Barrons, Vermont

November 1950

Of all the hated classes at Idlewild—and that was most of them—Weekly Gardening was the most despised. It had come, Roberta supposed, from some misguided idea that the housewives of the future should know how to grow their own vegetables. Or perhaps it descended from an idea that the school would subsist on its own produce, like a nunnery. In any case, every girl who attended Idlewild had to spend an hour every week in the communal school garden, digging hopelessly in the dirt and trying not to get her uniform muddy as she poked at the dead vegetables.

The month had slid into November, cold and hard. Roberta stood in a row with four other girls as Mrs. Peabody handed them each a gardening tool. “We are going to add lettuces to our planting next spring, so today we’ll be digging space before the ground freezes.” She indicated a chalked-off square of ground, filled with dead weeds and rocks. “One hour, girls. Get started.”

Roberta looked at Sonia, who was standing next to her. Sonia was huddled into her old wool coat, her face pinched and miserable, her thin hands on the handle of her shovel. “Are you all right?”

“Bon.” Sonia wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She reverted to French when she was tired.

Roberta buttoned her own coat higher over her neck and bent to her work. It wasn’t the work that the girls loathed—it was the garden itself. It was placed in the crux of shadows between the main hall and the dining hall, and it was relentlessly cold, damp, and moldy, no matter the season. The windows of both buildings stared blankly down at the girls as they worked. There was a persistent legend at Idlewild that Mary Hand’s baby was buried in the garden, which did nothing to add to the attraction of Weekly Gardening. Every time Roberta gardened in here, she expected to find baby bones.

The girls bent to work, their breath puffing in the morning air, the slanting November sunshine on the common putting them all in dark shadow. Roberta felt her shoes squish—the garden was always wet, with runnels of water pooling in the overturned dirt.

Mary Van Woorten raised her head and stared at Sonia. “You’re not digging,” she said, her mouth pursing in her pale round face.

“I am digging,” Sonia said grimly, pushing her shovel into the dirt.

“No, you’re not. You have to dig harder, like the rest of us.”

“Leave her alone,” Roberta said. She watched Sonia from the corner of her eye. The girl was gripping her shovel, wedging it into the wet dirt, but she wasn’t lifting much. Her teeth were chattering. Sonia was small, but she was strong, and this wasn’t like her. “Sonia?” Roberta said softly.

“I am fine.” As if to illustrate this, Sonia pushed at her shovel again.

“You aren’t even making a hole!” Mary persisted.

Sonia lifted her face and snapped at her. “You stupid girl,” she bit out, her hands shaking. “You’ve never had to dig. You’ve never had to dig.”

“What does that mean?” Mary said. “I’m digging right now.”

“I think something’s wrong with her,” Margaret Kevin piped up. “Mary, be quiet.”

“Shut up,” Sonia shouted, stunning all of them. Roberta had never seen her friend so angry. “Just be quiet, all of you, and leave me alone.”

They dug in silence. Roberta glanced back over her shoulder and saw Mrs. Peabody smoking a cigarette near the door to the teachers’ hall, talking quietly with Mrs. Wentworth. They laughed at something, and Mrs. Wentworth shook her head. From the girls’ place in the shadows, the two teachers looked bathed in sunlight, as if Roberta were watching them through a magical doorway.

She looked down at the space she was digging, the mottled, ugly clots of dirt. Baby bones. She always thought of baby bones here. Finger bones, leg bones, a soft little skull . . .

Don’t think about it. Don’t.

The blade of her shovel slipped, and for a second there was something white and fleshy speared on the metal, something pale and soft and rotten. Roberta flinched and dropped the shovel, preparing to scream, before she realized what she’d severed was a mushroom, huge and wet in the cold, damp earth.

She was trying to calm down when there was a huff of breath next to her, like a sigh. She turned to see Sonia fall to her knees in the dirt. She still clutched her shovel, her hands sliding down the handle as she lowered to the ground. Roberta bent and grabbed her friend by the shoulders.

“I can do it,” Sonia said, her head bowing so her forehead nearly touched the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.

“Mrs. Peabody!” Mary Van Woorten shouted.

“Sonia,” Roberta whispered, clutching the girl harder.

Sonia’s shoulders heaved, and she quietly threw up drops of spit into the dirt. Then she sagged, her eyes closing. Roberta held her tight. Her friend weighed almost nothing at all.

“Have you been sleeping?” Miss Hedmeyer, the school nurse, said. “Eating?”

“Yes, madame.” Sonia’s voice was pale, tired.

Miss Hedmeyer jabbed her fingers up under Sonia’s jaw, feeling her lymph nodes. “No swelling,” she said. “No fever. What else?”

“I have a headache, madame.”

Roberta bit the side of her thumb as she watched Miss Hedmeyer take a bottle of aspirin out of a cupboard and shake out a few large chalky pills. “I’ve seen this before,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She had light blond hair that contrasted with a startling spray of freckles across her nose. When she wasn’t treating the ailments of the Idlewild girls, she taught their meager science curriculum, which mostly consisted of the periodic table of elements and the process of photosynthesis, sometimes mixed with explanations of snow and rain. It was not assumed that the housewives of the future needed to know much about science. “It happens to some girls when they’re asked to do physical activity during their time of month. Am I correct?”

