The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (5 page)

So, in this world, Nathan was at war.

“Watch out, ma’am!” Heedless of the world around me, I had bumped into someone.

“I’m sorry, I—”

It was a young man dressed for Halloween as a genie. He smiled and touched my shoulder before moving on. His touch made me gasp. I tried to catch my breath as he made his way into the crowd.

Ruth took my hand. “Come now, darling.”

But I could not move, watching him walking away from me, chatting with his companion and laughing, disappearing into the crowd.

I felt her tight grip on me. Her concerned whisper: “Greta? Are you all right?”

“I know that man,” I said, pointing where he had been, a shimmer in the moonlight. I felt tears well in my eyes. “They’re alive,” was all I could say. “They didn’t die.”

“Darling—”

“That man,” I said, gesturing to the genie disappearing into the crowd. “His name was Howard.”

How could I explain it? That the year before, I had seen him every day selling me half-price baguettes at the bakery. Same short blond hair, same pale beard, same ivory smile. Just as he used to look standing behind the counter, months before. And waving at me late at night on the street, in tight jeans and with his buddies. And on the photograph taped to his coffin.

Laughing again, turning, looking around at me: familiar young men appearing in this unfamiliar world. Men who had died months or years before from the plague miraculously revived! There, in an army uniform, was the boy who made jewelry from papier-mâché beads; he died in the spring. And that one soldier, the stark blond Swede jumping from the streetcar, once sold magazines; he’d died two years before, one of the first: the cave’s canary. Who knows how many more were off to war? Alive, each one, alive and more than alive—shouting, laughing, running down the street!

Of course: 1918, a world set long before the plague. A world in which they had not died.

T
WILIGHT HAD DESCENDED
when we returned, carrying growlers of beer, to Ruth’s apartment—decorated, in this world, as a fairy-tale land. The ceiling was pasted with silver stars, and a cardboard gingerbread house stood at the entrance to the dining room, dotted with peppermint candies, some of which had already fallen to the floor. On the wall was a paper castle, and from it fell a waterfall of Rapunzel hair.

I had been lost in thought amid the crowds of revelers. “Ruth,” I said. “I’m going to tell you something impossible.”

“Not now, darling,” she said, leading me back outside. Yellow leaves blew in a spiral behind her. “Later, when we’re drunk.”

“I’m not who you think I am. You told me once—”

“Who is? I’m going to make the punch,” she said, squeezing my hand. “It has to be strong, to beat the flu. And last us through these insane times. You stay here, I’m sure we’ve kept him waiting.”

She disappeared into the house, the bright electric lights of her dress burning into my eyes.

Another world. My life if I had been born in another time. Ruth was the same, but what else would have changed? I looked down at my hand, empty now but still bearing the pink pinch of my wedding ring. Married. I should have guessed Nathan might be at war. Of course I would not find him here, waiting for me in this world.

I looked around and saw, all along the path of Patchin Place, leading right up to my aunt’s door, a peculiar thing: a trail of bread crumbs scattered on the stones. I felt the strange magic contraction of the worlds. I stared at those bread crumbs a long time before I began to follow them, one every few feet, back down Patchin Place toward the gate. It never occurred to me to look up, to see who might have left them, not until I reached out my hand to touch one, to be sure it was real, and a voice yanked me back: “Gretel!” I looked up and felt a black bolt in my brain.

For there at the gates stood a fairy-tale man, removing his feathered cap. “I’ve been pacing the block. You took so long!” he shouted. There is the thing you hope for, and then, beyond it . . .

As fox faced as ever, smiling, with skin and muscle and blood and all the spinning, churning apparatus of life: “Why did you take so long?”

I can barely write the words. It was my brother, Felix.

“Y
OU CAN
’
T BE
here,” I said. “You can’t.”

He asked me, laughing, why not?

I stared at him a long time before I answered, “Because you’re dead.”

“S
ORRY TO DISAPPOINT
you, bubs. I’m still kicking.” A well-remembered laugh. Red hair cut close on the sides, those few freckles still haunting his skin, pale eyes flashing. “No,” I said, bracing myself against the wall. “I was there, I watched you, I held your hand.”

That smile again. “Well, it’s Halloween! The dead walk the earth! Let’s go inside and have Ruth make us a drink.” A shout from inside, and the sound of shattered glass and laughter.

