Page 37 of The Lies We Leave Behind

37

Christmas came, Paulina and I doing what we could to make the day a tiny bit festive for one another. She had pulled out one of the many boxes of decorations from the attic the week before and we’d placed a few items here and there around the first floor, smiling as the flames coming from the fireplace danced off stained glass angels and stars.

As a girl, Christmas had been the one time of the year that life in this house had actually felt magical. My mother would hire a decorator to come in while the four of us, plus Nanny Paulina, went out for a day of meals, shopping, and dazzling the citizens of Hamburg with the perfectly coordinated outfits my mother had put together for us all. She’d be in a red dress with a white fur coat, my father in a charcoal suit, white button-down shirt, and a red tie that matched her dress, and Catrin and I would wear matching white dresses with full skirts, and red sashes tied into bows at our backs. Even our nanny would be outfitted to complement our festive attire, her usual uniform swapped for one in a deep forest green with red piping.

When we’d return from our adventures, the house would look like a winter wonderland that lasted until the second of January, when it would all come down and be tucked away once more, taking with it a small bit of my happiness every year. It was only during Christmastime that we got any kind of acknowledgment from our parents that wasn’t pure scrutiny and dismay. They watched with interest when we opened our gifts, as if genuinely hoping we’d like whatever they’d had their assistants pick out.

I reached out now, my finger brushing a crystal angel hanging from a small gold metal tree. Firelight glinted off it, casting prisms of light around the room. I’d done the same thing when I was a girl when no one was around to reprimand me for touching the expensive ornaments.

“The lamb is roasting,” Paulina said and I turned, a question in my eyes. “And the champagne is chilling.”

I grinned at her joke.

We’d been reminiscing on Christmas dinners past as we’d decorated the previous week. It had begun in sadness, and then became a game that had at one point made us laugh so hard we both had tears running down our faces, remembering how over-the-top the meals had been. The guests. My mother’s attire. At one point we grew so loud in our mirth, we woke my mother, who screamed down at us “den mund halted!” Shut up. We’d clapped our hands over our mouths and continued to snicker quietly. It had felt good to laugh so hard.

There was no lamb this year, of course. No elegant cuts of steak. No array of perfectly roasted vegetables. No trifle. But there would be small servings of chicken, roasted potatoes, canned green beans one of the residents on the lower floors had offered us, and for which we exchanged one of the muffins we’d received from the bakery that week, warm bread Paulina had browned and slathered in butter, and a small, dense cake whose lack of sweetness was covered with the addition of small chunks of apple throughout.

And there were three gifts. One for her, and two for me.

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the two small gifts wrapped in some of my mother’s expensive paper. “But I’ve only gotten you one thing.”

“And I’ve only gotten you one.” She held out one of the two boxes. “This one is for...” She looked to my stomach, which had just begun to show, but was still barely noticeable when I was covered in layers.

“Oh,” I said again, my eyes filling with tears.

It was still strange to think I had a child growing inside me. In fact, I often tried not to think about it, beyond determining I was about four months along and still had plenty of time before worrying about the process of giving birth. My biggest concerns were getting stuck and having to have the baby here or the city being attacked again. And what if something went wrong with the pregnancy and there was no one to help? Sure, I was a nurse. But I hadn’t trained in childbirth. I wouldn’t know how to help myself if something went awry.

And then of course there was always the chance my mother might tell the lieutenant who I was. So far she had been asleep when he came, not even stirring when he slammed cupboard doors and drawers in her room. But Paulina had convinced her that there was danger for her in telling the lieutenant who I was. He might not believe her story that I’d run away and instead come to his own conclusion that my parents had sent me away in an attempt to save me. That they’d hidden me and they themselves were traitors. My mother may be in pain, but her pride in her status was greater. She would not be sent to her death as a traitor to her country, and so she promised to keep my identity a secret. For all our sakes.

Of course, her promise made our exchanges that much worse. She knew she was doing me a favor and thus demanded my assistance over Paulina’s more and more, screaming for me whenever she was awake, her broken voice sending shivers up and down my spine daily.

Nothing was good enough for her. When I ran a wet cloth over her shockingly fragile body the water was too hot. Too cold. My touch too hard, too soft. I missed a spot. I was too thorough. I smelled. I was inept.

“A nurse,” she’d scoffed more than once as she eyed me always with disdain, her milky eyes sweeping from my face to my breasts to my stomach. “My daughter, the traitor.”

I pushed the memory from my mind as Paulina pressed the gift for my baby into my hands. I peeled the paper away, lifted the lid of the box beneath, and gasped.

It had been my favorite dress when I was little, the pale blue fabric soft, unlike so many of my other dresses. There had been no petticoat to be worn under. No stiff material that felt like it was suffocating me as it scratched at my neck or arms. It was a dress for summers. For sunshine and walks in the park with my nanny. For falling asleep in after a big day of play. And I had worn it well past when I should’ve stopped, forcing my growing torso into the tightening bodice.

“Can’t we find another?” I’d asked Nanny Paulina.

“Sorry, Miss Gisela,” she’d said. “It was bought over a year ago. The store won’t have it any longer.”

And so, regretfully, I wore it for a last time and then folded it up and tucked it away in my closet for safekeeping.

