The child shrugs. “Mr. Allred was nice, I guess, but I liked Mrs. Allred a lot. I was starting to love her. She bought me these shoes. They were black and shiny when she gave them to me. I thought she was starting to love me, too. But she wasn’t.”
I can stand it no longer. I scoot over to Amaryllis and put an arm around her, bringing her into my bosom. When she doesn’tresist, I put my other arm around her and hold her close. As Amaryllis eases into my embrace, I feel her shudder with the weight of owning far too much sadness.
“I want you to listen to me carefully,” I say into the child’s soft brown hair. “You are worthy of love, Amaryllis. And I swear to you, I will spend the rest of my life making sure you know it.”
“I don’t want to live here,” Amaryllis whispers after several long minutes.
“I don’t want you to, either.” I pull away slightly so that I can look at her and hold her gaze. “What I really want is for you to come live with me. I know it might be hard for you to trust grown-ups, but if you would have me, I would like very much for you to come live with me. You’re my family, Amaryllis. Your blood and my blood are the same. I know I’m older than most mothers, and I don’t have a husband to be a father to you. It would be just you and me. But I promise you I will do my very best to give you a good and happy home, and I will love you from this day forward as if you were my own daughter.”
All those decades of caring for other people’s children, and even the desolation of losing my beloved Brigitta and then the years at the convent school in Lucerne, have prepared me in both wonderful and terrible ways for this moment. I will not rest until Amaryllis is mine in law as she is mine in my blood and now in my heart.
Tears are now sliding down my own face. Amaryllis reaches up and touches my wet cheek, as if needing assurance I am real, and my tears are real.
“Can I go with you today?” she asks.
“Oh, how I wish you could. But I have to convince some people that you and I belong together, so I need you to be brave just a little while longer. I have a good friend who’s going to help me, and I promise we will work very hard to make it happen as fast as we can. I will not stop until you are with me. And I will comevisit you, every day if I can. In the meantime, though, I need you to be brave. Can you do that, Amaryllis?”
My niece regards me with an unreadable expression; it might be resignation or doubt or defeat or perhaps the beginnings of hope, but she nods.
I draw Amaryllis back into my arms. “I will come back for you, I promise you.”
33
Before...
JULY 1940
I stood on the platform at the train station in Favoriten, my hard-won travel documents clutched in one hand and the hand of the little boy who stood next to me in the other.
At my feet was a travel case, all that I was bringing with me from Vienna, all that a person who was supposed to be in Switzerland only a week would need. Wilhelm’s—an even smaller one—rested atop it.
No one had come with us to the station to wave good-bye or to help us board the train. It had been collectively decided that any tearful family farewells had to be said in the privacy of the Leitners’ house. Wilhelm Leitner and I had said a final good-bye to his parents and older sisters, all of whom struggled to rein in their tears, from inside a taxicab. Emilie had stayed behind to comfort them after we were no longer in view.
I squeezed Wilhelm’s hand now and smiled at him.
“You are very good at this game,” I murmured to him, moving my lips carefully so that the six-year-old could read them. He smiled back at me.
The object of the game was not to make a sound, not a peep, until we got to Lucerne. A box of chocolate-covered cherries was waiting for him in my travel case if he won. I had spent the last three days at Wilhelm’s house to get to know him and his parents and siblings so that he would willingly board a train with me with no family present. I had also learned the few signs he used to communicate everyday things like hunger, thirst, weariness, and the names of his family, as well as simple finger spelling.
“Wilhelm doesn’t know it’s uncertain when he can come home,” Emilie had told me the last time we’d taken the tram together to the Leitner house. “He thinks he’s going just for a visit to see the Swiss cows with their colorful collars and tinkling bells.”
“Even though he can’t hear the bells?”
“Even though he can’t hear them,” she’d said. “I’m afraid you will have to be the one to tell him the truth when he is finally safe. Or maybe my sister-in-law can tell him if you’d rather.”
The little boy had already become precious to me. “I’ll tell him,” I’d said.
I finally caught the eye of a porter, who brought our luggage aboard and hoisted it up onto the rack above our seats.
Wilhelm and I settled down, he at the window and me next to him. The train car was quickly filling with fellow travelers, civilians like us but also Nazi officials, and the occasional SS officer. We were no one to them; just a grandmother perhaps out with her young grandson, a quiet boy who wasn’t running around and shouting and being intolerable.
A woman walked by us in the aisle and said to Wilhelm, “What a cute little fellow you are.”
Wilhelm, with his concentrated gaze on the window and all that was soon to happen on the tracks below, didn’t look at her.
“He loves the train,” I said enthusiastically, and she smiled and moved on.
This was going to be the easiest part of the trip; I knew that. The farther we got from Vienna, though, the more I knew I’d worry about being noticed, remembered, or questioned. We had a very long day ahead of us and several transfers to make. Wilhelm had been warned by his parents that it would take a while to get to where the Swiss cows lived, that he’d be playing the game with Fraulein Helen for a very long time. But he also knew there was going to be a fabulous tunnel over the Tyrol and deep within the Alps where dwarves lived. And he knew that if a policeman came to us and asked to see any papers, he was to do nothing except play the game. If he got agitated or cranky, I had a small dose of sleeping powders to put in his can of juice. By the time we reached the German-Swiss border near Höchst, twilight would be falling.