But as he turned I gripped his arm, tight. His arm, solid and strong and alive. Not gaunt anymore, not thin or weak. He looked at me seriously now. I thought of the last time I had seen him, trying to swallow a spoon of poison, the wirework of tendons shifting in that arm. And here. Alive. How does the heart keep beating?

“Greta?” he asked, his face focused on mine now. We stood, regarding each other, and I’m sure it was only face-to-face that you could recognize our similarity. The lashless eyes that hid so much, the full red lips that gave away everything, the coloring of skin and hair that were mere variations, as if a passing shadow had briefly fallen over me.

“Felix, something’s happened,” I said firmly. “I’m not myself.”

He stood quietly for a moment and I watched his smile tense in the streetlight. I held his hand tightly and would not let my eyes leave him. Tall in his lederhosen, neck bare to the night wind. Here was the old nightmare, arriving on schedule as it had every night, this time brought on not by my sleeping mind but by Dr. Cerletti’s magic wand.

Some partygoers arrived, looked at us, and smiled; I smoothed my apron over my dirndl. I saw that, together, we were characters wandering far from their storybook.

“I know you’ve been sad,” Felix was saying to me after they went inside. “I know it’s been hard with Nathan gone. I know that’s why you went to the doctor; I’m sure he didn’t expect these side effects.”

I looked up and saw the moon had risen between the buildings, but then realized it was dangling from a window, on a fishing line, lit from within by a candle, and I saw in that window a pretty female Harlequin making it swing above the crowd. From behind her a man dressed as a black cat kissed the nape of her neck.

Felix squeezed my hand. He pulled some of my hair back from my face. “I know you’ve been lonely.”

“Yes,” I said at last. “I’ve been lonely.”

“I’m sorry I was away so long. Ingrid’s father wanted me to meet my future family. But now I’m back.” The lights of a passing cab shone across his face. “I’m back for a while.” An arrogant little smile beneath that arrogant little mustache.

And then I realized that I could say the thing I had been whispering to myself all these months, lying in my bed and staring out the window with lashes sticky from tears. I could say it at last to the person I was always addressing, the person I thought would never hear it. There before me in his costume. I held him close again and said: “I missed you.”

He laughed a little, accepting my embrace.

“I missed you. I missed you,” I repeated.

“I missed you, too, Gretel.”

I pulled back and kept his hand in mine. He was smiling. Above us, the moon swung from its line as Columbine began to sing to the crowd below. I asked him who Ingrid was and he squeezed my hand again.

“Ingrid,” he said distinctly. “You’ve met her. You’ll remember. She’s lovely, a girl in Washington, a senator’s daughter. You’ll remember.” He laughed but I saw his concern working away in there. “I’m marrying her in January.”

“Marrying her?”

The careful smile and shake of his head. “Hard to believe anyone would marry me, right? Well, I’m one of the few eligible men in town. There’s some luck in being German.”

To my relief I found myself laughing. My brother? Hanging from a lamppost in his boyish costume, rolling his eyes and his wrists, winking at me—couldn’t everybody see it? Not girlish, exactly, not the way he had been as an adolescent, trying on my shoes and necklaces; he had trained himself in certain ways, and grown in others, and was man enough. But anyone could tell. Anyone who cared to look, who knew a thing about life. “Felix!” I said. “Felix, you can’t be serious! I may be dreaming, but you can’t be marrying her.”

He stiffened, lowered his eyebrows, and let go of the lamppost. “Yes, I am. You’ve always said you like her; don’t change your mind now.”

“Well, I’m sure I do, but what about Alan?”

“What?”

“This is my dream. If you marry anyone, it should be Alan.”

Quickly, without hesitation, “Marry him to whom?”

It was the swift response of a man who is not really lying, but has constructed a careful world—like an acoustic chamber—that swallows the lie before he even knows he has said it. For the mind knows what the man does not.

“Oh, I see,” I said to him.

We stared at each other for one second. Moonlight made its way over the roofs onto the street, in a small strip, creeping along like an alley cat, lighting up the antique version of my old life. The monkey’s paw. I had been given a world in which my brother was alive, one in which he would not even go to this war, but I had not dreamed precisely enough; this world was a trap.

“Greta,” he started to say, but stopped.