Sonia blinked and said nothing, and even Roberta could see her abject humiliation.

“Get some rest,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She tapped Sonia on the arm of her thick uniform sweater. “You need to be tougher,” she advised. “Girls like you. There’s not a thing wrong with you. We feed you good food here.”

Sonia’s voice was nearly a whisper. “Yes, madame.”

“And less French, please. This is America.” The nurse turned to Roberta. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Peabody and get you the next hour free to make sure she doesn’t faint again. Since you’re on the field hockey team, she’ll likely agree.”

Roberta kept her eyes downcast. “Thank you, Miss Hedmeyer.”

She took Sonia’s hand as they left the room. She thought vaguely of putting the girl’s arm around her shoulder and half carrying her to their room, but Sonia stayed upright, even climbing the dorm stairs, though she kept her cold, clammy hand in Roberta’s, her gaze down on her feet.

In their room, Roberta helped her take off her mud-soaked stockings and shoes. They worked in silence, Roberta hanging the stockings over the doorknob to dry—dried mud was easier to get out in the sink than the wet kind—as Sonia pulled back her covers and lay in bed, still wearing her skirt and sweater. Sonia folded her hands over her chest.

Roberta kicked her own shoes off and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at her friend’s pale face. “Tell me,” she said.

Sonia stared at the wooden slats that made up Roberta’s bunk above hers. “It is a sad story,” she said.

“We all have sad stories,” Roberta countered, thinking of Uncle Van. Without thinking, she added, “Please.”

The word seemed to surprise Sonia, who glanced at Roberta, then away again. Dutifully, she spoke. “My mother distributed pamphlets during the war,” she said. “For the Resistance. She helped smuggle the pamphlets from the printers to the places they needed to go. I helped her.”

Roberta bit the side of her thumb again. In France? she wondered. What sorts of pamphlets? Resistance against Hitler? Already she was lost. She knew so little—no one talked to girls their age about the war. Some girls had brothers and cousins who went away, and either got killed or came back again, like Uncle Van. No one had ever taught any of them about a Resistance. But she wanted Sonia to keep talking, so she nodded, silent.

“We knew it was dangerous,” Sonia said. “Papa was already gone to Dachau—he was a writer. He was outspoken. They took him early, but they left us, because Mama’s father had once worked for the government. But they arrested us in early 1944. I was nine.”

Roberta breathed as quietly as she could, listening.

“We were sent to prison first,” Sonia said. “It wasn’t so bad. Mama tried to get us kept there because of her father. But her father was dead by then, and they put us on the train. We went to Ravensbrück.”

“What is Ravensbrück?” Roberta finally said, unable to help herself.

“It was a prison camp.”

“Like Auschwitz?” That was a name she knew—there had been a newsreel at the cinema once, before the movie started, that showed the gates in black and white, the train tracks. Something about liberation. That had been in the last days before Uncle Van came home.

“Yes, but only for women,” Sonia said. “And children.”

Roberta blinked, shocked.

Sonia didn’t seem to notice. “We were put in a barracks,” she said, “Mama and me. We were made to work. There was a work detail that dug all day. There was never an end to the digging—we weren’t even making anything, just moving dirt back and forth. Still, they made us do it. In the heat, in the cold, without food or water. Whoever fell during work detail was left there to rot. Women fell every day.”

Roberta felt her heart rise up and start beating in her neck, squeezing it in dread. I’m not ready to hear this. I’m not.

“We stood every day in the Appelplatz,” Sonia said. “That was the main square in the camp. They lined us up and made us stand, for hours and hours. It was supposed to be a roll call, but of course it wasn’t. We froze or we sweated under the sun. Whoever fell was left. Mama was all right at first, but as the days went by, she got quiet. Quiet, quiet. I thought it was a good thing, because when you were quiet, you got by and no one noticed you. Then one day, as they made us stand in the Appelplatz, she started to scream.” Sonia twisted the edge of her bedsheet softly between her fingers, dropping her gaze to it. “She screamed and screamed. She said they were murderers—they would all go to hell. She said the war would be over one day and it would all come out. She said there would be justice, that there would be no silence in the end. She said that the murderers would someday see, that they would someday face their Maker. They took her away and I never saw her again. I heard one of the women say that they executed her, they shot her in the back of the head, but I didn’t know if it was true. If she’d just stayed quiet . . .” She dropped the sheet. “If she’d just stayed quiet. But she did not. And then it was just me.”

“Could you get away?” Roberta whispered.

Sonia turned her head and looked at her. “When we arrived, they told us that if we wanted, we could see the last woman who tried to climb the fence. Because she was still there.” She turned back to looking at the wooden slats again. “She was.”

Roberta could not speak.

“Today, it was like I was back there,” Sonia said. “It doesn’t happen often. The war ended, and they brought us all out of there, and I came here. I’m fed and taken care of. I don’t think about it. But today, it was like Weekly Gardening had never existed. I was ten again, on work detail. It’s hard to explain. It was more real to me than you are right now.”

