When We Meet Again (10 page)

“You
are
family, I guess.”

I nodded. “I heard your grandmother passed away last month. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks.” Julie looked away. “This was her house, you know. The house she and your grandmother were born in and grew up in. I was living with her these last few years. I’ve been trying to get my college degree.”

“Good for you,” I murmured, looking around and trying to imagine what the house must have been like seventy-five years ago, when my grandmother still lived here. It was strange to think I was sitting in the same kitchen where she’d likely had her very first meal, the kitchen where she’d probably sat daydreaming about Peter Dahler long ago.

“Palm Beach Atlantic,” Julie went on. “They have a degree in organizational management. I’m taking it slow, because I work too, but I’m getting there. It helps to live here rent-free.”

“That was nice of your grandmother.”

“She was mostly a nice lady, you know.” Her words sounded almost combative, as if she was challenging me. “She didn’t have very good things to say about your grandmother.”

I refocused on Julie and frowned. It was a strange thing to tell a virtual stranger, and I felt instantly defensive. But I didn’t want to risk offending her for fear that she wouldn’t tell me about the letters she’d mentioned on the phone, so I bit my tongue and tried to think of something nonconfrontational to say.

“But then again, I think my grandmother had a very closed mind sometimes,” Julie added before I had a chance to formulate a response. “And she held grudges. Boy, did she hold grudges!”

“You’re saying she held a grudge against my grandmother?”

“Understatement of the year.” She shook her head. “Imagine feeling like that most of your life. It’s crazy when you think about it.”

“Do you know why she was so angry at her?”

“Yeah, I do.” Julie studied me for a moment and then abruptly pulled a small sheaf of papers from her back pocket.

“You know there was a man,” she began, holding the papers up. “The German. He ruined everything in this family.” She sighed. “Or maybe it wasn’t him who ruined things. Maybe it was the fact that my grandmother’s parents were just as pigheaded as she was.”

“So you know something about Peter Dahler?”

“Only a few things. My grandmother didn’t talk about the situation much. I didn’t even know she had a sister until I was a teenager.” She looked up at me. “But in the end, she talked about her a lot. I think she was sorry. I think that’s why she gave me these letters.” She held up the papers in her hand.

I followed her gaze, my heart thudding. “Are they from him? Peter Dahler?”

She didn’t answer my question right away. Instead, she turned to look out the window, where the sugarcane fields were visible beyond several shorter rows of what appeared to be some sort of vegetable crop. Green beans, I guessed from what Jeremiah had told me. “I think your grandmother really loved the German. But that made my grandma furious. She was older by two years, and she had a fiancé, Jimmy, who’d just been killed in the war. By a German.” She paused. “So I guess you could say the timing was bad for a German POW camp to land practically in her backyard.”

“Geez, I’m sorry,” I murmured.

Julie shrugged. “Yeah, I’m sorry too. But if this Jimmy hadn’t died, my grandma wouldn’t have met my grandfather, and I wouldn’t be here. So maybe things work out the way they’re supposed to somehow, right? Anyhow, far as I know, what happened was that your grandmother fell in love with one of the prisoners, and my grandmother took it like a complete betrayal. Can you blame her? All she could see was that a German had shot her Jimmy in the head, and there her little sister was gallivanting with the enemy. When it turned out your grandmother was pregnant—and the father was obviously the German—I think my grandmother just snapped. She called her little sister a whore and told the whole town. Of course that mortified their parents. And it sounds like my grandmother’s father had a temper, a bad one. They wanted your grandma to give the baby away, because of course the whole thing brought shame to the family. But your grandma, well, apparently she was in love with the German and was convinced he was coming back for her. As you know, she kept the baby, and her parents threw her out.”

I shook my head. “But he never came back.”

Julie chewed her lip. “But I think maybe he wanted to. For a while anyhow.” She hesitated then handed me the envelopes in her hand. There were three of them, and they were yellowed at the edges.

I stared at them for a moment. All three were from a return address in Barnoldswick, England. All three listed Peter A. Dahler as the sender. “He wrote to her,” I said softly. But what was he doing in England after the war?

