Stolen Child (8 page)

At school later that morning, I tried to pay attention, but as Miss Ferris wrote notes on the board, the words seemed to blur and blend together. I kept on thinking about that girl who looked like an older me. Who was she and why did she appear in my nightmares? I was so absent-minded that I didn’t hear the bell for morning recess. Linda touched my arm and I nearly jumped out of my seat.

“Sorry!” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I blinked a couple of times to try to clear the images from my mind. Maybe that girl who looked like me was just a ghost of my imagination? “Let’s go outside,” I said.

Linda sped down the hallway in front of me and pushed open the door. I followed her on legs that felt like rubber.

“You’re acting strange today,” said Linda, once we were outside.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t feel very well.”

“Maybe the fresh air will do you some good.”

Except the air wasn’t fresh. It smelled of burning leaves. We walked past a group of girls from our class who were clustered together chatting quietly. I overheard bits of
their conversation. Hallowe’en was tomorrow and they were talking about what costumes they would be wearing for the class party — a witch, a ghost, a nurse …

Others were playing double dutch with the younger students, but none of them called to Linda or me to ask us to join. Most of the boys were out in the field tossing around a football. How I wished that I could be like these other students. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to not have a past?

When we got back into the classroom, I noticed an envelope sticking out of the corner of my workbook. I had a moment of panic. Had Miss Ferris noticed that I wasn’t paying attention this morning? Maybe it was a note sending me to the principal’s office. I pulled the envelope out of my workbook and breathed a sigh of relief. A big childish
N
was written on the front in red ink and the writing didn’t look at all like Miss Ferris’s tidy script. Could this be an invitation to a birthday or Hallowe’en party? I looked over to Linda’s desk. There was no envelope on hers. I couldn’t possibly go to a party if she hadn’t also been invited.

Most of the other students had returned to their desks by this time but class hadn’t begun and Miss Ferris still sat at her desk at the front of the room, marking papers. I held the envelope on my lap so Miss Ferris wouldn’t see me opening it. I ripped it open as quietly as I could and pulled out the piece of paper — a crude drawing of girl with yellow braids — covered in red swastikas. Underneath, someone had written,
Nazi Nadia, go back to Hitler-land!

“Nadia, what are you reading?” Miss Ferris asked in a
sharp voice. She stood at the front of the room with her hands on her hips. “You know we don’t pass notes in class.”

I shoved the paper into my desk, but the envelope fluttered to the floor. Several of my classmates turned to watch me. Eric was grinning and David covered his mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

“Noth– nothing … ” I said. “I was just getting out my workbook.”

“Your workbook is on your desk,” said Miss Ferris sternly. “Stand up, and share with us what you find so interesting.”

I stumbled to my feet, but didn’t take the horrible note out of my desk. I could feel my heart pound in my chest. How could I possibly read it out loud?

“Get the note, Nadia. We would all like to hear it.”

I stood there, frozen. Miss Ferris marched down the aisle and knelt at my desk. She pulled the offending piece of paper out and unfolded it.

Her face became still. “Sit down, Nadia,” she said, resting her hand gently on my shoulder. She walked to the front of the classroom and held up the hideous drawing for everyone to see. A hush fell over the room. Someone giggled. I crouched down in my seat. If only I could disappear.

“Who did this?” she almost shouted. No one raised a hand. “You will all have a detention if the guilty party does not step forward.”

This time she did shout. No one raised their hand. I stared at the back of Eric’s head. He sat rigid, with his hands folded neatly on his desk. I was sure he was no
longer grinning. I couldn’t be sure if it was him or David. It could have been anyone. I felt embarrassed and small.

“Hands on your desks, everyone,” Miss Ferris said sternly. “Palms up.” She marched up one aisle and down the next, examining everyone’s hands for red ink. When she got to David’s desk she stopped. She grabbed one of his hands and twisted it back and forth. “Red ink,” she said. “Empty your desk. Now!” David reached into his desk and emptied it of books and notebooks and pens and pencils. Miss Ferris looked through each item carefully for more evidence and then tossed it to the floor.

“That’s all I have,” he said with an innocent look on his face. Miss Ferris reached inside his desk and rooted around. She pulled out a pad of paper and a fountain pen filled with red ink. She flipped through the paper. More sickening sketches of “Nazi Nadia.” I crouched farther down in my seat.

