“Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.”
Words, oh so true, of Kate DiCamillo in her story about goodness and forgiveness, about broken hearts and the fight against evil. The tale of a courageous mouse called Despereaux.
We pack so much into the confines of a name, the padded walls sheltering character and faith, work and family, history and home. Yet a name can be boundless as well, rich in legacy and fierce with love.
The moment Charlotte says Luzia’s name, everything shifts. It doesn’t matter that an ocean separates these sisters or that they are staring at screens—Sigmund’s laptop in the castle library and Brie’s cell phone in Ohio. What matters is that they found each other.
Introductions are short between them, unnecessary really. Light breathes into the darkness of their stories, shadows fading away, and then the thread of truth begins weaving their lives back together, one strand at a time.
Josh and I slip out onto the patio as they remember together.
Ella waves, quite content playing with Sigmund’s “greats” again—kicking around a soccer ball near a guest cottage. Josh and I move down to the bank, a sliver of tall grass and rocks between the water and pine trees.
The journey of these sisters, the story of one life stolen too early while another lived in her place—it’s all too much for me to process at once. Luzia told us about the man in Vienna who hurt her, about Max’s heroic attempts to save her life, and about that morning forever etched in her mind—April 9, 1939. The day the Gestapo took Annika away.
“Do you think Luzia loved Max?” I ask, the question in my mind spilling out to the man next to me.
“Perhaps,” Josh says. “One’s first love is hard to lose.”
I think of the tears in Luzia’s eyes as she told us about Hermann. “Second love is hard to lose too,” I say. “She and Hermann were married for sixty-five years.”
Josh reaches for my hand, and my fingers seem to melt into his. Even with Scott, I felt on edge at times, like he was expecting something of me and I wasn’t certain what to give, but I feel content here beside Josh. Like I can trust him with the pieces of my heart.
I told Josh about Scott late last night, while Ella slept, and he empathized deeply with my loss, different from his and yet we both have had to grieve losing someone we loved. And we’ve both had to battle our fears.
We sit on an old wooden bench near the shore, a branch dangling over us. “I wonder if Charlotte and I would have found Luzia years ago, if she kept her name.”
“Ernst Schmid would have found her long before you did.”
I shift my legs. “An impossible time.” Each of them—Luzia and Annika, Hermann and Max—they fought evil the best way they could.
The pattern of sky is changing as white layers itself upon the blue, and a breeze stirs up the water in front of us, the lake layered with its own secrets.
“Will you keep diving?” I ask.
“Perhaps.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t find the treasure.”
“We found something more important,” he says. “And, I hope, a second chance.”
“For Luzia and Charlotte?” I ask quietly.
“Yes.” When he turns to me, the fierceness in his eyes matches the storm building overhead. “And perhaps a second chance for both of us, too.”
I like the thought of that—no pressure, just the possibilities.
“What happened to that German wall built firmly around you?” I ask.
“You’re breaking it down, Callie.”
Just like he’s been breaking down the wall I built around my heart. “Sometimes, I suppose, we have to give up that distance to welcome others into our lives.”
He releases my hand and props his arm across the back of the bench. I settle into that space of strength between his arm and chest. A protected place like the depths of this lake before us.
My gaze, in the rest of contentment, falls across this strand of water to the hillside where the grave stands to honor Annika’s life, though the name on it, Luzia, is the one Annika took as hers long ago, Luzi and Annika’s secrets hidden away.
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.”
These words from the bizarre story about a girl named Matilda who loved books, written by Roald Dahl—a man whose imagination seemed unfettered by any chains.
And then I think of another strange story—this one about the salt administrator and his casket that used to travel across these waters every fifty years to visit his home, the last time in 1939 before the war began.
The number does the strangest thing in my mind. It blurs out and then refocuses like the autorefractor at my optometrist’s, crystal clear the second time. According to Luzi, the Gestapo took Annika away in the spring of 1939 as well.
“What if—?” I start, struggling for words so that this man I’ve grown to admire doesn’t think I’m completely crazy. Then again, his willingness to think outside the proverbial box, like Annika once did, has brought us to this place. “What if you can still return the treasure to its owners?”
“I don’t think this lake is ever going to relent.”
I take a deep breath, calming the craziness. “What if the treasure isn’t in the lake?”
He glances behind us at an estate that would have been thoroughly searched by the Gestapo and the teenage boys who resided here under the Nazi regime. “Where else would it be?”
I tell him my idea, and he pulls out his phone to dial a contact in Vienna.
And I realize he doesn’t think I’m crazy at all.