Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (13 page)

"Yes," she said to Ethan as she unlocked the car door. "It was a nice Christmas."

"Hey, hold on to that hat," he said to Eliana. "We're dismounting." As he lowered her to the ground and waited while Annette settled her in the booster seat, he watched Annette's expression; she seemed sad, and he couldn't figure it out. But there was a lot about her he couldn't figure out.

"Will you be in your office Friday?" she asked as she started up the engine.

"You bet."

"Good. I'm glad. I'm looking forward to it." Through the open window, she added in a low voice, "I could use a friend."

"You got one, pal."

Ethan turned toward his truck and as they drove away he heard Eliana call out, "'Bye, Ethan!"

* * *

On Tuesday Annette took her mother's old Buick into Strong City to have some work done on it, and she was late picking up Eliana from school. When she arrived the children had already been dismissed and the grounds were empty.

The school was quiet; not a single child trailing in the halls, classrooms locked and dark.
Where are you, precious? Where have you gone?
Panic seized her and her heart began to pound as she hurried toward the principal's office.

"I'm looking for my daughter, Eliana Zeldin," she said abruptly as she entered the office. "Do you know where she is?"

The startled secretary looked up. "I think everyone's gone. Did you try the classroom?"

"It's locked."

"Let me ask Mrs. Walters." She rose and tapped on a closed door, then opened it and spoke softly.

A moment later the principal emerged from her office. "I remember seeing Eliana leave the building, Mrs. Zeldin. But we had a little problem, a couple of the boys got in a scuffle on the bus and we had to bring them back inside and call their parents, so I'm afraid the teachers who supervise dismissal were a little distracted. Nevertheless, if someone had seen her waiting, they would have brought her inside and called you."

Annette used the secretary's phone to call home; she let it ring and ring but no one answered. Then she called Nell. Nell had been home all afternoon but hadn't seen Eliana.

Annette hurried out of the office and raced down the hall.
She slipped on the waxed linoleum floor and nearly fell, and she was angry with herself because she knew she was on the verge of breaking down.
How can you help if you break down?
In the car, her hands were shaking so badly that she had difficulty fitting the key into the ignition.

And then it began again. The cries. She knew it would. She could tell it was coming on. She mashed the accelerator to the floor and the car skidded away from the curb, kicking up sand and dirt behind her. It was very important that she stay calm and alert, that she slow down and look around for clues, anything that might help the police.

A light rain had begun, and she turned on the windshield wipers and slowed to a crawl, looking down every side street as she drove through the neighborhood. When she reached the end of her block she could see her backyard. Was that Eliana there?
In the rain. Why would she be outdoors in the rain?
No, it was just the hedge, a dark shadow in the gray drizzled light.

She parked in the driveway and raced to the front door, calling her daughter's name as she threw it open. Her father had gone to Emporia for the day to a trustees meeting, and the house was dreary and silent. She went through every room but Eliana wasn't home.

Annette was cursing herself for not buying a cell phone while she was here. Why would she need a cell phone in a place like this? For a few months? Stubbornness, that's what it was.
Just like your father.
She found some paper and scribbled a note:
Looking all over for you. So sorry I was late. Where are you??? If you come home, don't go out. Wait for me.
She tried to tape the note to the front door but the tape stuck to the roll inside the dispenser. She fumbled with it, picked at it and held it up to the light trying to find the end. It was cheap tape. Her father always bought the cheap, generic brands.

Angrily she hurled the dispenser across the room, then she laid the note on the carpet in the middle of the floor. Annette didn't have a clue where she'd left her umbrella, so she turned up the collar of her coat and headed down the street in the cold rain looking for her daughter. She'd walk every inch of this damn town to find her. She'd walk into the dark hours, through the night and all across the county if that's what it took.

By now the cries had returned, incessant, startlingly clear, not at all like something imagined. It was frightening how clear they were. It was raining heavily now.

* * *

Ethan looked up at the sound of footsteps running up the stairs. Bonnie knocked loudly, then threw open the door.

"Ethan! Come quickly!"

Ethan shot up and followed her but she was ahead of him by a flight of stairs, and when he got to the second landing he saw her at the foot of the stairs with Mrs. Zeldin.

Annette's hair was dripping wet; her coat was drenched and the sable collar matted with rain. She turned haunted brown eyes up to him, and the sight of her coming to him in need and despair wrenched his heart.

"Bonnie, do we have any blankets?" he said as he rushed down to Annette.

"I think I have one in the trunk of my car."

"Go get it."

He put an arm around Annette and helped her up the stairs. Her skin was like ice and she was shivering violently.

"What happened?"

"She's gone," gasped Annette.

"Who?"

"My daughter. She's gone."

His warm touch, his protective arm around her seemed to release the tension in her, and she stumbled up the last few steps into his office.

When he helped her out of her coat he saw that the rain had soaked through her black silk blouse to her skin. He grabbed his sheepskin-lined jacket from the coat rack, slipped it over her shoulders and guided her to a chair. Bonnie appeared with a blanket, making profuse apologies about the straw stuck to it, and Ethan wrapped it around Annette's legs. He pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, thrust it into Bonnie's hand and told her to go across the street to Carl's Liquor and get a pint of whisky.

After she left Ethan pulled his chair to Annette's and sat down, taking her hands in his. They were icy and he gently pressed them between his own.

