They Went Left by Monica Hesse

Author:Monica Hesse [Hesse, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2020-04-06T18:30:00+00:00

I’M READY TO GO,” I TELL JOSEF. HE RISES FROM THE SPIGOT, using a faded cloth to dry his hair. When he looks at me, he can sense something is wrong.

“I’ll just go get our bags,” he says.

“I already have them.” I point to where I’ve set them by the wagon.

“We can’t leave without saying goodbye to the Wölflins.”

“You do it. I’ll wait here.”

I spent the ride yesterday trying to convince Josef I wasn’t crazy, and now I’m undoing it with every sentence, with my abruptness, and with the off-kilter way I climb onto the wagon without waiting for a hand.

Josef is polite enough for both of us. He goes back inside to offer our thanks to the Wölflin family, telling them—I don’t know what he’s telling them. That I feel sick, or we’re late, or I’m unspeakably rude. They make gestures that I can see are offers: Do you have to leave so soon? Can we send you away with anything? And Josef refusing, No, thank you. We’ll be fine, but how kind of you to ask.

Back in the wagon, the horses hooked up and plodding, I watch the little white farmhouse recede until it looks like a postcard. Josef lets it disappear from the horizon before he turns to me. “Did something happen?”

“Everything,” I choke out.

“Everything?”

“Everything happened,” I say again, because right now that seems the best way to describe it. Sister Therese, and a mystery boy stealing money from a convent, and Inge falling out the window, and another Inge leaving her daughter, and Hannelore showing me a photo, and the similarities of their stories, of everyone’s stories. All of it is cumulative.

“Zofia, I already said yesterday that I don’t think you’re crazy. So do you want to explain more?”

I twist the handle of my valise. The clasp seems even more broken than when I picked it up. “That girl. Hannelore. She’s not the Wölflins’ real daughter. She was in hiding.”

Josef looks surprised that’s what’s on my mind. “I know. Herr Wölflin told me. Her mother was the daughter of good friends of theirs, the couple who used to own the feedstore. They were taken.”

“Inge,” I say. “Inge is dead.” Just then, the wagon goes over a rock, so the word comes out as a stab. Dead.

“Zofia.” He jerks the horses to a stop. “What are you saying? Did you know that girl’s mother?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I knew an Inge, but we called her Bissel.”

I tell Josef, in messy fits and starts. I tell him how I barely knew Bissel at all, that none of us really did, except that she slept in a bed next to me for two months and talked all the time about her daughter, whom she was going to find when the war was over. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat on the windowsill and leaned backward.

“And her daughter is waiting,” I say. “Bissel’s daughter is waiting somewhere like Hannelore is, thinking she’ll come home for her. But she’ll never come home.

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