Roberta put her head in her hands. Her temples were throbbing, and she wished now she’d gotten her own chalky white aspirin pill from Miss Hedmeyer. Her eyes were hot and she wanted to cry, but the tears were jammed in her throat, hard and painful. Had Uncle Van seen these things? Was that why he’d tried to use his gun in the garage? She made herself take a breath. “And the other day? In the dining hall?”

“That was . . .” Sonia searched in her mind, tried to find the words. “We had blockovas,” she said, “block leaders. They were prisoners who were promoted, assigned to oversee other prisoners.”

“Women?” Roberta asked, shocked again.

“Yes. A few were nice, and tried to sneak us things, but most were not. They wanted favor. They had leave to beat you, report on you. If you misbehaved, you were sent to the punishment block. Solitary confinement, and worse.”

Roberta thought back to that day in the dining hall, Alison punching Sherri, Sherri’s nose bleeding, the chaos and the noise, Lady Loon shouting, It’s Special Detention for you, my girl. Do you hear? Get moving. Move! It made sense now. A horrible, nightmarish kind of sense.

She circled back to the main problem. “What are you going to do?” she asked the other girl. “This can’t keep happening. You’ll get sent to Special Detention.” Katie, the strongest and boldest of them, had been sent to Special Detention, and she’d been so shaken she refused to talk about it. Roberta wasn’t sure Sonia would survive it. “You could be expelled,” she said. “You have nowhere to go.”

Sonia’s chin went hard; her eyes clouded. “It won’t happen again.”

Roberta wasn’t sure about that. But as Sonia drifted to sleep, she sat still, her mind dwelling on the problem, poking at it from all sides. Sonia was tired, drained, but Roberta was resilient. So was CeCe. So was Katie.

They’d gotten this far, all of them. Without breaking, without dying. Sonia wasn’t alone.

Together, they could do something. Together, they could carry on.

They sat on the floor of their room that night, all four of them, gathered around CeCe’s radio. With the sound low so Susan Brady wouldn’t hear, they listened to a show about cops chasing a murderer, and a rendition of “Three Little Maids” that made them all laugh. Then another show, this one about cowboys, before it got late enough that everything went off the air and CeCe turned the radio off. And then they talked.

In the dark, when they’d all been listening for hours, already relaxed, it suddenly became easy. The words flowed, weaving over one another, making up the pattern as they went along. Roberta told about Uncle Van, about the day she had opened the garage door and found him, sitting on a wooden chair, weeping, a pistol in his mouth. She told them of the days afterward, the silence in herself that she couldn’t break, the doctors, Uncle Van’s bloodshot eyes. He hadn’t been able to look at her. Roberta felt a new lump in her throat as she told it, remembering. She wished now that she’d crawled into Uncle Van’s lap and put her arms around his neck and never let go. But she’d been thirteen, and everyone had been horrified and silent, including her, and she hadn’t known what to do.

“Where is he now?” Katie’s low voice came through the dark when Roberta finished.

“He’s still at home,” Roberta said. “He sees doctors. Mother says he isn’t well, that Dad wants to put him in a hospital.” She forced the words out. “They’re fighting. Mother and Dad. I could see it on Family Visit Day—they wouldn’t look at each other, talk to each other. They’re ashamed of me and Uncle Van both. I know Dad works a lot. Mother’s eyes were red, and she says . . . she says it isn’t a good time to come home.”

The others talked now as Roberta subsided. A weight had lifted from her chest. Each girl spoke while the others were quiet, listening.

It went like that, night after night. Katie, with CeCe as an accomplice, began pilfering extra food from the dining hall at supper, sneaking through a door into the kitchen and taking it while CeCe kept watch. They snacked on the extra food every night after dark; they pretended that it was for all of them, but by tacit agreement they gave most of it to Sonia. With the lights out and the cold winter coming outside, they ate and listened to the radio and told their stories, one by one, detail upon detail. Katie and Thomas, the boy who’d attacked her and told her to hold still. CeCe and her mother’s accident at the beach. Roberta told them, hesitantly, about the song she’d heard on the hockey field, the same song Uncle Van had been playing in the garage that day, as if someone or something had drawn the memory straight from her mind. And the next night Katie told them about Special Detention, and the spiders, and the messages in the textbooks. And the scratching at the window, the voice begging to be let in.

Sonia spoke rarely, but when she did, the others went silent, listening, from the first word. She told them slowly, doling out piece by piece, about Ravensbrück—the layout of the barracks and the other buildings, the women and the other children she’d met there, the weather, the cold, the food, the day-to-day comings and goings of the prison, the stories the women had told. It was slow and it was hard to hear, but the girls listened to all of it, and as Sonia spoke, Roberta fancied that perhaps she felt better. That sending the experience out of her head and into words made it less immense, less impossible. They set up a signaling system for her to use if she felt another episode coming on, but Sonia didn’t use it.

They were trapped here at Idlewild. But Idlewild wasn’t everything. It wasn’t the world.

Someday, by God, Roberta thought, I’m going to get out of here. Someday we all will. And when we do, we will finally be free.