the Reich. This can’t—this won’t—change anything.”

Several moments passed before either of them spoke.

“So . . .” Marie was at a loss. “So I’m supposed to raise your daughter for you?”

Karl clenched his jaw. He didn’t look at her when he said, “For Elise.”

“Karl—”

He turned icy eyes on her. “Do it for Elise.”

Marie looked at Karl in disbelief, but there was no sign of conflict on his face. Only certainty and a fatigue that seemed to hollow out his eyes and gray his skin. “Are you sure?”

He nodded, looking away. “It’s better this way.”

Marie nodded. “Friday,” she said. “I’ll try for Friday.”