Going Over (17 page)

“You're leaning,” the kid says now. “That's your problem.”

“Yeah?”

“It's basic,” he says.

“You some kind of expert?”

“Sort of.”

“I guess it's my lucky day, then.”

“Look,” he says. “It's easy.”

His eyes are black all the way through. There's red in his cheeks where the skin is frozen. He's got a gold ring through the right flare of his nose, a string of leather at his neck, a freckled shell pulled through it. He doesn't look the bow-and-arrow kind, but when he reaches for the bow, you let him take it.

“Some simple rules,” he says, very deliberate, something like hunger in his eyes or respect for the mechanics of bowstrings and arrows. “Pull straight back but keep your arms a little bent. Put both hands up to your nose. Keep your shoulders calm and low. It's not your arm that does the pulling. It's the muscles of your back, your shoulder blades.”

He shoves his hair away from his eyes and sets himself up for a shot. Lays the arrow across the arrow rest and settles
it into the bowstring. He draws back across a perfect straight line, rubs at his jaw with his index finger. Finally he lets the arrow fly. It soars toward the tree, into the pom-pom.

“Aim small, miss small,” he says.

You shrug like you don't believe it, like it doesn't matter anyhow.

“You want to try?”

He chooses a fourth arrow from the quiver and hands it to you, like he's being generous with your own grandfather's stuff. You leave him standing there and head for the tree, where the pom-pom is a red heart bleeding. Now one by one you collect your things—the target, the arrow that made the mark, the two of them that didn't, the cardboard quiver.

“What?” he asks.

“I'm late,” you say.

“All it takes,” he says, “is practice.”

I wake to quiet talk and a broken square of sun, the rattle of the gassy pipes that snake through the walls and beneath the floors of this old building, delivering nothing but noise. Beneath their lids my eyes feel hot with the propellant and the fumes. When I breathe I smell the sweet, harsh smell of paint. It hurts on the right side of my head and at the back of my throat, but if I move I will forfeit my advantage.

It comes to me in pieces—the first voice Mutti's, the second not Omi nor Arabelle, not even German. It's the voice of a man who doesn't know this language well, a
man
, and my mother is laughing, that soft
whisk whisk
she does when she thinks no one who's sleeping can hear her. She is telling him to wait. He is telling her no, look, the sky is up. Not the sky. He means the sun. The sun is up, it's time to go; he says it right now, with a twist.

I blink and see fumes. I turn on the couch, sly, not enough to pop the soft kernels inside the old velour pillow. His hair is the color of strawberries smashed and preserved, set aside in a
jar. His skin is winter. The bones in his cheeks strut up high and hungry, but his eyes sit crooked on their shelves—the left eye a little smaller than the right eye, and neither eye looking at Mutti.

The morning sun is a mirage.

There's another lover in the kitchen.

So this is the one
, I think. The canal one, the heartbreaker. This is the one, and he's back, and my mother is tender, my mother is wearing that long sea-foam dress she wears when she thinks love is near, when she dares to believe in it; she's always falling, my mother. Cut wide at the neck, the dress falls haphazard, exposing the bones of her shoulders—so delicate, so hollow. She holds the Garfield mug by its chipped handle and lets it swing back and forth from the crook of her finger. There's a box of pastries on the table, its string snipped. There's a trail of powdered sugar—two trails. The smoke I smell is from cigarettes, and not from Omi's candle.

“Stay,” my mother says again, and the man says no so gently that it sounds like yes. He's standing and she's reaching for his hand. He says something about me, the girl on the couch. She says it doesn't matter.

“I matter,” I say, interrupting my silence.

They turn at once, my mother acting like she's so surprised to see me, like she didn't realize until just now that we're squatters and I sleep on an old found couch. It's not their privacy that's been taken; it's mine. It's not her smile that hurts so much; it's her hope.

“Sweetheart,” she says, standing.

“What?”

“This is Sebastien.”

“No shit.”

She glares.

“What?” Her face is flushed, her skin looks wrong in that Valentine dress. She seems surprised (again) that I'm not happy, that I don't remember all the other men and all the other loves and all the despair that comes after.

“Your manners.”

“Manners, Mutti?”

“Say hello.”

“Hello, Sebastien.” Between tight lips, I say it.

I sit upright, pull my knees to my chin. I'm wearing my green sweatshirt with the hood, my yellow flannel pants. I'm wearing a blanket around my shoulders, cape style. Some of my hair has fallen over my eyes. When I squeeze my eyes shut I see pink.

“I have a question,” I say, mildly now, a brand-new tactic.

My mother looks hopeful. Please don't look hopeful. “Ask it,” she says.

“Does Sebastien love you?”

“Ada!” My name like the snap of a whip.

“I was just wondering,” I say.

“Your mother's lovely,” Sebastien says. “But of course we only just met.”

“What does
of course
mean?”

“Excuse me?”

“In that sentence.
But of course we only just met
.”

Sebastien takes a minute, smiles. He gets his face rearranged, and his posture, too, like dealing with sleep-deprived, pink-haired, brokenhearted almost-sixteen-year-old squatter kids is his specialty. “I'm from France,” he says.

“I can tell,” I say, “by your German.”

“I hear you paint.”

“I graff,” I say. “Write. With spray paint.”

“Maybe you'll show me your work.”

