Life Will Have Its Way Read online

  “That doesn’t make it right!”

  “But she comes back! She always comes back!” she added defensively.

  I couldn’t understand what kind of person would think it was all right to leave a small, helpless child alone in an unfamiliar garden. “So why do you think she didn’t come back this time?”

  “I don’t know. She usually comes back when I call her.”

  I perked up, why hadn’t I thought of trying to call her grandmother… of trying to call her mother, her father, someone, anyone? “Do you have her number?” I asked with a sudden sense of optimism.

  Her forehead scrunched together and her eye lids tightened, she looked at me as though she thought I might be trying to trick her.

  “Her telephone number?” I repeated.

  “What’s a tel… uh… fone num… ber?” she asked, her forehead bunching.

  She seemed serious, how could she possibly not know what a telephone number was? I pulled the phonebook from the cupboard and asked if she could just tell me her grandmother’s full name so I could look it up for myself.

  Her head moved slowly side to side.

  “Her last name? I just need your grandmother’s last name, what is it?”

  “Uh,” she scratched the back of her head, “she doesn’t have one.”

  “She must have a last name.”

  “No… she doesn’t have one,” she trailed off, “her name is Petra. Just Petra.”

  Well then, easy enough, all I had to do was find a woman named Petra, just Petra, who thought it was okay to leave a tiny five year old unattended and far away from home. I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to find this Petra woman, and I was sure she wouldn’t want to hear the strong words I had for her when I did.

  I walked toward the window, hoping to look outside and see a woman, an older woman, bundled up in a dated woolen jacket with her hair tied in a colorful scarf standing patiently in the garden waiting for her granddaughter. There was no one there. The garden was empty, the sidewalk deserted.

  The girl joined me at the window.

  “Do you think your grandma might be back for you tonight?” I asked.

  She shook her head and started fiddling with her hair, twisting it round and round her fingers, then letting it loose in long golden spirals. I could do nothing but sigh. The cute little girl that sat in my living room wasn’t making it very easy for me to help her. I turned back toward the window, from a block or so down the sidewalk on the other side of the street someone exited the small café, the only shop in my view with its lights still on. It looked like it could have been a woman. “Look, look,” I pointed toward the moving silhouette. “Do you think that might be her?”

  She barely bothered to look out the window.

  “Right there,” I tapped on the glass, “the woman walking this way.”

  Without making any effort to look again she shook her head back and forth, as far as it would go to each side. I could tell she was getting bored, but I was determined to keep her focused on the window, on the street outside, hoping somehow, if we tried hard enough, we might actually will her grandmother back to the garden.

  The street seemed even more quiet than usual. I couldn’t help but remember the old adage about watching water boil. I felt as though the pot I was trying to watch was a pan filled with ice water that was apparently never going to get hot, let alone boil. I perked up when I saw a pair of lights flicker and bounce as they moved slowly down the street ahead of their car. I grew even more hopeful when I saw that the car was a taxi. It made perfect sense. Of course the grandmother wouldn’t have her own car. My heart fluttered, this had to be her grandmother. Maybe the woman was old and forgetful, she probably just wasn’t used to bringing the girl to the city and had accidently left without her. The car drew nearer, it looked as though it was going to stop directly in front of the garden. I started to stand, I would have to go out immediately, before the grandmother had time to panic when she saw that the bench, the bench where she’d left her little granddaughter sitting, was empty.

  The cab pulled to the curb. The bright red lights of the brakes flashed, then froze behind the car. The driver got out and went to the rear passenger door. He would feel he should help an old woman out of the car, he would know she was unfamiliar with the city, unfamiliar with riding in a cab altogether. The man leaned to pull the handle. His movements were slow and deliberate, as if he were on film that had been intentionally slowed. The door swung open and a pair of feet dropped from the back of the car, the person, whoever it was, put their hand on the top of the door and pulled themselves up out of the cab.

  It wasn’t a woman. My heart sank for a second then quickly recovered. “Is that your grandfather?”

  The girl jumped up. She cupped her hands to the window and looked in the direction I was pointing. She continued to look for some time.

  “Well, is it?” I asked anxiously.

  She pulled her face back from the glass, and turned to me, with a sad, half-smile, she shook her head, she looked as disappointed as I felt. I took one long last look down the street and realized it was time to give up on the window, time to give up on trying to will someone to the garden.

  The girl had already moved to the couch, I watched her small head as it teetered back and forth, suddenly too heavy for her neck. It would slip to the side then her eyes would fly open at the same time that her head jerked back into place. I went for blankets and a pillow and a bed was soon made up for her. She was asleep by the time I’d cleared her dishes from the table.

  I slunk down in the chair next to her, my thoughts were beginning to spin in nervous, repetitive circles when a familiar knock interrupted the cycle.

  “Yoo-hoo, it’s me!”

  Chapter 2

  Anja had lived in the building forever but I’d only known her myself for the last few of years. I figured she must have been in her fifties, but never dared ask. We didn’t really have much in common but I found myself immediately drawn to her quirky style and sweet, feisty spirit.