“My grandma said there were more. She only kept three.” She hesitated. “I think maybe there was a part of her that felt bad, that wanted your grandma to know he’d cared after all. But it was too late.”

“So what about the letter my grandmother
did
receive?” I asked. “Jeremiah gave it to me. It was supposedly from Peter, and he said he was marrying someone else. He wasn’t coming back for her. Did your grandmother forge that or something?”

“No. It was the only letter they gave to Margaret, for obvious reasons. But it really did come from Peter Dahler, far as I know. I’m sorry.”

I nodded, my heart sinking again. Regardless of what promises he’d made in the letters I now held in my hands, he’d failed her in the end. Maybe it was better that my grandmother had never seen these, had never been allowed to hope.

“The thing is,” Julie said after a minute, “unless he’s just really good with words, I think he really loved your grandmother. It’s hard to believe that he fell out of love with her so quickly. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“None of it does,” I agreed, thinking of the note that had accompanied the painting last week. “Can I have these?” I held up the letters.

Julie nodded. “For what it’s worth, I think my grandma was real sorry about what she’d done. I think that in the end, she realized she just might have ruined her little sister’s life.”

I stood up and tucked the letters into my back pocket. “Her life wasn’t ruined,” I said. “But I also think that maybe it wasn’t complete. And I want to understand what happened.”

Julie stood too and walked me to the door. “If there’s anything else I can do to help, will you let me know? I owe you at least that. Considering what my grandma did.”

I nodded, thanked her, and leaned in for a quick hug. I wasn’t sure I’d ever consider Julie family, but she was a connection to a piece of my grandmother’s past I’d never known about, and that was something.

I pulled the letters out of my pocket and set them on the passenger seat before starting my car. I was dying to read them, but I didn’t want to do it in Julie’s driveway, for although this might have been where my grandmother’s story had begun, it was also the place where her heart had been broken. I wanted to put some distance between myself and this place before I opened that particular door to the past.

DECEMBER 1944

L
ove was a funny thing, Peter thought. You grow up thinking you’ll have some control over it—when you’ll fall in love, who you’ll fall in love with. But then life surprises you out of nowhere, and you fall in love when the world is falling apart, with a person you never could have predicted, from the other side of the globe. Who would have thought Peter would be in America—falling in
love
with America—never mind falling in love with an American woman he was forbidden to talk to?

But it had happened. There was no denying it. Now Margaret was all he thought about, and he knew she thought of him too, which was all the more miraculous and unbelievable.

Margaret. Margaret Mae Evans.
Peter wasn’t sure if a more beautiful name had ever existed, a more perfect woman.

Suddenly, the days no longer felt endless and arduous. Yes, every one of Peter’s limbs ached constantly, and sometimes he thought he’d simply collapse from dehydration in the middle of one of the vast fields of cane. But now, the beating sunlight was something to look forward to, for each day brought a new chance of glimpsing Margaret, a new opportunity to catch her eye or speak to her across the divide of a narrow canal. Exchanging even a few words with her made him feel normal, whole, like a man in charge of his destiny rather than a prisoner whose life was already dictated by forces beyond his control.

She was often with Jeremiah, the boy she’d been helping when Peter saw her for the first time. Jeremiah was twelve, Peter had learned, slight for his age with arms that were sinewy and strong. Peter knew the boy worked hard. He should have been in school, but instead, Jeremiah rose with the sun like the prisoners did and labored in the fields. Sometimes, he cut sugarcane. Other times, Peter saw him harvesting sweet potatoes or green beans at Margaret’s or the other small farms that ringed the vast cane fields.

“His mother is dead,” Margaret had whispered to Peter one day as he worked on the edge of a field. They were separated, as they often were, by a thin canal and a thousand invisible barriers, and he longed to touch her.

He had glanced at the boy, who was a hundred yards away, weeding a patch of overgrown potatoes. “And what of his father? He doesn’t encourage Jeremiah to go to school?”

“He’s a drunk,” she told him. “Jeremiah has to support him, or they’ll lose their home. They’ll lose everything.”

