“Why does she hate me?” I’d once cried to my aunt in a back corner of our garden.
“She doesn’t hate you, little love,” she’d told me, running a gentle hand over the perfect ringlets my nanny had been directed to put in my hair that morning. “She’s always been this way. I’ve never understood it. Our parents, your grandparents, were kind, loving people. But your mother...she was born different. Angry. Fierce. Always on the hunt for better and more, as if it were owed her. And she’s never cared who she hurt to get it. Some people are just born—” She’d stopped herself, letting out a long sigh and shaking her head.
“Born what?” I’d asked.
She’d given me a sad smile and wrapped her fingers around mine.
“Ugly.”
Unfortunately, people like my mother tend to marry a puppet whose strings they can pull, or they find a mirror image of themselves. Someone with the same harsh outlook on life. The same selfish goals. The same cruel nature.
My mother met Gerhard Holländer her last year of high school in Dresden. They married after he graduated college four years later. According to my aunt, they were a perfect match in all the worst ways.
“They fed into each other’s worst qualities. Two people who seemed bent on destroying the happiness of others for their own wicked desires.”
“But...how can you stand to be around them?” I’d asked.
“I don’t come here for them. I come here for you and Cat.”
The arguments between my mother and aunt happened nearly every time she came to visit.
“Gisela needs to learn to be strong and not rely on others,” my mother shouted one afternoon as I listened from the upstairs landing. “She needs to learn how to sacrifice for the greater good. And whom to form alliances with.”
“She’s ten, Gabriela,” my aunt had said.
“Exactly.”
It was then that my visits with my aunt began to shift. Rather than tea parties in the garden or in the playroom with my baby sister nearby, we went for long walks that took us away from the house so that she could ask me about school, my friends, and inquire carefully about what I was hearing—within my school, but also at home.
“Father doesn’t like our butcher anymore and insisted we change,” I’d told her one day. I was upset about this because sometimes I got to go along with our cook to pick up the week’s meat and I was always given a treat by the kindly old man who showed off the selection he’d chosen.
Not long after we changed butchers, we changed florists too. And then I wasn’t allowed to go in my favorite bookshop any longer. Or go to my friend Ruthie’s house.
“Why can’t you go to Ruthie’s house?” my aunt asked as I cried on a park bench.
“Father says she’s the wrong kind of friend. But...she’s nice to me and we like the same games. How can that make her wrong?”
Eventually, I began to understand that to have the friends I wanted, or frequent the shops I liked, I’d have to become two versions of myself. One my parents found acceptable, and one I did. But only for a while.
Only until the plan hatched with my aunt in the back corner of my parents’ garden became my reality.
“You ready?”
I looked up from the article I was reading and glanced at my aunt, flawless in a pair of wide-legged gray slacks and a white blouse with a high lace collar, and then stared down at my dress and the cast below. After weeks spent inside, my leg resting on pillows, my every want and need tended to by my aunt Victoria, Uncle Frank, or Angeline the cook, today was the first day I was being allowed outside the house for something other than injury checkups.
“I suppose,” I said, setting the newspaper aside.
“I thought you’d be more excited,” she said, her smile disappearing.
She was taking me to Delmonico’s for lunch, and then shopping. She’d taken the day off from her volunteer work at one of the area’s two hospitals after the doctor gave me the go-ahead to start being more active.
“I am excited,” I said. “But getting around with this thing is going to be difficult.”
“That’s why we have the wheelchair.”
I nodded and she frowned, coming to sit beside me on the bed.
“Would you rather not?” she asked. “Is it too much?”
