Page 41 of The Lies We Leave Behind

41

William

Seattle 2003

“Dad?”

I jumped in my seat and wiped a hand across my eyes before turning to stare up at Lizzie, whose own eyes looked down at me with concern.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice husky. I gestured toward the house. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” she said, drawing the word out, her voice carrying the tone of someone wondering what the heck was going on. “Are you gonna...” It was her turn to gesture toward the house. I’d sent Selene inside thirty minutes before to wander at will, telling my daughter and granddaughter to pay no mind. “A mystery was afoot.” It was a phrase my wife had always used when she was trying to figure something out for one of her stories. It meant, “Give me a minute and don’t ask any more questions. For now.”

I smiled at my daughter.

“I still need a minute,” I said. “Is she...”

“In the hall. Looking at the pictures.”

I nodded.

“Okay, honey. I’ll be right there.”

She left and I turned back to the journal, my heart still lodged in my throat. Taking a breath, I opened it again, flipping to the page I’d found in the back where only two words were written.

“William. Forevermore.”

It wasn’t dated, and the way it was buried amid the blank pages made it feel like an acceptance. Maybe even a surrender. She hadn’t known how things would turn out. She’d only known she’d loved me.

Wiping my eyes again, I got to my feet and went inside the house, giving Lizzie what I hoped was a reassuring smile when she shot me another concerned look.

“All will be revealed in time,” I said in what she used to call my “wizard voice” when she was a little girl.

“Alright, oh wise one,” she called. “But we’re getting hungry and the lasagna is nearly done. Mom put extra cheese on it.”

“Is she trying to clog my arteries?” I asked.

“Can’t live forever, Old Man,” Emma yelled from where she was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, several boxes open in front of her, her ponytail now piled into a messy bun on top of her head. “But,” she added, looking up, a worried smile on her face. “Please do.”

“Can’t get rid of me that easily,” I said, giving her a wink before heading toward the hallway.

Selene was halfway down, a small smile on her face as she looked at pictures of Olivia and me on our wedding day, a newly born and angry-looking Emma, Lizzie in a leotard, a ladybug costume, her high school graduation gown. The family on vacation in California, New York, and Paris.

“You must miss her,” she said, pointing to a photo of Olivia. It was her first official author headshot. I’d told her she was a babe and had immediately run out to buy a frame. She’d blushed profusely when I’d hung it in the middle of a then-bare wall. But I wouldn’t let her take it down, so instead she’d added to it, thus creating what was now known as Memory Lane.

“I do,” I said. “She was fun. Smart. Classy. But she could also be silly. And a little bit devilish.”

She grinned, watching me as I spoke. Again there was something in her smile that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“And you?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“Could you be silly and devilish as well?”

I pressed a hand to my chest. “Who, me?”

“Yes!” Emma shouted from the other room, making the both of us laugh.

I shrugged. “I suppose yes, I could be.”

“Yes,” she said, an almost knowing look in her pale eyes. “You could.”

She pointed to the door to my left.

“Is that your office?”

“It is.”

“May I?”

“You may,” I said, standing back to let her enter. “I apologize for the mess.”

But if she was bothered, she didn’t let on, moving slowly around the room, taking in the silly signs, a homemade clay ashtray from Lizzie’s elementary days, a picture frame made of puzzle pieces from Emma’s. There were drawings in crayon that had faded over the years, and photos from every decade scattered about—from this one all the way back to my childhood.

She stopped in front of a black-and-white photograph. The first ever taken of me in my uniform. We were supposed to keep a straight face, but at the last moment I couldn’t help it, the corners of my lips turning up just slightly. Selene turned, the same smile on her face, and I froze.

“You’re...”

But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand. I blinked once. Again. But there it was, right in front of me this whole time. I hadn’t seen it because I’d been looking for Kate. But it wasn’t Kate I should’ve been looking for.

It was me.

I reached back, feeling around for my chair and then sinking down onto it.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

She sighed, her eyes conveying something I’d seen many times in my life. Surrender. But not the kind that leads to the end of a life. The kind that accepts whatever is coming next.

Her smile remained soft as she gestured to the sofa half-covered in paperwork and books behind her. I waved a hand. Yes. Please. Sit. And waited as she did so, catching a small stack of books as they slid toward her and setting them upright, before turning her pale eyes to me, her fingers laced in her lap.

“First, I’m sorry I wasn’t forthright at the front door,” she said. “I wasn’t sure how to begin. Despite rehearsing in the car on the way over.” She gave a shy laugh and then clasped her hands as she continued, a more serious expression on her face. “The woman you knew as Kate Campbell was born with a different name.”