  She usually popped over when she felt like having dessert or better yet, had her hands on some kind of dessert mix. Mixes were the best. All of the ingredients were pre-packaged and almost everything you needed was right there, ready to go, you didn’t have to forage or beg, speculate or substitute. As soon as I would answer the door Anja would smile mischievously, push whatever she was holding in my direction and ask if I didn’t mind whipping something up. For someone who loved sweet starches as much as she did, she seemed to have an unusual disinterest in baking.

  “You don’t happen to have extra flour, do you?” she asked as she forced a can of peaches into my hand, her eyebrows rising slyly up and down.

  I pulled her quickly inside and started to tell her about the girl while she slipped out of her shoes. She raised her chin to look over my shoulder, her eyes scanned the room and she pushed herself past me. She got close to the couch then stopped short. She stared at the sleeping child, straightened the sides of her shirt, then brought one hand to her mouth, holding her elbow with the other. She bit the side of her lower lip, then shook her head slowly side to side.

  “She was just sitting there? Alone? All by herself?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Does anyone know she’s here?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Anja turned and hurried toward the windows, she drew together the curtains in the living room then rushed to the kitchen to try to see what she could do to cover the window over the sink.

  “No one must know she is here,” she looked at me intently.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Now tell me again where you said she came from?”

  “I didn’t say where she came from… I don’t know where she came from.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know where she came from?” Anja asked.

  “She was just sitting there in the garden when I wal
ked up, it’s not like I saw someone drop her off or anything.”

  Anja produced an exaggerated moan as she scratched the back of her head. “We’re going to need a lot more than that.”

  “Well, she did tell me that she came here with her grandmother,” I added quickly.

  “Then where is she? Where is this grandmother?”

  “I don’t know. She said her grandma always leaves her and then comes back for her later.”

  “Well then… obviously something has happened to the grandmother.”

  “Maybe I should check the hospital and see if there’s anyone there with her grandmother’s name.”

  Anja grabbed me by the shoulders, “No!” she said sternly. “You must not contact the hospital!”

  I was taken aback, I pulled away, “Then what am I supposed to do with…” I stopped short and looked toward the girl.

  “Have you asked her where she lives?”

  “She wouldn’t even tell me her name. The only useful thing I could get out of her was that she didn’t live anywhere close by.”

  “Did she take a bus? The subway? Was she brought here in a car?” Anja asked impatiently.

  “No. She said she walked.”

  Anja threw her hands in the air, “Well then, it must not be that far away.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you absolutely sure no one saw you bring her in?”

  “I don’t think anyone saw us. It was getting late by then, there was no one outside and there was no one in the hallway or anything, so yeah, I’m pretty sure… I guess.”

  “You guess? You guess? Well. I hope you’re right.” Anja said brusquely. “Do you have any idea what will happen if anyone finds out she’s here?” She didn’t wait for my response and seemed more than willing to answer her own question. “The police will come and take her away, and depending on the mood they’re in they might take us away with her.”

  Anja was convinced there would be little effort made to find the girl’s family, instead she would be placed in the state run orphanage where she would surely be left and forgotten. To further her point, Anja went on to graphically detail the miserable life of an orphan, the cruelty, the filth, the hunger, the lack of privacy and the complete absence of motherly love. Anja was quite confident in what she was saying and I soon realized it was going to be entirely up to us to get the girl back to wherever she’d come from.

  Up until then I hadn’t felt too stressed about the unusual situation in which we’d landed ourselves. As a matter of fact, I’d found it all quite entertaining, but once Anja started talking about cruel, filthy orphanages I began to feel incredibly worried about what we would actually do with the girl if no one came for her. Anja instantly picked up on my anxiety and I could tell by the bothered look on her face that she wasn’t amused. In her opinion, fear and worry were useless emotions, emotions she could barely understand and seemed to have difficulty even tolerating. “Oh stop it!” she would say dismissively, as if one could wave a wand and make any feelings of worry just magically go away.

  Chapter 3

  Since I needed to leave early for work, Anja decided she would take the girl home with her. I would have preferred that they’d just spent the night in my apartment to avoid waking the girl and moving her, but Anja was insistent on returning to her place before the night was through. I decided I didn’t have the energy nor the inclination to argue with her, besides, if there was anything I’d learned about the woman, it was the fact that once she’d made up her mind it was a useless endeavor to try to change it.

  Anja had retired a few years before I moved into the building. I had no idea what she’d done while she was still working and even after a fair amount of effort and more than three years’ time, I was still as clueless about her former profession as I had been on the day I first met her. Initially, I hadn’t cared much about what it was she’d done for a living, but the more she refused to talk about it, the more my interest piqued and without any input from her I was forced to use my imagination to fill in the missing details. At times I would be comfortable with the notion that she’d been nothing more than a low level office worker, bored out of her wits but content to amuse herself after hours with gardening and a game of tennis every once in a while. But I have to admit, there were also times when I thought perhaps she was so reluctant to talk about her previous work because there was something to hide. Perhaps she’d had an incredibly powerful position. Perhaps she’d done things she wasn’t proud of, done things to make people’s lives miserable. Perhaps she was still in contact with her former employers and co-workers, and perhaps I was always saying too much.

