Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

resentful of the baby, then ashamed. In the middle of class, while the rest of the students are declining verbs, Elise longs to be back home in Mississippi, singing a solo in First Baptist with everyone staring in wide-eyed admiration. After each German class, she rushes back to the apartment and runs a bath.
    *  *  *
    The doorbell rings. Probably a delivery service, Elise thinks; they’ll try at someone else’s. But it shrills again, insistently, petulantly, like a newborn woken from sleep, and she lifts herself from the now lukewarm water and wraps a towel around her dripping body.
    “Coming,” she yells. How do you say that in German? “Kommen!” Something like that. Then she remembers the bell is downstairs, outside.
    She puts her nightgown back on and runs a washcloth over the foggy mirror, glances swiftly at her image. She is sweating. Her hair is plastered to her forehead in small curls. Minus a world of pain, she looks as she will in three months, pushing her baby out.
    She lifts the receiver. “Hello?”
    “ Hallo, Frau Kriegstein?”
    “ Ja, ” she responds, her voice, as always, an octave higher in German. She tries to place the elderly female voice.
    A flood of incomprehensible German follows. Elise buzzes in whoever it is, and turns to her bedroom to retrieve clothes. Shivering, her hair still wet, she returns to the door and opens it halfway. A small boy with white-blond hair, five or six years old, stands there. When she opens the door fully, he holds a letter out to her, on which Liesel Kriegstein is written in a lovely, flowing dark script. But this little boy is not the older woman who just spoke into the intercom below. Elise tries to frame her confusion into a German question but can only think of “ Warum? ” Why? Meanwhile, the boy has entered her apartment, politely removed his boots, and joined her in the foyer.
    He lifts the letter up to her and says something in German she cannot understand. She shakes her head, shrugs, makes all the miming movements foreigners use to show they cannot follow. She sees with alarm that his lower lip is beginning to tremble, and she takes the letter from him to prevent the storm approaching on his brow. But the tears begin, with the embarrassment of a child who is too old to be crying.
    “Tea?” she asks desperately. “ Heiße Schockolade? ”
    He simply stands and shudders. Appalled, she leaves him there and runs down the stairs in her socks to the street. There is no one there. It looks emptier, in fact, than it ever has before. There is only a man walking a small dog in the distance, and the sound of traffic from another intersection. Back inside, a wail fills the stairwell, growing louder as she walks back up. She finds the boy hugging his knees in her front hallway, crying like a kid lost in Macy’s.
    Not knowing what else to do, she hauls him upright and leads him gently by the hand, as she used to her little brothers and baby sister, into the living room, and brings him to the sofa. He clambers up like a sleepwalker, still sniffling. She takes him to her and rocks him awkwardly against her balloon-shaped belly. He continues crying, but softer, until it is just a wave every now and then of renewed misery. Then, eyes closed, he lies against her baby, and she smooths his hair.
    The letter is still in her hand. Careful not to disturb the boy, she opens the envelope and removes the letter, one page of onion-skin-thin, old-fashioned stationery that the pen fairly bleeds through.
    Liebe Liesel, it begins. And then German sentences that she cannot make out, aside from easy words like “we” and “you” and “weather.” There has obviously been a huge mistake; the boy must be reunited with whomever left him here as soon as possible. She glances down at him. His eyes are shut with the concentration of fake sleep. He is waiting, she sees, for her reaction.
    “I’m not Liesel Kriegstein,” she says to him. He does not look up. “I’m Elise