“Get up,” said Miss Ferris. She grabbed David by the ear and marched him out of the room. Once the door slammed shut behind them, a couple dozen pair of eyes turned to stare at me.

I convinced Marusia and Ivan to let me stay home from school on Hallowe’en. I did not feel like dressing up in a silly costume and pretending that I was having fun just a day after David’s nastiness. Doing chores around the house was preferable. “Let us not make this a habit,” Marusia warned me.

I was at the kitchen sink scrubbing grass stains out of one of her work shirts when I spied Mychailo at the back door. He wasn’t wearing a costume. “It’s open,” I called
through the window. “Didn’t your class have a party this afternoon?” I asked him as he stepped inside.

“We did,” said Mychailo. “I just put a sheet over my head and called myself a ghost.”

That made me smile.

He rooted through his pockets and pulled out a candy kiss. “Here,” he said, holding it out for me. “Now you can say you’ve been kissed by a boy.”

That made me blush. “Thanks,” I said. “Put it on the table.” My hands were still soapy. I rinsed Marusia’s shirt, wrung it out and then hung it on the laundry line outside. I opened up the candy kiss and popped it into my mouth.

“Are you going trick or treating tonight?” Mychailo asked. “You can go with me if you want.”

I hadn’t planned on going trick or treating. After the incident at school yesterday, I didn’t even feel like going outside. The whole thing was so shameful. Besides, this custom of Hallowe’en seemed strange to me — and a little bit scary. “I don’t have a costume.”

“You can go as a ghost,” he said. “Or a hobo.” He looked at me with impatience. “Those costumes are easy. Don’t you want free candy?”

I had to admit that the thought of free candy was exciting. And if I did go trick or treating, I would feel safe going with Mychailo. “I’ll ask Mar—
Mama
and
Tato
if I can go,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “I’ll come by just as it starts to get dark.”

Ivan was pleased that I had decided to go out trick or treating and he was especially happy that I was going with Mychailo. “You need to be a child more often,” he said.
And he helped me put together a costume. I was a scarecrow, with itchy long grass from the far edges of the backyard stuffed in a flannel shirt of Ivan’s. On top, I wore a pair of Marusia’s overalls that were so old they were patched on the patches. Ivan used her red lipstick to paint on a scarecrow face. We had no candy to give out, but we did have a bowl of apples from Marusia’s farm that she had polished to a glossy sheen.

I could tell by the expression in Marusia’s eyes that she was less sure about me going out, but she pretended to be happy. She gave me an extra-long hug goodbye when I left with Mychailo. “Stay on this street,” she said. “And be home in an hour.”

One nice thing about living on a street with close-together houses is you can get to a lot of them in an hour. My pillowcase was soon full of treats: candy apples and caramel corn, bubble gum and peanuts. I dumped all of my candy out on the kitchen table when I got home. Ivan, Marusia and I ate far too much of it. I went to bed with a stomach ache. I tossed and turned all night and had a long and scary dream. In the morning I could only remember bits and snatches.

I got into the habit of going to Linda’s house on Tuesdays after school and she came to my house on Thursdays. It was hard to find a place to play inside. Linda shared a bedroom with Grace on the second floor. They had bunk beds and a bookshelf crammed with old novels. I longed to look through that bookshelf, but the bedroom itself made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I think part of it was because Grace was always there. She’d either be reading, propped up on a pillow on the top bunk, or she’d have a friend over and they’d be doing a project for school or something.

There wasn’t much of a place to play in Linda’s backyard either. It was nothing more than an overgrown strip of land on a hill with wild bushes along either side and a laundry line down the middle. Linda had a deck of cards and we tended to play Crazy Eights or Concentration at the kitchen table, but then one Tuesday she brought out a board game called Monopoly.

With the cards, we could play several games in the space of an hour or two, but Monopoly was a much longer
game. Marusia would get dropped off at Linda’s house on Tuesdays after finishing at the farm, but once we started playing Monopoly, the game would just be getting interesting when Marusia would arrive and it was time for me to leave.

“Can you come to my house on Saturday?” asked Linda. “Mom said you could stay even if the game takes all day.”

Marusia and Ivan agreed. Linda’s mother suggested I come early on Saturday morning and she invited me to stay for lunch. Ivan was doing some yardwork at the Ukrainian church, so he walked me to Linda’s house, and we decided that once I was finished, I would walk over to the church to meet him and we’d walk home together.

