Yes, there were plenty of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink for two people. Yes, there were his clothes in his hamper. Yes, his office chair was often pulled out, there was paper waste crumpled in the little trash can under his desk, and freshly typed pages routinely lay in a little folder by the typewriter. Yes, his opened mail lay strewn about and there was the pipe ash and the slippers…
But she never heard the creak of floorboards above her.
Never heard the toilet flush upstairs.
Never heard a cough or a sneeze or the clearing of a throat coming from the second floor.
Never cleaned razor leavings out of either bathroom sink. Not one whisker.
Never caught the faintest whiff of shaving cream or toothpaste or foot powder or any kind of odor at all in Elwood’s bathroom.
If the telephone rang and the person on the other end of the line wanted to speak with Elwood, June didn’t go upstairs to ask him if he’d like to take the call. Her standard answer was that her brother-in-law was indisposed and could she give him a message, even though the afternoon calls were becoming more frequent.
But the most telling observation? Elwood’s clothes and towels that Eva had twice been instructed to wash didn’t smell or feel like they’d been worn or used.
Eva had cleaned many houses in which men resided. She was familiar with the daily residue of their existence. There was nothing about the Blankenship house to indicate that a man lived inside it, only signs that a man once had.
She knew Elwood’s departure had to have been recent—sometime after she’d overheard him speaking to Melanie earlier that month from an upstairs window.
But she also knew how unlikely it was that he had left the waymost people leave a house: by getting into a car or taxi or even just by walking away from it. Elwood had made a practice of not stepping outside his front door. It had been nearly a decade since he’d been anywhere, she’d been told.
Eva spent the entire afternoon of the fifth day pondering if it was possible Elwood had suddenly decided he needed a change of venue and had called for a midnight taxi when the cover of darkness could perhaps mimic the feeling of being inside a closed room. Maybe a longing to see some of the world again had outweighed his longstanding desirenotto see it.
But then why would June feel compelled to lie about that and go to such elaborate lengths to give the impression he was in the house? Wouldn’t it be a wonderful sign of improvement if Elwood Blankenship had finally left his house? Wouldn’t June be celebrating her brother-in-law’s triumph rather than hiding it?
It made no sense. Elwood’s absence didn’t seem possible, except for one explanation that seemed too absurd to consider.
The rose garden. The shovel. The wee morning hours.
When she imagined telling Melanie any of this, it sounded ridiculous—as ridiculous as Melanie thinking June was keeping Elwood a prisoner in his own house.
Because June did not seem like a terrible person. She came across as kind and caring. Not only that, but Eva was fairly certain June loved Elwood in a deeper way than just as his sister-in-law, and maybe had for a long while. It explained why she continued to care for him after she’d become a widow. Eva could see it in the way June talked about Elwood and when she looked at his photograph on the hi-fi, at his slippers by the back door, and even at his pipe in its tray. It was a look of longing, as though JunemissedElwood. Somehow, the Elwood she had long loved was gone from her life. Eva knew that look. She’d seen it in the mirror every morning since shewas fifteen. Elwood’s absence was not something June was happy about.
Because June loved him.
The mood inside the Blankenship house was a heavy mix of sadness and longing.
Eva could feel it.
It was a feeling with which she was all too familiar.
But it still didn’t explain where Elwood was.
“I want you to remember, Little Sparrow,” Eva’s father had whispered in the last few seconds before the men of her neighborhood were taken, “that there was a time when we didn’t have to run or cower or hide. We were home and weren’t afraid. We will find each other again in that same kind of place. But right now you must run.”
It was late August of 1941. Eva was a few weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.
His next words were a quick command to Irina Prinz, Sascha’s weeping mother, to pull her away from him. A Russian soldier had unshouldered his rifle and was using its barrel to push Eva’s father toward a large truck and a misshapen queue of other men. Her brother Arman was also being prodded to that terrible cluster. Sascha was apparently already in it, though because of the crowd she could not see him.
The men were all ethnic Germans, just like her father, Arman, and Sascha were, and the truck they would be forced to climb aboard was bound for the Saratov train station. From there they would ride like cattle for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers until those who survived the grueling trip reached the gulag, a wasteland of numberless labor camps near the Arctic Circle, and from which, it was said, no one ever returned.
The soldier yelled at Papa to move, and Eva caught a glimpse of Sascha in the group of men at the truck. She untangled herself from the arms that held her and dashed toward him, screaming his name. The next moment she was on the ground, and the side of her head felt as though it had burst open with the piercing light of a thousand stars.
Arms came around her again, pulling her back, pulling her away, the light of those stars becoming less brilliant with every tug.
Irina, still weeping, was dragging Eva from a second soldier who’d rammed the end of his rifle stock against the left side of her head.
When her vision fully cleared, the now-loaded truck was being thrust into gear to drive away with its human cargo. Irina and Sascha’s little sister, Tanja, were huddled beside Eva for the moment on the warm pavement just outside the glass factory with other weeping wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.