  “Okay,” I said, “but how can we get her to your place, without someone noticing?” I gestured back and forth in the direction of the apartments on the other side of the hall. The tenants across from Anja were an odd, older couple who gave me the same feeling Hansel and Gretel must have felt when they were confronted by the little old woman in the candy house. Both had an unnatural interest in everyone’s business and became immediately available anytime there was the slightest bit of activity in the hallway. They presented themselves under the cover of their small, yappy dog that always, conveniently, needed to go out. It was Anja’s theory that they were paid with booze and cigarettes to report everything that went on in the building. I hadn’t yet decided if that was truly the case, maybe they were just bored and lonely, or maybe their dog just had a small bladder.

  “I think we’ll be fine if we wait until it gets a bit later,” she said. “You know those two slushes in 1B will be passed out before midnight and I’m sure that little bitty in 1D still has her night job.” Anja smiled, seemingly amused by her unneighborly description of the neighbors.

  She leaned over to brush the hair out of the girl’s face, then dropped into the chair next to the couch. She picked up the little blue coat draped across its arm and held it up by the shoulders, she tilted her head and squinted while she tried to read the tag attached to the inside of the neck. “Bremmer-Klein? Hmmf,” she shrugged, “that’s strange.” She folded the coat over itself and sat it on her lap, then ran her hand thoughtfully over the fabric. “That company hasn’t been in business for decades.”

  “You think that’s strange? What about these?” I picked up one of the girl’s boots and passed it to her. “Check this out! I bet you’ve never seen anything like this before?”

  Her eyes grew large as she took the boot from my hand. She ran her fingers over the fur trim, and into the lining, she pulled at the strings, and rolled them between her fingers, she turned the boot over to look at the bottom and moved her hand over the thick surface that covered the sole.

  “What is it?” I asked, wondering what she’d seen that had so captured her attention.

  “Oh nothing,” she answered, “It’s just that, well, believe it or not, I actually have seen boots like this before.”

  “Where?” I asked skeptically.

  “Oh, it’s been forever, and I suppose there’s a chance my memory’s just playing tricks on me, but I’d swear that some of the men that came to see my father wore boots like that.”

  “Men? Who? What men?”

  “From the Resistance,” she answered in a hushed tone, “they were in the Resistance.”

  “But why? Why would people in the Resistance be coming to see your father?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you can figure that out on your own dear,” she replied a bit sharply.

  Over the years the idea of the Resistance had been highly romanticized and usually conjured up images of dashing young men rushing secretly about the city in the dark of night, organizing, arming one another and sabotaging the efforts of the enemy. But in reality, a big part of the underground consisted of extremely ordinary people, people like Anja’s parents.

  She looked away, her eyes moved side to side while she thought, her face shifted while her head shook back and forth. “No. No. That can’t be. Can it?”

  “What? What are you talki
ng about?”

  “Oh nothing. Nothing,” she shook her head quickly. Leaning to place the coat over the arm of the couch she noticed the girl’s leather bag on the side table. “And what do we have here?” she asked while picking it up. Examining it closely she ran her fingers along the stitching at the edges and across the colorful threads that created a butterfly on the flap. She sniffed a few times into the air, looking around for the source of a smell she had just noticed. Realizing it was coming from the bag, she brought it closer to her face and inhaled deeply. “Ooh, that smell, I love that smell,” she took another deep breath. “Sometimes my grandfather would throw a bough of pine into his stove. The needles would catch fire then they would crackle and burst and emit the most wonderful smell.” She took another long drag of air from near the bag. “Everything in the room would smell just like this. Sometimes everything in the entire house,” she laughed, “even him.”

  “Well there we go,” I said half-joking, “now we just need to find a house with a wood burning stove filled with burnt pine needles.”

  “Well, if this girl lives in a house with a wood burning stove… she isn’t from anywhere around here.”

  Anja kept hold of the purse, she tinkered mindlessly with the closure, a narrow barrel shaped piece of metal that went through an opening then turned to secure the flap. When she finally went to set the bag back on the table it flipped from her hands and the contents spilled to the ground.

  “Oh my!” her face flushed, as she scooped everything up and tucked it back in the bag. She looked nervously at the girl, hoping she was still asleep and hadn’t witnessed the violation.

  Chapter 4

  Anja popped up from the chair and announced that she needed fresh air. She said she’d take a look around outside and see if someone might have returned for the girl. She suspected that anyone that might come looking for her would be from out in the country and predicted that they would be reluctant to go door-to-door in an unfamiliar neighborhood in the city. She stepped into her shoes, threw one of my jackets over her shoulders and slipped out the door. I listened until I heard the loud, hard slam of the outer door then dashed to the window where I watched Anja round the front corner of the building. It was quite dark outside and the street lamps struggled to cast enough light. She stopped to look in both directions along the street then stepped onto the path that ran across the grass to the arbor.