Here it was now though, in my hands once more, the fabric as soft as I remembered it, and refashioned in not one, but two outfits—a dress with a rounded white collar, and a pair of overalls.

“Do you recognize the fabric?” Paulina asked.

I nodded, my eyes filled with tears.

“I remembered how you loved that dress.” She sighed. “I found it years ago when I was cleaning. When you told me you were pregnant, I knew I had to turn it into something your child could wear. Of course, we don’t know if you’re having a boy or a girl so...I made something for both sexes. I hope you like them?”

“Oh, Paulina,” I said, my voice catching on a sob. “They’re beautiful. Absolutely perfect. Thank you.”

“I’m making a few other things, as well,” she said, wiping away a tear of her own. “But I thought these were a perfect gift for Christmas.”

I hugged her and she held me tight for a moment before letting me go and handing me the other gift at the same time I handed her the one I had for her.

When we’d decided to have a small celebration for the holiday, we’d agreed not to risk going out to find gifts at the few shops in town, but to shop the house instead. Nothing was off limits. But it had to be thoughtful and well-intentioned.

“Do not give me one of your mother’s gaudy jeweled necklaces,” Paulina had said, making me laugh.

“What about one of her furs?”

“Can you imagine if I went out in one of those to pick up meat from the butcher?” We’d laughed more and then looked out the window where huge snowflakes were coming down. “On second thought,” she’d said.

And so there were no jewels or furs beneath the elegant wrapping paper. Instead, for her there was a beautiful knit scarf in a vibrant blue that had been gifted to my mother years before and shoved in the back of her closet because “Such a horrid color shouldn’t be forced upon anyone.” But it was pretty. And soft. And all Paulina’s scarves were worn and old.

“I remember when she got this,” she said, wrapping it around her neck and burying her face in it. “I’d thought it so beautiful, and then felt a fool hearing how she hated it. I clearly knew nothing about fashion if I coveted something she deemed so awful.”

“My mother is a snob,” I said. “You know that. What she really didn’t like was that it wasn’t a Vionnet or Lanvin.”

“Well, her loss is my gain.”

She pointed to my gift then and I pulled the wrapping away from a box the size of my hand. When I lifted the lid, I smiled. Inside was a crystal angel like the ones we’d hung in the living room.

“You’ve always loved them,” she said as I pulled it from the box and held it up by its string, watching as it twirled, the light from the candles we’d lit and the fire sending tiny rainbows around the room. “Do you remember doing that for Catrin when she was a baby? I would bring you to her bassinet and she’d smile up at you. I don’t even think she noticed the angel.”

I sighed and dropped my arm.

“Part of me thought...hoped...today would be the day she showed up.”

“I won’t lie. I thought she would too.”

“Do you think something has happened to her?”

Paulina shook her head. “If anything had, we would know right away. I promise.”

We cleaned up the wrapping paper and then Paulina went to check on dinner while I climbed the stairs to my mother’s room. She’d been asleep all day, not even waking when Paulina changed her soiled clothes and bedding. Paulina had called for me after, worried, and I’d checked her pulse and temperature. She was breathing, her irises responded to light, there was no fever, and her pulse was faint, but no different than it had been in the weeks before.

“Do you think maybe...” Paulina’s voice had trailed off. “Maybe she won’t wake up again?”

It would be a small mercy for all of us. But I didn’t say that to Paulina, who I knew, despite my mother’s many shortcomings, wretched ideologies, and propensity to ruin lives, cared for the woman who had employed her for decades.

“I don’t know,” I’d told her, taking her hand. “It’s possible she’s awake now, but tired in a way that won’t allow her to respond to us.”

I entered the room now and put a log on the fire, then moved to the diminished form of my mother, shifting bedding carefully so I could see if it, and her clothing, needed to be changed out.

“You should leave.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of my mother’s raspy voice cutting through the quiet.

“I intend to,” I said, pulling the bedding back into place. “Are you hungry? Would you like Paulina or me to bring you some broth?”

“She will never go with you.”

I ignored her. There was no point in arguing.

“Your Kitty Cat,” she whispered, “is no longer yours. She is mine. She is Germany’s.”

I pasted a smile on my face, ignoring her and picking up the water glass on her bedside table. “I’ll have Paulina bring you some fresh water and broth.”

It took everything I had not to slam the door after me when I left. But it would do no good. She would always have the upper hand, because she didn’t care. And somewhere deep inside me was still the little girl who just wanted her mother to love her.

The scent of dinner filled the main floor and I inhaled, smiling as I descended the stairs. At least after my mother was tended to Paulina and I would share a nice meal, maybe partake in a bottle of wine from my father’s collection, and perhaps even play a rousing game or two of cards.

“We need to warm up the broth,” I said as I opened the door to the kitchen. “She’s awa—”

I stopped, my eyes moving from the worried look on Paulina’s face to the shocked one on the face of the young woman standing at the far end of the kitchen.

And then a name. One I hadn’t heard spoken in ten years.

“Gigi?” she whispered.

I exhaled, my heart pounding in my chest, my knees so weak I had to reach for the countertop beside me.

“Hi, Kitty Cat.”