The Broken Girls

She drew the bombed-out church she’d slept in that first night. The woman, the fellow prisoner, who had found her and joined her. The family that had taken them in. Their two children, their thin faces, their wide eyes. There were certain things her memory refused to yield up to her—blanks of time, some of them frustrating, some of them possibly merciful. Her mother standing in the Appelplatz—she could not recall that, not clearly. What angle had she watched it from? Had she been in front of her mother, or behind? It wouldn’t come, and Sonia started to wonder if she’d only heard about it, though she could have sworn she’d seen it. It was all so confusing.

Her friends noticed what she was doing, of course. She told them honestly what she was writing about, but she didn’t offer to show them at first. Even now, after so many nights lying on the floor with them, listening to CeCe’s radio and talking, she felt shy about what was in the book. But eventually she showed Roberta, and then the others. Roberta was silent and grim when she read it; CeCe, whose notebook it was, shed big, fat tears down her cheeks and hugged Sonia long and fierce when she was finished.

But Katie had read the notebook with an expression that went harsh and white, impenetrable as concrete. She was sitting on the edge of her bunk, the notebook open on her lap as she paged through it in silence. Sonia sat next to her, her feet curled up beneath her, biting the edge of her thumb. It was an offering, giving Katie the book, and she could not read Katie’s response while her eyes were down and her lashes lowered. She waited.

Katie used her palms to clap the book shut with a snap that reverberated through the room, a big gesture, just like all of Katie’s gestures. “You should be a writer,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Sonia asked.

“You have talent,” Katie said. She looked down at the closed notebook, the whorls of flowers on the cover. “You can draw. You can write. This is talent, Sonia. Talent can be used to make money.”

Sonia dropped her thumb and felt her jaw gape open for a second. “You mean like a job?”

“You could be a writer,” Katie said again, patiently, as if she knew it was difficult for the idea to get through. “You could write books, articles. You could be published. Then you wouldn’t have to get married.”

The girls had talked, more than once, about how none of them wanted to get married. The only waverer was CeCe, who said she’d like to have children but was terrified of the kissing-and-sex part. The other three agreed that they had no use for boys whatsoever, except that they had no idea how to get by in the world without a husband, without being a terrifying spinster like Lady Loon. It was a problem the four of them had yet to solve, not least because their severe lack of information—aside from Lady Chatterley’s Lover—hampered their ability to make a decision.

“I can’t write a book about Ravensbrück,” Sonia said. “I can’t.”

Katie glanced at her, those dark, bewitching eyes missing nothing. Katie was so beautiful it was hard to look at her sometimes: the raven black hair, the pure perfection of her forehead, the gull-wing slashes of her brows, the straight nose and mouth that almost never moved to express a single emotion. If you wanted to read Katie, Sonia had learned, you had to watch her eyes carefully, as the rest of her face would never, ever give her away. “Why not?” Katie said.

“No one wants to read about this.” Sonia gestured to the notebook. “It’s just the memories of some stupid girl. We could all be dead in a nuclear war tomorrow. It isn’t important.”

Katie looked at her for a long moment, thoughts moving swiftly behind her eyes. This was Katie’s calculating look; Sonia had learned to recognize it. “Then don’t,” she concluded bluntly. “You don’t have to write about Ravensbrück. But you can write. And you can draw. You could write a book about something else.”

“About what?”

“Anything you want.” Katie handed the notebook back to her. “You could write children’s tales, like Winnie-the-Pooh. Or something for grown-ups—I don’t know. You could write Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

That made Sonia laugh, which it was intended to do. She felt her cheeks heat at the same time; they’d read passages from the book in some of their late-night radio sessions. “I can’t write that,” she said, “since we just agreed I’m not going to get married. A writer has to write from firsthand experience.”

Katie rolled her eyes, which was also intended to make Sonia laugh. “Firsthand experience is nothing to write home about, believe me. Tom was sweaty and smelled like mothballs.”