There is a truth that everyone knows but you. Each of us has it; no one is immune. Not a secret, not a scandal, but something simple and obvious to everyone else. It can be as simple as losing weight, or as difficult as leaving a husband. How awful, to sense that everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you! You are left to guess, all by yourself. Until the moment comes when it reveals itself to you, and of course this revelation always comes a moment too late.

“Furlough papers,” came a gruff voice behind us. A big snub-nosed officer in a deep blue uniform. It took a moment for me to understand this was not a man in costume.

“I’m excused from service, Officer,” said my brother. “I’m German.”

“Papers.”

“Yes,” he said, and I could see Felix suppressing his rage. “Yes, right here.”

I seemed not to have brought any kind of purse. I wondered if I had papers. I wondered what those papers would be.

What Felix produced was a little card, which went immediately into the officer’s hands; the pink-faced man examined it with a frown. I could see, at the top of the card, in bold copperplate, the words:
ALIEN ENEMY REGISTRATION
.

“Who is your employer?” the officer asked.

“I’m a freelance journalist.”

“I need an employer.”

Felix turned to me and said very calmly and quietly, “Go into the party. I’ll find you later.”

“No!” I shouted.

The officer pulled him back: “Talk with me, Fritz, not your girl.” He asked who Felix’s associates were in this neighborhood and if he was a member of any German organizations.

“No!” I insisted to Felix. “I can’t lose you again!”

“Go, Greta,” Felix hissed as the officer barked again for his attention, asking if he was a member of the Communist Party. I watched the policeman pull my brother out of sight. Red hair, long legs, lederhosen: gone. Standing there in Patchin Place, I cried out for my Hansel—as if my bones had all been broken.

I
DID NOT
last long in that world, on that first visit. Ruth found me there, crumpled at her doorstep, and took me up to my apartment. “He’s gone!” I kept saying. “I lost him again!” Passing her door, I saw only fairy-tale costumes and heard only laughter and the chandelier sounds of a party. She whispered, “He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine. But, darling, you should have told me your doctor was coming.”

She took me into my bedroom, and there stood Dr. Cerletti.

Small wire-framed glasses, in this world, but bald as ever, in a neat brown suit. He carried a wooden box by its brass handle. “I tried to call, Mrs. Michelson. I apologize, I should have guessed you would forget after yesterday. We’re going to do these at home. It’s as easy to do here as at the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Ruth said to the doctor, sitting me on the bed. “She didn’t tell me. I didn’t know.”

He said nothing, but put the box on a little table, unfolding the lid down the middle like a tackle box. Inside, nested in green velvet, was a glass jar, half coated in foil, from whose lid emerged a brass knob. Sunk in the velvet, around it, lay a silver circlet. A wire led from it to the device. He lifted out the jar and set it before me, then carefully removed the circlet with both hands. “We do these twice a week, Greta,” he said softly, holding it before him. “You remember. I’ll see you again next Wednesday. Eventually, you may be able to do them yourself.”

“I don’t remember this . . . ,” I said.

He said it was a capacitor. A Leyden jar. I had only to touch my hand to the knob. I looked up at Ruth and she seemed to be close to tears. Her electric dress glowed in the dim room, making our faces pink above the device. “Go on,” said Dr. Cerletti. “You did it yesterday.” Was this what Alice felt, when she saw the bottle that said
DRINK ME
? She knew this would help her get there, to the place she desired. That beautiful garden behind the little door.

He placed the circlet gently on my head. I looked down at the strange jar; there seemed to be water inside. Did I imagine it glowing? And, after a moment, I put out the index finger of my right hand and brought it to the bright brass knob. . . .

W
HEN HE WAS
gone, Ruth undressed me and gave me a sleeping pill the doctor had left, although my body wanted nothing but sleep. I recalled the bright spark that leapt from the device to my finger, the blue spark that lit my brain. I kept telling her he was dead, Felix was dead, and she kept trying to hush me, calm me down, when a shout came from the street—“Greta!”—and in my daze I moved to the window, thinking it was Felix escaped from the police. But it was a stranger. Was the device already working? A young man in a Civil War costume below my window, flowers in his hand. Wide clever face, small eyes, an eyebrow raised. An enormous, drunken smile. In the moonlight, his hair gleamed in bolts of brilliantine.