When I got to Linda’s, it was just before nine. Mrs. Henhawk was in the kitchen making applesauce. “Linda will be down in a minute,” she said. She offered me an apple, but I had just eaten breakfast.

“Take a seat beside George.” She pointed to the chair beside her husband. “He won’t bite.”

I sat down and Mr. Henhawk lowered his newspaper, caught my eye and gave me a wink. He seemed as friendly as Mrs. Henhawk was.

I must have let a fly into the house when I came in through the back door. It kept buzzing around my head. I waved it away but it kept coming back. Suddenly, I felt a whack of a newspaper against the side of my head.

I blinked once and then again. Why would Mr. Henhawk hit me like that? I barely heard what he was saying to me now …

“Don’t stuff yourself, Eva,” Mutter is saying as she tries to pull the plate away, but Eva grabs it with two hands and pulls it back
.

“They’re my favourite, Mutti, and you know it,” says Eva, cutting off a giant portion of apple-filled
Eierkuchen
and shoving it into her mouth. A chunk of apple falls out and lands on the table. She picks it up and pops it back into her mouth
.

“If only
that
one would eat half as much as you.” Mutter looks at me. “If the
führer
hears we’ve starved his little darling, it will be the end of us
.”

I look at the plate in front of me and pick up my knife and fork. I cut one bite and hold a piece of
Eierkuchen
to my mouth, but the greasy smell of it makes me feel sick. I think of the women and children with the yellow stars. How can I eat this when it seems they have nothing? I push the plate away
.

Mutter slaps me hard across the face
.

“Nadia, are you all right?”

Mr. Henhawk’s voice pulled me back to the present. I was standing by the table in the Henhawk kitchen, a chair upended beside me. I lifted my hand to my cheek. I could almost feel the tingle of that long ago slap from Mutter.

“I’m fine,” I told him.

But I didn’t feel fine. These scenes from the past made me queasy and confused.

Linda appeared in the kitchen doorway holding the Monopoly box. “Nadia, you don’t look so good.”

The kitchen was humid, with an overwhelming smell of apples. I felt like I was going to be sick. “Would you mind if we played outside instead?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Linda. She set the Monopoly box on the kitchen table. “We’ll be outside, okay?” she said to her parents.

“Stay in the neighbourhood,” said Mr. Henhawk.

I gulped in fresh air as we stepped out to Linda’s narrow, overgrown backyard.

“Let’s go to the park,” she said.

I didn’t know that there was a park. I walked beside Linda as she stayed on her own side of Usher Street and headed west. As we got farther from where she lived, I noticed that the houses seemed to get shabbier. Usher curved into Rushton Street and I noticed a fancy wrought-iron gate almost hidden by bushes. It looked like something from a storybook. Was I dreaming, or was this real? I went up to touch the gate.

“Come this way and I’ll show you something better,” said Linda, grabbing my hand.

So it was real.

We walked around the curve. Through the bushes I could see that the gate was attached to a long fancy fence, also almost completely hidden by leaves. But all at once there was a break in the bushes. I was so shocked by what I saw that I grabbed Linda’s shoulder to steady myself. A rundown mansion on top of a hill. It seemed out of time and place, like something from a dream — or a nightmare. It felt a little sinister, with paint peeling from the latticework and ragged curtains hanging limp inside shattered windows.

“That’s Yates Castle,” said Linda. “I don’t think anyone lives there anymore, except maybe hobos.”

Something about the vast abandoned mansion tugged
at my memory, but why? It looked nothing like the large, well-kept farmhouse I had lived in with Eva and Mutter and Vater. And there was no building like this in the DP camp, of course. Hot bile rose up in my throat and I doubled over, gagging.

“Nadia, are you all right?” asked Linda.

I took a few heaving breaths and tried to calm myself. After a couple of minutes I was able to stand up straight again. “I’m — fine,” I managed.

“What’s wrong? Does the house scare you?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer.

“Does it remind you of something during the war?”

“It must,” I told her. “But I don’t know what.”

“Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand again. “Let’s get away from here.”

As we walked past the mansion — or castle or haunted house, whatever it was — I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. It was awful and beautiful at the same time …

I am being carried, kicking, screaming, up white-painted steps. “Baba! Baba! I want my baba!” I am put in a room all by myself. I try to open the door but it’s locked. I pound until my knuckles bleed but no one answers
.

