Gisela tried to understand what was so funny, something about fruit and making fat children.Hänsel und Gretel, bellies empty, nibbling away at the witch’s cottage, fattening themselves to be eaten, blaming the wind.
That night, Gisela lay awake, thinking of the mother and father below them, what they might be plotting. She rubbed her full belly. Loose shutters clattered in a west wind. “Do you think they’re fattening us up to eat us?”
“Don’t be silly,” Elisabeth whispered. “We are lucky to be here. You worry too much.”
Gisela balled up, squeezing her eyes and the brown rabbit tightly.Der Wind, Der Wind, Das Himmlische Kind.
The following morning, Gisela and Elisabeth were hardly down from the loft when Fiadh appeared in the doorway with a list of chores and ideas for games and adventures. “Soon enough, those O’Kane boys will be off their boat and just wait until they get a load of you lot.”
That afternoon, the sun high in a cloudless sky, the O’Kane boys came up the path like a single, dozen-limbed lobster—boy chests armor-hard, thin carapace, flushed faces, bones bare and pokey. Denis, the oldest, then Jeremiah, called “Jem” for short, and the youngest, Conor. Denis was light haired with a spitting lisp and crossed hazel eyes, looks that reminded Gisela of the boys in Cologne who played at being soldiers, who jutted out their arms and hands in allegiance toder Führer. Jem and Conor were his opposite—dark hair, blistering blue eyes, uncommon white teeth. Fiadh had been fighting Conor her whole life, she told the girls. “Denis is the ugly one, Jem is the clever one, and Conor’s a rogue—he’ll get you cigs if you want. Bit of a temper too.” She touched her hair when she spoke his name.
Gisela raised her eyebrows and eyeballed Conor.
“What?” Fiadh said, incredulous. “You think I like him or something? Well, you’re wrong. I hate his guts. I hate his stinking, mean guts.” She smoothed her hair with both palms and wetted her lips as they approached. “Mark my words, though,” she added, grinning mischievously. “I do plan to marry him and make his life miserable.”
The boys squared up and blocked the road like brawlers. Fiadh stepped out, hands on her hips, legs spread into an A-frame. Conor did the same.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” Denis jeered. “Kiss your bride, there, Con!”
“Shut your trap or I’ll shut it for you,” Conor said. “That what you call muscle, Fee? Your girls are scrawny.”
The air between the two kids crackled. Gisela’s eyes popped when Fiadh blew Conor a kiss.
“Give me a fag,” she said.
Conor smirked at his brothers. “Kiss me for reals, and maybe I will.”
“We’re leaving,” Fiadh proclaimed, stepping back and squeezing herself between Gisela and Elisabeth. “No guff from you today, Conor O’Kane.”
Jem stepped forward. “Ah, don’t leave. Fee, who are these girls anyway. They talk?”
“They belong to Hannie and Hugh. German orphans. Hannie got them at auction by Dublin. They’ll be giving them back, though who’s to say when. For now, they’re mine. Like sisters to me.”
What did it mean, Gisela wondered, to belong to Fiadh? To belong to Hannie and Hugh? She’d heard of slaves before, this American thing. Had America won everything? Did everyone have slaves now? Is that what they were? Fiadh grabbed their hands protectively, the way their mother had when she’d pulled them through the streets, past soldiers and shopkeepers, to their grandmother’s house before the body wagon took her away. “Stick to me like glue,” she’d say. At some point that Gisela could not pin down, Mutti had lost her insistence, had surrendered to fate and war, given them up for dead while they still took breaths. Could Fiadh keep them safe?
“You got your very own Germans?” Jem stepped past Conor. The boys softened, moved toward the girls like Fiadh had come to possess a bundle of firecrackers and punks to light them.
“Ah, sure you’re nice now that I’ve got something you want,” Fiadh said.
Gisela stepped back from the advance.
“No,” Jem said. “We’re not trying to hurt ya.” He addressed Fiadh, though his eyes remained on Gisela and Elisabeth. “They come from the war?”
“Aye. Their mum—” She slashed at her throat with the tips of her fingers.
Gisela pressed her tongue into her cheek. The last she saw of Mutti, she was running toward their building after the collapse, her mouth gaped open. Gisela could not hear any sounds she made, though the memory of her own screams echoed in her head. It had happened so fast, the truck that barreled into Mutti, then the strange angle of herneck and hips, the red stains on her yellow dress, the way she wore only one shoe. Gisela forced her lips together and breathed through her nose hotly. She cleared her throat as if it were still clogged with dust.
Elisabeth shook her hand free of Fiadh’s, clamped her tiny waist, and thrust her head forward. “Unsere Mutter ist nicht tot! Nein.She is not dead!”
Gisela bit her lip, threaded her hand through the crook of Elisabeth’s arm. She had tried to tell Elisabeth—Sie ist tot. Sie ist tot—but her sister refused to listen. Elisabeth, clinging to this false hope. Now was not the time to try to convince her again. Which would be better? Safer? That they had a mother to return to or that there was nothing left for them in Germany? Best to be quiet, to keep their business secret. “Sag nichts,” Gisela whispered in Elisabeth’s ear.
“Hissing donkey, that one.” Denis spat and laughed, a manic sound that went with his bright red face. “I wouldn’t want no sister like that. Besides, Fee, how you figure them for sisters? Hell, you’re not even cousins. Hannie and Hugh ain’t nothing to old Batty Jean.”
“I’ll call them whatever I like, and you, Denis O’Kane, had better not use that name again. Not like we haven’t all seen your own mam running down the lane shaking the rolling pin at your da. You’re lucky she’s fatter than him, or she’d give him a licking good. Like she ought to be giving you lot, by the by.”
“Let’s not fight. Come on. We’re going to look for periwinkles,” Jem said.
Conor thrust out his hand to Fiadh. “Truce?”