“Maybe. If I finish it. If I want to.”

“No pressure,” Sebastien says, and it's the right thing to say, and I am stumped so I shrug and suddenly I'm not at all interested in the conversation. Suddenly I know—or I remember—that Sebastien will come and Sebastien will go, like all of Mutti's men, and that this is not something I can protect Mutti from, because I've failed every time in the past. Being nice hasn't worked and being mean doesn't either, and there are other priorities, as a matter of fact. There are other people in the world who need much more than Mutti does. I have to find out what Meryem knows. I have to find Savas. I have to make sure that Arabelle will be fine. I have to get Omi her bratwurst. I have to get up, take a shower. I have to mail another letter.

“Sebastien,” I say, knocking the hair from my eyes. “It's very nice to meet you.” Emphasizing the
very
so he knows I don't actually mean it, and giving my mother a faux smile.
I stand up from the couch, shake sleep fuzz from my foot, rearrange the slack blanket-cape on my shoulders. “You don't mind if I use the bathroom?” I ask, fake-demure.

Sebastien looks from me to my mom and laughs, so ridiculously handsome. “She's just like you promised,” he says to Mutti.

My mother isn't laughing.

Arabelle's bike was gone, so I walked, my damp hair drying stiff as a board in the winter air. When I turned and looked back, I found my mother in the window, watching, nobody beside her and her eyes too round, and I hated me for the things I'd said. I hated the fact of this fact: I cannot protect Mutti without also hurting Mutti. Or. I have forgotten how that's done.

In the bell tower of St. Thomas Church the nine o'clock chimes ring, crystal pure, and I wonder if Stefan is listening. I wonder if the machines of the Eisfabrik stop to let the chimes through, and if they don't, does Stefan hear them anyway, the way that once, he said, he heard me crying. It was back when I was fourteen and still in school, before my job at the day care. It was the afternoon, the bell had rung, and I was walking the narrow strip between the wall and SO36 when I felt a hard, hot knock on the back of my neck. Spinning, angry, I saw twin-looking brothers with identical hooked noses and slits instead of eyes, slacking Os for mouths. The O mouths were
laughing as if they'd gotten me good, as if there was nothing they thought I could ever do—just one of me and two of them between the wall and the edge of the Kiez.

“What for?” I'd demanded. One hand on my hip, one hand on the back of my neck, rubbing hard.

“Because of the freak in you,” they'd said. Together, as if they'd rehearsed it.

The chip of steaming coal was at my feet. The heat of its burn was in my skin. In their steamed-up tower beyond the wall, the border guards were watching. Anything could happen in the West, and the guards would let it go. Anything between two boys and a girl, and they'd sit with their feet up and their rifles greased and turn it into a show. I knew that. There were stories. I should have turned and run, shouldn't have still been there when the dare went down. Five marks to kiss me, one of the ugly boys said. Seven marks for tongue.

I was wearing a pair of shoes with wooden heels, a backpack with everything in it. My hair was orange, long, and wild. They were on me like wolves with their filthy snouts, and I fought with everything I had, but they won. The boys won. Left me on the ground with my jacket broke and my backpack split, and I've never walked that part of the Kiez again, and I never told Mutti, but she knew. I wobbled up those stairs and into the flat and she knew, tears in her eyes like she had seen it from her window, like this was history, repeating itself. “Take a shower, love,” she said, and I stayed in the heat until it burned me all over, until I was erased by the steam, and even today there's a
mark where the hot coal struck and shadows where the welts had risen when I let the water burn, but right then, that day, I couldn't leave the shower, I couldn't turn the water off, because if I did, they'd hear me crying. I was angry at everyone, not just at the boys. I was angry at the guards who watched, angry at Mutti who knew, angry at Omi for the way she watched me, angry at Stefan for not being in the West where he belongs.

If Stefan lived here, it wouldn't have happened.

If Stefan lived here, I would always be safe.

Safe and nobody's freak. Not ever. Safe, and somebody's girlfriend.

Two weeks later, it was our time to visit and Stefan was there, waiting at the crossing as Omi and I exchanged our marks and showed our papers and were finally let through to his side. His wide arms were around me in a second. His words were in my ear.

“I've been so worried, Ada.”

I said nothing.

“I thought I heard you crying.”

Don't make me start, I thought. Don't make me
.

He ran his fingers through my hair. They stopped at the rough patch of the welt where the chip of coal had struck. He stepped back, looked into me, and kissed me on the bad place. Omi was calling, impatient. Stefan wouldn't hear her, wouldn't stop.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It's nothing,” I sniffed.

“Don't lie to me,” he said. “All right? We promised not to be liars.”

But I couldn't say, and I couldn't stop the tears, and suddenly my fists were pounding against his icemaker's chest, my tears were stains on his thin blue jacket.

“It's going to be fine,” he finally said. “Whatever it is.”

“It will never be fine, Stefan. Okay?”

There wasn't time to explain, and I couldn't.

Stefan crouched down and took Omi's little white suitcase of long-ago photos into one hand. He kept his other hand on me. We all went forward into the smudged air of the East, none of us talking, Stefan as close as he could be. To his flat and through the door and then he put down that suitcase, and we left the grandmothers together, making tea. Out on the balcony, it was just the two of us, and I was mixed up between love and anger.