Peter had looked over to the boy in astonishment. “But he’s just a child!”

“In a place like this,” she said sadly, “one doesn’t stay a child for long.” There was something in her eyes that chilled Peter. But then she blinked and glanced away. “It’s why I try to work with him as often as I can,” she added. “When I’m in the field with him, I try to continue his lessons. We talk about history and geography and politics. I think I have helped create a boy who wants to change the world.”

“Good,” Peter said. “We should all want to change the world.”

“Yes.” Margaret smiled shyly. “There are many things I wish were different, Peter.”

He held her gaze. “As do I.”

She had told him that she’d had to drop out of school at the age of sixteen to help out on her family farm and that there was no hope of attending university now, for her family was very poor. So she read voraciously, borrowing books from the library two towns over and trying her best to absorb as much poetry, history, and literature as she could. “I want to see the world one day,” she had said, her expression suddenly fierce. “I’ve never even left Florida, but there’s so much out there that I must see with my own eyes. Will you tell me, Peter? Will you tell me about the world?”

And so he told her stories of the food he’d eaten in Germany, the tribes he’d encountered in Africa. He sang her the songs that were traditional in Bavaria, and he told her about the time his grandparents took him to London for a month when he was six, and he’d had afternoon tea at the Ritz. He told her about the traditional Christmas tree in his town square and the legend of Christkind, the German equivalent of Santa Claus, and he talked of politics and poverty and Hitler’s rise to power.

In turn, she told him of the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 that nearly wiped out Belle Creek. She told him about the dike Herbert Hoover had ordered built and how it had taken away the lakeshore but would save the town from future disasters. And she told him about her family: her older sister, Louise; her quiet, reserved mother; her hardworking and hot-tempered father.

“I would like to meet them someday,” Peter said wistfully late one afternoon, when Margaret had snuck to the edge of the field where he was working to bring him a glass of water. He gulped it down gratefully and looked up to see her wearing a somber expression.

“It isn’t possible,” she said, her voice dropping to a hushed whisper. “My father fought in the Great War, and he has no warmth toward Germans. And my sister, well, she lost her fiancé, Jimmy, last year, on a battlefield in France.”

A knot formed in Peter’s stomach. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“As am I. He was a nice boy, and Louise loved him. But now, well—” Margaret paused. “Now she holds all Germans responsible.”

Peter nodded. On some level, he understood this and grieved for Louise. “She hates us.” He had seen Louise a handful of times and had already guessed she was Margaret’s sister. They had the same brown waves, the same tall, slender frames. But where Margaret’s green eyes twinkled and her full mouth always seemed a moment away from curving into a smile, Louise’s eyes were cold and empty, and her mouth was set in a thin, hard line. On the days when the prisoners worked near the edge of their farm, Louise often came to the front porch with a shotgun and just stood there, staring. It made Peter uneasy.

“Yes,” Margaret said simply. “But one day she will understand that Jimmy died in a war, and that the strings were being pulled by people in power. It was not you who shot him, nor any of the men here. And if Jimmy hadn’t been shot, he would have shot others. There is death in war. It’s part of the bargain.”

Peter thought of Otto and how losing his friend was a bargain he never intended, a bargain he’d regret forever. “War is a terrible thing,” he said softly. “It turns us all into something lesser, no matter which side we’re on.” He paused and added, “Even those who aren’t on the battlefield are hardened by it, aren’t they? Look at the way the town views us, just for being German.”

Although the people of Belle Creek were warming slightly to the prisoners—who were, for the most part, polite and hardworking—Peter knew it was easier to see them as a hated class of people rather than as individuals who were just as trapped by circumstance as they were.

“It’s a small town, and in small towns, one often finds small minds,” Margaret said softly.

Peter smiled. “The same is true of large cities. Small minds aren’t dictated by geography.”

“I suppose not.” She paused. “I’ve never been to a city, Peter. Will you take me to one someday?”

He stared at her. “I would love to take you anywhere, even to a restaurant for a simple meal. But it is impossible now.”