I frowned, and then remembered Selene mentioning another name when she’d arrived. Something Kate had alluded to having in the few entries she’d made in the journal I’d read, but had never stated outright. Perhaps because she’d been afraid what might’ve happened if it had gotten into the wrong hands. I assumed that was also why she’d only vaguely mentioned the places she’d stopped on her way to Germany, choosing descriptions over names, and feelings instead of facts about what was happening and who she might’ve met.

“Giselle?” I asked.

“Gisela Holl?nder,” she said. “Born to Gerhard and Gabriela Holl?nder, two people who fully supported the Nazi ideology. And when I say supported, I mean funded, threw lavish parties, and mixed with the man himself.”

The words sat between us as I tried to take them in. Absorb them. Have them make sense as I remembered the woman from my past who had haunted me ever since.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How...”

My eyes darted around the room, memories, tarnished and blurry with age, forcing their way to the forefront of my mind.

“It’s a long and complicated story,” Selene said, empathy welling in her eyes, just as Kate’s had so many years before as she’d worked over me, stitching me up so I wouldn’t bleed to death.

I held up a hand. “I’m sorry. Can you just...” I stood. “I’ll be right back.”

I hurried down the hallway and found Lizzie and Emma standing at the kitchen island, a laptop open to our favorite pizza place.

“Old Man?” Emma said, looking up, taking in my face, and stepping toward me. “What’s wrong?”

“Dad?” Lizzie reached out a hand, placing it on my arm. “Are you okay?”

“Can the pizza wait?” I asked. “I want you to hear this at the same time I do.”

“Hear what?” Emma asked.

“I’m not really sure. I just...don’t want to be alone.”

The two women looked at one another and then nodded and followed me silently back to my office where Selene had cleared the sofa, making neat little stacks on the floor beside it. She stood waiting for us, as if anticipating a slightly larger audience.

“I know this is all very strange,” I said, looking from my daughter to my grandaughter. “And I’m sorry for the secrecy. I just...wasn’t sure where this was going. But now...” I motioned toward Selene. “This is Selene Michel. She knew an old friend of mine and is helping clear up a bit of a mystery. Selene, this is my daughter, Lizzie, and my granddaughter, Emma.”

“I am so pleased to meet you both,” Selene said.

The four of us sat then, Lizzie and Emma looking curiously from Selene to me, seeing the same thing in her that I had, but not realizing yet what I’d come to understand but couldn’t quite explain. Yet. But finally, after a lifetime of wonder, I knew the answers were coming.

“Who is the old friend?” Lizzie asked.

“A woman,” I said. “Someone I knew before your mother. The woman who saved my life during the war.”

“Someone you loved?” Lizzie asked.

I inhaled. As I let the breath go, I nodded.

“Yes.”

“Did...” Emma looked from me to her mother and back again. “Did Gran know?”

I smiled and chuckled. “Your grandmother was the one who helped heal me after I returned home, thinking Kate dead.”

Emma nodded and slid her hand into her mother’s. I met Lizzie’s eyes and she gave me the same smile her mother used to give and then we all turned our attention back to Selene.

“Kate Campbell’s name at birth was Gisela Holl?nder,” Selene began, and then went on to explain the parents she’d been born to, the quality of her life—the extreme wealth, the apartment in the city, the country house, and the travel. The circle of friends they belonged to. The way she was treated by her parents, how she was expected to behave, the friends she was to surround herself with, the piano lessons, social graces lessons, extra tutoring to ensure she excelled not only in school, but understood politics. Their politics.

“She hated it,” Selene said. “All of it. And her mother made no qualms about her disdain for her. And her sister.”

I frowned. “I thought... Wasn’t she an only child?”

Selene shook her head. “She had a younger sister. Younger by six years. Catrin. Cat. Kitty Cat. When you met Gisela, she was of the assumption that her sister had died years before. She learned she was still alive after you returned to the front.”

“She sent a letter that said she had to go home,” I said, remembering. “I thought she’d meant Manhattan. I thought she’d gone back to where she lived with her aunt... Victoria?”

“Victoria. Yes,” she said. “Victoria was actually born Helene. Gisela was nine when Helene married a man named Elias Fuchs, a wealthy Austrian businessman who ran in the same circles as Gisela’s parents. Elias was the only son of one of Austria’s wealthiest couples, who had died years before, leaving him, their sole heir, the entirety of their fortune. What his parents didn’t know when they were alive, was that he had been using his hefty allowance to help the opposition of their political leanings.” Selene paused and took in each of us before continuing. “Like Gisela, Elias didn’t agree with his parents’ ideologies. Or those of the man they supported. He was secretly working against them, attending parties to gain knowledge, which he then passed on to certain friends he’d made. American and British friends. In Helene he met a kindred spirit, and the two of them worked together as part of an underground group that had existed since the First World War. No one would suspect the wealthy, sparkling couple attending parties at her sister and brother-in-law’s bidding could be spies. So when they left on a long-planned vacation the year Gisela turned thirteen, there was intense shock and sadness within the group when their plane crashed and they died.”

