“No! Otto! No!” I wrench open his mouth, finding a trace of white residue around his larynx and a drop of blood around his carotid artery. “Why? Why would you take your—” I cry, shrieking at him as I press my fists into his stomach and pump my hands up and down, to expel the bottle full of aspirin he’s ingested.
I yank him to his side and drag him to the edge of the bed, so his head hangs down. I thrust the heels of my palms into his back, hitting him over and over, relentlessly without success.
“Why would you do this? Why?”
I slide off the bed, dropping to the side of the shattered glass bottle and his hanging head, grabbing his face between my hands.
“Otto.”
A sob bursts from my chest and the thought of everything that has become my life—our lives—over the past however many years has been enough torture and pain to last a lifetime, and now this. This wasn’t the answer. It didn’t have to be the answer.
“I failed you. I’m sorry, Otto. I’m so sorry.”
I lift his hand, pressing my first two fingers against his wrist to check his pulse.
There’s no pulse.
I reach for his neck, my hand shaking so hard I’m not even sure I’m near his artery. Foam snakes out of the side of his mouth and I glance at my fingers, knowing they are where they should be to feel for a pulse.
“No, no. Otto. No. I lean my ear up to his mouth, listening for the air that won’t pass through his lips.
He’s still warm, but he’s dead. He’s gone, and I never loved him the way I should have. Maybe if I had, he would have taken a different path. I could have shown him a different way. “I’m so sorry. I am. I’m so sorry.”
My chest aches, and the pain is relentless no matter how hard I press my fists against my sternum. I don’t know what to do.
I need to get help.
I run downstairs and check our phone, not expecting it to be working since the line was damaged during the explosion. It doesn’t connect. There’s just silence…like the rest of my house at this moment.
Spinning around again, gasping for air, I race out the front door, spotting Karl’s car out the front of their house. I’m barefoot, running over debris, trying to get to their front door as fast as I can, but it’s as if the front door keeps moving away from my reach.
I trip up their front steps but catch myself on their door and bang as hard as I can. “Help!” I scream. “Help, please.”
Marie, Ingrid’s eldest daughter, opens the door, horrified to see me like this, and I should have thought better than to come here and scare the poor children after what they’ve already been through this month. “Mama!” she shouts, pointing behind mewhere Ingrid is running back from Helga’s with ice wrapped in a rag.
“What happened?” she yelps, panic lacing her eyes as she reaches me. She pulls me in against her chest to offer me comfort but that’s impossible right now.
“He’s gone. He’s gone. I don’t know what to do.”
“Who’s gone? Who? Otto?” she cries back.
“Jesus,” Karl says, sprinting out of their kitchen. “Is he upstairs in your house?”
“Yes, yes. He was in so much…”
Karl runs out the door and Ingrid continues to hold me in her arms, spinning me in a slow circle, hushing me and cradling her hand against the back of my head. The tears clear from my eyes for a moment, and I spot the picture frame across the room—the one she didn’t want me to see the first time I came over. It was face down every time since.
And now I know why.
A photograph of Ingrid, Karl, and Adolf Hitler smiling in front of the Dachau iron gates. She’s pregnant in the photo.
“I should go help Karl,” I say, trying to catch my breath.
“Of course. Come back once—well, I’ll come check on you in a bit. I’m so sorry, Emilie. I can’t imagine?—”
“I know. There’s a lot I haven’t been able to imagine too,” I utter before stumbling back out her front door, knowing I’ll never be able to set foot in her house again.
I stumble, like I’m blindfolded, into this nightmare of a life. I have been trying to save Danner at whatever cost.
