there is no excuse, will take the most sensible way out. A suicide befitting a war criminal—likely a steel barrel in the mouth. No one will care when the note he leaves claims he was only following orders. He actually calls my parents to say he’s sorry before he eats the gun. I hear Dad swearing in German at him.
Martha Underwood, and others like her, will be reunited with her boy, forgiven when she says she was only doing what she was told. The forgiveness will be official only. Martha will find this out on trips to Safeway when she feels the stares of fathers and when she hears mothers whisper. She’ll move to a new state before long.
I think it will be a good Thanksgiving, and the weeks before Christmas promise to be even better. My parents will have a full house again, both the old and the young to take care of. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, they’ll have a ton to be thankful for. On her tenth birthday, which happens to fall on the same date as the demolition of five buildings formerly known as Kansas State School 46, Freddie will celebrate by wearing her Wonder Woman costume for a solid week. She’ll stop taking her anti-anxiety meds at the same time, and nothing horrible will happen. Anne will meet a boy, a nice boy, who will take her to the winter dance. She won’t get as far as asking him what his Q was, but she’ll probably let him get to first base. The papers will report a rash of divorces, of which I would have been a happy statistic. Everything will be different, and I love it this way.
I love that Lissa and Ruby Jo will both return to teaching and found a different kind of school, the one I’ll insist shouldn’t be called Fairchild Academy but the New School. Simple is better, I’ll tell them, even if I have to make the funding conditional and tell them that in legalese.
The hashtags #NeverAgain and #NoMoreYellow will do what all hashtags do. They will trend, and then not trend, and then be replaced by other, more timely hashtags. Anne will keep them pinned on her social pages, though. She’s set on taking a journalism course next year, and Bonita Hamilton is going to offer her an internship. I think maybe Columbia University is where Anne will end up. Unless she turns to hacking and cryptography. Who knows?
And Oma, my lovely Oma, will still paint. She might switch from fences to doors, but they will still be strange, abstract things that ask more questions than they give answers.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
My parents run in a constant upstairs and downstairs routine, checking on me with blood pressure cuffs and thermometers, bringing me blankets or ice water, depending on my state. One afternoon, Oma comes in.
“You haven’t been sleeping.” She fixes the covers I’ve thrown off, pulling them up to my chin and tucking them in between the mattress and the box spring. “Were you cold again, Leni?”
I nod. Dad brought up the portable oil heaters and put one on either side of the bed. He’s fit for a sixty-five-year-old man, but his shoulders don’t square themselves on their own. If he’s not thinking about it, they curve down in two sad arcs. He doesn’t realize I notice, but I do.
Oma sits beside me on the bed and reads the cards that arrived in today’s mail. “I didn’t know there were this many people in the world, Leni.” When she gets to one from Ruby Jo, I ask her to read it again. The words say something about the most amazing woman ever. Funny, I don’t feel so amazing right now.
Then Oma gets to the point.
“Do you remember the time I struck you? When you were in high school?”
“Barely,” I lie.
“I have never forgiven myself for that,” she says, choking back the words. “It was a cruel thing.”
I reach out to take her free hand, and she squeezes mine gently.
She continues, “It was cruel, but that is not the point. I struck you because that day when you came home and told me about your school friend, that Irish girl from the poor family, I did