She went on to explain that they’d actually faked their deaths, setting them up to begin a new life in America, Gisela’s knowledge of the plan, and how they’d sent for her, under false pretenses, two years later.

“When Gisela was fourteen, she began correspondence with a girl her same age,” Selene said. “It was a program set up between her exclusive private school and one in California where the parents of the children quietly supported Nazism. Of course, Gerhard and Gabriela loved this. They had hosted several prominent European celebrities over the years, and the thought of getting in with Hollywood... Well. Gabriela was keen. And so they both supported the pen-pal relationship wholeheartedly. And when Gisela was invited to go visit her for two weeks the summer after she turned sixteen, they practically packed her bags for her, sending her off with a trusted friend of the family.”

Selene shifted in her seat, suddenly looking uncomfortable and glancing worriedly from Lizzie to Emma to me.

“I understand this is a lot of information and I’ve come to your home uninvited,” she said. “I—if you want me to stop at any time I can.”

“Please keep going,” Emma said.

Selene looked to Lizzie, who nodded, then to me.

“Can’t stop now, kid,” I said. “This group loves a good story.”

She nodded. “Where was I?”

“The pen pal,” Lizzie said, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

“The pen pal didn’t really exist. At least not in the form of a sixteen-year-old girl. The letters were actually written by the woman in charge of handling the mail that came in and out of the school—and who was part of the network Gisela’s aunt and uncle worked with. Using a code Helene and Gisela had made up during their many walks and talks, she sent letters filled with innocent-sounding details of her life by the ocean, browning her skin in the sun, and luxurious vacations with her imaginary parents. A month in France, a jaunt to Seattle, two weeks in Hawaii...and a long, boring week in her grandmother’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“For two years Gisela exchanged letters with this imaginary girl, cementing a narrative. A history. Trust.”

“What about the trusted friend?” Emma asked. “Did she know what she was getting herself into?”

“Indeed,” Selene said. “In fact, there were a few people associated with the Holl?nder household who knew, as they’d been recommended for hire or introduced to the elder Holl?nders before Gisela was born. By her aunt Helene.” She looked to me. “She had eyes and ears everywhere in that house.”

“As soon as Gisela landed in California, the woman she’d been exchanging letters with handed her a set of papers. Inside was her new name, a new birthday, and a hometown listed as Manhattan.

“She spoke English, but with a heavy German accent, and so she didn’t say a word on the train that took her cross-country to New York and her aunt Helene, now Victoria, and Uncle Elias, now Frank.

“She was homeschooled until she could speak without a trace of an accent,” Selene said. “Then went to high school, made friends, and on the weekends she volunteered as a candy striper at a nearby hospital with her aunt. It was there she found her love of caring for others. And in the back of her mind...a mission.

“The three of them, Victoria, Frank, and Kate were a tight-knit group. At home they listened constantly to the radio. Due to Uncle Frank’s job, still providing funds for spies overseas, they were privy to information others weren’t about the war coming. After Kate graduated from high school, she immediately enrolled in nursing school. She was determined that if war should come, she would be able to help her fellow Americans. It was her way of trying to make amends for her country’s transgressions.”

Selene looked to me then.

“There was a program in Kentucky for additional training. Military training. For nursing while in flight. She was based first in the Pacific Theater. Then the European, where she met you on a flight to England.”

I could feel Lizzie’s and Emma’s eyes on me, but I could only see Selene now.

“What happened in Germany?” I asked.

Once more, she reached for her purse. Another stack of letters, tied with a string, yellowed with age, bent from time.

She leaned forward and held them out to me. At the familiar sight of my name written in Kate’s penmanship, I sucked in a breath.

“She wrote these to you. A few from her parents’ home in Hamburg, but most were written from the work camp she was sent to after her mother, sister, and her childhood nanny were killed. She never sent them, thus the absence of postage. I imagine she didn’t have a way to. The ones written in Hamburg were returned to her a few months after she arrived back in Manhattan.” She stopped, taking a breath. And then, “The bottom one in the pile, I believe, will answer your question.”

My eyes filled with tears, the weight of the letters in my hand growing, an ache I’d long since buried, building in my chest.

“Dad?” Lizzie said. “What question?”

But I couldn’t answer. Not yet. Instead, I slid the letter at the bottom of the pile free from its binding, stood, and left the room.