Sonia laughed, though it was a painful story. She knew that laughing at it was one of Katie’s weapons, a way for her to make the experience smaller, easier to manage. “Do you know something?” Sonia said.

“What?”

“When I first met you, I was a little afraid of you.”

Katie shrugged; she was used to it. Everyone was a little afraid of Katie; she was beautiful, bold, impossibly strong. “And now?”

And now I love you very much, Sonia wanted to say, but instead she said, “Now I just think you like to read dirty books, so you want me to write them.”

That made the other girl’s mouth twitch, that perfect line of lips cracking briefly into an amused smile that she quickly pressed away. “Write about a girl in a boarding school,” she said.

The words were tossed off, but they hit Sonia with the unexpected force of a great idea. She thought about it for days, as she leafed through her notebook. She could start drawing her friends, the girls here. She could stop drawing Ravensbrück. She was almost finished drawing Ravensbrück anyway, at least for now.

So she did quick, furtive portraits of her friends, sketches at first when the girls weren’t looking, then others from memory. She did not write words, not yet. She didn’t know what the words would be. What the story would be. She knew only the faces. The words would come.

One day, she got a letter from the great-aunt and great-uncle who had sponsored her trip over the Atlantic. They wrote her from time to time, and they visited at Christmas, but they hadn’t offered to take her in. They were elderly, and they didn’t want children. But this letter was different, inviting her for a weekend visit.

Sonia read the letter over and over, shared it with her friends, trying to parse it. What had made them offer a visit so suddenly? What had made them want to see her? Was it possible they were considering taking her from Idlewild and letting her live with them? She was twisted with a crazy anxiety, mixed with a crazy hope. She could not leave Idlewild and her friends, who felt like sisters.

Her relatives had said that they didn’t want children. But to live in a house with a room of her own and a man and a woman . . . a yard . . . to get up in her own room and go to school every morning . . .

She accepted the visit and lived in anticipation, wondering what was to come.

It was November 19, 1950.

She would be dead in ten days.



Chapter 21



Portsmouth, New Hampshire

November 2014

Fiona stomped off the thin layer of slush from her boots as she entered the little café. A thin, wet ribbon of snow had fallen overnight, just enough to make the drive from Vermont hazardous and wet as it melted again. Still, she’d made it to New Hampshire on time for her meeting with Roberta Montgomery, formerly Roberta Greene.

Fiona had taken a chance and called her, asking if she was in fact the Roberta Greene who had once attended Idlewild, and the elderly woman had given a dignified, reserved agreement. Fiona had explained over the phone, her spiel about the restoration of the school and her wish to cover the story, and after a moment of silence Roberta had agreed to a meeting. Roberta was seventy-nine now, and Fiona easily picked her out in the small café, a white-haired woman who sat with perfectly straight posture and still resembled the picture that had been taken with the field hockey team when she was seventeen.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Fiona said, pulling out a chair and ordering a coffee.

“I’m sorry you had to drive in the mess,” Roberta said. Her voice was educated, naturally cool, as if she rarely got excited. “I don’t drive anymore, I’m afraid. I like to sit here, across from the firm.” She gestured out the plate-glass window, where across Islington Street a sign was visible on one of the old buildings: MONTGOMERY AND TRUE, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW.

“You were a partner?” Fiona asked.

“For thirty years. Retired now, of course.” Roberta tilted her face toward the window, and Fiona realized she had the quiet, stoic kind of beauty that defied age. “They still let me come in a few times a week and consult. They’re humoring me, but what do I care?” She turned back to Fiona and smiled. “Try the cheese croissants. They bake them here, and I eat them every day. I’ve stopped worrying about fat at my age.”

Fiona smiled back at her and did as she was told. The coffee was so strong it nearly took the top of her head off, which was welcome after the long drive. “I’d like to talk to you about Idlewild,” she said.

“Yes,” Roberta said. “Someone is restoring it, you said.”

“You didn’t know?”