Her body was shaking convulsively and her teeth were chattering.

"Take a deep breath, then tell me what happened."

She nodded, inhaled deeply and looked up at him. "I was late picking her up. She wasn't there. Nobody saw where she went. She's not at home. She's not at Nell's. I've looked all over."

"Annette, this is Cottonwood Falls. Kids don't just disappear..."

"It can't happen again, can it?"

"What do you mean?"

She looked away.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, God..."

"Could she have gone over to play with a friend?"

"Nobody's ever invited her to play. I wouldn't know who to call."

"Doesn't she have riding lessons after school with Jer?"

"Thursday. Jer picks her up on Thursday. This is Tuesday."

Ethan thought for a moment, then rose and found his cell phone on his desk. He called a number and while it was ringing looked over at Annette. Her eyes were hanging on him.

"Jer, buddy. Hey, you haven't seen Eliana this afternoon, have you?"

He listened, a smile of relief washing over his face. He nodded reassuringly to Annette.

"Yeah, well, I guess she didn't get the message. We've got one worried mom over here."

Bonnie showed up with the whisky just then and Ethan motioned for her to set it down. She threw him an inquisitive look and quietly left.

"Yeah, sure. I'll tell her. Thanks, Jer." He hung up and turned to Annette.

"He said he called yesterday and left a message with your dad. Jer won't be home Thursday. Said he'd pick her up today instead. I guess your dad forgot to tell you. Jer has her working in the indoor arena. He'll bring her home in about an hour."

Annette stared at him blankly.

"She's okay. Nothing to worry about."

Ethan poured some whisky into a coffee mug and when he turned around to her she had her hands over her ears.

"The music," she said. "I can't stop the music."

Ethan set down the mug and gently peeled her hands away from her face.

"There isn't any music."

He held her hands tightly in his for a long moment. Then he picked up the mug again.

"Go on, drink."

This time she took it and drank a little.

"What were you doing out in the rain like that? Why didn't you just drive over here?"

There was terror in her eyes.

"This is about something else, isn't it?"

She nodded faintly.

"What happened, Annette?"

Ethan waited patiently. She took another long drink of the whisky and waited while its warmth began to swim through her veins. It calmed her and she reached for his hand and squeezed it.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Her touch electrified him. He closed his eyes for a second and when he opened them again her hands were back in her lap, clasping the mug.

"It's a long story," she said.

"I have all the time in the world."

As she began to talk about the tragedy she had kept buried for so many years, the last wall between them crumbled. Until then neither of them would have acknowledged that they were falling in love; but love had been waiting for this moment, like some souls eagerly await their appointed hour of terrestrial birth, knowing full well it means renunciation of harmony and peace.

Chapter 15

Annette was only twenty-three and David Zeldin was over forty that evening when he settled her on the sofa in his Tel Aviv apartment on the top floor of a high-rise overlooking the Mediterranean and told her about his childhood in a concentration camp. His boyhood, which he had described without a trace of sentimentality, reminded her of the grotesque events in a Jerzy Kosinski novel. Then he spoke to her of Jerusalem; he talked about the city the way a man speaks of a woman he loves passionately; he spoke of Hebrew poetry, of arid rocky hills, of deserts and olive groves, of waging wars and song.

She returned to her hotel later that night after he had made love to her and lay awake thinking how he had shattered her world. She thought about the contrast between this country and the comfortable Kansas town where she had grown up, a town defined by order and hygiene, self-righteousness and congeniality; how she had left it behind and set herself adrift among others who, like her, had left behind a great and painful wound. Knowing that home would never be home again. She had toured Europe and played in major cities throughout the United States, and in every city she asked herself,
Could I live here? Could I be free here? Could I be happy here?
And on she had drifted, until she came to David Zeldin's bed and knew one night of intimacy with an extraordinary man. When she walked onto stage the next day and saw him waiting on the podium, smiling at her, she knew where she belonged.

David was six when he was torn from his mother's arms and herded to the children's barracks in a Polish concentration camp. His mother had fought so fiercely for him that she nearly dislocated his shoulder before the Nazis finally clubbed her unconscious. He never saw her again. Three years later, when his camp was liberated by the Russians, he had no family, no homeland, and no language. The kapos had beaten him whenever he spoke Yiddish or Dutch, and so the only words he comprehended were the hate-drenched German commands he had listened to with fear and humiliation for three years. For weeks after that he lived in the streets, eating rotten garbage and sleeping in rubble, until a priest found him and sent him to an orphanage in France.

It was two years before David learned his father had survived Auschwitz, and in 1948 father and son emigrated to the newly independent Zionist state of Israel, where David's father remarried. Even the Nazis, however, couldn't bash the boy's brilliance out of him—neither his linguistic aptitude (by the time he was at university he spoke seven languages) nor his gift for music. It was his American stepmother who took him out of the kibbutz every Saturday and into Tel Aviv for his violin lessons, an operation that remained clandestine for many years because there was no money to be spent on such luxuries. David kept his violin at the home of a math teacher in the nearby village of Ashdod, and every day after school he walked seven kilometers into the village, where he practiced, then seven kilometers back to the kibbutz to work the rest of the afternoon in the dairy, mucking out the milking stalls. He skipped practice only on holidays and on the day his sister, Simi, was born.