Linda was saying my name, but I ran down the block, pulling her with me. I had no idea where I was going but I had to get away from that house.

“Slow down!” she cried, tugging on my hand. “I’ve got a stitch in my side.”

When I stopped running, I realized that I was huffing for breath and covered in sweat. I felt Linda’s hand take mine and she led me up a pathway through the trees. We stepped out onto tidy grass on a hill. It was open and airy
and not scary at all. It was hard to believe that such a nice park was hidden from anyone strolling down Usher Street.

She led me to the middle of the open space and we both flopped onto the grass. For long minutes, we lay there side by side, watching the clouds and not saying a word.

Then Linda asked, “What did Yates Castle remind you of?”

A feeling of dread came over me. I sat up and looked at Linda. I had confided some things about my other past to her already. I longed to talk to her about those scenes that would flash into my mind. But would she understand? More importantly, would she tell anyone else? Mychailo had warned me about talking to Canadians. But Linda was my best friend, after all. I had to tell her something.

“All I remember is being locked up in a fancy house,” I said. “That, and how frightened I was.”

“Who would have locked you up?” she asked, a puzzled expression on her face.

“I don’t know.”

“Was it your parents?”

“No!” It was hard to even think of Marusia or Ivan doing anything like that to me.

I didn’t say anything more, so Linda dropped the subject. We played a few games, like I Spy, and finding shapes in clouds, and then she said we should go to the church to find Ivan. “After the scare you’ve had, I’m sure you want to go home.”

I looked at Linda with new appreciation. What a kind friend she was.

“Do we have to go past that house again?” I asked her.

“We don’t have to,” she said. She pointed up the hill. “That’s Terrace Hill Street. We can go up that way to your church.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind us not playing Monopoly?”

“Nadia,” said Linda. “Of course I don’t mind. We can always play another day.”

Once we got up the incline to Terrace Hill Street, we had a beautiful view of the train station and beyond. You could see almost all the way to my house, yet the castle was hidden by trees.

As we walked down Terrace Hill Street, I was surprised at how close the Ukrainian church was, and I was disturbed to realize that Yates Castle and the church were actually back to back. In fact, along the side of the church and extending down to the castle was a set of steps and a carriage road. My heart tightened. That little church had been one of the few places I had felt truly safe, but now that I realized how close it was to that creepy house, I wondered if the church would ever feel like a safe place again.

Ivan was raking the leaves off the lawn in front of the church. I noticed that Mychailo was helping his father plant a row of shrubs along the church walkway. When we got there, Ivan looked at me with surprise. “You’re finished your game already?”

“We’re not finished, but … ” I looked to Linda.

She caught my eye and nodded. “We got bored,” she said, shrugging. “We’ll play another day.”

Ivan looked at the pile of leaves he had raked up and then gazed at the rest of the lawn. “I won’t be finished here for at least another hour.”

“I could help you,” I said

“So could I,” said Linda. “Do you have any more rakes?”

I looked at her and smiled in thanks.

Ivan grinned. “It won’t take long at all with three of us working.”

When we were finished with the yardwork, Ivan took my hand and began to walk towards those dreaded steps that led down to Usher Street alongside Yates Castle.

“This is a quick way to Linda’s,” he said. “And I want to show you an interesting house.”

Ivan knew about it! Of course he did. He had been doing yardwork at the church. How could he miss seeing a castle behind the church? I was just surprised that I had never noticed it through the trees before.

I didn’t budge from my spot on the sidewalk. “That place scares me.”

Ivan’s forehead crinkled in surprise. He looked at me, then at Linda. She shrugged her shoulders. “So you don’t want to go down that way?” he asked.

“No.”

We walked down Terrace Hill Street and then to Main and dropped Linda back home.

Once it was just the two of us walking home, Ivan asked, “Does that big old house remind you of something?”

I nodded.

“The German house in the country?”

I shook my head.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go look at it with me?”

“I’m sure.”

“That’s too bad,” said Ivan. “Because it’s an interesting place and I thought you’d enjoy seeing it up close.”

I shivered at the thought of it.

“It was built in the eighteen hundreds by the man who owned the railroads,” he said. “He wanted it to look like — ”

I squeezed Ivan’s hand so hard that he looked at me and stopped talking mid-sentence.